329: Patines Del Diablo

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 am a deathly ill Brian Schulmeister. Ruh-roh. I'm reasonably sure my son brought me home the bubonic plague. Oh. Do you have the nodules? Oh man, I am just destroyed. Last week my son was sick and then my wife was sick and I held out the longest.

But this whole week I've just been absolutely destroyed. So bad that I have not even had my glass of wine at night. That's how bad you know it is. You should have some hot toddies at night because that won't, you know, cure anything. I should, but I have not been indulging. And I just have not gotten better.

It's, I don't, it's so weird. And it made me start to think about, and this is weird to say, in the early years of our show, because yes, we have been doing it that long.

Yeah. In the early years of our show, we talked a lot about, um, running your own company or being a contractor and self-employed and working from home. And it made me realize that like in 20 years, I don't think I've taken a sick day for a number of reasons. I mean, the first off, you know, we don't go into an office, so we're not going to be infecting anyone else. The responsible thing to do if you're actually sick and you have to be around other people is to don't be around them.

Yeah. Stay home. You filthy bastard. Because yeah, stay home and take your sick days. And the other reason obviously being, it's not exactly like we're doing manual labor. Uh, it's, you can still code when you're sick, but it's still not.

Also that pesky rent thing. Yeah. Well, there's that too. So yeah. Um, so it made me realize that like, that's just stupid. And I desperately need to take a few sick days. And I was thinking that as you wrote me this morning, getting ready for the show saying, Hey, can we go old school and only do one show next week? Because we're dead. We just, we need a break. So this is a heads up to everyone next week. Old school, one show, one show.

We'll get back to doing two the week after that. But, but we all need, we need some me time. Damn it. Yeah. I am so fucking burnt out. I mean, doing three shows for Jordan Harbinger and two shows for us. I have not had more than three days off in six years.

And in the funny part is I need the time for next week so I can work. That's the, that's the fucked up part. I'm taking time off next week so I can work more because I got to get this damn course written and filmed and I just have no time.

By the end of the day, you know, I get up at four in the morning and by four in the afternoon, that's 12 hours I'm working and I'm just dead. I can't think I can't write. So yeah. And a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty is going to be helping me out with the course stuff. So that's a, that's a big help.

Nice. I would like to say I could help you, but I am bubonic plagued. So now it's maybe, uh, maybe for future followup stuff, I will be able to join in on you. But, uh, yeah. So, so because college stuff has been in the news so much the last few days, which we won't be talking about on the show, but it just triggered the, the, the, uh, the idea that, uh, basically we're going to take a senior ditch day next week.

And, uh, for this show, I basically have senioritis because I am so loopy and unfocused. It's ridiculous. So let's try to slog through this. Yeah, that's about it. It's like, I haven't slept. I'm just exhausted. Just too much work. Podcasting for people who don't know is actually hard. This is a hard job. I know it's not physically hard, but man, it just takes so much time. What are you going to do? So let's get, let's roll right into this. I got some followup here.

All right. This comes a hat tip to old man mixa over on, uh, the Twitters. Mark Zuckerberg's former mentor says privacy manifesto is a PR stunt. Can I just say we called it? Yeah. Yeah. Roger McNamee is an early Facebook investor and one time advisor to Zuckerberg called the CEO's recent promise to rebuild Facebook as a privacy focused platform, a very effective public relations move that once again is deflecting us away from the core problem.

Now this guy does have a book that he's promoting called Zucked waking up to the Facebook catastrophe, which is great in which he says Zuckerberg and Sandberg ignored his warnings about Russian activity on Facebook in 2016. So we'll see how that's going to go. Right. Yeah. That's far from the only Facebook news that we have this episode.

Oh, we've got a little bit here and there, just a little tiny bit. Um, so I did start to read that book that I was talking about last week. Uh, it's, it's called, uh, messing with the enemy surviving in a social media world of hackers, terrorists, Russians, and fake news by Clint Watts.

You got to read this book, dude. All right. Oh my God. What I love about Clint Watts is, you know, he did two tours in the FBI. He was in, he was in the 101st airborne, right? You know, I mean, this guy's no joke. He's, he's a crazy dude. And so his hobby, his hobby in his downtime is trolling terrorists online. I mean, come on, this guy is my hero, right?

He is so my hero. He's just like, yeah, nobody else is doing it. I'm just going to do it for fun for shits and giggles for the lulls as it were. So yeah, I highly recommend everybody listening to this. Check out messing with the enemy. It is so good. I'm only like, you know, maybe 25% in and just, I just love this dude. I seriously love this dude, buddy. 101st airborne. That's, you know, band of brothers territory. This guy's no joke.

No joke. Anyway, moving on to people who are a joke. Let's talk about Gimlet media. My favorite people. So Gimlet has an 83 person staff. That's pretty big. Why do you need 83 people to make podcasts? Well, I guess maybe because some of them get time off every now and again.

Yeah, well, they're going to unionize. Okay. Yay. Writers Guild of America East is who they're unionizing with. And I'm like, you guys just got $230 million and now you're going to start a union. It's like, fuck you. I just, I, if this was anybody else, if this was anybody else, this is exactly what we should, we should be applauding.

I know that's the problem with Jason. Be happy for them. No, if it was anybody else, I'd be so happy for them, but I just hate so much. Maybe Gimlet will acquire us at some point and then we'll be in union. Look at the plus side of these things. Do you know how many times I've made fun of reply all on this show? There's no way that they're ever going to acquire us on the plus side. They've never listened.

This is also true. Actually, I'm not entirely sure that they haven't because they seem to rip stuff off from us all the time. Oh yeah. Facebook listening to all of your conversations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. But no, no, you should not be, be against this at all. This is a fantastic thing. Unions are a very good thing. If anything should be clear to everybody, I don't care how far right leaning you are. The world is broken and this is a way to fix it.

Unions are good right now and all the power is coalescing in the upper reaches and we need to crawl and grab and and get this back any way that we can. So good, good. Make a union. Open it up to people that don't work for Gimlet. Let us all in. Yeah, we can we can have a union of two. Yes, except where the boss is at the same time. So what are we going to do here?

Uh, now I ran across an interesting article over on Slate. Um, I almost died riding an e-scooter. Now this is old news to anybody that's been listening to this show. And it's certainly old news to anybody that lives here in Santa Monica where these things have been terrorizing us for almost two years now. But, uh, they're just, uh, they're still spreading everywhere.

