325: One Hot Pocket at a Time

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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. Are you grumpy today, Brian? Are we ready to grump out? I've got a little bit of follow-up. And I'm a little grumpy. Just coming off of what we talked about on the last episode about YouTube and how they were pulling anti-vax videos and things of that nature.

I got an email from my kid's school this morning. So we'll see how much of the show we even get through because he is showing some signs of pink eye. And should it get worse? Yeah, I will be called to go pick him up. I already scheduled a doctor's appointment. This is the second time he's had pink eye this year.

In between that, he's also had a viral ear infection and basically constantly snotting and gross. My point being, even if everybody... The disease and the vectors for kids, especially when you put them in these tight social situations, things spread.

They spread fast. And they spread through the whole school. Like the kid that had... We got a notice that somebody had pink eye two days ago. And he's not even in Lucas's class, but apparently, you know, they all play with the same toys. They share all the germs. So that's what happens. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, it's great. He's in grade Petri dish.

Exactly. It's a Petri dish. And I understood intellectually why vaccinations were important before I had a kid. But now I so understand it so viscerally. And it's so important and prevalent and meaningful to me because you see how quickly all these things spread.

And, you know, it's one thing. These are non-lethal diseases. We have lethal diseases that we have vaccinations for that people are choosing not to take and sending their kids out into the world with it. Now, I understand I am living, pun intended, in Ground Central for this shit.

Because here I'm in Santa Monica where there are a lot of incredibly rich, incredibly stupid people that have decided to follow Jenny McCarthy. In fact, she probably, well, she probably lives in Malibu. But to be fair, Malibu and Santa Monica share a school district. So I'm suffering anyways.

But one of the choices that my wife and I made, we made a very conscious decision to go to a preschool that requires vaccinations. If your kid is due for a vaccination and you do not bring that yellow sheet from your doctor, you are not, your child is not going to school that day. You go home and you do not come back until you have that vaccination.

You do not. I can't even take my dogs to daycare without vaccination records. Exactly. I mean, it's so, you know, the fact that, again, hopefully I'll make it through the whole show. But just watching these diseases and illnesses spread, no wonder there are massive outbreaks again now.

All it takes is one kid that hasn't been vaccinated getting something. Because vaccinations aren't 100% foolproof here, people. If you've been vaccinated, you can still get this disease if you're exposed to it. You know, don't do it for you. Do it for everybody else. This is a step up and be a part of society thing, people. Yeah.

No, this is for the greater good. Greater good. Yes. So let's move on quickly because I have a feeling I'm going to be picking up a sick kid. Shortly. Oh, yay. A bit more follow up. This is hat tip to friend of the show, Mike, who lives here in Santa Monica with me and has been my grumpy old curmudgeon sitting at the bars about scooters since they first dropped here.

He sent me this link from the Santa Monica local paper. Brake complaints accelerate for e-scooters. Now, in addition to there being software glitches that have caused problems with brakes, recent testing is suggesting that some dockless scooters with electric brakes are unable to stop on hills.

The brakes are not powerful enough for the environment they are being dropped into. Yep. Yeah. So. Class action. Class action. Philip Ross Rossescu, a forensic engineer at Wexco, tested a scooter model that uses electric brakes activated with a rider's thumb to see whether it could come to a complete stop on a sloping road.

This is based on some lawsuits that are currently going on here as a Santa Monica personal injury attorney has is pursuing against bird on behalf of clients who were injured after jumping off scooters that were unable to stop on hills. These hills are right down the street from my house. You're on top of a hill. I am on top of the hill.

So these are the people that are coming down from the from the scooters that are blocking my lawn so I can't get past it with my kid. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, so they're trying to use. So basically, this one specifically is a nine bot Segway ES2, a model that came out last fall and can reach 15.5 miles per hour.

You cannot control the intensity of the electric brake. Now, this is the handbrake. Apparently, the fender brakes are good and fine, but riders don't think to use them. They just use the brakes that are right there at their hands. So he's been testing it and he tried a hill up in Playa del Rey.

It was pretty steep, but again, these scooters are in the wild there. And he said that if he just tried to use the handbrake, he could not stop the scooter at all. He went straight through the intersection. It did not stop a damn thing. Now, fortunately, he didn't get hit so he could come back and report to us.

Exactly. So then they are. He repeated the test using the fender brake, which caused the scooter to come to a stop and 47 feet. That's a long way. 47 feet, 15 miles an hour. Come on, you need to stop. So if you use the two brakes in conjunction, you can stop at 33 feet, which is better.

But on a hill, he's saying the e-brakes are effectively utterly useless. That's crazy. This is the area. Yeah. Yeah. So San Francisco. No shit on the San Francisco. The interesting thing was he even mentioned in here that people like using them in conjunction, like it takes coordination to do that, that most people who are just random riders don't have.

So now, Brian, have you ever ridden a motorcycle? Yes. Yeah, that's right. You used to have a scooter that we used to ride around on. I still have it, actually. No way. I can't believe that. Yeah. That thing's got to be ready for the scrap heap. It's old, but it works. Yeah. Again, once you have a kid, it's like, hmm, maybe I shouldn't be riding that anymore.

So when I got my motorcycle license, they teach you that when you're braking, 75% of the brakes comes from the front brake, 25% from the back. So you use them in conjunction to stop quickly. Yes. And so if the e-brakes, which are the front brakes, don't work, most of your stopping power is just completely gone.

And it also is something that takes a lot of practice. That's one of the things they drilled into me at motorcycle school. Or just even riding a bike on hills. You learn over time that you should ride the brake down hills. Yep. And you should do the same thing with scooters, which people are obviously not doing.

They want to go as fast as they can because it's fun. Whee! Yes. No, it takes a bit of skill to do this stuff. And especially if the brakes don't actually work, then that is really, that is just a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.

So we now have a new slogan for the e-scooter companies, and that is move fast and brake bones. Yes. In the news. So we've been hearing since May 2018, when Facebook was coming out of the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, that we were going to be getting a clear history feature that would let users flush their browsing data from Facebook, much like you can erase it from your web browser.

Yeah, sure. Hasn't shown up yet? Haven't heard much about it, but the concept is something privacy advocates have been calling for. But yeah, there's just not much coming. So we originally, Facebook told the tech site Recode in December, and we talked about this then that it was taking longer than they thought because it was, there were technical obstacles.

It's an excuse that might hold more water if it didn't come from a company that employs thousands of the world's most skilled software developers. Yeah. Something we always forget to mention about that. They've got the cream of the crop who can build this stuff. $240,000 a year, cream of the crop. So yes.

And we called bullshit on this at the time because we know that it's not that hard. But as of last week, the press was increasingly losing patience and BuzzFeed wrote a story headlined, Mark Zuckerberg promised a clear history tool almost a year ago. Where is it? And an anonymous person in Facebook said Mark just wanted to score some points by announcing it and it may not ever be coming.

However, on Tuesday, Facebook gave a strong indication that it might actually be coming sort of their chief financial officer, David Werner, told an audience of bankers, investors and industry insiders at Morgan Stanley Conference that the feature is coming later this year and it will take an advertising hit, which means they'll lose some monies because we will be blocking and deleting some of those precious status.

