328: Slanderous & Unnecessary

This episode is brought to you by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. 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. Guten tag, Herr DeFilippo. Ah, guten tag to you. Actually, it'd be guten morgen. Oh, yes. Guten morgen. See, even I know that. Was ist los? Ah, nicht. No, everything. Everything.

So now we have some over fuck's sake follow up. Oh, man, I saw you put this in there and I'm like, oh, great. Now I'm going to get a bunch of angry emails directed at me again. Of course, because you got me on the bandwagon now. So, yes, I saw this and we just do this just because I guess we like to troll some people.

But they're trolling us. New Zealand has a measles outbreak, the worst in years with 22 cases confirmed. Wonder why that happened. Well, it turns out and they buried the lead on this one. New Zealand's Ministry of Health said in a statement that since 2012, all cases of measles in New Zealand came from travelers bringing the disease from overseas.

And guess who's going to New Zealand a lot? Rich Californians. Yeah. To go buy their, you know, buy their bug out home. But the problem is that they don't even have enough vaccine in New Zealand. They've got a shortage of vaccines. So they're working to get that fixed.

But yeah. Yeah. Small country, you know, don't need that much. No. You know, they thought, yeah, just give us a six pack. We're good to go. Yeah, we're good. Everybody's got it here. We're fine. Apparently one in five people in New Zealand are adequately immunized. So they've got an issue. Oops. Oops.

Well, and I just wanted to throw in another story about this, too, because even if you even if you don't care about your fellow man and you don't want to join our wonderful little society where we've basically eradicated a lot of these diseases through immunization. How about your pocketbook? Why don't you want? Do you want to protect that?

Because let me tell you, it costs nearly a million dollars to treat an unvaccinated kid that got tetanus. Yes. Yeah. Shaking my head at this one. An unvaccinated six year old boy in Oregon almost died from tetanus, the state's first reported case of the deadly disease in over 30 years.

Yeah. Yes. He contracted it in 2017 when he scraped his head. Six days later, he was airlifted to the hospital after he started having muscle spasms and difficulty breathing, along with lockjaw. When the doctors found out that he had not received any vaccinations, he was given diphtheria, tetanus and ADTAP immunizations, along with a medicine that contained tetanus antibodies.

It took eight weeks in inpatient care, 47 days of which were in the ICU, where he was put in a dark room with earplugs to lessen the severe spasms and pain he was experiencing. He also had to have a breathing tube inserted. After 57 days of hospitalization, the boy spent an additional 17 days in rehab just to be able to walk more than 20 feet, not including the helicopter transportation and any follow-up care, of which there is a lot.

The staggering cost of his medical expenses was $811,929. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Guess who ends up paying for that? Yeah. So, I love this last quote here.

This hospitalization would almost certainly have been prevented if the patient had been vaccinated against tetanus. Dr. Carl Erickson, one of the physicians who treated the boy, told NBC News in an email. Most school-aged children have received five doses of tetanus vaccine, with each dose costing approximately $30. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, but that's not even the head scratcher. That's not the kicker. That's not the kicker. But despite their son's near-death experience, the anti-vaxxer parents refused his second dose of the DTAP vaccine, along with any other recommendations from the immunizations, and the CDC reported that.

And so, you are going to let your kid go through this hell again, possibly, because you're- See, this is the whole thing. You can't even reason with people anymore. Nothing will change their minds. It is what it is. Especially science.

Yeah. Especially science. Science is evil. Yeah. Well, I'm down with DTAP. Yeah, you know me. Speaking of the CDC, though, the city of Austin is doing a study in e-scooter-related accidents, along with the CDC. Just in time for South by Southwest.

Exactly. Exactly. Because right now, there is no national database for tracking scooter accidents. Mm-hmm. The thing about this article, which is, you know, from WSOCTV.com, it's just going to- I know it's going to autoplay a video.

I know. No, no, it didn't. Thank God. In their video, though, they show how they've actually put signs on the streets in Austin. Mm-hmm. And I love this. It says, no pads, with a little scooter, you know, painted above it.

And South by Southwest is going on right now. And please, dear God, somebody change those signs to no pedo and put a picture of R. Kelly. That's all you got to do. You got to do. R. Kelly Lane and Michael Jackson Street. There you go. Well, Senator Elizabeth Warren has come out and taken a big swing at trying to break up Silicon Valley and looking at the largest tech companies in America.

She's released her roadmap, one of the first major proposals of a presidential run, which includes ambitious antitrust moves like undoing Facebook's purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp and separating Google search from the company's ad business. She also wants legislation to prevent platforms from competing on the same marketplaces they own, i.e.

Amazon cannot do Amazon Basics anymore because that arrangement gives them a big advantage compared to other people's products. So what's going to happen here? Well, what we can expect is significant pushback, no matter how well her candidacy fares, and particularly if other Democratic presidential contenders unveil similar policies because of lobbying.

It's kind of insane. So this article really kind of gets into how deep into lobbying in Washington, Silicon Valley is now the fact that, you know, Amazon, Facebook and Google have all hired former top aides from the Obama and Clinton administrations, you know, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg is a Clinton administration veteran as well.

The amount of money that they're spending. Amazon has nearly 100 lobbyists on and hired on more than a dozen lobbying firms to throw its punches. Facebook, Google and Amazon have spent a total of forty eight million dollars on lobbying last year. So good luck. We should be lobbyists. We should be.

Yeah. Yeah. At least they get paid. Yeah. So we have a link in the show notes to her full full write up on what she wants to do, which is pretty interesting. It's of course over on medium. Now, the thing about this last week, we're like, there's been so much digital ink spilled on the Mark Zuckerberg privacy issue.

This has eclipsed that tenfold easily. It has. It really has. It's everywhere. And the best thing that I've read so far is over at Stratechery, Ben Thompson's newsletter that we subscribe to. Yep. He runs Senator Warren through the ringer. He makes some really valid points and he does agree on certain areas, but nails her on the issues where she where she missed the mark.

And there are plenty of issues where she missed the mark. That's good. That's good. And I hope somebody on her team reads it. I'm just glad that somebody is trying to say something now. It's opening the dialogue, as it were. Exactly. And he totally broke down her Microsoft antitrust argument and shows how it's completely irrelevant relevant to her claims, which is very interesting.

And the now that she's come out against Apple, it's completely off the mark with Apple. There are a few issues where Apple can be dinged for sure. Yeah. And that goes back to ownership of the payment platform that app developers are forced to use. Yeah. Which is a real, you know, that really is monopolistic that you can't use your own payment scheme in there.

And also how Apple does use their platform when it comes to streaming services, like they promote Apple music over things like Spotify. That kind of stuff should be called into question. It's a really long article. And I got through, I skimmed it this morning because I just didn't have time to read the whole thing. But there are a lot of really good points in there.

So it's well worth it as well. It was definitely a good rebuttal and not even necessarily a rebuttal. It was more like you're kind of thinking the right thing, but here's where you're wrong about it. And here's where you're missing a few things. And exactly. So it's a it's a really good open dialogue that I hope that these teams are having with each other because it's kind of clarifying what we should be looking at and what what we shouldn't.

So it's really enjoyable to read both. Yeah, because if she's going to be doing this, I'd rather her have the tools to do it properly and the information to do it properly, because would that not be nice? It would be nice. Oh, my God. Government knowing what they're doing. And now and you can't make this shit up news. Facebook backtracks after removing Senator Warren's ads calling for Facebook breakup.

