319: The United States of Apathy

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. I think you gave me the plague through the microphone, Brian. You're an evil man. Who knew that Zencaster worked so well? I know. Not great for audio, but great for the plague. Yeah, seriously. Germcaster. That's what I got. All right. Sorry to hear it. I know it wasn't my fault. I have not seen you in person.

It should theoretically be impossible for me to get sick since I never leave the house. This is true. This is true. Yeah, it sucks. I get the studio all set up. I'm ready to move in and then just get whammied. I have not been able to move in yet, so still in the bedroom. Yay. Okay. Fun times.

Right. Well, I've got a bit of follow-up. We've obviously been talking about Facebook quite a bit and getting off Facebook and all that sort of stuff. And I have to say, I'm definitely on a long, slow, but inevitable Facebook fade out at the moment. I've noticed that my friends are posting less. I'm posting less. I'm not seeing things from people that I'm close to.

I'm seeing things mostly from brands and random people that I've friended. There were terms for them that I don't even remember right now that were thrown around in articles like latent friends, latency friends that you've picked up years ago and you just never got rid of. And randos. Randos. So that's all I'm really getting.

So Facebook, your algorithm needs some tweaking because people are getting annoyed and not seeing the point anymore. And once you like we already have an ethical issue with staying on you, once you get rid of the only benefit and the reason that I'm there, I have no reason to be there anymore.

Seriously, seriously. So, yeah, I've pulled Instagram off of my phone. OK, I do use flume to check it just because I do have friends on there who do post things that I do want to see. And every now and again, if I do have to post something, then I use flume.

But taking it off my phone has been just a revelation. I don't have any social media on my phone at all anymore. Twitter's gone. Instagram's gone. The only thing that's on there basically is mail. Right. And I'm half tempted to take that off of there, too. And then just use it as a phone.

Well, for actually making phone calls, texting with people and using maps. There you go. I mean, right now it's a I mean, it's a great camera and it's a great map. Those are the two things that I use it for. So it's kind of nice. Kind of nice. Excellent. We've got some definite follow up on the severity of scooter injuries on the west side.

Yes. Here in Santa Monica and Venice where these plagues first appeared. UCLA, which runs major hospitals in the area, very good ones, finally has put out their official reports over the last year. During the summer, they saw about two to three injuries per day and even more on weekends.

The injury numbers have grown in direct proportion to the number of e-scooters in the city. So we don't think this problem will go away anytime soon. Most e-scooter accidents are often injured seriously enough from fractures, dislocated joints and head trauma to require treatment in emergency rooms.

Damn. Damn. Yes. The researchers examined data from 249 people who were treated at the emergency departments of UCLA Medical Center Santa Monica and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center between September 1st, 2017 and August 31st, 2018. The study found that one third of them arrived by ambulance, an indication of the severity of their injuries.

So, yeah, they're basically saying you need to follow the law. You need to wear a helmet. Fifteen miles an hour is way too fast. These things should be slowed down. If you hit the brakes too hard, you can fly over the handlebars in an instant. They've seen teeth knocked out, jaws broken in several places, noses crashed, headed injuries, including skull fractures.

The most common injuries are wrist, ankle, collarbone and shoulder fractures. But they've even seen a young woman wearing flip flops who needed to have part of her foot amputated after she ran her scooter into a car. What? Wow. This is just gruesome. Yeah, it's pretty gruesome.

So, it finds that the most common form of injury among scooter riders were falls. That's 80%. Collisions with objects, another 11%, are being struck by moving vehicles such as a car, bicycle, or another scooter, 9%. Only 4% of injured riders were wearing a helmet. Oh, surprising. Surprising there, yes.

Yes, the researchers also observed e-scooter riders at various Los Angeles intersections for a total of seven hours from September of 2018. About 94% of the 193 people they saw riding scooters were not wearing helmets. And the injuries are not just to the people on the scooters.

8% of injuries were non-riders, including pedestrians who were struck by scooter riders or who stumbled over discarded scooters. Okay. Well, you know, you definitely have a lawsuit there. If there's a scooter in the street and you trip over it and hurt yourself, that's definitely a lawsuit. You know, I had a motorcycle for a while, and when I got on my motorcycle and rode it around, I had full pads, I had a helmet, gloves, the whole nine yards.

Because when you fall off of a two-wheeled vehicle going very fast, you tend to get hurt. So, you kind of want to be protected. But if you're driving around in shorts and flip-flops with no helmet, what did you think was going to happen? Well, what did these companies think was going to happen when they dumped a bunch of scooters off at the beach?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Oh, look, you're preaching to the choir here, brother. Yep. So, not good. Now, after last week, you had your massive rant because we had learned that, what was it, Gimlet Media had been bought by Spotify? They were still in talks when we recorded the last show.

The next day it came out that the purchase actually went through. Right. And they've also picked up a podcast-making platform called Anchor. Mm-hmm. Oh, I love Anchor. Loves me some Anchor. Yes. Yes, this is audio, so you couldn't see my eye roll. Well, Spotify is making a big push into the podcast game.

We'll see what that actually means. Well, the thing about it is, I mean, I'm pissed off that the people at Gimlet made money because I hate them. I hate them with every fiber of my being. And it's funny, even Marco Armit made money on it because he was an investor. Surprise, surprise. Right.

But for me personally, I just, I hate those people and I don't think they should have gotten a dime. The thing about this deal is it's, I don't really care that Spotify bought Gimlet. Gimlet makes podcasts. Okay. They're, they're a podcast studio. That's fine. They're going to make, you know, new content for Spotify that is going to be behind the Spotify paywall.

Yes, that's fine. They make, they already make content for other providers that are behind the paywall. That's a lot of their business and they're keeping the shows that are public, public. All right. Good for them. That's fine. I really don't care about that deal. It's overpriced. They got fleeced on it. Anchor, on the other hand, is a completely different beast because what the, what anchor is, is a podcast creation platform.

Yes. Anybody can sign up. You can start your own podcast, your, your own completely horrible sounding podcast using your phone of all things. Yes. And so they're going to get a reach into that. Now, I mean, we've dealt with anchor in the past.

They've, they've asked us to be on their platform several times and, and, you know, they don't make any money off of hosting your podcast, which is, you know, red flag to me. Now that they've got Spotify behind them, it's not as much of a red flag because Spotify has money. Yes. But when they first started, it was just like, here, come create a podcast.

We're going to host it for free forever. And then eventually we're going to roll out an ad platform where you can have ads on your podcast and we will give you some money and we will take a cut of that. And that's how we will stay in business. And for people who don't know how podcast advertising works, we charge basically on what's called the CPM cost per thousand.

So for every thousand downloads of our show, we get X amount of dollars. And for grumpy old geeks, we get about a $35 CPM for our ads. Well, when anchor sent us the email saying, Hey, we've got an advertiser for you, we're going to give you $7 and 50 cents.