Now, stop me if I'm wrong here. Isn't that kind of like insider trading, talking about features that are going to cost money so that then they can dump their stock beforehand? It does feel a little weird, but as we all know, it's a house of cards, right?

Yeah. So I get why they have been slacking on this because it is going to cost them money. Yes. If they actually do it properly. Well, they may not do it properly, though. Here we go. So the fact that Facebook CFO is talking about the feature in terms of headwinds to its business suggests that it's not mere window dressing, that it may be coming.

But Facebook has a long history of rolling out things that would be good for the consumer in such a way that it's either ineffectual or unlikely to be broadly used. So I think what we can expect is something buried way deep in privacy, not really announced very well and made incredibly obscure and mostly ineffectual.

Yep. That's probably where it's going to go. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? There's another way to delete your browsing history. Hmm. Delete your Facebook account. Well, wait, they don't delete anything. Never mind. They're still going to keep it around. No. Yeah. They have all your old information, which they can use.

Obviously, again, big data. They can they can relate your deleted account to other people with similar likes and interests and thus build the bigger pile. Yep. Shadow profiling. All that good stuff that we've talked about before. So, yeah. It's game over. You just can't get away.

You just can't get away. And here's the fun part. They've been working on a cryptocurrency. We mentioned this briefly before when at first kind of like some of the news was trickling out. And the next web has a new article called What We Know About Facebook's Secretive Cryptocurrency and What We Don't.

Well, it turns out what we don't is most of the article, but they are working on building a stable coin, which is going to be what's it called? Stable coin. What's a type of cryptocurrency?

It's a type of cryptocurrency that's backed by fiat currency. So it doesn't fluctuate in the market like the other proof of proof of work coins like Bitcoin. I don't think it's my non-death bullet. This is a stable coin. This is a fucking not stable.

Okay. Anyway. Well, that's the point is they're trying to make it stable. Okay. So they're going to try and like, you know, put the value of the coin to a bunch of different foreign currencies and not just the dollar, which will be interesting. Right. So it's so the value does not fluctuate as much.

Now, the thing about it, they still don't know if they're going to be doing a decentralized coin or something that they completely control. That's that has not come out yet, which is an interesting thing, because I guess Signal and Telegram are also working on their own coins, which, of course, they are.

Of course, they are. Everybody's working on their own fucking coin. But they have a lot of people working on this and some pretty heavy hitters. The whole cryptocurrency and blockchain thing is being led by David Marcus, who formerly headed up the messenger division and also ran PayPal.

So he's also Captain Kirk's son. What? Dave, Dr. David Marcus, Captain Kirk's son from Wrath of Khan. Okay. Well, I guess the Genesis device does work. Yeah. He's still he's still with us. And they've also got some guys.

I don't know why I know that. I don't know why that popped into my head. But that completely threw me for a loop. But hey, at least I still remember the Genesis device. They got some guys from Instagram over as well, since, you know, they're just now that the main guys are gone.

Yeah. They're just going to do that. They've got apparently 50 people working on this crypto and blockchain project. You know what they need? They need 50 people working on PR to convince anybody to give Facebook their credit cards. Oh, they need five, five thousand PR people. Fifty is not nearly enough.

And what they've done is they've sequestered the team. And so they're in a different building with different keycard access. So they stay away from all the other Facebook employees. That should be good for morale. Oh, yeah, I'm sure, because morale is so high at Facebook right now. Yeah. Well, Facebook might find themselves in more trouble than they already are if they do try to roll that out and take over more of the industry that's out there, because the FTC is finally listening to our show, but they are starting something that we've been

hoping for for a long time, a new antitrust tax task force to look at big tech. So they're launching a new task force focused on the tech industry with a broad antitrust mission that will include reexamining mergers that have already been approved by the government. Slow clap. Yeah.

I'm very excited about this FTC chairman Jim Joe Simmons wrote in a statement, the role of technology in the economy and in our lives grows more important every day. Yes, it makes sense for us to closely examine technology markets to ensure consumers benefit from free and fair competition, of which now there is none.

None. So this is good. FTC official did not discuss specific companies that might be examined by the new force. But fair enough. It's early days. Get on it, people. Yeah. And there's like 17 lawyers on the task force, which is good. I mean, that's a start. I mean, it's not as big as Facebook's cryptocurrency division, but it's a start.

Yep. But it's nice that they're willing to go back and reexamine these mergers that have happened before. Yes. Yes. Which would be interesting if they come up with like, OK, we've got to break up Ma Bell all over again. That'd be nice. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. It's like, OK, Instagram. Bye bye. You're going off on your own now.

Bye bye. What's up? See you around. Oh, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. And I mean, this is a really good first step. I hope that this actually starts to make some headway. And I really want them to go back and start looking at the cable giants, because what really irks me is now you have these cable companies who not only own the means of distribution throughout their network, but they own half of the damn content producers.

Look at like, you know, Universal and all that stuff that's going on. It's like that should not be allowed to exist. Right. It really shouldn't because because you're going to get, you know what I'm you know what I mean. You know, you get premium placement on your network for your shows and then the other shows don't.

It's just like you just look at you look back at the AOL Time Warner merger for those of you old enough that remember that it's the same thing over and over again. History keeps repeating. It really does. And speaking of history repeating, Amazon is going to stop expanding in Seattle.

OK. Now, the interesting thing about this is Amazon threw a hissy fit a while ago because they're making new buildings and they're leasing new buildings because they've got a lot of people that they need to get to work. So there was a tax on the books in Seattle called a head tax of approximately five hundred dollars per employee with companies with annual revenue in the city of twenty million dollars or more.

Right. So Amazon would have had to pay about twenty two and a half million dollars a year for its forty five thousand employees. The tax was changed to be a point seven percent payroll tax in twenty twenty one if it went through and it did go through and then everything. And then just recently the whole thing was repealed.

They passed it. They actually got it through and then they they stepped back because Amazon was like, ah, yeah, we're just going to start pulling out of the city. You remember the whole, you know, HQ2 thing? Yeah. Well, now that the tax has been repealed, Amazon has come out and said, yeah, we're still not going to do anything for you guys right now.

You know, just totally backstepping on what they said they were going to do for the city of Seattle. This is at the same time that stories are going around about how Amazon has paid zero dollars in income tax on its over billions of dollars of profits this year. This is these are horrible optics and no one seems to care.

No, they don't care. This is incredible. It's absolutely incredible. And they have no reason to care because everybody still shops with them because they have billions of dollars of income. So it's just you can't trust these guys, period. Well, no. And hopefully that FTC tax force goes after Amazon first.

Yeah. We'll see. I wouldn't mind that. They are researching into Amazon a little bit at the moment. Anyways, the FTC has brought its first case against fake paid reviews on Amazon. Now, obviously, this is helping Amazon to some degree. Or is it? That is the question. Yeah. But they announced on Tuesday evening that it brought its first case against using fake reviews to sell products online.

Commission said it will settle with defendant Cure Encapsulations, Inc., a New York City based company who is accused of making false claims about a weight loss supplement, which obviously that's the main business model for weight loss supplements and paying a third party website to post fake reviews on Amazon in a press release.

Andrew Smith, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said when a company buys fake reviews to inflate its Amazon ratings, it hurts both shoppers and companies that play by the rules. Yes. Yeah, because that's why nobody plays by the rules anymore, because you can't compete. You can't compete if you pay by the rules anymore.