And, uh, this is a writer, a technology writer based in Mexico city where they have now, uh, shown up and angry locals are referring to them as pet patines del Diablo or the devil skates show title. Yep. So, uh, this, this writer was like, uh, he's, he's been studying. He's been reading up on this. He's been hearing about the danger in other cities, probably been listening to our podcast.

And he, he was honest with the end of this article. He says that all these cities were acting like the fun police. He said, lighten up San Francisco. Don't have a cow. Um, but now that he's got them there, he said, there's so much fun. You're never going to wear a helmet because why would you? And he almost died because he got hit by a car while not wearing a helmet. And, uh, now he's completely like, Oh my God, these things are so incredibly unsafe. Oh my God. Everybody that rides them are idiots. Oh my God. We got to stop this stuff.

Oh, karma is a bit. So he has completely come around to our opinion. It's a, it's a good wrap up. If you still somehow I've been listening to our show and don't understand our position on e-scooters. Uh, this is a great view of it from somebody brand new to it. That was originally like, this is the best thing ever. And then all of a sudden goes, Oh my God, what is going to happen to all of us? We're all going to die. We're going to die. You're going to die. We're all going to die anyway. Speaking of dying though, I think your next, your next story rolls right into that. Perfect. Yeah. A little more follow up.

I, I, I, I'm pretty sure it's just in the zeitgeist right now. Um, because people are stupid or Facebook's feed or, or the, the, the great internet gods are following me around and only putting anti-vax stuff in my news stories. But I did run across this at the LA times. Officials warn of measles exposure at LAX. Uh, pass. Uh, did anybody not watch 12 monkeys? Are we not aware that if you are having deathly communicable disease, one should not be on

in airports or traveling? What is wrong with people? I'm so going to go back and watch that today. I love that movie so much. So a passenger who had a layover at LAX, meaning that the exposure isn't just at LAX. It's lots of places on February 21st was diagnosed with measles, measles, a highly contagious illness that spreads through coughing or sneezing. I've never heard anybody cough or sneeze on an airplane.

Oh, never, never. Oh, no. So anybody who happened to be, maybe you have measles. Maybe that's why you can't get better. You've got the measles. Uh, I've got the vaccinations for that. So I should be all right. Yes. Okay. Uh, the most at risk are people who have not been vaccinated against measles. Officials say if a person infected with measles walks into a room, the virus can stay there for two hours after the person leaves, ready to infect.

Of course, they do not know about this. Three people with measles walk into a bar. Yes. And, uh, three of them are Jenny McCarthy.

In the news, we have a new note from our galactic overlord, Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, he's been busy writing recently, hasn't he? He has. He's a, he's a, you know, just a wordsmithie. Now, what are you going to do? Um, logger. God.

So, uh, this comes from newsroom.fb.com. It's not on medium. I'm medium. Uh, so two of his upper echelon have decided to leave the company. Now, when you read this article, you'd think that everybody's happy, copacetic. There's even a photo of Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox at the bottom of this. And I opened that photo and I looked at it and I swear to God, Mark Zuckerberg is turning into a Muppet.

He looks like a Muppet in this photo, but, uh, Chris Cox and Chris Daniels have both decided to leave the company. Now reading between the lines on this, I see this as don't let the doorknob hit you in the ass because they have disagreed with him on the new, basically where the company's going, their privacy focused model. One of the guys was the head of WhatsApp and the other was just, you know, another exec. Uh, I just, I, I just, I can't bother to care about any of these people. I'm glad they're leaving though, because they seem to have.

Ethics. So, well, maybe not though, because I'm not glad they're leaving. I'm not glad they're leaving because they did seem to have some ethics. And what I see, this is a, is a complete consolidation of power for the Zuck camp in Facebook, which is not good news for anybody that kind of had any hope that Facebook might come back from the brink of stupidity.

They're not coming back from the brink. No, they're not. They're definitely not. So, uh, in related news, uh, after almost 24 hours of technical difficulties, Facebook is back. Yes. On Thursday, uh, the technical problems that kept many of its app, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and messenger from working on Wednesday had been resolved. I don't know if you noticed. Um, I certainly don't know. Cause I did. And on Facebook.

On Facebook. Well, you are on Instagram and, uh, Heather things. But yeah, they were all pretty down for most people. And, uh, the crazy thing is when it came back up, a lot of us wrote and just kind of said, Oh, that was actually kind of nice.

See, did not mind it being gone. So this is an article over on recode. And what I found really more interesting than the story, cause stuff goes down. Oh, well, whatever was the largest service outages by number of reports in chart that they had in here, which is a 7.5 million for Facebook. So this is the biggest one ever. But then you had YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Pokemon go, a bunch of pissed off people complaining, uh, WhatsApp, Fortnite, WhatsApp, and the PlayStation network.

So most of these are Facebook run companies at this point. Most of the world is a Facebook run company at this point. This is true. Let's be honest about it. But yeah, I, I did not notice, um, cause I, I, I actually did post three photos on Instagram yesterday. I thought I was being very prolific, but, uh, beyond that, I barely look at it anymore because it's not on my phone.

I took it off my phone. I don't have Twitter on my phone. Well, we will be getting to that later in the show because, uh, I have made some changes to my life as well. Excellent. But, uh, moving forward with the news, uh, Senator, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I need to, I need to, I need to point something out here.

Cause it just, it blew my mind. When you look at how much money Facebook makes per day, this came out in the article that you posted, they make an average of $189 million a day. Wow. That is fucking hell.

That's a lot of money. That is a lot of money. That's a lot of money. So when they are down for a long time, that is, you know, you know, almost $200 million that they lost. Well, yeah. Yeah. It couldn't happen to nicer people. Couldn't happen to nicer people. No. So, uh, back to the next story then Senator Elizabeth Warren can welcome an unlikely new passenger to her anti-monopoly starship.

I like that. But, uh, Spotify, so Spotify has, uh, shared that it filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Commission on Wednesday, claiming that the app store gives Apple an unfair advantage over its competition. In this case, because it takes 30% cut of any Spotify subscription that users pay for through Apple.

Now, you and I are both in general, very much Apple supporters, but that is kind of bullcrap that they, Apple forces people to take, use their pay system and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, they control it. They control the gateway. So, uh, yeah, well, I have, uh, a little bit of follow-up to that.