And we're like, uh, yeah, go die in a fire. Maybe, but that's, you know, that's the rates that anchor is pulling right now. So they're not really big in it. But I think the, the fact that Spotify is just looking for free stuff, that's what Spotify has bought a platform so that you can now go make your own podcast and put it out on Spotify.

Right. And then Spotify doesn't have to pay for music because people are listening to podcasts. This whole thing is just leveraging your free media so they can not pay people what they're worth. That's kind of it. That's the way of everything these days. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of my, my thoughts on it.

I'm sad that Gimlet made money and, uh, the anchor guys, I got nothing against them. I mean, I see what they were trying to do, but, uh, now that they're going to be inside of Spotify, I think that I'm still going to stand by the fact that you should never host with anchor. If you run a podcast, that's just where I stand because you just don't have as much control as you would with an actual paid hosting platform that you dictate the terms to, you know?

So, you caveat emptor, caveat emptor, and of course, stay away from SoundCloud. Don't host your podcast on SoundCloud. Can't believe SoundCloud is still a thing. Spotify is probably going to buy them next week. And of course, we all woke up to the world of no, thank you, Mr.

Pecker from this is, this article is everywhere. It's Jeff Bezos posting about Mr. Pecker who runs the, the inquirer and how he was going to be blackmailed. And this ties into the story that you brought up a while ago where your, yours and your wife's worlds had collided in the world of Jeff Bezos's divorce.

And I think it's interesting that he wrote this entire thing. Well, somebody wrote it. I don't know if he wrote it himself, probably his PR team. Yeah. Saying that, you know, look, if I can't stand up to these people, then what kind of world is it that, you know, we live in the unwashed masses are going to be blackmailed by these people and they don't stand a chance.

So he's standing up against these guys. And you know what? Good on you, Jeff. He's like, I love it, man. Now, here's, here's the thing. And here's my thought. I have many, many thoughts on this. And I'm going to just stay safe right now for the record. Anybody that's a Republican, don't get your panties in a bunch.

I'm going to say right wing. And I don't mean you regular rational Republicans. I'm totally fine with you guys. I mean, the fucking crazies. I mean, you know, the pizza parlor, Hillary running a child porn ring, fucking insane nutbags that on the fucking far right.

This is all I'm talking about right here. The Alex Jonesians, the Alex Jonesians, the far right. And I have to include Donald Trump in this hate Jeff Bezos. Donald Trump hates Jeff Bezos because Jeff Bezos is everything that Donald Trump says he is, but isn't. He's a fucking millionaire.

He's a great business person. He's a great negotiator. He Trump is on record as not being able to stand this guy. Trump is also well known to be, you know, highly influential with the Inquirer, right? We know this. It's already come out. The pecker has fucking covered for Trump a gazillion times.

Here's the thing. The tide was turning on Amazon, on Bezos. It really was. We have gone just even in the length of the show. We have gone from Amazon is the best thing ever to most people having a vague sense of unease, if not even shame or guilt about ordering from Amazon.

The tide was turning. Public opinion was turning. We see it everywhere. There are articles. There was everything was coming out about what have we wrought and how are we going to take care of this? And Amazon cannot be this big. We've got to do something about it. The tide had even turned on Jeff Bezos.

The thought was originally, my God, look at the wunderkind businessman to there being tons of memes about him being Gollum or pure evil. Like the tide was turning, but you had to go and fuck it up. You had to go and push it too goddamn far, didn't you? Because now he's a fucking hero for me.

Now I feel bad for him. Now I'm like, go Amazon. You were getting what you wanted. We were starting to not like him. We were starting to get very, very, very concerned. And now everybody's on his side. You stupid idiots. Well, that's one way to look at it.

Am I wrong? Sadly, you are 100% correct. By doing this stupid fucking thing, you have just swung everybody onto his side. You did the exact opposite of what you thought you were going to do. Yep. Even Kara Swisher tweeted out.

She's like, I don't like Jeff Bezos, but I love this. Yep. And linked to his story. I'm like, wow. Yeah. You know, he's now America's hero. Well done. Good job. Far right. Good job. Come at me, bro.

Come at me, bro. So I was having this conversation with my wife last night, and we kind of moved on to the other cluster fucks that are going on right now, which is the Grammys and the Oscars. Same sort of completely out of touch, old white people screwing everything up.

I don't know if you've followed anything about the Grammys. And say what you, you know, the music isn't my music, but it's never been my music. Yeah. The Grammys never paid attention to the stuff that I was listening to. So I remember just being shocked that I threw a bone and let The Cure perform once on the Grammys. Unbelievable.

But they've never been for me anyway, so it doesn't matter. But Ariana Grande is arguably the biggest pop star in the world right now. And she is basically not going to perform at the Grammys because the fucking old out of touch Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich basically wanted her to not perform her biggest single right now and do a medley because, you know, the kids love the medleys.

Oh, yeah. Who doesn't love a medley? Who doesn't love a medley? The medley's need to die anyways. So he tweeted or he explained to the Associated Press that Ariana Grande felt it was too late for her to pull something together, which she obviously he Grammy award winning producer Ken Ehrlich is not modern enough to understand there's this thing called Twitter because Ariana Grande basically went to Twitter and said, fuck you.

You're lying about me. Here's why I didn't do it. You wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do. You wouldn't let my creativity and self-expression be stifled. You tried to make me do something I didn't want to do. And now you're lying about me. So I'm not going to the Grammys. Suck it. And now she's not. And now other people are dropping out.

Kendrick Lamar is probably not going to go. He's definitely not going to perform. He's pulled out of performing. It's unknown if he's going to go or not. That's the guy that was a basketball player, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, again, it's not for you. It's not for me. So Drake is not going to perform.

Childish Gambino is not going to perform. Like, it's just getting worse and worse. Like, it's like they looked at the Oscars and said, hold my beer. Yeah, because the Oscars, as we all know now, can't even get a host. And they decided to cut a bunch of music numbers. But then they didn't cut the music numbers because all of a sudden the people that did the music numbers were pissed and going, what the hell?

Wow, these things are just dying, aren't they? It's old, out-of-touch people running it. It's old, out-of-touch people that are the voting base for these things. And I don't see how anybody even gives a shit anymore. And I think that's what we're finding out.

When the artists for the Grammys have realized, I'm not going to get anything out of this. Why should I go? Getting an award, performing live, that used to sell music. You don't sell music any. No, you don't. Not enough people are watching things like the Grammys or the Oscars to get a bump.

So why do it? Yeah. No, it's times they are a-changing. That's a song, by the way. By an old guy who probably won some Grammys. I think, I'm pretty sure he did. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I've given up on that stuff.