Yes, that kind of prove her point. Kind of kind of did. Oh, it was fantastic. It was fantastic. So, yeah, they basically said, oh, our bad, our bad. And apparently what they were saying was it's because she used Facebook's trademark in it.

You're not allowed to do that. But OK, yeah, you're not allowed to use their corporate logo. And so they are. Oh, they're putting them back. They're putting them back. I don't know if they had to go remove the Facebook corporate logo or not, or if they just have too much pie on their face from the whole thing.

Because it's just like I can just have her see her in her office going, see, see what they're doing. Exactly. It's just kind of proving my point. Well done, Facebook. He's kind of stepped on your own petard there. And what's great about this. Didn't. So, yeah. What's great about this whole thing is, you know how much press she's gotten over this, just this one thing.

Oh, this is great. Yeah, this is great. So it's great for her. Yeah. And the ads were limited in size and reach, with each costing under $100, according to disclosure details. And she's now gotten millions of dollars worth of attention. This is the Trump plan in effect for Warren. Well done.

Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Zuck. Thanks for the free ads. Yeah. Well, speaking about big tech, there's a good argument being made right now that Facebook is actually going to be taking on Apple. This is more of the ink spilt over the Zuckerberg privacy pivot, as it were, because they're going to try to dominate private online communication to the same degree that it dominates what we call social networking today.

This will put them finally, for the first time, in direct competition with Apple, because so many people are using, you know, obviously Apple's text messaging system and really, really like it. The other interesting thing about this article is that they also point out the same thing that I've been saying, which is Facebook's ultimate vision is something akin to an American actually global everywhere except for China version of WeChat, the Chinese super app that people use for everything.

So that is definitely where he's trying to go with this. But like they say, the goal puts that goal puts Facebook for the first time in direct competition, not only with Snapchat, Google and Twitter, but now also with Apple. This feels very Hitler-esque. We're fighting all over the world.

Let's go after Russia, too. Didn't work very well. Can't take on everybody at once. Yeah. Yeah. At least I'm not the one that referenced Hitler this early in the show. Well, not Hitler in and of himself, more his battle plans. Yeah. Where they spread themselves far too thin by trying to take on everybody at once.

When they did, he did say. Just waited a little. Everybody that plays Risk knows if you wait a little bit and take them on, knock them down one by one, you do much better. Yep. Yep. And he did say, though, he was going to leave Russia alone. Yeah. He changed his mind. Probably. I'm sure. I'm sure. I don't know how we're getting into Dan Carlin territory on this podcast, but do you remember Palmer Lucky?

Vaguely. He started Oculus Rift. Oh, right, right. Yeah. Then he sold it to Facebook and he's basically a Trump butt boy. And he left Facebook and started a new company called Anduril Industries. Is that like taken from Lord of the Rings?

I get some nerd shit, probably for sure. And do you remember Project Maven? I do remember Project Maven. Yes. That's the project that Google actually pulled out of because of dissent from the employees. Right. Which was basically for having, you know, using AI to have drones, like drone footage scanned for like people like to try and figure out who's a bad guy, who's a good guy, who's a donkey, you know, and just go through the footage and do that.

Well, his company has won the contract. Oh, imagine that. Yeah. How lucky. Yeah. How lucky for Palmer Lucky. Yeah. Hmm. Trump supporter. Big money. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Okay. Yeah. But he's been running another little side project called the Lattice System, which is used on the U.S. border for picking out people that they can go after.

You know, they're basically drones and cameras to figure out when people are trying to cross the border. Really? Okay. Hey, can't we call this a digital wall and be done with this wall shit then? Hey, good call. Good call. Yeah. We got a digital wall. Call Victory, tweet Victory Trump and walk away.

Yep. There you go. Far, far away. Yeah. As far away as possible. But apparently it's working, like I said. So it's interesting. And they're going to use some of the tech from the Lattice System into Project Maven. Okay. And yeah, he's down for defense contracting.

So that's his new thing. He wants to be a full-on defense contractor. That's where the money is. Yeah. Smart move. All right. So I found this great article on Recode about Twitter, and it's called Inside Twitter's Ambitious Plan to Change the Way We Tweet.

So a year ago, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced plans for a somewhat idealistic solution, not just for minimizing, you know, kind of what they're calling Twitter dunks, which is just the habit of hopping on Twitter and just shitting on people left, right, and center, because that's what Twitter's for. That's what Twitter's for. That's a feature, not a bug.

Yes. But also for minimizing all kinds of angry, vile, and abusive user behaviors that don't necessarily violate its rules. He wants to invent a new metric that measures Twitter's health and then optimize for it. Interesting that he refuses to kick anybody off Twitter that does horrible things. You'd think that would be part of plan A, but no.

So Twitter even partnered with outside researchers to come up with new metrics for what healthy actually looks like. If Twitter can identify what user interactions are healthy, the thinking goes that maybe it can change its product to encourage more of those behaviors while discouraging more antisocial conduct.

So you get a lot of engagement if you dunk on people and you get a lot of likes and a lot of retweets, and that encourages you to be mean, basically, they're saying, which is the internet in a nutshell, not just Twitter. And they're trying to imagine ways of changing the product in order to discourage that. So it's a nice idea, but apparently it's taking a lot longer than expected, according to exclusive interviews with both Twitter employees and company partners.

The research teams that Twitter announced last July to help them work on the project haven't even started yet. One of the two teams has abandoned the project altogether before even starting. Internal metrics Twitter is building on its own are still in the experimentation phase and aren't being tested in the wild.

And this article is about goes on for another 100 pages or so. You don't need to read anymore because basically that tells you right there in a nutshell that they aren't doing Jack's squat. They're not doing anything. Nothing. Nothing. It's all been shut down.

Well, you can continue to read if you enjoy schadenfreude because they really get into how these things are falling apart, which is very funny. Yeah. I mean, this is a this is taken right out of Zuckerberg's playbook. Let's talk about something that's going to fix the problems. Let's get through the news cycle and then let's not do a goddamn thing about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've also talked a lot about how we should never build your house on somebody else's yard because you don't have much control of that. And a bunch of merchants, thousands of merchants have found that out about Amazon this week. So thousands of merchants that sell on Amazon woke up to a rude surprise on Monday morning as they got messages that Amazon was no longer placing orders for their products and in some cases that their accounts were completely being shut down.

So these vendors, which is the term used for brands and other merchants that sell products to Amazon at wholesale prices, were simply told that Amazon won't be placing its weekly orders for their products like it normally does. In other cases, they told that they were told that if they wanted to keep selling their products on their platform, they should set up a seller account where they would sell goods directly to Amazon customers rather than to the company itself.

They haven't really explained why, saying only in a statement to Recode. We regularly review our seller partner relationships and may make changes when we see an opportunity to provide customers with an improved selection value and convenience. In other words, it's our platform. Fuck off. Mm hmm. Well, I have a theory about about that, which ties in perfectly with my next article, which is Amazon caught selling counterfeits of publishers, computer books again.

Apparently, counterfeit goods on Amazon is a massive problem, a very big problem. And Bill Pollack, who runs No Starch Press, has been calling out Amazon again for them selling counterfeit copies of his books.

Right. And it has gotten to the point now when this just cracks me up, not for Bill, but the fact that people can do this. What people are doing is saying that we publish this book, we're going to upload the text of the book, and then we're going to have Amazon print copies of the book for us and then sell them as if we are the official seller and thus cutting out the actual person who makes the book completely.