All right. Which is Apple's rebuttal to Spotify. Mm-hmm. And I don't know if you read this yet. I did not because you put it in later, but I did see your comments, so I have a feeling this is a good one. Bitch slapped! Oh, my God. Apple just comes back to Spotify and says, well, let, let me, let me splain something to you here.

Let me Apple-splain this to you. Well, yes, I'm going to Apple-splain it. I'm going to, I'm going to Tim Apple-splain it. To you right now. You use our platform to get hundreds of millions of users for free. You don't have to pay us for anybody that uses the app platform for your free download.

Yes. Every now and again, we do want you to actually use our platform for payments. So it is 30% for the first year, and it goes down to 15% after that. That helps cover the cost of all the hundreds of millions of free apps that are downloaded to your platform, helping you gain market traction.

And they also bitch slapped them for all of the bullshit Spotify has done to basically not pay artists, which was just like a total side jab. And I was just like, oh, man, punch, punch, jab. That's great. They, I mean, they took them to task on this.

It was just like, look, you don't have to use us, you know, but since you have, and we have kept your users safe. And also, they go into all of the different bits where Spotify is like, well, they're, you know, they're anti-competitive on this and that. And then Apple's like, no, we're not.

We have worked with you on several occasions to make sure that your apps work properly and are good for all of our customers. They don't say users. They don't say, you know, they say customers, which is what they are. And you can sign up for Spotify through the website.

You don't have to use Apple Pay to do it. And they don't take a cut for that. I was about to ask because I signed up through Spotify through their website. So I didn't use Apple's payment system. So what's the beef here? There is an alternative method of payment. Yeah. No, they are just the whole thing.

I mean, Apple tears them down brick by brick by brick. It is beautiful. It is one of the most well-written press releases I have ever. I mean, I'm reading it this morning on the crapper just going, yes, yes. And I'm sure my roommate was just like, what the fuck is he doing in there?

But I have to say that Apple really came back to them with, you know, all guns blazing. And they proved every single point that Spotify is just being little whiny bitches right now. Well, excellent. I will have to read that in full later.

Moving on a bit to the Boeing 737 Max, which has had a rough couple of weeks. Yeah, you think a few crashes and basically being pulled from air everywhere these days. There's an interesting take on this, which is basically the theory right now about the crashes is because of software, a navigation software system called the MCAS that was designed to do a bunch of different things.

And it's basically been malfunctioning, which is a problem. And pilots are coming out and saying, well, there is a lot of similarity between these systems and where we're headed towards with our driverless cars, which are using very similar types of systems in them.

The difference being all of us as pilots are extremely well trained on these systems, while all you idiots are just going to be jumping into your damn car and you're not going to understand the difference in driving in that you still you can't just sit there still. You have to be active.

You have to be paying attention to what's happening in case the systems fail and drivers will not be doing that. And it's going to be a really, really dangerous thing. Yeah, and one of the things that people talked about, some of the pilots that I was reading their comments on was that it's a faulty sensor that triggers the MCAS to basically think that it's doing one thing when it's doing another one.

And I just wonder about redundancy on that, if there are redundant sensors that happen. I mean, yes, the pilots can turn off that system. But what I'm also hearing is that the the training for the that system is just, you know, I think somebody said it was just criminally underdone and it's not in the manual properly.

And I'm just wondering, like, you know, when we do get self-driving cars, are there going to be redundant systems? Are there going to be redundant sensors? Are there going to be manuals? Are we going to understand how they work? Because we don't get a lot of manuals these days. Well, I beg to differ on that. My Explorer came with a 400 page manual that I am.

I'm literally working my way through because there's so much crap in this car. I can't figure out how it works. So I am literally reading the manual for my car. I had this is the funny part. The reason I started was because I couldn't figure out how to get the gas tank open. I'm like looking for switches, levers.

It's just a smooth surface. It's kind of like the three shells in Demolition Man. You kind of don't know how they work, but they work somehow. Right. And I had to get the manual. It's like, okay, find this quadrant of the cap and press. And I was like, oh, and it magically opens. So it's funny.

Like, you know, these things are getting so complicated, but you have to read the manual. Yeah. You have to RTFM. Yeah. Seriously. RTFM. But apparently with these Boeings that there is no M to RTF. So that's the big problem.

And it kind of sucks, really, especially for the people that were on the planes. But I don't know, man. It's crazy how much software goes into these things. And when they work, they work great. But I think this is, it's an edge case that has definitely, you know, come to light.

Boeing is going to have a huge problem trying to recover from this one. Yep. Definitely. Now that the satellite data has come out and they said that, yeah, yeah, these things are pretty similar. So we're just pulling all the planes. And this is their best selling plane ever. They got like 4,100 orders for these things.

So they better fix this shit fast. Yeah. They got to fix it quick. Yeah. Maybe they may, maybe not put fresh talent on the in-flight systems as we learned before. Yes. What a great term that is. Now I was thinking about, we should do something on our social media. We should put out a poll of some sort.

Who do you hate more, Zuck or Dorsey? I think it's a toss up at the moment. God damn, that is a toss up. That really is a toss up. It's really hard. Like it's a photo finish. You know what? No, no, no, no. Zuck wins. Zuck wins in the long race because. Well, let me see if I can change your mind.

Okay. Let's see what we can do here. With one little story here. Now we know Facebook, Zuck, Pinterest, YouTube, and Amazon are all, have all kind of woken up a little bit and are working to keep dangerous anti-vax rumors and hoaxes from proliferating across their networks. In the meantime, Jack Dorsey appears on a podcast with a noted anti-vaxxer.

Thanks him. Says we had a great conversation and appreciates everything that he's doing about increasing one's health span. Yeah. You're talking about Ben Greenfield, aren't you? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got a long and storied history with hating the Ben Greenfield. Vaccines do indeed cause autism.

He tweeted in early February. Fuck him. Fuck Ben Greenfield in the fucking ass with a measle tainted dick. That's all I got to say because we're going to lose a few listeners there. Well, you know what? I, I'm tired of apologizing. I, I actually, I, I don't, I can't remember the last time I apologized.

Fuck that. No. Ben Greenfield is a hack. He's got no, he's got no skills. And by the way, the fact that he's, he tweeted that just, you know what? You're dead to me. You're fucking dead to me. Yes. Well, a Twitter spokesperson told Recode that Dorsey wasn't aware of Greenfield's take on vaccines and neither was the company.

