308: Merry Crapulence

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. And this is our last regular show of the year. Oh, yes, yes. Sweet, blessed relief. Yeah, I'm pretty. I was excited until I looked at the calendar and I realized that I am full on Christmas starting tomorrow. And it ain't done until the new year. Like, yeah, I've got something almost every single day.

It's not a travel day. It's it's some family thing here or there or some friend thing here or there. It is a sweet, blessed relief from reading tech news. But I'm going to be busier than I am normally. Yeah, that's a funny thing. And to get some time off for next week, you know, I basically have to work for the next 72 hours straight to get everything done so I can stop.

Because the other shows I work on don't do seasons. Right. Go figure. Just like this one. Just like this one. We don't do seasons. Yeah, I remember when I was doing developer stuff and I was all my clients would always do a Christmas dump on me. And I was always so upset about it. I was like, you had time. I asked you ahead of time.

Please don't dump things on me. And then they always would, because God forbid everybody not have a Christmas message. Anyway, I am looking forward to it. It was funny. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and she said, you know, this is supposed to be that that time period of love and peace and togetherness. And I just feel stressed out and going crazy.

And I understand that. And it's certainly I can feel that way myself. It's easy to let it slip and kind of overwhelm you. But I've got to say, just take a minute, man, and enjoy it and try to. It's easy for me this year because I'm really looking at the eyes.

I'm looking at Christmas through the eyes of my two year old son, who doesn't really know. I mean, certainly doesn't understand why everything is going on, but is just pure joy and delight. At everything that's going on. He loves the tree. He loves the lights. There are presents. Oma is making cookies, has been making cookies for weeks.

And every time we go visit, he gets to eat cookies and there's Santa hats, whatever Santa is. And it is there's just a joy and delight there. Now, that will be all gone by next year when he realizes he can ask for shit. And it's basically, you know, it's a present and money grab. But this year, it's phenomenal.

All right. Well, at least you get one good year out of it. That's right. It is definitely the most wonderful time of the year, I have to say. No, I'm going to have fun. Once I get the work done, it'll be fun. You sit around the tree. Eggnog? Yeah, I don't do the eggnog that much anymore.

Well, I got a drink for you later in the show then. Awesome. Okay. Yeah, I got, you know, all it takes is one Christmas with food poisoning from eggnog to put you off of it for pretty much ever. Because that's some nasty stuff. I mean, you're drinking raw eggs, so. Well, yeah, I mean, sort of.

If you're going to go all out and make it yourself instead of getting the low-fat one from Trader Joe's. Ugh, God, that stuff is terrible. Putting up brandy in anything, Jason. Yeah, I put rum, brandy, whatever. You know, you put enough spirits in the holiday spirit and you will get there until you pass out.

Definitely. So we got some follow-up. We do. So, Netflix swears it did not read your Facebook messages in a very strange tweet. The official Netflix Twitter account, for some reason, decided it was time for a moment of levity about something that is not levy at all. Not that levy's a word.

I'm making it. Well, you can drive your Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry. Oh, man. Trent is going to hate you for that. For some reason, a friend of the show, Trent Hamilton, always goes off on the screed about how Don McLean is not dead yet and he hates that song. So I'm thrilled that you just dropped that in there. That's just for you, Trent.

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So, yes, Netflix tweeted, Netflix never asked for or accessed anyone's private messages. We're not the type to slide into your DMs. See how hip they are? Creepy. Yeah, let's, let's, let's, this is something that was kind of a big deal, which actually isn't, which we're going to get to in a second.

But it was a huge privacy concern. People freaked out about it and to go kind of creepy, weird, hip on it as your official statement. Probably not a cool thing. They asked if this tweet was Netflix official comment and a representative gave a much better statement to Vulture. Over the years, we have tried various ways to make Netflix more social.

One example of this was a feature we launched in 2014 that enabled members to recommend TV shows and movies to their Facebook friends via Messenger or Netflix. It was never that popular, so we shut the feature down in 2015. At no time did we access people's private messages on Facebook or ask for the ability to do so. Now, to follow up on that, initially, after the news broke, I had written about 35 questions in this, in our show notes about what I wanted to know about this kind of access.

And we've kind of gotten the answers. And this is all much ado about nothing. So, yes, Facebook did allow companies like Spotify, Netflix, the Royal Bank of Canada, Amazon, et cetera, gave them extra above and beyond access than most companies ever had, including the abilities to read, write, and delete users' private messages and to see all participants on a thread.

However, they did give it to them as part of a tool set, as an API to do something like Netflix tried to do, which is basically bring Facebook Messenger into their apps so they can stay within Facebook Messenger without leaving, say, Netflix or Spotify or whatever. Most people didn't build that out.

Most people didn't even know they had the tool sets available to them. And even when they did build them out, they ended up getting rid of them because nobody was using them because it's stupid. But that's all it really was. So, it's not like they got this gigantic data dump of all your messages or anything like that. They got a tool set to allow them to basically build Facebook Messenger within their own apps.

That's it. See, now that makes sense then. That makes sense. Yeah, you would need the ability to do everything that they just said if you're writing to Facebook Messenger from your app because you are going to need to be able to delete the messages. You're going to be able to need to read them and see who they're sending to and from.

Yes. So, you can find them again. It's all tightly bound up in, theoretically, some sort of API or whatever, which as developers, I think you and I would love to see that, but we never will. But I'm assuming that actually this is kind of on the up and up and it totally makes sense to do it if they, you know, they gave this as an option to basically inject Facebook into all these other apps, which makes sense for Facebook.

And if you were trying to be social and didn't want to build out your own messaging system, it would make sense for these companies as well. Right. But here's the one thing they didn't do is vet the developers on the partner side. Yeah. Because if I had one of my questions. Yeah. If I had that access, I'm just sitting around late at night going, oh, looky what I can do.

Let's see what all my ex-girlfriends are up to. Well, again, we've talked about God status before, oftentimes on the show. And to some degree, it did hand over God status to these entities. So, who in the companies was actually in charge of this, built out these things, was looking at them?

Because, yeah, if you bring that in, somebody's going to be able to see everything. But that's the way of everything. That's what we call digital God. Now, over at Motherboard, Motherboard has been kind of hit or miss for me. Remember they did the article about how Facebook is listening to your post with all that great research that that one guy did.

Yes, the great research of one dude once. Yeah, one dude once who is very unscientific and then got shared and brought the whole damn thing back to the forefront. Well, this author over on Motherboard, Jason Kobler, or maybe Keebler, because maybe he's a Keebler elf.

Yeah, it could be. Very Christmassy. Yeah, it would be. He wrote an article saying, we should replace Facebook with personal websites. Now, I've brought this up on the show before. We said that about 10 years ago. Yeah, it would be fantastic. But I'm sorry, dude. That ship has left the port a long time ago.

The reason Facebook exists in sites like Facebook and Twitter is because people don't want to run their own damn websites. No, it becomes a mess. This is kind of what the downfall of MySpace was, is then everybody, as soon as MySpace gave everybody the ability to turn their basically standard looking system into their own website, we got sparkly stars everywhere and animated things and rotating cursors and text on colors that nobody could read because nobody is a fucking designer that does all these things.