So this is a good again. I'm this is like up with the FTC week for me. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully the FTC is going to go after Amazon for their in-house brands, because this is something I noticed, too. Recently, I've been going. We have Ralph's here in Southern California.

Yes. Which is owned by the Kroger company, like, you know, the big conglomeration. And most of the brands that I find myself buying nowadays are Kroger brands because they've done the same thing as like Amazon Basics. They're buying up or actually I don't even know if they're buying up.

They probably have the same companies that make the more expensive brands. Co-pack the stuff for them and just rebrand it for themselves like they do at Costco, you know, because God knows Costco whiskey is just amazing because it's Woodford's. If you want to get a good rye whiskey, go get Costco's brand and just you're just drinking Woodford's.

It's awesome. But the problem is they're undercutting all of these other brands and I don't think this is sustainable because if everybody starts buying the Kroger brands, the other brands are going to go out of business and then they're not going to have their co-packers. And then, you know, it's the companies are going to have to buy them and keep going.

It's this whole thing about rebranding with your own internal brands. And it's the same thing, like I said, with Comcast, they own the distribution and the product. And I think I mean, we're just seeing broken up. We're just seeing this consolidation happening at just such an amazingly increased pace.

And yeah, somebody's got to do something about it. Well, that's what the FTC is for. So hopefully they're going to get on it. I don't know. I mean, it's amazing that they're making this much headway in this current administration, which I salute them for that. You know, it's amazing. I wish the the FCC would be as bold.

Yeah, one hopes. Now, we've talked a bit in the past about how there is a replication crisis in sciences where, you know, the whole concept of science is that we use the scientific method. We come up with a result. Different people do the same studies. We see if the results can be replicated and then if so, we have something that we consider to be a working theory.

This is this is how we've proven it works. We've done multiple studies. This is what happens. But we found out that a lot of these were being bullshitted and people were lying and people were cheating. Shocking. Hang on while I hang on while I do my power pose. I'm going to do my affirmations and power poses so I can get through this article.

Yes. Well, DARPA wants to do something about this. The military basically wants to build a bullshit detector for social science studies using, well, machine learning, not a form of AI. They say perhaps a machine learning derived computer program, a form of AI. See how we're even twisting the wording there?

Like we're massaging AI into machine learned computer programs. Oh, it's just OK. But that ship has sailed and we've given up on that. So anyways, they are working on something that could rapidly assess and predict the reliability of scientific findings. And that would be awesome.

The project is called SCORE, the Systematized Confidence in Open Research and Evidence. Good work there. And it's a collaboration with the Center for Open Science in Virginia with a price tag that may top $7.6 million over three years. Now, I know that was written to make it sound as if that's a lot of money, but $7.6 million is not anymore.

For DARPA? No, that's just a drop in the bucket. I mean, that's your coffee budget for like a week. Yeah. So we'll see what happens here. But the question remains, even if DARPA can build this tool, will people feel comfortable taking recommendations from it? That's a question many fields are grappling with as they introduce more AI into their methods.

And I say, yes, I think people will be OK with it because we just are all being conditioned to it at this point. And if it works, it works. I don't care. I want things that work. That's that's I'm I'm practical that way. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's not that difficult of a problem.

I mean, the biggest problem is going to be figuring out how to parse the the reports that come from the scientists and then take that and say, OK, what does this study show? How do I match it with the other studies? You know, the the language learning on that is going to be the most interesting thing. But I think we've got a lot of that already hammered out.

So, yes, I look forward to this because it might actually work. And that way you could, you know, at the drop of a hat, say, OK, what do you think about this study? How many how many times has it been peer reviewed? How many of those studies have failed versus how many have succeeded and go from there? And that way you can say, is this actual science or point people to things that they can then go do new studies on to replicate or disprove?

Right. I like it. I like it a lot. I like it a lot, too. Here's something else I like that the president is doing. Didn't expect to hear that statement from me, did you? Nope. All right. Well, the president and Congress are thinking about changing an important Internet law. This Internet law is something that you and I have been screaming about a long time.

It is the way that all these services claim they are just platforms when they are no longer platforms. It's called Section 230. We have a link in the show notes and I urge people to go read it. It talks all about it and why Jason and I have been so screaming about this for so long.

So it's an emerging debate about it. And in this article, they state that when the steady stream of content policy challenges flowing across tech platforms, the notion that Section 230 provides an excuse for tech companies not to moderate their platforms seems increasingly untenable. Something we've been saying for a long time.

So they're looking at changing it. So and the debate has started, which, again, I welcome. So we'll see what happens. This is not the one that we generally talk about because this comes from the communications. Yeah, they are tied together. This is part of the Communications Decency Act. What we usually talk about is Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Yeah. The DMCA. So these are they're related, but slightly different. But they also still have, you know, it ties to the same type of regulation. Look, I'm just happy that this is actually being discussed now to our other points that we often make in the security segment.

Do any of these people discussing it actually understand it? Yeah, well, that's debatable. Can we get some machine learning on whether or not these people know what the hell they're talking about? But I welcome the fact that it's actually being discussed now because I think it is very important, especially as we're trying to figure out which way the Internet's going to go moving forward.

These massive companies first off need to be split up and second off need to stop being able to hide behind. I'm just a platform. Absolutely. Yeah. And there's there's some really interesting quotes in here. So, yeah, I urge people to it's a good article to to kind of get yourself up to speed on on the conversation.

And yeah, I love people do that. I love Senator Wyden's remark. He's like, if you're not willing to use the sword, there are those who may try to take away the shield, which yes, that's the way it should be. So and we have some new news in the transportation front and something a bit too late. In my opinion, this should have been happened a while ago.

The Department of Transportation and the FAA have issued an interim rule banning the transport of lithium ion batteries and cells as cargo aboard passenger flights because they tended to catch fire. Blow up. Yeah. I didn't know that you could have a lie on battery cargo on a passenger plane.

That's kind of crazy. Well, my father was an air cargo supervisor. You would be shocked at what is on passenger planes. Oh, I don't need to hear that ever. Oh, no, I don't need to. Yeah, because because a lot most of the space below planes, in case you didn't know, isn't actually for your luggage.

It is for people that have bought shipping companies and private companies that have bought space and shipping on every single flight. So there's all kinds of stuff underneath you when you're flying on a plane. Oh, great. Great. Just as I'm negotiating buying my next ticket to Fireside. Awesome. So you can still first carry your personal devices on your trips in most cases, but companies can't just stuff a ton of battery packs into an airliner's hold anymore.

Yeah, I was pretty. I see. I was living in a world where I thought they couldn't do that already. So, well, no, they could. So the cargo ban will mainly affect people who order batteries. Larger companies getting tons. You'll still likely get your orders, but you will have to wait for dedicated cargo flights for them now.

Also, and this is super interesting, and this is how it this is how it's actually going to affect us, the consumer. The interim rule demands that batteries aboard cargo aircraft carry no more than a 30 percent charge. Now, guess what this means? Who's going to check that?

Are they going to have somebody sitting there with a battery tester? This is a really good question. Who is going to check that? It's obviously going to be a lot of personal trust. Yeah. Which I'm sure people will follow. But the way that it's going to affect us in the future is right now, when you go out and buy something, it tends to be fully charged.

