333: Halfway to Hell

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We are recording at night, which we have not done for a long time, and I know from my messages with you earlier that you have some beers. I have a Lagunitas Maximus, perfectly chilled by my side. I'm insanely jealous. I'm over-caffeinated and under-alcoholed.

I've pushed my digital detox to a complete detox because me and my family have basically been sick for the entire month of March. I've had two beers in two weeks, one beer each at each memorial I had to go to over the weekend, and that's it. So I have nothing but iced tea in front of me, and we are all just trying to get healthy here. I miss booze.

I was going to say, this is not like a spiritual detox. This is just, I'm sick of being sick. Yeah, you're trying to detox so you can actually drink again. Yes, exactly. Let's be clear on that. All right. You had me worried there for a second.

I had a palpitation. I'm very sad because we so rarely do nighttime recordings. This is the opportunity for us to let our freak flag fly, but it's just going to be you. So I'll have to try to rein you in, I suppose. I guess. I guess. Or just let me go. Just let me go. I'll just turn off my mic and walk away. You may not notice after the end of the sixth beer.

Okay. So I've got a bit of follow-up. I know we've been talking a lot, particularly recently, about our nostalgia for the old web. And I ran across this article. You can never go home to GeoCities again. And we have now fast-forwarded our culture so much that we are recycling the early days of the internet. It is time for that to come back again.

Well, hasn't one of our taglines on the show been, this has all happened before and this will all happen again? Well, it definitely is now. There are two new games that are coming out that are nostalgia games about the early days of the internet. So the article talks about how, you know, quantitatively, the explosion of the web is obvious with the number of internet users growing from just 5% globally in 1999, or what Jason and I call the glory days, to more than half of the world today.

But qualitatively, the story is much messier. Alongside rapid adoption around the globe, we've also seen countless platforms collect millions of users in short periods of time, only to be abandoned within months or years, pushed aside by something new and shiny, promising an even better way to connect the world around us.

So we have this cycle of adoption and abandonment, and our virtual lives are scattered and all over the place. And now people are cashing in on this. We've got two games coming, one called Wrong Box, which came out in February, and one called Hypnospace Outlaw, which came out in early March to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

And in both games, players are transported into manifestations of our digital past, with references to web platforms popular during the late 90s and early 2000s. So Hypnospace Outlaw, which was developed by a game company called Tendershoot and runner-up for three awards at the recent Independent Game Awards, pairs a pre-Y2K web experience with many of the more unsettling attributes of today's internet.

Players are introduced to the Hypnospace, a GeoCities-like web hosting platform, in which users can make homepages and surf the web in their dreams. Witness the dawning of a new world where sleep time is no longer downtime, promises the intriguing, hopelessly utopian introductory video. But rather than exploring this dreamlike space and peace, players serve a far more nefarious role as enforcers.

Okay. So they go around chasing after people who violate copyright law and angsty teenagers who cyber-bully people on lonely homepages, and it gets all dystopian. Shocking. So there's one game. The other one is the Internet of Wrong Box, which is slightly newer, coming primarily from the experience of game creator and internet artist Molly Soda's high school years in the mid-2000s.

Just as Facebook, which she calls FacePage, was supplanting MySpace, which she called MyPlace. A lot of thought put into those, yeah. Yeah, so this is more like a sensory experience because it's done by a graphic artist. So it's driven by colorful play of texture and color and animated GIFs and all that sort of stuff.

So the player is tasked with carrying out a small number of searches around a variety of virtual spaces from recreations of teenage rooms to imaginary aim chat sessions to a number of three-dimensional environments with glittery fairy sprites and spammy image GIFs or GIFs. Yeah, I was going to say, you just said GIF.

Well, back in the day, it was still like a, you know, a thing. So I was just being, you know, time appropriate, right? Oh, it's still a thing. Oh, there is still a holy war going on over GIF versus GIF, even though the GIFers are so wrong. So wrong. Yeah. So I will not be playing either of these games, but I thought, you know, because we've been talking about this so much, maybe you dip your toes into them.

Check them out. Maybe. Maybe. In my copious free time, you know. What I did enjoy was the last quote in the article from this person, Molly Soda, who made the second game Wrong Box. Instagram can be deleted in a second, and then I would be like, wait, what the fuck was I doing on Instagram in 2013?

We entrust so much of our lives onto these spaces, and if we didn't record it online, it didn't happen. And then if the website goes away, then it didn't happen. Well, yeah. No. Didn't we talk about that last week, though? Yeah, but I mean, let's go back to what we've been talking about recently, which is our digital detoxes. How about you live your life in meatspace?

Let's try that again. Yeah, a little meatspace follow-up on my digital Shabbat, by the way. I have fired my groundskeeper. On my Saturdays now, I will take the new lawnmower that I bought off Craigslist, and I will go out and I will do yard work, like a good Midwestern boy should.

I even got a new weed whacker today. I have to say, though, and you're probably going to get upset about this, friend of the show, Dr. David Teeter, wrote me and said that you broke your digital Shabbat this Saturday, and you Instagrammed. Yeah, I did, because I had a couple things going on, and I was just on there, and I'm like, I'm on here.

I'll just post something. But I had a meeting, and I had to pop on the thing to do it, and it was just there. So, yeah. But I did take most of the rest of the weekend off. It was just one, it was one lapse. It was just one lapse. Just one more drink.

Just one more drink. You lost your seven-day card already. Your seven-day chip. Gone. Yeah. Starting fresh again. Yeah. And the funny thing is, it's just basically because I forgot. I'm like, oh, I'm not supposed to be doing this. But then I had to go to a meeting, and I had to get on email to figure out where the hell I was going, because it was someplace I'd never been before.

But anyway, but yeah, I got rid of basically our gardener, who comes every week, because he does a terrible job. He doesn't charge very much, but I'm like, okay, well, if I get rid of him for two months, then I can afford my own lawnmower and weed whacker, and just go out and do it myself.

Yeah. Then it's healthy. Burn some calories. Exactly. And I like doing it. Do stuff with your hands. Yeah. I love doing things with my hands again. This is one thing I've really reconnected with just in the past couple of weeks. My roommate was just like, you want to mow the lawn? I'm like, I love mowing the lawn.

I've been mowing the lawn since I was five. Right. What I don't like is a truck full of Mexicans pulling up at my place at 645 every Tuesday morning, and it sounds like attack of the killer bees for an hour outside, and you go out. It's just a wasteland after destroying our yard.

I'm like, I'm just going to go out and do it the right way. Right. Here's the technology tie into this, and I did have a point to this. The lawnmower I got is the first thing that I've ever bought on Craigslist. After all these years and all this time, and even hanging out with Craig Newmark multiple times, I've never bought anything on Craigslist.

So this was an experience for me. Look at you. I know. Getting into the early 2000s. I'm really on the bleeding edge, you know. Now, we've also talked a lot about ageism and the fact that you and I basically couldn't get hired in Silicon Valley if we wanted to these days.

And I ran across on Recode a podcast with Kara Swisher, because she always does them, with somebody named – she's an activist named Ashton Applewhite. And she says that Silicon Valley keeps trying to cure death, and instead they should fix ageism, which I agree with. She says Silicon Valley has an unhealthy fetish.

As the first billionaires of the personal computing era have hit middle age, some of them have begun pouring money into dubious projects to keep the young, even possibly stop death. And she says ageism is the first form of discrimination that many white men encounter. So I'm eager for some of these guys to get woke. Yeah.