So that's quickly we discovered social media doesn't work that way, which is why Facebook is so tightly controlled and makes sense and why everybody uses it. Yeah, I mean, MySpace back in the day made GeoCities look like, you know, the Guggenheim. Yeah. Now, I strongly feel that brands should definitely be pushing their websites more and more.

We've been talking about that since we started the show as well. Brands need their own websites. I don't think people do. We need to be honest. People don't have that much to say. Yeah, they do. Yeah. Look at comment sections. Do we need them? Fuck no. No. And, you know, even podcasting, we find people don't have much to say because every show that starts up that last year, like I would say 90 percent peter out after five episodes and then the rest peter out at 12 in a very small percentage keep going after 13.

13 is a magic number, but very small subsets of those. And even some that make it the whole year are just like, I just ran out of stuff to say. Yeah, I agree. I got to go out and have some new shit happen to me so I can write some new stuff. You've got a brand or you got a company. Yes.

By all means, go have your own website. Start doing what we've always talked about that people should be doing. Drive your traffic from your socials to your website. By all means, do that. But no, not everybody needs a personal website. Yeah. And, you know, Facebook with their really boring ass design. Actually, I mean, I can't stand it.

I hate that color. I wish I could change the colors, but you can't even do that. That's how tightly controlled it is. But guess what? For the lay people, the unwashed masses, that works. It actually works. I was listening to some podcasts. A friend of the show, David Teeter, got me back into Stay Tuned with Preet, which is a fantastic, fantastic podcast.

I don't know why I stopped listening to it, but he did an episode with Kara Swisher this week. And I wish I could link to the actual episode page in our show notes, but I can't because NPR, the idiots at NPR have these, you know, big sites with all their podcasts on it.

But there's no permalinks to individual episodes. Which is stupid. It's so stupid. They could really use some good web designers over there and web programmers, I guess. Do you think that Kara Swisher, would you call her the queen of podcasts? Is there one person that has not appeared on more podcasts ever? Like, she's on every podcast known to man and has like five of her own.

Well, yeah, I don't know. I think there are a lot more prolific people. It's just you're seeing it on a, there's a self-selecting sample. Yes, because I'm looking at a lot of tech podcasts. Exactly. She's on the ones that you, you listen to, but no.

So here, let's get, let's get back to this show though. It was pretty good. And did you get a chance to listen to it or no? No, I did not. Oh man. So she's basically saying that, look, Mark Zuckerberg is never going away. You can't get rid of them. But she's like, Facebook will go away at some point.

And I'm with her on that one because it's happened before. She's like, look, I was reporting on AOL when they were the biggest company in the, in the world. Who are they now? You know, these things have life cycles and she's like, you know, Zuckerberg is just a man child who's never going to figure this stuff out.

And I love it. I mean, she was just brutally honest and it was a really good listen. I mean, I don't listen to a lot of her stuff cause I don't really jive with her on a lot of things, but she nailed it on this one. She just took Zuck to the wall. Well, look, I think we all can agree that he was 99% of Facebook's success was right place, right time.

That's it. It wasn't like he was some genius. Yeah. The technology is not all that amazing. Yeah. We know that it's not that hard. Look at it. It all existed before he made it. He just got lucky with getting people young when they were in college and that just turned into a thing.

He just got supremely lucky and we got unlucky. That's how it goes. The world. I mean, not just me and you, but that's the thing. There is over at the hustle newsletter, a great writeup and a great title. I got to say they, they, they're doing pretty good on their titles.

They do the newsletter every day and it's a, you know, it's a bunch of fucking millennials, but they do some decent journalism. Sometimes they have a great title on this one. A very scary Zuckmas in a crappy new year, 2018's failed attempts to fix Facebook. Nice. And they have a roundup of Zuck's greatest hits of 2018.

And they list the 12 scandals of Zuckmas in order. And it's pretty good. It's basically a list of the 12 main ones for the year. They should have done a song. Yeah, really. So you don't have to get the newsletter to see the article. It'll be linked in the show notes at GOG.show slash 308.

Facebook's problems continue, although this time they're trying to separate themselves a little bit because it's done through WhatsApp, which they own. But, you know, they're pushing the idea that this is a WhatsApp and not Facebook problem.

WhatsApp chat groups are being used to spread illegal child pornography cloaked by the apps end to end encryption. Who would have saw this coming? So TechCrunch did an investigation and they found out that there's a whole bunch of disturbing content slipping by WhatsApp's automated systems, which is strange because, you know, as we all know, Facebook's is very good.

Facebook blocks things that shouldn't even be blocked. Yeah, it's so good. It just blocks good stuff. It blocks everything. So apparently they haven't ported over that API yet to WhatsApp. So they're having some real issues over there that basically there's a lot of child porn going on in in groups that are named very obvious things.

Wait for it. Child porn only. No advertising. Child porn X videos found on the group discovery app. Group link. So it's all over the place. It's pretty easy to spot. It's a little hard to believe that an automated system wouldn't be able to find that. But what they're basically saying is, hey, the automated stuff is not cutting it by in and of itself.

Automated moderation is not good enough. And we kind of know that's true. But we also know that nobody's throwing money at human moderation. And we also know what happens to these human moderators psychologically. Yeah, they go a little crazy. Now, the interesting thing that would be this would be great if this is what was happening, that these are stings.

You know, these are honeypots. So some government agencies set up these these channels. And wait for people to join and then just get their usernames. And because if you're joining that, you kind of know what's happening. If it's that explicit, then you can get flagged and become, you know, a person of interest.

There's no denying that you were going in there for what was being advertised. Yeah, it says what it is on the tin. I thought it was going to be videos of puppies. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I'm dyslexic. I thought it was something, you know, I couldn't read it right. Whatever. Anyway. Yeah.

Let's we've been you know, the world has been dumping on Facebook, rightfully so. But there's enough manure to spread around. So let's dump a little bit on Twitter here. Twitter stock has gone down 11 percent yesterday after a Citron research report called the platform. I love this. The Harvey Weinstein of social media.

Yeah. Love it. Basically saying Twitter is doing absolutely nothing at all. They have built the world's largest crowdsourced data set about online abuse against women. Twitter is a place where racism, misogyny and homophobia are allowed to flourish basically unchecked. You hear that, Jack?

Well, we know Jack's stance. So. Yeah. So but it's finally starting to to actually filter down to a real level where they're getting hit financially because people are saying, you know what? You need to clean this shit up. Yeah. The thing that bugs me is it's, you know, it went down 11 percent and it was twenty nine, twenty nine a share.

Yeah. And that's like ten bucks more than I sold it for when I won our bet. Yeah. It was good. Twitter was in the crapper last year. They kind of crawled back a little bit, but it looks like they're going to take a hit again. So we will see what happens. I don't understand how they came back. Well, we do know a little bit. We know that they basically got rid of a lot of expenses.