Bullshit. Yes. The topic apparently didn't come up during the podcast. Yeah. So there you go. That's what's happening with the doors. Yeah. I mean, it's, that still does not come anywhere close to the evil that Zuckerberg has unleashed upon the world. You know? All right. If, if Dorsey, Dorsey has to do one thing.

You have one job, Jack Dorsey, delete Donald Trump's Twitter account and all this forgiven. All is forgiven. If you do that one thing, you have one job, but it's never going to happen. It's like, it's like we're the, we're the swearing and cussing and smoking and drinking NPR right now.

We kind of are. This is not your grandfather's NPR motherfucker. Dun, dun, dun. Oh, we are in a mood today. I got to say. So, uh, going on from the, uh, the Facebook outage, Telegram apparently benefited greatly from the outage.

That's still around Telegram. Yeah. I mean, I don't use Telegram. I used it when it first came out and then moved away from it. There was, there were some issues with Telegram's algorithms that, uh, had some, there were some issues with Telegram. I know a lot of Bitcoiners use Telegram.

I personally use signal. Uh, I trust that one more than anything. I do believe that, uh, Edward Snowden said Telegram was not the one to use, but you should use signal. So I think that's when I switched over to signal and I use it once every maybe three months when somebody hits me up on there.

I was about to say, like, I don't, uh, I don't really need any of them. I use WhatsApp, so it is what it is. I don't, well, I don't use WhatsApp. I don't have that on my phone. I use, uh, I use Slack for almost everything. Slack and email. But, uh, I do have signal for when somebody has to send me some covert Intel that we have to have deleted.

But Telegram got three million users when Facebook went down. Wow. That's impressive. That is impressive. Look, anything's better than Messenger. That's true. There's nothing. Anything. Oh God, it's terrible. It's terrible. But, uh, yeah, three million people said, screw you guys.

I'm going home to Telegram. Yeah, well, I'd like to see the stats on actual usage. Over the next month or two. Like, okay, everybody went in and installed it, but did they just switch back to Messenger when Messenger was back up? More than likely. More than likely. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Now, this next one I found I love to death because the law of unintended consequences.

Facial recognition's dirty little secret. Millions of online photos scraped without consent. Hang on a second, though. Is this actually a dirty little secret? No, it's not. I just assumed this is what's happening. Yeah, it's what's happening. No, this is, this is basically AI people are taking trainings or making training sets using Creative Commons licensed photos.

Yep. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that because they are Creative Commons licensed. This is, I'm like, these guys are obeying the letter of the law. Exactly.

Obeying the letter of the law. And now they're getting hit for it because they did the right thing. Yep. There's absolutely nothing illegal about what they did. Yep. And I call total bullshit on anybody pointing this out because I'm sorry, NBC News.

This is not a big kerfuffle. They actually went and found photos that were licensable that they could use and they used them. Huh. Go figure. They weren't taking, they weren't diving into your Facebook feeds and stealing shit from other people.

They went to Flickr and they did a search for Creative Commons licensed photos that we can use legally. And they used them. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Come on. I think, you know, it's obviously a story just because we've hit this zeitgeist with this stuff, right?

People are fed up and people are, people didn't RTFM for the internet. That's the problem. Yeah. Like people don't understand that if you put stuff out there, other people will take it. That's the point of it. They just don't seem to understand that.

And I think people are getting upset about it. So you're seeing stories like this where there are a million stories that they could have written about people that are actually doing things that are severely sketchy, if not outright illegal. This is ridiculous because this is straight up completely legal and non-sketchy.

I mean, it's not, you don't like to hear about it, but there's nothing sketchy about this. No. At all. Exactly. That's the whole point of this is why I'm just so, I'm tearing my hair out. Was IBM supposed to just wait, like put up a site for you to upload your own photo and wait for you to show up and upload your photo there?

Yeah. Why? You put up your photo under a creative commons license for the entire world to see anyways. Yeah. I just, I, this guy, uh, this law professor, Jason Schultz, I want to, I literally want to slap him in the face. He says, this is the dirty little secret of AI training sets. Researchers often just grab whatever images are available in the wild.

Well, they're available in the wild. Come on. At least IBM did the fucking due diligence to look for the creative commons license that said you can use this image. That's what creative commons is all about.

So you cannot sign up for creative commons and then get butt hurt when somebody actually uses it for the fucking purpose of the license. Drives me insane. We need a week off. You think? I'm going to have a fucking coronary right now.

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 lovely Maryland. Dave is also co-host, and I'm not going to say new because you've been around for a while, co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering.

We are not joined by Jason today. He is with his dogs or drones or doggy drones or something like that. He's taking a well-deserved break, right? He's taking a mental health hour. He's the hardest working guy in podcasting, I think. Well, he certainly says he is. So good.

Just kidding, Jason. You know we have to do this. I love it because he's going to edit that out, I'm sure. Well, if we can't make fun of him when he's not here, not that having him here makes us hold back. Stops us, really. No, no. That's right. That's right. Oh, goodness.

So, some stuff this week. We have a little follow-up on that guy that found the first Chinese database out there. There are more. There's quite a few of them that are not protected, and some get a bit creepy. They do indeed. This one in particular that they found 1.8 million women, including a field indicating whether they are breed-ready.

Breed-ready. I do enjoy the fact that it is a digital notation, one or zero. One or... No Y or N. Right, exactly. No, there's... When I first saw this, I kept thinking, Tim, I guess I naively hoped that this was maybe some sort of translation mistake or something like that.

Yes. Doesn't seem like it. No. No, it does not. This is a woman of age at which she can reproduce. I'm guessing this is... Yes. ...what this is. I don't know why you'd have to track that, but I can see in China that I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

No. The other fields also include has-video, which indicates probably whether they are under video surveillance or not. And, wow, it's pretty intense what's happening out there, and I suppose we should not be surprised.

China has kind of basically openly said they're going to do crazy stuff, and they are. Yeah. You know, it's interesting to me because just earlier this week, I was speaking with a researcher from Recorded Future, which is a threat intelligence company. I host their podcast.

And we were talking about how China uses a different type of influence operations than Russia does, where, as we've talked about here plenty of times, Russia, their goal is to cause instability, to erode confidence in our norms, those sorts of things.

Yes. What China does is they want the world to feel good about China. Right. So theirs is much more a PR kind of thing. What's good for China is good for the world. Right. Success in China, having China manufacture things and be a booming economy, that's good for everybody because we all get good things out of that.