That's amazing. It's unbelievable. Because what Amazon doesn't do when you upload the text to their CreateSpace system, which is what does the book printing. Let me guess. They don't run it through any sort of machine learning tool to see if that thing already exists, which would be ridiculously easy for them to do.

Or just verify that that person owns the copyright. Right. You know, that's all you got to verify that these people actually own what they're uploading. I mean, even I worked at Kinko's for two years and we had a very strict policy of not making copies of anything that nobody could prove ownership of.

Like if you came in with an album cover and you wanted to make a copy of it, sorry, no, we can't do that. We would not copy any copyrighted materials, but we would point over and say, the self-service copiers are over there if you would like to go avail yourself of their services. Right. We were not allowed to press the button and Amazon has automated, you know, wholesale copyright theft.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's insane. And they know they have a problem with this because it came out in one of their earnings calls that they have a problem with copyright and people selling pirated goods. So I'm thinking that this might be one of the ways that they're starting to crack down on this because we don't know what the merchants were selling that got kicked off.

Yeah. So this could have been a copyright crackdown. We just don't know. Yeah. Other people are of that same thought as well. So with that, so it is what it is. But again, it just really illustrates how, uh, how, how dangerous it is to, to build your, your living on somebody else's lawn.

But as they say, go get a new seller account, what they have done is lifted restrictions on seller accounts now because they have had a, they basically had it in place where if you have a seller account and you sell a product on our platform, you cannot sell it for cheaper anywhere else.

Right. So now they have lifted that ban. So now you can sell it in different places at different prices. Oh, that's good. Yeah. We've got no details on why the decision came, but apparently Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter. And, uh, it's, uh, he sent it to the FTC though.

And it, uh, it says, uh, the decision comes in the wake of a letter from Senator Richard Blumenthal arguing that the practice would stifle market competition and artificially inflate prices. And he sent that on December 19th last year. So it seems to have, uh, had some impact. Good. So I think this might be Amazon actually trying to clean up its mess in the wake of the, uh, the Warren, you know, going on.

I think everybody's trying to, you know, put on their, their best Sunday dress. Yeah. It's time for a little spring cleaning. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, ah, shit. Everybody's looking at us now. I guess people are looking at us now. We got to, we got, we got, we can't, we can't do this illegal stuff. So, so blatantly anymore. Yeah.

Blatantly. We still do it on the, on the download on the DL and in sad news, which is something that I'd never thought I would be saying Adobe shockwave will be discontinued on April 9th. Well, I thought it was discontinued on April 9th, 20, 2005.

Yeah. I was about to say like, it doesn't really exist anymore, but it did make me sad as well for all the complaining about flash and shockwave and all that sort of stuff that we've done over the years, it kind of is one of the last vestiges of the old web that we came up developing. Yeah.

I mean, I, I don't, I never did flash, but I did shockwave with our mutual friend, Dave Riegler for paramount back in the day. Like all of our stuff back then were shockwave games and it was, it was cool. It was cool stuff, you know, doing it in director and, and spitting it out.

It was fun. And the crazy thing that I didn't even realize was that director was still working up until 2017. Yeah. I had no idea director was still a thing. So the cool part is you can still get the player.

So I think I'm going to go for PC. So I think I'm going to go grab that player and for my, for my, my PC and be able to actually at least maybe load some of the old games that I've got and do video captures of them. Although they were written in like shockwave two and it's probably sure this is like shockwave 27 now.

I don't know if they'll still run, but it would be fun to try. Right. So, you know, RIP shockwave, you, you are actually missed. You were, you were fun while you lasted. Yep. And other interesting news. Uh, we've talked a lot about the different movie pass companies. Cinema is one of them.

Uh, something strange is going on there. Shocking. Customers are reporting that their accounts are being wrongfully terminated. As of beginning last week, subscribers of the discounted movie ticket company took to Twitter and Reddit because that's customer service these days where they report their accounts that have been closed for suspected fraudulent activity.

Um, cinema has not really given any response to this. It's just been vague. Uh, some customers receive emails saying their accounts were terminated by the system automatically and that no other details could be provided at all. Uh, cinema told business insiders that users were kicked out for fraudulent activity, but the customers claim that's untrue and unfair.

Some were apparently asked to tip the company, a feature that they were testing before being cut off. And, uh, cinema has just said that it has uncovered more than a thousand variations of fraud and has improved its fraud detection systems accordingly. And that it detected fraudulent activities by a number of users whose memberships have been subsequently terminated due to violations of the terms of service.

And again, nobody really understands what's going on. The funny thing is, it's probably cinema's fraud that's getting shut off. Probably, you know, these movie tickets. It scams are pretty, pretty scammy scam. Yeah, it's all pretty scammy scam scams anyways. So who knows what's going on there?

And we have an interesting new legal case going on right now. Philadelphia has passed a law requiring almost all businesses to accept cash payments, effectively banning cashless stores. This comes into force on July 1st and any business that violates it faces a fine of up to $2,000 per violation.

That's pretty hefty. Why is it almost all businesses? Do they actually say? Well, they're making exceptions for a handful of things. I was going to get to that. Let me skip down to find it. There are a few exemptions to the Philly law, namely parking garages and lots. So, you know, nobody there. Online and phone transactions.

Retailers with a membership model such as Costco. And companies where a credit card deposit is usually necessary, like hotels and rental car businesses. So there's a handful of exceptions, which, you know, we've kind of gotten used to. But I like this. I like the fact that we're holding on to the idea of cash. Hell yeah.

Yeah. I think it's bullshit when stores go credit card only. Yeah, I don't go there. 99% of my transactions in the real world are cash. Most of mine are credit card anyways, but I like the idea. So good for them. After our debacle of the chip and pin rule out here in the States, I just said.

What a mess it has been. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, similar legislation is also under consideration in cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. Massachusetts, meanwhile, has long required all businesses to accept cash as well. Good. As it should be. Yeah, absolutely.

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Well, I've discussed at length my love-hate relationship with the Adam Carolla podcast. I go through periods of time where I enjoy listening to it. I go through periods of time where I can't listen to it at all because it's the same stories all the time. So it comes down to, is it a good guest, or I'll just watch or listen to the second hour, which is the news, and that's news.

So he can't always be repeating the same stories in news, can he? You'd think, but he's pretty good at it. He figures out a way to work it in there. But in my longstanding tradition of wanting to support things that I do listen to or enjoy or watch or consume, I do consume his podcast, so I feel like every now and then I need to throw a few ducats at him.

I'm not going to buy his booze because I don't care. I'm not going to buy his merch because I don't care. Have you tried Mangria? I have tried Mangria before. Oh my god. I don't need to be that drunk. Seriously? No one needs to be that drunk. It is way too strong, so I will not be purchasing that anymore.

I don't care for his beer either. I tried it once. I didn't know he even made beer. Yeah, he's doing beer now too. When we did, Jordan Harbinger was on his show up in Northern California. We went up there and hung out with them and did the show, if I can speak.

I'm still suffering from my Mangria. I had like five of them. And fortunately, it was a very long drive home to San Jose. And I basically passed out in the back of the car because, man, I had no idea that stuff was that potent.

It's tasty, though. It's basically wine with vodka added to it. Yeah, it's really all it is. I don't even know how to describe it. It is. It's sangria with vodka. Yeah. So I don't, yeah, again, like I said, that's not a way I'm going to support him to throw any money his way. And I learned the hard way a long time ago, don't buy his books because if you listen to his podcast, he basically that is his books.