So it's just fun to sit back and watch, but the fact that there's no host for the Oscars is just, it's mind-boggling. It is. I hope they just send out a drone and do it in robot voice. You know, they should just have Jeff Bezos come out and do it. With his swinging pinwheel. Swinging pinwheel.

Speaking of swinging pinwheels, I heard this on the Cortex podcast with CGP Grey and Mike Hurley, and I almost spit up my NyQuil that I was drinking because I'm so damn sick. CGP Grey called the Slack logo a dick pinwheel.

And I went back and looked at it, and I'm like, yep, pretty much nailed it. Pretty much nailed it. I still, all I see is still Hitler, but now I see Hitler decks. Oh, no. Now I see penises. I'm looking at it right now on my desktop. Great. I'm going to call it the Bezos logo. So a while back, we cheered New York City's law that would require that Lyft and Juno drivers

actually get a raise, $5 more per hour, which is supposed to start on Friday. Unfortunately, that is not happening now because the two ride-sharing companies have blocked that law because it says that it unfairly benefits their biggest competitor, Uber, because for whatever reason, Uber wasn't part of that law.

I mean, what they're saying is that... I mean, they were part of the law, but... Yeah, they are. It's... Yeah. So they're saying that because Uber has more people and more users and can keep drivers busier, and the minimum pay rate is calculated in this bizarre-ass way of length and distance of each ride, then it's unfair to Lyft and Juno because Uber has more people going and they'll be able to get better money, or I don't even understand this anymore, but just give these people some money, stop fighting, be a good company.

Yeah, this is ridiculous. This is, like, flat-out ridiculous. They're just saying, it's unfair, it's capitalism, motherfuckers. It's capitalism. Step up. The only reason you exist is capitalism. How do you think the taxi companies feel? That was unfair. Yeah, no shit. I mean, it's like... Some people had to spend, like, $30,000 to get a ring, or coin, or whatever the hell they call them.

Token, or something like that. Oh, no, I'm sorry, medallions. Medallions. They're medallions, that's the word. So, yeah. No, this is just, this is pure bullshittery from Lyft and Juno, so hopefully people in New York are just going to completely, you know, boycott Lyft and Juno until this thing is fixed, because it's just, it's stupid.

It's stupid. It's like, oh, I'm sorry, our business isn't big enough. We're, I mean, every small business in the world has said that about Walmart, but you know what? Walmart still wins. That's what, the bigger company's going to win. So, shut up and either come up with a better product, or pay your people more.

I don't, I don't fucking know. I got cold brain, but still, this is pissing me off. Yep. And Facebook's top PR exec is leaving. I'd never even heard her name, which is not a good thing for if it's the top PR exec. Karen Marooney, she's leaving after eight years. It's been a rough last two.

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. So, I can't exactly blame her for leaving, because she certainly hasn't helped. So. And after eight years, she's totally vested, so she's walking out of there with some FU money. We're going to see a lot of people leaving, because the vesting is coming for a lot of these people, so when they started to really expand.

Amazon is theoretically doing something semi-good here. They're trying to regulate themselves over facial recognition software before Congress does. Of course, we all know that this is basically, look, look, we're doing something about it, so you don't need to do hardcore laws. Yeah, no. I'm with Microsoft on this one.

It needs, it needs government oversight. Self-regulation is not going to work on this. No, definitely not. So, it's at least a step in the right PR way, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I still think that somebody needs to, like, slap their branding department, because recognition with a K still annoys me.

I don't know why it annoys me so much. It really does bother you. That becomes your main point every time we talk about it. It's very funny. Because, I mean, everything else is, like, you know, spelled normally, but except for this one service. This one service sticks out like a sore thumb, and I can't figure out why it bugs me so much.

But, I don't know. We'll see how this plays out. But, yes, we know, I think we do need legislation around facial recognition technology, because we need standards. We need standards and practices. Because if your service, if you're touting a service that's going to be used by law enforcement, then it needs to have, you know, a basic set of guidelines that it actually can perform to.

You know, what's the fail rate? What is the false positive rate? How many, you know, what's the sample size? Where do you get your actual images that you're doing facial recognition on? What are all these points of data leading to down the future? What is going to happen?

So, we need a task force that is going to get behind this and really say, look, if you're going to release a facial recognition product, it has to abide by these standards, and you have to be transparent about it. Definitely. That's what I totally believe. Excellent.

I agree with you. So, we just talked about a lot of people that are vesting in the near future at a lot of these companies that will be exiting the companies. And they're not just exiting the companies. A lot of them are exiting California. 2019 is going to create a lot of millionaires in Silicon Valley, but it'll also mean it'll create a lot of ex-Californians.

We are the highest tax state in the country and is long motivated wealthy to look for cheaper states in which to park their fortunes. I think we know somebody that we've talked about off air that has done something similar. Yep. But the most appealing time to flee is now, just before a historic amount of new money is created in a year expected to the biggest IPO bonanza since 2000.

Bonanza. Slated to feature highly valued startups like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Slack, Peloton, and Pinterest. All of this raises some ethical questions about the obligations of the wealthy, especially at a time when liberals are calling for higher taxes on the rich. It's perfectly legal for these people to move and not pay a dollar more in taxes than they're required.

But is it right? They made the money here. They benefited from the environment here. They should be paying in here. And it is one thing if you just pick up and completely move and get out. But a lot of these people will be moving on paper or coming back and forth and keeping their jobs and living part-time in California.

And we see this all the time in Europe. Like you see people, you know, moving to moving out of the UK to avoid their tax laws and hide all their money. And it really is games for the rich, isn't it? It really is. It's the game is rigged for them because, you know, yeah, I can't afford two homes.

I can't afford one home. So I can't have one home that I spend 51% of my time in in, say, Austin, Texas, where there's very little tax and then come back here 49% of the time to make all the money. Now, I do have a problem with California's tax rate, which is exorbitant.

And the franchise tax boards tactics, which have, you know, basically ruined me several times over by just going in without any paperwork and taking all my money because they felt like it. Yeah, I know the the I hate to say this, but there's like the shop when it comes to your money.

You live in fear of your income in California sometimes, even if you're you know, you're planning on paying your taxes if they feel like it's like, oh, well, you haven't filed your quarterly yet and you're like three weeks late. Well, we're just going to come in and take everything that we want. So I, I, I think these people are smart if they can do it.

Honestly, I think it sucks. But I think I think California is partially to blame here because the franchise tax board has gone basically unregulated for far too long. And what they do is just illegal. So I can't I can't fault these people. All right. All right. Fair enough. I think it's more of an issue for small businesses than it is individuals, especially these people with all this money.

They're not running small businesses. They're just fucking rich. Yeah. But, you know, you get rich because you worked. And when he didn't, you know, I have to shut down one of my companies because they took all the money and I can't continue with it, which cost me more money because I have to set up a new company. It's I mean, it's it's a really vicious cycle that goes on with tech here.

