334: Shrodinger's Cancer

This episode is sponsored by our good friends at Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for credit cards. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, go to Privacy.com slash GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Well, Jason, I feel better-ish, sort of. Let me tell you what's happened. Kid is on the mend, better. Slept through the night for the first time two nights ago in weeks. That was good. Wife is feeling better. Slept through the night for the first time in weeks, two nights ago.

I woke up yesterday still kind of feeling pretty rough, not great. But as the day went on, I started to feel better and better, and I felt like I was almost back to my old self. And then I got cocky, Jason. Oh, no. Did you drink? I had a whopping two whole glasses of wine.

Oh, Brian, Brian. And I woke up feeling like I'd been run over by a Prius blowing through a stop sign in Santa Monica. Yeah. Two glasses of wine, which for you and me is normally would be considered an aperitif. Yeah, that's a warm-up. That's a warm-up. Knocked me on my ass, and I am feeling rough today.

But on the mend, so hopefully I will be able to get back to my normal alcoholic ways soon enough. See, you got to start low. You got to start with some Carlo Rossi. Two glasses of wine over the course of like four hours. I really can't believe how much it screwed me up.

Yeah, start slow with like Carlo Rossi. Not the good stuff. No, no. Top shelf or nothing, baby. Yeah, well, how'd that work out for you, though? Not very well. Amateur move, Brian. Amateur move. I know, I know. Should have stuck with the NyQuil. I got some questions for you about Whole Foods and Prime.

Sure. Okay. Because I'm a Prime member and a Whole Foods shopper. Yes, I know. You go there all the time. I don't because I can't afford to generally. But I was wondering, how are the prices now that Amazon has taken over with all of the Prime subscription stuff? They have dropped significantly.

You will not be finding any $17 bottles of asparagus water anymore. So, yeah, I actually found an article about this because I had a feeling that this was going to be your question because they just slashed prices again on hundreds of items within the Whole Foods stores this Wednesday, actually, as they're trying to battle the moniker Whole Paycheck that we always talked about it, too.

Yep. Yeah. So this is the latest attempt to bring shoppers into Whole Foods, including, obviously, Prime members, because right now just 11% of Prime members shop at Whole Foods several times a month, according to a recent survey. However, this shouldn't be too surprising as Whole Foods are not as ubiquitous as Prime members are.

So there's lots of Prime members that have no access to a Whole Foods. So there you go. Yeah. So they're definitely trying to get Prime members to come in. They're trying to compete with your regular grocery stores. They don't want to be seen as this super exclusive, hippy-dippy, incredibly expensive place.

They are definitely cheaper. It's still more expensive than, say, going to a Ralph's or whatnot. But the flip side of that is, I think, one of the ways – well, first off, they're doing what all the companies do now, right, which is you have to compete to win and take out everybody else. So you will cut your own – you cut your own profits to beat other people.

So they're taking a hit to some degree. The other thing that they're doing, which we kind of knew was going to happen because it's Amazon and they're logistics masters, a lot of the products that they used to carry and brands that they used to carry that I particularly liked and my family enjoyed are slowly disappearing.

So we're losing – yes, we're losing quite a lot of variety and third-party items that Whole Foods used to always carry because they're not making as much money off them as they would off their own stuff or stuff that's sourced through different companies with better logistics chains.

Interesting. Yeah, see, my roommate shops at Whole Foods all the time because I have one about a block from my house, and she just can't get it around her head that she's a Prime member, but she won't install the app because it's too much trouble. And I'm like, well, you're going to save a lot of money.

Like, ah, I can't be bothered. You didn't for a long time when they first took it over because I got the app right away and I would always scan it. And you had to go around the store and find – it was only certain items that were Prime member deals. And, you know, when you have a kid, you have very specific shopping.

Like, I might as well not delete my notes, my shopping notes, because we get the same stuff every single time. So, yeah, you had to be pretty cognizant of it originally and, you know, find the stuff. Okay, this week, you know, pineapples on sale. Great, two for one if you're a Prime member.

But that is actually getting better more and more, again, because they're trying to appeal to that market. So tell your roommate, you know, you're already putting up with no Amazon Echoes in your house. Right. Get the damn app. Okay. Maybe I'll just install it for her. All you have to do is scan it at the checkout.

You know, you just stick it under the thing. And since I'm paying with Apple Pay anyways, I can go to Whole Foods without my wallet. I just use my phone. Nice. Yeah. Is there an Apple Watch app for Prime? Can you scan your watch? I don't know. I don't believe so. Because that would be sweet if you could just go with your watch and leave your phone at home.

Although, yes, well, you do have the cellular watch, but you turned off cellular. So I did turn off cellular because I didn't see the point in paying $10 a month for something when I have my phone on me anyways. True. True that. Now, speaking of the private label brands from Amazon, and I have seen my roommate bring home a lot of those private label brands from Whole Foods.

Yes. And it used to be that whenever you would search for something, you would get, like, Amazon Basics ads everywhere. Well, apparently they're dialing that back quite a bit now. Thank you, Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, exactly. It was an antitrust issue, so they're trying to get ahead of it and not get nailed with it ahead of time.

So smart on their part. Yeah. Yeah. CNBC did a little bit of research on it, and it turns out that, like, they have significantly rolled back their house ads. And, of course, Amazon is saying, we're always testing different experiences in order to provide more convenience, more efficiency, and more options for customers while shopping our stores.

Well, yeah. This time they're trying the not illegal experience. Yeah. Well, it wasn't illegal. It was just sketchy. It's just sketchy. Yeah. Yeah. Now, we had a story in the show a while ago when we were talking about millennials and how they're fairly useless sometimes. And my dad went to a coffee shop in Naperville, Illinois, and they couldn't figure out how to make change.

Right. And they had to, you know, get their phone out and figure out what it was. I ran into this the other day. Actually, yesterday, I went to my local sandwich shop and got a sandwich, and it was a very pricey sandwich. It was like 15 bucks. Whoa. It did come with fries. It was called the works. It was like an Italian beef with pepperoni and sausage, all this stuff.