So I wasn't going to do that. But I heard he put out a stand up. Now, you know, he's been talking about it a lot. And I figured I can support him that way by renting it because I know he was complaining because Netflix wouldn't pick it up and all this other stuff. But you can rent it. And I figured $4.99 stand up.

It's got to be somewhat different from his podcast. It's a different format. So yeah, well, the thing is, he's just not that great of a stand up. It was not that good. And it was a lot of the same stories, but it wasn't even really the best stories that he has. It was nice to have the visuals that go with his normally repeated stories on his podcast.

So that was a plus, I guess. But if you even have a casual relationship with this podcast, you've heard this all before. Yeah, he did a lot of stand up before the show we did up in NorCal. And I think there were two new stories, but it was like 35 minutes of just rehashing the old stuff.

Yeah. Well, here's something to keep in mind. Who am I to tell Adam Carolla, the basically king of podcasting, how to do his job? But if all you do is podcasts all day long, you're not getting any new experiences to tell anyone. That's the problem. Yeah. Go ahead and have some way too many shows.

Yeah, that is the problem. He's stuck in the studio way too much, way too much. Yeah. All of his new stories are just what happened when he was going to another stand up gig. Yeah. What went wrong? And then that's it. You know, it's the great thing that happened to like all the bands in the 70s and 80s that just toured all the time.

And then all of a sudden, all they could do is write songs about touring. That's true. No other life experience happening. It's kind of sad. Kind of sad. So I finished the Umbrella Academy. Okay. Recommended. Oh, my God. Yes. Really? Highly recommended.

Fucking loved it. Okay. I will check it out. Absolutely loved it. It was really, really, really good. I've been under the weather. So I remember I put on the first episode and I had hoped to make it through the entire first episode. And I think I got 15 minutes in and I woke up four hours later on the couch.

So I will attempt again. Yeah. Start from the beginning again because it's worth it. It really is worth it. And I saw a trailer for The Inventor, Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. And this is the Theranos story based on the book Bad Blood. Right.

And it's an Alex Gibney documentary. He always does good work. Yep. Most of the time. And I'm really looking forward to this. This comes out next week. And actually, wait a minute. I think this comes out next week.

I think I'll edit that. I think you might need to leave that in. So I bit the bullet because we have Game of Thrones coming and I kind of wanted to start watching John Oliver again. So I got HBO Now. Oh, dude. Did you see this week of John Oliver? Yeah.

The Robocall one. Oh, so good. Anything that goes after Agit Pie, I'm happy about. Yeah, I love that he still has the big mug behind the desk. Great. So, yeah, I signed up for HBO Now. Works pretty well. Works pretty well. Same thing as before. Not the best interface in the world, obviously.

But it gets the job done and it works on my Roku TV and my giant, massive iPad. So that's all I really care about because that's the thing. It's like, yeah, I could go to Sweden for Game of Thrones. But no, you have to watch that in real time or it is going to get ruined for you the instant you see anybody on any kind of social media or even when I'm scanning my RSS feeds in the morning to get news for the show.

There are people who are just so stupid who put spoilers in the titles. It doesn't it doesn't even matter for me because I actually have to be off of social media for three hours before Game of Game of Thrones airs here because I have so many friends in Toronto and they all post in real time.

So basically when on Sunday nights Game of Thrones comes around, I am off social media as soon as 6 p.m. hits. Yeah. Yeah. I think, though, with HBO Now, you can watch it in I don't know when exactly. Yeah, I think they release it East Coast time.

Yeah. On HBO now. So it's going to be even worse this time. Well, get HBO now for a couple of weeks and then cancel. Only 15 bucks. What are you going to what do you got to lose? Actually, no, to be fair, I can watch the earlier version. Well, now that I have a kid, I can't. But I used to be able to watch the earlier version because when you pay for cable, you get East and West Coast feeds of HBO.

Oh, that's nice. That's nice. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to that and just digging through. So, yes, now I have another subscription, but it will go away as soon as as soon as Game of Thrones is over until I do the prequel. Yeah. So I got a couple of years for that one.

I do have to pick up a star subscription now, though, because American Gods is back. Oh, yeah, I've seen some reviews saying it's not that great this time around. Yeah, everybody said that about the first one, though, too. So I don't care. I know that book backwards and forwards, and they did. I thought they did a fantastic job on season one.

So I'm definitely going to pick that one up. And I had totally forgotten that Apple's new streaming service is making a Time Bandit series. Do you remember that? Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with Time Bandits. I want to like it, but I don't.

Yeah, me too. That's really the problem with it. I'm like, you know, there's something going on here that I should really like. I should really enjoy this, but I don't. And I've gone back to it a couple times to try to enjoy it, and I still don't enjoy it. So I don't think I'm going to be watching this.

Yeah, well, I might because Taiki Watiti, I don't know how you spell that right, but he's come on board as like the main writer or he's going to co-write and direct the pilot. Now, I don't know if you remember who he is, but he's the guy that did Thor Ragnarok.

What we do in Shadows, which is, you know, pretty damn good. And one of my favorite movies, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which was a lovely little movie from New Zealand. And if you watched that movie before you saw Thor Ragnarok, you'd see like all the same characters in there.

Like Sam Neill's in it and a bunch of other people. Right. And I have hopes that he might be able to save it, but we'll see. All right. Yeah, we'll see. So I will let you jump into that for a first and you can tell me if it changed your mind about Time Bandits or not.

Yeah, well, that one that one's going to straight to Sweden because I'm not paying for Apple's thing that they're going to be announcing in a couple of weeks. So, but yeah, it's going to be interesting, interesting for sure, because yeah, Time Bandits, I really, really, really want to like that movie. I think I was just too young when it came out.

So I have it in like burned in my head that I just don't get it. I have a vague memory of being in the back of my parents' van at a drive through and it was like it was Time Bandits was on before like Raiders of the Lost Ark or something like that. It was like a double feature and I just remember not getting it, but I've gone back and tried to watch it as an adult and I still just don't get it.

I still just can't get into it. Yeah, I kind of have that same feeling with Brazil too. I actually like Brazil. That one took a while though. I didn't really get into Brazil until college. So yeah, I should go back and watch that. The problem now is you don't know which fucking version to get. There's five of them. Yeah, that's true.

At the library. I finished a book out of genre for us, Brian, because I needed a reset. I got The Spy and the Traitor, The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben McIntyre. All right. I've read a bunch of Ben McIntyre books because he is like the master of the true spy novel.

You know, he does all these kind of deep dives on like these older stories that were real. And this one is Oleg Gordievsky. This guy was he was basically a like a heavy honcho in the Russian military.

Oleg was one of my favorite characters in The Americans. Yeah. I miss that show so much. Me too. But this is a true story about how he flipped and started working for MI6 for years. And then it just goes it goes crazy and off the rails.

I guess I can spoil it because it's a actual story that already happened a long time ago. Hey, but he went back to Russia for like this last meeting. But they were worried that it was a trap. It's a trap. And it was.

So they had all these crazy plans to get him out of the country. And I won't spoil the end, but it's a really cool story about how the Brits like did all this crazy shit, you know, with this rescue plan to get him out. It's amazing. I mean, and this shit happened.

This isn't like, you know, fictionalized. This stuff happened. It's really cool. It's a longer book, like 12 hours on Audible, something like that. But man, is it deep. It's really cool. His his stories are so insanely complicated. But when you want to get out of the sci fi realm and completely do something different, Ben McIntyre's books are fantastic.