And it's like it does hinder small business. I'm with you on that. And why don't they just go after the rich people and leave the leave us poor little guys alone until we can get our feet under us and, you know, get some income. Come on. I agree. Well, this is going to piss you off then to snap.

Yeah. Snap had a better than expected earnings on Tuesday that shot the stock up more than 22 percent in after hours trading. Now, I'd like everybody to keep in mind that that more than 22 percent in after hours trading is nowhere near. They started that and it was still not a good buy.

So, yeah, apparently they are making more money and they're slowly moving towards profitability. Oh, no, no, it makes me want to vomit. Just even the fact that we're talking about a company that is just valued at so much money that isn't profitable, hasn't been profitable, will probably never be profitable.

Yet somehow like Uber makes me want to puke. And then, yes, we're just talking about how you can't even start a small business in Southern California because there's so many taxes on it. So, it makes me sick. Anyways, they're making more money, but their user base still hasn't grown at all.

Okay. And they've started to warn people that their app's user base might shrink. So, simply not growing could actually be seen as a positive. What? This is the world we live in now. Yeah. Wait, they're saying it's a positive that we have less people using it? Well, we're warning you that it might shrink. So, if we're just not growing, that's actually better than shrinking. So, yay us.

Okay. Man. So, anyways. That's some circular logic there, for sure. They're basing all their user growth on this point at a new version of the Snapchat Android app that they've been working on since late 2017, which has not been rolled out yet.

But they're hoping that because everybody hated the previous version, this new version will be great and will bring all Android users running to have the milk in the yard of Snapchat. And that will help save them. Now, it won't. And this may seem slightly like good news for Snap, but it's not because it's false growth, false stuff, and nobody cares.

But one thing came out of this. They're better than Twitter. This is mind-boggling. Twitter's daily user base is a lot smaller than Snapchat's. A lot smaller.

A lot. Wow. 60 million fewer users daily than Snapchat does, and a lot fewer users, obviously, than all the core apps owned by Facebook. So, roughly 39% of Twitter's monthly active users are on the app every day. And this, again, this is all about numbers, just like Snap's crazy-ass numbers game.

So, they basically want to start talking about daily active users instead of monthly active users because that lets Twitter show that it's growing because their daily users are so low. But it'll come up if they do stuff, and they're going to stop sharing their monthly active user totals altogether because those numbers don't seem to be budging.

And if they are budging, they're budging down. So, we're just going to lie to you with our numbers to make you think that we're doing okay. Oh, are you saying that stats aren't real? I think we might have covered that a couple times on this show. I think we may have covered that a little tiny bit.

The crazy thing is we just read these articles now where they run through the numbers, and they tell you that they're lies, and we all just kind of keep pretending this is normal or okay or anything. Yep. Yeah.

It's fake all the way down. It always has been. It always will be. I feel sick. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

Dave is also co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. How's it going, Dave? Yeah, it's going pretty good. How are you guys doing? Jason's sick. Jason's sick. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Jason. Yeah, it's no fun. It's no fun at all. Yeah.

Should have got that flu shot. Oh, you think you have the flu? It's not a good one. This is not a good one at all. I got the flu shot. My kid got the flu shot. My wife got the flu shot. We all got the flu. Well, obviously, the conclusion here is stop vaccinating everyone.

Well, I was speaking to Jenny McCarthy, and that was a... Right. Yeah. I mean, who do you know who's getting polio? I don't know anybody. Maybe that's what I've got. Maybe that's what I've got. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, starting off this week, we've got kind of a follow-up, or could it possibly get worse, wrinkle to a story that we covered. I guess in the past few weeks, we were talking about that situation where there were bounty hunters who had access to location data, and that was coming from the big mobile phone providers, and that location data was then being resold, and people were getting access to it.

Well, it gets worse. It turns out that not only did these folks have access to that data, but it wasn't just the cell phone tower data that they had access to. In some cases, they had access to actual GPS data. Oh. Oh, great.

Yeah. That's nice. So, there's a flavor of GPS called AGPS, which I was not actually familiar with, which is different from the GPS you use for your mapping kind of stuff. I guess it works. What I put together from this story, and I reserve the right to be wrong about this, but what I put together is that it uses a combination of the GPS hardware in your phone and the cell tower information to get a fix on you very quickly.

And the main purpose for it being there is for 911 to be able to find you if there's an emergency to be able to find you quickly. And so, it's supposed to be private information, but some of these networks were selling it. And there was a company called Sercare One, which sold this information.

They bought it from someone else who bought it from the cell companies. But one of the things about Sercare One was in your user agreement with them, if you were, say, a bounty hunter company, you went after people who skipped their bail bonds, you could buy this information from Sercare One.

But part of the agreement you had with Sercare One was that you had to agree not to acknowledge that the company exists. Okay. That's interesting. I don't know if there's anything that off the bat tips you off that maybe you're dealing with a shady company, but I would say in their user agreement, if it says that you must agree to not reveal that we exist, that might be a red flag.

I'm just going to put that out there. Were they at Kaisersoze.com? Yeah. Now, I will freely admit that I don't have a lot of exposure to bounty hunters other than Boba Fett and Dog the Bounty Hunter. Yeah. Those are the only two that really leaped to mind, but not a lot of ethics.

Steve McQueen had a good movie. I recommend that one. Okay. All right. I'm just saying, you know, not a lot of ethics on coming from that side of the table. So, not too surprising here, right? Yeah. Back in the 90s, I remember in our office, we had a letter pinned up to the wall that someone had sent us that basically, and you got to remember, this was before YouTube.

This was before Facebook. This was before any of all this data aggregation and selling. There was a company who their business model was they wanted to buy our contact list, but they wouldn't tell anybody that they bought our contact list.

So, you know, that was, we want to buy your contact list, and we promise we'll keep it secret that we're buying your contact list. So, if you've told people on your contact list that your contact list is confidential, no problem. Your secret is safe with us. Please let us know, you know, how much we can buy your contact list for.

And we had that posted on the wall because it was so ridiculous. And look where we are today. I remember in the days of just even collecting email lists, I worked with a lot of musicians and bands, and I would collect all that information and we would use it for our own marketing purposes and emails and, you know, tour announcements.

And every single time, the record labels would say, can we have that list? And I would say, well, no. Nobody has an interest in getting an email from you about the other bands on your label. They signed up for this list because they're interested in this band. And the labels never really understood that.

And it was always a fight. And I'm always, you know, I was trying to state to them, unless we put some words in there with a checkbox saying, you know, I agree to give this information over to X label as well. We can't give you the list. Not ethically or legally.

I mean, it just is what it is. So it was, it's, this battle has been going on forever. And, uh, yeah, a lot of people just don't seem to care. No, they do not. They do not. So, uh, part of what's in this story, this is a, this story comes from Motherboard. And, uh, it seems as though there are some folks up on Capitol Hill who have been, who have taken an interest in this.

