307: Alexa, I’m Leaving

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. So I guess we should talk a little bit about our Christmas schedule. Now correct me if I'm wrong, Jason. I think this is what we came up with. We actually have a relatively full show today. And because all of our listeners are so awesome, we have a metric ton of feedback. So I think what we're going to do is we're recording today. The show will come out Thursday.

We will be recording another episode with Bittner on Friday, our last one for the year. That will come out on Monday. And that is the end of what you're going to hear from us this year, except we will be doing all of the feedback that we got as a special show that we're going to be putting up on Patreon at some point.

Before we come back. Yeah, this is an exclusive for Patreon subscribers only. It is all the questions and comments and links and that kind of thing. Yeah. And if you're hearing this and you're a Patreon subscriber, feel free to send in a question because we're not going to record this for a few more days. So get it in there. And if you have any burning questions for us, now's your chance.

Yes. Yes. It's coming. It's coming. It'll be fun because we'll be drinking for that one. Probably most likely. Now, we have both been freelancing for quite some time. Jason, you've dipped your toes in and out of the freelancing thing, and you're basically a freelancer once again right now as a freelancing podcaster.

I have run my own small business, just two people. So technically, basically, I've been a freelancer steady for 20 years now. And there are some troubling signs in the economy. Do you think? No. Yep. So I ran across this article over at Lifehacker thinking that this might be interesting information to us. It says there are warning signs that freelancing way of life might soon become more difficult, according to a piece in Forbes that warns of a recession for contract work.

They've set the date for the end to somewhere around 2020, quoting numbers from CNBC. They say most economists on Wall Street still believe a recession won't occur until 2020 or later, but they are getting increasingly worried about economic conditions and higher rates as the stock market sells off. While banks and brokerages try to calm the negative animal spirits of the market, the S&P 500 is poised for the worst annual market performance since 2009.

And basically, as budgets shrink, cutting costs by eliminating freelancers from the budget is an appealing choice to managers, one that will look better than eliminating staff positions. Not that that doesn't happen. So if you haven't felt the end coming yet, now is the perfect time to prepare yourself. Prepare for the end times.

Yes. I then rub my hands together and go, oh, goody, maybe I'll get some interesting tips here about how we shall survive this recession through our podcasting career. Uh-huh. Unfortunately, all of these are no shit Sherlock's. So here's our first one.

Maybe get a full-time gig. Wow. What a concept. Number two, save money in advance. Okay. Yep. Yeah, doing that. Consider how your business could improve. Should be doing that anyways. Kind of what do you do when you run a business?

Check in with clients. Basically, that personal touch to make them hopefully not fire you. I personally know this doesn't work. Haven't been fired on Thanksgiving Eve by somebody I talk to almost every day. So that doesn't always work. Expand your network. Also something you should be doing all the time. Yeah.

So this is how to be a freelancer from, like, you know, the dawn of time. It's how to be a freelancer. Not how to be a freelancer preparing for a recession. Because you're always preparing for a recession when you're a freelancer. Every day.

Your next gig. You never know when your next gig is coming. You never know when you're going to get fired. You're always in recession mode. Yeah. Yeah. More great tips from the folks over at Lifehacker. Yep. Yep. Spit out that content, boys. Yes. Amy, Amy Lutkin wrote this one.

Yeah. I use the metaphorical boys. Yes. Specific gender specific for all you people concerned about that. I was just seeing if any of my favorite people wrote that so I could rag out and snore. But, yeah. Save your money and do better at business and meet people. Yeah.

Maybe give up on the freelancing and try to get a job. Yeah. And as I know, freelancers a lot of times actually do well in the recession because they do cut, you know, full-time gigs because it looks better on the books. That's 500 people from Paramount got fired in one day because they wanted to raise the stock price a quarter.

Yep. So it happens everywhere. I mean, that was a continual cycle back when I was in the web development business and battling constantly against the record labels. Whenever things were flush, the record labels would try to bring everything in-house and get all their artists to sign agreements that, you know, the record label would be in charge of their websites and social medias and all that.

And then as soon as things went in the toilet again, they fired that entire division and, you know, all of a sudden artists were looking for me to help them again. Yeah. The cycle always repeats and it usually repeats by the end of the year. It's funny how, like, you know, the happiest time of year, Christmas, is when most people get shit canned.

I do believe we talk about this almost every year. I think one of our episode titles was something like a pink slip for Christmas or something like that. Yeah, something like that. Because it does always tend to happen. It's you're sliding into the holidays and that's when you get shit canned. Yep. Happy Merry Christmas or Festivus or whatever holiday that you prefer to celebrate.

Crying in your beer at the bar is what most people do when that happens. That's true. Oh, man. So I found this over at Ars Technica and this is fascinating because it ties directly into the stuff that we were talking about last week. Because I got my genetic test kind of cleaned up and read the report and, yeah, not good.

And it's genetic information as self-fulfilling prophecy. And it talks about the placebo effect and the nocebo effect and talks about how, oh, you know what? Actually, knowing this stuff might actually bring on some of the conditions that you don't actually have and didn't have before you found out you had them.

But now you do. Okay. So this is a does the Pope shit in the woods sort of thing? I don't know. Does he? I don't know. And if we look, we'll find out. And then that proves it, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, the thing about this is this is a very ethically sketchy test that they ran. Did you read this one? I did. I wasn't entirely sure how I feel about about the study. I mean, obviously, we've known a placebo effect exists and there's a lot to be said for I don't want to get all woo woo because I'm not, you know, I'm not a woo woo person.

But there's a lot of the mind body connection that we don't understand. And there is proven placebo effects. It exists. It's a real thing. If your brain is convinced of something, you can somewhat manifest it a little bit in yourself somehow. So you can definitely manifest it.

Yeah. I mean, we know I've just as stupid as this is. We know this is true. If you're in a bad mood, just smile. It fucking works. Like if you just keep smiling, all of us, it sends off neurons. It does something and you will be in a better mood.