And I do have I'm going to I'm going to put this up on the next up list that I just bought that I'm going to be having for next week. It's called Messing with the Enemy Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians and Fake News by Clint Watts. OK, I've never heard of Clint Watts, but I was.

He was editing a show yesterday because he came on the Jordan Harbinger show and his episode comes out the same day that actually a day later. No, the same day as the show comes out. So I'll put a link in the show notes for when that drops. Great episode. This guy basically hunts terrorists through social media.

Right. Yeah, except he's like ex-military, ex-FBI and just like kind of a no bullshit kind of guy. I really like this guy and it's I can't wait to read the book. So that's next on the list. So I'll have a review for that next week if you want to get the book and play along at home.

Excellent. Well, after my rant last week about the sad state of popular sci-fi, I too decided I needed some palate cleansing and needed to get away from sci-fi. So I wrote a bunch of my friends and kind of asked what their favorite books were. As a result, I've got like six different books sitting around to be read and I've started some of them trying to find which one's going to hook me.

But it made it impossible for me to finish anything for this week. I will let you know, though, that I've read half now of Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, and I will be finishing that for next week because it is fascinating to me and it's already making some major changes in my life, which I will be talking about next week.

Awesome. Glad you finally dug into that one. Yep. This might be my favorite story of all time. A man was angry his photo was being used to prove all hipsters look alike. And then after he tried to sue, he learned it wasn't him.

A man threatened to sue a technology magazine for using his image in a story about why all hipsters look the same, only to find out the picture was of a completely different guy. This ran in the MIT Technology Review, something you and I both read, which detailed a study about the so-called hipster effect, the counterintuitive phenomena in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same.

The inclusion of a version of a Getty image photo of a bearded, flannel-wearing man tinged with blue and orange hue prompted one reader to write the magazine. Your lack of basic journalistic ethics in both the manner in which you reported this uncredited nonsense and the slanderous, unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response.

And I am, of course, pursuing legal action. So in the end, the creative director wrote to Getty Images and said, look, we have an angry reader who doesn't like the way we use this photo. Could you check on it and make sure that the model signed a release and the license is all in order? And they got it all back and it's not that person.

And they wrote to him and said, this isn't you. And he replied, oh, I guess you're right. It's not. No apology. Oh, my God. Oh, so good. Now, last week, we also had the great the Tim Cook, Tim Apple from our President Trump.

Colin, it's just I just I just can't. But, you know, so you fuck up, right? You fuck up. You just move on, don't you? No, no. You double and triple down on Friday night under a tent erected over the pool at the Mari Lago Club in Florida.

President Trump claimed the media were spreading fake news when they said he called the CEO of Apple, Tim Apple. He told the donors that he actually said to book Apple. So he said cook really fast. And the cook part of the sentence was soft. Of course, if you look at the video, it's not there at all.

It's just Tim Apple. So this is obviously not true. And Axios calls it one of the president's weirdest lies ever. So on Monday, he tripled down and tried a new approach and tweeted. Because he can't let it go at a recent roundtable meeting of business executives and long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple, I quickly refer to Tim plus Apple as Tim slash Apple as an easy way to save time and words.

The fake news was disparagingly all over this. And yet it became yet another bad Trump story. Yeah, this is a way to say time and words. Save time and words. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is what we got. This is what we got.

Fucking five-year-old child. Oh, God. I tell you what, though. We need the palate cleanse. But here's the thing. The tweet that came after this, this is surprising. He said, making daylight saving time permanent is OK with me. He didn't say daylight savings time, which is a common thing that people do.

He actually got daylight saving time right. I'll tell you what, though. He got it right by accident. Probably. I guarantee you, he just mistyped it. And he meant to type daylight savings time. Yeah. OK. Give us that palate cleanser. I love this story. Hat tip to friend of the show, Amber, who posted this on her Facebook.

A record setting. Five thousand people stand in the rain for hours to see if they are all a stem cell match for a five-year-old battling cancer. Five-year-old Oscar. I'm not even going to attempt the last name there. Was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in December. And they did a crowdfunding page and were able to raise about $11,000, which is more than they dreamed of.

But the doctors insisted that Oscar needs a stem cell transplant. So the parents in school decided to organize a donor event in order to find a match. Anyone aged 17 to 55 was able to register. The event was run by more than 200 volunteers who showed up from across the country to help. Saturday was the first day it was live, and over 1,800 people showed up to register.

Sunday was even more packed. Another 3,000 people came, setting a record for the most people to ever volunteer as stem cell donors. People queued up around the block in the pouring rain, and nobody moaned about it. The spirit we had here was absolutely incredible. The generosity of people. And after the event ended, numbers continued to rise as another 1,000 people registered to be potential donors online, bringing the total to approximately 6,000.

Good humans. Good humans, and hopefully they can use the people that didn't match this kid. For other people. Yeah, for other people. Yeah, that would be nice. Mm-hmm. Would be very nice. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers this week.

Martim, Stephen, Melissa, Steph, and Thomas. And Thomas writes in, Brian's recent rant on the generic plots for recent popular sci-fi books is stuck in my head. I think Scalzi's new series, two books out now, breaks this mold, but I haven't enjoyed them as much as his Old Man's War series. One of my absolute favorites on Audible has been The Fear Saga by Stephen Moss.

And the first book is Fear the Sky. But I would have to admit that it fits at least 80% of the criteria on the aforementioned rant. I put it in my queue, so maybe I'll give it a listen. Still, I have listened to that book probably 10 times now. Yes, it's formulaic, but the execution was superb. And for Jason, R.C.

Bray's narration on Audible is top-notch. And yes, R.C. Bray does a bunch of my favorite series. And he also did the audiobook for The Martian as well. He's fantastic. And I put links to the new Scalzi books in the show notes. The first one is The Collapsing Empire, and the second one is The Consuming Fire.

I've read The Collapsing Empire and reviewed it on the show. I liked it a lot. And I just haven't gotten to The Consuming Fire yet. Gotcha. And Vinny also writes us, Dear Brian and Jason, I can confirm that the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast works from behind the Great Firewall of China, even without a VPN. Hooray!

Hooray! Meanwhile, it seems porno and harmless cat videos from YouTube are still hard to reach without a working VPN. Not me, the wife asked about them. I swear. I will have to look for a good VPN that works within the yellow motherland. If your listeners have a good recommendation, I will happily jump ship from PureVPN, whom I mistakenly believed would work here as they are a Hong Kong company who are all about the Internet's freedoms.

I'm going to download all of March episodes thus far and listen on a quiet day of R&R. Well, we have our favorite VPN, but I don't know if it works in China. I don't believe any VPNs work in China at this point. That's the problem. I don't even know if you...

I'd be worried about rolling my own. Yeah. Because I know you can roll your own pretty easily on just about any, like, hosting service. Yeah. Because it's really basic to make your own VPN. But the problem therein lies that you might get flagged by the Chinese government, which would probably be not worth the porn and cat videos.

Look, we know a lot about the Chinese databases. More of that coming up in Friday's episode, or Monday's episode. Boy, did we find out more about Chinese databases this week. Yep. All right. And over at PayPal, we got a donation from ACOS. And a quick note out to Martem.

We're sending a few stickers your way, so you can paste them around Portugal for us. Woo-hoo. Thank you, both of you. Yep. Over at Twitter, Sarah at Zing writes in, Just listen to your podcast for the first time, episode 327. Your commentary was refreshing, not grumpy.

