323: This One Goes to 11G

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. That is a very calm intro. Are we NPRing? We are NPRing. We need more sound buffers. Do you have a keyboard still? Or did you get rid of all your keyboards?

I kept one. I kept my favorite. So I'm never going to get rid of that one. Besides, the kid might want to play some someday. That's cool. What kind of keyboard do you have? I could just sit here and play live. It's a... Jesus Christ. Do you have a Moog or a Yamaha or what kind? No, I have a Nord. N-O-R-D.

Oh, fancy. I have a Yamaha that I'm going to start busting out soon. I bought these stickers through an Instagram ad that I saw that puts all the keys of the keys, the notes on the keys. So I'm like, always, I'm like, okay, two, three, four, we're C, trying to figure out what the notes are.

Oh, geez. Don't spend money on stickers. If you've ever been in a recording studio, every single keyboard has just Sharpies of all the letters. Are you kidding me? No, of course not. Even, sure, there are plenty of professional piano players, but, you know, rock stars, musicians, maybe recording a bit drunk or whatever.

And it's always just nice to have the cue there. There's no shame in that. It's in every studio. Oh, that is the funniest thing I've heard. Yeah, I spent like 14 bucks and got stickers. Nope. Yep, just right on it. And I had a, yes, of course, and I have a Sharpie right here on my desk.

There you go. That's what the pros do. Pro tip. Okay, pro tip. Now, obviously not for the ones on stage or, you know, using videos. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want anybody to see that shit. You don't want to see it. Yeah, no. Drop a marker. We already blew the clean show. Oh, man. What are you going to do?

Yes, we're trying to do a clean show, and I forgot. What are you going to do? So, a little follow-up for the car. Wow. I never knew until yesterday that I needed a heating steering wheel and heated seats. Well, to be fair, I can't remember the last time it snowed in Los Angeles.

It is cold here. It is freaking cold. I had to scrape ice off my window. I'm like, wait, what's going on? Oh, that's right. Climate change. Yeah, but I got in, and I'm like, I found the button for the heated steering wheel, because it said, like, would you like to heat your steering wheel?

Because it's cold. And I'm like, that's a pretty damn smart car. Yeah. And sure enough, and then I heated my buns. I like toasty buns in the morning, because the funny part was I had to be a driver for my roommate because she's got an ancient Hummer.

I was about to say, did you start a side hustle? You got an Uber sticker on that thing now? Dude, I've only got 10,500 miles a year. I can't do an Uber. But, yeah, my roommate's Hummer broke down, so she had to go get some new belts. So I was basically like her driver. She's like, I can get used to this.

This is cool. And, oh, man. But I do love the app. We got the app going. I had to go to the dealership yesterday because the app wouldn't sync. Right. It, like, wouldn't activate. And I'm like, dude, what's going on? So I came over. We, you know, did all the stuff.

And then, like, and he's just like, I got to call tech support. And then, finally, tech support got it activated for me. He's like, you're the first person that this ever happened to. And I'm like, well, of course. My luck. My luck. But it finally works. So now I can start the car from the app.

I can set the heated seats, the heated steering wheel, everything from inside the house. I had no idea these things were that cool. They're basically rolling computers these days, Jason, with all the problems that come with that. Yeah. Yeah. I posted a picture on Instagram about my car doing an auto update yesterday.

And I'm like, what could possibly go wrong? So. And by the way, the update still hasn't finished. Of course not. It's still downloading. I'm pretty sure they have 56 bod modems in the cars. But it's hooked up to my home Wi-Fi, which is the crazy bit. Yeah, I don't get it.

I don't get it at all. But yeah, this thing is really cool. I mean, I do like the tech. And I got CarPlay to work yesterday. CarPlay's pretty nice. It's pretty nice. The problem that I found, though, is you can't use Google Maps with it. You have to use Apple Maps.

Right. That sucks. That really sucks because Apple Maps ain't the best. Right. But I guess I can. I do not have CarPlay yet. But I'm assuming my next car will have that. I thought you had CarPlay in your fancy BMW. It's the BMW interface. They have their own proprietary one that runs on, I believe, Linux.

Yeah, mine's Android. Right. And it's funny because this is Sync 3. And it used to be all Microsoft. But it's not Microsoft anymore. It's like an Android-based system. But it does work. It does work fairly well, which is kind of neat. But yeah, so far, so good.

I'm digging it. It's super easy to sideload viruses. Exactly. Just what I need. And what I really like is, so I got the car from the dealership. And then I go into the app. And it's like, I can see the tire pressure for all the tires. And then like the two tires in the front are at 38 PSI.

The two in the back are at 37 PSI. And then it says at the bottom, optimal pressure for your tires at this temperature is 35 PSI. And I'm like, why the hell did they give me over-pressurized tires? What's up with that? Because nobody was expecting this kind of weather. Oh, that's true. I guess.

I guess. Yeah. And I think I've talked about this on the show before. But Todd, do you ever get mags for miles emails? I don't even know what that is. You put it in the show notes. And I was like, is this going to be a porn thing? It's not a porn thing. Okay. So I have a United account.

You know, I do my miles on United because I was in Chicago and Chicago is the main hub for United. And I've flown United since I was five. Right. So I've always got, you know, miles on United. And what I started getting about five years ago were emails called mags for miles.

And what you can do is you can trade in some of your United miles for magazines or newspapers. What are these magazines of which you speak? Uh, magazines, the paper things that come in the mail that you generally throw out. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was actually going through my Bon Appetit yesterday because I just got a new, new, uh, not, not new episode.

I got a new issue. I downloaded the new issue. Yeah. And, uh, here's the funny thing about this. Apparently they've never figured out how to deduct the miles from my account when I signed up for new magazines. So yesterday I got, uh, signed up for the wall street journal for 302 issues a year.