I'm serious. As soon as the Zuck hits 40, he's going to be like half to fire himself. Yeah. That's the way it's going to work. And her argument, of course, is suppose you could live forever or live to be 200. Do you want to be that age in a world that treats you like a second-class citizen? I don't. And the more worthy goal, she explains, is using this moment to examine how tech culture has unfairly enshrined youth as the ideal, which I agree with.

Well, yeah. I mean, we have the experience. That's the annoying part. Well, yeah, we can't stay up, you know, 20 hours to code something because we can do it in two hours because we did stay up for 20 hours a long time ago. Also, there's something that happens called life.

Like, do we want the world to end? Because you know what? When you have a kid, you don't work 20 hours a night anymore. You can't. Yeah. We've, like, cut out the way that the world is supposed to work, which is as you get older and you get other responsibilities and do other things with your life, you're still supposed to be able to make a living and keep the fucking human society going.

Yeah. What's it all for if you can't have fun in a life and experiences with people? And, again, that's certainly something I've been thinking about a lot recently, especially since my kid has been sick the last two days. Fun. Yeah. 24-hour-a-day daycare. But, I mean, I think about that because I see people that I still know that are still really doing the hustle.

And, I mean, I'm blessed and lucky in that I have a situation in which I don't actually have to make any money. You got a sugar mama. That's what you got. I really kind of do at the moment. So that's helpful. But I have to say, if we weren't in that situation right now, I'd be getting the hell out of this town.

I'd just be finding somewhere small where we could afford to live because your priorities just change so much once you have a family. I'm not interested in any of that anymore. I just want to hang out with my kid, have a good time. Can't wait for him to start playing sports. I'd be able to afford the basic necessities.

That's all I want. Yeah. Now you're making me sad because that's what I had before I lost my house in Chicago. And I had to come back here and deal with all this bullshit again. But I had just that. I had a little place that I liked. Had my family, which are my little fuzzy ones. And I did the things I wanted to do.

And I worked when I needed to work. And it was a nice life. And then, of course, it was all ripped away because of assholes. Patreon.com slash GOG. Yeah. Okay. Now, we've been talking a lot about ethics in tech, right? Yes. So, I found this article over on TechCrunch called Expert Panel.

What even is tech ethics? And it's by Greg Epstein. And he says, it's been a pleasure this past month to launch a weekly series investigating issues in tech ethics here at TechCrunch. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I didn't hear about this until now. So, let me go read this. This was just posted about 10 hours ago.

I'm going down. And he's gathered a bunch of really smart women to talk about ethics in tech. And these women look very, very qualified to talk about it. And I get down to when the article starts. And then it fades to black. That's it. Extra crunch. And then it says, sign up for the newsletters.

So, I signed up for the newsletters thinking that was going to give me access to the article. No. No, no, no. There's nothing here that says how to get the rest of the article, period. And so, I do a little digging here. At the very top, it does say extra crunch. Then over in the sidebar, it says extra crunch with a little new flag next to it.

So, I click on extra crunch. Extra crunch. Dig deeper. Build better. And then it loads this page and asks me. Like, I click on learn more. I get all this stuff. And it gives me all of this stuff. Sign up today to help us support builders like you. And it's got the whole spiel.

It's got everything about it. You know what it doesn't have, Brian? What? I don't know if you noticed this. It does not have a button to sign up. Hmm. I think you have different settings on your browser than mine. Because I didn't have to go anywhere.

As soon as the article started to fade out for me, I get a little pop-up window. This is extra crunch exclusive. $15 per month. You can click on that. Or $150 per year. You can click on that. Didn't get a thing. Hmm. You must have that popped. No pop-up warnings. I turned off ad blocking.

I turned everything off. I even tried it in incognito mode. Hmm. Nothing. Right. So, I cannot sign up for extra crunch. And it's just... And it's one of those articles, too. We've talked about this. TechCrunch has that thing where you try and select the title of the article.

Oh, yes. And it always clicks on it and takes you to the homepage. Yep. What genius over there. I mean, okay. They report on technology. Maybe fucking hire a technologist at some point to actually build your website. Nobody cares anymore. I was trying to figure out how to give them money to sign up for extra crunch because some of the articles look decent.

They don't look $15 a month, $150 a year decent. No, it doesn't. But I couldn't figure out how much it costs because there's... On their page, there's nothing about pricing. There's nothing. It says, get started. Membership benefits. Blah, blah, blah. To inquire about discount prices. Blah, blah, blah. Then it goes to the FAQ.

And that's it. I get nothing. Nothing at all. So, way to go, TechCrunch. You know, enjoy all those monies from your premium membership. And if you're wondering why nobody's giving you any money, it's because they can't fucking sign up. Extra Grump. Patreon.com slash GOG. In the news.

Well, Lyft shares kind of bounced up the first day like we thought they were going to. And they opened at $87.24 after the initial price of $72. So, at the end of the day, the value stood at $26.4 billion, making it one of the most valuable American companies to go public in the last decade.

It was more than 23 times the valuation of the parent company of Hertz, the rental car provider, and bigger than the parent company of United Airlines. How, what kind of wrong world do we live in? We live in the upside down, I guess. And, of course, those risks sent jitters through some investors on Friday with Lyft shares falling after opening up strongly.

The stock dipped to roughly $80 before declining further near the end of trading to finish the day at $78.29. Well, you got an earlier article than I saw because I have one as well, which is a little less optimistic for Lyft.

And a hat tip to Gwydian, who also sent this to us on Twitter. But this is the first one that I saw, which is investors are already dumping Lyft. Of course. And they took a little different point of view on this. I like the way that they approach this. Lyft, the mobility company that doesn't have a viable business model and has never made a profit, open trading as a public company for the second business day on Monday.

Investors promptly dumped shares, lowering the company's stock below its IPO value of $70 per share. In the world of high finance, this is generally regarded as a bad thing. You think? Analysts told CNBC that not only is this bad news for Lyft, but also for other tech companies looking to IPO this year, including the ride-hailing company's rival, Uber, which is also known for not making any money.

These guys over at Jalopnik are kindred spirits. They kind of are. Regardless of whether this portends trouble for the now public company or a temporary correction to an overhyped IPO, it's worth remembering that Lyft lost more than $900 million last year and argued in court that if it has to pay drivers a minimum wage, it will collapse their entire business model.

It's almost like many tech companies exist in a sort of bubble. Who knew? Oh, yeah. And as of this recording, right now, Lyft is trading at $68.97. Can we get a we told you so? Yeah, I said don't do it.

So, here's another thing, though. The EU's new copyright laws won't wreck the internet. Now, we've been somewhat skeptical about these laws and a little bit worried about them, but this person, let me get the name really quick because I didn't grab it, Eleonora Rosati.

I'm not entirely sure what her qualifications are. Okay. They never do that anymore on these sites very quickly. She is an associate professor in intellectual property law at the University of Southampton and author of Copyright in the Court of Justice of the European Union.

However, regardless of all this, so we've been talking about this. Critics have dubbed this directive as a censorship machine that would harm free speech, impose new obligations on platforms that would be technically impossible for them to comply with, kill memes and gifs, and ultimately wreck the internet. The argument that she's making is actually, no.

No, it won't. It appears unlikely that these laws will harm the internet and our free speech online. In fact, it makes users' legal positions safer than what is currently the case. In fact, in most cases, the directive will protect users from the risk of legal liability for sharing protected content. They also now have a right to share parodies, quotes, discussions, characters, etc.