This was the most poignant part of the episode for me. There's so many things to be outraged by at the moment. This is just somewhere on the list, isn't it? That's kind of our podcast in a nutshell. Yeah, it kind of is. We cherry pick the things to be outraged at. Yes, thanks so much.

Chris writes in, As requested, I tried to like you on Overcast, but it asked me to connect my Twitter account. Not happening. I've made it this far without connecting any of my social accounts to anything else, and I will never quit the resistance. All right. All right. Stand firm. And Oller writes in, Hey, GOG, I love your podcast and have used Patreon to show my support until my new bank's credit card wouldn't work with Patreon.

On Tech Neme, I heard about Kimberlite, which is Kimberlite.fm today. And maybe it's something you could offer as well. Have a great weekend. I've never heard of that. I'll take a peek at it and see what it is. I'm taking a peek at it. It's a podcast subscription service kind of thing. It's Patreon for podcasters.

Oh, so that's trying to niche themselves. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's going to be gone in a year. So maybe not. We've still got PayPal. We've still got PayPal. So, and if there's anything there that we offer to the Patreon subscribers, we also offer them to PayPal subscribers as well. So you wouldn't be missing out.

Nope. Bastion writes in, listening to the rant on the podcast about good sci-fi, I suggest The Paraphaith War by Ellie Modisit and Gravity Dreams, also by the same author, also considered Flash by the same author as well. Interesting when compared to American politics right now. I've never heard of that author before, so I will take a look.

Thank you. I do appreciate all these suggestions, everyone. We always keep a list. So thanks. Yeah. No. Yeah, we definitely, because we run out of shit a lot. Gwydian writes in, all of the Apple fanboyisms in this podcast made me think of this recent podcast, The Privacy, Security, and OSINT Show, number 113, The Creepy Things Apple Knows About You and Me.

So that's over at SoundCloud. There will be a link in the show notes. Yeah, I was going, I just didn't have time to listen to it, and they do a really crappy job on show notes, so I have no idea what they talked about on that podcast, because I just didn't have the time to listen. I was going to peruse the notes, but they don't note like we note. Yeah, nobody does, man.

It's a lost art. Well, it's actually an art that nobody ever had. Yes. Third in Command writes us, hey, that story on your Nest device microphone. Pa, I see that and raise you. This is a link to the register, OSCO. From hard drive to overheard drive, boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic.

So, eggheads at the University of Michigan in the U.S. and Zizang University in China have found that hard disk drives can be turned into listening devices using malicious firmware and signal processing calculations. So, acoustic sound vibes make hard disk parts vibrate, and they're able to figure that out.

Crazy. Who the hell has a spinning hard drive anymore? That's a good point. But, these unintentional microphones send speech with high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive. Holy shit! Well, first off, you have to have an old hard drive, but you also still have to have Shazam.

Oh. But, no, that's still, that's pretty crazy that I can actually recognize. Yeah. Yeah. And he also sent a second link, AdTech Opinions, Nada, and this is another from the register. UK's ICO event on targeted ad opens floor to the ad tech industry. Anybody? No?

Speak for 10 minutes? Hello? So, they weren't able to get anybody to talk about security implications of programmatic advertising at the event because, you know, nobody wants to talk about the privacy implications, basically. All right. Hilarious.

And Mac says, the struggle with generic sci-fi is real. Unknown alien event? Struggle against all odds? And sappy love? Check out Artemis by Andy Weir for hard sci-fi punk girl with no aliens, no romance. And, here's my commentary, no fucking story. Yeah, Jason and I both read the book, and we both talked about it on the show in the past.

Jason hated it. I thought it was okay, just not as good as The Martian. Yeah. Oh, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry. I was thinking of a completely different book. Oh, what were you thinking? My bad. Oh, um, the follow-up to Ready Player One? Oh, yeah, that was horrible.

That was Anthem. Yeah. Something else with an A. That was, we both thought that was crap. Armada. Armada. Armada. Armada was crap. Sorry, I was thinking about Armada. Yeah, no, we covered Artemis. I actually really, really liked Artemis. Okay. I think I liked Artemis more than you did. Yes, maybe. I think you did. Yeah. So many books.

So little time. I know. We should have a spreadsheet. We should. Over at GOG. Over at GOG. Show Anonymous writes in, thought y'all might be interested in this story. The article points out why it's a bad idea. This is a link from the New York Times. On disability and on Facebook, Uncle Sam wants to watch what you post. If you're on federal disability payments and on social media, be careful what you post.

Uncle Sam wants to watch. The Trump administration has been quietly working on a proposal to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to help identify people who claim social security disability benefits without actually being disabled. If, for example, you're claiming benefits of a back injury, but you're shown playing golf in a photograph posted on Facebook, this could be used as an evidence that the injury was not disabling.

You know, I don't actually have too much of a problem with that. I got no problem with that. I got no problem with that at all, because half the reason that our medical system is so fucked up is because people try to cheat the system all the time. Yeah, this is just anti-fraud. I'm fine with that. I'm okay with it. Yeah, go.

If you're dumb enough to do that, by all means, get caught. No, my mom was on disability and they parked a goddamn private investigator out in front of our house for a week. Right. You know, it was crazy. I mean, she had a literal disability, but, you know, the guy was just like sitting there with fucking binoculars looking at our house.

So I mooned him many times from my bedroom because I come from a generation where it was still okay to moon people. Yeah, that would be a hashtag me too offense these days. Me moon. Me moon. Mad pessimist writes in, hey, Brian, Jason, and if available, Dave, I love the show.

I work at a medical device company that's making moves toward using our smartphone app, user data, and AI to expand business prospects in the future. Picture the kind of data that would be in for the Apple health app as an example. The idea of my employer using this data for marketing purposes has me nervous because this is not really what our company has been about before.

It's not that I suspect any malfeasance, just accidents. I'm not a developer, but I'm concerned about the possibility of an app made by, shall we say, fresh talent leading to either major vulnerabilities in the app or identifiable data about customers being leaked. What are some questions I can ask the CEO or the app team to help ensure that this thing I'm not working on is made responsibly?

Thanks and keep on grumping. Well, first, I do appreciate the term fresh talent. That was awesome. And secondly, look, we love doing this podcast for free. We love giving you our opinions about some things and we love talking about our books and our thoughts and feelings about what's going on in the tech world.

And so no offense, but this seems exactly what we should be hired as contractors for rather than, say, giving you detailed solutions on our podcast for free. Yeah, good point. So I mean, there are limits to what we're going to respond to, I suppose, is what I'm saying, because this is definitely something that we should be getting a paycheck for if we're going to help you with that.

Good point. Find a budget and we're all in. And we're all in for you. Benson writes us. Hey, guys, love the show. You're one of about a dozen tech podcasts I subscribe to, but by far my favorite. I'm what you would call a degenerate, the kind that spends a lot of time on tour browsing DNMS.

Cough druggy. Anyways, I've heard from some hacker friends that FraudFox is by far the best for anti-detection, anti-fingerprinting tools. Do you have any opinions for or against this claim? I realize that this is kind of a spicy question, so I take no offense if you're uncomfortable answering this, regardless of whether or not you're able to answer the question. Please keep up the great work.

Yours in Christ. Okay. It may be spicy. I have no, I'm not uncomfortable answering this. I just don't know because we're not that spicy anymore as programmers or developers or web people. I'm not on any of the stuff. Don't know. Yeah, I've stayed away from tour and the dark web for a very solid reason.