It was glorious, glorious. I don't need to eat for three days. But anyway, the girl behind the counter, I gave her a $20 bill, and she looked at me like I had, you know, antlers growing out of my head. Yes. Why are you not using a card? Well, yeah, they've got this whole, you know, like fancy POS system and everything there.

And I'm just like, I would like change, please. And she pulls out her phone and has to type in, you know, 1574 minus 20 or whatever. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. I was just like, I didn't say anything. I was just like, okay, okay.

Well, there you go. There you go. And here's the funny part, though. It had the change written right there on the POS. She didn't have to get out her phone. It was right in front of her. Of course it was. Wow. Okay. Strange world. Strange world.

Strange world. Now, I found a follow-up article called The Problem with AI Ethics over at The Verge. Mm-hmm. And it's kind of going through all these different ethics groups that are coming around, like we talked about the Google AI Ethics Board, which we'll talk about in a second here. This talks about just the state of the industry in general and how they're trying to get ahead of, you know, just the public perception on AI.

And they want to be seen that they're doing something. Right. And everybody's thinking that this is just BS, absolute and utter BS, because these ethics boards have no control over anything that's going to happen. Right. You know, they meet just a couple times a year.

And it's, you know, it's just a paper tiger, if you would call it that. And one thing that I love about this article that he points out, though, IBM has been vocal about its ethics efforts in AI. And last year, it created an ethically diverse data set to help remove racial bias from facial recognition systems.

Right. Reports from The Intercept have detailed how, as recently as 2016, the company's surveillance tech was used by police forces in the Philippines, where thousands have been killed in extrajudicial executions as part of a brutal war on drugs. An interest in ethical algorithms doesn't stop companies from assisting deeply unethical causes.

So I thought that was pretty interesting. Excellent. Yeah, people are being called out for this just being bullshit, you know? Right. It's just placating the masses, making sure that people, they're seen to be doing something, when in all reality, nothing is actually going to happen.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, Google's AI ethics board is just all over the news. People are quitting, more petitions and more signatures, and it's just not looking good for Google right now with their AI board.

Nobody can get their ethics together, apparently. Nope, not at all. All right. Brief bit of follow-up on this. We recorded this episode on Friday morning, and as of Friday afternoon, the Google AI ethics board has been completely disbanded. Well, we had talked a little bit about how Amazon's Alexas were starting to appear in hospitals and healthcare situations, and it was a bit worrisome, obviously, because there are a number of privacy concerns, and particularly when you get to your health and all that sort of stuff.

So, I am happy to announce that Amazon is unveiling the first ever HIPAA compliant Alexa skills. So, they are actually aware of this and putting some effort and thought into it. They've partnered with a lot of people, like Providence St. Joseph's Health Skill, which can book same-day appointments, while Cigna and Express Scripts have new skills that track wellness incentives and manage prescriptions.

And this is all done through completely HIPAA compliant systems, meaning that everything is protected and stored and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, on the downside of this, of course, it is up to the individual developer's responsibility to ensure that they honor the law.

Should not Amazon be the gatekeeper here? I don't know about that. I really don't know about that. I mean, these are trusted developers. You and I just can't walk in and write one of these. Not yet, but they are planning on opening up a whole kind of eligible environment.

You will have to apply to it, obviously, of course. Yeah, it's interesting. I can see why they wouldn't want to take on that responsibility. Me too. Yeah. I mean, the liability. We're just a platform, right? Yeah. That's what you want to do.

You want to kind of make sure that you're not responsible. But, I mean, there's no stopping this. I mean, obviously, this is the way things are headed. So it's good to see that they're at least paying attention to it and they're trying to follow the rules because the HIPAA exists for a reason. It's pretty important. I think it's funny that the company is well aware that people will be nervous about trusting their medical information to a voice assistant.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Amazon noted that it securely stores data with access controls and encryption. How's that working out for all these AWS breaches that we see? Because people forget to turn on the encryption. Yeah, that is an issue, right? So I guess if you're a trusted developer, you remember to hit that switch.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, seriously. And this I found pretty interesting. We're going to talk about the Internet Archive a couple times today. But this is the first one. The Internet Archive will host 490,000 music tracks that were, quote, unquote, lost by MySpace. To be fair, they were also, quote, unquote, probably illegal.

So thank God they found them. Yeah, but some of these actually aren't. That's true. You know, like clips from Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, and Donald Glover went tits up. But, you know, this was a research group that had downloaded all of these 1.3 terabytes of music from 2008 to 2010.

Yeah. And they got in touch with the Internet Archive and said, hey, guys, here's some. So they've been putting these back in. And you can actually investigate the collection using Hobbit, the search engine that they have built into the Internet Archive for what they're calling the Dragon Horde.

Dragon Horde. Very slow to load. But that is Archive.org. It is woefully underfunded and woefully underpowered. Yes, it is. But, hey, they're trying. They're trying. In the news.

Well, we've all been under a deluge of robocalls recently and got some bad news here. Election time's coming up and not so much robocalls, although you'll be getting those as well. We're going to be getting a lot of text messages that are unsolicited from our lovely, lovely politicians.

So peer-to-peer texting platforms allow campaign workers to send large numbers of unsolicited messages. Texts to a list of phone numbers. The phone numbers are usually harvested from voter registrations, meaning if you are a decent citizen, they have your number. This is obviously American only. So sorry, foreigners. So yeah, and they combine data such as location and prior voting history to reach out to voters with invitations to attend rallies, requests for donations, information about polling places and other messages intended to promote a personal connection with the campaign.

Now, why are they doing texting? Many people do not answer their calls anymore, obviously. Emails are not seen. And text rates have open rates between 70% and 90%, which vastly outstrips phone calls or emails. So it makes sense for them to do this. Now, is it legal?

They have to press a button every time they send a text. They cannot be completely automated. So what happens is you have volunteers and staffers basically just mashing on a send button to contact up to 1,000 people per day. Oh. Yay. And the technology is continuing to evolve.

So we will, there's nothing you can do to stop this, really. So every time you get one, you can opt out individually, one by one. But as we know, these groups just split all over the place. So be prepared for a lot of spam texts. Great. Just what I'm looking forward to.