So we'll see if it, um, we'll see where it goes from here. But, uh, it keeps another one of those ones that keeps getting more interesting, the deeper that these, uh, journalists are digging in. Right. Now, I ran across this over on Engadget, and I'm kind of wondering if it's much ado about nothing.

Um, e-ticketing systems used by eight major airlines, including Southwest, um, were basically sending out, uh, unencrypted check-in links via, to their passengers via email. So they were open to basically somewhat being hacked, sort of. Um, but it's unlikely that too much could have happened here because it would, it's quite complicated to get information.

But theoretically, if you could hack it, you could, you could get a decent amount of personal information from names, addresses, passports, ID numbers. And they'd certainly know exactly about, you know, flight times and preferences and all that sort of stuff. But, uh, you know, basically, as long as you just hit the check-in links on a secure network, you're fine.

And most people have secure networks these days. Is this much ado about nothing? Or is this a big deal? Is this just, uh, you know, when they, when these companies built their systems, they didn't think about encryption and they just never thought about it and spent the money to upgrade it? I'm not sure.

It strikes me that, like you, I, I don't see it being all that practical an avenue for folks to gather up large amounts of information. Yeah. I wonder if someone set up shop in an airport when people were getting updates on their flight information and so on and so forth.

Is that a place where you could harvest stuff? Because if they're sending this stuff out in email, well, email is usually not encrypted. So the link is available. Yeah. Right? I mean, so there's the link and then you could go visit the link. And I suppose you'd have to get there first before the person who the email was sent to.

I'm not sure. Well, I think you could still, I think you could still see the information and not check in. You just don't click the check in button and, or finalize the check in. Right. Right. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. And you know, you can get that information if they're going to that link over unsecured wifi. If you're like at a Starbucks or someplace like that, if you're sniffing the wifi, you can get that.

But it seems kind of like, it seems very random. It seems of all the security vectors that we have to talk about, this is not that big of a deal. Well, isn't there, it seems, I remember not too long ago, but I guess within the last year or so, weren't we talking about that the barcodes on boarding passes were a problem that, for example, people post photos of their boarding passes.

Yes. And there's a lot of information encoded in those barcodes that is easy to unencode if you know how the barcodes work. Yeah. I mean, you just get a, you just get a scanner and scan it and pull the information out. I mean, that's not hard. That's not hard at all.

You can do that in 20 minutes, you know? Yeah. So I don't think this, I think this is a, yeah, much ado about nothing because it doesn't really matter if it's encrypted or not because it's, it's such a weird vector to get to somebody's information that it's like, okay, if you can get to the link that has the boarding pass, you can get to other things, you know?

It's like, it's kind of random to me. That's what I thought too. It just felt a little weird. Yeah. Yeah. In more interesting news, and here goes Germany again. Oh, those Germans. Not in a bad way. This is in a good way. German regulators are trying to clamp down on Facebook's data collection practices. The German Federal Cartel Office, which is in charge of antitrust laws, is trying to restrict Facebook from merging user data from various sources.

Obviously, this is coming on the heels of Facebook announcing that they want to basically kind of tie together the backend systems for WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, et cetera. And Germany is saying, no, no, you cannot do that. Nein. Nein? Nein.

So that's good, right? I think so. Facebook is, of course, pushing back, saying that this particular office has no jurisdiction in this area, but then you just switch it to a different office that does, don't you? Well, and the other big loophole here is that they need to, the regulators are saying that they need to get voluntary consent of the user.

Yeah. So this could be a matter of Facebook just coming up with more clever ways to get voluntary consent from the user. Right. Baring it in a new EULA. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dark design patterns to, you know, make sure the box is already checked, things like that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I wonder, though, if this could be a test of what would it be like if Facebook got split up a little bit.

Right. That's an interesting possibility here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is. I mean, you know, we thank God, you know, that people are thinking about this stuff because nobody in our government is thinking about this right now, I think. So at least Germany's is.

I mean, a lot of people, text journalists here and security people here are thinking about it. We're seeing unending articles about it, but I don't think anybody in our government. Well, I guess we're active again. Government's running. We have it on this. How can you tell? We have the government, you know. Yeah.

Right. So I definitely want to follow this and see what happens. I mean, it does seem to be just kind of putting a roadblock that Facebook will be able to kind of easily leap over. But it's a step in the right direction. I think so. I think so. Yeah. Worth watching for sure. Yeah. This next one also, I think, might be a tempest in a teapot.

A lot of major companies like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia are using a company called Glassbox to monitor the basically user's information on their phone and be able to replay app sessions. Now, the thing about this is you've been able to do this on websites forever.

There have been, you know, cursor tracking algorithms and like sites like that that can do this. And they're saying that, oh, well, the problem here is that all the data is being sent back to Glassbox instead of being blacked out how it should be. But is this does this really matter?

Does this really matter that this other company has this information? Because if it's already if you're putting this information in the app, the owners of the app should be able to see the information anyway, because you're giving it to them. You know? Well, yes, but no. I mean, there's the argument that people got freaked out by with the fact that like Google was recording what you were search terms you were typing in without even hitting enter.

Right, right. And I'd feel the same way about these apps. I don't necessarily have a problem with it. It makes sense from the app builder's perspective. You want to see how people are using your app so you can increase it. All of this, anybody who's gone through and used, you know, use Google's own, you know, web statistics systems and tracking systems knows that you can build these sorts of things easily into into a website without even screen recording.

But here's the thing for me. And it's the next article that you put in here. I'd like to know if an app is doing it or not and make my own decision about using it. I don't like the fact that they're doing it in secret. There's a I mean, welcome to the Internet. Everything's being done in secret.

We hardly ever know what anything what's going on anywhere. But that's the part that bothers me. I just want to know. Be nice to know. Yeah. I wonder if there's if to go to the extreme, which is what we do best. I would like to know, for example, could someone know based on the cadence of how I enter information.

If I have some sort of a health problem. Right. Yeah. Are my hands shaking or my am I doing a higher than normal rate of errors and deleting things? You know, so. So I suppose there's that risk. It seems like a small one, but trying to see unintended consequences.

Yeah. Of these things. And so I think what Apple is saying and we we covered this in today's Cyber Wire, actually, that Apple has gone in response to this, Apple has gone out to their developers and basically have said, knock it off. This is not allowed within iOS.

So this is against. Well, it's not it's not allowed unless you disclose it. Right. Right. You have to you have to specifically tell people which will be buried in the EULA, which nobody ever reads. Yes. Yeah. We'll see how far Apple takes this through, because it seems as though they selectively decide burying something in a EULA isn't good enough.

But we'll see. Yes. The benevolent dictatorship of Apple. Yeah. Yeah. Well. It's been interesting to see this sort of push and pull between them and Facebook. Who really has the power here? Right.