I don't want to get flagged for anything, even if it's just like dicking around, you never know because, you know, the government is pretty good at de-anonymizing tour traffic nowadays. Yeah. And we're not exactly non-high profile in tech at the moment.

We do a big podcast. You know, I don't know much about FraudFox. If anybody who's listening to the show knows more about it and wants to write in for Benson, please send us your replies. We're getting great replies for a lot of people on the stuff that we asked about. So hopefully somebody who is big into tour will let us know.

But yeah, I've I've personally stayed away from it for, you know, just literally personal reasons because I got enough problems. I don't know. I got 99 problems and tour ain't one. Exactly. Exactly. Neil writes in. Hi, grumps. Heard you say that you are loving Umbrella Academy on Netflix.

I loved it, too. I've only seen one other show that's as good with weird, funny, quirky and with gory, casual psychopath killing. And I recommend you try to watch it. Maybe visit via Sweden. It's an English show called Utopia. Yes, we have seen Utopia and Utopia is awesome.

It did only last two seasons and unfortunately didn't make it to a third. And there was talk that David Fincher was going to do a reboot of Utopia on HBO when it got canceled, but that has fizzled out, unfortunately. Right. But yeah, Utopia is fantastic.

And you can watch the first two seasons and still walk away pretty satisfied. Right. It's one of my favorite shows. I go back and watch it like once a year. OK, I don't think I've ever watched it, so I'll have to go for it. Oh, man. Well, I have it here, so maybe I'll just drop it on a thumb drive for you.

All right. Sarah writes this. Hi, guys. Are you familiar with any of the literature out there about drone warfare? I'm eyeing the book Army of None, Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Schar. It has really mixed reviews on Amazon. I know that almost everything has really mixed reviews on Amazon. That's true. Including Amazon.

Including Amazon. I'm wondering if it or other books like it are worth reading. The concept of drone warfare makes me think about the military technology revolutionizing warfare in World War One. And I just want to make sure I'm not wasting my time reading garbage. Thanks in advance. I've got nothing on nonfiction for that stuff. I don't recall you ever reading anything specifically towards drone warfare nonfiction either.

So not really. As far as fiction stuff, Daniel Suarez's stuff touched on it. Yeah, and it's a really crappy third book. Yeah, the third book sucked. And Technology of a Sorts with World War One. I love the Ian Tregellis Milkweed series. So some fiction recommendations, but sorry, we got nothing nonfiction for you.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, got nothing. But now that I'm a droney, maybe I'll dig into that because it is kind of interesting stuff. I do love my new drone. That's all I got to say about that. Daryl writes in, I thought you would be interested in this article about how this car alarm could be taken over, tracked, and disarmed by anyone with a web account of the brand.

Enjoy. Thanks for the ulcers. And this is over on TechCrunch. It's car alarms with security flaws put three million vehicles at risk of hijack. So two popular car alarm systems, one by, imagine that, a Russian alarm maker, Pandora, and a California-based Viper, or Clifford in the UK.

These were vulnerable to easily manipulated server-side APIs. So there you go. So if you've got those, better go check into it. In Russia, car steals you. Yeah. Jeremy writes in, you said you were looking for a really hardcore sci-fi book on the latest episode of GOG.

Have you ever read Eon by Greg Baer? It's one of my favorite hardcore sci-fi book series. I have. I used to read all the killer bees pretty regularly, Bear, Benford, and David Brin, all of whom were plucked by the Asimov family to write the second Foundation trilogy, which actually didn't suck, unlike the horrible things that the Frank Herbert family is putting out for Dune.

They were great in my youth. I read a lot of them in the 90s and the early aughts, but I haven't read anything by any of those three authors recently. So if anyone has and can recommend one, send it on. Cool. Well, I mean, were they like young adult or were they decent sci-fi? No, no, these were these were all three hard sci-fi authors.

Okay. Yeah, but they were really big in the 90s and all that sort of stuff. So I don't know how well they're they've kept on. So we shall see. Raf writes us, sends us a link on Facebook. You are about Facebook. U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions. Edison research says.

So all the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison research show an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017, the biggest drop is in the very desirable 12 to 30. When did 12 year olds become desirable? You hook them young, man.

Hook them young. All right. Cigarettes. Very desirable 12 to 34 year old group. Marketplace Tech got a first look at Edison's latest social media research. It revealed almost 80% of people in the U.S. are posting, tweeting or snapping, but fewer are going to Facebook. OK. And by the way, 12 year olds shouldn't have a Facebook account.

No, they're not supposed to, are they? No, they're not. Yeah. He also wrote in Amazon. You also mentioned that Amazon can do anything with no repercussions. But speaking for myself, I canceled my prime, which I had for a decade. Now I order less online. If I really want something, I try to find it at the local store or order it from an original website.

Additional issue with Amazon is that it's hard to tell which products are originals versus knockoffs, which I believe that buying one less thing a year probably offsets any savings I'd be getting through prime anyways. And I like being more conscious about every new item I add to my collection. Well, well done. I'm happy for people that are able to do that.

Cool. And Michaela writes in the Xbox Maverick console will be named Xbox one S all digital edition. Pre-orders start in April 2019. And here's the rub. It's, uh, you know, all digital, which means no discs, which means all the DRM.

Yeah. And she wrote in DRM digital only system. What could go wrong? I know you guys don't usually do a video game stuff, but felt important to me. Reed, do you really want to own what you buy digitally? By the way, thanks for the open audible suggestion. I use open caliber for Kindle, but didn't know what could manage my audible books works great.

Uh, yeah. The other problem I have with this locked system is it's a slippery slope to the subscription model there, isn't it? Because pretty soon they're just going to say, well, rather than buying things that you download, we're just going to charge you a monthly fee to play it or use it. It depends on, I bought far cry five for my Xbox and it was a one time deal.

And, uh, you know, I technically own it, but once I'm done with the game, I really don't care anymore. I'm not going to go back and play it. That's true. Gaming is slightly different. Well, no, some people do do that just like you do with movies, which I don't understand either. So, yeah, I mean, it depends. Depends on the game because this is just like a one play. I mean, it's an open world multiplayer game, so you can technically go back and play it again.

But once you're done with the story, I don't see any reason to go back and play something like far cry. Right. But except they do get you with the digital add on packs, which I bought a couple of those and they do. They do nickel and dime you for sure. Yep. Bob writes in, I have a problem with my passwords.

I'm seriously considering starting to use a password manager as you keep telling me I should. Yeah. The main factor why I haven't yet is that I share my house with my wife and two teenage daughters who don't understand or care about online security. To explain my point, my youngest keeps forgetting the password for the Netflix account and keeps complaining.

Why do you make the password so hard to remember? I tell her she's missing the point, but it's like talking to a brick wall. I realize that to implement the password manager, everyone will have to be on board because a lot of the logins we share, YouTube, premium, Netflix, Wi-Fi, et cetera. How do I get them to get the message about the seriousness of the password manager?

After all, the success depends on everyone following the program, and I'm gearing up for all the backlash because of all the different types of devices it would need to be set up on. It could take me a week just to set it all up on everything. Help me, grumps. How do I accomplish this seemingly impossible task? P.S.

The last episode I listened to mentioned you were attempting to create a clean show. Fuck the clean show. I listened to you guys because you don't sanitize the news. Don't sanitize the language we all use either. Thanks. Well, Bob, considering we haven't gotten you personally to switch to a password manager yet, good luck.