Yep. Which is convenient as F, right? Yeah. It's kind of awesome, but this could end that, because now they can't have anything more than a 30 percent charge. So when you first buy something now, you're going to have to go home and top it up. You know, I'm okay with that. I am too, because I lie a lot.

I'm also used to it. You know, I'm used to getting things. When I buy something and it comes and it's got like an 85 or 90 percent charge, I'm always surprised. I'm still surprised to this day that things have charges when I get them. Yeah. I'm just like, that's nice. They didn't used to. Yeah. They'd come dead and you'd have to charge them for half or like half a day.

Half the time they didn't come with batteries. That's true, too. But we're very old. Batteries not included. Remember that. So, I mean, this is interesting. And, you know, my gut reaction was originally this might be in response to that Amazon cargo flight that just, you know, crashed in the swamp.

But I know the FAA does not move that fast. So this has been in the works for a while. I think they're still they're just now getting around to responding to those stupid flying hoverboards that blew up in planes. Oh, yeah. That seems about right for the timeline on how slow the FAA moves. Yes.

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Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven, cybersecurity news service based in the beautiful state of Maryland, who has a lot of followers, I've found.

And Dave is also co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. I did enjoy the latest episode, by the way. It was very good. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good to be back. So, shall we kick off with a little bit of follow-up? As we do, yes.

Yes. I enjoy this one. Yeah. So, listeners may remember from last week when I was on, I had a funny feeling about this gentleman who was calling appropriate attention to a bunch of folks who were doing inappropriate things on YouTube, calling out videos of young girls.

Everyone on YouTube, guys. Yeah. Yeah. So, we got a note from one of our listeners. This is someone, Marcus McGee on Twitter. Thank you, sir. Who said, Hey, Dave, you were right. People found a video of the YouTube whistleblower asking a girl on the side of the road to make a porno with him.

Also had some other creepy stuff on his original YouTube account. Nailed it. Yes, he does protest too much. Now, in the interest of being more fair than this guy probably deserves, this video of him asking a girl on the side of the road to make a porno with him is a bit of performance art.

It's a clip within a larger video that he made about having his life go down the drain because he got involved with a cam girl or something like that. And it's all pre-produced and it's all acted out. Also, I mean, to be fair, who among us have not rolled up on the side of a road to a girl and asked them to make a – nobody else?

Just – Well, never mind. Never mind. I'm going to not say anything right now. Yeah. I'll just be quiet. Yeah, don't worry, Brian. We'll edit that out. No problem. No one? Yeah. So – I think you know some people.

I know. So thank you, Marcus, for sending that in. I wouldn't have seen this follow-up because, honestly, I didn't want to see any more of that guy. Yeah. Yeah, but we pretty much called it. Pretty much called it. Yeah. Now, the follow-up on the YouTube side of things is that YouTube has disabled comments on videos that they say – or I don't know how they look for this, but – It probably is.

But a video with young kids, they are automatically disabling comments. Gee, where did that idea come from? Imagine that. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of things that one doesn't necessarily want to see anything more of, hat tip to a friend of the show, Amber.

I'm not sure who this is for. I don't know if it's for you, Dave, our own favorite furry, or for Jason with his unnatural love of his dogs, but there is a new Japanese service that has created stunningly frightening, super realistic replicas of your own pet's heads that you can wear around the office, go to the bar, take selfies with.

Your own pets. Oh, boy. I've started saving up for this one already. I did. I did look at this. Wow. I don't know. I'm so going to wear this on a walk with Bam Bam because – Talk about freaking out the neighbors. Yeah.

These are frightening. They are. They're a bit pricey. Almost three grand. They average out to almost three grand. Oh, I didn't say for a while. So patreon.com slash GOG. Yeah. Oh, man. We should do a Kickstarter for Jason to get one of these. Oh, man. You have to go with Bammers, I guess, right?

Oh, hell yeah. No, yeah. I wouldn't – sorry, Dino, but Bam Bam is the way to go on this one. This would be the triple threat walking down with me. Oh, and I can wear my T-shirt that has a Rottweiler and a hoodie, too.

So we'd have – we'd be Rottweilers all the way down. Yeah, yeah. This is something – it is both frightening and yet I can't seem to take my eyes away from it. It's so cool. I love it. I really love it. All right.

Well. Okay. A little bit more of a whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Warm up those credit cards, people. I need me a Bam Bam head. Yeah. If you've got money you want to throw away in the street, instead, send it to Jason. Patreon.com slash G-O-G.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. And I've got a little follow-up because Dave Bittner, you posted a link to a video called Star Wars Always, which has been making the rounds. Yeah. And this turns out to be edited by Topher Grace. And he took all 10 Star Wars movies and put them into one five-minute trailer.

And I got to say, it was epic. Yeah. It was epically good. It managed to make the six really shitty ones decent. Yeah. Go figure. It really did. Better world building than they did on their own. Yes. Yeah.

I have to say- Take that, Lucas. Yeah. Push my buttons. And then also, along with that, this week was when all the information started coming out about the new Star Wars land at Disneyland and Disney World. Looks like some reporters got some behind-the-scenes tours of that, so- I'm very excited.

I am, too. My fear, though, is how many years is it going to be before you're going to be able to go there and actually get on the rides? Six months. Many. Many. Well, no. But you know what? People are- I think it's going to be helpful that they're building two of them.

Yes. But- Splitting the traffic. Right. But there's still a three-hour wait on that Pandora ride down at Disney World, and nobody cares about Pandora. Oh, true. True. Well, I think nobody really does care about Pandora. No, they don't.

The somewhat smart thing that they seem to have done, having- You know, I'm a longtime Disney guy. I grew up down the street. My mom still lives a few blocks away from it. I was a local. I had annual passes. I'm a Disney freak, as it were. Yeah. The one smart thing that they're doing with this land is it's actually- There's only, as far as I can tell, two rides.

It's mostly immersive, walk-around, fun, cool stuff everywhere. It's more just kind of dropping into the world than- I mean, obviously, you're going to want to go on the rides, and there's going to be- gazillions of hours of waiting for them, but there's going to be a lot to do just walking around, and I think that's very smart of them to do that.

Yes. Well, the thing is, it's like, you're going to go to Disney and take one ride for the day. You're going to be in line the entire time for one ride. Well, there are the fast pass options using the apps and all that sort of thing, so I don't think it's going to be quite as horrific as we all imagine it will be. Certainly, it will be for the first few weeks, but my son is coming up on just being old enough to go to Disney for around the first time anyways, and in the timing will be nice, and I will say, goodbye, mommy.

Goodbye, kid. Daddy's going to Star Wars land. I'm just bracing myself because I, too, enjoy Disney a lot, and I'm one of those people who when I come underneath the berm and turn the corner and see the castle, I'll admit I do get a little misty, and I just can't imagine the ball of goo I'm going to be when I come around the corner and see the real Millennium Falcon.

I can't believe the ball of goo everyone in that land will be when they see you wearing your pet's face. That's an easy way to get to the front of the line. Yeah. I'll let this guy go. But you know what? I mean, if you're going to wear it, that's a place where no one's going to look twice at you, right?