I'm not so sure about Apple being all that benevolent, though, because I thought this one was quite funny. A researcher has discovered an exploit that can expose passwords on Mac OS, but he will not share the details of the bug with Apple because Apple's bug bounty policies are only effective for or only in place for iOS and not Mac OS.

So he's basically saying, I found a bug. Do you care? And Apple's saying, nah, we're good. Yeah, not really. All 12 people using Mac OS out there will be affected. Well, it is. It's kind of a sign of the times that they aren't as concerned with the old school laptops that we're all using.

And they're more concerned just about iOS these days, isn't it? I mean, who's out there selling Mac OS bugs nowadays? I mean, how much how much are you going to get from it? Honestly. So I can see why they put all their money into iOS, but they should. I think, honestly, they should have a bug bounty program for Mac OS because we all live in Mac OS.

Yeah. So it would be nice if they gave a shit. And honestly, if I think about the amount of things I store and we're old, I have way more sensitive information on my laptop than I do on my phone. And I would much rather know that my Mac OS is as secure as iOS.

I'd be happy that they were fixing vulnerabilities. Well, and this is sort of a double whammy because the vulnerability is in iCloud's key chain, which is the most secretive area of Mac OS. That's where your passwords are kept.

Ask any actress. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So I agree. I think I don't understand why Apple doesn't have a bug bounty program for Mac OS. It doesn't make any sense. Apple has all the money. Why not? Yeah. I'm sure they have their reasons, but why have it on iOS and not Mac OS?

Maybe this will push them in that direction. If nothing else. I mean, this tells them, hey, you have a problem here and here's where you need to start looking. But certainly they'd find it a lot faster if this guy just told them where it was. Yeah, seriously. Part of the, I think also, you know, people were, I think, offended over the years where they were getting good bug bounties from other companies and Apple would send them a T-shirt.

That really happened. So that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, get with the program, Apple. You can do better than this. I want a T-shirt. I guess I need to go find a bug. All right. And the final article I saw, I thought was really interesting.

And it's China's privacy conundrum. It's talking about how in China, they're basically putting up a lot of data protection and regulatory systems in place for third-party social networks, Facebook's Chinese counterparts, and all the different, you know, all the struggles that we're having here with all these companies.

They're doing anything that they want to do. China is basically saying, you can't do that. We're going to stand up for privacy. You know, and they're basically going, wow, look at the Chinese government has got the public awake into privacy and is protecting us. While at the same time, of course, the government is basically a surveillance state in and of itself.

They're using facial recognition. They're using big data. They're grabbing all the data themselves. And I guess my argument here would be, is this really a conundrum? It makes complete sense to me. The government doesn't want any third-party companies to have all the data. They want it all themselves. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

It makes perfect sense within the... For a totalitarian approach, this is what you want. You don't want Mark Zuckerberg having the information. You want the information. Right. Right. And this is that notion of the splinternet, you know, where we've got these walled nations that are very protective of what comes in or goes out.

But within, they're doing all the surveillance on their own. And China certainly does that. Yes, they do. Yeah. I guess one of the things I like about this article is how it goes through the different philosophies in different parts of the world, how this is almost flipped on its head in Europe, where they have a lot of trust in their government to protect their privacy, and they don't trust big corporations.

Yes. And here in the U.S., we tend to trust big corporations or at least let them do what they want. And we'll see how that starts to change over time. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, we don't really trust the big corporations.

We just kind of turn a blind eye because we're- Trust them a little bit more than the government. Yeah, there's just no trust left. Yeah. We're just- Yeah, we have no trust here. We're just so beat down. Right. I mean, but do you think it's- Yeah, but what would be the right way to frame that? Do you think it's fair to say we trust the market forces?

That's our inclination? I would say we don't, but we do it anyway. Does that make any sense? We don't. I mean, certainly, I think the ball has swung that way. We do not trust them. I think everybody knows that. But that doesn't stop us from using them.

So, are we just- Have we just given up here in the U.S.? Well- I mean, as opposed to Europe, where you see they're fighting for it. And even in China, they're fighting for it in a certain way. But it's just saying, okay, we know the government's doing it, but the government is protecting us from this. And in Europe, it's kind of flipped. And here, have we just given up?

Yeah, I think a big part of it is that so many of these companies have grown beyond human scale. Yeah. So, I think we've touched on this before. It used to be that if you had a problem with your cable company, you called the local cable company office because it was a local company. And chances are, you had a neighbor who knew somebody who worked there and you could get your issue worked out.

And these days, it doesn't work that way. Right. Right. You're just churned. Nobody cares. Yeah. You're just a cog in the wheel. Right. Well, welcome to the United States of apathy. And we wonder why we're all anxious.

Yeah. So, definitely a different show from last week. Yeah, sure. We knew we'd swing back, just not so quickly. Yeah. A little less chipper, maybe. Oh, well. Well, I hope you feel better, Jason. Thank you. I'm going to go take some cold meds and fall asleep.

Go take some cold medicines. Crawl into bed and cuddle up with your two pups and have sweet dreams. I said, you're Tupac. And I was like, I don't really see him as listening to Tupac in bed. No, you're two pups. I like Tupac. I'm a Tupac fan.

Don't judge. Yeah, I'm not saying that. I'm saying, you know, crawling into bed while you're sick. Yeah. Yes. It's not the jam. Right. The soothing sounds of Tupac. Yeah. The healing tones of Tupac. Yeah. Studies have shown. Right. Yes.

I'm going to hate the cold out of me. Yeah, exactly. You're going to intimidate it. It's going to move to it. Back to a different neighborhood. Yeah, exactly. Right. I'm going to put a cap in this cold, motherfucker. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right, guys. I'll talk to you next time. Cups and doodads.

We talked recently about the choose your own adventure kerfuffle with Netflix and the company behind choose your own adventure. Choose Co. Well. Right. Somebody actually did pay the licensing fee to choose code to make new choose your own adventure books. And that would be Amazon.

Right. You will now be able to do choose your own adventure books on your Alexa or your Echo or whatever, whatever version you want to call it. I think that's quite a good idea. Except for the fact that. Not for an adult. Yeah. Not for an adult. Yes, definitely. But for a kid, like if I would have had that version when I was a kid, when instead of just reading the paperbacks, if I would have had a lady in a tube, well, if I would have had a lady in a tube in my teens, that would have been a whole different story.

But if I would have had a lady in a tube when I was like 10 and reading choose your own adventures and I could just like be sitting in my room and doing my homework and have a story read to me and then pick a direction, that would have been cool as crap. I would have loved it. Yeah, I think it is neat. I definitely think it is neat. They're coming out with two books and they're read by Josh Hurley, who I don't really know, and Stephanie Einstein.

