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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. We're starting a little late today, Brian, because I was stuck at the car dealership this morning. I had to trade in my old lease and get a new one. And I got a big boy car. And by that, I mean, I got one of these modern behemoths that everybody seems to have here in Los Angeles.

I got me a shiny 2019 Ford Explorer, fully loaded, because that was the only way I could get a black one. And it's like, OK, you can pay a little more and we'll give you the black one. Otherwise, it's going to be burgundy. And then I'm going to be thinking about Ron Burgundy the whole time.

Yeah. When you sent me a message last night saying that you were going to go pick up a car in the morning, I was like, you're going to be late because those things, no matter how long you think they're going to take and you think they're going to take quite some time, they always take two to three times longer than you thought. It took 15 minutes longer, actually, than what I thought. So it wasn't bad.

The guys over at Vista Ford just pounded me through, which is great because I did all the credit stuff yesterday. Right. So I could walk in there first thing in the morning because it's President's Day. Not my president, but the other presidents that I really like. 44 out of 45. Yeah.

Yeah. Gave me a fantastic discount. And I'm like, OK, I had to pay a little bit more to get out of my other lease, but I saved like thousands of dollars in the long term. So I'm like, OK, let's do it. So sorry about the short notice. But man, this is the first car I've had that has technology.

It's nice, isn't it? Yeah. I thought it would be, you know, fun to talk about today because my car is just basically one turbo boost away from being kit now. Full voice control. I mean, it's crazy. Everything. I just press a button and I tell it what to do and it does it.

It's nuts. It's got all the, you know, the bells and whistles to make me not run into things, which is good because it is massive. It's like it is a land yacht, but, you know, more room for the dogs. Now I can go on trips with the dogs with more than a pair of underwear in a Ziploc bag because that's all that fit before.

Right. But, yeah, it's nice to have a shiny new car. I got to say, even though I'm going to be working, you know, even more to pay it off. But, yeah, the tech in it is pretty cool. That whole, like, you know, don't take your keys out, push a button to start it. I know it's been around for 10 years, but I've never had one.

And it's kind of fun. I'm late to the party. So that's all I got to say. But, yeah, I'm very happy with my new lease. Congratulations. Thank you, sir. You got a real man car. I do. I do. I can actually pull up to the polo lounge now and not be embarrassed because it looks like I stole a soccer mom's car.

So I got a little CBS all access follow up. Yes. I was going through the list of shows and I noticed there were there was a thing for the Twilight Zone. I'm like, oh, cool. I want to check out the Twilight Zone. But then I saw it was a Super Bowl Twilight Zone ad. And it turns out they're bringing back the Twilight Zone.

Yes. You were not aware of that? I was not aware of this at all. And Jordan Peele is going to be the guy behind it. So I'm like, I'm in. I'm all in. But what it really got me into was, OK, my my new jam before I go to bed, I get it, get the get the iPad out, turn off the lights and I watch an episode of the Twilight Zone because they have all of the old episodes and I've never seen them all.

So I started at the beginning and I'm going from beginning to end. My calm down at the end of the night is to watch an episode of the Twilight Zone now. And it is so much fun. That is such an amazing old show. Yeah, I did love that. You know what? And this is more follow up because this pisses me off because after I read this in the show notes, I went and checked out their show listings.

MASH aired on CBS. It was a CBS show. It is not part of the all access package. Why not? That would actually get me to pay for it. I would tell because I was just complaining the only place that I could go watch it was on Hulu. Maybe they have an exclusive deal with Hulu, but it was a CBS show. So MASH should be part of their thing and I would pay for that and then get my discovery and I would watch MASH in order and be very happy.

You know what is really funny? I just finished listening to the Alan Alda MASH episode at about four in the morning because my dogs got me up at three today. And I'm like, I need something to listen to to maybe make me go back to sleep. And then I got that Alan Alda episode and listened to it and it was a fantastic episode.

It was so good. Yeah, it really was. So hopefully they'll get the rights back and be able to put that on CBS all access. That would be nice. Yeah. I mean, for six bucks a month, it's it's so far it's well worth it. It's really well worth it. And a little follow up on some of the feedback we got last week on the guy who wrote in saying, why do you guys always talk about regulation, regulation?

And I have an article in here from Bloomberg News that is just awesome. And it's how one crash 10 years ago helped keep 90 million flights safe. Yes. And this is the I don't know if you remember when this accident happened, but I remember this well, Jason, because 10 years ago I was going back and forth between Buffalo a lot because I was currently doing the Among Us stuff with Robbie and from the Goo Goo Dolls and they had their studio there.

And and I was taking these little turbo props because there was no direct flight from L.A. to Buffalo at the time. So it was always a stop over and then get on the little crop duster to get to Buffalo. So I was flying on these when this happened. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is the Colgan Air flight that basically just dropped out of the sky and they couldn't figure out what happened.

And it turns out that they still don't know exactly what happened. But the aftermath of this is that the FAA got through a ton of changes through Congress about, you know, pilot fatigue, how long people can be on on roster and things like that.

And it changed so much stuff. And you can there's a there's a graph that plots, you know, how many flights have crashed since then to now. And it's like our air travel is so much safer now because of, oh, what's that called?

Regulations. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, if you want to go and go and check out this article, it's fascinating on how they really just revamped the entire air travel industry after this. And it's great. I mean, it's terrible about the 50 people that got killed, but they've saved millions of lives.

Well, maybe not millions. That might be a stretch. But it's it's it is now much safer to fly because of because of what is the point of regulations. The point of regulations is exactly that. It's it's it's a knowable thing that we know that if we do this thing, it will make the world a better place, a safer place, et cetera, et cetera.

So, therefore, we make it a law that people have to do it because we've discovered that in general, people are a-holes and won't. Right. Now, to play devil's advocate, I'm going to tell you about the other side of regulation and where things can go wrong. Have you been to the Strand bookstore in New York City?

I have not. OK, next time and seriously, next time you're in New York City, you as a book lover, you must go to the Strand. They have 18 miles of books. Literally, it is the coolest bookstore I've ever been to. I was there once like 15 years ago.

And my ex-girlfriend, who, you know, little Miss Missy, took me there and she's like, you're going to love this place. And I walked in. It was just like gobsmacked by how cool this place was. Well, they're under assault by the city of New York City because they want to register the building as a landmark.

And what that comes with is a huge amount of bureaucracy and regulation. And they're fighting against this right now, saying that, no, you're trying to register as a landmark so we can, you know, be a beacon of great stuff in New York City.

But what you're going to do is put us out of business, right, because it's a bookstore. Margins are small. And by doing this, they can't. There's so many things that they're going to have to do. And they're fighting against this stuff. And it's really interesting because the owner of the store is the wife of Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, which is really interesting.

And this whole thing is just a political thing. And it kind of stems out of Amazon's big deal, which we're going to talk about in a second. But they're they're really screwing these guys. I heard about this on an episode of Off the Hook, the 2600 hacker radio show.

Right. And they were on there with the lawyers and everything talking about it. And it was just like they're getting railroaded through this to have it done. And it's it's it's really a shame. So I definitely recommend checking out the 2600 episode. We've got a couple other links from the New York Post and that in the the show notes.