I actually believe that they won't. I'm sure that the rules will not allow you in with that mask on, but go for it. Time to start planning a caper. Oh, God. It's so funny. I actually went to Disney World in Orlando the first year that Star Tours was out, and I got to ride it the first year.

And I tell you what, when we came out of that ride, we were just like shaking. It was just so cool. And then there was the giant AT-AT. I know. I'm sorry. AT-AT. I'm not allowed to say AT-AT because the nerds will hit me with their fake lights. But it was the coolest thing ever.

And I'm actually really looking forward to this. I am going to go to Disney just to do this for sure. I don't want to be a one-upper, Jason, but when they opened up the one here in Anaheim for Star Tours, they throw a 48-hour party. It's the only time that the park has been open 24 hours straight twice. But it's the only time they've ever done it.

So 48 hours straight, they kept the park open. And I got grounded because I was young and I snuck out. And we were there for 24 hours straight, me and a bunch of friends. And it was well worth it. Well worth it. Oh, very cool. Very cool. No, Star Tours was definitely the realization of a lot of childhood fantasies.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think between me and my dad, we went back, I think, four times and did the whole thing because it was just so cool. So cool. And we'd go to Epcot, make our tour, come back, do it again, go to the Raiders of the Lost Ark thing, then go back.

And I mean, because we had passes to all the different parks and we spent like five days going between Universal and Disney and we hit everything multiple times. That was the greatest road trip in the history of the world as far as I'm concerned. Well, and by all accounts, this new Millennium Falcon ride is, you know, Star Tours taken to 11.

So yeah, I can't wait. I can't wait. All right. So we talk about crappy things now. Yeah. Shall we actually talk about what this segment's about? Now that we're happy and excited, let's let's let's depress everybody. What do we got this week? So over at Big Think, something that we've been talking about for quite some time, most Americans don't realize what companies can predict from their data.

We've been screaming about this. We are somewhat aware of this, and it's just good to kind of reiterate exactly how much information all these big companies are getting from us, from the little dribs and drabs that they're collecting together into a gigantic ocean or puddle of goo, as you were, of us.

You know, data about mobile phones, past locations and movement patterns can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where they attend religious services, age range of children based on when they drop them off from school. Almost everything that we talked about just last week that we knew the Chinese were getting. And as I said at the time, OK, the Chinese government's doing it, but we know private corporations are doing it here.

And this article basically tells us exactly that. Yeah, there's a great little graphic in here and Misa no like. So just to keep with the theme here. So they have different identifying data, like your name, previously used names, because we all have previously used names, I guess.

Harvey Menfringen. Jensen. All the fun stuff. And of course, latitude and longitude, phone numbers, email addresses and sensitive identifying data, like your social security number, which nobody's supposed to have.

Driver's license. Insurance companies put on the damn card. And in most, you know, higher education institutions use as your your student ID number. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the day. Ridiculous. Birthdates of family members in your household. Demographic data, which is just a very long list of things that they know.

Court and public records, of course, because that's, you know, public data anyway. General interest data. And this one I find I find funny. Apparel preferences. OK, why do they care if I just wear all black? I don't care. Because if Gap has a new dark black T-shirt that gets pushed into your ads.

Of course. Charitable giving, gambling, participation in outdoor activities. Well, I'm safe on that one. You don't have to worry about that. Basically a vampire. Yeah. Yeah. Pat's dog owners. Jason's getting nothing but Netflix ads and the button for when he falls over and nobody's around.

Exactly. I've fallen and I. Have you guys seen those new I've fallen and I can't get up commercials? No, because they don't get pushed to me because I have outdoor preferences. Oh, my God. Yeah, I've seen them. Yeah, they're like a horror movie. They make it like a horror movie. It's like where they got this scary music and the woman's at the bottom of the stairs going, help, I've fallen and I can't get up.

Right. It's not just Mrs. Fletcher anymore. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. All your social media data, which we knew they were getting anyway because you posted by yourself, of course, and home and neighborhood data, you know, census data and things like that. So there's I mean, it's just a treasure trove of stuff that they get.

Now, looking at this article, one of the things they pointed out was that in the U.S., these data aggregation companies or the folks who collect the data, so the phone company, the cable company, all these different places you shop, the credit card companies, they own that data.

And so that is what allows them to sell that data to the aggregators. Yes. Now, how much of a difference do you think it would make if here in the United States we owned our own data? A lot. We would be able to sell it ourselves.

It's our data. We could choose. They would sell it or not. Yes. They would need permission. Yeah. Is it as simple as that? Or is that a good first step? It's a good first step. But to some degree, isn't the Pandora's box already open? Don't they basically have everything about us already?

Well, I think. Well, it depends. Now, would they be required to wipe it or turn around and write us a check for the information that they already have? Can we make it retroactive? We're the lost generation for sure, right? There's no go on without us. There's no point saving us.

Yes. But we are adrift in a sea of data. And, you know, Jaron Lanier kept saying, it's like, that's the way to really make this stuff work is it's like, if you're going to use my data, give me a cut or give me a preference to opt out. Yeah. Right. Right.

Here's hoping. Yeah. Keep hoping. As they say, wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which one gets filled first. We're never going to do a clean show, Jason. Never. Nope. Nice. All right.

Well, speaking of the next generation, this is a good enough segue into that since we're the old one. The owners of TikTok, an app you probably too old to know about, find $5.7 million for illegally collecting kids data. Now, I'm aware of this app because I have a kid and friends with slightly older kids who come to me because, you know, I'm the tech guy and I was asked about this.

And so there it is. It used to be a lip syncing app called musically.ly. It's been rebranded as TikTok. And now it's a short video platform that is very much a youthful demographic. If you've got it, you might be that creepy guy from YouTube. If you're old, otherwise you're a kid.

That's that's where it's at. So and I love this particular sentence. In the past, its stance on obtaining user consent was, let's say, inattentive. Basically, it didn't exist in it. So now, you know, now they've got an age gate prompting users to affirm that they're 13 or older, which, as we know, always works.

Oh, yeah. But but they didn't. And for a long time, they didn't. And that is against the law. So they are now the recipient of the largest civil penalty for violating the online privacy of children among information potentially captured by the app. Email addresses, phone numbers, first, last names, obviously photos and all the videos that people were putting up again, another particular favorite line from this article.

A tech company's flagrant disregard for privacy laws is old hat by now. But the combination of an open messaging structure, automatically public profile pages and a large underage contingent led to public reports of adults trying to contact children via the musically app. Yes, he said.

Now, again, it's almost sad. And I do wonder, have we just reached saturation point where we don't even notice anymore? But again, the tech company's flagrant disregard for privacy laws is old hat by now. We rarely bat an eye. We don't even know what to do about it anymore.

And none of these companies ever really seem to get in serious enough trouble, either legally or financially, for them ever to change their ways. Yeah. Yeah. I like this quote from Senator Ed Markey. He says, while this fine may be an historic high for a COPA violation, that's the Children Online Privacy Protection Act, it's not high enough for the harm that is done to children and to deter violations of the law in the future by other companies, which is exactly true.

It's too small. Yeah. In preparation for this discussion, I called up my son, Jack, who is 12. And I asked him, I said, what can you tell me about TikTok? He said, well, what do you want to know? Do you want to know what it is or do you want my opinion on it?