Nothing. It didn't pull out my miles. I can go to my United account. Still not, still not gone. Starts in about five or six weeks. And then I'll get actual paper copies of the wall street journal because we're never going to buy it. The digital version because it's so expensive. We've talked about that on the show and I get tons of magazines from them.

I've got, I gotta, I have a, I have a yearly subscription to Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, the New Yorker and Bon Appetit and a bunch of other ones that just come for free because they can't figure out how to stop taking my miles away.

And somewhere there is a forest in your name that is dying. Yeah, but I, I read them all. Me and my roommate read them all. I mean, that's the way it goes. These are, these are magazines that I want. It's not that I'm getting them because I don't, you know, just like, oh, let me kill a tree, you know, for my general gratification.

No, these are magazines that I, I, I like and I enjoy. So I just think it's really funny that we talk about how programmers don't know what the hell they're doing anymore. Well, there's some proof. Well, yeah, there's, there's somebody that's getting paid for this that isn't doing their job and doesn't care because there apparently is nobody following up on them.

Nope, not at all. I need to get one of those jobs. In the news. It has finally happened as of 2019, where a e-marketer is projecting that U.S.

advertisers will spend more than $229 billion on digital advertising, more than the $109 billion they plan to spend on traditional advertising. So this is the first year that digital advertising has overtaken traditional advertising like TV, radio, and newspapers. Can somebody send some of that money our way?

Yeah. I would like some. I mean, you've got billions of dollars. Come on, send us some. As the study is showing, it's basically the two, the two big ones that you would expect that are getting the lion's share of this money, Facebook and Google. Now, their, their, their percentages have been going down comparatively, but they're still, you know, almost all the monies is going there.

So Amazon is coming in as the next big competitor to them. So thank God another struggling young company is getting some of that money. Oh, startup life. Yeah. Startup life. But yeah, it's a big deal. We all knew it was coming, but it's finally actually happened. So yeah, digital advertising is now a bigger industry than traditional advertising.

And one can only assume that this will continue to grow Jason's, uh, free magazines for miles. Yeah, there are a lot of ads in those magazines. I do have to say they're mostly ads. That's the one thing I've known. I mean, for the last 10 years, in addition to basically magazines, just disappearing, magazines have become almost entirely ads with one article in them.

What's really crazy. I got my new wired in the mail yesterday. Remember when wired was like half an inch thick and had like, it was perfect bound and all this stuff. Wired now is a pamphlet. It's basically printed on toilet paper. It is printed on toilet paper and it is a pamphlet.

There's almost no stories in there. And the funny part is it's like, I can't tell them to not send me the paper version because I get the digital version because I paid for it. I paid $25 a year so I can read all the articles and wired so we can do it on the show. And they still want to send me the paper version.

And they sent me that damn YubiKey, which I'm never going to use again. Um, but it's crazy. I looked at it and I'm just like, there's nothing here. Yeah, the only time I really read magazines anymore is when I'm flying because I always tend to buy one just to pass a little bit of time, although that's gone away with kid.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, over the last 10 years, I've definitely noticed that, you know, magazines have just disappeared. Most of the ones that I like to read are no longer in print or just gone purely digital or yeah, it's, it's a couple articles and 99% ads. Yeah. I mean, most of the magazines that I care about are food magazines because I get them for the recipes, you know, and, uh, I still, I still do traveler because even though I don't want to travel anymore, I've gotten to the point in my life where I'm like, you know what?

Traveling sucks. Going, going on a trip sucks. I am not with you on that. Oh, I can just look at a magazine and go, you know what? I'm glad I'm not there. That's how it's, that's what it's come to. Well, AR will be very good for you. You'll be able to travel virtually.

Yes, I can. Now I ran across this article over on recode called Mark Zuckerberg explains why an ad free Facebook isn't as simple as it sounds. Okay. I'm going to call bullshit right now. It is as simple as it sounds, but what does Mark say? Zuckerberg correctly identified that the problem most people seem to have with Facebook is not actually with Facebook's ads.

It's with the personal data that Facebook collects and uses to target people with those ads. Correct. Yeah. But you can't have one without the other. Okay. So why can't I give him 20 bucks and not show me some fucking ads? He says, when people have questions about the ad model on Facebook, I don't think the questions are just about the ad model, even though they're asking you questions about the ad model.

You're telling us that that's not what we're, that's not what we're really asking about. So thanks, Zuck, for telling me what I'm asking you about. Um, they think they're about both seeing ads and data used around ads, which involves seeing the fucking ads and the ad model. Okay. No more clean show.

Go on. Continue. We didn't, we didn't last long at all. We didn't last long. But that's why we said we're going to start to try. So we're going to try to do a clean show. Yes. Okay. So he suggested that a subscription product would need to include a way for people to opt out of Facebook's data collection practices altogether. Yes. No shit, Sir Locke.

That is exactly why we want to pay you. You idiot. Something that doesn't currently exist. Again, no shit. Facebook users can opt out a certain type of ads or curate the list of their interests that Facebook uses to show them target ads. But there's some data Facebook collects about people no matter what, like their internet browsing data, which we will pay you to stop collecting.

Stop it, you dumbass. That's all we want. We have to pay you to stop doing the thing that we don't want you to do. Come on. So he's talked about this clear history feature that Facebook is building, which we haven't gotten yet, which he said that we were going to get last year, which still isn't there and probably won't be there anytime soon.

And he says it's a, it's a requirement, I think, for being able to do anything like subscriptions. Partially what someone would want to do if they're going to really actually pay for an ad free Facebook, you would want to have control so that Facebook didn't have access or wasn't using that data or associating it with your content and your account.