And look at these cute, cuddly pandas. But meanwhile, at home in China, you have stuff like this. Yeah. I mean, as a PR department, whoever is running this for China must feel like Michael Jackson's PR department these days. Right.

Right. You know, great songs. Just ignore everything else. Right. Right. Right. From the people who brought you Bill Cosby. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the hits kind of keep coming. Right. And I'm assuming nobody in China is hearing about this.

Right. That is correct. Yeah. So we know that there are these databases, but they do not. That is correct. Yeah. What a strange thing. I wonder how much of a back channel rumor news, you know, news, traveling of news is there.

Right. Or have the Chinese been successful enough to inject enough fear that people don't do those sorts of things out of fear of disappearing? Right. Yeah. That's a good question. I'm really intrigued by that. Yeah. I don't know. I would suspect that's something someone's done reporting on, but what a hard thing to really track down and know that you're getting the real story in a place like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I put a story in here. I was actually listening to a podcast earlier this week. This is from the folks over at Marketplace. They have a podcast called Make Me Smart. Oh, yes. And it's hosted by Kai Rizdahl and Molly Wood. And I like it a lot.

In this particular week's episode, which I recommend, they interviewed a woman named Shoshana Zuboff. And she's a professor at Harvard. And she wrote a book titled The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

That's a pretty heady title there. It is. One would assume that she actually earned her degree and didn't just get bought in. Yeah, I guess that's hmm. Well, we have to ask now, don't we? Yes, we do. Don't we? Right. Yeah. That's funny. So what I love about this segment is that, yes, we do dig into all of the things that we talk about here, about the power that Facebook has and Google and all these other companies.

She makes the good point that you can't just opt out of them, that that is not a reasonable thing to expect someone to do. And also, there are plenty of companies out there that are tracking you without you knowing it. So there's no way, you know, discover all the time.

I remember the most chilling one that we ever talked about was, I believe it was around Thanksgiving, and we figured out, you know, that people knew where you were. Right. Without your knowledge, yeah. Right, right, right. Yeah. And I believe they could tell your political leanings based on how long everybody stayed together on Thanksgiving, whether or not they could track whether, you know, there was discord based on how long your little portable pocket-sized GPS tracker put you

How many times you had to storm out of the house for five minutes to cool down? Go outside for a smoke. Yeah, yeah. So, but the thing that really struck me about this interview, and I do recommend folks check it out, is that she leaves on a positive note.

She says that she believes that us getting control of this is inevitable, that it will happen, that it has to happen. This is a phase we're going through, and that we will outgrow this, the proper legislation will come along, and we as societies around the world will figure out how to deal with this.

I mean, we're never ones to be optimists on this show. Well, that's why I'm throwing us all a bone here. I do find it hard to argue with. I mean, I think we are going to have to come to some sort of resolution.

I believe you actually coined the term a couple weeks back in this segment where you kind of called us the lost generation, and I do think we are. I think it's going to come too little too late for us, but we're seeing so much pushback now. I think we're really hitting a turning point where, damn it, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

It seems to be kind of a growing feeling, and there's only, all the money in the world isn't going to stop a popular uprising. Just ask the French. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So a little bit of hopefulness there, and so that struck me and got my attention, and I think it's worth sharing, so do check that out.

I might have to, I'm going to have to give this a deep listen then, because I could use a bit of optimism right now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think Jason threw these stories in here for us, a little something for us to talk about here. DARPA is building a $10 million open source secure voting system. Yes.

I personally would like to see an extra zero behind that 10, because I know 10 million ain't exactly what it used to be. Right. Right. Yeah, this is pretty cool. We've been talking about this article over on Motherboard by Kim Zetter, and if there's anybody who knows about election security and voting systems, it's Kim Zetter.

Really, really up on this stuff. I've spoken to her a few times, and every time I get to speak to her, it's a real treat. She really knows her stuff. Right. So what they're doing is, DARPA is contracting out to build this open source voting system, and this is, I guess, part of me wonders what's taken us so long.

Yeah. Well, lobbying and the companies behind the machines that exist now, I'd imagine, is a big part of it. Yeah. You're probably right. It's hard to get anything to move. Any kind of large organization. And, you know, we have different voting standards in different counties. The fact that this all isn't standardized just seems a little ridiculous to me.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, states' rights, you know. Oh, yeah. So my understanding of the way that this works is, or what they're proposing here, is that you will go and cast your vote on this electronic machine, which will then print out your votes.

Yes. And it prints it out in a way that you can read it, so you see where the little X's are next to the things, the people you voted for, your choices. So there's no ambiguity there. There's no barcode. No hanging chads. No butterfly ballots. No. And the idea here is that because of that, there's no way that you could have checks next to certain names, but the barcode would represent a different set of votes than what you check next to.

Gotcha. Right. So you take this sheet of paper that's been printed out, and you walk that over to the optical reader, the scanner, and you slide it in the scanner, and the scanner reads your votes, and then that piece of paper also gets stored.

So we have a paper trail. Right. And then you get a receipt that has a cryptographic token on it, which you can take with you, and then you can later check that token against a website that will track the fact that you voted.

Right. Now, you won't be able to bring up your votes on there because there's some good reasons not to do that. There's some privacy reasons. And, you know... So it's stored, but it just is not visible. Not visible to you. Set to is not visible. But there is a paper trail, and it seems to solve a lot of the problems that we have with previous electronic voting systems.

Also... So long as this database is protected. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And they're taking it out to DEFCON this year. It really seems like they are... They're checking all the boxes here. Yeah. Yeah. There's a good-faith effort to get this right.

Well, this is wonderful. We certainly need this. Yeah. You know, it only solves one part of our voting problems, the other being misinformation and social media. But this does solve this problem, and we're well overdue for this.

So, good. Well, right. But imagine... I mean, it's a one... Like you say, it's one piece of the puzzle where if we can reestablish confidence in the system itself, that is a good thing. Right. And so, hopefully, this will do that. Well, I'm taking what I can get, Brian.

I'm taking every bit of optimism I can get today. That is the nature of our segment now. Yeah. Anything that we can crawl and claw out of this that makes us go, hey, it might get better. Shred of hope. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And we have Jason's final story, which I know is entirely so he can put a music sting at the end of this podcast, but we'll throw him his bone.