So there was an original version that was really bad, which required all these upload filters and all that sort of thing. That's been changed. Now platforms will have to seek licenses from right holders. So, for instance, if YouTube wishes to allow users to post content that incorporates songs by Pearl Jam or whoever, it will need to make sure that they have received permission to do so from those that own the rights to the music.

Can I pay them not to post anything with Pearl Jam on it? Well, at this point, I'll take that before Despacito or anything else that's all over the place. Platforms will need to prevent unlicensed content from being uploaded, but the law says that they might be liable if they unduly limit users' rights.

So, for instance, if you make a parody of Despacito, YouTube cannot prevent you from uploading it. If it does, and you live in an EU country, then you'll have the right to have it reinstated on the platform. The law also removes the availability of platforms' legal immunity, or safe harbor, when users violate copyright.

Unfortunately, it still will remain available in relations to other user activities, including defamation, criminal activities, trademark infringement, etc. So, to a certain degree, this is giving us what we want. It's kind of smacking these platforms, saying, you're not just a platform anymore. You have to pay attention to what's going on here. Yeah, it just sounds so overcomplicated.

It is, but you know what? The internet is now. It's not what it used to be when we started all this stuff. That's true. That's true. These mega platforms are very complicated. They're very complicated. We're going to talk a little bit about YouTube in a little bit, but, you know, just racking my brain about how to get this done from a technological standpoint is, like...

Impossible. It's... It's what we've always talked about. It's... The AI isn't there, because AI is people. And there's not enough people in the world. Yeah, really. If everybody was actually out... We would all have to be employed by YouTube full-time to go through everything.

And then there would be nobody left to make content for YouTube. Exactly. So, it's a bit of a conundrum. And she actually does mention that. She says it might be very daunting, and it's going to be very difficult to do this. But it's also... Yeah, it's just complicated, right? We're in a very complicated world at this point.

That's true. It is getting more complicated every day. That's why I want to go back to LiveJournal. I don't... I just... You're going to have to go play those games that we were talking about at the intro. That's all you got left. I know. We're going to have to return into some fantasy world. Or we just rewrite LiveJournal, since it's owned by the Russians now, and we can't actually post there.

That's true. Now, Stuart sent this, and this is something that we both missed for some reason. So, we're going to put it in the news instead of in feedback, because it's a big deal. But he said, it's big of Zuck to call for regulation now that all of Facebook's failures have been made public. And he has. He has posted an op-ed in the Washington Post asking for government help to control internet content.

Yeah. It's too great for firms alone, he says. He calls for new laws in four areas. Harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability. Yeah. Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly, I agree, Mr. Zuckerberg writes, adding that Facebook was creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions about what is posted and what is taken down.

Yeah. Now, go ahead. It'd be nice if he would have done this a few years ago. Well, there's some other issues about this. Keep going, though. Keep going. All right. So, let's go through his points that he's decided are important here. Number one, common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third party bodies to control the spread of harmful content.

Okay. Okay. So, I guess we have a new world government now. All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months to put it on a par with financial reporting. That'd be nice. Okay. Good luck. Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections with common standards for all websites to identify political actors.

Lip service. Mm-hmm. Laws that not only apply to candidates in elections, but also other divisive political... And I'm the one that's drinking. What the hell? I know. But also other divisive political issues and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods. More lip service.

Yep. New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online. Still servicing the lip. More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union's GDPR, which came into force last year. Uh, he's lying through his teeth. Which would kind of put Facebook out of business.

A common global framework that would mean laws are all standardized globally rather than being substantially different from country to country. Again, new world order. Clear rules about who's responsible for protecting people's data when they move it from one service to another. You cannot move any of your data from Facebook to anywhere. No, you cannot. No. So are they going to build that?

They've tried. The data portability, you know, thing that has been going on between all the big players for a long time and it never went everywhere because everybody's systems are different and they can't get along and they're not getting along because they don't want it to actually happen. Yes. Why would you want somebody's data to...

Well, you don't want that as a business. But, uh, okay, Zuck. Whatever. Yeah. You do that. You do all that. Let's see what happens. I've read a lot of op-eds on this today. And the general consensus between the people who know their ass from ye hole in the ground say that this is an opportunistic play to try and, you know, move the target away from what they've done wrong to what they're trying to do right.

But also everything that's in here would still leave Facebook in a position of dominance in the market. That's what they're trying to do. Yeah. And since when was the last time Facebook published anything new? I don't believe that. I don't think they have any engineers left. I think everybody's gone.

They've only got fresh talent. Nobody can figure out how the machine works anymore. Fresh talent. Yeah. It's like one of those dystopian futures where, you know, you have the peasants keeping the machine running, but they don't know how it works. So if it breaks, everything falls apart. If it breaks, it breaks. And then we need Captain Kirk to show up.

Exactly. And plug in the nine volt battery to make the servers go again. Exactly. Oh, so many, so many things wrong with this, Zuck. We see through you. We see through you. And nothing's going to happen from this. This is all PR.

It's all PR. Yep. Now, this one's interesting. Inside the Google employee backlash against the Heritage Foundation. Not a sentence I thought I'd ever see. But we talked the other day about this new board of, you know, experts who will kind of keep an eye on what AI is doing at Google.

And they call it the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council. AT- Atiac. Gesundheit. Do I need to perform the Heimlich maneuver when somebody says that? Somebody says that? But the problem is, they put K. Cole James, the president of the Conservative Heritage Foundation, on this board.

Right. Well, that didn't go over well with the Googlers. Right. You know, this is somebody that is just really not, let's say, in the wheelhouse of what a lot of people at Google have gone through. The LGBTQ issue is really a big one because it's just so funny.

One of the great lines here is, you know, they think that some of our colleagues either do not or should not exist, says one employee. And it's true. This is not somebody you want, like, on a board that talks about the AI ethics that are going on at Google. Because they don't have ethics. Well, they don't have ethics.

But, well, they do have their own ethics for their own point of view. But there are already issues with AI and how it discriminates against different subsets of people. And the LGBTQ community is one of them, you know?

And minorities are another one of them. So why would you put somebody on the council that has a vested interest in it staying the same? Well, here's the thing that I think a lot of these people are, they can't see the forest for the trees on. It's political.

Yeah, it's politics. This woman has no idea what AI does. She's not like a technical advisor at all. She's not going to make one iota of difference. What this does is this placates the conservatives and lets them think that they actually have a seat at the table.

Yeah. And by pissing and moaning about it and kicking them out, you're actually, I think, doing more harm than good without trying to find a middle ground. You've got to play the game at this level. Absolutely. Yeah. You're going to have conservatives coming after tech all the time if you don't at least throw them a bone.

You know, let them join the party. Hear what they have to say. Let them sit there. And maybe sometimes they might have good ideas. This is all about getting in the middle. I think a lot of these kids at Google are sniffing their own filter bubbles. You have to have some kind of diversity. While I disagree with every single thing this woman stands for, doesn't mean that, you know, her side should not at least have a seat at the table.

So everybody gets a seat at the table. We can just choose to ignore some of the people. Exactly. That's the thing. It's like they deserve to be heard because if they don't, then they're just going to keep coming after the tech. And they have enough power to make it miserable for everybody. So why not at least let everybody play?

You know, that wasn't that was my take on it. You know, I understand where these kids are like really pissed off saying that, you know, these people suck. They hate us. Yeah, they do. Get over it. This is politics. You can't have everything you want. Nope. You don't just get to you don't get to fill the room with your own crowd.