Duh. Yes. And as a matter of principle, we're not going to offer a control like that just to people who pay. If we're going to give controls over data use, we're going to do that for everyone in the community. No. Offer two versions. Free. And pay. Exactly. He's just dancing around it and basically saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We're not going to do it. It's too hard. Hmm. When he just really doesn't want to do it. It's the most annoying thing I've read in a month. I'm just saying. Well, since the last Zuckerberg op-ed. Yeah. No, I swear to God, I wish this guy didn't have a $10 million ex-Massad security detail around him so I could walk up to him in the street and slap him in the face and say, what are you thinking?

I'd like to thank you, Jason, for toning it down to just slapping him in the face. You are doing your due diligence. I am. I am. I didn't. I, I, I'm not going any, but far beyond that. He just needs a smack. He needs a smack. Because we've been, uh, let's, let's move on. It's moving on.

Yeah. So we've been talking a lot about NASA and the wonderful things that they've done and the lack of funding that they're getting. But what I didn't realize is that they were actually in charge of making the FAA for drones basically they're called yeah unmanned aircraft traffic management the utm system uh so they're working with the ffa ffa ffa so the project is now in its last phase and they've teamed up with the nevada institute for autonomous systems in las vegas and the lone star uas center

for excellence and innovation in corpus christi texas to conduct a final series of technical demonstrations so apparently we're going to be getting drone traffic control systems pretty soon that's awesome which we need yeah so good yeah no i'm definitely looking forward to that because you know if they can tie that into the regular air traffic control system so i'm not like panicking when a goddamn helicopter comes across the hill and i'm like ah i had to drop my drone out of the sky

that would be nice that would be nice if everybody was talking to each other so i'm looking forward to that that's good yep excellent and we've also regulation now we've also talked a bit about i'm going to say it again and i probably got it wrong yahweh haway huway what's that how do you pronounce that huawei huawei the chinese telecom giant uh that is basically the leader in 5g tech yep and uh how we've gotten in a bit of a pissing match with china especially about this company who

have stolen some secrets and done some bad things but the reality of the situation as was explained to me is that unless we get our equipment from them we're going to have a real hard time building our own 5g networks yep that's a problem it is well thank god we have a president weighing in oh no what the fuck did he do now he tweeted uh seemingly out of the blue tweeted that's all he does seemingly out of the blue donald trump weighed in on the future of u.s wireless technology thursday morning and i

shall now read the tweets i want 5g and even 6g technology in the united states and now you know why i want to call this episode uh but this one goes to 11g 11g yes uh technology in the united states as soon as possible it is far more powerful faster and smarter than the current standard american companies must step up their efforts or get left behind there is no reason that we should be lagging behind on something that is so obviously the future i want the united states to win through competition

not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies we must always be the leader in everything we do especially when it comes to the very exciting world of technology so as dumb as this sounds we now know kind of why he's doing this because this is his way of walking back his rhetoric about screw china because he realizes and he's been told by the telecoms we need this technology yeah you are not going to get to buy our stuff if you don't shut the fuck up

yeah that's about it so so trump has reportedly been preparing an executive order to ban uh ban these companies from operating the united states and would grant u.s companies a little more cushion to build their own 5g networks but now it seems he's reconsidering the ban through this tweet and uh as the it's the final line in this article over on slate says i love it so as the onion would say fuck everything we're going to 6g

and this is on slate yeah wow okay so we're trying to do a clean show i should have realized before we were even doing the the decided to do the clean show that i was actually pulled a direct quote that had a cuss word in it exactly whoops oh my god and finally as a lead into uh our security network because i think our security segment security ha

because i think you've uh you've um you've bashed poor dave bitner's brain with too much of your sex stuff i thought i'd throw this in here as a nice little lead here's the latest list of dildos that want to steal your personal data i love it love it as reported by boing boing the cyber security focus privacy not included buyer's guide for mozilla was recently updated to include high-tech sex toys some of which are selling your orgasmic data to their highest bidder so the majority of these products still meet mozilla's minimum security standards their privacy violations seem glaring enough that

they would recommend avoiding them altogether for example for example love senses nora and max a pair of devices that connect to an app via bluetooth so long-distance couples can have an interactive experience inexplicably shares your data with third-party advertisers oh god granted not as bad as some of their previous security violations which as boing boing reports saw some of their products making accidental audio recordings of customer sex sessions are you kidding me

the lesson here protection in the bedroom can take a number of forms and if you're wondering if your fancy new sex toy is sharing your deepest darkest secrets keep an eye out on the internet of dongs a helpful cyber security blog that regularly updates its reviews of these naughty gadgets i do wonder if why did we not start that ourselves the internet of dongs come on that is so in our wheelhouse well my really kind of is well yeah but oh and i i can't find the link anymore but there was an

article that i read about the ethics of sex toys going forward and i'm going to try and find it and put it in the show notes because the this guy was like yeah they're coming and this is like an mit researcher well they're more than just coming and i don't have the article in front of me right now but uh there there was an article recently that was doing the rounds and i think i think it's a reposting of something because i remember we covered it a long time ago but it was how the future sex robots will

kill us yeah and uh i was listening to corolla's show and gina grad was talking about it and she brought up a story that i also unfortunately don't have in the show notes but i'll anecdotally tell it now about uh a poor um unfortunate male that um had a problem with his internet controlled butt plug and ended up having to go to the hospital wait wait wait wait what there's an internet controlled butt plug jason there's an internet controlled everything and i would just uh as as a public service announcement

to all of our listeners go nuts with your sex toys don't put them on the internet oh my god the more you know this episode is brought to you yet again by the acquired podcast they sponsored last week and since so many of you ended up listening to their show they're back apparently our audience's interests must be pretty similar acquired is a podcast about technology company

acquisitions and ipos the hosts ben and david pick one acquisition per episode analyze it and grade it if it was a good idea for the big company to acquire the smaller one or not this week they analyzed one of the greatest acquisitions of all time facebook buying instagram they had emily white the first business executive at instagram on the show as a guest to help unpack all the decisions they made during the integration of the two companies this episode is particularly