It's stupid, but it's true. But it works. Stick a pencil in your mouth. That helps. If you're not really in the mood to smile, stick a pencil between your teeth. There's a great book called Cure, A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Joe Marchant. We had that author on our show a long time ago, and it's a fascinating book.

I highly recommend picking it up if you are interested in this topic because it actually is true. So I'm just I'm just worried about now that I know this stuff and have the reports, it's like, should I just delete it and not even think about it? Or should I just keep taking steps to get healthier? Well, both, both.

Don't don't don't focus on it. Don't dwell on it. Don't keep going back to the study. Don't keep thinking that you have Alzheimer's already. You're aware of it. File that away somewhere in your brain. Do the things that make sense for you to get yourself healthy. Yeah, that's that.

That's pretty much a pencil in your mouth or maybe up your ass. I don't know. Up my ass. Whatever works for you. Whatever makes you smile, I guess. But the interesting thing about bringing this up now is because a lot of people are going to be getting 23 and me and Ancestry.com kits for Christmas. That's screwing all of us, because now that means all of our genetic data is out there.

So I might as well get one myself at this point. You just might as well. You might as well. Because, yeah, the cross-referencing by the time Christmas is over is probably going to be strong enough where they're just going to know everything about everybody. Yep. And this is an interesting one.

I updated my Logitech software drivers for my because I use the MX Master and MX Master 2 mice for my editing because they're fantastic mice. Highly recommend them. But this new update asked me, hey, would you like to sign up for an account so we can keep your mouse settings in the cloud?

I'm like, no, no, not really. Why? Not really at all. Do they even provide any explanation as to why that would be useful? That was it. Sign up now for an account to keep your mouse settings in the cloud.

Like, cancel. Okay. Well, listen, Logitech, to begin with, if my computer gets so foobarred that I lose my mouse, settings, I've got more fish to fry. And I probably won't have a working computer to be able to pull those settings out of the cloud anyways. And they're mouse settings.

How hard can they be? Well, with this one... I mean, they can get complicated. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. Yeah, because I've got per app mouse settings for, you know, basically every app because this thing has so many buttons on it and you can do so much cool stuff with it. And, you know, I would like to be able to maybe save it to Dropbox or maybe I can just go find the prefs file like a normal person would.

Like a normal person would. And send it to myself. But because when you have three computers and you want to have the same mouse settings across, it can be a pain. But I am not going to give you an account. You're almost kind of making an argument for them. I am kind of making an argument. Now that I actually talk it out, shit.

This actually makes sense for you. You should be storing yours in the cloud. Damn. Oh, what are you going to do? That's what we do on this show. Yep. Boy, that's stupid. Hmm. Actually, this applies to my life. In the news.

Oh, we're going to have some fun with Facebook today here on In the News. This new article that came out from the New York Times yesterday outlines how Facebook gave away all of your private data to about 150 different companies and completely just opened the barn and let it out.

This is the one that's tipping it for me, Jason. This really is. I didn't think it could get any worse for Facebook, and I didn't think it could get any crazier for Facebook. But this one, the fact that they let third-party companies like Netflix and Spotify be able to view your private messages.

Yeah. Read. What? Yeah. Read your private messages. And why were they giving everything to Bing? Bing's a search engine. What did they do? Excuse me. What the hell? Because they could see all of your friends without any of your consent, and they just did this over and over and over again.

What I'm curious about is, okay, so you sign up with Netflix and Spotify and say you don't sign in using your Facebook ID. Say you created an email address and a password, which is what I always do. I've never, ever signed into anything, signed up for anything with Facebook because I figured if I do that, that gets a little weird and sketchy.

If I didn't, was Spotify still or Netflix still able to get access to my account? Were they able to get access everyone's accounts or only people that signed up through login with Facebook? We don't know. I would like to know this. And because I would, the reason I would like to know this is I'd like to believe that they only allowed people to do this for people that signed in with the Facebook ID.

If they didn't, it's pretty goddamn easy to cross-reference. If they just scooped up everything, they'll know who I am anyways and be able to connect my messages to me. That's messed up. You think? Again, like I said, this is really tipping it for me. Not so much that I'm going to completely get off Facebook.

I'm not. I'm going to start definitely limiting what I'm sharing and certainly anybody because I have a couple friends that Facebook Messenger is their preferred method of communication. Again, not the slippery slope thing. You and I go back and forward about this. There's nothing I write in Facebook that I'm concerned about at all.

If Spotify wants to read it, knock yourselves out. It's going to be super boring. But I don't like the precedent. I don't like what they're doing. I think it's ridiculous. And anybody that talks to me via Messenger, we're going to find another way now. I am never using Messenger again. Yeah, for normal people, it's not a real issue.

But for people who are at risk, you know, like battered wives who are escaping their husbands, we had this discussion before. You know, it can open up data that shouldn't be out there. I mean, granted, people could say that you shouldn't be using Facebook, but sometimes that's their only avenue of communication.

And that's what happens. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I would definitely like to know some more technical details on how this worked. Because if they were just cross-referencing email addresses or just using IP addresses and tokens, you know, like you have – I can never remember the name of the ads that follow you around the internet.

Retargeted ads. Yeah. They know basically where you're at everywhere. So you go to Facebook, then you go to Spotify, and you log into your account. Is there a tracking token there? They can just marry the two together, and Bob's your uncle, even if you didn't create the account using your Facebook login.

You know, it's funny that you're talking about retargeting ads right now, because there's another Facebook story, because we have so many, that I didn't even put in here, which I'm now just going to quickly mention. Okay. A tech journalist turned off all location tracking. All of it. Everywhere. Studiously went through and did every single setting on every single app.

Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Location tracking off, off, off, off, off, off. Still had Facebook ads following her by location. The reason that – the way that they did it, IP address of where they were logging in by. Yeah. Yeah. The IP address is the one thing you can't really fake. So even if you turn off location tracking, they can still track your location.