Hackers love to strike on Saturday, according to Redscan. So, they've done some math here, and they've done a data dive to figure out that, unbelievably, Saturdays are pretty empty for a hacker, and they've got not much else to do, so that's when they hack. Yeah. And I think also because businesses are closed on Saturdays.

That does help, does it not? Yeah. So, fewer of the IT staff are monitoring the systems on a Saturday. So, I think that probably has a lot to do with it as well. We were just actually, just today, Joe Kerrigan and I were recording a segment for Hacking Humans, and we had a similar story to this that actually came from AARP, who does a lot of work trying to protect, you know, older folks from being scammed.

So, we don't have to. That's right. Although, as Joe and I joked, I am moments away from having my free AARP membership card sent to me. Oh, yes. We are not getting younger. I'm teetering on the edge of that. Yeah, yeah, no, and so I'm in total denial of that.

But, anyway, they were talking about when are people more susceptible to being scammed on the telephone. Right. And this was for employees, and what they found was Monday mornings, people are much less likely to be scammed, and as the week goes on, they are more and more likely to be scammed, and Friday afternoon at 5 o'clock is when you want to hit somebody.

You have, like, two out of three of these successful phishing attempts, two out of three attempts, they were successful if they hit the person basically at closing time on Friday afternoon, because that person's, you know, has been worn down, the weight of the world has crushed their spirit, they just want to go home.

So, my takeaway from that is stop answering the phone around three on Friday. Just call it. Call it a day. There you go. Right. And if your boss asks you why, tell him you're doing it for the good of the organization. That's right. That it's a security move. Ops and Tell told me, no more phones. That's right.

I'm done. See you later. I'm doing it for you. Yeah, yeah. I like it. Me too. See, look, full of hope this week. You know what? This is the most optimistic security segment we've had in a long while. I think we should probably just leave it here. Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, have a pleasant weekend.

You too. Have a good one. Great talking to you. Great talking to you as well. Talk to you soon. Ops and Doodads. We've gotten our first look at the new Harry Potter Wizards Unite app that's coming out from the same people that brought us Pokemon Go.

I was about to say, is this basically a Pokemon Go type thing with magic ones? Uh-huh. Okay. I am going to play the ever living shit out of this app. It looks cool. I'm sorry. It does. And I know this is one of those few things that's going to get my wife to actually use an app because she is such a Harry Potter fan.

I know a friend of the show, David Teeter, is a huge Pokemon Go fan and lost like 35 pounds running around San Francisco collecting his Pikachus and shit. But this one I might actually play. It looks kind of cool. And there's a demo in the article that we're going to post in the show.

It's at GOG.show slash 329. Check it out. It's coming out in a couple months. I'm digging it. I think I'm going to try it because it looks good. What the fuck not? Yeah. I mean, it looks really good. Yeah, and it's a little more advanced than just Pokemon Go where you just flip shit at it.

You have to like do gestures and things like that, which whatever it's it's a game. Yes, it's just a game. But man, I think I might be able to get into this one. I've got to tell you, I will not be getting into it for reasons I'm about to get into. But I am looking forward to much like when Pokemon Go first came out, a bunch of idiots walking around in Santa Monica and Venice doing weird gestures.

It's so much fun. Oh, God, it is so much fun. I used to go to the park by my house in Downers Grove. And literally, I told you about this one time. There was like a couple hundred people in the park going around trying to collect their things. And they had like, oh, is it an NRAD or whatever that that that that sound device that is meant for, like, breaking up crowds that the military uses MRAD or something.

They had one on top of the pavilion and they unleashed it on these fucking high school kids. Everybody scattered. I'm just like, seriously, what the hell is going on in Downers Grove that you need this device a for one and be that you that you turn it on for a bunch of guys just walking around playing with their phone.

So can't wait. Can't wait for this. But this is going to be fantastic. I just I am waiting for waiting for this to drop. This is going to be so much fun. Right. Well, I can guarantee you I probably will not be installing it. And I'll tell you why right now. I finally finished reading Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism.

Now, I will talk about that at great length when we get around to having an at the library segment again. Yeah, that'll be on next Monday show. Yeah. Next Monday show. OK, yeah. So I will talk about it at greater length there because his overarching things I'm not going to talk about yet because I have not gotten rid of Facebook or things like that nature.

But what he did spur me to do was basically to Marie Kondo my phone and digital environment. Does it not spark joy? I went through things and decided, yes, it's time to figure out what sparks joy and what doesn't. What has just been hanging around on my phone for years for no particular reason whatsoever.

I'm not doing it all in one go because that's way too daunting. But every day and first thing in the morning, I pick something to delete something just to get rid of. So far, I've deleted my accounts and killed off Periscope and Snapchat. No idea why I still had those as well as untapped. Sorry, Kyle.

But I just don't go and drink craft beers like I did before I had a kid. So no point in having that on my phone anymore. Moved a bunch of silly music apps that I've never once used on my phone, like garage band titles and sequencers. Also, I'm getting rid of Pepper Plate, the recipe app. We just don't use it.

We have a physical binder full of printed out recipes with handwritten notes and changes and tweaks. And when we try something new, we print it out. If it makes the cut into the binder, it goes. Sometimes physical is just best. Yeah. I got to totally get on with that idea because we have a recipe book here, too.

We print them out. We make notes. And it's just so much easier to just because, you know, it's a binder. You just open it up. It's the bandwidth is much higher on a binder than it is on an app trying to search, find out what do we do on this one? Blah, blah, blah. It's just like you open the book, you find the recipe, you see your notes.

Oh, yeah, we're going to use white wine instead of chicken stock on this. OK, done. You know, it's great. Yep. So, yeah, I'm just kind of decluttering my digital life. And finally, as of this morning, I even went and deleted my Elo account. Oh, my God, because it still existed.

Like once every three months, I'll get like a comment on a post I made four years ago. And I'm just like, finally, I'm like, why do I still even have this open? Why don't I practice what I preach? Why am I not going around to all these different social media accounts and deleting them and just getting rid of them? Because there's no point in keeping them.

Now, how many of these services actually really deleted my account and content? Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck knows? They all have periods of time. And if I log back in to check and see if it's deleted, then it obviously gets reinstated back. So basically, you're just kind of left going, well, I told them to delete it.

I hope they do. I still have my Elo account and I'm going to keep it because in some weird side universe that I live in, Bruce Sterling, who's one of my favorite authors of all time and one of my favorite futurists and cyberpunk authors, he posts to Elo like 17 times a day.