You got to open up the doors for everyone. So I think I think it's short sighted of these these kids at Google who were signing this petition to get get her kicked off the board, because I think it makes I think it's a very smart. Well, it puts them on their level. Right. I like they're doing exactly what this person is is does to them.

They're refusing to hear the opinion. So hear the opinion. Move on. Yeah. You can hear the opinion and choose to ignore it like an adult. Yep. So, I mean, that's just my two cents, and I'm sure I'm going to get some lovely hate mail or hate tweets on that one. Yeah. Well, one of the hate tweets that we got a little while back ago was somebody basically calling us Apple fanboys and for no reason whatsoever.

And we kind of tried to explain it. But this article does make me question Apple and the pivot that Apple is currently going on, which does worry me. And it's something actually you and I have been talking about for the entire six years that we've been doing this show. We are getting to a point where nobody owns anything and we're all expected to just rent things.

I own a lawnmower. Yeah. Well, we're kind of getting there where it's just physical stuff. Pay us forever. Apple wants you to rent your life from them. So this article points out over at Slana, it's really well written, that Apple, a tech company renowned for its gadgets, held an event on Monday in which announced five new offerings, only one of which was an actual gadget, the Apple TV.

The rest were services, an ethereal category so profitable that it has become the second biggest revenue generator at the most valuable public company in the world. What services refer to, of course, are things that you subscribe to and pay for forever, or at least until you subscribe, you terminate your subscription, which means that you lose everything.

So they call this business model rentier creep, the phenomena by which services we formerly owned become rented and things that once were bought outright become bought on credit. And Apple's pivot to renting more things to its consumers epitomizes this cultural and economic shift and shows us a dismal future in which we become beholden to some of the largest corporations on Earth for our survival for the rest of our lives.

Stop right there. Stop right there. Yes. I would like to I would I would like to say hyperbole alert. Hyperbole alert. Yes. For our survival for the rest of our lives. No, we can all go live in a we can all go live in a mud hut. Yes, Jason. We're talking about television shows.

We're talking about television shows here. We're not really talking about. Talking about music. Also, not really on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So I'm just saying, let me finish. Yes, I understood. We can live there with our tactical sporks in a cave somewhere.

That's right. We'll be OK. In the past 10 years, the tech industry has been the main promoter of the transition towards a world in which we never owe anything but merely rent our lives from capitalists, from cars to hotels, contract gigs to music to movies to games. True. Right. Correct. Yes.

It's just much more lucrative to rent than it is to sell. That's why it's nearly impossible to buy Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite these days. You'd have it actually is impossible to buy them unless you get a very old version. You'll have to settle to rent them from Microsoft and Adobe, respectively, because of the business.

If I buy it once, Microsoft only gets my money once. But if I pay $10 a month for the rest of my life, I'm hooked. So that's the drug dealer model. And you've got Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, Apple Music, Lime, Spin, Bird, all the other gig economy stuff. Everything is about renting and not owning.

And there's even a movement now towards renting clothes. Wired just published a feature about this startup called Rent the Runway, which is all about just renting clothes instead of owning them. I think we covered that. And this should scare the crap out. Yes, we did. This should scare the crap out of us because there is something about ownership.

We shouldn't all just be renting because it's all just being everything is being everything is just coming down to the hands of a very few people and everything is going to go to them and they're just going to ruin the world and just rule all of us. It's insane. I would like to point out on the on the list here, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix, Apple Music, Lime, Spin, Bird.

Out of that list right there, Uber, I bought a car. I have my own car. Airbnb, they pay rent. I can go to a hotel still. Spotify, yeah, there's a case to be made for that one because you can't get music anywhere else anymore. It's talking about trends, Jason.

I know it's talking about trends. This is looking down at our future and going, holy shit, where are we headed? I know, but still even Lime, Spin and Bird, you can go buy a scooter for 500 bucks. Come on. Yeah, go buy your own scooter and set it on fire because it's a useless piece of shit. Just don't throw it in the river, damn it. Just don't throw it in the river.

It's just, it made me think. It did make me think, and especially because I am so locked into the Apple ecosystem now. Like, I'm like now going, oh, great. How much stuff am I going to have to rent from Apple now? Well, I mean, I already rent iCloud from them because they don't have enough storage. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't have to.

I can still download stuff from my phone to, you know, my computer. But there are always alternatives at this point. I can see what they're talking about. There are at this point. There are at this point. This is the worry. Yeah, but what gets me about this article is that this is nothing new.

But they're saying that it's new now because Apple has joined in. Well, Apple sees the writing on the wall with everybody else making money. They just want a piece of the pie. Well, that's also the biggest company in the world. That's why it starts to become alarming. When Amazon joins in on this and we're not buying things from Amazon anymore, we're renting them.

Well, Amazon Prime Video, I don't own any Amazon Prime Video. That's true. Here's the reason I would never be worried about this. Apple sucks at this game. They're terrible at it. You know, they have shown for their entire lifespan that they cannot do any of this right.

So I am really not worried about Apple coming in and being the juggernaut that takes over the rental economy because, yeah, they're terrible at this. I just like this last quote at the end of the story. What Steinbeck wrote of the bank supplies to Apple II, when the monster starts growing, it dies.

It can't stay one size. It needs more money. Now, this next one is really fun and not unexpected.

YouTube executives ignored warnings letting toxic videos run rampant. Now, you've listened to this show before, I'm assuming, unless you're a new listener, but let's put this into context here. It is a public company that needs to make money. What are they going to prioritize over anything else?

Making money. Yes. Making more of the monies. Well, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube's chief executive officer, has basically said over the years that she cares about running the company and doesn't really care about these little things that are going off on the side, like, you know, toxic videos and bad recommendation engines and hate speech.

And yeah, it basically anything that. Or just a platform. The same thing we always say. Yeah. Anything that would curb engagement, she doesn't really care about. So this is an article on Bloomberg, and it just basically says all the people on the inside said, yeah, we kept throwing things at the wall and telling them that this is going to fix some things and make it better for people.

And they just didn't really care. They just had this metric in their head where they wanted one billion hours of viewing a day on YouTube. Now, no matter what was up there, that should be a crime against humanity. You know, it's like, what could we be doing with that one billion hours of time?

Oh, curing cancer, you know, finding renewable energy sources, watching cat videos or alt-right videos. No, yeah, I guess that's what they care about. I don't think that anybody that is inclined to watch 12 hours of video on YouTube is going to be curing cancer. So I'm not too worried about that. Well, you never know.

They could have been until they went down the rabbit hole on that recommendation engine and then forgot to put in their, you know, their college application and they got booted out. And then, you know, that could have been the next Einstein or Madame Curie. But we'll never know. We'll never know. So it's a good article.

It's very long and kind of long-winded, but it does kind of lay out the fact that the people at YouTube in the higher echelon just didn't give a shit. And color me not surprised. Yeah. Your article got really into kind of the company-wide version of it. My article is a little more just what the hell is going on here.

You can tell from the title. The YouTube pedophilia commenting scandal explained. It's clear the problem dates back to at least 2017. People have begun to ring the alarm about weird, implicitly sexual comments on videos of little kids made for kids.

Major advertisers like AT&T stopped spending for ads on the site when BBC broke a story that found that inappropriate comments on videos of kids that were monetized included often timestamps for second long moments of suggested positions and links to unlisted videos and did not resume spending until the issue was, air quote, fixed, end air quote.