But, you know, regulation can go wrong sometimes. So I just wanted to play devil's advocate here and say, hey, you know, there is such thing as way too much regulation. Or poor regulations, of course. Mm hmm. And in general, given the choice, I'll take regulations when it comes to airplanes. I'm all for it when it comes to a building that isn't really going to go anywhere.

No. And I remember the whole Landmark Society in the little town I lived in in Chicago called Downers Grove. They had a, you know, basically a Landmark Preservation Society. And every homeowner in the place hated them because if you got registered as a Landmark, you were screwed.

Yeah. You can't you can't make changes to your place anymore. Even something as as basic as like making a fix to your house. You have to go through all these different meetings and plans and all that because, yeah, you just can't do anything. So, yeah, that's why that's why that town looks the same, because it's so hard to build there.

But anyway, moving on, I found this on our local CBS station here in Los Angeles. It's a video about e-scooter warning. Lime bird lawsuits continue to cruise in as injuries soar. Oh, and it's like a five minute video talking about people who were injured riding these stupid scooters and all the, you know, the lawsuits that are happening and the lawyers that are doing it.

The thing that really pissed me off about the entire piece was that the fucking reporters couldn't even be bothered to wear a helmet. Can't mess up their hair, man. I know. I know. Ron Burgundy would would approve of no helmets. That's right. Oh, man. In the news.

Well, Facebook may be getting bitch slapped a little bit by the FTC. Apparently, they are contemplating a multibillion dollar fine for potential privacy violations related to how the company has shared data in the past with outside developers, including, obviously, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So this may happen.

There's negotiations going on right now between Facebook and the FTC. It's unclear exactly how much Facebook will have to pay or if the company will settle at all. If they don't settle, then then it goes to court. So a multibillion dollar fine is a step in the right direction. And it sounds really good until you realize that Facebook brought in almost fifty six billion dollars in revenue last year alone.

So while it's a steep fine to everybody else in the world, it's not really going to be that much to Facebook. Well, I mean, there's revenue versus profit. You have to remember operating costs and things like that. So it will definitely affect the stock price, which is fine. Yeah, that's fine. And it should. Hey, and that that money goes back to the government.

And apparently we need it to build a wall. So we got to have that money's got to have that money's. So we'll see how this goes. I'm sure it will be knocked down to two million dollars and everybody will go about their separate ways. I'm sure Facebook in Mexico will pay for that wall. The Mark Zuckerberg face.

Yeah. Book it to face wall. That's what it'll be. Oh, man. He's already got a hospital, so we're good to go. And of course, in the other big news, Amazon has pulled out of their plans to build their second headquarters in Queens. Yeah.

Yep. Well, that was a clusterfuck. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the pushback was, you know, intense, intense. And that's fine. That's fine. And it is. It's totally fine because a city has a right and the citizens of a city have a right to have their opinions known about about these sorts of things.

And it was ridiculous. The three billion dollars in state and city incentives to for Amazon, for Amazon, for Amazon, for Amazon, Amazon. Jesus. I mean, it's just ridiculous. No, it's not. Brian, it's obscene. It is fucking obscene.

And so fortunately, Amazon said, eh, we're going to take our toys and go somewhere else. But the funny thing is, they still admit that they're going to grow their presence in New York without the promised subsidies. So what the hell were you giving them money for anyway? To win the contest.

To win the contest. We are in a world right now where the only thing that matters is winning. Winning. Hashtag. Yeah. But speaking of taking their toys, I have some potential good news. Toys R Us, a relaunch is actually going to happen. How so?

Well, after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September of 2017 and closing or selling all of its 800 stores in the U.S. last June, True Kids Brands, a company founded by former Toys R Us employees, took control of the company's brands, including Jeffrey the Giraffe, as of January 20th.

Richard Berry, who is a 33-year-old or 33-year Toys R Us veteran and who was chief marketing officer when the company dissolved, is basically going to be bringing it back, at least in e-commerce format for now. But hopefully, there are plans to actually open up physical locations. Interesting.

Interesting. The chief marketing officer who was in charge when the company went under is going to do it again. Yes, but we talked about it at the time. You know, they definitely made some missteps, but it was more just bad business handling. Yeah, it was the investors. Yeah, it was the investors that really shut that thing down.

Yeah. But happy that they're coming back. I mean, because I was quite disappointed about the fact that I would never have the experience as a father of taking that. Taking my own kid to Toys R Us, because I so vividly remember my dad taking me. So, it'd be nice. Yeah, you know what they need to do? They also need to bring in some executives from Best Buy, because Best Buy is killing it.

Somehow, somehow Best Buy is still hanging in there. It's amazing. Yeah, because you know what they are? Smart about business. They're not, they don't have these, you know, investors that are coming in and trying to just gut the entire company for as many dollars as they can before they just file for bankruptcy.

They're not predatory. And so, if you have people that care about the business instead of these predatory investors, you might be able to make a lasting brand that people love. Go figure. Yeah. So, I'm happy about that.

Now, something that pissed me off over at Lifehacker. Now, I've always had. Come on. Why are you still reading Lifehacker? Lifehacker has always been hit or miss for me. There are some good things that come out of there, but more often than not, no.

We should call it Ragehacker. That's all it is now. Well, this one is particularly galling to me. It's an article by Virginia K. Smith. They're having something called Rejection Week. And she wrote an article saying, we reject the side hustle. And she says, what I'm most tired of hearing are admonishments to always have a side hustle or to compulsively stack extra side work on top of the full-time work you already have.

In honor of Rejection Week, I hereby reject the side hustle once you strip the term of its post-recession rebranding, the second job. And then she goes on talking about how, you know, we had to do extra work in times in our lives because we needed to make more money or we really were in the hustle period where we're trying to establish ourselves.

But that side hustles, once you have a real actual job, are very bad for you. They drain your energy levels. They impact you emotionally, physically. And they make you worse at your real job because you're always concerned about your side hustle and doing all this stuff. So she's saying, we reject, at Lifehacker, we reject the side hustle.

Except for the fact that Lifehacker has done nothing but run articles about finding side hustles, the joy of side hustles, how great side hustles are, how you should be doing this as a side hustle for fucking years. And we've been screaming at them about this, saying side hustles are bullshit. You should not want a side hustle.

And all Lifehacker ever did was say how great side hustles are. So fuck you, Lifehacker. Slow down there, Chief. Chief, slow down. Now, I want to talk about the origin of the side hustle was you start a side hustle while you have your day job because you're doing it with the goal of having your side hustle become your main job so you can start a company.

Not doing what the person say in the photo of this article does, which I thought you might enjoy. He's a guy smoking as he's walking about 75 dogs all tied around his waist. Oh, my God. What a... That looks like...

Wait a minute. Take a look at that for a second. Looks like Harry Potter. It's Harry Potter. This is... Yeah. This is a still from probably some movie. Yeah. That's why all the girls are staring at him in the background. Somebody did not really fact check that photo.