They weren't making any more money, but they tightened up the ship a little bit in terms of, well, they didn't have to pay for any moderators, obviously, because there's no moderation. Seriously. Oh, well. And we've talked a lot about how Amazon is taking over the online sphere. And we're going to hear a lot more about that as, you know, the year end reviews come up and we find out that everybody ordered everything from Amazon for Christmas.

But there may be a decent competitor coming next year. Target same day delivery service shipped. Shipped. I-I-P-E-T. I'm glad they didn't drop the I and just go with shipped. That's some brave branding. I mean, it's one letter away from shit. Come on. This is true.

Especially if you have a speech impediment. And the one thing that I'm going to be ordering a lot from Target's delivery service is toilet paper. So I guess it makes sense. That would make sense. Yeah. It would be like one of the number paper products I would totally order from them instead of Amazon. But they're going to expand their service quite a bit and rapidly.

So we will have an actual kind of competitor to Amazon next year because Target carries a lot of stuff. And if I can get same day delivery from Target and the price is right and I can go there instead of Amazon. I mean, granted, it's just another gigantic company, but it's not the gigantic-est company.

So maybe it'll help a little bit. So we'll see what happens. But I'm happy about the fact that there might actually be a competitor against Amazon at this point for kind of your generic basics. There is Walmart, you know, Walmart delivery. Right. So because, you know, they have the employees bring stuff home at the end of the day and they can drop it off to you.

Yeah, that's great. What I would love to see is a Walmart employee with a backpack of all your stuff in it riding up to your house on a bird. That would be amazing. To drop it on his way home. That would be it. Continuing on with bashing on Amazon, The Verge wrote a masterpiece called Prime and Punishment.

This, I mean, it's great. The only problem I have with this piece is everything is in images. So, like, they have a really nice key findings guide on the side and you can't copy and paste it. But, so I will just read the quick key findings for you.

Did you get a chance to read this epic tome? I didn't read the whole thing. I scanned through. I really enjoyed the graphics that they did. They were fantastic. And, yeah, I read the key points. Yeah. Yeah. So here's what it basically boils down to. Amazon's marketplace, the company's third-party platform, has almost twice the sales as Amazon retail and it's growing far faster.

But getting suspended from the platform can have severe financial repercussions for sellers and land them in a bewildering appeal system. The suspension process has given rise to an industry of consultants who specialize in writing Amazon appeals and getting sellers back on the platform.

There's something you can do from home and make some money. Sellers use Amazon's own rules against each other, devising intricate schemes to get their rivals suspended. Schemes include buying fake five-star reviews for their competitors, filing false intellectual property reports, reclassifying their rivals' listings in unrelated categories, and tampering with trademark files at the patent office.

What? People are horrible. I know. People really are. Okay. I mean, the buying fake five-star reviews for your competitor, that I can see. I mean, that's low-hanging fruit, right? Anybody can do that. And the one thing that they shouldn't, hopefully they can't do the verified buyer thing because that way at least somebody would have to buy your product and write about it.

But getting dinged for fake five-star reviews is ridiculous. Amazon needs to fix that and they can fix that. What gets me is the tampering with trademark files at the patent office. That is some serious black ops going on right there. Merry Christmas, Jason.

I think what I'm learning is that the internet has just made us all even worse people than we were before. That's why we started the show. Come on. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. This is nothing new. And finally, there's a black market for internal Amazon data on customers and sellers, seller accounts, and reinstatement, which means there are some moles working at Amazon, just like the ones at Instagram that were charging $10,000 to get verified.

These guys are selling data from Amazon from the inside. You know, you always thought it was far-fetched when I said that there are people probably at Apple and Google writing bugs into iOS and Android so they could leave later and sell them as zero days and make a couple million dollars.

You might be right about that now. I think this is enough information between everything else that we've heard in the past two years to pretty much put that into the realm of highly probable. I agree. I agree. I got that Mythbusters graphic come up. Plausible. Yeah.

Extremely plausible. And Amazon now, I had no idea that they had grown this so much. Amazon Air. We talked about that when it first hit and they were leasing planes and buying planes because they are trying to take over the world, obviously.

You know, so they've taken over bookstores, grocery stores. Now they need to get rid of FedEx and UPS and, well, DHL ain't that hard to get rid of. They're the worst. Days after FedEx CEO Frederick Smith dismissed the Amazon threat to its business during the company's earnings call, Amazon announced an expansion of its two-year-old Amazon Air operations, which will now add 10 767-300 dedicated Amazon cargo aircraft to its fleet.

This brings the number of planes they have up to 50. I had no idea that they had 50 planes. I still thought they had like five or 10. Right. That's a lot of planes. Well, there's some countries that don't have that many planes. There's a lot of Amazon packages that need to be delivered, so it makes sense for them to actually own the distribution methods.

They've got the money to do it, so they've got the money to do it. They're going to buy the U.S. Postal Service at some point. I hope so. Yeah. Well, I think Amazon's the only thing keeping them afloat right now, but... I think they are too, so... When are we going to get our Jeff Bezos commemorative stamp collections?

Oh, can't wait. All right. So over in the digital realm, Spotify has just settled a $1.6 billion copyright infringement lawsuit. Basically, they had a bunch of music on Spotify. Well, one of the reasons that I like Spotify over the competitors is they had basically all the music.

What we found out is they didn't have all the music legally, which makes me wonder if they have an old LimeWire account running all the time that's grabbing all this music that they haven't made deals for to make sure it's on their service. Morpheus exists. It's still around. Wix and Music Publishing filed a lawsuit a couple of years back against the music streaming service because it was using tens of thousands of songs without the proper licensing.

I remember when we covered that, yeah. Yes. And this just got settled, and the terms of the settlement, of course, aren't disclosed. But as Variety reports, it appears whatever monetary compensation there was didn't amount to the $1.6 billion initially sought, as Spotify would have had to disclose that to its shareholders. So it seems to be a kind of, oops, are bad.

We're going to pay you a little bit of money, and we're going to make sure that we have a good, mutually advantageous relationship moving forward. Yep. And no one was in the room when it happened, which you can't get on Spotify. Wix and Music is huge, by the way. Actually, full disclosure, did a website for them a couple of years back.

So they are a serious player, and they own the rights to almost all the musics. So this was a big lawsuit. Which site was it? Was it for one of the dead people? No, it was actually the Wix and Music site itself, which has since been changed over to something even more boring than what I did at the time because they had no imagination there.

Well, it's a big business. They're not supposed to have an imagination. That's for the artists, not the guys who take in all the money. And speaking of copyright infringement, Pinterest may go public as soon as April. Jesus, fuck. You've got to be kidding me. Pinterest.

Okay, of all, of all, of all the various things that have gone public that I have said you are an idiot to invest in, this is the number one. Pinterest has no, none, zero content. All their content is stolen. That's all it is.

It's all copyright infringement. The entire company is nothing but copyright infringement. Yeah, I know. Okay. So, I'm just telling you. And here's the funny bit. Guess how much funding they've taken so far. I don't even, you're going to make me sick, aren't you?

I'm going to make you incredibly sick. Okay. Pinterest, which is basically a bulletin board, has raised nearly $1.5 billion so far. $1.5 billion for what amounts to a bulletin board where people can post stolen shit.