It didn't get fixed, just in case you were wondering. Now, here's some stats that I find staggering. YouTube has 10,000 human reviewers who are tasked with reviewing 400 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every minute. Run the math on that really quickly. I know. Okay. Once you're done with that, they're also in charge of looking over engagement with the videos and all the comments that come in on the videos.

There's not enough time in the day. No, there's not. There's not for 100,000 people. There's not for 100,000,000 people. Yeah. Yeah. It just doesn't. It just doesn't work. The math doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. And as we're discovering, people are horrible. So as YouTube becomes a place that more and more children consume video, I have a child that watches a lot of stuff on YouTube, as well as a place where they showcase their creations.

Those in charge of the platform need to make a decision about whether moderation ought to be pursued in the interest of plausible deniability or in the interest of protecting children. As we talk about all the time on the show, I don't think that there is any moderation that's going to work. There's not enough people.

Yeah. It just isn't. When it comes to kids' videos, they need to be handpicked. They cannot be algorithmically picked. You have to get to this point, too, where maybe you have to do what Facebook does and do a nod, nod, nudge, wink, wink. You have to be 18 to sign up. Maybe kids should not be uploading videos to YouTube.

Yeah. I love this. Patrick Copeland, a former Google director who left in 2016, recently posted a damning indictment of his old company on LinkedIn. While watching YouTube, Copeland's daughter was recommended a clip that featured both a Snow White character drawn with exaggerated sexual features and a horse engaged in a sexual act.

Yay, algorithm. Woo-hoo. Yeah. This is your future Mr. Ed right there. Great. I can't wait until my kid starts browsing himself. Oh, you're just, it's over, dude. It's over. I'm going to get so angry. Well, here's, let's end on a high note.

I want to, I want to end on an algorithmic high note. LA County is using an algorithm to clear 50,000 pot convictions faster. We talked about how San Francisco is doing that because they only had about 8,000 marijuana convictions. But there is an estimated 50,000 eligible cases in LA County and 4,000 in San Joaquin County.

And Code for America's Clear My Record system has been basically pressed into service to try and run and run through these and figure out which are the main cases that should be checked first for either, you know, letting them go or resentencing. Good. Well done. I'm, I'm actually just a little surprised that there weren't more in San Francisco than LA.

I thought there'd be a lot more pot smokers up there. Yeah. San Francisco is seven by seven miles. Just look at the size of LA. Oh, that size. Okay. Yeah. You fly over LA for an hour. I'm sure per capita or per like square meter there, there's definitely more in San Francisco. Well, you just don't even think about it.

8,000 in a seven by seven grid and we've got 50,000 in the entirety of Los Angeles County. Okay. Fair enough.

Media candy. I found myself awake and painfully sober and unable to sleep because I was sick and I watched the dirt. What'd you think? I should have waited until I could drink. Yeah. It was fun. Um, I enjoyed it.

The casting was pretty good. It felt a bit like Bill and Ted's excellent heavy metal adventure. They, they made them a bit goo, a lot goofier than they actually are in real life. Oh yeah. And, and it was pretty whitewashed compared to the book. Um, the book was a lot, there was dirt.

There was real dirt. This just made it seem like, Hey man, we're just party people except for like the one dude's heroin thing, which they did a nice like Axl Rose esque video for, um, but it was fine. It was meant to be pop culture candy and it was definitely, you know, you can see why the band approved it.

It certainly made them look a lot better than the book did. Even though they approved the book too. Um, but yeah, it was definitely Bill and Ted's go, go on a, go on the sunset strip. I mean, my original like premise was it was Bohemian Rhapsody meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but I think Bill and Ted's might work too, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty good.

Um, I will, I enjoyed it. I'm not, I know the real story, so I was able to separate fact from fiction, but, uh, it was fun. So it's worth watching. I'll definitely give them that. And what I really loved about it, and I'm not sure if the guys in the actual band should have approved the, the very end sequence where they showed the actors and then the real life guys, because the actors are so much better looking.

Oh yeah, it was, that was bad. Yeah. Like you wonder how these guys pulled, like these guys compared to the actors, the actors were really good looking. And then you see like what they really look like and you're like, Ooh, Ooh, what happened? It's like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where everybody's melting.

Yes, exactly. So that was pretty funny. Uh, and then I just ran across a headline that I just thought was absolutely hilarious. You can read the article if you'd like, they continue the humor, but really the humor is boiled down to just the, uh, the headline Christian Bale gains 450,000 pounds to play a sandworm in the Dune remake.

That's pretty good. That's funny. So I started watching Hannah on Amazon prime, which you cannot go two feet without seeing an ad for nowadays. That's true. I see them everywhere and I don't even know what it's about. What is it? Uh, well, the original movie was, was pretty damn good.

It's about like this girl and her father who like he, he raised her in the woods and then she becomes a super assassin and goes off and kills a bunch of people. All right. The version on Amazon is an eight part series, so they drag it out a lot longer and they change the story quite a bit.

It's not as super violent as the movie was. All right. Um, I'm not going to go ultra violent, but it was super violent in the movie. I'm enjoying it though. I just finished episode four before we started recording and, uh, me and my roommate both enjoy it. The episode four was a filler episode.

You know, one of those, I hate those so much, but, uh, it's still good. There was some good plot points in it, but so far it's, it's well done. I enjoy it. Excellent. Yeah. I mean, the acting is really good. The casting is really good. The, the fight scenes are good. The, some of the gunplay scenes are really stupid.

I mean, it does have some really stupid plot holes in it, but for a popcorn, you know, 15 year old girl, super assassin, it kind of says what it is on the tin there. But, uh, so I did watch the first episode of Jordan Peele's twilight zone last night.

It was really good. The funny thing about it was like in the first 15 minutes, I'm like, there's no way that they can fill an entire hour with this. There is just absolutely no way, but they pulled it off. They really pulled it off and you can actually go see that first episode, uh, free on the tube of the use right now.

Excellent. There are two episodes out, but I, I had, I could not stay up to watch the second one because it was way past my bedtime, but I wanted to at least get the first one in because I'm, I'm, there was just nothing else on and I was exhausted. But, uh, and I wanted to see if it was going to have legs and so far that first episode really, really delivered.

Excellent. I'm going to have to check it out. I've been looking forward to it. So now that I know that I get an episode free without having to, uh, go to Sweden or pay for CBS, which I'm not going to do until we get Picard. Uh, cool. Now I know link is in the show notes. Excellent. And we have some great cure news cure.

My favorite band of all time. Obviously they were just inducted to the rock and roll hall of fame on Friday. We found out that we're getting a dark and incredibly intense new album, which should arrive around Halloween. And, uh, before they tour that we are apparently getting the full 30th anniversary disintegration concerts in the U S around Christmas time.

Ooh, I'm very excited about this. So remember to get me a ticket. They already announced that they're going to do it in Sydney. So that's part of the year's vivid live in May. But, uh, he said in Rolling Stone interview that he intends to bring it to the U S later this year when they did their tour earlier, a couple of years back where they played the first three albums, they did smaller theaters, but he's saying the disintegration is just a big album.

So they're going to do big venues. I would love to have them replay Dodger stadium. That was like one of my first concerts. I was like 15 years old disintegration Dodger stadium. Do it again, man. Let me know. Give me time to grow out my hair. I've been, I've been growing out my hair for a year.

I'm ready to go. Mine's quite short right now. And, uh, because I'm going to cut what we have in moron of the week, because it wasn't that good. I did have in the hero of the week, Robert Smith, who offered a blunt response to an overzealous TV host when I asked him how he felt about, uh, uh, becoming in be being put into the rock and roll hall of fame.