I said, well, first tell me what it is, because this article is correct. I'm too old to know about it. And he said, basically, it's, he said, there are three things that happen on TikTok. He said, first, people use it to lip sync along with music. The original purpose.

That's right. He said, second, 60-year-old men use it to try to do inappropriate things with young preteen kids. As the internet is for. Right. This is. Apparently. Yeah. This is coming from a 12-year-old.

Right. That's what was disturbing to me. Well, at least they're, I don't know if that's disturbing, though. I kind of like the fact that they're cognizant of it. Yeah, that's encouraging. He knows what's going on. What, what, what set me back, though, is how, just how casual he was about it. Like, yeah, you know, I mean, as you do.

Like, like they, like they do. Yeah. Right. Exactly. This is a day, this is like, you know, avoiding stepping in dog poop on your way to school in the morning. Just, there's, there are men all over the internet trying to, oh, yeah, well, of course, dad. I mean, come on. You just watch where you're stepping. Don't be silly. Right. And the other thing he said was people doing what he described as just awkward things, awkward things trying to be funny, but weren't very funny.

To get memes or viral or attention. Yeah. Right. He said that. It's a vine all over again. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He said no one at his school uses it, which is exactly what he wants me to think. Yes. That is, that is, that is misinformation. Right, right. Fake news, fake news. He said no one at his school uses it.

Well, I'm not on it. Nobody at my school is on it, dad. Don't bother getting on it. Yeah. Let me tell you every exact thing about what this app does and how it's being used. Yes. Yes. And I, I believe him because he's, because he's a good boy. So, uh, so that's my take on TikTok.

Right. So do you have it installed now? Have you taken a look? No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not a good enough parent to do something like that. Wow. Okay. I, I am over parenting, apparently. And Dave's a professional singer. He would never lip sync. That's right.

That's true. That's true. Don't get me started. You want to sing us into the next article, Dave? I'm just going to say, creeping on you on TikTok because I'm 60. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade used to involve Broadway singers singing songs live.

And now they all lip sync and get off my lawn. Ladies and gentlemen, he's officially a grumpy old geek. Yeah, there you go. It took a while, but we brought him to the dark side. Well, you know, I think, I think it really went to, went to pot when, uh, we got rickrolled at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and he'd lip synced his own song.

That was not cool. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're going to, if you're going to rickroll us, at least do it, do it live, man. Do it real. Anyway, speaking of creepy things, uh, this was an article that came by, uh, it's from a blog called One Foot Tsunami, which is just, I don't know.

It's your source for crucial emoji news. It is. Uh, I, I, I think I got linked to this from, uh, Daring Fireball, John Gruber's, uh, Mac News, uh, site. But, um, what this is about is a company called Cooler Screens, which is testing out at, evidently at Walgreens around the country.

Ah, it's on the news. Yeah. Yeah. So rather than the transparent glass door in the cooler section of your grocery store, because retailers cannot resist putting advertising on every flat surface possible, they're replacing those doors with video monitors.

Right. And, okay, so step one, this is annoying. Ads everywhere. Yes, annoying. And they're saying, they're, the demos for this, uh, on, on the actual company product screen, they have pictures of the products that are behind the glass.

Uh, but to me, this is a terrible idea because what happens? Those poor stalkers that have to put everything in the right place. Well, there's that, uh, but also what happens when I want my, I don't know, my Hot Pockets and I go to the store to get my Hot Pockets and I find where the picture of the Hot Pockets is and I open the door and there's no Hot Pockets.

First world problems. Yes. Oh my God. The agony. Right. The pain. Yes. There should be a, the, the picture of the Hot Pockets on the door should have a circle with a slash through it. It needs to be grayed out. Yes. No grayed out. It's like Big Brother when somebody's kicked out of the house, it's like their picture turns gray.

Right. Right. So there's that. I'm sure they could build them smart enough to do that. And maybe they will. Maybe it'll automatically scan the barcodes. It'll, so now we get to part two of this wonderful invention. Yes. Part two is what I have a massive problem with. So part two is, uh, not only will they have, yeah, not only will they have the video screens, but they will have cameras built in as well to watch.

Pointing out. Pointing at you to watch and profile the appearance and actions of customers who find themselves in their paths. Would you like some wild turkey, big boy? Right. So they're going to be able to, to, to track what you're looking at, how long your gaze falls on a particular thing.

Now they do have a privacy policy. I do wonder if when you go to open the door, a window pops up where you have to agree to it, the terms of service before you can actually open the door. Right. The door doesn't open until you're not getting those hot pockets. There's a Yula for your V8. Yeah. That's right. How bad do you want those hot pockets, big boy?

Yes. Yes. Now we tend to throw our hands up in the air, uh, cause it seems to be very little that we can do about these sorts of things. But for once, I, I feel like I have a call to action for all of our Grumpy Old Geeks listeners. Okay. Go find these and fuck with them.

Stare at things forever. Wear your, wear your pet masks when you go in. Start, just stare at one particular product and then grab something else. Fuck with their data set. Go people. I was just going to say, put a sticker over the camera, but I like your idea much better. I was just going to think, go to, go to the bubblegum aisle, get some hubba bubba, chew it up, get some grape hubba bubba, chew it up, and then stick it on the camera as long as you didn't go along and then go to the front and buy your hubba bubba and pay for it.

Oh yeah. But I like the disinformation campaign. I think we need to start a disinformation. Yeah. I think we need to start a disinformation campaign on this. Right. I suppose the other thing you could do is just start moving stuff around on the shelves without telling them. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Oh man. Yeah. Swap the hot pockets for the, the prune juice. Right. I think it's time to take back our privacy one hot pocket at a time, people. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I think, uh, there's another one of those things that probably sounds good in a pitch meeting, but the actual sounds horrific to the rest of us.

Right. Right. Just what I need is something tracking me, chasing me down the aisle with an ad as I walk from one place to another saying, no, no, you really, please, you know, you really want the hot, all right, listen, I'll give you 50 cents off the hot pockets. How about a dollar off the hot pockets?

Stop. Slow down. Come back, please. Well, as our known sage and author of one foot tsunami, your source for crucial emoji news wrote them himself at the end, uh, to anyone who might listen to cooler screens, please just stop. You are making the world a worse place. Reconsider what you're doing.

Not every single thing that can be tracked and monetized must be. Is this what you want your legacy to be? Yuck. Stay grumpy. Yeah. Truer words have never been spoken. Yes. I think I'm going to have to subscribe to one foot tsunami.

I think I like this guy. Yeah. He sounds of our ilk. Yeah, that's true. We should at least reach out and send him some stickers or something. Yes. So he can go place them on the aisles on the cooler screens products. That's what you do. People get your grumpy old geek sticker. We're making some, we're making some grumpy old geeks Walgreens stickers.

That's what it is. Perfectly over camera screens. We'll start processing now. Yep. Patreon.com slash GOG. Please send us your monies. That's right. That's right. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's enough fun for one week. Let's go dream of Star Wars land.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. We'll have to, we'll have to next time I come out your way. Maybe that's where we can all get together and go ride. Yes. They're going to have a bar, by the way, with alcoholic beverages. There you go. All right, we're going to do a live, live show from the cantina. That's it.