Australia has passed a new law that will punish social media companies for violent posts. All right. Not just a platform? What are we thinking? We're thinking this is, this was rushed. This was very much rushed.

So what they're trying to do is stop the thing that happened with the mosque shooting with the 50 people that were killed and the guy live streaming to Facebook as he did it. This is a knee-jerk reaction to that. And they say these platforms should not be weaponized for these purposes.

And the problem is this is a very poorly thought out bill. And basically every single ISP out there is going, hey, guys, hey, guys, this is not a good idea. Because what they're doing is saying that you need to be able to get this stuff down as soon as you know about it.

And if you don't get it down, then you are in big trouble. Big fines. Big, big, big fines. They have 800 penalty unit fines, which currently costs $128,952. So you can do the math on what a penalty unit is.

But it's like dinging your driver's license, I guess. Your internet driver's license gets 800 points on it. I don't have anything. I actually think it's a good idea. I don't agree with that. Yeah, it is rushed. It needs to be more thought out, considerably more thought out.

I'm OK with fines. I don't like the idea of employees could be sentenced for up to three years in prison. Come on. No. That's ridiculous. Fines, OK. Companies must also inform the police when illegal material is found. Yep, that's part of it. You have to notify the Australian federal police within a reasonable time once you become aware of the abhorrent violent material that occurred or is occurring in Australia.

Yes. Right. So the thing about this is, though, this isn't just the platforms. This isn't just saying Facebook has to do it. This is everyone. This goes to the ISP level, which is a problem. Yeah. Because the ISPs are, you know, they are just carriers. Yep. So if they're saying that the ISPs have to be liable for this and they're going to have to look at everything that goes through the network and that which we do not want.

No, that is definitely something we do not want because that just turns everything into a surveillance state. So between this and some of the other things that Australia has been doing with their cryptography laws and wanting back doors in, I think we should just turn them off the Internet for a while and let them stew and give Australia a time out.

Yeah. Australia, Australia, New Zealand need a time out right now. Come back to us when you've had taken some time, rewritten these laws to be sane, and then we'll let you back in the sandbox. Right. Yeah. That's that's all I can think of, because these are it's just overreaching and knee jerk.

Yeah. I mean, understandable given the situation that's happened. But yeah, take it. Take it. Take a deep breath here, Australia. Let's think about this. Let's not break the Internet. Yeah. Again. Again. Now, we had the article the other day about the the nine nine six rules in China, the people having to work, you know, nine to nine, six days a week.

Yep. And some people are fighting back. Well, they're trying to fight back. A couple Chinese software developers are using GitHub and open source licenses to try and get some of these companies that use massive amounts of open source software to say, hey, cut this practice out.

What they're trying to do is they're trying to get this new license called the nine nine six dot ICU put into different open source initiatives to say, hey, if you're going to use our software, you have to abide by all the license terms. And in our license terms is this, you know, anti nine nine six license.

Right. And the thing about this is it's not it's never going to pick up. It's I see what they're trying to do, but nobody worth their salt is going to actually put this into their software. Because it it might actually be breaking the open source initiatives rules.

Right. About restricting access to software based on, you know, just arbitrary things, because it's a slippery slope when you start going down that road, because just by putting in a license, it says, OK, by using this software, your company has to have these policies in place. Now, what what happens when you get down to something that's, you know, just about an ideology instead of just work practices?

It's that's where people are going to start fighting back on it. I found this interesting that they're trying to do this. And it got a lot of press because this is the fastest growing GitHub repository in GitHub history. Wow. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. And it's bigger than TensorFlow and some of the Facebook open source stuff.

It's crazy. But it's in, you know, I don't think anybody's really picked it up yet because they don't want to have their software kind of blackballed. Right. And because, you know, open source should be open source. If you abide by the standard open source licenses, everybody should be able to use it.

That's the way it goes. So this is just kind of like trying to backdoor their way into it. And I understand what they're trying to do. I applaud them for trying it, but I just don't think it's going to work. Right. Well, speaking of things that I don't think are going to work, Snap has a new plan.

Yes. The redesign failed. That didn't work to get Snap going. The glasses and the subsequent glass relaunch failed and didn't really get Snap going. Now Snap has a new idea. It wants to sell ads. OK, they announced what amounts to a mobile ad network on Thursday at their first ever partner summit here in L.A.

It will be called the Snap audience network, which is basically akin to Facebook's audience network, which has been around since 2014. So in exchange for selling ads on behalf of app developers, Snap will keep a portion of the ad revenue. Snap hopes advertisers will use the network to reach a large group of people.

Then if they advertise on Snapchat alone, an important point considering Snapchat's user base is no longer growing. So product's not working. Let's roll out an ad network network. Yeah. Just take the tech we have for running our ads and see if anybody else wants to use it since. Exactly.

So there you go. I sense a pivot. I sense a pivot, too. And I heard that that little summit they had was quite off the hook. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's a big Hollywood production. Even, you know, some celebrities were there. What do you know? Well, they're rolling out more, you know, original content, Snap shows that nobody watches, or at least we don't know if anybody's watching because, you know, they don't release stats, which is never that way.

If you don't release stats, that means no one's watching. Exactly. I mean, that's kind of where we're at. So. So, yeah, now they're going to do an ad network. And they, of course, are claiming that their ad network is better than Facebook's ad network because they believe in privacy. Yeah, that's funny. That's funny.

I just love that they named it the same as Facebook, which has to be a dig. That has to be a dig going back to Facebook stealing stories. Mm hmm. Yeah. I think so, too. Tesla's not having that great of a week. They haven't for a while, have they? No, it was looking up for a bit.

It was looking up for a little bit. Yeah. So one thing that came out this week is some of the new navigate on autopilot features, which they're trying to say, hey, look, look over here. Look over here. We're not going to hit our we're not going to hit our numbers. And we're dropping the prices.

But look over here. The car, the car can now change lanes without you having to do anything. That's really it. That's what it is. That's what we wanted. Yeah. It's it's basically a new feature that lets the car while it's navigating to where it needs to go change lanes automatically.