And I love Bruce Sterling. I can't I just can't get away from the guy. I really love Bruce Sterling. I mean, he did the Shaper Mechanist series way back in the day with Skiz Matrix and wrote a bunch of mediocre novels that had some really good ideas in them. But I don't know.

I just love the guy to death because he's just a kook. He's just a total kook. He lives in a villa in Italy now, and he's just a crazy guy. I love him. But he only he posts on Twitter and on Elo. So I go check out his Elo post. So I can't get rid of Elo as much as I would like to.

You're insane. But I love Bruce Sterling. I'm sorry. He's the only reason that I can stay on Elo. And I get a follow notice pretty much every other day on Elo, which is basically a porn bot. It's all porn bots. Now, I'm like, me like you.

You want follow back? I'm like, no, sorry. Sorry, dude from the Ukraine. I'm not going to follow you back. Nice tits, but I'm not following you back. Now, as far as Cal Newport's digital minimalism goes and his take on social media, again, like I said, I will talk about that more when I review the book itself.

But I did finally, finally turn off all my notifications. I actually deleted Twitter because I just I don't get on Twitter on my phone ever. That's something I say for my desktop, but I made a folder and I moved Facebook and Instagram into it. So they're not front and center and notifications are turned off on them and I'm using them so much less.

Yeah, good. It's nice. It is really nice. And it's been a very drastic change. It is hard the first few days, but you get used to it. I think the hardest part for me right now is my muscle memory on where the apps were on my phone because everything's moved now. Yeah, that's like everything is moved. And then the next step, move them again in like a week and just keep moving them around.

So you don't get that muscle memory for it. So, yeah, I don't have any social on my phone. If I do have to like, you know, if I if I've got some stuff on my phone that I want to post to Instagram, it my I changed my I went back to iCloud for photos, which I hate.

But the easy thing about it is that then I open the photos app on my computer, drag it to the desktop, then open flume and then have to post it through flume after I drag it into Photoshop to, you know, do any modifications on it, which makes it a giant pain in the ass.

But that's the way we used to do it. It's not. Here's the thing. It's not a giant pain in the ass. It's what we did for fucking 20 years before Instagram made it like two clicks and go. Yep. To pump Chuck, whatever. But yeah, I just I enjoy it much more that I'm more cognizant of the shit that I post on Instagram.

Right. And I just, you know, I go to the website and I see the stuff that my friends post when I need to. And I use flume for that. And it's just it's just like a weight off of you. You don't grab your phone all the time. What I want to notice is, Brian, you should look at the what's what's the name of that app that is built in now?

I think it's a screen time. Oh, yeah. You should look at screen time and look at pickups like over time and see if your pickup rate has gone down. Yeah, I know the just in the first week, my time on on the phone dropped by like 30%, which is good.

So, yeah, I'm at 24 total pickups today. First pickup was at 2.52 a.m. Because I had to use the flashlight to find my pants because I had to take the dogs to go pee. Uh, my usual total pickups were in the hundreds.

Right. And the fact that I've been up for six hours and I have 24 pickups on my phone ain't bad. Right. Ain't bad at all. So let's move over to some fun news. Okay. I was browsing around Amazon the other day looking to get some vitamins because I had to re-up one of my vitamin subscriptions.

And I got a, you might also like, you know, one of those ads that come across the bottom. This is the K-Bar Tactical Spork Spoon Fork Knife Tool 9909.

Costs $5.98. Free shipping for Prime members when buying this add-on item. Now, introducing our new two-in-one multifunction K-Bar Tactical Spork. Perfect for various occasions like camping, hunting, and fishing.

Highly recommended sturdy polymer plastic material. Plastic Spork is durable and long-lasting, making it effective and long-lasting. I think you said that already. One of the best feature, one of the best feature of camping Spork is that it could be separated in half and becomes multifunctional.

Pretty cool little setup. Also contains a pretty decent knife with it. Multi-tool. Fairly inexpensive. Which is two words here on the Amazon Review. Food and detergent safe. Perfectly designed to be an advanced compliance tool. Without a period.

You could eat with it. Also helpful in self-defense. Overall length. 6.875 inch folding spork is made in USA extremely lightweight. We have come to the point where we have a fucking tactical spork.

The funny thing is we've come to a point where, again, in the early years of this show, you would have put this in here not as a joke, but now you are. So I'm proud of you, Jason. Yeah. No, it is. It is amazingly awesome. And I'm pretty sure that I got that because I bought the K-Bar K-A-1214-BRK USA fighting knife.

So I do own a K-Bar knife. Right. And I've always wanted one. And I swear to God, this is the sexiest knife I've ever owned. It is beautiful. It is behind the door. So if you ever want to come and try and rob us, because we've had a lot of break-ins in the neighborhood recently, I just keep that by the door.

And everybody's going to say, well, you're going to get killed with your own knife. Well, I took several years of martial arts, so I kind of know how to use a knife. And you can just save those emails. Yeah, this is a knife. And honestly, this is a fucking knife.

This thing is beautiful. All black. Oh, my God. Yeah. Link will be in the show notes to it. I love this knife. I want to get a second one for the car, but we'll save that for another show. But I'm not going to buy the tactical sport. Although, actually, I just might because it's only six bucks.

What the hell? Just so I can say I have a tactical sport. That I'll keep in the car. That would be my self-defense. Wouldn't it be funny if, you know, the neighborhood meth heads break into my house and I don't kill them with the giant K bar or my pepper spray air gun or anything like that.

I kill them with a fucking spork. Oh, my God. I love this thing so much. And I do want to talk about one other new investing app that I found called Beanstalks. That's B-E-A-N-S-T-O-X. It's kind of like M1 Finance that we use.

It lets you buy fractional shares. So I'm checking that one out. So if anybody has tried Beanstalks who's listening to the show, drop me a note, jpd.me. I'm curious about your experience with it, because before I dump in a bunch of money and I don't have a bunch of money once I dump in 50 bucks to see how it works.

I'm just curious if anybody's tried it and what you think about it, because it looks like it does the same thing as M1 Finance, but it's run by, I don't know if it's run by, but Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank is an investor in this. So that's how I found out about it watching Shark Tank.