End of story. Yeah. Yeah, even if you're using a VPN, you're still going to be logged in with that one IP, and then, you know, unless it changes, or you change locations, it's easy for them to follow you. And nothing you do on the internet is private anymore. Just, Steve Rambam says, get over it.

Just get over it. Yep. Speaking of privacy, we got another one here, don't we? Continuing with the Facebook news that we did have in our show notes, Facebook still has not launched a big privacy feature that the Zuck promised us more than seven months ago. Back in May, at the height of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, he went up on stage and said, you know what we're going to do?

We're going to give you the ability to clear the browsing history connected to your Facebook profile, meaning you can just nuke it all and start fresh. How's that coming? As it turns out, according to Facebook, it's a lot more difficult than expected. It's been more than seven months, and they haven't mentioned it since then.

Facebook's chief privacy officer, Aaron Egan, said at the time that it would take a few months to build. Now, Facebook tells Recode it will not be ready for several more months. Now, product delays aren't uncommon in the tech world, but clear history was announced to show users how serious Facebook was about taking their privacy, and it's going to be at least a full year.

Why so serious? It's taking longer than we had initially thought, admitted David Bazer, the head of Facebook's newly created privacy product team, which has zero products, as far as I can tell. We did underestimate how long this would take, and there are two reasons for these technical challenges, both of which I think Jason and I, as developers, would call bullshit on.

Facebook data is not always stored in the same way it is collected. When Facebook collects web browsing data, for example, that data set includes multiple parts, like your personal identifying information, the website you visited, and the timestamp for when the data was collected. Sometimes these pieces of data are separated and stored in different parts of Facebook's system.

Finding them all so that they can be cleared, especially since once they've been separated, has been a challenge, Bazer said. I say nay. I say it's a database search. It's a join. But here's what they're saying. They're saying that, okay, when we're collecting the data, it doesn't have the user-identified information in it, so we have to go back and we have to add the user-identified information for everything that we're storing, which does not have the ring of truth to it at all.

No, it does not. Because, yeah, then otherwise, how are they going to marry it back? Nothing they're saying sounds like the truth to me. No. And the second point. Facebook currently stores browsing data by date and time, not by which user it belongs to. This means that there was no easy way within Facebook's system to see all the browsing data linked to an individual user.

If that's true, then how come the advertisers seem to be able to do that? Exactly. Nothing here sounds like the truth. Period. Yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't. And if it is the truth, then they've built a really shitty database at the beginning and never bothered to fix it. And by the way, again, search and join.

Done. Yeah. Seriously. They're just liars. They're fucking liars. Really? They really are. They're lying. They're lying here and they're liars. They're lying liars and the liars that lie. Get off Facebook. Or at least stop using it as much. La, la, la, la, la, la.

All right. Somebody is quitting Facebook. Walt Mossberg is quitting Facebook, which is an interesting one because, you know, he's a tech journalist. Well, to be fair, he's also quit being a tech journalist, so he doesn't need to be on it anymore. Yeah. Yeah. He's not officially working. If he were still a tech journalist, there's no way he'd be able to quit.

It's the conundrum that I face. You got off Facebook. I want to stay on it to see what the hell's going on so we can crap on it. That's your job. Thank you very much. Yes. But, I mean, Mossberg still does some stuff. He just doesn't write for the journal anymore. Yeah. And doesn't he own part of Recode?

I think so. Yeah. I think he's definitely part of that. But he says, I'm doing this after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I'm no longer comfortable here. This is a decision I'm making just for myself.

If the company or service change significantly for the better, in my view, or become effectively regulated, I may resume regular use. Ain't going to happen there. I love that regulation word. Yeah, the R word. The R word. And let's talk about the B word.

Blockchain. Blockchain's back in the news. In a while since we talked about the old blockchain. Facebook has a blockchain group. Did you know that? No. Well, I bet they tell us that their blockchain is pretty ineffective because everything's connected in a way that they can't actually figure out anything.

Right? Because that seems to be your excuse for your gigantic database anyways. Maybe that's why they need the blockchain. Maybe. So they can actually tie everything together. Oh, man. So this has been around for like eight months. And they're sending their staffers out trying to recruit new people.

And they're trying to get cryptographers, programmers, top academics. Problem is, they can't really find anybody. They're having trouble hiring. Why are they having trouble hiring so much? Nobody trusts Facebook. It is a problem.

It is a problem. Yes. So Facebook wants to reinvent money, but they just can't find anybody to do it for them. Aw. Facebook is. Yeah. Well, Facebook has already dipped their toe into trying to get involved with financial stuff anyways. You're not going to find anybody willing to give any money to Facebook or a credit card or anything ever.

Oh, I'm sure. That's ridiculous. But I'm sure people do. I'm sure people do. Come on. I'm sure people do. All right. You know, we're not going to do it. The listeners of the show probably aren't going to do it. But our friends and family might. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. And some interesting news, again, from the Times, Russian efforts to influence the 2016 elections targeted African-Americans.

This is like a two-parter here just because this is all technology-based because, you know, they're making the fake accounts from the Internet Research Agency, and they were using basically every platform known to man to do this. But the interesting thing is that they were doing it to, like, stir up racial tensions, that there is no doubt about that now that that was happening.

And the great part is I don't see a single platform, because everything's a platform now, that they used that wasn't made by us. That's where I get a chuckle out of this. It's like, oh, yeah, we gave them all the tools to do this.

We certainly did. And it turns out Instagram was the biggest one, also owned by our friends at Facebook. Yes. Yes. I said, no, an inordinate amount of people were using Instagram to post memes, the old meme factory, to divide and conquer.

How crazy is that? Yeah. Yeah. No collusion, though. Well, I think we might need Mueller to investigate Zuck soon. Yeah. Well, can't be that far behind, can it, really, at this point? Yeah, really. All right, let's switch over to Wikipedia and a big change that's coming over there.

At this year's Wikiconference, North America, Kevin Lee, a 17-year-old freshman at Stanford, told the author of this article that Wikipedia administrators like him have three special powers. I don't know if everybody out there is aware of this. At one brief point in time, I was a Wikipedia administrator. That was a long time ago, though.