If you go in and set a couple different settings inside, you have to proactively turn this on in the past to make it change lanes. Because when it when it asked you to change lanes, you actually had to physically do something and you also still have to have your hands on the wheel while this is all happening.

It's right. I don't know. It seems like, OK. Not really that much. This seems like a settings change. And they're trying to trying to put this out as, you know, they're really getting closer to autonomous driving. It just seems like, oh, you know, wag the tail or wag the dog type of thing.

Right. But I thought it was funny. I thought it was funny. And this one is really funny. Oh, my God. The fastest account on Instagram to hit one million followers came out this week. It's at Sussex Royal. Well, turns out funny story here at Sussex Royal was actually owned by someone else.

OK. And Instagram just took it. Right. They just said, oh, we're going to take it and we're going to give it to the Royals. And apparently it can do whatever it wants. They say, according to Instagram's rules, it has the right to take over accounts.

It deems, quote unquote, inactive, which is what happened here. OK. This poor guy, he was, you know, he was a big fan of the he lives in Sussex and he loves the football club, the Royals who were there. And that was his thing. And he just used the account to, you know, like other posts and he never really posted that much.

So they just said, yeah, you don't you don't really need that anymore. We're going to give it to the actual Royals. So Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, that's their new Instagram account. Right. And it got to a million in five hours and 45 minutes. Wow. Beating K-pop star Kang Daniel, who originally did like he's the last record holder.

He did it in 11 hours and 36 minutes. So they crushed it. They crushed the record. Crushed it. So poor guy. He does have at Sussex Royal on Twitter. So he's he's like trying to protect that one now. But he's he was very upset. He was very upset.

As you should be. That's that's that's kind of bullshit. Hey, that's what happens. Somebody else's platform. They make the rules. Somebody else's platform. That's true. They make the rules. Scooter news. Ready for some. Oh, boy. Yes. I'm surprised that you found so much. I've almost been like avoiding it on purpose. I told you, man, I got that Google alert for scooters every now and again.

You get just a wave of them coming in. And I thought maybe we should just have a little more scoot scoot news. OK. UC San Diego trauma surgeon says number of scooter injuries increasing. Really, really, really. Yeah. Oh, yes. I love this. And he's just seeing like this just drastic rise in it.

Now, the thing about the article that is great. All of us are scrambling to find out how big of a public health concern this is going to be. Most of the time they say they were doing something stupid, says Dr. Kobayashi. About 50% of the patients that we are testing are intoxicated on either alcohol or other illicit substances.

Shocking. This is what happens when you put them in tourist areas like Santa Monica here or Mission Beach. Yeah. Duh. People go out to the bars and then go ride the scooters. And then they fall down and go boom. Yes. And they get an ouchie. Sometimes. Kobayashi. Kobayashi Maru.

I know. I saw that too. Yeah. You can't win on a scooter. That's the whole point of it. That's right. You got to reprogram it. You do. Paris is in the news now. They are going to fine you $150 for riding a scooter on the sidewalk. And if you park your scooter like poorly, which a lot of people do, obviously, it's a 35 euro fine.

These things have got to be covered in dog poop in Paris. Oh, my God. On the sidewalks. Yeah. The scooters have to be disgusting. I never even thought about that in San Francisco. They're just covered in man poop. Yeah. Ooh. They need a scooter wash going around. That could be a new business.

You just go around and, you know, wash your scooter, sir. Wash your scooter, sir. Wash your scooter. Yeah. Because they're expecting 40,000 scooters to be in France by the end of the year. Jeez. That's a lot. That's not just Paris, but that's France. And yeah, I was like, if that's just Paris, that's going to be ridiculous.

They're saying that by the end of the year, they want to create 2,500 dedicated parking spaces for the scooters. Yeah. The problem is you don't need just dedicated parking spaces, especially in a city like Paris. I don't know the last time you were there, Jason, but the sidewalks are packed. Like, you need somewhere to ride them. You can't ride them on the sidewalks and you can't ride them on the streets.

That's for sure. Yeah. Not in Paris. Streets are ridiculous. The sidewalks are ridiculous. So, I don't know. I really don't know. Again, it comes back to, like, my first argument when these things first appeared in Santa Monica. Great idea. We don't have the infrastructure for it. And who's going to build it? And who's going to pay for it? Yep. Yeah.

Who's going to pay for these 2,500 dedicated spots? You know? Exactly. The company's going to do it? Or the taxpayer's going to get screwed? And down in Texas, the state senate has filed a bill that is going to try and, like, basically give some rights back to the cities to say that, oh, you know, you have some rights to say what these scooter companies do in your towns.

Right. You know? They want to increase the age requirement, decide whether a scooter can be parked or ridden, like where it can be parked or ridden, penalize people who don't follow the regulations, require riders to hold a driver's license and raise the age of the riders, you know? Right.

All the things that should have existed in the first place. Yeah. Yep. Not having two people on a scooter and only allow scooters on roads that don't have a bike lane if the speed limit is under 30 miles an hour. So, you know, if there's no sidewalk and you have to ride on the road, but it's a 40 mile an hour speed limit, you can't ride a scooter there.

Fair. Yeah. Good. So, I mean, it was proposed. We don't know if it's going to go through, but that's the way it goes. And a man is suing the basically San Diego, the city of San Diego. All right. Plaintiff Richard Pearson.

He's also suing Bird, which is a good thing. I don't know if he'll win, but he is one of those guys that we talked about who is disabled and has a wheelchair. Right. So he was riding his electric wheelchair down the street, minding his own business, and two girls aged 12 and 14 on a scooter on two girls, one scoot.

Worst, worst Internet meme ever. They crossed over the center line of the boardwalk and into Pearson's path. The scooter caused a cyclist to veer away and then crash into Pearson's wheelchair. That's when he got injured. So he sustained a bruising to his torso, ribs, left knee, and left arm.

So he's blaming Bird for not establishing geofences for speed on the boardwalk and not having a speedometer on the vehicle, which is actually something that they should have, come to think of it. That's true. They should. Yep. And he said, the suit contends the city is liable for creating a dangerous condition on public property.