Yeah. Yeah. And maybe five years from now when you can actually walk in and get a seat and get a drink. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm excited though. So. Me too. Me so happy. Oh, God. May the force be with you. Ups and doodads.

I'm a big fan of NPR's comedy news quiz show. Wait, wait, don't tell me, which I know isn't a podcast as Jason would always get mad about. Yes. It's a bunch of reruns. Download of the show that is aired. But it's a good show. I love it. But it's very good. I enjoy it. I enjoy it. I usually download it.

It comes in Friday or Saturday and it's part of my bike ride on the weekend. It's all listened to it. Keeps you up with news and current. It is very funny. Very funny people on there. They have actually released an app for Alexa or Google Play, which is very cool. Like I've basically just been using my Alexa as radio players or music streamers or whatever you want to say it is.

But this is the first thing that I've actually found that I found to be quite innovative and well done. The host, Peter Segal and Bill Curtis do it. So you're not like getting computer voice. You're getting them actually talking to you and they're tracking stuff. So you play every week for a chance to win the wait, wait voice of your choice on your voicemail, just like the real game show and hear your name on the air, apparently.

So whoever scores highest or whatever, I don't know how they're doing that exactly. It's updating weekly, takes roughly five minutes to play and it's a lot of fun. So if you're a fan of the show, you're going to really enjoy this interactive thing that they've built for our for our ladies in the box. Oh, cool. I'll definitely check that out.

I am. I'm still working through get fact. I'm up to like question 60, but I just haven't had time to go back and play. But I like you know me. I'm with you. I love the trivia games. Yeah, they're a lot of fun and these are very funny. So I enjoyed the first episode and I'm set up a notification.

So they'll ping me when new ones are available. Yeah. Very cool. I lost my bell. I redid my studio and I lost my bell. Damn it. Now over at Gizmodo, somebody went through the exact same experience I was going through and I found this very interesting.

So we've got some bullet points here, but I'm going to give my experience, which again is the exact same. I have an iPhone 7. It's been wonderful. I've used it for a long time now, have not upgraded, don't need to, does everything I needed to do. But I was starting to have problems with it charging. The lightning connector was getting funky.

I don't know what was going on. I would plug the cord in. It would signal that it was charging. And then as soon as I put the phone down, it would signal that it was unplugged. And over the time I started to develop a strategy where I basically had to like prop my phone up a little bit at an angle and they would keep its weight in the connector and the contacts.

So it would actually charge. Now this became a low level annoyance, but as you know, with low level annoyances, when you've got, when you're busy as all hell, uh, they get pushed down the chain. Like I was like, I got to look into this. I got to see what's going on. I got to get to the Apple store or something. I'm not buying a new phone because they're crazy expensive.

So it was just annoying. And then it got to the point where like I would charge it in overnight and I would wake up and find out that it hadn't charged at all. And my phone was like at 10%, which is a pain in the butt. So then I ran across this article and this guy went through the exact same thing. And, uh, apparently he woke up one morning, a little bit hungover and, uh, kind of looked into the thing and just saw some colors in there.

And then he grabbed what was at hand nail, not recommended to use a metal nail, but shoved a metal nail in there and just started scraping out lint. Lots and lots and lots of pocket lint. Yep. And that solved the problem.

I did not know this. I have never dealt with this before. The last four months have been an ongoing nightmare of charging. And, uh, so I did not grab a, uh, a nail. I went and grabbed a skewer for a wooden skewer for kebabs and, uh, shoved that thing in there and just started pulling out lint after piece of lint after piece of lint.

Shook it around a little bit, got the air can, blew that in there. More stuff came out and now charges perfectly. Yeah, dude, this has been around since the three GS. I can't believe you didn't never happen to me before. It's never happened to me before. I didn't know what was going on. So thank God for algorithms that push Gizmodo's articles in my Facebook.

That is so funny. Yeah. So yes, don't use metal for that. Don't use metal, use something wood or like a plastic toothpick or better yet. And I do like this line. Um, this is a good time to advise all of you that if you're suddenly motivated to Marie Kondo, your iPhone lightning port, just take it to an Apple care location where there is reported.

They have a special brush designed specifically to clean out lightning ports. Apple, you could sell that brush. I would probably buy one. Just get a fucking toothpick, man. Well, that's all you need is a toothpick. Yeah, perfect. Everything works great now. That's all you need. I can't believe you're an iPhone seven and now the 10 is out and you didn't know this.

This came out with the three GS. Never happened to me before. How am I supposed to know if it's never happened to me before? Okay. Okay. I think I mentioned it on the show, but you don't listen to my segments on the show. So no, I don't know. What were you saying? So yeah, exactly. And you're not going to listen to this one either. I have found a new photo app that I am absolutely in love with.

I've been using exactly. See, there he goes. There he goes. I've been using Lightroom since version one. And I think I'm on version six now. And the problem with Lightroom is it is dog slow, dog slow. So I recently edited an interview for Kevin Rose's show for an upcoming podcast that he has with Trey Ratcliffe.

And he was talking about this product called Luminar 3. And I went and got it. And if you have photos and Brian, this really pertains to you too. So don't fall asleep again. If you have thousands and thousands of photos that you need to organize, this is by far the fastest app I've ever seen.

I see it's powered by AI. It's got, I was good. Well, you just stepped on my joke there. But as far as speed goes, I put in 10,000 photos into this thing. And these are, I'm not talking like little photos, like from the iPhone.

I'm talking about 45 meg TIFs. I'm talking about 35 meg Raws, all of this stuff. And the cataloging on this is so unbelievably fast. I just have no idea how it's done. No idea. So it must be the AI that they have.

They do have AI filters for sky enhancing and things like that, which are incredible, I have to say. As far as, I mean, yes, I know. We all know what AI really means. But their filters are really, really good. And you can create custom filter stacks that you can apply to a bunch of different photos.

But I just have to say, for the organizational aspect, I've always had to have one folder per year for Lightroom. I haven't been able to, like, put my entire photo library in one catalog that I could, you know, tag and search over everything.

With this thing, I can. It's under 100 bucks. It's super cheap. And they've got a 60-day money-back guarantee. It's $69, you know. So well under $100. And I just cannot believe how goddamn good this thing is.

It really just blows my mind. So I am thankfully going to hopefully be stepping away from Lightroom soon. Because Lightroom 6 is still a turd. I mean, it does what it needs to do, but it is still a turd. So I just, that's my, you know, that really is my software recommendation of the week for photo stuff.

I could not believe it. And I'm actually going to end up setting up a SmugMug account because I did some research and because people were asking me after the previous shows when I was talking about the photo stuff. Yeah. I went back and I re-looked at SmugMug. And, I mean, they used to have the worst design of anybody in the history of photo catalogs.

They fixed it pretty much. But it's still, it's not cheap. It's going to cost like $180 a year. But, I really like how they have it set up and I can sell prints if somebody wants to buy a print of mine. You know, after, I mean, I've got close to 100,000 photos that I can just dump up there and some people can, you know, pick up a print or two if they want.

It's really cool. And finally, my last recommendation for absent doodads is Feedly. I have fallen back in love with Feedly. Before, they were just kind of a tie-in for my RSS feeds and my Reader 3 account.