bananas since instagram had zero revenue when it was acquired for a billion dollars and is forecasted to generate 14 billion dollars on their own this year inside of facebook whether this is good for the world or not is for history to decide but it's undeniably one of the greatest business success stories of all time you can check out the show by clicking the link in the show notes or going to acquired.fm that's acq ui red.fm or searching for the show in any podcast player this episode is

sponsored by privacy privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online privacy lets you generate a brand new visa card number for every purchase you make online with one click with a browser extension or mobile app now we're all skeptical of these things and we're all worried about changing our normal workflow we've got muscle memory right like i know what i'm doing when i'm putting in my credit card

number i've got my methods of doing it this is insanely easy unbelievably easy unbelievably easy that that that browser extension shows you a little like widget in the credit card number that says do you want to make a new credit card i'm like yes i do yes i do so cool it is so cool and look we all buy stuff online more and more and privacy gives you a temp credit card number for every site that you buy from

never forget to cancel subscriptions or trials ever again that alone is worth the price of admission and oh yeah brian did we mention the price of admission is free just like our podcast just like our podcast yes because they make their money from the debit card transaction fees that everybody else gets when they make a debit card transaction it is so cool and it i i just love these guys you know how skeptical

we are free services here on gog particularly me not so much jason he sometimes goes to the dark side and these guys actually have a business model to back it up oh by the way when jason goes to the dark side he ends up bitching about it later because you know it is what it is this has a business model so they get our seal of approval we can actually trust these guys jason actually reviewed this product when they first launched and we're not just pimping the product because they paid us i'm now an actual customer too after jason hounded me forever to do it and i love what they're doing and the ease of use in

doing it it is a fantastic idea it's a no-brainer yes it's fantastic and we're going to have beau from privacy who is the ceo respond to some of your questions on feedback loop soon so it's it's a really amazing service and honestly it doesn't cost you anything and they're secure they are totally secure so if you use a password manager and why don't you if you listen to the show seriously please you

should use this you don't use the same password everywhere why should you use the same credit card number cards are locked to a merchant so you don't have to worry about changing your card everywhere if your card gets hacked and see we're all inherently lazy that alone again is worth the price of admission you don't have to go chasing down everything everywhere once you get hacked as you inevitably will one of the other things about being inherently lazy like i am is i was initially skeptical

because i didn't want to go through and create a new profile somewhere and do a whole sign up and then 25 minutes later after javascript broke and things didn't work i'd be sitting there going oh i still don't have an account awesome but new sign up took less than two minutes and like i said it is completely free so far they've saved their customers over a hundred and fifteen million dollars in unwanted and unauthorized charges and for me personally they've saved me probably like i think it's about two

thousand dollars in just recurring fees that i didn't even know were coming it's awesome these guys rock yep they do and look you can freeze cards and set spending limits that's going to be super important to me as soon as my kid figures out in-app purchases cards locked to merchants making them useless to thieves and hackers you can protect yourself from online fraud with virtual card numbers and you can delete cards anytime and kiss forgotten subscriptions goodbye again very useful as i keep signing up for

different services for my kid and i don't have to remember to unsubscribe in fact i have to remember to keep subscribing we love opt-in alexa buy me some toilet paper so to sign up for free and get a five dollar credit just go to privacy.com slash gog that's five dollars free seriously five bucks you get five bucks to sign up it takes less than two minutes to spend

anywhere online just by signing up go to privacy.com slash gog get it now privacy.com slash gog

we're back this week with dave bitner from the cyberwire podcast the cyberwire is a free community-driven cyber security news service based in the lovely state of maryland that everybody loves and everybody wants to move to because it is so damn lovely it's true dave is a dave is also the co-host of the new hacking humans podcast along with joe kerrigan where they take on social engineering it is one of my favorite podcasts thank you so everybody go and subscribe to that because

seriously it is a great show thank you time to take the new out of that because you guys have been around for a while now doing well i think we're up to episode 38 or so something like that so uh not yeah once you get i think once you get to 52 i think 52 is going to cut it off that's a year i think a new podcast is a year all right so very good leave it in and you know what they people aren't paying me by the word so i'm just going to leave the new in if you want to pay me to take the word new out i'm fine with that i would be just going to leave it technically less money for you because it's one less

word jason this is why you need an agent anyway i do i do need an agent thank you yeah and a therapist and all sorts of other things but let's let's get into it this week how you doing dave pretty good pretty good uh lots going on as usual uh what do i know you guys have some stories for us this week what do you want to start with uh we've got some exposed chinese mm-hmm yeah not so not the fun kind

unfortunately victor gevers i believe is how you spell it the yeah he's a dutch cyber security researcher who uh ran across a unprotected database uh online of about 2.5 million people in western china now this isn't just uh what you'd expect from a from a hack or a leak or an unsecured database these days it wasn't just their names and stuff like that this had updated constantly gps coordinates of

their precise whereabouts alongside names birthdates places of employment there were notes on the places they had most recently visited mosques hotels and restaurants so we have gotten a deep dive glimpse into exactly how extensive the government surveillance is in china these days yeah yeah and we should point out that these are all muslims yes it's a particular it's a particular region that the well this is the only the database we found though jason we don't know this is true if they're tracking everyone the same

way but we've certainly found in this one area of china which is largely muslim population that they've got this database going in real time including uh being tracked by facial recognition technology yeah more than 6.7 million coordinates in a span of 24 hours were logged into this database and it was wide open wide open no password no no login just sitting there for all the world to see

so we've got uh double disturbing facts here first the collection and the extent to which it's being done and secondly the fact that even these guys can't figure out how to not leave their ass out hanging in the wind yeah yeah please was this on aws i really wish it was i really wish it i don't believe it was oh damn i was really hoping the chinese will remember the chinese are pushing very hard not to host on anybody else's stuff so i'm sure it would have been an internal i was just