It blames the city for not having regulations in place that would require geofencing, speedometers, and signs warning pedestrians that the boardwalk is also used by scooters whose speed could not be monitored. So. Regulations. They only slow down progress, right? Yep. Yep. This is progress, all these scooters.

This is fantastic. The mayor has since proposed a number of rules that would regulate the scooter industry, including requiring geofencing in various areas, including the boardwalk where Pearson was hurt. So. Right. The city's, the city attorney's office is reviewing the complaint and an inquiry to Bird did not get a response.

Now, this brings me to my final point for in the news. We need a new villain. I mean, we have, we have gone through so many villains on this show. We, we, we have had Uber, we've had Airbnb, we've had Zuckerberg, we've had Elon Musk, we've had Jeff Bezos.

Having scooters is our villain for the past couple months is just getting tiresome. We need a new supervillain on the internet. Somebody get on that. Event something stupid. Yeah. Or something nefarious. Come on, guys. I mean, we've, we've yelled at the anti-vaxxers enough.

We're just running out of people to yell at. So we need some fresh blood. We need some fresh assholes. The problem is we have to vanquish some of our enemies. They just don't go away. No, no. They just get subsumed into the zeitgeist. And yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, haven't heard of Travis Kalanick in a while.

He's kind of. I wonder what he's up to. Let's do some research for the next show. No, I'm not going to do that. I don't want Travis Kalanick in my search history.

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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 Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Now, Dave, I found a fun fact about Maryland for you this week.

Yeah. Oh, good. Good. Are you working for the Maryland Department of Commerce now? Yes, the Tourism Bureau. That's it. Okay. Go on. Go on. I think Jason's employment doubled their employment numbers. Yeah. Go on. Go on. Well, I have to say, friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, sent this one to me.

All right. There is a Guinness Brewery in Maryland, which is the only Guinness Brewery outside of Ireland. Yes. So suck it, you Californians. Well, it's kind of cool. They're located on the site of the first Maryland distillery that opened after Prohibition.

They are, yes. I have not been there yet, but I have several friends who have, and I hear it's a really fun experience. Well, as with all things in Maryland, there is a caveat. Oh, boy. They don't actually make real Guinness there. You know what they're known for? They are the exclusive brewer of Guinness Blonde, which any true Guinness lover will tell you everyone has tried once.

Once. That's unfortunate. I was just about to plan a Grumpy Old Geeks podcast field trip. Exactly. I was, too. I won't even get off the freeway for that. Now, once again, we have to fly over Maryland and go all the way to Ireland. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. As friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, once I pointed that out, he told me, he's like, what's the fucking point? You know, I learned recently that Ellicott City, which is near here, which you may remember from being a town that has been flooded several times in the past few years.

It's an old mill town and happens to be built in the middle of basically a big granite funnel. So when there are heavy storms, it gets flooded very, very badly. But it's an old, old town. And turns out during Prohibition, it was the town that Marylanders went to to get their prescriptions for their medicinal alcohol, which was a thing.

Who knew? They went to Dr. Hooch. Yeah. Yeah. Ellicott City was known to be the place where you could go to get your prescription for your medicinal alcohol. So there you go. Claim to fame. Very nice. All right. Well, I have a little bit of follow up. We were talking last week, Dave, you're concerned for the dolphins and their privacy and how they got very sad if they didn't get private.

And lo and behold, did I not find a new article this week? Plants and birds need privacy online, too. Our enthusiasm for sharing birds, plants and super blooms has unintended consequences. Boy, don't we love them. I'm sure we've all known the story about the flower places that have been trampled and ruined by influencers going and taking photos.

And then this article got really into some interesting things about open source projects and people who are big bird fans. So there's a site called eBird, which is an online birdwatching community that has had to start blocking endangered animals so people wouldn't be able to find them.

There's the idea that the well-meaning efforts of citizen scientists and open data projects can do in what had taken previous generations, may have taken poachers years to map, can now be downloaded in minutes for exotic animals. So there are all these unintended consequences about putting everything in the world online.

You send the poachers right to where the birds are. Yeah. Do the work for them. Or other animals, exactly. Because people are doing this for everything, right? Like we're tracking where elephants are and all that sort of stuff. And all these databases are public domain and it's all out there. Yeah, there's a lake right near my house and it's full of turtles.

And there are groups of people who come along every now and then and you'll see they have like a big five-gallon bucket full of turtles that they're poaching out of the lake, which is illegal. And what I've seen is that some of the local people have been using Facebook to coordinate the reporting of these folks and call them into the police or even just send somebody out there to say, hey, put those turtles back in the water or I'm going to call the police.

Right. So there's some organizing on the other side that I guess is helpful. But how interesting that if you spot a rare bird, your report may be nefariously used. Yeah, but also hidden.

I guess it's for the best. Yeah, I guess it is. What's with the weird black market turtle thing going on there in Maryland you got going on? Well, they use it at the- Someone's got to chase that flavor of the Guinness Blonde. Right, I was going to say, they use it at the Guinness plant. Ever since they opened the Guinness plant, it's just been off the hook.

I don't know. Who knows? What I've heard is that there are some Asian dishes that- Turtle soup soup. Like to use turtles. And so that seems to be a thing. But we have these, they're called painted turtles.

And the lake is full of them. But people like to take them, and they're not allowed to do that. Rat bastards. Yeah. Yeah. Now, we've talked a bit about the somewhat worrisome state of security affairs with our commander-in-chief. And I'm sure we all heard this story this week.

A 32-year-old woman from China carrying four cell phones and a thumb drive infected with malware gained access to Mar-a-Lago during President Trump's visit to the Florida resort over last weekend. What reports didn't show is that she had three turtles under her dress, too. And only ordered Guinness Blonde from the pool bar.

It's the Southern White House, you know. Yes. Well, I'm glad he stepped away from trying to call it that. But it is de facto pretty much that. And the security situation there is not good. She basically showed two Chinese passports and said she wanted to go use the pool.

And she was brought in. And, you know, it was it was Mar-a-Lago's own internal security that then kind of looked at her and escorted her out and turned her over to the Secret Service. But the Secret Service has basically said they do not determine who gets access to Mar-a-Lago. That's up to resort management.