Well, it is Lifehacker. Uh, that's true. That's true. They don't really fact check a goddamn thing. Oh, yeah. No, the side hustle was originally started so you could actually become an entrepreneur, not to augment your income because you were poor. So, they don't...

I bet they don't even make that point in the article at all. Because it's Lifehacker. They did not. Of course. They did not. And speaking of crappy journalism, I found this article over on Recode talking about the alternative to your dying local paper is one written by one person, a robot, and you.

Okay. So, it gets into what we've heard about recently, which is all the layoffs for the, you know, individual small papers in local areas and all that. And it talks about Patch, which I forgot even existed. The all-digital local news company you probably stopped paying attention to years ago when AOL used to own the company.

And it says, for better or worse, it may represent the future of local news. So, Charles Hale, the investor that has owned the company for the past five years, has a network of 1,200 hyper-local sites that are turning a profit generated by more than $20 million in annual ad revenue without a paywall.

So, apparently, it's doing okay, and they're going to ramp up and employ more people. But the real problem is, is it's not really all that hyper-local because what they do is they have one or two journalists that cover multiple towns. So, you're not really going to be getting exhaustive local coverage at all, which is probably okay for smaller towns, but not really for some of the bigger ones.

So, this is, you know, the fact that they're going to be using AI to generate stories and all that sort of stuff does not, to me, scream investigative journalistic sorts of things that we'd actually want or need. No, I mean, I always hated Patch because they're doing what we did at Metblogs, but doing it poorly and with just the profit motive.

You know, we did it with local people, local journalists, wannabes, who were actually go out and report the news. And it just drives me crazy that this guy is making money because we should have stayed in business. Damn it. We were too early. Too damn early. Hey, that's the story of your and my life on the internet.

Too damn early. This is true. By the way, I've been, I've been, it's driving me crazy. Remember that little show we did called Up to Speed? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is the new hotness in podcasting, by the way. We were. Daily, daily micro-podcasts? We were four years too early on that, so. And even, even now, they're like, in the descriptions of almost all of these shows, it's like everything you need to get up to speed.

I'm like, that's why we named the fucking show Up to Speed. We were first. Damn it. And we just, we missed it again, again. Maybe we should start that back up. Oh, yeah, with all that free time that we both have. Oh, yeah, that's right. Shit. Yeah, there's that.

Better dust out a magic marker, Jason, because the FAA has now requiring drones to display their registration numbers externally. And you have until February 23rd, so you need to mark the ID number on your drone's body by then. Guess what I bought? What? Some vinyl letters from Staples. And I put my, I put my ID on my drone.

So, there you go. Easy enough. It'll, it cost me $4 to do that. I'm fine with that. I have no problem with that, as long as you're not being a dick with your drone. Me either. I'm fine. Remember, we were talking about this a long time ago. We were like, drones need license plates, just like anything else. Exactly.

So, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in compliance with the regulation. How about that? Regulations. Now, I thought this was hilarious. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wanted to do an interview with Kara Swisher, and they agreed to conduct the interview on Twitter, which is his platform.

They created their own hashtag for it, hashtag Kara Jack. And, uh, you know, but basically what they discovered is that it was a massive clusterfuck, and nobody could follow anything that was going on because Twitter is not conducive to one-on-one linear conversations. Oh, God, did the algorithm get in the way and reshuffle the entire conversation?

Of course it did. So, yeah, I'm, so, Dorsey even admitted this himself. He said, I'm going to start a new thread to make it easy for people to follow. Walt Mossberg just texted me that it is a chaotic hell pit. That's awesome.

Okay, definitely not easy to follow the conversation, Dorsey replied. Exactly why we were doing this. Fixing stuff like this will help, I believe. So, good spin there, Jack. Yeah, turn off your algorithm, you twat. That's all you got to do. And, by the way, I'd like to say hashtag Kara Jack is the worst Billy Jack sequel ever.

Ooh, yeah, callback there. Old movie. Old movie. Look at you. And it turns out that governments are requesting more and more data from Reddit, the front page of the internet. So, in 2018, they received more than twice as many government requests for user data compared to 2017, which is 752 compared to 310 the previous year.

The vast majority of requests were to provide information on users, and the site complied with 77% of them, all of which came from the U.S. When the requests were subpoenas or search warrants, Reddit complied over 90% of the time. So, pretty interesting what's going on over there. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these companies have these, you know, disclosures every year.

So, it's fine. You know, if they come with legal documentation, there's nothing they can do. They have to give over the information. Yep, exactly. And I found this one over on the New York Times. Not all fun and memes. BuzzFeed News employees plan to form a union.

Good. Day late and a dollar short for a bunch of your buddies. They say, it's not all fun and memes, the organizing committee said in a statement. Our staff has been organizing for several months, and we have legitimate grievances about unfair pay disparities, mismanaged pivots, and layoffs, weak benefits, skyrocketing health insurance costs, diversity, and more.

Unfortunately, more than 40 people that were laid off were on that organizing committee. So, we'll see how this is, but always remember, always remember this, because we talked about this when the layoffs first happened. BuzzFeed's revenue grew by more than 15% last year, but that gain wasn't enough to stave off the decision by its founder, Jonah Peretti, to reduce the number of employees.

In an email to the staff before the firings, Mr. Peretti wrote, Unfortunately, revenue growth by itself isn't enough to be successful in the long run. Then what is? What is? What is this mystery metric that we're missing here?

Yes, what is the metric that you need to be successful in? Because I thought it was revenue. Yes, it's the whole point of business. Oh, man. And there's a huge, huge fallout over at Blizzard, because they laid off several hundred people, too.

And which sucks, because I love Blizzard, and I want them to keep making more games. But that's the whole point of this, which is really funny. The Activision basically said, you need to make more games. So we're just going to lay off a bunch of people. So we have less people, and now we have to make more games.

Granted, most of the people were in support roles, and that's kind of just the way it goes. And they're reintegrating their European divisions and their American divisions, because that turned out to be a clusterfuck. They're like, oh, let's split everything. We'll have a European office, and we'll have an American office.

And so we have double the headcount and all that stuff. But I just want them to come up with World of StarCraft. That's all I want. If they can do that, then they get all my monies. They get my monies anyway. I still buy stuff from Blizzard. This episode is brought to you by another tech podcast.

The show is called Acquired and discusses the finer points of what went right on the internet. Well, sometimes. Acquired is a podcast about technology company acquisitions and IPOs. The hosts, Ben and David, pick one acquisition per episode, analyze it, and grade if it was a good idea for the big company to acquire the smaller one or not.

Some of the all-time greats include Facebook's friggin' steal, picking up Instagram, and the absolute debacle of AOL convincing Time Warner to merge. If you like our show, these guys are less grumpy, but we think you'll like theirs, too. They had a great recent episode where they analyzed SoftBank's acquisition of ARM and what it means for the entire computing landscape.

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The Cyber Wire is a free community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is the co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Hi, Dave. Hello, gentlemen. How are we doing? Hello. We're doing good. At the beginning of the show, I was telling everybody that I got a brand new car today.