hoping i was hoping for that but uh yeah it's crazy because we know that the chinese just track everybody we this is the great firewall of china and all that stuff but uh this is disturbing it's very disturbing because we know that they you know target these people right that's why they're tracking them i mean i'm not sure how disturbed we should really be um i suppose it's more disturbing in that

we consider it to be a somewhat not great government doing it as opposed to all of us who are having the same done to us with facebook which is a private company well yes but so far i would say the uh the critical difference is that china is actually taking people and putting them in re-education camps yes yes exactly exactly exactly we're not getting yeah i don't think we're all that far away from facebook

jail but you know that's right yeah yeah zucker jail welcome to zucker jail yeah people talk about being put into facebook jail yeah but uh yeah i know the i believe you pronounce it uyghur we've covered this on the cyberwire before the uyghur minority um the chinese are doing their darndest to uh get these folks to see the light and uh become followers of chinese um i don't know i don't

know what the right word for it is um well propaganda um the way they want them to live yeah yeah they they want them to see it their way and um not none of this religious stuff yeah not follow their own beliefs and religions and so on and uh the way they're doing it there's plenty of people who are being sent off to these re-education camps as they call them and that's bad yep no you think you think

not what you hope for yeah yeah no yeah i don't know it's um you're right this is a really interesting window into what they're doing it's confirmation that they're doing this on a certain level it's chilling to be to have this verified i suppose most of us assumed that they were doing this i think it's also it's chilling because it's confirmation of how readily available the technology is to do it and

how easy it seems to be to do it and we need to be very aware of that in our own particular political environments well and yeah i mean we could we could start doing the show in chinese and maybe we'll get some get some new followers we'd be blocked we would be blocked is the problem exactly that's the problem there was a story related to this that uh i saw come by in the past couple days where

in addition to this sort of tracking they were taking dna from people so you would go in for a what they described as a free health test um a mandatory free health test where they would mandatory yeah is the operative right and they would take blood um and based on that they would catalog your dna in addition to doing a facial recognition scan fingerprinting all that kind of stuff and you once

again we're aghast at this happening and yet 23andme has given all of our data to go yeah we do it we do it we do it voluntarily yeah we pay to do it we actually yeah pay them to do it yeah yeah oh yeah yeah okay well that's the difference well we went we went from cheering to not cheering anymore real fast well let's move on to something uh i guess a little bit lighter here uh

jason you have some nest gear in your house don't you not yet i'm waiting for you have the ring that's right that's right i've got rings the ring uh yep yep yep so um google has of course google bought up nest and so nest has a security system that you can buy for your home and it has a base station and there are little remote units that you can put around the house to do motion detection and

monitor for things like glass breaking and so on and so forth and um google sent out uh a note uh to their users recently to their nest security users and they said hey guess what you can now you can now use google assistant with your nest base station and everyone said well that's interesting how can it hear us with our nest base station and they said well it uses the built-in microphone look at what we did

for you they said wait what built-in microphone uh turns out that google had never documented that there was a microphone in this device and it wasn't in any of the technical specs yep now what was interesting when i was looking at this we actually um joe and i ryan's going to explode over there right now i can hear him right now he's ready to explode

brian this is so insane that these companies do this and i i blame this all on i don't know who made the initial decision the death of the manual and the death of the specs like we have no fucking idea what's in on any of our stuff anymore and we used to know like well oh my god remember i mean they used to come with um with basically a service manual built yeah you could see the

circuit diagram yes of what was in the devices uh but uh google apologized a google spokesperson or spokesperson said that um this was done in error they they did not intend to to not announce that there was no microphone in the device it was done in error now when i give me a break this is this is the this is like that stupid stunt that apple pulled with you too hey you choose albums now on your phone

right but i don't want that good news yeah i hate you too come on right i don't need you taking up my memory with this yeah um now when i saw this story come by and i thought to myself i was surprised that it was news that there was a microphone in here because what's the first thing that happens whenever a new device like this is released somebody comes and tears it down right they do a tear down

video on youtube so i went poking around trying to find tear down videos and i couldn't find any interesting granted i didn't spend too much time wanted it well it is it is pricey for what it is and you're not going to tear apart something that's quite that pricey unless you're crazy right but then again people pull apart thousand dollar iphones so you know yeah yeah no i mean there are breakdown videos of every phone and tablet that ever comes out it's surprising that there isn't one of these that

is interesting that that none of this uh nobody figured this out ahead of time yeah that surprised me i i did some poking around not not too extensive but you know youtube and google and all you know regular searches i couldn't find any sort of tear down of this particular device so that was surprising but uh anyway google has uh said sorry about that but congratulations on your new functionality and of course if you want to you can opt out oh so it's opt in by by default i believe so

well that's what it is not that's not 100 how do you opt out of having the microphone in it at all should i should be able to send it back and remove microphone yeah yeah can i get those aforementioned schematics so i can go get my soldering gun and take the damn microphone out of my security system i didn't ask for a year from now when they go oh by the way we also put cameras in there that do facial recognition right oh did you oh thanks for that wow just extra features on features on features

that reminds me of uh that old thing from the simpsons you ever handle a penny yeah the government has yeah we laugh because it's true we laugh we laugh because we've lost all hope there is that and uh speaking of losing all hope um jason and i spent a lot of time talking about lazy programmers and uh the death of of basically anybody really paying attention to what they're doing

anymore winrar paid attention for once and patched a 19 year old bug that left millions vulnerable 19 years yeah just just let that roll around in your head for a minute yeah 19 years that this bug was out this was on somebody's whiteboard just just sitting there i'm gonna get to it one of these days uh but i do like the take that engadget took with their particular article on this in that they said