I didn't know that. Yeah, I was briefly an administrator because I got kind of involved with it, but I dropped out of that a long time ago. But the three things that you used to be, well, still can do, I guess, is you can block and unblock users. You can protect articles from persistent vandalism, basically locking them down. And you can hide changes from the project's editorial history.

So these are the high-level technical abilities you get after you go through the community review process. But recently, they are making a change to the first superpower. An administrator is no longer able to self-unblock. That means if Administrator A is blocked by Administrator B, A can no longer lift the ban himself.

They're basically calling this the nuclear option. Okay. So this is being done because of bad actors, basically. People are getting in there and have been vandalizing the site. And the reason it's become so important is because Siri and all the ladies in the box and the ladies in the tubes are grabbing so much of their information from Wikipedia now.

And Wikipedia has to be very careful because what they do is sometimes they dump this information and save it. So if there is a briefly fucked with page that has completely incorrect information, it could exist on Siri or Alexa or whatever for weeks at a time.

Oh, wow. So they're trying to do more like real-time monitoring to make sure that bad information never gets in there. That's interesting. It's a good plan. It's a good plan. You know who should help be funding that? Everybody who's using their data? Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Yeah. I'm sure Jeff Bezos gave Jimmy Wales, you know, 50 bucks this year. Yeah, I'm sure. When the pop-up comes up around Christmas time, Jeff Bezos always clicks on it and goes, I'll toss you 50 bucks. Yeah, the sad Jimmy Wales pop-up.

Yeah. I love those. Now let's move over to Snap, who has a new Spectacles boss. Ooh. The third in the past six months cannot keep anybody in that position, can they? I wonder why. Yeah. Yes. Snap's secretive hardware unit, SnapLab.

The team responsible for Spectacles photo and video sunglasses has its third boss in six months. Sahil Sharma, Snap's VP of hardware development, took the job in July when previous boss Mark Randall left, and he's leaving the company now. He'll be replaced in February by Steen Strand, who joined Snap a few months ago after more than a decade at Icon Aircraft, a company he co-founded that's building private float planes.

So you can't keep anyone in that job. And I've got to say, I live basically in Silicon Beach, home of Snap. And if there's anywhere that you would see Spectacles in the wild, you'd think it would be here. Not a one. Nope. Not seen a one. Nobody wants to be recognized as a Snap employee.

That's why. Yeah. This one just makes me smile. Verizon admits defeat with a $4.6 billion AOL Yahoo write-down. Oh, my God. They got hosed on this deal so bad.

So bad. Has led to a lot of oaths in the boardroom. Yeah. I mean, you know, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people, Verizon. Really. You know, this one makes me smile. I remember when they announced this, you and I were just going, AOL and Yahoo?

Why? That much money? Really? And even after the Yahoo breach, you know? It's like, they still bought that? Yeah. But maybe the whole thing was just a tax scam.

Maybe. Maybe Verizon's like, Joe, we have too much money. How are we going to get rid of it? I have an idea. Let's buy Yahoo. And then we'll call it Oath. Yeah. Because why wouldn't you just, you know, keep the branding? No. Let's just rename everything so nobody can find it again.

Then it'll tank. Then we can have a big write-off. Woo-hoo-ha-ha-ha-ha. So, like I said, can't happen to a nicer bunch of people. Nope. And let's talk about another one of my favorite companies, Bird, again. They have a new service called Bird Platform, which provides third-party operators with scooters that can be branded with custom logos and graphics.

Those who sign up for the service will get access to Bird's network of chargers and mechanics in exchange for 20% of the money earned on each ride. These independent fleet operators will also be free to collect and charge the scooters on their own. So, you can pay them to slap your logo on a scooter. Scooting is a platform.

Scooting as a platform. As our buddy Vander Zanden says, the e-scooter movement has never just been about one company, one city, or one way of providing a service. With Bird Platform, we encourage new entrepreneurs and existing local businesses in all cities to join in the effort to get cars off the road.

Oh, my God. How much does this cost? Because maybe we can get some grumpy old geek scooters out there to start spreading the word. That's what I was thinking. Patreon.com slash GOG. We want a fleet. We want a fleet of grumpy old scooters. That's right. I got a little follow-up about the Lime scooters in my neighborhood.

Like, last week, I saw them everywhere, and then the next day, they were all there. Nobody had touched one, and now they're all gone. And I thought, oh, yay, they've been taken away. Nope. Turns out that they have definitely infested the neighborhood. I'm sitting out there in the yard yesterday with the pups playing around.

And these two guys come barreling down the street on their Lime scooters. Those things go fast. Oh, yeah. The Lime scooters have got some power. They go really fast. And they zip by my house right through the four-way stop sign. It almost got creamed by a guy coming across the street.

I was just like, oh, man, would that have been, oh, that would have been so good. But it's Christmas, and I'm not allowed to think that. So good on them for making their way through the intersection safely, going as fast as humanly possible on a Lime scooter. And, of course, no helmet.

And did you follow the new Instagram account that I sent you, which is the greatest Instagram account in the history of the world? I looked at it. I did not follow it. Scooters Behaving Badly is the greatest Instagram account ever. It's quite amusing. Oh, my God.

But I don't need that because I just step outside. I was going to say, you just look out the window. Yeah. But there are some pretty good spills on there that are pretty funny. Yeah. And lots of videos of guys throwing these things in different places. But please, guys, stop throwing them in the water.

Yes. Please stop throwing them in the water. It's batteries. It's crappy batteries at that. Let's be careful here. Now, we talk a lot about crappy headlines, and I've got a crappy headline coming up a little bit later in the show. But this one made the show purely because of the headline. I'm not sure if I would have talked about it any other way, but I just love this headline, and it caught my eye and did its job.

You can't buy the Raspberry Beret MP3 at the secondhand store. Okay. That's a well-done title. Thank you for that. So this is a company called Redigi, and they've been around since 2011, sort of, because they've been kind of in court since they launched in 2011.