So there's two different books, The Abominable Snowman and Journey Under the Sea. And The Abominable Snowman offers 28 total endings. Well, The Journey Under the Sea has 37 different endings. Look, great idea and congratulations and good move, Amazon, on actually licensing it from the company.

Yeah, it's actually a pretty decent use of the lady in the tube, I think. It's a good use of the technology. I totally agree. Yeah, better than the buttons. Yeah, much better. And I found an app called Kitty Hawk for my drones and it shows you where you like uses geolocation and it shows you where you're legally allowed to fly.

And I'm glad I got this thing because I was going to be taking my drone out to Malibu and getting some good footage of like, you know, the burn areas and the mudslides and all that stuff. Well, turns out, nope, you cannot fly a drone in Malibu anywhere because it is all labeled as a state park.

Yep. It sucks because Malibu is cool and I would love to have gotten some footage out there, but there's not a lot of places you can fly in Los Angeles. It's kind of crazy. That's not surprising. And probably as it should be. Yeah, we got a lot of airports, turns out. Yeah, we do. We've got a lot of airports.

We've got a lot of ghetto birds, as we always call them flying. There's a lot going on in our air and there's a lot of space that you don't want a drone to actually accidentally fall into. Yeah, yeah. No. And a lot of people here. There's a lot of people here, too, for sure. And since I finally got my drone up to I've maxed it out at 300 feet.

I haven't gone to 400 yet because it's sphincter clenching to have twelve hundred dollars flying 400 feet in the air. I've gotten to 300 feet. And now that I've seen how high up that goes, there are tons of helicopters that fly over my house regularly lower than that. So you have to be like really diligent about that.

Yeah, because they come over the hill and they're just cooking along. You know, we've got we've got the ghetto birds, as we said, the police helicopters, lots of fire and rescue come through here. So you got you got to be ready to drop that thing at the drop of a hat, as it were. But it's really nice. It's a really nice little app for Kitty Hawk, and it'll map all of your flights and do all sorts of stuff so you can like, you know, do flight plans and things like that.

And it ties in with your DJI account. So it's a cool little app. I really am digging it now for the big news of the week. I did it. I pulled the trigger. I got the damn thing. I got the iPad Pro 12.9 inch, the newest one.

I got the Wi-Fi and 64 gig, the cheapest one you can get with the new Apple Pencil. How cheap was it? Well, with both of them together with tax, it was about thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah, that's cheap. Well worth it, though. I am going to tell you that this is the best iPad that has ever been made.

It is phenomenal. It is gigantic, but it is super light. It's lighter than my nine point seven inch. It feels like. How about Bezos is nine point seven inch? Oh, ha ha ha ha. But we should call this episode Fire Stick.

Fire Stick. Yeah, that's true. So I got that and I didn't get any of the Apple cases. I got the ESR Yippee Magnetic Smart Case for the iPad Pro 12.9 third gen 2018 release. Support Apple Pencil Charging Tri-Fold Stand Case Magnetic Attachment Auto Sleep Wake Rubberized Cover Black from Amazon.

Pro tip to the wise, never, ever, ever get one of Apple's cases. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this thing was 20 bucks. They're useless. This thing is great. It basically has magnets on the back. So you just slap it in. It folds over, completely protects it. Really nice feel to it. And it was 20 bucks. Yeah.

The Apple cases are just ridiculously overpriced. Yeah. And so far, I just love this thing to death. It really is all I wanted it to ever be. So I got lucky because my one of my friends works at the Ford dealership where I got my my lease from and my lease is coming up.

And I had a little stack of cash saved up because I'm going to have to get a new car soon. But turns out he can get me a no down payment lease. So so I got an iPad, I had to like a financial advisors fucking nightmare. Oh, my God.

Yes, I'm terrible. I'm terrible. That's why, you know, it's like there is no retirement for me. There is just one day I'll just fall over dead and be done with it. So try not to do it mid show because then I'd have to drive over to your place to edit. Oh, oh, it's nice.

You know, actually, if I died in the middle of a show, you care about getting the ad out that week. Great. I want your legacy taken care of, Jason. Yeah, right. And I want to I want to talk about a website called creative market dot com. I've been using this thing for years and years and years and years.

And once you sign up, you can get six free items a week and they just send them to you. And, you know, I collect them. I have a folder that's where I think it's about 15 to 20 gig right now of free fonts, templates, all this other stuff that you get every week that you're legally allowed to use.

And I just scroll it away. But and I have bought a bunch of stuff from there for different design projects that I need. But if you ever are in the market for like, you know, any like clip art or fonts or WordPress themes or things like that, check out creative market dot com. It's pretty nice. And over the years, I've definitely gotten some good stuff out of there.

It's just I don't know why I haven't pimped it on the show before, but I really I do it every week and I love it. So very nice. I'm signing up. Yep. And finally, Flume. I talked about Flume before. It is the Mac OS basically client for Instagram. It's it's OK.

It's not great, but it gets the job done. But now I can use Instagram on my computer and post to it. And it's got they just did a big update that had a bunch of new features and a decent update. So since I've taken Instagram off my phone, it's just the only way I do it. And then I don't keep it in my dock.

I have to remember to go do it. So it's not like it's always in my face. But when it was on my phone, I'm just like, oh, let's see what's going on. What's going on? And it's it's nice to not have it on my phone anymore. So check out Flume. The pro version is is worth it if you're going to be posting a bunch of stuff and it just works for what it is.

It's an easy way to go through. And the nice the really nice thing is it uses small thumbnails. So you can basically go through your timeline in about 30 seconds to see what everybody posted. You don't have to go page by page by page by page. So excellent. Dig it. Dig it.

Now, I found something that existed on the iPhone since iOS 10, which I did not know was there. You probably did. Did you know that there was a little known feature that basically is turns your phone into a magnifying glass? Yes, I did. I did not see. I've spent a lot of time.

And those of you out there that deal with equipment and gear and whatnot know finding serial numbers can be quite difficult. Oh, my God. It can be small. They can be, you know, just raised bumps on black on black plastic. Almost impossible to read.

I've generally found over the years that just the camera on the phone with a good light was enough and I could take a picture and be able to read the serial number. So I have a small USB stick that I had to return because it was faulty and the serial number was printed so tiny that even with my 2020 younger vision, I never would have been able to read it.

The phone wasn't doing it. So I did a quick Google and the magnifier saved my ass. So it's hidden in accessibility. If you're not aware of it yet, it is a thousand times better than the camera zoom. And you can finally, finally read those tiny little engraved serial numbers.

Yeah, I turned that on for all of my older friends who basically need to read a menu in the dark. Right. So if we're out to dinner and they can't read and even I've run across that problem, I can't see for shit and these glasses are terrible. So I use that when I go out. The only thing is it binds automatically to triple click on the main button.