And I will not step on it. Link is in the show notes. He is a hero and hat tip to everyone in the world who sent this to me, including listener Christopher. At the library. Brian, I have finished the traveler, the first novel of the fourth realm trilogy by John 12 Hawks.

What did you think? I'm curious. Wow. Good. Right. Damn good book. I mean, get worse. Well, damn it. The first was the best. Okay. I can, I can also see that there's one plot point that, uh, would, would kind of like, uh, tickle the back of your head going, Oh, not that again.

Uh, it's just like, Oh man, let me, let me not dissuade you from reading them all. They're all, it's a good series. It's worth reading all three, but God damn that first book is good. Right. What I really love about it is he really gets into this entire global panopticon state and like, you know, the people behind the scenes pulling the strings, which is a great premise for the book, the woo side of it.

I thought, I mean, I wish you had a different, you know, story plot point for that, you know, some kind of storytelling device that just wasn't so damn woo woo, but then it wouldn't exactly be a fourth realm, would it? Exactly. You know, I'm just, I can see how he just had to kind of dip into the supernatural for it, but it didn't bother me that much.

It actually works, especially through the other two books. So stick with it. I'm, Oh, I'm going to, I have to find something to go in between, which I think I'll talk about in a second here, but I, I gotta say, man, he was pretty spot on and ahead of his time. But think about when he wrote the book.

That's what I was saying when I brought it back up to like, there was a reason that that book never got Marie Kondo out of my collection. And when I finally reread it again, I was like, cause I read it when it first came out and I was like, Oh, that's crazy. And then I reread it again and I was like, Holy shit. He was way ahead of his time. Yeah. I mean, he's a little bit ahead of his time, but I mean, it's all come to the forefront now.

I mean, William Gibson was writing about a lot of this stuff around the same time that he was writing about it. But I mean, this guy that I've never heard of before, I mean, William Gibson has been doing this stuff for his entire life. Yeah, exactly. You know, that's, that's a whole different beast. And this guy comes out of nowhere, you know, and just comes up with this and it's, I thought it was really well written.

I enjoyed all the characters and I can't wait to dive into the next two, even though there is a caveat. Yeah, it's not bad. It's worth it. But I think, you know, it's just one of those things where it's the concept so much more than anything else in the first book that lays out the concept blows you away, right?

And then you're just going to finish up the story. So yeah, it's, it's, you don't get that blown away factor that you get from the first one. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. I just kind of want to see how it ends now, but I thought it was really, really good, but I'm going to follow our, our standard advice when it comes to trilogies.

Do not read them back to back because I'm not going to do that. And this isn't out yet, so I can't put this one in. I've got another book that I'll talk about later that is going in between, but there's a new book coming out about Tim Cook. It's called Tim Cook, the genius who took Apple to the next level.

And it's basically the story of how Tim Cook fought the FBI and kind of the FBI and the Apple won. Yeah. And I hate that song, so I didn't want to go there, but thanks for doing it for me. Anytime. And it's like, they talk about how he basically bet the company on it and said that, look, this is our, this is our stand and he won.

So I can't wait to see like the behind the scenes on, on what happened with all this. So I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it again. That's Tim Cook, the genius who took Apple to the next level and then dropped it firmly back down to the previous level with all the subscription shit that he's trying to sell us.

Feedback loop. We have some new Patreon subscribers, Chris, Jeff, Jonathan, and Krista, who sent us a message. I'm sure you guys are on it, but just in case it hasn't crossed your desk yet, definitely take the time to listen to Sam Harris's new episode with Roger McNamee.

It's amazing and terrifying and everything you guys are constantly yelling about. And I did. It's a good interview. And we talked about his upcoming book, Zucked, which is, it's actually out now. And that is the book that is on my list in between the, uh, the traveler series books or the fourth realm books or whatever they're called.

Right. But that Zucked is next up in my queue. Perfect. And Vinny also on Patreon writes us high court orders, jerk, not anonymous anymore. And this is a link. Google agrees to give details of user who posted defamatory YouTube video about a He says, note, Garda is the English word for police.

Google has a European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, so it's not hard for the guards to send an angry court order. So, yeah. Nice. And, uh, Tim from Patreon also wrote us a very long question and we're working on the answer to your question. So stay tuned. It was a long question and we got to, we actually have to do some research, but yeah.

Research. We have to do some research, but you are a, you are an epic Patreon subscriber. So we will, we will get back to you with that soon. Yes. And over at PayPal, we got donations from Raymond, Stephen, and judge and Bobby who wrote per Jason's recommendation on the podcast. I'm discontinuing my Patreon and going direct FYI.

We don't care where you go. Thank you. As long as it all ends up with us. And Simon writes in, I blame Dave Bittner in the cyber wire. He mentioned you and I've been hooked ever since. I moved from industrial automation engineering to new OT cyber role last year. I started looking for podcasts as a way to keep in touch with the topic and not just with all the vendors.

I've enjoyed your unique style and delivery so much. I added you to iTunes to give you a rating and found it doesn't go back to the beginning. I've now used your website to start at episode one and I'm catching up. This is fascinating, but also some of the topics have been outgrown by more recent events. Oh yeah. They were six years ago.

Yeah. I mean, half the crap we talked about doesn't even exist anymore. Yeah. Note, I'm not suggesting obsolescence. This is the industry's history and still provides useful context for how we got to the mess we're in now. I'm a couple of years older than you both and remember the first Alan Bradley PLC5 able to send emails.

Why? I've argued ever since that just because it can does not automatically make it a good idea. Now look at IOT and IIOT. Thank you for keeping me up to date and feeling sane. It isn't just me that thinks this way or despairs with users and their antics. Stay grumpy.

Well, Simon, we will. Thank you. And Sticky over on Twitter sent us a link. Driverless vehicles given perception tests to prove they understand surroundings. A team from the University of Southern California. Hmm. Hopefully these people didn't have their parents by them and know what they're doing.

Has developed a new mathematical method that is able to identify anomalies or bugs in the system before an autonomous car ever hits the road. So they're using perception algorithms based on convolutional neural networks powered by machine learning, a type of deep learning. They are very difficult to test.

So we don't fully understand how they make their predictions, which can lead to devastating consequences and safety critical systems such as autonomous vehicles. So there you have got some system called timed quality temporal logic using a used to test two popular machine learning tools, squeeze DEET and YOLO.

By the way, I'm never getting in a car that uses YOLO. Exactly. What genius came up with that? Using raw video data sets of driving scenes and logic successfully honed in on instances of the machine learning tools, violating sanity conditions across multiple frames in the video.

So cool. Cool. Okay. I feel like great. Anything to make these things safer? Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I do YOLO and I would like to YOLO longer. Yes, me too. So, oh, that was, that was genius over there.

Okay. These guys might be great at machine learning, but not really good at branding. Well, by the way, squeeze isn't exactly the best name for anything that I'm going to get. I'm going to be in a hunk of gigantic metal and I'm basing my life on something called squeeze. Squeeze only works if you're like in a VW bug and you have to squeeze in with all your buddies.

That's it. Or a smart car, uh, Mrs. Shiny side writes in what budget standalone microphone would you recommend for vlogging? Well, the, the two that I recommend for podcasting are either the audio technica 80 2005 or the Samson Q2 you, I will add links to those in the show notes, but the problem with those is they are standalone microphones and they're going to be in your face.