That's un-fucking-believable. Merry goddamn Christmas. Jesus. This site should be shut down. It shouldn't be going public. It shouldn't have, the bank should be looking at this and going, there's no way we can invest in this.

But, but, but, this is technology. This is technology. So, I would like you to, over the break, when we're off, I know this is going to be such fantastic reading. I love homework. Check out the Wikipedia entry for the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act.

Now, you probably have never heard it, referred to it as that, but this is the safe harbor clause in the DMCA. They were just a platform. Exactly. So, we need to seriously repeal and replace this thing. I hate the word repeal and replace because it just makes me think of people yelling about Obamacare.

But, in this case, honestly, look, okay, SoundCloud. SoundCloud is basically going out of business because all people do is upload copyrighted material to it, and that's why nobody wants to buy them or invest in them or give them money. They should go public.

Pinterest is, SoundCloud is the same thing. Yeah. Okay. It's just a different type of file. I give up. Show's done. I quit. Don't drop that mic. It's on loan. I know. I'm throwing your mic out the window, Jason.

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Techmeme.com is great for returning to several times a day to find out what you've missed in the world of tech. We're just taking what Tech Meme is good at and distilling it into podcast form. Same news headlines, context, and conversation around what happened today in the world of tech. It's a daily show, Monday through Friday, posting around 5 p.m. Eastern every afternoon.

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So go give Tech Meme Ride Home a listen to now. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire Podcast. The Cyber Wire is a cybersecurity news service based in Maryland.

Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans Podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Dave brings joy and terror to children everywhere in his sexy Rudolph furry costume. So, Mary Firmus, everyone. That's right. That's right. Uh-huh. It's true.

It's true. This is my favorite time of year. Put my Rudolph costume on and go cruising around daycare centers all over Maryland. That does not sound creepy at all. Wonderful time of the year. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Yes, it is. Yeah. Oh, my.

So we talked in the past about how there has been a problem in the Matrix and there's something wrong in the universe. And, Dave, you and I both agree on this whole Berenstain, Berenstain Bears debacle that we are definitely in the wrong universe. Well, it turns out back in 2016, there was a weasel got into the Large Hadron Collider.

And I think this is the source of the universal split. I am so into this. I am. First of all, when I read this article, I laughed out loud because coming into it, I was not thinking that it was an actual weasel.

Well, turns out. No, it was a guy in a weasel suit. It was a furry. But the fact that CERN had to put out an update saying, actually, the creature may have been a Martin. No, I don't even know what that is. I don't either.

Marvin the Martian? No, no. Is it weaselesque? Martin Short? I don't know. Now, this would explain a lot. The timing is right. Yeah. This is what we get for messing with the universe. My favorite line in this article is, where is it here?

It says that it is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking the secrets of the universe. I don't know. I felt my favorite line was this one. There have been previous incidents, including one in 2009, when a bird is believed to have dropped a baguette onto critical electrical systems.

Yeah. Again, every sign points to some sort of coordinated thing that these are just parts of the universe that we should not be messing with. Yeah. The universe is pushing back. Now, if dolphins were involved, then we know we would have a conspiracy.

Right. Because that would be... Trying to save us from ourselves. Yes, yes. If the universe has been destroyed by a rogue baguette or a malicious Martin, I love this. Oh, yes. So, at least we have an answer to why things are so wrong.

And, yes, no, it is still the Berenstain Bears, not the Berenstain Bears. I agree. That's the way the world should be. Well, this is the universe that we're stuck in. So, let's continue with our craptastic Christmas. Let's make them a mistake. I'll tell you what, this universe at least has good material for us.

Yeah, so the EFF has released their annual guide to creepy surveillance Christmas gifts, topping the EFF's don't buy for Christmas list. Shockingly, Facebook's portal. Ah, who would have guessed that? Followed closely by Alexa, Google Home, and other Home Hubs, Verizon's App Flash spyware-equipped phones.

It's a feature, not a mistake. And even the elf on the shelf gets a look because it normalizes surveillance. Now, that might be going a little bit too far. Yeah. I have a couple of thoughts on this list. First of all, Facebook's portal. When I first saw the TV commercials for this, I was calling shenanigans because in the commercials, this device pans and zooms and follows people around the room.

And I was thinking, well, that's just for the commercial. But no, evidently, it actually does that. Yes. Yes. You can thankfully turn it off. Yeah. But again, if you put a device in your home with a camera and a microphone that was built by Facebook, you have lost your freaking mind.

Something we all agree on. Yes. Yeah. And then the other thing, the elf on the shelf. Well, I will never have an elf on my shelf in my house. It's just something I don't get. I don't understand. I certainly remember as a kid being told that Santa Claus was watching.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I don't do elf on the shelf either, and I never will. I think it's horrid. But, yeah, of course, Santa was watching, especially in December. That's when you had to be on your best behavior. But you can always get a mensch on a bench. Yeah. I like the trooper on the pooper. I've not heard of that one.

Oh, it's a stormtrooper sitting on a toilet. Nice. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, this whole idea of, you know, a supernatural being watching over you. There's a long history of that. So, I don't think we're. Yes, we call it religion.

Yeah. I don't think we're getting rid of that one anytime soon. But, I guess, personifying it and making it a creepy little elf. Yeah. For me, that's a bridge too far. I think future generations will have Mark Zuckerberg dressed up as Santa because he's the one that really knows when you've been sleeping or awake.

That's right. That's right. I'm going to make a Zuck on a duck. A little Zuckerberg figure that you put on like your rubber ducky in the bath. Uh-huh. And he just follows you around the tub. Yes. And wherever you look, he just turns.

He's just like. Somebody should make a little cozy for this Facebook device that has the face of Mark Zuckerberg on it. So, you can cover the device, but still have a picture of him staring at you. Yes. You cannot get away. Just a reminder. Photoshop is in my future today, I think.

Right. I'll sell it on Etsy and Pinterest. Yay. There you go. See? There. Very nice. Very nice. Except somebody will steal it on Pinterest. And, of course, I'll get no revenue. Yes. And they will get $1.5 billion in funding. Yeah. Moving on with some more fun Alexa news. Have you heard about this one?

A German user who was trying to get his GDPR sanctioned data from Amazon to hear what his Alexa was recording. Got sent 1,700 voice recordings from a total stranger. This was like, okay, this is the worst case scenario for Amazon at this point.

Except right now, except Amazon is sold out of Echoes. So, what are you going to do? I mean, they've already sold them all. They're all out in the world. This is like, you know, the dystopian future where the rise of the Echoes. They're going to sprout little legs and they're going to start coming after us.

But the thing is that, yeah, they really – they're saying, of course, it was human error. Right. Human error. Not the AIs. Don't know who wants his voice. Yeah. I believe that – my take on this, while the timing is certainly bad and it's not a good thing, my take on this is that this is the modern equivalent of getting the guy across town's photos from his bachelor party when you go to the photo mat to pick up your photos.