The process, the thought here was, don't you, you can secondhand sell your CDs, you can secondhand sell your vinyls, that's no problem. What do you do with music that you purchase digitally, say, on iTunes, and if you don't want it anymore, can you sell it? Interesting model.

Back in 2011. I'm sure by now they should be considering quitting anyways because of streaming. Yeah. It doesn't make sense anymore. So the idea was they created, they had to work with the labels, obviously, and the labels weren't just going to let you take your stuff and sell it.

So they created what they always do, some bullshit thing that doesn't make any sense, that doesn't really work. They called it the music manager software. So if you wanted to sell your music, it would take it bite by bite into the software, deleting it off your drive and putting it into their cloud locker.

To say to the labels, look, we deleted it from their drive, so they don't own the copy anymore. We have the only digital version of this file. Except let's talk about DRM on iTunes songs. So you got to unlock it.

So that's an issue there. But also the fact that anytime I go into my iTunes account, I can delete a song that I bought and then just go redownload it later. Yes, and as the courts have pointed out, there's no way for you to prove that the person didn't make another copy of the song anyways on some other drive.

Exactly. So the way that they've said that you can now exist as a company is you have to purchase it, be very careful never to make a copy of it, store it only on, say, a thumb drive, and you have to mail the thumb drive in to read Digi. Are you kidding me?

No. This is what the court came up with. Well, look, OK, the fact that, hey, yeah, I don't even I don't even have to say anything about this. No, we don't. That is so goddamn dumb. At first, anyways, it doesn't even matter who's buying music off iTunes anymore.

If I could, if this actually goes through, I want to sell my entire iTunes library. That'd be amazing. Yes, you got to have one big thumb drive. That's a big damn threat. Yeah, it's too big for going in the Apple cloud. That's true. There are so many loopholes in this business model. It's ridiculous. It is just it's idiotic.

It is idiotic. Yeah, I I just lost for how people think that, you know what this is? This is like somebody who we used to have probably worked with and comes up and says, hey, look, I have an idea. It's a great idea. I'm going to pay you to make it.

And then somebody is like, well, if I don't make it, somebody else is just going to get the money. So why not? Might as well get the money. Might as well take the monies. Because there are a lot of people with that that have really stupid ideas. Yes. And this would have been one of them. Yeah. There's an article over in Fast Company called the two year old Instagram influencers who make more than you.

Way to rub it in, Fast Company. It's just about everybody does. Did you look at this article about these kids that are being used to pimp products on Instagram? Yeah, it's sad, actually. But, you know, let's not blame. This is this has been going on since YouTube.

I mean, there are YouTube people that just pimp their kids out and make millions, which is insane. Yeah, it's ridiculous. All those unboxing videos and stuff like that. Honestly, I just I, you know, there have always been child actors. So I guess you can't say, no, this is bad for them. But I don't know.

It just leaves a funny taste in my mouth that these people are doing that. You know, after these kids grow up, will they be able to go back and sue their parents for, you know, child abuse? Or at least for the therapy that they're going to have to get. Exactly. That or they could just this could be just genius.

So could be. Yeah, maybe we're just dumb. Yeah. How's how's your kid's Instagram account coming? How many followers does he have? Yeah, it's funny. I was just talking with another parent about that the other the other day. And yeah, no social media accounts until until teen years.

End of story. And God knows what it's going to be like. Then at least we'll have an idea which way it's going. But at that point, maybe they'll write the ship and maybe I'll feel more comfortable with it. But yeah, or maybe I'm not pimping up. I'm not pimping my kid out on social media. Well, I'm pimping my dog out. She's got over 550 followers. So if you want to go to Bam Bam Roddy on Instagram, be my guest.

But she hasn't been posting lately. She's been having a bad hair day. Anyway, there's another article over on Tech Republic. Millennials are making more money than earlier generations did at the same age. Now, doesn't this fly in the face of everything that everybody's been telling us?

Every other article that we've had on the show is that they're not making any money. Right. So which is it? Yeah. You know what this is? This just reminds me of, you know, Brian, eggs are really bad for you. You should only have one egg a week. If that. Oh, wait. Eggs are great for you. You should have eggs every morning.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It is very interesting. But I don't know. It's clickbaity. And somebody sent it in to me. And I was just like, I just wanted to point out that none of this stuff seems to really good.

These studies just don't really matter. It's silly. Now, Brian, this is my favorite one of the week. Well, it's the neatest one of the week. Alexa guard goes live. Let's your Echo speakers listen for trouble. So now you can talk to your Alexa and say, Alexa, I'm leaving.

And then it'll say, OK, I'll be on guard. So now to listen for sounds like glass breaking or a smoke alarm. And then you can tie it in to, you know, let you know that something's going on. OK. And you can do it through other security services, too, like ADT or Ring.

And the guy who tried it said it works. It actually works pretty well. Right. Are you going to turn this on for years? I'll give it a go and see what it does. The interesting thing is I would there's no face on these things.

Right. For most of them. So like there's how do you know if it's in guard mode or not? Like my concern here would be would, you know, could I go to somebody else's house and turn it on guard mode and just leave it that way? So it's always listening to them. And can you access this? Can you hear this sounds? What happens?

What are the legal ramifications? Because we're still working through what happens if if if these smart devices record something like that murder case. Like we're so far behind on how all this stuff actually works that I'm a little concerned about it. It doesn't seem like necessarily a bad idea.

No different than having a security cam, except it's just an audio cam. Um, you know, right. And I think what it is, it's just this is modified trigger sounds. Yeah, because normally you would just have a trigger word to turn on the tube. Actually, you know what? I'm not going to turn this on because we don't know what Amazon does with all the recorded information yet.

We just don't. Oh, you can. Right. You can see it all in your app. You can see it all in your app. But even if you delete it, we don't know if it actually gets deleted. That's my point. Is it just visibility set to zero or is it deleted? Um, and I'd want an easier way to delete the stuff. I, because I, not to be paranoid, but the idea that, that Amazon would just be collecting hours upon hours of audio from my home is creepy.