Well, once I got the new iPad Pro 12-inch, I found out that Reader 3 has not been updated in a very long time. And it sucks on the new iPads. So, I had to go back and I'm like, okay, what am I going to do? Well, so all my feeds are at Feedly.

So, why not just go check out their app and see if it's any good? Turns out, it's amazing. It is really well done. It's really easy to be able to go through the thousands of headlines that we have to go through every week for this episode and the other episodes.

And with the pencil, it makes it really easy to scroll. I just sit back and I'm like, no, no, no. Oh, that looks interesting. Let me look at that one. Then I save it to pinboard and bring it into our show notes. It's great. So, I highly recommend Feedly for the new iPad Pro 12-inch if you've got one of those.

It's a great little app. And I can't recommend it more. Excellent. And since the mantle of parental stuff on the internet has fallen onto my shoulders for obvious reasons. And I got a couple tweets about this particular thing that's going on. The viral Momo challenge that's out there, which is supposedly popping up on YouTube.

And it's telling kids to hurt themselves and commit suicide. That is a fake, everyone. It is a fake. It does not exist. There are no videos out there. This has been kicking around for a while. It's just come back again. And I saw a really interesting article that I urge all parents to read, especially if they're not particularly internet savvy.

It's over at Wired. How not to fall for viral scares. And the little plug for it. The disconnect between how the olds, that would be us, and their children use the internet leads to parental anxiety. And in this case, so this week's resurfacing of the viral fake Momo challenge, panic and misinformation. Arm yourself with some information, parents.

Please go read this article. Link in the show notes. I ran across this at travelandleisure.com, and I found this a little bit interesting. I know we're not supposed to be bagging on millennials, but how much money would change your life, Jason?

According to a survey from one Poland self-lender, the average American considers about $20,000 the amount of money that they would need to turn their life around in 2019. Now, I know that you and I are at slightly different ends of the spectrum, but I would actually, a life-changing amount of money would need to be considerably more.

For me, I'm $100,000 in debt. Of course, I need a little bit more than that. I would need a little bit more for life-changing for other reasons. For me to, like, for my life to drastically change, I'd need to, like, have enough to pay off the mortgages and things of that nature.

But what I found interesting is that... I just want to get to zero. You're talking about paying off your extra homes and all this other shit. Look, I want to get to zero, so you give me $100,000. Like I said, I realize that we're at slightly different edges of the scale here, but we're not quite the millennials yet, so this is interesting.

For the average millennial, those now aged between 19 and 39, they say they would only need to be given $5,000 for them to consider that amount of money life-changing. Because that's going to get them to the Fyre Festival next year. Speaking of that, yeah, so we'll not dwell on that too much, but the Fyre Festival, in L.A., we had a recent event called...

What do they call it again? The L.A. Beer and World Barbecue Festival, which is being called the Fyre Festival of Barbecues. Now, I've never been a big fan of beer festivals or food festivals of that nature because it's always felt overpriced, overpopulated.

You have to wait in lines for small amounts of food. It's beer. You've never been to Tasty Chicago, my friend. Well, that's probably a very well-run one. Most of them aren't. This one, in particular, went spectacularly bad. It was held at the Mandarin Plaza here in Chinatown in Los Angeles.

It was an unmitigated disaster with a severely delayed start, hours-long lines, not enough staff, and heavy overcrowding. The events-based app called Fever, the company behind it, is in full damage control mode. Didn't appear that they intended to defraud anyone, as with Fyre.

They simply got overmatched and oversold things because of greed. They're in the process of offering refunds as of today. The plan was to give attendees who paid $32 per person, one drink ticket, and three food tickets to try out a variety of worldwide barbecue styles. VIP people were, of course, able to pay for more and get more access.

According to various posts on the event's Facebook page, including plenty of video and photo evidence, three deep lines drew around the block for hours before people were even let inside. So you oversold by a lot. Some reports say that there are only one or two or three small bars to handle full-capacity crowds, and the lines for just one vendor took over an hour, with the whole event only spanning four hours total.

What? Oh, God. Yeah. So there you go. So I have a bit of a mini rant here. And look, people, doing shit is hard. Anything. Putting together these festivals, they're hard. They require work.

They require funding. They require planning. Lots and lots of it. And you have to step away from your profits and keep in mind the ability and the user experience. I've been involved with enough attempts to do things and seen them fizzle out because we got smart and said, we cannot pull this off. Now people just charge through, even though they know it's going to fail.

Knock it off, people. I loved on the Fyre documentary when they were really starting to, like, figure things out. And they're like, guys, we have to deal with poop. It's not something you really have to deal with, you know, in your normal day-to-day life.

It's like, guys, we're going to have a lot of shit. So we're going to have to figure out how to deal with that. It's one of the, you know, unintended consequences of putting on a festival where people eat and drink. There's logistics. Logistics involve poop. And if you're throwing a barbecue and beer festival, logistics also encounter the number of people that you can run through any particular thing in any particular time frame.

You can't oversell just because the demand is there. Yeah. Damn it. I have to say, the only festival I've really been to in the past 20 years is Riot Fest. And those guys have it down. They should just know what they're doing. Yeah.

They should really just sell their expertise to other venues because I tell you what, I mean, I never had to wait in line for a bathroom, even though near the end of the run for the concerts, the bathrooms can get what you might call apocalyptic.

Yeah. When there is poop and toilet paper rising out of the actual toilets themselves, that really is not something you want. It's not what you hope for. Definitely not what you hope for. It kind of reminded me of the end of Dogma, if you've seen that movie. But yeah, no, but I mean, you can do it right.

You really can do it right. And these people who just come in and just say, I got some money. Let's do a festival. Yeah. You need to do your due diligence. Damn right. Closing shout outs. From the word getting old. Damn it.

Jason files. Some sad news. Former Cure drummer Andy Anderson has passed away age 68 after battling terminal cancer. He worked with Robert Smith in 1983 on the Cure side project with Susie and the Banshees, Steve Severin called The Glove, which is a great album. He played drums on that.

He also played on Speak My Language and The Love Cats, which became The Cure's first top 10 hit in the UK. And he worked on the album The Top and appeared on the live album concert as well. After leaving The Cure, he went on to play with people like Iggy Pop, Glenn Matlock, Edward Collins, Peter Gabriel, and Isaac Hayes.

He was a very talented drummer. So that is sad news to hear. And we have some even crazier weird breaking news as of right now, which I just saw. Luke Perry from Beverly Hills 90210 is sedated in hospital after suffering a massive stroke at his L.A. home.

Yeah, so he's in a medically induced coma right now, which is sad news to hear as well. You know, he's only 52. Yeah, well, he is only 52. Not was. He still is. Still is. Didn't I say he is only 52? I thought you said was. I'm like, oh, no. Can somebody come here and fact check this?

The sad thing is he's the only person that has not signed on to the reboot. Mm hmm. Well, yeah, I don't think he's going to be in it now anyways. Yeah. Well, maybe this is karma for not signing back on. Wow. That's dark. Well, it's closing shout outs has turned into just the graveyard of grumpy old geeks.

So, well, it seems like the appropriate place to give call outs to people. So it's unfortunately tends to be quite negative. And then Jason says, go die in a fire. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks to support the show and keep us on the air.

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