So for vlogging, not really the best option. So you want a shotgun mic for that shotgun or a lavalier. Yes. Or a lavalier. And that was my second thing that I was going to say. Sorry. It's okay. Uh, the, the new zoom lavaliers are pretty nice. And then you can actually sync the audio with the audio from your video camera or your phone in post.

And I've got one right here. Let me find the name. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. That would be the zoom F1 field recorder. They're about 160 bucks and they're really cool. And also they do take the capsules from other zoom microphones.

So if you do want to get a shotgun mounted mic and put it on top of your camera, it has a little camera mount that you can get and it will record directly to the field recorder. They're pretty cool. I've been playing with them. They're, they're, they're actually really nice for the price, which is like, like I said, I think about 160 bucks, not include, not including the external microphones, right?

But it does come with a lavalier. Okay. Brett writes in, Hey geeks. If you implement deep SSL packet inspection on your edge device, you may be able to see some nest network chatter. Would you send us a tutorial on how to do that? Because I have not done deep SSL packet inspection ever.

Yes, me either. Write film, sleep, repeat writes in. If you're looking for a new sci-fi podcast, you can always try my creation. Monsoon Jackson and yes, GOG podcast. I am a Patreon donor. We know we've mentioned your show before and now you're getting it mentioned again. Ka-ching.

Ka-ching. How about that value? MS, MS, God damn it. I do it every time. It's like I have MS. Moss6502 writes in another example of what you guys say about building a business on somebody else's infrastructure. And he links to a tweet from Violet Blue. Amazon just terminated my associates account and said it will not pay me any outstanding fees it owes me.

The reason is because the content on Tiny Nibbles promotes unsuitable activity. This affects all of my books and book links everywhere over a decade of linking. Yeah. Well, yeah, I've got an article over at Welcome to the Prude Internet.

No more sex talk allowed. And it talks about some of the new regulations that have come out that we do not like very much that we've talked about on the show before. I recommend going to check it out to get all the, you know, the back stuff. The deets. The deets. Yeah. And she also wrote, seriously, the associates partnership was how I could survive on my books.

My old publisher screwed me out of my e-book and audio royalties going back almost 20 years. Because I write about sex, I can't use Amazon Associates, PayPal or Square, MailChimp, WordPress.org, which is wrong. She can't actually use WordPress.org because that's where you download the free version. It's WordPress.com.

She probably can't use Google or Facebook ads, most web hosts in Apple or Google Play. Now, I know Violet. I've known Violet for Jesus Christ, like 20 years. And she's always had this problem. And it sucks now that she's getting run off the net. And she's a prolific writer.

And she's done like, you know, amazing work in sex education. And, you know, I just used to hang out with her all the time when I was up in San Francisco. And this is, this is sucks. It's, it's total bullshit. Wasn't the internet like the place where you could just go let your freak flag fly and get shit done. That was the old internet. Yeah, that's right.

We don't have the old internet anymore. So, you know, I, I can't believe that, you know, most web hosts won't let her post whatever she wants. That's ridiculous. I find that a little bit hard to believe, but, you know, it's a different world out there now. Yeah, it is. But Violet has also been known to hyperbole sometimes.

We'll be honest about that one. But yeah, it's still just bullshit that Amazon just took all her money. Yep. Mustavio writes in Venezuelans hunt for gold in game. And gamers hunt Venezuelan players. And this is an article over at nationalinterest.org about gold farming.

I found this fascinating, sad, horrible, everything that's wrong in the world, but absolutely fascinating. So in case you weren't aware, Americans in particular, Venezuela is having a really tough time. Years of economic misadmanagement and, and the desperate population trying to figure out ways to put food on the table and make ends meet.

It's just horrible there right now. And for some reason, there's this game called RuneScape. It's nearly two decades old, and it's been around for a long time. And two decades, actually. Yeah, two decades. Thank you, Jason. You're welcome. I'm not the one drinking beer. Increase.

It's increasingly providing one of the most stable sources of income for tech savvy segments of the Venezuelan population. In desperation, many Venezuelan gamers have turned to playing this game. They're using it as a source of income more, more reliable than any employment in their country, where the monthly minimum wage was just increased 300% to roughly $6 and 70 cents.

By way of comparison, RuneScape players selling 500,000 gold per hour on third party sites would earn that sum in less than two eight hour shifts. So the way that you get this money is to kill green dragons. Okay. Players can collect items dropped by the dragons and sell them on the in-game marketplace for gold.

And this gold can be sold on third party sites for money that works in the real world, often in cryptocurrencies and things like that, because, you know, crazy. And while prices may vary, 1 million gold in RuneScape is worth about one US dollar, and an hour of killing green dragons typically generates at least 50,000 units worth of in-game currency.

Unfortunately, this strategy called gold farming breaks the rules of the game, and people that are playing this for fun in other places of the world are getting pissed off about this. So there's been a Reddit thread about how to target and hunt down Venezuelan players to stop them from doing this so they can play the game. How crazy is this world that we're living in right now?

Well, here's the thing about this. This is just old. This has been done forever. When World of Warcraft first came out, gold farming was the thing. I mean, and leveling a toon and selling it on, you know, a third party site was a thing.

Right. It's just nobody plays World of Warcraft anymore. I can't believe anybody plays RuneScape anymore. Most of Venezuela. Yeah, yeah. This has all happened before this will all happen again, I guess, because this was, I mean, this is 20-year-old news for a 20-year-old game. Right. This is, when we were playing Warcraft, this was just a thing.

Everybody did it. Right. Crazy. Over at GOG.show, Deliveroo Drivers writes in, not sure if you'd seen the Flat Earth Credit Union, it has gems working there, such as Karen, who I'm pretty sure also rides a bird scooter to work every day.

Karen is the director of marketing. Karen successfully manages multiple businesses in cutting-edge industries, including essential oils, weight loss teas, and detox treatments. She has five unvaccinated children. I'm sorry, I just refreshed the page. She has four unvaccinated children.

Nope, refresh. Wait, no, three. Three. Oh, two. One fell off the edge of the earth. Oh, God. Chris writes in, hey guys, I've started to follow your podcast for the last few weeks. I was never into podcasting, but I am now a religious listener of yours, and seriously, you are changing my life. Well, my digital life, at least.

I almost exclusively use Apple devices, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, the whole nine yards. I do this mostly because of the ease of use and integration, but also because I believe in the security and privacy features that they bring with them. Do you agree with this? I don't want to get into the debate of Apple stuff being overpriced or cheaper alternatives. I can afford what I buy, and I'm happy to pay the Apple tax for the premium devices.

But is this a smart move for security and privacy? If you've been listening, we would say yes. Yep. We like Tim Cook. Apple is behind it. I'm a little concerned about their pivoting towards subscriptions and everything, but in terms of security and privacy, you cannot beat Apple right now. Yep.

They're the best game in town, and also, it's the best software in town. So, I mean, I started with OS X because it was based on a BSD kernel because I love Unix. And so, you know, Mac OS X, or whatever variant it is now, is built on Unix.

I like Unix, so that's why I use it. But the nice upside is everything works together most of the time. So, and I see the security and privacy is just a nice to have. I don't even care about it that much. I just care that everything works. Yeah, it works.

Neil writes in, hi again. I just thought I would give you a link into how Brisbane in Australia is dealing with Lime scooters. And this is a, here's the TLDR. Find the user's big finds for no helmet. Lime had to supply 6,000 helmets for 1,000 scooters, but no helmet with the scooter is no excuse.