Ooh, that's exciting. Yes, and it's one of those modern cars with all the apps and doodads. Yes. I, too, recently got a new car. So, go on. How's it going so far? My car came with an app. Really? It comes with an app that I can remote start it with.

I can find it wherever it's at. It tells me how much gas it has, how the oil pressure is, all the tire pressures, all the shenanigans and craziness that you can get from the app economy. I just want to know, how scared should I be that my car has an app? Well, I've had my BMW for over two and a half years now, and it also has an app, and nothing untoward has happened yet.

Okay. Yeah, I have a Ford, so I don't know if I'm a little farther down the food chain than the BMW fancy pants. Well, evidently, your Ford is fancier than my new Mazda, because I do not have an app. But I will tell you, Jason, I want to say within the last year, I talked to someone, it was a security professional, who had a Ford Mustang that he had bought and sold.

And he discovered when he sold the car that he still had access to the car with the app. I remember you talking about that. Yeah. Yeah. So he could still do all the things you can do with the app, including locate where the car is. And just also all those things he could do.

He could start it. He could, I don't know. Can you honk the horn? I don't know if he can honk the horn. I haven't played with it that much. I've had it for about 20 minutes. OK, but but what the other thing he discovered was that at that time, Ford was really not up on what they should be doing to prevent this.

So they don't have like the the Apple iTunes deauthorize all the computers that once had access to my iTunes library and then just re-authorize them. They need something like that, basically. Exactly. Yeah. There's no you can't turn off find my car like you have to do. Yeah. And the Ford folks, my recollection is the Ford folks were saying, well, that's not our problem.

And he was saying, well, whose problem is it then? If who's going to reset this? I would say it is Ford's problem. Yeah. So I don't know how it ended, but that was a concern at the time. So he had he had a Ford Mustang, I believe. Interesting.

Well, one of the crazy things that they had me do is as soon as I got home, they're like, when you pull up to your house, go to the go to this setting, click the Wi-Fi and then pair it to your home's Wi-Fi, because then it will automatically get over the air updates for all your patches.

So my car is like my Eero now. It's going to automatically update while I'm sleeping, which is kind of cool. And hopefully it won't brick itself. Exactly. Yeah. So this is why I don't ever turn on automatic updates on anything.

Yeah, I don't. I mean, granted, it's got four wheel drive and powertrain and all this stuff. But if it won't start, then that's a problem. You know, that's a really interesting point about the app not decoupling, though, because now I'm going to have to go look into that for the BMW as well, because I often wondered about that.

What happens when you when you sell the car? So, yeah, because when I signed up this morning, they had me put in the VIN number and do some back and forth with their servers. But all I really did was put in the VIN number, which makes me think, hmm, maybe I can go add another car and put in the VIN number and see if it'll let me pair to it.

Well, sure. I mean, the VIN number is viewable from outside the car. That's what I mean. Like, OK, so this is not so secure. Well, I guess we'll be hearing more about this story as it develops. And the other interesting thing was, while I'm sitting there waiting to fill out all the paperwork, I noticed that every monitor in the Ford dealership had the IP address taped to the top of their monitor.

And I'm like, really, guys, you might want to you might want to not do that. And what could go wrong? Exactly. And they're like, people who are buying Fords really aren't hackers. And I'm like, excuse me. Right, right.

As Jason walks around taking pictures of every single IP address. Watch this. I took pictures of five monitors with IPs on them today. I'm like, squeeze me. Squeeze me. Don't whack the hornet's nest. I'm not.

I'm not. I just thought it was a fun thing. No, no, I'm saying for them. They shouldn't whack the hornet's nest by telling you that people who buy Fords aren't hackers. Because what's what what let me ask you this, Brian. What's your experience when someone tells Jason not to do something? He does it immediately. That's right.

Right. I'm a six year old. There you go. I'm a six year old. I will say a lot of similarities between my son and Jason more and more every day. I'm discovering impulse control. And as I get older, I poop myself more often. That's the way it goes. Yeah, that's true.

I will say having this new car and my last car was, oh, 10 years old or so. Boy, have things changed. Yeah, quite a bit. It's no doubt. It's really cool and it's really fun. And I love all the fancy things that my car is capable of doing.

It's also funny how you go from thinking that something, well, I would never use that to, oh, my God, I can't live without this. Yeah. 15 minutes. I'm like, how did I ever live without stop and go cruise control? You do realize that we're probably the very last generation of people to wax rhapsodic about cars like this because I don't think anybody coming up after us is going to give a shit.

But, you know, I remember when I got the BMW. It was also my first new car in a long time. And I was like, where does the key go? Wait, where's the key? I tried to. I like I pulled out the fob when I got into the car to put it in. And I'm like, oh, that's right. And then I had to like push the brake, press the button.

But there is a hidden compartment on my key fob that has an actual key stuffed in it. They're like, if the key fob ever stops working, you still have a key. I'm like, OK, why didn't you just give me a key? Yeah. You will get used to the fob. Trust me. I'm sure I will.

But like, you know, twice now I've pulled it out of my pocket to shove it in the thing. And I'm like, oh, there's no hole. So what are you going to do? That could be the title of your autobiography, Jason. Well, that's that saying. You know, my favorite iPhone accessory is my car. Yeah, this is my first car with CarPlay, too.

So I get to play with that. But the weird part is you have to plug it in to make CarPlay work. I'm like, yeah, everything else is wireless. I talk to this car. I press a button and I tell it the radio station I want to play or the address I want to go to. And it just does it. Yeah. And it is almost like kit without turbo boost.

But but why do I have to plug the phone in to make CarPlay work? It makes no sense. I can't believe you can't just Bluetooth it. Well, in some cars, you can. Mine is the same way. You have to plug it in. And I suspect it's just probably a money saving thing on the car manufacturer or something like that to get to make it easier to get the bandwidth that they need.

And I, too, find it's that thing where, again, once that thing that you you you did not need and now it won't do it in quite the way you want it to. And you're like, God, this is this is bullshit. It is bullshit. Right. Right. And I'm going through the settings and they're like, would you like to set up your Wi-Fi hotspot?

And then I'm like, what? I got a Wi-Fi hotspot. And then it sends me to AT&T. And it's like, I got to buy a data package for my fucking car now. It's like, what? Come on. Data packages for cars, privacy policies for mattresses. This is our world now. I know. That's how they get you.

That's how they get you. It's insane. So now I'm just like, oh, I mean, we've made fun of this stuff. But now I have real world experience with it. And it's just I'm scratching my head. And the entire thing runs on Android, which is even worse. Oh, really? Yep. The new Ford Sync from Microsoft runs on Android.

Go figure. And you're using CarPlay. Yeah. I don't know what mine's using. I think it's some kind of Linux thing in there. But BMW stuff is Linux. It's fun. It's fun. I would love to be able to. You guys probably remember back in the day, you know, clock chipping your computers.

I would love to be able to clock chip the system in my Mazda because it's a little sluggish. But I have a bad, you know, on the other hand, probably shouldn't mess with the system that also has control of the steering wheel. Yeah. Probably a good idea not to get too hacky in there.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I just want it to work. That's all. Yeah. All right. Well, it'll be interesting to see what you find out. Yeah, but man, I'm loving it. The thing looks like it's a Secret Service car, basically. Oh, nice. It's a 2019 Ford Explorer, like loaded, and it's got black wheels.