But we know they can't do that. That's the, the data doesn't point to that. It's only when the trigger words are connected and this has nothing. I mean, this is the same exact thing that you're saying. Okay. So guard is basically just adding trigger words like breaking glass. It's not constantly recording.

Yeah, it has to be. There's no way that it can be sending audio from every echo in your house to Amazon all the damn time. All right. I'll look into it a little bit more. Yeah. There's something about it, just like the Instagram thing with the kids for you that kind of makes me, it's my spidey senses tingling a little bit, but I'll look into it.

Yeah. I think this is just another cool feature. I don't see anything wrong with this. I just can't put the echoes in my house, but since you, since you have them and they're always on anyway, always listening to you waiting for a trigger word. What, what's the, you know, what's the downside of having it be, you know, going when you're not home?

Cause that's the other thing you do this when you're not in the house. Right. It's like, okay, I'm going out. You only set it when you're out. So yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. Check, check the article. Unfortunately, just the link in the show notes is from CNET. So if you're checking this out later on, we're just know that there's going to be autoplay video and it's going to piss you off.

Sorry about that, but it seems like it might actually work. Right.

Media candy. We just talked a little bit, the other episode about the good place and how the third season was still good, but not as good as the first two. I am all caught up. I just watched the latest episode, which is a season three, episode nine, and it was frigging hilarious.

I think they're up to 10. I've seen 10. It might be up to 10 now. I just watched nine. So which one was not, which one was not in about. Oh, Jesus. Well, okay. All you know, it was fun. Okay. It was the Janets. Janets. Oh, yes, yes, yes. That was very good. Yes.

And I think that according to the website, that's what they're up to right now. Maybe 10 is out somewhere. Yeah, it's definitely in Sweden. And I had to kill all my recordings on my DVR because DirecTV, like our system, crapped the bed. So they gave us the new wireless Genie 2 system yesterday.

So I lost everything. So I have to go to Sweden and pick them up. But I think I can get them on streaming because it is connected to the internet. It is an internet of thing. There you go. And the first Downton Abbey movie teaser trailer is finally here. It's one minute of absolutely nothing.

Nada. Zippo. No new footage. Just the music that we all know and love and some beautiful shots that could have been outtakes for or even could have been the intro from the series. It's been so long. I don't remember. So, yeah, absolutely nothing in there. Yay. But a bunch of names at the end.

They had a bunch of names at the end. You know what? I think they hired the same trailer company that did the last Game of Thrones teaser for season seven. Yeah. I think we're done with teaser trailers, people. They're useless. Let's just wait and give us something real. Well, they got press from it. So...

That's true. That's true. That's what they're for. Here's some of that press that I'm going to talk about in an absolute note about crappy headlines. And shockingly, it's from HuffPo. The first Downton Abbey movie trailer is here and it's glorious. Glorious.

It's a minute of nothing. It's a waste of time. So, I guess, well done there. The Grand Tour is confirmed for season four and quote unquote years to come, whatever that means. But they're doing something I'm quite excited about.

They're going to change it. Not for this season. The season that's coming is going to be regular, just like it was. But for the fourth season, when that comes, they're getting rid of the tent and it's only going to be road trip specials. Oh, no. We're going to lose Conversation Street. No more Conversation Street. No more Not Stig.

No more celebrity interviews and no more news segments. Just the fun stuff. Oh, man. You know what? I'm kind of down with this. Me too. And the holy shit balls moment in this article came when I said, when it said, Amazon reportedly spent as much as $5 million per episode for the past couple seasons.

So, we imagine that will continue. What the holy hell? That is a lot of money. That tent must be really made of gold. Yeah. Exactly. Pretty crazy. Now, Star Trek Discovery has released a trailer. And this is a real trailer.

And it shows plenty of Spock. It's actually got a lot of stuff in it. It looks pretty good. I'm not so sure how I feel about hipster Spock with the beard. Yeah. I'm wondering if he's alternate universe Spock. Because he does smile in it. You know? He does smile too. So, who knows?

Maybe he came over when, you know, Michelle Yao came over. Who knows? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, it was a good trailer. Lots of action. It didn't give away too many plot points. It got me excited for the show. Yeah. Yeah. There's a new villain. That's good. But I really don't care. I want some fucking Picard. Yeah. We're at least a year away from that, man.

I know. I know. Makes me sad. It makes me sad, too. I found a new podcast that I listened to called Near Perfect Pitch. It's from England. And this particular episode that I have linked in the show notes has an interview with Mickey Bareny of Lush, who is in her new band, Proyshka. These are...

four-hour podcasts that are mostly music. Whoa. Which is illegal, isn't it? Not unless they have the license. You can buy licenses. You can buy licenses, but I'm pretty sure he hasn't. So listen to it while you can.

Really good music. Right up my wheelhouse. But yeah, I don't know how much longer this one... This is one of those things where if the podcast ever starts doing really well, they have to stop doing it. Yeah. Episode 108 was the one that you listened to. He's been doing it for a while, but yeah, we'll see.

Somebody's going to catch on at some point. Yep. And they're on Podbean, which means it's not part of probably the BBC or anybody that can actually afford a license. They pay for the license. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there's a show that I love and that I watched on Facebook for a while because you can only watch it on Facebook.

It's Returning the Favor with Mike Rowe. And this just drives me crazy. You can't watch the show unless you have a Facebook account. And I want to watch the show, but I don't want to watch the show bad enough that I'm going to make up a Facebook account for it.

I'm never going to reactivate my account. I actually need to go through the steps to delete it because I just keep forgetting about it because, you know, the time limit has run out. I do not need a Facebook account anymore. Everything that I use that Facebook, you know, sign up for an account with Facebook, all of that stuff has been retroactively retrofitted.

So I can log in with, you know, a different email address and a new password and Facebook should theoretically not have any access to it. But as we all know, theoretically, theoretically. But if you do have a Facebook account and you want to, like, you know, spend some time in a dusty room and just feel good about humanity, it's a great show.