Yeah. And I don't know how it works on the iPhone 10 because there's no button to press. So I don't know how it actually works. That's interesting. I use the triple click on my home button on my iPhone, usually for black and white mode. So when I go to bed at night, I'll turn it into black and white mode.

So and turn the brightness all the way down. So if I need to see something like if my ring cameras go off and I can see that there's a skunk in the backyard or a burglar or an intruder, a ne'er-do-well. But it's usually just a skunk. But so now I got to figure out how to do that with another another route.

But, yeah, triple clicking on the home button is a nice little feature that they have in there. And it works for magnifying. So I really recommend it when you go out to restaurants at night, because if you can't read the menu, you don't know what you're going to order and you never know what you're going to get. Well, links in the show notes, old people.

Go check it out. Brian, we've been talking about how studies come out that just contradict everything that we've ever held dear in our lives. Eggs were great. Eggs were bad. Eggs were great. Eggs were bad. Everything is good.

Everything is bad. Now, apparently eating milk's bad. Yep. And apparently eating breakfast now is bad. If you're trying to lose weight. The most important meal of the day that I've heard all my entire life. Exactly. Apparently, if you want to lose weight, don't eat breakfast, which, you know, for some people, that would be like, duh, less calories.

But it's a new study. Found this over on Vox. My head is just spinning. I know. What about if I had eggs? Because eggs are good. Wait, I'm so confused. Bacon is good now. Eggs are good. You're supposed to have high protein first thing in the morning, but now you're not supposed to have breakfast.

But then you're supposed to fast. But then you're only supposed to eat within an eight hour time. Fuck this. Somebody figure this out. Here's the deal. Just eat what you want. You're going to die anyway. That's pretty much where I've gotten to. But I have noticed that if I do have breakfast, then I am more hungry throughout the day and I eat more.

So, you know, when Adam Savage lost all his weight because he was a chubber, he just stopped eating breakfast. And that was the only thing he did. And then the rest just kind of came into play. But the thing is, I like breakfast. It's not the most important meal of the day. It's just my favorite meal of the day because I love eggs.

Well, you can have bacon and eggs for lunch, man. I know. I just don't want to wait. I get up at five in the morning. So that's like seven hours before I can eat. But what are you going to do? Anyway, I just thought it was a fun read. So check it out. It's a link will be in the show notes. And there's another article over on The Verge called Why Captchas Have Gotten So Difficult.

And I put this in here for one specific reason. Okay. Amazon received a patent in 2017 for a scheme involving optical illusions and logic puzzles. Humans have great difficulty in deciphering. Called Turing Test via Failure. The only way to pass it is to get the answer wrong.

Now, talk about maddening. Captchas already can be maddening. You know, it's like, okay, click all the pictures with a bus. Okay. Click all the pictures with the cat. Okay. There's a little tiny corner that has a paw in it. Does that count?

I don't know. There's a corner of a sign in that one. And it's supposed to be all the ones with signs. I know. But the fact that now they're just making it so you just go mad trying to figure out if you're a human or not is getting ridiculous. So it's good times.

Yeah. I miss just typing in a code. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Two factor. Give me a two factor. I'm done. Yeah. Two factor takes care of everything. Let's just go that way, people. Move on. Now, I ran across something and I feel like I did this in the show before. And this is the problem with Facebook and the algorithm now is it tosses me the same articles like two or three years later.

And I go, oh, there's that. And I don't remember anything that we said on the show. So I put it in. But maybe I didn't. And I just find this interesting. You are not a native Southern Californian, but you live here now. I grew up here in Southern California. And I have always said the before freeway numbers.

Yeah. We have a big freeway called the 101 here. Yep. The 101, the 405, the 5, the 10. Yes. The, the, the. Now, I didn't find out until college when my roommates who became best friends and we all lived together all four years in college. One came from Arizona. One came from Kansas and one came from Texas.

And they would just say, oh, I'm getting, I'm going to go take 101. I'm like the 101, the 10, no, 10. We only do that here. Yep. Everywhere else in the country. Everybody just says the number, not with a the. And there's a reason why this happened.

And it has to do with how long freeways have been part of the Southern California landscape. There's one called the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which is between LA and Pasadena. It opened up in 1940 and it was the first freeway in the West. But outside of LA and New York city, many places didn't get highways until Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system in 56.

So by the time the rest of the country started building highways, LA had already, we already had a bunch of them and they all had local names to describe their route, like the San Bernardino freeway or Ventura freeway, which we all still use as well. And certain freeways encompass multiple route numbers. The Hollywood freeway was 61 or 66 and 101, depending on where you were on it.

In 64, we simplified the numbering systems. So they only had one route number, but the linguistic pattern was already set. We were already saying the in front of the numbers. So it wasn't just the Harbor freeway. Then we would also say the 110. So essentially we have a, the, just because we drove along highways a lot longer before anybody else ever did.

So we're cool. That's why we do it. Here's the weird thing. When I'm here in LA, I do say the 101, the 405. When I go back to Chicago, I'm taking 88 to 294 to get to O'Hare. You know, I will say such a Southern California thing.

Yeah. I could say I'm taking the Eisenhower to the Stevenson and all that. But you know, when they, when you, they have names on them, then you can say the Eisenhower. I'm not going to take Eisenhower to Stevenson. I'll take the Eisenhower to the Stevenson. But when I say numbers in any other state, I just use the numbers. But when I'm here, it is ingrained in me that I'm going to take the 101.

It's so weird. It is such a weird thing. I find it difficult when I'm traveling anywhere else and they don't put the in front of the numbers. I'm like, are you stupid? No, it's just a thing. It's just a thing. It's just a thing. And a fascinating one to me. I'm fascinated by it too.

Actually, I've never even thought about it. I just say the, when I'm in Southern California. Now we've turned into an episode of Saturday Night Live. Closing shout outs. My closing shout out this week is to the Jordan Harbinger Show cast and crew.

We made it for one year. Congratulations, guys. I've met and know most of you and well done. Yeah, thank you. It's been a slog. And I don't think we have closing FUs, so I can't say a closing FU to the reason that we had to start the show over, but we'll leave it at that.

Yeah, that's true. They're definitely two morons in a week. When we don't have Gwyneth Paltrow in it and there's room. Yep. Yep. So just a hearty congrats to my friends over at that show. It's been a rough year, but it's been worth it. You know, we've got 30, I think 38.4 million downloads in the first year, which ain't too shabby.

I got to say. Not bad at all. Yep. Not bad. Until next time, I'm Brian Showmaster. 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 GOG.show slash 319. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. Well, I escaped. I ran down an on-ramp and hauled ass across the five, and then I hitched a ride on the back of a taco truck down to where, like, the one-on-one meets the ten, you know, and I told the driver, hey, hang a ride on Alhambra and drop me off on Sunset.

Bye, Cahuenga? That's right by his bungalow. How do you know where he lives? This is Christine Coe from the Edit Your Life podcast.

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