And entering the resort does not permit access to areas used by the president, which require additional security screenings. So they're saying not on us. It's on them. And my argument would be if the president is there doing meetings, it's on you. Yeah, there's a lot of weird things about this story. First of all, if this woman were up to no good, if she were sent by a state.

I've generally found that anybody carrying more than one cell phone is probably up to no good. Well, but my point is, if if let's say China sent her over here, it seems like they would have sent someone who is better at this than her. Right. Right. Like also.

And so that's one thing. She seems to be stumbling around and obviously not very good at this whole espionage game. Right. The other thing is, I suspect if she were a serious threat, we probably wouldn't have heard about her. One would assume.

Yes. Yeah. Unless it's a double blind. Yeah, could be. Could be. It's turtles all the way down. That is. It's turtles all the way down. Finding out. There is actually a turtle in Maryland that is threatened, which is why it's probably illegal. It is the bog turtle.

Oh, OK. Yes. Painted turtles are not threatened. But the bog turtle, which might get thrown in with the painted turtles if someone is not very picky about their turtles. Definitely. I know we have musk turtles and we also have snapping turtles the size of VW beetles.

Yeah. Those guys are big. Oh, no. You have the bog turtle, the spotted turtle, the wood turtle, the eastern box turtle, the red ear slider, the eastern painted turtle, the midland painted turtle, the eastern river cooter, the northern build red bellied cooter, the northern map turtle, the northern diamond backed terrapin.

Those are your main turtles there in Maryland. Yes, we are. Next week. Turtles aplenty. Flora and fauna of Maryland. Right. The herpetology podcast with Jason and Dave. We'll be talking about snakes. The turtles coming out of the water very slowly.

Copperheads, black racers, and brown eastern water snakes. There we go. Yes, indeed. All right. So AI experts are questioning Amazon's facial recognition technology. This would be recognition with a K, which we still don't know why there's a K in it. Well, at least 25 prominent artificial intelligence experts and researchers and from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a recent winner of the prestigious Turing Award have signed a letter calling on Amazon

to stop selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement because it's biased against women and people of color. Well, Amazon says, no, it's not. But there is research to say that it is. So it's funny that all these other companies who have competing products are saying, yeah, Amazon shouldn't be doing that.

They suck at it. We're better. Yeah. We actually talked about this on Smashing Security last week. Carol Terrio had a story about this. It was actually an apartment building in New York that was started using facial recognition. And the stats they had on this was that in terms of recognizing white men, there was a, I think it was a 0.8% error rate.

And in terms of black women, it was 30%. Ooh, that's a significant. That's out of bounds. That would be different. Yeah. Yes, it would. So I suppose, I'm just guessing here, but I suppose it's one of those things where, you know, data in, data out, the sample size probably of both images of people going in is probably heavily biased towards white males.

I suspect probably the research is heavily biased by white males. So in terms of doing their testing, that's probably where they would focus on, hey, does this thing work or not? Right. Just a guess. But it makes sense that that could introduce bias into these systems.

So I think I agree with this, that until they get this figured out and that sort of bias is a non-issue, then we got to hold off on these things, especially with law enforcement. Yeah, that's where it really comes into it. It's like, yeah, if you're selling it for, you know, people at the mall, maybe it's okay.

But even that's not really okay. Because that was a story that I think we had a couple weeks ago where you can be banned from the mall if you're like, you know, caught shoplifting in one store and then it goes into the system and then somebody else in another store, you get picked up on the cameras and they say, nope, out, get out, get out.

And it might not even be you because the facial recognition isn't all there yet. Right, right. So, yeah. Yeah, this is just not ready for primetime. It is not ready for primetime. Yeah. And these fuckers over at Ben-Gurion University. Now, now.

These guys. These guys. I think you mean that as a compliment, don't you? Of course I do. I am always impressed with what they can come up with. It drives me mad. They are diabolical, aren't they? We cannot have nice things because of these guys.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Here's the latest one. They have made a malware that can trick researchers into thinking that people either A, have cancer or B, don't have cancer. It's a Schrodinger's box of malware.

Yeah, it's Schrodinger's cancer. Oh, man. So, yeah, they can take. There's your show title. Schrodinger's cancer. I do like that one. And so if they can take a scan and they can, you know, either take away some cancer or put in some cancer and they've done tests with researchers who are, you know, radiologists who know what cancer looks like.

And they can fool them, you know, up to 99% of the time, which is crazy. So it's that good. And this is just a way to show that these medical devices and scanners are, you know, they're vulnerable to malware. Yeah. The compelling example I heard from this story was, if you remember during the 2016 election here in the U.S. when Hillary Clinton fell ill, remember she had pneumonia or something.

So imagine if she went in and she had pneumonia. So chances are she got a chest X-ray. So what if that X-ray came back and someone had hacked it and said Hillary Clinton has significant instance of cancer? Well, that would certainly have an effect on the campaign.

Even if it turned out to not, even if it turned out to not be true, well, then conspiracy theorists start your engines, right? Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So that's an interesting case here. I don't know that we're going to start seeing this sort of thing running rampant, but it's good to know that there's a possibility.

I think like you point out, Jason, this points to other weaknesses in the system where things need to be better protected and encrypted and all that sort of stuff along the way. Yeah. This is a proof of concept and it's just an evil proof of concept. I want to have a beer with these guys because the guys who come up with this shit are just crazy good at what they're doing.

I think your lead in calling them fuckers probably means you're not going to be getting a beer with them anytime soon, but that's just my guess. I'm actually, yeah. That was a term of endearment. I love these guys. I've always loved the stuff that they do, but I mean, some of the craziest stuff with lasers and security cameras and using the IR lights to, you know, X-filled data.

I mean, any cool thing that you could come up with that you would watch in a movie and go, oh, that's bullshit. Nobody can do that. They've done it. They've done it. These guys are so good. I'm interviewing someone from there in the next couple of weeks. I'll, I'll pass on your love.