Pretty much, yeah. Or, yes, I got the wrong bag at my McDonald's drive-thru order. This is not what I ordered. Yes. This is the other person's order. It's a human error. I totally – I don't see this as horrible. Unfortunate for them for timing, but at least – hey, at least they're giving the stuff up to the wrong person.

But no, no. Why is a human involved in this? It should be an automated process. It's like, okay, here's my account. Yep. Just send me my data. Do a – just do a, you know, a select and zip it up and send it my way. Give me a link. There should be no humans involved in this process. I would imagine that – and I'm just – I'm totally, you know, talking out of my ass here, but I would imagine – which I've built a career on – I would imagine that they probably think that having the human involved is actually more secure.

It might even have something to do with GDPR. I don't know. But having a person verify that what they're sending you is what they're sending you. And in this case, the person mistyped something or who knows what. But, yeah. Yeah, I don't – as a programmer, I don't see that you need a human in this process, honestly.

You know what I think they haven't done yet is written the scripts to do it automatically. That could be. So somebody had to go – like, you know what they probably did? They just mistyped a user ID because they probably had to do the, you know, the select manually. 765-9243872596664321. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they put a dyslexic person in charge of it.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it would have been fun to hear the recordings, but at least this guy did the right thing and just, you know, told them and didn't post them to Pastebin or something. Given the entire rest of this show that we've done so far, Jason, it's nice to hear that there is a decent human out there.

There's one left. There's one left. He's in Germany. Right. He's sitting outside of the Large Hadron Collider. Looking for stray baguettes. Yeah, right. He's knocking them out of the sky. Throwing pieces of bread at every weasel that walks by.

Now, we've talked a lot in this segment about evil for hire sites, and there's quite a few out there. And apparently the FBI has now done something about it. There are a number of DDoS for hire sites out there, and the FBI has kicked some of the worst of them off the internet. Obviously, this involved a lot of effort and searches because they had names such as downthem.org, netstress.org, quantumstress.net, vbooter.org, and defcon.pro.

Who would have thought what those sites were doing? Yeah. I love the euphemism that these are stressor sites, that you can order a stressing of a site. You're just doing them a favor by pointing out to them what happens when their site is under stress.

It's just a nice little way to say something other than what it is. You know, there is a legitimate need for stress sites, but... Sure. Not these guys. Well, yeah. I guess the FBI took a close look and said, no, that's not what you're doing.

Yeah. So, good for them. See, legitimate stress tests involve somebody from the actual organization ordering them, not other people. That's kind of the way it works. Exactly. Right. Not a competitor. Yeah. Yeah. And nice to see, as we've often said, it's nice to see perhaps someone will actually do some time for doing a bad thing.

That would be nice. Yeah. These guys are all... What are they? Two of them are out of California, one from Alaska. So, this next one I put in here, this is actually a follow-up. This is something that we had pondered at the tail end of one of our shows maybe about six months ago or so.

We'd wondered about automating, overcoming two-factor by walking through basically the login process behind the scenes. And sure enough, that's what hackers are doing. They've set up a way to do this in a completely automated way and to do it at scale.

And it's pretty much the way that we wondered if it could be done this way. Basically, you know, you send someone a phishing email and they click the link, which you never do. And so, for example, that takes them to Google to log in. Of course, it's a fake Google page that looks exactly like the real Google page.

And they log in. They send in their username and password. And so, behind the scenes, the bad guys are logging into real Google with that username and password. And then Google responds with the multi-factor. It sends them the SMS. Or even if they go use Google Authenticator, they enter the code that they received or the code that Authenticator generated.

They put that in the fake site, which is now asking them for the additional factor. And behind the scenes, they log in to the real site using the multi-factor. And now they own your email. Yeah. Amazing. It works.

Go figure. It does. Yeah. You guys both kind of sketched that out and you nailed it. We did. I guess on the one hand. Maybe you gave them the idea. Maybe they were listening. Right, right, right. Maybe we should stop doing this segment. It'll be right. In the sentencing report, it'll say, how did they get the idea?

Yeah. I had a lot of copies of this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. The article does say that if you use something like a YubiKey hardware token, that you will be protected from this sort of thing with that. Until you lose your YubiKey and then you're screwed.

Have you lost a YubiKey, Jason? Yes, I did. I finally found it. Jason's been in that dump with the guy that lost his cryptocurrency. They've been looking for these keys for months. And we're both out there with our shovels and our metal detectors.

I was like, what are you looking for? CryptoCoin. What are you looking for? My YubiKey. The CryptoCoin guy gave up because it's not worth anything anymore. He went home. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. My YubiKey still has value. Maybe Bam Bam ate it. No, I eventually found it. I eventually found it.

But then I immediately disabled it because I couldn't log in. This was back when we were testing it for Facebook, though, because when Facebook said, oh, you can log in with your YubiKey now. I'm like, OK, started doing it and then realized that I was out and about on my laptop and I'm like, oh, I don't know where my YubiKey is.

And then when I got home, I couldn't find it anywhere. And it took me like two days. So I was off Facebook for two days. It was glorious. But the thing about YubiKey is everybody's giving them away when you do something. I've got like a bunch of them, but they're all different generations. Like when I signed up for Wired Magazine, they sent me a YubiKey.

Everybody nowadays is you do something basic and they send you a YubiKey, but they're all different versions. Right. Can somebody just send, if you sign up for this thing, give me two YubiKey so I can make a backup, please. Oh, it'd be nice. Yeah. End up with a bunch of YubiKey's on your keychain and look like a janitor.

It's kind of going to be it. It's a sexy look, Jason. I think you should go for it. Right. Yeah. What was the janitor's name in Laverne and Shirley, who would always be like looking for his keys? I just remember Schneider. That's it. Schneider.

Yeah. Schneider. Yeah. That was One Day at a Time. One Day. I just remember Lenny and Squiggy. Was that Lenny and Squiggy's show too? Lenny and Squiggy were. I think there was a lot of crossover back in the day. Yeah. Lenny and Squiggy were Laverne and Shirley, one of my all-time favorite gags, which is someone says, this is terrible. There can't be possibly anything worse than this.

Door slams open. Hello. Yeah. Over and over again. Which, by the way, I discovered recently by my wife and I went through the entire series of the Mary Tyler Moore show, which is really good. I highly recommend it.

It's so funny. It's just a nice little escape from, you know, all the crap we're going on. This universe that we're, this baguette universe we're stuck in. Yes, yes. The weasel world that we're in. But they did that gag on that show with Ted Knight, with Ted Baxter, and that predates Laverne and Shirley.

So, not an original gag, but just as funny. Nothing is new in this universe. No, no. It's probably an old vaudeville joke. But, so, finally, I thought this week we would close out with something a little philosophical.

This is from the Lawfare blog, and it's an article titled, Cybersecurity, Time for a New Definition. It's an article by Susan Landau. And she's making the case that the definition that we use for cybersecurity at the government level, the definition they list here is, I'll read it here.

It's prevention of damage to, protection of, and restoration of computers, electronic communication systems, electronic communication systems, wire communication, and electronic communication, including information contained therein, to ensure its availability, integrity, authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. Right.