You shouldn't just rely on whether there's a helmet there at that particular time. You can prepare yourself properly. Big finds for speeding or riding on roads. Coppers are already doing blitzes at peak times. I like this. I want to see it. I want to see a Brisbane copper blitz.

That would be kind of fun. Figures also show more than 120 people were taken to hospital with injuries related to scooter use in the first two months since they were introduced into Brisbane. So that's what, to a day? Yeah. Not to a day. I see math. Good. Yeah.

Math. Pat writes in furries and hackers combined with a link to a Twitter account. The DC furs really effing weird. And I thought Bittner might be interested in this. I believe I saw him subscribe yesterday. Yeah, I think so. It says, uh, followed by, uh, yeah. Followed by, yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to out him on his, on his Twitter handle, but yeah.

Neil writes in high grumps. You were talking about the prefab pubs in three, three, one. I thought you would be interested in a really, truly unique pub in Winchester, England called the black boy. What about the Winchester? I would rather it could be the Winchester. Yes, they've resisted changing its name and are still under pressure, but it has been a pub for hundreds of years.

What's amazing about it is the ephemera. Here's a link to their website, which is the black boy pub.com. There's a street view walkthrough in there. It's impossible to describe how truly bizarre this place is. Think of having your beer in a cozy, warm pub with the ceiling covered with eyeglasses and being stared at by a stuffed giraffe, for example.

I saw the giraffe. I actually commented on that. There are lots of better photos on Flickr, but good luck searching for black boy. Although black boy Winchester brings up some results. LOL. Well, thank you, Neil. It's actually the only black boy in Winchester. God. The only gay in the village.

Anyway, I looked at the pub. It looks amazing. I mean, we need more stuff like that in the world. It's I would love to have a drink there someday. Yep. Ivan writes in. Hey, grumps. Love your show. You're always keeping me updated in what's happening in the tech world with humor. Keep it up. Now about something that is making me grumpy today. Remember, you talked about robots taking out jobs.

Well, I guess it's happening. Check out this video. There's a video. Oh, no. We're on YouTube called Handle Robot Reimagined for Logistics. And yeah, it's pretty cool. I got to say, those robots are like Amazon. If anybody's working on an Amazon warehouse, you're going to be about to be out of a job.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Pretty good. Ramsey writes in. Just a suspicion. Evernote using a supposed password breach to get their active user count up. I was sent an email suggesting my password had been hacked and that I should log in to reset it. I haven't used Evernote for at least five years, but now they have a record that I'm an active user for this month as I've logged in.

Is this yet another way to game the system and justify ongoing viability? Hashtag cynical, hashtag suspicious, hashtag gaming the system RF. Well, I got that same email and I logged in as well. Evernote's got a spike. And the funny thing is, they didn't really give you a whole lot of info on the breach, but they said, you know, if you reuse your password, you might want to reset it everywhere.

Fortunately, I use one password and it was like an 18 character single use password. So I definitely didn't do it anywhere else. My problem with Evernote is they I have to log in every now and again and check that they haven't reset my account. To renew because they they have a habit of doing that.

I went from premium to free two years in a row and trying to get through customer support to get that money back is a pain in the butt. I just recommend everybody delete their Evernote account as soon as possible. Done and done. Polly writes in all about the bottom line and it's a link to Bloomberg.

50 women say Salesforce helped traffickers exploit them. 50 women who described themselves as survivors of sex trafficking on the now defunct Backpage.com web portal accused Salesforce.com of profiting off each ad. The women sued them on Tuesday in a San Francisco court claiming billionaire Mark Benioff, Mark Benioff's company knowingly supported Backpage by providing customized database tools to market and re-market prostitutes to pimps, johns and traffickers who had been underusing its trafficking service.

Salesforce knew the scourge of search sex trafficking because it sought publicity for trying to stop it, according to the complaint. But at the same time, this publicly traded company was, in actuality, among the vilest of rogue companies concerned only with their bottom line. Yep. Yep. There you go.

There you go. Pamela writes in, hi, geeks. Here's a link to something I was already sure was happening. What you don't know about your health data will make you sick. Yeah, this is over at Fast Company and I read through this and it's not surprising. One out of probably 50 Americans are being monitored by third-party data analyst giants Optum, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group, Inc.

It's captured medical data, lab results, diagnoses, prescriptions and more from over 150 million Americans, half the U.S. population. They're grabbing everything. They're storing everything. It's part of their health insurance contracts with a bunch of different health providers. So you have no choice.

It's just part of the system. Yay. The only place you get away with this is if you live in New Hampshire. It's the only state that mandates its residents own their medical data and everywhere else, you're on your own. Well, I don't recommend anybody move to New Hampshire, but if you really care about this stuff, there you go.

You have a safe haven. I did like the end of this where they're talking about the future as a system that runs on blockchain, which is basically a secure, visible, irrefutable ledger of transactions and ownership. Still, a recent analysis of over 150 white papers revealed most healthcare blockchain projects fall somewhere between half-baked and overly optimistic.

I think being overly optimistic is saying it's half-baked. Yeah, pretty much. Not even half. Naveed writes in, hey, Grumps. So, Jason, I found a way for you to get that retirement money you've been looking for. You're going to absolutely love this story. It's a very short read. And this is over at IGN.

Man steals $122 million from Google and Facebook by just asking them for money. This is the old invoice scam. And you can get away with this for a while by just sending an invoice under, like, you know, if you send it for, like, $500, they'll generally just sign off on it if it looks legit and send you the checks.

Now, $500 a pop to get to $122 million. No wonder he got busted. No wonder he got busted. That's called greedy. Yeah, so that retirement money, yeah, you will get the retirement money, but your retirement is going to be in an 8x8 cell somewhere.

So that's how you retire. You get, you know, three meals a day and about an hour in the yard where you could just get shivved. And Booker writes in, you kind of got the Facebook clear text password thing wrong. The clear text password was logged in the app's log, not stored in the database. Since logs are archived and searchable, anybody with log search privs could find their text passwords.

It's still really reprehensible engineering, but it happens far too often. Okay, yeah, that wasn't actually out when we first covered that story. There wasn't that much data about it. We had it as right as we could have with the data that we were giving, but that is really messed up.

That is really messed up. Over on iTunes, Liksom Navin from Norway writes in, I think he meant to say mediocre, unless that's how they say it over there. Unless that's how they say mediocre. It's a fun show until the charm wears off. Once the charm's gone, it's a show which 15-year-old me would love, but which I now find okay most of the time.

Boring and childish the rest. I'll take this one, Jason, because I know what you're going to do. Go for it. I'll just stop that. It's a three-star rating. I would like to, first off, let everybody know we read all the reviews. One star, three star, five stars. So, happy to read it. And I get it.

I wax and wane with some shows sometimes, too. Sometimes I just get sick of them and move on. So, I would like to say to Liksom Navin, while you enjoyed the show, thank you for listening. It would have been nice if you would have written the review while you still enjoyed the show, though. That's all.

That would have been preferable. That would have been preferable. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show.com 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.com iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Or a three-star and a mediocre review.

We'll take them all. Or a minicry review. Closing shout-outs! I've got a shout-out to NyQuil. Thank you. You've made the last week bearable. I've been drinking that like it's Jaeger. Oh, yuck.

Yuck. I highly recommend Magtech for sleeping at night. But it's just a magnesium supplement that puts me out in about 20 minutes. And you sleep all through the night without any of that drunken side effect the next day. All right. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo and I'm going sleepy night-night.

And I'm Brian Shelmester. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Pass 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 sidebar. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 333.

Halfway to hell. 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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