So I thought maybe diversify a little bit and just have two, you know, two different apps that I could invest in. Because the thing about M1 Finance is you just, you create your pool, you know, with all the different stocks and then you throw in money and then it just spreads it out over those. I'm just wondering, hopefully Beanstalks, you can just say, I just want to buy like point two, three shares of Apple and here's a hundred bucks, you know.

Right. Let me know if it does that. That'd be interesting. I will. Next week on Grumpy Old Geeks. Now I've got some cool science news, especially for us that are podcasters and have home studios. A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe and then they cranked it up as loud as it could go.

And what did they hear at the other end? Nothing. Yeah. Nothing. Did they put noise canceling foams or concrete in there? No. They left it open except for a small 3D printed ring placed around the ring. The rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker enough to make it inaudible to the human ear.

It's an acoustic metamaterial is what they're calling it. Mathematically modeled design shaped in such a way can catch certain frequencies passing through the air and reflect them back towards the source. So, you know, typical normal acoustic paneling, like what you've got up in your studio and blankets that I have thrown around mine, absorb sound and turn vibrations into heat.

This is completely open. Air and light can travel through it. Just sound is stopped. How cool is that? It's pretty neat. I got to say, it's really neat. I was checking out the video. It's cool. What if it works is going to change construction because you can imagine like putting this in your house like it's become super easy to make basically completely soundproof rooms.

How cool is that? Yeah, I need that now. Honestly, I need it right now because these damn gardeners are driving me crazy. But yeah, this is it's a really cool system. And I just I'm in like, let's get this thing to market now. Yeah, I mean, they're even talking about how they can make drones silent, which is a little bit more terrifying.

But I'm down with that. I mean, my drone's pretty quiet. You know, once it gets past 10 feet, you can't hear it. But soon there'll be silent but deadly, Jason. I've got some silent but deadlies for you right now. I'm sure you do. I had Mexican for dinner. What do you want? And on the other end of the audio spectrum, sort of a United Nations World Health Organization petition is warning against using wireless devices such as AirPods over fears regarding potentially dangerous radiation.

Here we are again. EMF radiation concerns. Yeah, that's it. That's all you got. I was going to go into it more and more. OK, again, this is just like everything else.

One scientist comes out and says these are really there have been recent. Numerous publications that have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. And then other people come out with studies that say, no, there aren't any things happening here. So which is it, people?

Here's the deal. Brian, life is a fatal condition, so I don't care. I love my iPod or my AirPods. I'm going to just basically you can you can put me in the coffin wearing them and just, you know, if you hate me, then you'd be able to sneak into the coffin and play reply all on repeat until the end of time.

If you want to torture me forever. But I'm sticking with my AirPods. I just don't I just don't have any Fs to give anymore. I don't. Brian, I love data visualizations.

I'm a huge nerd when it comes to data visualizations. And when I found this latest data visualization, I was just giddy. Giddy is a schoolgirl, a schoolgirl that maybe Leonardo DiCaprio would date because he likes him young. And that is this is an infographic on the ever increasing age gap between Leonardo DiCaprio and the women he's dated visualized.

This is one of the finest infographic I've ever seen in my life. It is hilarious. It's awesome. What's that Matthew McConaughey line from from Slackers or whatever? I get older, but the girls, they stay the same. There you go. That's pretty much it.

Yeah. If you hit 25 and you're dating Leonardo DiCaprio, you're out. No, you're you have hit peak Leo at that point. This is a beautiful graphic. I highly recommend everybody go to the show does gog dot shows slash to what the hell number we on to three to nine twenty nine.

I'm still I still can't believe we're in the three hundreds three to nine. Yes, it's a little frightening. This is this is just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Well, I have some more infographics for you. These aren't quite as beautiful, but I do like the the what's actually being studied here. Drug abuse dot com via metal injection surveyed 976 musical festival attendees and the results weren't all that surprising.

Alcohol and marijuana were the most common substances used at music events that shouldn't really surprise anybody who's ever been to a festival, nor should it surprise anybody that EDM fans are by far the most likely to be intoxicated at a show. Heavy metal is second on the list, which is a bit of I guess I don't think that's too surprising, but they know it's surprising.

Yeah, I've been to a lot of metal shows. Yeah, they got a drink. Sixty two point two percent of heavy metal fans get drunk at shows compared to fifty eight point seven of hip hop listeners. Forty six point six percent of country fans and just thirty nine point eight percent of pop concert attendees. Now, tell you what, if I was at a pop concert, I would be the drunkest.

Exactly. That's what I was thinking. I'm like, this is skewing weird. If I got to go see fucking Yanni, I need like seven Jack and Cokes just to get through the door. Yeah. Those who favored folk music were more likely to consume drugs than blues, RB and soul or jazz enthusiasts. OK, so there you go.

I do like there's a whole bunch of stuff in here about the drugs and alcohol that people use at music events because, you know, we need these sorts of studies in our lives. Oh, oh, here's a surprise. Molly was far more popular at EDM shows. Go figure, go figure. Oh, man.

And I just put this in here because it just made my my warm heart just smile this morning. I'm like the Grinch today. You know, I just it grew twice the size because in a four hundred and twenty to zero vote, the House of Representatives says Mueller's report should be public.

Four hundred and twenty to zero. Wow. And they say they say we can't reach across the aisle these days. No shit. I mean, seriously, I can't believe that. I mean, it's just I was just like shocking that there's not even like five no votes. That's amazing. Yeah.

I mean, I'm gobsmacked, completely gobsmacked that they actually agreed on one thing that they could do. And this was, yeah, let's let's let's make that public. What do you think? OK, I'm in. Oh, so nice. And in very sad news, I have a closing shout out to all our friends and listeners in Christ Church, New Zealand.

You guys have unfortunately learned what we've had to deal with for quite some time. Forty nine people are dead after two mosques were hit by some unbelievably stupid jackass. Yep. White supremacist who learned about life from the fucking Internet and and live streamed it.

Live streamed it. It's this is just the most disgusting thing I've ever heard. I actually was like in tears this morning when I read that. It just it really hurt me because I know so many people from Christ Church that I've met over the years in tech. They are the sweetest fucking people I've ever met. They just love life.

They're fun. They don't judge anybody. And this is an Australian guy who came over and just decided to do this because he's a fucking asshole. You know, I just I my heart goes out to you guys. So stay strong. Agreed. Until next time, I'm Brian Schelmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks to support the show and keep us on the air. Go to Patreon dot 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 dot show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG dot show slash three to nine.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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