it's kind of all the jokes on you for all you people that didn't pay for the software by clicking next time all those years because if they could have had any money maybe they would have fixed it but there was no uh no cases of this being exploited either so i guess it's out of sight out of mine no apparently it was quite quite obscure involved ace archives and i can't think of anybody that's used

one of those in two decades much less ten years what about the ace man the ace man um yeah so it was very esoteric um but still the fact that something was sitting in there for 19 years and uh nobody in the company ever fixed it is kind of insane to me but not because this we know how this works the fact that they the the exploit exists means the nsa probably used it all the goddamn time for all

those precious things being stored in ace archives well if you just rename a rar to an ace that's all you got to do and then then it basically put like an executable file in your startup sequence yep that's the really nefarious bit yeah good times and finally i found this over on the verge and i just thought this was really interesting uh bay area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges and among the evidence was a series of

instagram direct messages he'd allegedly sent to a woman one read teamwork make the dream work with high heels and money bag emojis placed at the end prosecutor said that the message implied a working relationship between the two of them the defendant said it could mean he was trying to strike up a romantic relationship who was right now the article gets obviously not just on that particular case it's the overall thing is courts are having to deal with emojis as evidence more and more every year between

2004 and 2019 there was an exponent exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in u.s court opinions with over 30 of all cases appearing in 2018 so the problem is judges don't necessarily know what they mean there's a certain inference to them um and the courts don't really know how to deal with them and beyond beyond that all of the different court database services

like westlaw or lexus which is where you know lawyers go and find previous precedents and things of that nature these electronic databases aren't capable and set up to handle emojis so they can't even put them in the record of law oh crap so we've talked a lot are they like are the court recorders having to type out eggplant eggplant eggplant eggplant peach peach peach let's hook up right one can only imagine that that is how it's being handled right now but we've talked a lot in this segment about how politicians in

law are always playing catch-up and very poorly with technology but i really didn't see this angle in the courts coming and the fact that they don't really know how to handle or deal with emojis huh that that's that's insane to me you should be able to just change your database records to be able to handle that well you know another thing that caught my eye with this is the fact that emojis render differently on different platforms yep ah good point is it a google burger or is it an iphone

burger right yeah right yeah is the cheese on the bottom like some horrible person at google thinks it is or is it the cheese on the top right like any sane human would happen exactly right they made the point that there was some there's i guess there's a gritting teeth emoji and some versions of it it looked a little more menacing than other versions or it looked more kind of cute i guess but isn't it still just utf-8 i mean shouldn't these databases be able to handle well they would all have to be

updated which would cost money right and and there's a certain legacy i'd imagine i don't i'm not being a a lawyer not using westlaw or alexis i'm certain there are legacy systems and and things of that nature so it becomes effort but don't like that needs to be taken sorry i'm sorry effort is these people make money but don't you you can spend some on your programmer don't you think that this is kind

of like having to interpret idioms kind of yeah it is and that's that's the thing it does it there's a certain it's almost that there's a learning curve to emojis and and all of us being you know second generation not digital natives we we had that learning curve and you start to use them and then you start to understand the parlance and the common language that comes out of them the problem here that they're

stating is obviously these judges and these lawyers may not have exposed themselves to these things long enough to really kind of have a feel for it it's almost another language right right right yeah yeah i had a friend who was uh german who was living here and so english was a second language and he was telling me how i was asking him about how is english to learn as a german and he said it's not that bad but you guys have idioms for everything and so we have to learn them all he's like what do you mean

the horse has left the barn what horse what barn i don't understand you know all those sorts things and of course every language has them but i would imagine i actually even think about my wife because she grew up in in canada first generation chinese but she grew up with her parents being you know very chinese and there wasn't the popular culture thing wasn't in her house so my wife knows no sayings and it's amazing how it's a you know this always just busts me up it's a constant sense of

hilarious uh constant cause of hilarity for me in in my household but yeah it's it's she doesn't have that common touchstone right of popular culture references and idioms and things of that nature two birds in one hand and all that sort of she doesn't get any of that stuff huh and it's hilarious to me i mean she's gotten much better at it over the years but uh yeah it is it's and this is much the same thing it's it's almost a secondhand language and uh they don't they don't know it

have to bring in some millennials to translate for them hey finally we found a job for millennials all right all right everybody get out of your parents basement there you go there we go yeah we finally found something for these lazy bastards to do all right well i have one more story for us this week this is uh have you guys been following this dust up with youtube and the the um the pedophile

comments and all that sort of stuff yeah yeah so this um this came to my attention because somebody was sending around this video that this gentleman named matt watson created and uh if you look in the article that we'll have in the show notes here there's a picture of mr watson you can go find the video he's the one who kind of created this storm around this and i have to say

this guy rubs me the wrong way right okay and if you watch the video i think you'll know i think you'll see why he's i think he i absolutely support everything he's doing in terms of pointing out uh the terrible things that are going on here and and just to back up a little bit what's happening here is people are through the comments of regular youtube videos mostly having to do with young girls so let's say pre-teen girls doing gymnastics dancing around dancing doing gymnastics yeah playing

in their bedrooms whatever just normal things that little girl kids do uh and may or may not need to be posted to the internet right right but just saying nothing inherently salacious nothing sexual or nothing at all so through the comments people are making sexual comments they're they're posting um uh time stamps for when the girls might be in certain positions or things like that so it's just

right it's really creepy it's really creepy gross shit yeah it's gross it's terrible and uh advertisers locker room talk boys will be boys right exactly so um advertisers have started by the youtube yeah the advertisers have started taking note of this and they've yanked their ads from videos that have these comments which is great so hopefully youtube will respond uh isn't it weird that there