So it's black with black wheels. So it looks like I'm in the Secret Service, even though I am about as far from the Secret Service as you could possibly get, unless you count the watch lists that I'm on. You're going to go ahead and tint the front windshield? Oh, I'm in California, man. You know it.

That's illegal. Is it? You can't tint it at all here? No. Oh, yeah. I know I can't do it here in Maryland, but I figured maybe L.A. had a, you know, because you're in the desert, so there's actually a practical reason for it there. Yeah. All the windows in the back are tinted, but yeah, the front windows and the front side windows are not, but everything else is tinted.

So it's pretty swanky. Nice. It's pretty swanky. So I'm just waiting for it to get hacked. Right. Speaking of hacked, I was hacked this week, apparently, because I was a 500px customer, and I used 500px to run jpd.photos. And they were like the, eh, they were an okay flicker substitute, and I could post nice photos up there, and people could vote on them.

I was a pro user. I paid $100 a year to get, you know, the super high res and all that, and then I get an email this week, and I'll explain why this is important after I read this. Our engineering team recently learned of a potential security issue affecting your 500px user account.

We are taking this issue extremely seriously and have taken immediate action to address the situation and ensure the protection of our users' data. There is no indication of unauthorized access to our user accounts. And it goes on, but then I go to another site that I follow called Petapixel, and it's like, 500px hacked, personal data exposed of all 14.8 million users.

And I was just like, okay, here's the thing about 500px. I hated them because there were no photo exports. Like, they wouldn't export any of my big photos unless I sent in a request for every single photo to have them send me the high res.

There was just no high res dump. Like one at a time? One at a time, and I had hundreds of photos up there. Wow. And also, when people, they give you premium domain mapping that you have to pay for. So, jpd.photos goes to my 500px account.

Yeah. When people come to my 500px page with all of my photos, a pop-up shows up saying, would you like to join 500px? And I'm like, I'm paying you $100 a year and extra for a custom domain, and the first thing you do is hit my users with a pop-up?

And I'm like, this is bullshit. Yeah. Backform. And for two years, I tried to get them to fix that, and they never did. So, I disabled my account because there was no delete. And I disabled my account a year ago, and then I get this email.

So, I'm like, okay. And then I had to go in, re-enable my account, which I had to go through, like, five or ten different steps to get that to happen. Then I finally got to the support page where I had to search for a delete account. Then I put in a form that said, delete my account.

And as of right now, you can still go to jpd.photos, and all my stuff is there. Huh. Yep. All my information, everything. Because they don't make it easy to disable your account. And these guys are just rank amateurs.

You can't export your data, which I paid for. It's my data. And, you know, I just went to the site right now. I put in the domain. I'm not logged in. I scroll down, like, half an inch, and then, boom, a pop-up says, join you pick now. And it's ridiculous.

These guys are just rank amateurs. When you say rank amateurs, I say about the same as everybody else out there. Yeah, it's true. This is probably the state of the industry right now. But if you want to go see my photos that are up there, you know, everything's up there right now for the time being.

I think it's good stuff, but, you know, I might be a little jaded on the 500px, but I still think my photos look nice. Have you found an alternative to a different place you like better? Not yet. I've been searching for over a year now trying to find something. So there's nothing really out there.

I'm not going to Flickr. I don't like SmugMug, the parent company. And just I don't know. There's just really nothing out there. There are a couple open source, like, catalog solutions that build websites for you that seem to be pretty nice. There's one up on Nodehost that they will install as a package, but it hasn't been updated in a long time, which means, nope, not going to use that.

And so, yeah, I'm still on the hunt. So if anybody out there has good ideas for really professional-looking photo websites that are easy to use, that if you do want to pull your stuff back out, that there's an easy export, I am open to it. Do not say Squarespace ever to me, please.

But, yeah. Anyway. You know we're going to get, like, 30 emails saying Squarespace. Squarespace, of course. Yeah. And what was the Klan name in that Class Royale thing again? Of course. And, of course, I'm sure you guys have both seen the Wired story about how popular electric scooters can be hacked to speed up or stop.

Yes, indeed. Oh, what do you guys think about this? Well, I mean, it's unforgivable. What are the basic functions in terms of safety that these things need to have? It sounds like the ease with which you can access the controls of this via Bluetooth is ridiculous to the point where the folks over at Zimperium released this because they thought it was so serious.

They had to get it out there as soon as possible. What happens if you're riding one of these scooters and somebody has control of it on their phone and they hit the accelerate button and send you off into traffic? Here's a side note on that. I saw this in one of the previous stories that we covered about all the injuries and the lawsuits that are happening around these scooters.

There are geofenced areas where they have speed limits. So as soon as you enter the area that there's a speed limit enforced, the scooter slows down automatically. But as soon as you leave the geofenced area, the thing takes off like a bat out of hell.

Oh, wow. That's great. Exactly. So it's a feature, not a bug. Yeah. They need to be able to modify the speed without you actually doing anything. So this is built into the operating system for these things.

Is that not insane? This is all insane. The idea that there wouldn't even be passwords on these things. It's almost malicious. It should be illegal. It's ridiculous. There's nothing about these scooters that really is a good thing in my opinion.

And certainly this rollout is ridiculous. And the fact that they don't. Did no one think of this at all? Well, isn't this the, I mean, how much do you think this is the we need to be first to market issue? This is the move fast and break things, right?

Oh, yeah. Let's get up on the street and we'll figure out security later. We'll dump them on the street and we'll figure out everything else as the problems come up. Well, here's the other issue, though. These weren't originally intended to be fleet vehicles. They were intended to be personal use scooters. Personal use individual scooters. Yeah, they've been hijacked by these idiots at these scooter companies to be used as fleet vehicles.

They have no real, like, built-in software to be decent fleet vehicles, which means there's no security. These things are off the rack. They buy them at, like, you know, garage sales in China for 200 bucks and then bring them over here, put on a little GPS box and send them off out in the traffic.

Slap on their sticker. Yep. Yeah. So do you guys think there needs to be regulation on these sorts of things? No, they need to go the fuck away. They don't need to be regulated. Yes, there needs to be regulation. Of course there needs to be regulation. The one listener that writes in to us that says, why do we always say that regulation is the answer to everything?

Here you go again. They couldn't do it themselves. So somebody has to step in to make it safer for everyone. Because it strikes me that the situation where you are renting something to the public means that you have a higher standard for safety than if I was just buying this to tool around my neighborhood with.

Yeah. Yeah. One would assume. Yeah. Yeah. One would be wrong. Yes. One would be wrong. Hence, once again, yes, regulation. Of course, we're going to have to come in and regulate this. Right. Yeah. Right. These people, these companies will not fix these things themselves.

They just aren't going to. It's move fast and break things again. It's such a cultural thing now, and it's just so horrible. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. Moving on. So we talked a little bit last week about the Facebook and Google misuse of enterprise certificates for Apple and how Apple bitch slapped them for it.