Say that three times fast. It's basically hardware, hardware, hardware. Right. And the point that she's making here, and she quotes some other people who have been thinking about this, that we're beyond that now, that there's psychological parts of this that...

So, basically, we need to add and memes to the definition. Yeah. Yeah. And some interesting things to ponder here. You know, do we have to basically turn the internet over to some sort of a real names kind of thing? Does there have to be attribution for political advertising?

Yes. Those sorts of things. Yes. Yeah. Ideally, yes. But the real name thing doesn't necessarily work, because that is Facebook, and Facebook was one of the worst problems in the last election, or at least, you know, so that is real names, and that didn't really work. And how many times has Facebook actually, you know, have they asked for your ID?

Do they know it's your real name? No. I have friends with hundreds of accounts with fake people that they have made out of whole cloth. Yeah. You know? It's not a real name. They say it's a real name, but they were just trying to go after, like, you know, drag queens with stage names at the beginning. Right. It's ridiculous.

And you know Facebook knows when these fake accounts are being spun up. I mean, they have to. They're so good at this. They must know, but they want the clicks. They want the eyeballs. Yes. Especially when they're using facial recognition, and you post up photo galleries of people that you've, you know, gotten from Google.

You know, their whole photo albums, you post them up there. They know that those people are coming in as different names, so they should be able to shut those accounts down and go back to the first mover, and they don't do that. It's not in shareholder value to do so. Yes. That is ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

Who's got the bell this week? There you go. Thank you. Yeah. No, I read through this whole article, and I 100% agree with it here. There's nothing wrong about this. The term cybersecurity certainly needs to be expanded at that definitional level, because that's the real problem that we've had and that we're finding out about, and God bless.

Have a Mueller Christmas. This is exactly what's been going on, and this is what happened to us. Our infrastructure did not get hit by Russian agents. Our political system did via memes and psychological warfare. Right. Yeah.

That's it. The article also talks about how internet users should have clarity on how algorithms like news feeds and search engines work so that you know, if this is bubbling up to the top of my news feed, why? What do they think about me that makes them think that this is going to be interesting to me?

Who perhaps paid for this to be placed here? Yeah. All that sort of stuff. Yeah, it's funny, because that's been a recurring theme, I think, with Jason and I over the past couple episodes, is we keep going. We'd love to see how they actually built this. Like, I would like to...

Where are the damn manuals? Where are the manuals for these services that we're using that explain how they work? Because I want to know. There's another problem with this, going back to quote unquote AI, is a lot of these people who are writing the AI systems don't know how the systems are actually coming up with the final result that the AI is spitting out.

It's just like, we're going to throw it in this black box, and if it looks okay, then we're going to use it. Now, since we're kind of doing a thought experiment here, isn't that wildly irresponsible? Yes, it is. It's wildly irresponsible. If you have no idea how this process is working, it is wildly irresponsible to unleash it on humanity.

Well, I think we're just starting to realize that. A bit fucking late. Well, absolutely. I agree. You can go all the way back to the genesis of the internet, though, and that's the problem. They didn't know what this thing was going to do. They just thought they were going to be able to swap scientific papers with everybody at the other universities.

Right. Well, there's one thing with unintended consequences of a product and not knowing how people are going to use it. It's another thing entirely to not even understand what the fuck it is that is your product. That's true. It's like, I made this thing. It's kind of intelligent. It's coming up with some kind of things, but then, you know, it doesn't, and I don't know why.

Oh, then it turns into a teenage racist in, you know, half a day. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, Microsoft had that problem with Tay. Yeah. Yes. That was one of my favorite stories. Yeah. Yeah. And I think- It turned into a really horrible person.

Uh-huh. To Jason's point- Garbage in, garbage out. That's right. To Jason's point about shareholder value, I guess if your number one question is, will this make money, and then your number two question is, is anyone going to stop us from doing this because is this illegal, then at no point if you're asking, is this the right thing to do, because that seems to be the question that either goes unanswered or we'll figure this out later.

I guess the whole Facebook move fast and break things. Well, that's it. That is the glitch in the matrix that has really screwed up our world that we're always talking about on this show. No, it was a bagel. It was Zuckerberg with a bagel. It's the pervading philosophy within Silicon Valley, the move fast and break things, the Uber model, fuck the law, we're just going to do it until someone tells us to stop.

Right. That is the fundamental problem with our entire universe right now, is that that behavior is lauded instead of criminalized. And nobody ever goes to jail. Yep. Yeah. Well, this is fun. Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy New Year.

We do at least, before we go cry in our eggnog. Yeah. Jesus Christ, I'm depressed. Yeah. There are at least a bunch of AI scientists out there right now who are trying to come up with a standard that says, if you cannot explain what your AI is doing, then it shouldn't go out there.

You have to, it's like, it's like, it is an accountability system that they're trying to get past. And this comes back to regulating AI. And ethics, regulations and ethics. Yeah. If you cannot explain what your thing is doing, then you don't understand. It's like quantum, it's like Richard Feynman in quantum theory.

It's just like, if you say you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory. You know, if you think you understand your AI, you don't. So you have to like have those steps in place to say, okay, you know, Tay did this. Then Tay did that. Then Tay went to the store and bought some Uggs.

And then Tay yelled the N word on the street. It's like, why did Tay do that? Why would Tay ever go buy Uggs? Because nobody should wear this. Well, yeah, that should explain some things. Yeah. Can I have a trace log, please? Yeah. And wasn't that a surprising outcome? Hmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Let's put an AI and point it at Twitter and see what comes out. What did you think was going to happen? Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? All the lights went out in France. What an interesting outcome. Can we see a log of that, please?

Nah, let's just put a few more out there. If I tweak this, will all the lights go out in Germany? Hmm. Well, this is a cheery way to end the year. I can't wait for our first show when we come back and we talk about guns.

You know what? I got to say, first of all, yes, this is our last show of the year. It's been a fun year. Thank you all for having me. It's always fun to come and chat and unload. And I do enjoy and value our conversations. And thanks to everybody who listens, who makes it possible.

But boy, has it been a hell of a year, hasn't it? Oh, boy. I cannot wait to see 2018 head out the door and let the door hit it on the ass. And hopefully, just hoping that 2019 is going to be better. I don't have a whole lot of reasons to think that.

Hope springs eternal, Dave. And hopefully we'll have a Christmas in 2019. Hopefully it will still be here. I get accused of being a cockeyed optimist all the time, of being Pollyanna. And we do our best to ruin that for you, Dave. Yes, you do. You've really recalibrated my worldview.

I'm with you, though. I am hoping that we spend a lot of time next year in this segment talking about ethics that are being put into place, regulations that are being drafted, a sane and rational Congress that understands technology and takes steps for the common welfare of the people.

I cannot wait to have those report on those news stories. And I don't think it will ever come. Well, what we need to do is we need to send a sparrow with a scone to Switzerland to reset the universe so maybe we can get back to normality. I'm with you.

I'm with you. It's been fun having you. Well, with that, have a great holiday, a happy new year, and I will talk to you guys next year. All right. You too, man. Caps and doodads. Now, I found a little something for you, Jason.