Yeah, please do. Cause man, those guys, it's impressive as hell what these guys can pull off. Yeah. Well, let's, uh, let's go ahead and stick with the problems in the field of health, uh, stories and health department in India exposed more than one, uh, 12.5 million medical records for pregnant women.

And after here we go again, it failed to secure a database record span over five years, uh, for a state in the north of the country and includes sensitive data, such as family medical history, mother's age, details of other children, doctor information, and court case details.

Uh, it was a database just sitting out in the wild. It took three weeks before the Indian computer emergency response team was able to remove the records from the database, which is still available online, according to ZD net as of right now. Uh, so yeah, people just can't seem to lock down their databases. Can they?

Fresh talent. Yep. Yeah. You know, you know, well, since this is in India, they did hire, hire out to Indian programmers, which. Well, the problem is they actually hired an American company. Oh, no, I'm just, I'm making that up. I don't know. Yeah. People just leave these hanging out there and, um, they really do.

It seems like every day a new one is discovered. So it seems like, uh, a week cannot go by with us, uh, using the F word, which is of course is Facebook. Uh, and I have to, again, I have to give credit to the folks over at Smashing Security for that joke, which I happily steal from them.

Um, so turns out that, uh, Facebook has been asking some new users for passwords to their email accounts. So for, okay. So you go to create a new account on Facebook and Facebook says, Hey, what's your email account? And you give them that, which is all good and fine and what we do.

And then Facebook says, Hey, how about the password to that account? We'd like to use that to be able to verify that it's you and also suck in your contact list. And people were going for it. Unbelievable.

And, uh, so as, as, as is the case with these over and over again, Facebook got called on this. Someone pointed it out and Facebook had their standard. Oh, were we doing, was that, was that wrong? Should we not have done that? I'll tell you what, we're going to stop doing that from now on.

We're, we're sorry. We, we shouldn't have done that. We're, we're not going to do that anymore. Yeah. Their actual phrase was, we understand the password verification option. Isn't the best way to go about this. So we are going to stop offering it. Facebook said. And I love it.

It's, it's, it's only for certain email providers. I would like to know which email providers that they have to do this with. Yeah. It, it makes no, it actually, it doesn't. Email is email. You send me an email. I have a link. I confirm my account. Boom. Bob's your uncle. Yeah. There's a reason for this. One of the earlier reports seem to indicate that maybe Facebook was trying to say that they were, they did this with sketchy email providers to try to cut down on scammers and fake accounts and that sort of thing.

But no, we're calling foul on that one. This is not something that they ever should have considered asking for. If you're worried about a suspect email provider, then you just block them and you say, sorry, you can't register to Facebook with this email. Go get another email account. But they need all the users they can get.

So of course they're going to try. They're going to try whatever they can do. Well, speaking of Facebook's users, here we go. Surprise. Another 540 million Facebook users data has been exposed. The researchers from the cybersecurity firm UpGuard shared that they found two massive troves of exposed Facebook user data that had been posted publicly on an Amazon cloud server.

The data included users, passwords, and I mean, getting exhausted talking about unsecured databases. It's just ridiculous. So these actually technically not Facebook's fault. The two troves of data came from two different app developers, Cultura Collectiva, a Mexican company that was responsible for the vast majority of these data exposures, and At The Pool, an app that has been defunct since 2014, but had improperly stored records of 22,000 users, including their passwords.

Despite being contacted in January by both Amazon and UpGuard, Cultura Collectiva didn't move to take down the data until Wednesday when Bloomberg contacted Facebook about the findings. So Facebook had to go yell at them. Yeah. I had a thought about this. You guys, you guys, stop it. My thought about this is that Facebook sharing data like this is like someone sharing naked photos of their girlfriend with their best friend and trusting them not to share them with anybody else.

Right. First of all, they shouldn't be sharing in the first place, and they're fools to think that that data is not going to get out. This is true, but it is their business model, sharing naked photos. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody that built an app back in the day, all of us, we looked at each other and like, they're giving us all this stuff?

Are they crazy? Are they crazy? Yeah. We took it. We kept it. I'm sure I still have them around. I'm sure I've got databases. Yeah. Anybody that signed up for our Muppets game, I'm sure in a table somewhere in an archive, there is probably at least 2 million user records from Facebook.

Yeah. But you know where that data isn't, Jason? It isn't on an unsecured Amazon web server. Well, I don't know. It's on an unsecured Jason server. It's on a unsecured drive somewhere in a closet. Right. Right. Bam Bam uses as a chew toy. I just tear off a user and toss it at her.

Yeah. Here, have someone from Lithuania. Oh, man. It just doesn't stop. There's a lot more of them out there. There's a lot more. We just haven't found them yet. Yeah. So, a story from Andy Greenberg over at Wired, who's writing I always enjoy.

And the title of this is, Hacker Eva Galperin has a plan to eradicate stalkerware. And this is someone, she works for the EFF. And she's working with malware or, what do you call it, antivirus software providers to start tagging stalkerware as viral.

Okay. Which I think is great. And she's also working behind the scenes to try to get legislation passed and things like that. But basically, she is on a, she is heading up a, I was going to say a one person campaign. But really, she's just, she's motivated and she's leading this campaign.

She's got the EFF behind her to try to get rid of this stalkerware. Because the conclusion that I think everybody agrees on is that most of the people who use this, the vast majority of people who use this, are up to no good. Yeah. I mean, the stuff is marketed as like what?

Well, you know, make sure your kid isn't doing anything crazy online. But the vast majority. Yeah. So good on her. I'm with her. Yeah. Me too. The other thing I just want to note is that the photography in this story is really great. And she looks like she's ready to step into the next Avengers movie.

Yeah, it really is. Doesn't it? Matrix, yeah. That is a very nice jacket she has. Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. You're coveting her jacket. That was a great jacket. I would wear that. Yeah. Yeah. So if, you know, if there's anybody I want to have my back in fighting stalkers, I think she certainly looks the part.

She definitely looks like a badass. So hats off to her. I would like to have a beer with Eva. There you go. But not a Guinness Blonde. But not a Guinness Blonde and no turtles. Right. Right. What I really liked about this is that she went for Kaspersky first because they need a win is the way she put it.