But TechCrunch is reporting that dozens of gambling and pornographic apps are using the same process to sidestep Apple's normal restrictions. So they are going out and getting certifications using fake company names or nondescript names to avoid any suspicion and avoid detection. Others are using the names of other unrelated legitimate businesses to gain approval and basically getting these apps out there using the enterprise certificate thing.

And what we're discovering is Apple doesn't really have any kind of proactive mechanisms in place to find these things. They're basically, when they're found and pointed out to them, they'll remove them. So it's all whack-a-mole with all these developers abusing certifications. Yeah, it is.

Now, do you suppose Apple, what would be the way that Apple would be able to detect this at scale? That is a good point. I mean, other than actual eyes on, seeing everything that's out there, reviewing all the apps as they come through, seeing where the traffic is going through certifications.

I don't know, you know. Right. You'd think you would have to have an idea of, okay, if you're using the certification for its intended purpose, say, within your own company, right? You'd think part of the form that you'd fill out with Apple was how many people are in your company. And if you see that, like, there are more than 50 people using this app, like there are 100,000 people using this app instead of the 50 that was supposedly in your company, that would be a warning sign.

Well, yeah, pay for license. It's a dollar per user per certificate. Oh, that's interesting. And then when it hits a certain threshold, you can say, you don't have 100,000 people in your organization. You are not Amazon, you know. And by the way, what is all this porn that you are about?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm fine with not being able to see what's going on because that's the whole point of, you know, certificates like that is that they can encrypt things and not see it. But, yeah, I mean, they should just have user limits on them. It seems like kind of a basic function that wouldn't be that hard to implement.

We saw a story came by in the past couple of days related to this where there's been dust up over Apple saying that they're going to require two-factor authentication for developers. Right. And the notion there being that a lot of developers, or I guess enough developers, are getting their credentials stuffed.

So someone will go in and piggyback off of their account, get their certificates, use that for stuff that they're up to no good with. And if you have two-factor, then the developer account is tied to a phone number, whatever.

But it'll be reasonably traceable. Yeah, it'll cut down on that, I hope, quite a bit. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out as well. So this next one I put in here, this is about the ring doorbells. Now, Jason, you still have your ring? I've got two of them, yes.

You've got two of them. I've got the ring spotlight for my backyard, and I have the ring doorbell for my front yard. And pretty pleased with them so far, yes? Fantastic. Except they need skunk detection because the backyard one... Well, don't we all, but go on. Oh, that's true. Yeah, no, the one in the backyard definitely is not good with people detection.

Every night at three in the morning when the skunk walks through the yard looking for worms, it wakes me up and my phone goes off. Oh, interesting. I installed one for my mom, and she has kind of the same issue. It's kind of funny. So they need a better AI algorithm on that motion detection.

I just need a little boy in the Philippines to be watching my feed all night long and not press the alarm when the skunk comes through. There probably is a few. You can probably get somebody on Fiverr to do that for you. Well, so have you taken advantage of any of the neighborhood functions where you can join up with your neighbors and...

Yeah. Yeah. And how do you like that? Yeah, I totally have. It's nice because the main thing... Well, it's a double-edged sword. Let me just say this. Yeah, there are a bunch of really scary, paranoid people in my neighborhood who are... Anybody that walks by who is maybe of color or maybe has a backpack are a threat to the global stability of our neighborhood.

I see. And those people are crazy. So the problem with connecting with other people is the people part. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Like, what's that hyper-local app? Is it called Neighborhood or whatever? Oh, yeah.

Where good people connect. Yes. Yeah. So I signed up for that like two years ago and I lasted about a month before I realized how much I hate everybody that's around me. Right. Yeah. I lasted about as long. Yeah. It's basically you find out how garbage your neighbors are. Yeah. But this is kind of the same thing.

But everybody has video and photos of what's going on. Oh, even better. Exactly. So I find that a lot of it is just junk and the people are terrible. But the one thing that it's good for, at least in my neighborhood, is wildlife spotting because we have coyotes that run through the neighborhood.

So if you have dogs, like a lot of people have little dogs that they go out for walks and they lose a lot of dogs in the neighborhood to coyotes. So people who spot coyotes can tell everybody where they're at and to avoid the neighborhood. You can't call animal control on coyotes because they're not allowed to shoot them.

So you just had they just have to drive around them and make sure they don't kill anybody. But it's been it's been helpful for that. The rest of it is just it's a dumpster fire. Right. Well, the folks that ring the higher ups at ring evidently believe that law enforcement is a big part of their mission.

And in addition to these neighbor to neighbor kind of portals, they have also spun up a version for law enforcement. And this article from The Intercept talks about how they haven't really shown a bright light on the fact that they have this portal for law enforcement.

And there are lots of people who aren't very happy about the implications of having this site for law enforcement. It seems like the way it works is if a police officer is investigating something, they can go to this ring portal and it will locate on a map all of the locations where there are ring customers.

Now, one of the things that caught my eye here is they say that they don't reveal customers locations, but they're putting you on a map. It's a map of Narnia.

They forgot to mention that. Right, exactly. There are no street names on the map. Yeah. But you just can't put a ring in Mordor. Yeah. Obviously. So the police, if they want, they can put out a request within a certain area and evidently they're supposed to have certain information for the request to go through.

They have to have an incident number, a specific area of interest and a specific time range and date and time and so forth. And they can put in the request and citizens can opt in to sharing their footage automatically. So they can say yes.

But you have to go out of your way to opt in, correct? Correct. I did not do what I hope that. Okay. It is not automatic. You don't have to opt out. Correct. Correct. So, so, so, so far, so good. Yes. Do we think? It is. So far, so good. Yeah. Warning bells are tingling.

Right. Yeah. My spidey sense is not as off the chart. We all have that feeling that there's more to the story, don't we? Yeah. It's called the other shoe. Where's it coming from? Right. So what people are concerned about is this notion that it can give law enforcement what they describe as coercive power over customers.

So what happens when the request comes out from law enforcement to see my footage? What happens if I say no? What happens if I refuse? I think the same thing when they call me for like the policeman's ball and they want some money. I'm like, can I say no?

Right, right. Right, exactly. So are you, are you going to, are you suddenly an uncooperative witness? Right? Yeah. I guess it would be a weird feeling. And I certainly know that like somebody like my mom would automatically just say yes because she comes from a generation that just kind of does not ever question authority, right?

Right. She would, if anybody called saying they were a cop and wanted access, she would say, of course. I have, I have a very standard reply to that. Come back with a warrant. Yes. Seriously. That's it. Come back with a warrant. Yeah. I will not voluntarily give police any data unless they come back with a warrant because I did that once I let them come in my house because somebody got robbed down the street and I had cameras in my house and I ended up getting taken to the station and fingerprinted for

the crime just because they came in my house and they saw like the movie posters that my company was working on and they thought I was a counterfeiter. And then they fingerprinted, they took me down, they fingerprinted me and like I'm, I finally figured out why we had, there was a time discrepancy about the cameras, but it was just because I had flown in from California the night before and forgot to reset my watch.