I know you've got your two pups and, you know, we've passed fireworks time in the 4th of July, but maybe this will be ready for prime time by then. It's Ford. The auto company has created a noise canceling doghouse. Many dogs and other pets are terrified of fireworks and for good reason. They're more sensitive hearing that makes that pleasant popping turn into a nightmare of sound.

Ford has come to your rescue. They've built a doghouse that uses noise canceling to minimize canine agony during fireworks shows like the technology in noise canceling headphones or Ford's own Edge SUV. The candle detects explosions with microphones and counteracts them by pumping out frequencies that mitigate the sounds or eliminate them altogether.

So look at that. And it's even got soundproof ventilation and an automatic door. Yeah, this is interesting. I'm looking at it. It is just a prototype. They don't know if they're actually going to make it, but it's pretty clever. And it actually it's designed quite well. It's very futuristic looking. It's very futuristic.

I have a problem with the design. The triangle shape is not conducive for big dogs turning around or even little dogs turning around. They need to test this with some dogs. Right. But for the most part, I like the concept, but, you know, for using it once a year, although in Los Angeles, we do have a lot more gunfire than fireworks.

Copters and things of that nature. Yeah. Yeah. The copters don't bother them. It's, you know, explosions and things of that nature. But this is a pretty cool concept. I dig it. I'm good on you, Ford. Now get back to that self-driving car. Now, I've spent a lot of time on this show talking about the trials and travails of my iTunes library, which is too large to go into their cloud, which has iTunes has crashed multiple times and destroyed the library.

And I've had to piece it back together and I've had drives go and had to piece it back together. It's not too big to fail. It is too big and fail. Too big and failing. Yes. Good show title. I have my iTunes library on a, you know, USB disc that's connected wirelessly to throughout the whole house so I can get to my library from any device I want to, even though I never really do it anymore because I use Spotify and listen to all the illegal music that they have on it, apparently.

But my drive failed again the other day and I was like, briefly, I thought, oh, fuck it. Who cares? I give up. I give up. This is the straw that broke Brian's hard drives back. But then I realized I do have a lot of pretty rare stuff on that, including some of my own music.

And yes, I do have backups of everything somewhere, but I didn't want to spend the time to try to find it all. So I got myself the iBoySoft data recovery for Mac. It's a nice, decent enough price. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Recover the drive in about four hours. And Bob's your uncle.

I've got all my crappy library back that's still in disarray from crashes in the past. Yeah, you should get rid of that drive then, honestly. Oh, yeah. I got rid of the drive and put it on a different one. Okay, now back that one up and put that where you can find it. Keep it up to date. For that, I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner.

That's a mighty fine app that goes on there, too. That's what I use every day with my two 8-terabyte or three 8-terabyte drives, which I swap out. I have a main drive, then I have my secondary drive, and then every five days, I swap out another one to mirror the other two. So, the most I'll ever lose is five days, if both of them die.

So, yeah. It's 24 terabytes of disk space. Right. A lot of disk space. That's a lot of stuff. That's almost as much as Facebook has on us. Well, that's true. But, I mean, granted, it is only 8 mirrored twice. So, I picked up the Zoom Digital Multitrack Recorder F1LP.

Okay. This thing, it's new, and I'm so glad I picked it up. I've been working with so many different types of recording setups for my studio. I'm like, okay, I got shotguns I'm trying. They're not working. Reverber, everything sucks with them.

Just in my space. So, I've tried all these different things, and I'm like, okay, God, I'm going to have to, like, bite the bullet and get a lav system. And we just got a new lav system for the Jordan Harbinger show, and it was like $1,000 or $1,500 if you want to get a really good one. And that one sounds great.

You know, I can make it sound like you're in a beautiful studio, but I didn't have that much money to spend. And then this thing came out, and it's under $200. And what it is, it's a little Zoom recorder, like a, you know, a little tiny digital recorder that would look like a battery pack or a transmission pack and a battery pack on a normal lav.

Yeah, this is small. It's handheld. It's not even handheld. You just clip it to your belt and then run the lav up through your shirt? No, I meant the actual recording bit. Yeah, the little box. Yeah. It's got a belt loop in it. If you look at it, if you look at it closely, those little things on the side are a belt loop.

You just run your belt through it and stick it behind you and run the lav up through your shirt. It's amazing. It sounds incredible. You just stick in a micro SD card, two batteries, and you're off to the races. It is so cool. But the other cool thing about it is if you have, like, a Zoom H6 or H4N or one of those and the accessory capsules that go on it, the top of this thing pops off.

You can clip in any Zoom accessory and it comes with a camera mount, too. So, you can stick it on top of your camera and run the audio out into your camera or just record straight on the Zoom. This thing is versatile and it's $169.99 landed. Nice. Editor's note here.

I misspoke on that. You do have to buy the camera attachment separately. It is about $27, $28. You still got to get the micro SD card for it. And the tip is, if anybody wants to get one of these things, it can only take up to 32 gig cards, which I have none of in my house.

I'm, like, looking everywhere. I've got micro SD cards everywhere. And the smallest one I had was, like, a 64. And I'm, like, damn. So, I went to all of my old Chinese video cameras that I had, my security cameras, looked in those and, like, scraped up an 8 gig from somewhere, put it in, tested it.

And the audio is amazing on it. So, if you need, like, a lavalier system on the cheap, this thing is great. And I bought two of them. So, next time we go do a conference or anything, we can actually record ourselves with them. And Bob's your uncle. Nice. So, somebody invite us to a conference that we can go speak at.

And pay for us to go there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I know the story has made the rounds everywhere because it's quite clever. So, I just had to put it in here, too. Popeyes has done some very good marketing.

They've made emotional support chickens to make holiday travel better. And the foxes are quite funny. Right now, as far as I know, this is only in the Philadelphia International Airport. I know there's no Popeyes in LAX, so I won't be seeing this. But, yes, you can pick up an emotional support chicken carrier to bring your fried chicken on board your flights.

It's very funny. It's cute. But people who bring food onto a flight should be forcibly ejected through the toilets at 35,000 feet. I think I'm with Adam Carolla on this one. I'm one who has brought food on flights many times. However, in my defense, it is Bay City's subs.

They do not smell. You cannot bring hot food that is stinky or odiferous onto a flight. That is grounds for being tossed out the airlock. Yeah, multiple people who have sat next to me have brought personal pizzas, you know, with pepperoni and sausage and sat next to me and ate it while we sat around before we could leave.

And I knew it was going to be two hours before I could eat anything. And I wanted to kill them. And it reminded me, I can't find this study, but when I lived in San Francisco like a decade ago, there was a report about the increase of violent crime to victims who brought food on public transportation. So, like, it's late at night, you get a bag of fries, you come on to Muni, and you just get the crap beat out of you by somebody who can't afford that bag of fries.

And then they take them from you and then get off the train. Right. You know, if anyone can find that, your Google skills are better than mine. I cannot find the report, but it's a real report. But as we know, nothing lives forever in the Googleverse. So maybe I should try Bing. Maybe. Yes. Mm hmm. Now, I have two holiday themed articles that I found, and I just wanted to share them with everybody so you can get your your spirit on.