I can't recommend it enough. I'm trying to give some good news out to the world in this time of the holiday seasons. The pink slips. Yeah, exactly. It's something to do when you're home. You can't get a job. And there's also a YouTube channel for the LA Fire Department, the LAFD.

And it's fantastic. They're doing these behind the scenes videos. And there's one about this all volunteer crew that are just basically made up of teenagers. It's, you know, it's kind of like ROTC for the fire department because it gets them experienced and trained up for when they want to go and apply for the fire department.

And, you know, these guys are the ones that you see on the hillsides pulling the like doing brush removal and, you know, doing fire lines with the chainsaws and everything. It's really cool. It's really cool. They need some better camera work or at least learn how to focus on some scenes.

But for the most part, it's a really cool story. And you learn a lot about the LA Fire Department. So if you're in LA, highly recommend checking it out. Or if you're into the fire department scene, it's pretty cool. And they're short videos. They're like 10 minutes. And they're just gives you a nice behind the scenes for the people you see all the time.

And it's funny because there's one on the air service and they've got two, like these two choppers. They got four choppers that they rotate through. But one of them flew over my house yesterday and I just waved at them because like, keep going, guys. They did a good job. All right. Hey, LA Fire Department. If you guys want to start up a podcast, I need two podcasting guys that could help you with that.

Yep. For money. Yeah. After finishing 2001, I did what I said we should never do, which is immediately followed up and read more. But there's a caveat here.

I've read all these before, so it's not quite the same thing. It's kind of like revisiting an old friend. And it had been a long time. So I read 2010 Space Odyssey book two by Arthur C. Clark and thoroughly enjoyed it. I really like the intros that he had written for them. Now those are quite old as well. But at the time when the book came out, it was new.

He was like, he reviewed basically what they got right and what he got wrong about the science up until that point, as far as things are known, which is really kind of an interesting perspective to have the author go back and say, when I wrote this, we thought this, this turned out to be true. This didn't. So the intros in and of themselves are worth it.

But the book itself was great. I really enjoyed it so much so that I'm on 2063 Space Odyssey book three now. Of course you are. Of course you are. A little holiday reading. Hey, they're actually uplifting. It's nice to some of this all modern sci-fi tends to be really dark.

Right. And but these older sci-fi classics, most of them are actually rather uplifting. Oh, you mean the Murderbot series isn't a pick me up? No. Seven Eves. Yeah. So it's kind of nice to go back to some of this more classical sci-fi where there was good outlooks on life for the most part.

And it's again, the pick me up thing continues, Jason. OK, that's good. That's good. I read The End of Alzheimer's, the first program to prevent. That's not a pick me up. Actually, it's quite a pick me up. The first program to prevent and reverse cognitive decline by Dale Bredesen.

And fantastic book. Lots of really interesting stuff that has been tried, you know, in trials to help reverse cognitive decline, which is, you know, relevant to my interests. So I actually went out and got the Kindle version as well because I listened to the original on Audible and I went and got the Kindle version because there's a lot of protocols in there for different vitamins and things like that.

So now I can annotate it and bookmark it and go back to it in my Kindle app, either on the phone or the computer. But I do have to recommend if anybody's never used the Kindle app on your on your Mac, you can do really good annotations and stuff in there and even copy and paste, you know, passages out if you need to reference them for later and like put them in a notes app or something.

It's not bad. So much easier than using it on the phone or the iPad, the Kindle app. So, yeah, I always do that. I always just when I'm reading in bed with my iPad and there's something I want to come back to later or whatever, copy or paste or whatever, I just throw a bookmark in and I use the app on my Mac. Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff.

But I highly recommend the book if you're getting of a certain age and you worry about this stuff or if you have family members who are at risk for these things because it's a problem. And I went through, you know, two family members, one with Alzheimer's and one with dementia. And if, you know, if we could have, you know, stopped it before it began, it would have been a nice thing.

President Trump. Nope, he's not the one this week. He's currently threatening to partially shut down the government if Democrats do not give in to his demands for five billion dollars in funding for the border wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for. But Ohio Representative Warren Davidson has an idea.

I have an idea. He's drafting a bill called the Buy a Brick, Build a Wall Act. OK. Yes. Now, there's no explicit mention of cryptocurrency here, but wait for it. The bill allows the Secretary of the Treasury to accept monetary gifts on the condition that it'd be used for a border wall.

So you can just give money to the government, which we all do already. I was going to say, we do that already. But this is specific to it would then go to a border wall fund. Now, on NPR, he did an interview to elaborate on this concept. You could do this with sort of like a crowdfunding site or you could even do blockchain.

You could have wall coins. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yep. This is where we're at now, people. That's it. That's really it. Yes. And they need five billion dollars. Yeah.

Good luck. Good luck. I'm not sure if he's looked at how well the cryptocurrencies are doing, but I don't think that's the way to go. And I don't think that we're all go funding ourselves for our health care right now, much less the wall. Yeah, no doubt saying go fund yourself. Yeah.

Now, Twitter. Twitter has finally made it easy to set your timeline to reverse chronological. So three years ago, they introduced the algorithm with the rankings and the tweets on top. And after three years of people complaining about it, they're going to finally take it away. So at least on iOS starting Tuesday, you'll be able to toggle with a single tap between the rank timeline, which Twitter is now calling the home timeline and an unfiltered reverse chronological one.

You'll do that by using a sparkle icon that appears to the top right of your timeline. Yeah. Tap it again. Algorithm comes back. Tap it. It goes away. We'll see how much it goes away because I don't even believe Facebook's most recent anymore. I'm looking now and I don't have it yet.

Unfortunately, I would like to try it, but yeah, no. And I have to use that damn Twitter app on my phone now when I want to see it. What a, what a piece of crap that thing is. I miss tweet bot so much. I have a hero of the week and attempting to keep things light.