are ads on videos of pre-teen girls dancing anyways no there's not because it's a platform brian and all they want to do is get in front of the people who are watching the videos they just say i want people that have an age range of this to this and i want them to see my ad for sherman okay that's all you gotta do yeah and so well so back to this video um mr watson again i'm i'm sure i he's sincere in his frustrations

but as you watch the video it just struck me that he goes now look at this this is horrible now look at this this is horrible now look at this this is horrible let's look at some more stuff that's horrible look at this a little too eager i am so angry i'm i just can't look at any more but here's some more let's look at some more this is so horrible i can't believe they're doing this i gotta look away but i can't look away because it's so horrible and i'm like mr mr watson obviously needed a mr holmes to calm him down

a bit i think thou doth protesteth much yeah you know i'm with you on that but people like him need to exist because they do find the stuff that needs to be found yeah you're right i i i'm i'm with him on finding horrible stuff i mean half of my career is finding people who do self-help videos and products that are just crap and these this guy is trying to find people who are doing really horrible

things with underage women i i'm not are you saying that horrible things happen in comment sections oh god yeah i guess i guess again and this is probably as much about me as anything just this like i i totally admit this i just guy just rubs me the wrong way i'm sure he's probably a really nice guy and it's mostly me but it strikes me as one of those people when they get up to receive an award and they say

folks this is not about me this is about everyone else everyone else but me and so i'm gonna tell you you're you're you're down with the cause but maybe thinking this guy shouldn't be carrying the flag yeah maybe yeah he does look like a douchebag i'm not gonna i'm not gonna front i think that might be most of the problem mr watson again lord's work but maybe get somebody else out totally exactly behind what he's doing here i think he's doing yeah this is something that needs attention brought

to it i'm glad it is and youtube says that by you you maybe just went on a little long went on a little long little weird a little too much i don't like gay people i don't know check it out check it out see if it's just me or if if he is his username like 13 year old camel toe you know i mean look i guarantee it's not just you because there is something inherent in our human nature and the way that we

quickly make snap decisions and we shouldn't obviously you can't always judge a book by a cover but just looking at the still i'm judging this book by the cover yeah i'm not a fan of this guy yeah kind of and and as we've learned from the previous segment of the show that we have no free will so you know yeah okay what are you gonna do i mean i guess again his his point is so valid and the thing that frustrates me and i hate you know i don't think we need to glom onto the messenger about this youtube

can take care of this problem they choose not to i don't think they can i'm i'm i am they will have to lose so much of their profit margin yeah but they can they can't they're gonna have to stop they can't if they're not all if they don't want to be billionaires sure no i mean there's so much content that come and comes into these platforms yeah that there's just not enough people on the fucking planet to actually watch everything that comes in on youtube we're never gonna get anywhere as a species

if we're gonna actually have to watch youtube videos all day long to say okay this guy made a stupid comment oh uh this video is not right this video is copyrighted we we're just we need to not do that thing yeah and i think that that is just killing society personally yeah but sorry okay yeah well but the kids but the kids they want to put up the videos yeah we'll turn off comments that's this is all

about getting rid of comments actually that's that's actually a phenomenal idea well yeah that is but also maybe charge to upload videos yeah we don't charge for anything remember no zuckerberg is already zuckerberg has said it's impossible to do subscription models it wouldn't make any sense because yeah there's no reason at all whatsoever in that okay yep exactly all right well now we're sounding as angry as mr watson so okay we're going on too long we're protesting way too much yeah we don't protest

too much yes yes yeah okay all right all right gentlemen well let's leave it there do check out the video maybe uh let me know what you think uh next in the comments section in the comments right yeah exactly right to brian at grofieldgeeks.com i'm gonna turn that email address off yeah except that i run it have a good week have a good week dave

ups and doodads one of our mutual favorite podcasts no such thing as a fish which is an offshoot of the qi show which is a english base but it's it's obscure trivia and it's very very funny and a wonderful podcast uh have put out their own app it's called get fact which is the most genius app name in the history of the world it is it is it and i've been playing it off and on uh

when i have a free moment or two it's uh basically solve 1072 amazing facts and i'm up to uh fact 67 at the moment i'm at fact 33 that's that's as far as i got uh it's hard it can be it is hard very hard it is very hard and uh i've thus far resisted the impulse to look anything up online um i've been very close a few times banging my head trying to figure out what some of these things could be uh but it is it is a wonderful time waster so i highly recommend getting it out there for any

trivia buffs out there yeah and the thing about it is i got stuck on question 30 and i had to ask you about it and i had done the googling i i was done i was just like i can't figure this out and their their answer was wrong i'm sorry their answer was wrong because the answer for number 30 was like vinyl records but it was plastic records well technically vinyl is a vinyl is type of type of place but they were like little like remember those fisher price things they're getting you on a

technicality there jason i know okay well what are you gonna do i guess i should just go i guess i should just go get fact spoiler alert you just got an answer to a question 30 if you're downloading the app you're welcome you're welcome you're welcome yeah all right so in other news apple and goldman sachs are putting out a credit card earlier or later this year that i can't get approved for awesome great uh well it's a kind of it naturally

makes sense with apple pay already so why should apple miss out on the revenue of having their own card that could you would attach then to to your apple pay um should you get it asks life hacker oh god you're back to life hacker well you can guess where this is going they ask a question should you get the apple and goldman sachs credit card well then there's a two page ish article saying we don't know enough about it yet to tell you either way see this is why you i i need to get to your house

and i need to ban lifehacker.com in your vpn rules i just need to stop it you you you're not allowed to go to life hacker anymore ever okay i get perverse enjoyment from these articles to be fair to life hacker uh nobody knows because uh well no okay first to be fair to life hacker nobody knows any of the details about this card yet so people have all the other people have announced it and said that this is coming but life hacker is the only one that basically states a question that should have an