So they thought I was lying. But the thing is I asked them what the victim or what the perpetrator looked like. And they're like, oh, he's about 300 pounds and five, 10 and I'm six feet tall. And back then I was like 200 pounds and I'm like, you guys are assholes. So after that, after being thinner, fingerprinted and put in the system for a, basically what is, you know, I was a suspect in a rape case.

It's like, uh, no, I'm not giving you guys anything. Come back with a warrant. Yeah. Well, let me go ahead. Is, is what the police can access. Is that basically the same thing that when you're opting in as the, as part of the neighbor's portal, what your neighbors can access, right? I believe so.

Yes. But the thing about Jason, you will not share this with law enforcement, but you'll share this with all your neighbors. No, no, no. The way it works with the neighbor's feed is that you can select the clip that you want to share and your actual, your actual location is obfuscated. If you want it to be, you can say you can put like a.

A ring around like a general location to say, okay, I saw this in this general area, but you do not have to give your specific location. Hmm. But. Okay. That seems ridiculous. It's also going to be able to figure out what the location is from the view of the camera. Yeah. Well, there's that.

Depends. Depends. Depends on. There's that big tree that was in the photo. Right. There's the street corner with the street signs on it. I don't know where. No. It depends on your angle of your camera. The idea that this is obfuscated in any way is fucking ridiculous. Well, and that is actually something that's brought up in this story as well, which is ring says in their terms of service that you should not have your camera pointing at any public space, which of course is absurd.

That's absurd in front of your house point. Right. And the concern here is that innocent bystanders, folks who are just walking down the street, minding their own business are going to end up on your ring camera footage, which of course they will. And they do, which is kind of the point, right?

Yes. When you put one of these in. But the other issue that people have with this is that, of course, and I believe ring has even said that eventually you're going to have facial recognition come to this. Yeah. Yeah, probably. Yeah.

And just to just to counter Brian's cackling point, my two, you cannot you cannot determine where I am from the angles of my ring cameras. I made very certain that. You are very, very, very involved in all that sort of stuff. I guarantee you, everybody else in your fucking neighborhood, you could figure out.

Pretty much. Of course. So my point is valid except for you. Of course. Exactly. So I love how Jason always like, because it goes, your point is invalid because I am crazy and I do crazy things. Well, your point was invalid when it just comes to me. Everybody else are dumb shits.

I just want to make it clear that I am not a dumb shit. Of course. Well, I am. I am. But in different ways. Not in this area. Not in this area. No one would ever come to that conclusion about you, Jason. Yeah. Kiss my ass, Dave. Now, obviously, the police are really happy with this portal.

Well, no shit. Yeah. Of course they are. Yeah. They'd be really happy with breaking encryption, too. So it doesn't make it right. Mm-hmm. So we'll see. This is, you know, it's up and running. It would be nice if they made it clearer to the users and purchasers of this that there was a law enforcement component.

They don't seem to say much about that. Nope. Is this going to trickle down to all of Amazon's cameras at some point? I don't know. The article doesn't say anything about that, but Amazon certainly has an interest in aggregating data, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, any time that you're opting in to share something in any public format, I always just assume there's going to be a backdoor. I don't know who's going to have access to it, but it'd be nice to know.

But there will be backdoors. Right. So anytime you, yeah, anytime you hose anything up to the internet that has access to your information, just assume somebody else can see it. Yep. All right. All right, guys. Well, that's what I have this week. So I will check in with you next time.

All right. Caps and doodads. The NPD group has estimated that smartwatch scales have jumped 61% in the 12-month span ending in November 2018, and basically one in six American adults are now wearing a computer on their wrist or a smartwatch.

That's actually pretty impressive to me because I didn't really think it was going to get that far in depth. If you ask them, ask the NPD why they say it has to do with LTE watches, such as the more recent Apple Watch models for the tipping point, they became more appealing when you could leave your phone behind and still message your friends or receive notifications.

He said, I don't agree with that at all. I have an LTE watch. I ended up turning it off because I always have my phone with me. I don't really know if that's an actual factor. For me, it's just that they actually got somewhat useful and interesting. So there's a lot more software for them now, and it finally made sense for me to put in the expense to get one.

Yeah. I mean, what does the NPD stand for? Who are these people? Some sort of consumer group of blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. There's more people making money just following trends by listening to what we say on our podcast and then telling people about them.

Gotcha. Okay. I would like to point out that I went to the NPD's website to just try and find out what NPD stands for. Yes. Nothing. On the about page, you go to the about page for about NPD. It says nothing about what the acronym is.

You go to the homepage, nothing about what the acronym is. Why do I care about you? The NPD group. But they're industry experts, Jason. They must be because they are so secretive that we just don't even know what the NPD group stands for. Right.

God. And I've been pushing to bring back our Kickstarter in the ball segment for a while because it's just getting good out there again. And this one did the rounds on social media this week. Of course, love sync is a $57 button that silently lets your partner know that you want to have sex anonymously.

Okay. Anonymously. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? What? Yeah. It's in quotes. Anonymously. Yeah. Okay. I don't entirely understand the anonymous aspect of that. You'd kind of like to know who you're going to be banging. Well, you have to give them the button. That's true.

It's two buttons. So, you know, it's not anonymous in any way, shape or form. It's stupid. Yeah. Okay. And they also, they also dropped the ball on this name. Love sync. I'm sorry. This should be called the butt signal. Because, you know, that's what it really should be.

You want some booty. You want some booty. Yes. The purpose is to summon your partner and it's intending to replace audible consent for sex because saying, hey, babe, you want to get it on is apparently too difficult. Okay. I thought we had. What is the sound of one button bleeping? Fap, fap, fap.

Oh, apparently these guys have never heard of emoji. No, no. You know, I mean, I basically just send the, send the eggplant and we're good to go. Yeah. Does she send the peach back and then you're on? Damn right. That's right. Get it on, get it on emoji style. I had to go send a text.

God. And there's a little follow-up about Instagram and taking it off my phone. I don't miss it at all. I really don't miss it at all. And the only issue that I had the other day is I use flume to just pop it up every now and again, just to see what's going on.

See, that's the, but you can't say you don't miss it when you're using a third party app to access it. I don't use it on my phone. So it's, it, the clutter has come down and I've, if I want to, I can just pop up flume when I have some spare time, but when I'm at my computer and it's like, okay, I got five minutes while this audio is processing, let's see what's going on on Instagram.

You know, it's like, it's my downtime thing, not just on my phone all the time. It was difficult the first week because I'd open up my phone. I'm like, okay, well, Twitter's gone. Instagram's gone. Clash Royale is gone. I have nothing on my phone. So now my phone just sits on the charger in my room.

It's great. Clash Royale is gone. Do we not have a clan anymore? We do, but it's on my iPad that I keep in the bathroom. That's it. I told you, Clash Royale is my bathroom break. So that's it. But to get flume on one of my laptops, because it wasn't, I had to like upgrade it because they had that new version that I said was really nice, but I had to re log into it.

Well, I use two factor off and I use an app on my phone to do the two factor off. So I had to, it was so stupid. You have to enable SMS off to make it work. So I had to download the app, re log into the app using the two factor like app that I have.