Uh, NASA engineer creates glitter bomb package to thwart parcel seat thieves because we live in a world where we can't have nice things. Package theft is a real problem. And, uh, so net former NASA engineer, Mark Robert has devised a glorious solution that guarantees instant vengeance. He's got a YouTube video up called package theme versus glitter bomb trap.

I highly explain, uh, recommend watching this. Uh, the police refused to help him in his crusade against parcel thieves. So he engineered this box that, uh, is disguised to look like an Apple home pod. And when open sprays a buttload of fine glitter and repeatedly pumps fart spray into the atmosphere.

Yeah, no, this is glorious. It's glorious. It's everywhere right now. And I want to, I signed up for this guy's channel because this guy is smart as hell and makes fun stuff. But the fart spray I thought was the piece de resistance. Oh yeah, definitely. Not just glitter.

We're going to give you some stink. Yeah. Cause that's, you know, that's what gets them to like dump the package so he can go back and retrieve it. So it's pretty cool though. It is a pretty cool video. So hat tip to you, sir. Yes. Now my hat tip this week in the, in the hero department is judge Robert George from Missouri.

This is the, this is a very disgusting case. David Barry jr. Pleaded guilty on December 6th to charges of taking wildlife illegally. He received a one year jail sentence and he also received 120 day sentence in a neighboring county for felony firearms, probation violations. The thing about this, this guy is a scumbag.

He was basically killing deer and just taking, taking parts of them for trophies and leaving the rest to rot. So it was just a waste of life. So I am glad that he got jail time. One year doesn't sound nearly enough to me because there were a lot of deer killed, but the judge has sentenced him to watch Bambi at least once a month.

I love it. I'm not so sure that's going to be effective. The only part of the movie he likes is when Bambi's mom gets killed. Probably, probably spoiler alert, spoiler alert, spoiler alert for a 50 year old animated movie. That's right. That's right. But man, it's like, I just want to see like, you know, the other inmates like sitting around with him watching Bambi.

I'd be thrilled. I love that movie. I have not seen it since I was a kid. It traumatized me. It is pretty traumatic. I have to think about when I'm going to let Lucas start to see, especially this old, the older Disney stuff has some pretty crazy shit in it. Oh yeah, man. There's topless chicks in Fantasia. That's nuts.

It's nuts. Or tits. We've got a bunch of new Patreon subscribers. Thank you very much. Ian, Joe, Brian, Nancy, Fabian. Fabian says, I had two choices. Start smoking cheap Polish cigarettes obtained from shady dudes in East Berlin or giving that money to some guys I enjoy listening to.

Chose the latter. Keep it up. Greets from Berlin. Well, thank you very much, Fabian. Thank you. Love Berlin. One of my favorite cities. Sarah also wrote us over there. So excited you mentioned Cirque. This is seriously one of the first times I've heard someone besides me talk about their love of Cirque de Soleil music. I love it. I've seen tons of shows since I was younger.

Your episode inspired me to revisit the music of Allegra, Quidam, Veracay, etc. Allegria, Quidam, and Veracay. I'm sure I pronounced half of those. Yeah. See, there you go. Yeah. I knew that was coming. There are so many shows out now that I feel they take away from the classics. Anyway, my husband and I love your podcast. Please let us know if you ever come to Boston so we can buy you some beers.

Woo-hoo. We'll do. Over at PayPal, we have some donations from Linda, Lawrence, and Lawrence writes, France 24 is a reasonable news source. See feedback rant, which we'll cover in the special feedback episode. Please don't discuss politics anymore or I will have to stop listening to all U.S.

tech podcasts. We are now responsible for all U.S. tech podcasts. That is some great responsibility. That is some great responsibility. Yes, it is. With great power, Jason. Yes. Great power. Rafal also writes us, thanks for making other grumpy old geek lives better every week. Love the two-show format, doing bigger chunk donation as I'm afraid of monthly subscriptions.

All right. We appreciate it any way it comes. And Justin writes in, love the two-time-a-week format. You're my favorite podcast by a lot. Keep it up. All right. And all the other feedback will be in a Patreon-only special coming sometime around Christmas time. So thank you so much to everyone that wrote us.

There is a crap ton in here that we'll be getting to. And again, if you're a Patreon subscriber, send us a question now and we will try to address that as soon as possible. And over at iTunes, we have best AI podcast out there. Are you a fan of Space Force, Artificial Intelligence, The Berg's, Zuck and Sand, Furries, EULA's, Digital Privacy, Bitcoin?

Look no further. GOG is a juicy one-stop show for everything tech. Marinated in sarcasm, realism, and a huge dose of wisdom. Make tech great again. Well, thank you from YesDumbledoreWasGay. Thank you. We have another five-star rating from O'Felly, my go-to podcast.

I absolutely enjoy listening to this podcast while working on my Etsy orders at home. I have my own shop on Etsy and I think it's a pretty helpful platform for starting your own business. Would be cool to hear your thoughts about it. Also, my kids, 11 and 14 years old, have heard this podcast a little while I'm working sometimes and they think you guys are hilarious. Well, we do throw in a lot of heart jokes.

And RickSuperDigital.com writes in, fun to listen to. Informative and fun. These guys are great and the info keeps me up to date. Highly recommend it. Thank you very much, RickSuperDigital.com. Yes, and we got another five-star review from G Morricane. Blue light. The largest source of blue light in your daily life is the sun.

I think that was more of a comment than a review, but we appreciate the five stars anyways. I don't go outside, so no, it's not. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions 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.

And if you are a PayPal donator and want to get in on our, you know, our Patreon feedback special, drop us an email and we'll hook you up when it comes out. Yep. Pausing shout-outs! Shout-out to Penny Marshall, who just passed away.

She was obviously Laverne and Shirley's star, also one of the first massively successful female directors. She had quite a run there. She, you know, just did a ton of movies, including Big, A League of Their Own, all that sort of stuff. She passed away from a result of complications with diabetes.

She will be missed. Very sad. Very funny woman. Very sad. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Pass 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 307. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Schlemiel. Schlemizer. Hansenbemper Incorporated.

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

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