The first is 15 long lost words to revive this Christmas. And the two that I particularly enjoyed. The first is Yule Hole. That's a great one. The Yule Hole is the makeshift hole you need to move your belt to after you've eaten a massive meal. I love that one. And my favorite, Crapulence.

Once all the festive dust and New Year confetti has settled, there's a word for the morning after the night before. Crapulence, or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, an 18th century word for sickness or indisposition resulting from excess in drinking or eating. Basically, you're stuck on the crapper all day. Merry Crapulence, everyone.

Merry Crapulence. And the second article I found is Eight Truly Strange Christmas Customs. Now, I read through all of these. They are phenomenal. Of course, Krampus is in there, but I think almost all of us know what Krampus is these days. But the one that I loved is the Christmas pickle. The story goes that when German families decorate the Christmas tree, the last ornament to be hung is the Christmas pickle, usually a blown glass ornament that may have been passed down through generations.

It is tucked away in a hard-to-see spot. It is green, after all. And the first child who finds the pickle on Christmas morning gets a special gift and good luck all the next year. As the article points out, and I am from German descent and have many German traditions in my Christmas, the trouble with this legend is that people in Germany have never heard of it.

I have never heard of it. This sounds like something... We did not have a Christmas pickle growing up, and nobody in my family or extended Germanic family did either. So... This sounds like something your creepy uncle made up for the little kids.

Hey, kids, come find the Christmas pickle. It appears like many things, it became kind of a marketing thing in the U.S. Glass tree ornaments were made in Germany in the shapes of fruits and vegetables and other objects. These ornaments became very popular in America when F.W. Woolworth began importing them in the 1880s.

So an old German legend, no doubt, was created to help sell more of these ornaments. So yes, as somebody with Germanic origins, I've never had a Christmas pickle. Okay. I'm just going to stop there. Yeah, I'm just going to stop there. One of the traditions that we do have, though, is Gleevein, which is a mulled wine, a warm, hot wine.

Now, I know you're not an eggnog fan, Jason, but I do think that you would very much enjoy this. So I'm going to give you the recipe and all our listeners as well. It is a wonderfully festive drink. So you need two clementines, a lemon, a lime, one and one-third cup sugar, six whole cloves. Oh, this will all be in the show notes, by the way, GOG.show slash 308.

Six whole cloves, one cinnamon stick, three fresh bay leaves, one whole nutmeg, one vanilla pod. Two bottles of Chianti or any other dry red wine. Two star anises. Peel the sections of the peel from the clementines, the lemon and the lime. Put the sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. Add all the peels.

Squeeze in the clementine juice. Blah, blah. Okay. It's all in there. Fine. Whatever. All done. Moving on. Okay. It's quite delicious. I highly recommend it. All right. This will definitely be in the show notes. I watched American Meme last night on Netflix.

Did you watch this thing? No. Oh, no one in this movie is likable. No one, except with the exception of Matthew Felker, who got famous for being the guy in the Britney Spears video that banged her on the plane. See, here's the thing. I'm looking at the page right now and it says starring Paris Hilton.

I'm out already. I wouldn't watch this in a million years. She is the main star of this. And it's about, oh, your favorite buddy, DJ Khalifa's in it. Oh, so it's a whole bunch of useless. It is all of these people who got really rich doing really meme-y things and hate their lives, except the fat Jew.

The fat Jew's doing okay. All right. But I recommend nobody watch this thing because you're just going to hate everybody in it. Granted, it's a cautionary tale, but it's too adult to show your 10-year-old who just wants to be famous because there is a lot of nudity in it.

Because one of the guys, his only job is literally to go around to clubs every night and spray champagne in topless women's mouths and take pictures of it. That's how he got famous and got rich. And he wonders why he's so sad and can't find a girlfriend. Like, oh.

Yeah. Yeah. For a hate watch, it's great. It's fascinating. But I came out of this just feeling like gross. It would make me feel dirty. Yeah, I feel completely gross. Just even reading the page makes me feel dirty. Ugh. And listening to the vocal fry on Paris Hilton's voice, oh, it was just driving me crazy.

Yeah. Somebody with like, even, I just have a little bit of misophonia and it's just like, I, yeah. Yeah, it's getting, my skin was crawling. So, American meme, thumbs down. Thumbs down. All right. So, this is our very last show of the year and we will not be back until after January 1st.

We have a few more Patreon subscribers that came in and a couple iTunes reviews. Now, remember, we are going to attempt at some point to do a huge Q&A show that will be posted on Patreon only or for you PayPal subscribers. You'll just write us and we'll give you a link, something like that. Yep. Because we had a whole bunch of feedback we couldn't even get to last week.

So, we've got a ton. And if you're listening to this now, it's probably too late, but you already heard it. Go to Patreon.com, sign up. You can submit any question you want to us. We've already gotten a couple and a few people signed up, obviously, and then sent us some questions. So, thank you, Christopher, Ken, and Dino. We will be answering your questions on the Patreon only show shortly.

And over on iTunes, we got two reviews. One from Osborne01. Funny but sad. Five stars to counter the one who doesn't want to hear discussions of public policy. You can't separate Washington's venality and stupidity from what's happening in tech. Otherwise, you get ubiquitous, unregulated social platforms that allow the promotion of murder, misinformation, spying on innocent people, treason, inequality, the rise of oppressive power, and brutality, a populace controlled by lies.

We wouldn't want that. GOG does its own tiny bit with biting humor, the sad and even terrifying state of tech. Fuck tech. Nice. Thank you. And we also got Not Grumpy, Realistic from DanielJ101, another five-star rating.

A clear-eyed view of the world at large with disarming honesty used to talk about the things that are important to us all, notwithstanding the title. Entertaining, informative, and crucial to one's daily well-being. Thank you. No, thank you. Thank you. That's actually two very nice reviews to end the year on.

I've never been crucial to anyone's daily well-being. Aw, Jason. That's sad. Give you a hug. Closing shout-outs! Because it's us, and it's our show, and it's depressing and sad, Greg Dooley of the Afghan Wigs has just released Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

Greg Dooley is not well-known for being happy. He's kind of depressing and sad, and this video is depressing and sad, but it's also quite beautiful. It's a beautiful cover. I love Greg Dooley so much, and it's wonderful, and the video is quite sad and quite an indictment of our current time, but well worth it.

So, you know, watch this, and then go have some eggnog to cheer yourself back up. Just put a lot of spirits in the holiday spirit to raise your spirits. It is currently my favorite Christmas song, so well done, Greg Dooley. And my closing shout-out is to every single person that's listening to this show right now.

Thank you very much for sticking with us this long, and I really appreciate it. I know Brian appreciates it, too, and I'm sure David Bittner, somewhere in his furry costume, appreciates it as well. But it has been a great year for us, and we just love you. Love you. So come back next year, please.

Speak to you then. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulman. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month, and we'll love you forever. 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 308. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Have a grumpy Christmas and a grumpy new year.

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