Then I have to go find the settings, which took five fucking minutes because the settings are so buried in the Instagram app that is so frustrating that I was just about to say, fuck it and just delete the whole thing. Finally found it, turned on SMS off, went back to my laptop, signed in, got the code, put it in.

And then I had to go back to my phone, turn off SMS off because I don't want that turned on and then delete the app just to get it installed on my laptop. I'm like, yay, yay security and user interfaces. This is why people don't use two factor. So stupid, so stupid.

But yeah, I'm just going to say, like removing all this stuff from my phone has really given me a lot more time to get more stuff done. And, you know, I just, I get to focus more. I totally get to focus more. So, you know, I'm into the Cal Newport's digital minimalism thing and it's working.

I get more time to do more stuff wherein I can make more money. So that's really what it comes down to. And it's great. I used to love me some, some, some Chipotle. It was some good stuff. Um, you know, before we discovered that they had some definite issues with their quality control.

A little bit, a little bit, I always called it Chipotle because I had to crap 20 minutes after I ate it. So that's why I stopped, but I never quite felt that way about it. It was always good. And I liked the burrito bowls. I think they were part of, uh, Tim Ferriss's whole concept of the slow carb diet and all that sort of stuff.

So I used to go quite often and enjoy it. Uh, I have obviously stopped going. Um, but the one thing I truly missed was their, their rice. I loved their rice. It was delicious. And I didn't know how or why, but luckily there's the internets and we found, I found a pressure cooker recipe for Chipotle cilantro lime rice.

That is pretty damn spot on flavor wise. It was really tasty. So I'm making huge vats of this stuff for myself and my family now. And it is, uh, it's quite tasty. Okay, stop the, uh, stop the no carb thing, I guess, because rice is not really that great for you.

No, it's not that great for you, but no, uh, I had a New York strip steak yesterday cooked in my new air fryer. Really? Oh my God. You fried up a steak. I air fried a steak, uh, cause it's, it was raining and it couldn't bring out the grill, you know, but, uh, they had these beautiful New York strips bone in on sale.

So I'm like, ah, I gotta get these. And I was, I wanted to try it in the air fryer. So I cooked up my first one perfection, absolute and utter perfection, perfect sear on it. Everything juicy, medium rare. I cannot say how much I love this steak.

So, uh, another point for the air fryer. That's all I'm saying. And a long time ago, we talked about, uh, the soda stream and when you got yours and we talked about wine in the soda streams, uh, over at Epicurious, this is an older article, but I, I, I finally dug it back up cause I was thinking about it the other day.

I'm like, can I, can I make a wine spritzer with my soda stream? I was thinking of just making some carbonated water and mixing it with, you know, some wine and some wine spritzer, you know, but I found this video of a kid who put in some wine in his soda stream.

And it is hilarious. The link will be in the show notes. I highly recommend you check it out. Let's just say it did not end well for wine in a soda stream. No, no, it did not. Um, yeah, I've, we got really into this a while back cause I remember going, okay, I've got a soda stream.

I love it. What do we do with booze? And then I realized I'm not in college anymore. Booze is fine as is. It's pretty much okay. It's been okay for a long time. We do not need bubble technology to really, I do not need to hack my booze. I'm, I'm okay. Yeah.

We do not need to hack our booze for sure. But, uh, the, the, the audio of the father in this is just priceless. Cause it was very funny. Yeah. Um, and I found over at cheddar explains, uh, which is a YouTube channel on how focused music hacks your brain.

And I thought this was a really fascinating, it's a six minute article that talks about beta waves and, and different frequencies of music and how it can really, you know, make you focus. And I thought this was really good. And one piece that really came out of this was the Trent Reznor, uh, Facebook, it wasn't the Facebook, the social network, the social network score, how, how it really kind of uses some of these techniques.

I listened to that soundtrack all the time when I'm working because I feel it makes me focused. So I think that there's some validity to this video for sure. Well, there's definitely validity to this. I mean, this is stuff I did get speaking of my college days when I wasn't, uh, thank God I didn't have a soda stream in college. When I wasn't indulging in alcoholic pursuits in college, I was a music and psychology double major.

So I, I kind of got into this stuff a lot back in my college days. So yeah, there's a lot of validity to how music actually, we're just starting to figure out the why's, but we certainly knew that it did, um, affect your brain back then. Yeah, no, it's a really interesting video. And speaking of interesting videos, this is, this is from friend of the show, Bob Fogarty.

He sent this in and it's some genius combined Morrissey lyrics with Amazon reviews of P90X. Uh, I've, I've never heard of this, uh, subsection of vice called a noisy. Have you heard of this before? We have had many a story in there from them. Okay.

It's pretty cool. And the, these are the guys that use like the, uh, the auto complete to come up with different stories. And the video is great. I highly recommend watching the video, but as a, as a add on at the end, they did a, a fake interview with Morrissey that I was in tears reading.

Did you, did you get a chance to read that? I did. It was very, very funny. Yeah. Well worth a, well worth a look if you're a Morrissey fan. Yes. A young person, yeah, a young person in Hollywood asked about why you can't feel sad the same way we can. And the answer was, that is not true.

I feel sad about violence and more. I feel so dismal that I mistakenly caused the world to kill me. You could almost see Morrissey saying, yes, good stuff. Very funny. And the last thing I found was another site that I like to frequent every now and then because I grew up by Disneyland and, uh, I was a Disney local and I remember going with my parents when I was very young and I found vintage magic kingdom photos capture what it was like in its first decade.

It's about 20 photos, a little bit more of, uh, of the very first few years of Disneyland in the, uh, late seventies. And, uh, I remember all of this. I remember walking these streets with my parents. I remember exactly how this all looked. It's, it's a nice cool walk down memory lane for me.

It is. And I love the first photo or actually it's the second photo, but, uh, it's the first actual numbered photo and it's Mr. Toad's wild ride, which I still think is the best ride ever made at Disney. It was so fantastic. It was good stuff. And there's so many rides in here that have now disappeared and are no longer in existence and like the Davy Crockett Explorer canoes and all, but just so much cool stuff in here.

And just great to see like the seventies stuff going on. I mean, it's just a total, total memory lane for me. Amazing. It's, it's funny. These look like my family photos. I went to Disney world, not Disneyland, but you know, it's for a lot of this, it's still the same, you know, they just plunked it down there.

But yeah, this is, this is really cool stuff. This is, oh man, I feel old. Yeah, we are old big shout out to my friends over at Vista Ford out here in the valley and, uh, Woodland Hills. They really hooked me up with my new hackable car.

Send me your VIN when you get a chance. I'll download the app. Yeah, seriously. Let's see if we can actually make that happen. Oh man. Yeah. But, uh, they, they saved me so much money so I can get a fancy car for the first time in my life. So I'm almost, you can pay for that iPad. I know I'm almost adulting now.

Almost, almost until next time. I'm Brian Schulmeister and I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks to support the show and keep us on the air and please help pay for the car. Go to patreon.com slash GOG tosses 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.

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