answer to it in their article and they don't answer the question yeah well they can't because that information doesn't exist yet oh my god why why do you do this to yourself brian why do you do this actually technically i'm doing it to you i'm kind of okay with it well you're doing it to the 10 000 people that listen to this show too so you might want to think about that all right we should put up a we'll put up a quiz on our social media should brian block life hacker sounds like a plan

i ran across an article over on bigthink.com which i check out every now and then when i want to have my mind exploded and uh unlike life like it's my antidote it's like yeah you know i i take a shot of life hacker and then i have a chaser of big think all right the way it works so uh this is a great article called your identity is almost entirely based on unconscious brain processes so most uh yeah here we go let's let's do our deep dive let's let's take the blue pill okay most experts see human

consciousness as a combination of two different phenomena the first is the consciousness we experience from one moment to the next that's knowing who and where in the world we are along with carmen san diego it's also the ability to evaluate things and calculate opportunities and threats the second is our thoughts feelings impressions intentions and memories so here's the innovation this is a 2017 paper so it's been out for a while okay published in futures of psychology that says that actually our thoughts and feelings are developed by unconscious mechanisms behind our logical thoughts

we don't so much as come to conclusions on things as we become aware of how we feel researchers write that the contents of consciousness are completely unrelated to the experience of consciousness so getting to the basic idea that our consciousness is not in our control at all and given so much of how we think and feel seems to be outside of our control how responsible are we for our choices opinions and behavior so this is the free will and personal responsibility notions that have been

constructed by society not by us so is there free will probably not nope if you listen to sam harris he he definitely is behind the fact that there is no free will yeah so that's kind of what the study is saying at this point so super fascinating oh this is oh man i need mushrooms for this well i have a chaser for that as well for this segment okay 10 old-fashioned swear words to spice up your cousin all right what do we got and i figured this is

perfect for us as we're trying to move towards doing a clean show so the next time instead of me dropping a cuss word i'm going to say by saint booger and all the saints at the back door of purgatory but jabbers dad sizzle consarn thunder nation great horn spoon snails gosh all potomac g rover cripes by the double barrel jumping jiminy i love these you see now we can take

the explicit off our show we can we can it's gonna take us a while we need to make a we need to make a cheat sheet for this i know i'm gonna have to put this up in a note on my screen oh dad sizzle actually what we'll do is we'll just record all of these and then you'll just have to oh great more replacement editing hey make some macros you'll be fine oh god darn it dead snizzle

i'd like to throw a shout out to viet nguyen who's a friend of mine over on the twitters and uh i posted a thing about uh the caesar milan episode that we did recently and he's just like hey as a as an immigrant i was very happy to hear this episode and i remembered that oh wait my family are immigrants too so technically most of our families are immigrants almost everybody in this damn country

is an immigrant yeah but uh my dad has the the trunk that my great grandmother brought over from italy in the old country when she came through ellis island and that's like our family treasure we we have one as well you do i did not yes we do and my sister and i are kind of negotiating as to who's going to get that my dad won't let me have it he's just like nope you can have it when i'm dead but you can't have it now it's at my mom's house and i'm not allowed to take it yet either but yeah

you know he just some point uh it will be passed down through the family of course it's amazing i didn't know you had one as well yeah yeah no they came over in 1908 big old steamer trunk yep what's really cool is my great grandfather came over to pennsylvania he went through ellis island too and like you know my my family name is de philippo but a lot of the philippos that came through ellis island changed their names to phillips so it's really hard to go back and like trace our family tree

but they americanized it yeah yeah what what he did was he came over started to work and worked at uh the coal mine and then opened a bar and he was a carlini my that was that was his family name so we had carlini's bar he had people sleeping in there and like you know paying rent he did the first airbnb basically that's all i'm saying like unlicensed unlicensed airbnb the guys from the coal mine would

stay at his place and he saved up enough money to go back to italy to propose to my great-grandmother and have enough money to bring her over and so when they came back over together she had the trunk and then we have the trunk in the family and that was uh my great-grandmother uh nunny that's and it's a really fun story so when when uh vietnam wins was like yeah you know we're immigrant states and he'd be

posted a fun hamilton gif for me but he's also got a podcast that i want to plug because he and here's the thing he didn't even ask me to plug this podcast but i'm going to plug it anyway it's called intelligent millennials we got nothing figured out i love it i love it so so thanks yet it's uh it's good to know you sir and uh also a shout out to our friends daria and kevin rose because they have a new kid

which is awesome which we found out about congratulations uh at fireside is like i'm pregnant again this sucks but i do hope that you daria are now able to enjoy a martini that you so desperately wanted back then oh god she wanted to drink so bad she's just like i just want to drink so congratulations on the kid and i have a single martini because i'm sure you're probably breastfeeding and you know better than i yeah about all that stuff because you're the you're the health person so yeah

but the video they posted this morning it's a private video so unfortunately we can't share it but it was their their first daughter zelda meeting their new daughter nova and it was just it i mean it was it was heartwarming it was really heartwarming so i'm glad that daria is now not with child and maybe she can get back to podcasting so i can make some more goddamn money come on let's go come on daria let's get it going i love how you always make it about you jason of course i do i'm a

narcissist what the fuck do you want i know what the gosh darn it do you want dag nabbit until next time i'm brian schulmeister thanks for listening to grumpy old and i'm jason de filippo yes i missed as the narcissist missed his own naming his own name yes i'm still jason de filippo shut up brian 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 book a month and we'll love you

forever if you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation go to gog.show and click the paypal button in the sidebar show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 323 from there you can find links to old episodes leave feedback ask questions and get links to stuff we like stay grumpy me me me me me me yep that's it

at qvc fall shopping is more than just checking out it's discovering the brands you love across beauty fashion home and culinary all in one place whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings cozy nights or everyday moments qvc has what you need for the season ahead with brands like laura geller

philosophy ninja and so many more shop now at qvc.com