We don't know how to convince anyone to do it because we keep trying. Yeah. If you're not going to even drink the Kool-Aid, how could you get them to? Look, I think you just do it for yourself. Leave the shared stuff off for a while and just try to gently nudge people to doing it because you can't badger anybody into doing anything.

Or you can get a 1Password family plan and just say, well, if you want the password, you have to go. If you're under my roof. 1Password account. Exactly. Yeah. So there's always that. Brian writes this. I was listening to a recent episode and you made the comment that colleges use social security numbers to identify students.

I can assure you that it has been more than 20 years since that has been the case. I know this firsthand because I haven't. I have either been attending college or worked in higher education. Well, that's good to know. It's been 20 years since I've been in college. So. Well, there we have it then. Good. I'm glad they made a change. Len writes in. Greetings, glorious grumps.

Digital storage question for you. I have a somewhat large archive of family VHS home videos and photos that I would like to have backed up in the cloud. I'm still in the process of scanning photos and converting video all at the highest quality possible. So I don't know how many terabytes the final tally will be, but it could potentially fall out of my monthly storage subscription price range.

I'd really love to stay under $15 a month. I'm not looking to access these files unless something catastrophic happens is I have copies on two different drives at my home. I just want to know that copies are out there somewhere long term if myself or my family member needs them someday. Wondering if either of you have any long term storage solutions.

Jason, you've said you have a ginormous collection of photos. It's huge. How do you deal with cloud storage? Thanks for any advice. Keep up the great work. Well, one option is Amazon S3 Glacier. It's not the quickest way to do things, but what it is, it's built for long term storage.

This exact thing, low cost, very high latency to get your stuff back takes forever. But the trick is it's still there and you don't pay a lot because you don't access it a lot. It's not like live storage. You basically send it up to the glacier and it just gets frozen.

And then someday when you need it, you can get it back. Other than that, for $15 a month, yeah, there's really nothing that's going to really come close to that if you've got multiple terabytes of data. Things like, you know, Backblaze and those types of services don't really handle external drives anymore.

They've moved that all to the business side of things. And when it comes to off-site storage, honestly, I would stay away from the cloud with that much data. Yeah. I would just get another drive, fill it up and get like a, get a, what do they call those boxes at the bank?

Safety deposit box. I don't know why I blinked on that. Do that. That's, that's definitely one option, or I'm sure you have family that are out of state and you can do what I do. I have two rotating drives. What I will do is I will basically back up everything to one drive. It's an eight terabyte drive and I will ship it to my dad.

He will ship me back my other one. I will do that one in two weeks or a month or whenever you get around to it because that stuff doesn't update that often for me. Then I will, you know, create a new image of all the stuff, send it to him and then he'll send it back. That way it's at least offsite and out of sight, out of mind.

He puts it in a fireproof box that I bought him that he just keeps in the basement out of the way. And then it's, you know, I do have peace of mind that not everything I've ever done is sitting here in one place. Right. But you want to get that offsite backup going. But I, with that much data, the cloud is a bad idea for two reasons.

First, it's the cloud. Well, I don't care about that. I'm fine with that. The problem is getting it to the cloud because a lot of people have one terabyte data caps per month now. And you're probably using a lot of that for just life and to actually try and stack on sending all this stuff to stuff up to an archive.

You're going to kill your data caps and you're going to have to pay a lot more. So I just recommend doing the, the hard drive cycle thing because hard drives are so cheap now. I mean, you can get an eight or 10 terabyte drive for under 200 bucks. Right. And just, just ship them off, get them out of the house.

Yep. That's what I would do as well. And Michael writes us, uh, he's given us some, uh, insight into getting into cybersecurity here because we're still working on that. Writing into someone who recently made a transition from a boring finance job to doing cybersecurity work, junior web app and network pent, pent tester, pen tester, penetration tester.

It's called pentester. Yeah. Okay. Remember this rule in cybersecurity. Your job is to understand how the system works, how you break it and communicating to your clients, whomever that may be, how to fix it. First off, get the basics down. Start with Cybrary. Cybrary.it. All these links will be in the show notes, by the way. Cybrary has a good, a bunch of good material.

Do the comp TIA, A plus network plus and security plus certs. If you don't have an IT background, if you can afford it, get a year membership to Linux Academy. They have great courses on Linux administration and some courses on ethical hacking. Next, the SANS Institute has some free course material at cyberaces.org.

Also look at Coursera. Do the Python for everyone track from the University of Michigan. InfoSec uses a ton of Python. Also look at University of Colorado's Windows Server course. 90% of all companies use Windows and 90% of those use Active Directory. So about 81% of all companies will be using Windows servers to manage their enterprise.

Finally, start listening to security podcasts. Learn the industry by immersing yourself in the language. You'll be confused at first, but keep trying and you'll find your footing. Good luck. Thanks. Cool. Thank you, Michael. Much appreciated. And sadly, this week we have no iTunes reviews. Come on, guys.

Get on it. Yeah. Everybody's too busy starring us on Overcast. Oh, by the way, I have follow up. I have follow up. It worked. Okay. We have finally beat the Accidental Tech Podcast on Marco's own platform. I will post a screen cap in the show notes.

And as of this morning, it's funny, though, because I think he's got a problem with his ranking algorithm. It was just pretty funny. We are the third most recommended podcast in Overcast over the Tim Ferriss show, over the Accidental Tech Podcast, over Noah Kagan Presents, which is funny because that's a show I worked on, but I don't know why it's in there.

I thought it was dead. If you ever listen to that podcast, that's me at the beginning introducing the show and the Jordan Harbinger podcast, which is going to probably get me in a lot of hot water. But hey, Grumpy Old Geeks, number three, most recommended on Overcast today. So thank you, everybody, that sent in your stars and keep doing it.

Yes, thank you. Let's let's unseat Rogan next. Nice. Let's unseat Rogan. Come on. We can do it. We can do it. Of course, I'd take less stars and more listeners. So tell a friend, please. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Closing shout outs. Rest in peace to Hal Blaine, famous Wrecking Crew drummer and Rock Hall of Fame member who died at 90. He played on basically everything in the 60s and 70s as a member of the Wrecking Crew.

I cannot talk today. The Wrecking Crew, Hollywood's elite cadre of first call studio musicians. He died on Monday, according to a statement from family members on his official Facebook page. I love this. May he rest forever on two and four read the statement. Very clever. If you have not seen the Amazon documentary on the Wrecking Crew, my God, highly recommended.

It's pretty awesome. So you get to see this guy work. He was pretty amazing. Cool. Very cool. Had a good run. He had a very good run. So rest in peace, Hal. And I was on the Unstructured podcast this week with Eric Hundley. We had a nice, long and very unstructured conversation. That's the way it goes.

Links for the episode will be in the show notes. It's not out yet. He said it's coming out today. So either way, there'll be a link to the podcast in the show notes. And happy birthday to friend of the show, Chen. And thank you for the awesome shirt from the Strand bookstore. She went to New York and went to the Strand and sent me a shirt, which was so cool.

Very nice shirt. And of course, when we were recording this on the 12th of March, it is the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web. So happy birthday, Webb. If it wasn't for you, I'd probably be dead or in jail if you didn't exist. That's the way it goes. I certainly wouldn't be here doing a podcast. That is damn sure I would be.

Probably still working at Kinko's. That's the way, you know, the web got me out of Kinko's and I never looked back. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the side. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 328. And there you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

Cool. Now I got to go make me some succotash. Man, it's hard to talk with a sore throat. Yep. Whoa. I made it.

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