And she can get them on board. And they jumped on it, which is really cool for them to come. And say, look, you know, this used to say not a virus, but not right. And I mean, it was flagged, but it just still said not a virus. So it was a really weird error message that they used to put up.

And now it says, this is a virus. Would you like to get rid of it? Which is really cool. Yeah. And I really wish she wouldn't have said some of the things she said about Kaspersky in the article because it might weaken her position with them. Yeah. If I was the writer of this article, I would have left that stuff out because it kind of weakens her position.

I love the fact that Jason, of all people, is the one saying that she should have exercised caution and been a bit more politic. You know, diplomacy is his sharp suit there, isn't it? It is. It is. Even a stop clock is right twice a day.

There you go. There you go. Well, this next story, you know, we have talked about endlessly about how no one goes to jail for any of these things. In corporate America, no one goes to jail. It doesn't matter what you do. The worst thing that usually happens is you get to retire early with your golden parachute to go live on an island counting your money.

Well, Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, she has put in some legislation, proposed legislation that corporate executives could face jail time if they oversee massive scams. What do you guys think about this?

They should. Yeah. Can we hire her now to be president? Yeah. We technically have to vote them in, I believe. At least that's, well, it used to be. Yeah. I don't know what's happening anymore. Let's be honest. I've read through a lot of Elizabeth Warren's campaign points and promises and platforms, and I'm pretty down with most of what she has to say and the approach about this.

I think, you know, we know from just doing this segment the last couple of years that there's nobody is ever responsible for anything when they clearly are when they clear. I mean, if it is so clear that, you know, that they were overseeing it and they knew what they were doing, why shouldn't they have jail time?

Right. Why are they getting off? I don't understand. If we did it, we'd be in jail. Yeah. And why not? To be the head of a multimillion dollar corporation. Right. Right. And this, the notion is that this would incentive, incentivize them to really keep an eye on this stuff.

It would be nice. Yeah. I'm down with this. Do you think there's enough political will? Do you think the tide is turning that we might see something like this make its way through? No. I hope so. I'd like, I'd like to think so, but. I would like to think so, but this country is so divided and I don't, I don't know.

I just don't know. You know, Elizabeth Warren is far too polarizing of a figure to, to, to the right. And nobody else on the left is really beating this drum. She's kind of doing it alone. What I do hope is that will influence other people in the democratic parties to at least take a look at this and pay attention to these types of things.

Right. You know, and change comes slow, but I'd like to see it. Yeah. Well, maybe it could get rolled into some privacy acts or something like that, but I agree that I guess I'm cynical that this has a chance of going anywhere, but on the other hand, at least somebody's talking about it because.

Yes. That's new. That is new. That is new. Oh God. That's a sad state of affairs that we're in. Oh, all right. Well, I got one final story here.

It's not really a story. It's, it's kind of a, uh, I was listening to a 2600 off the hook radio program this morning. You guys ever listened to that? I've not, I'm familiar with 2600, but I didn't, I don't know this. Oh yeah. Emmanuel Goldstein's had a show on the radio in New York for years.

I mean like decades and they do two shows. They do, uh, off the hook and the other one is some really bad one. Uh, the off the hook is more of the hacker one. I highly recommend it. It's, uh, like once a week, it's a one hour long podcast. They just rebroadcast the radio show and it's hit or miss, but there have been some good things on there.

Like I learned about the strand bookstore and the stuff that was going on there in New York from them. There's, there's some good stuff. And this week they had on Jason Scott from the internet archive. Oh. And, and they were talking about how they were in a mad scramble to save all of the Google plus page, like the public Google plus pages that Google was nuking because it's all gone now, unless you're a business client, because all of the business stuff in Google plus is too tied into their backend and infrastructure to get rid of it.

So if you're a business client, you can still play with Google plus, but all the public Google plus stuff is now gone. It's absolutely gone. They said they got 98 to 99% of it. And there was some really interesting stats because they said when they got all of geo cities, it was like five or six terabytes, like, or like four or five terabytes of active data.

And like, you know, maybe another terabyte in there for the entirety of geo cities. But when they get into Google plus, they're in the six petabyte range. Wow. That's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of stuff. So it's going to take a month to go through it. But there was, I think they talk about all of the other services that go away and you know how they try and save them and how like nobody's really working with them that much.

They do talk about the flicker stuff with the new owners of flicker and how they're like really trying to not delete as much stuff as they originally wanted to. And they're working with people to, you know, keep people who are dead, like keep their accounts alive. They're working with people who are creative commons publishers. If so, if you're, if you're over a photo limit, but your photos are creative commons, they'll keep them.

They worked with some Tumblr stuff and all of these other services. But there was one key thing in here where they were asking Jason, like, okay, did you get to work with Google? And like, maybe they could just give you the data. And they're like, yeah, it's Google. Forget it. You know, they don't care about people or anything like that.

And he, one of the guys on the show asked him, he was like, so do you think they really delete this stuff when it's gone? And he's like, he, he, he wouldn't give a straight answer, but he gave a very cryptic roundabout answer because he still knows people over there that he has to, you know, still work with and things.

He's like, the roundabout answer was hell no, they don't delete a goddamn thing. It's all still there. Yeah. Why would they? Why would they? Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because I was thinking about the internet archive now lately because of the, the, my space stuff we talked about at the top of the show and them trying to do all the Google plus stuff and it's a seriously underfunded, you know, uh, organization.

Yeah. It really is the stuff that they're doing. It's like, I, is there like a place where we can just send you our old hard drives to like reformat and stick in the, in the raids? Yeah. We'll send, we'll send you drives with tons of Facebook dumps on them and dog spit and naked ex-girlfriends.

Although for me, it does beg a larger question, which is, is there a point to saving Google plus posts? Yeah, there is. It's, it's, it's for the future. It's for the future. They're archivists. They want to say things that were there. I, I mean, I think about all those, uh, decades worth of tonight show with Johnny Carson episodes that were lost forever because nobody wanted to store the quad tapes they were recorded on.

And so they just got tossed in the dumpster because who's ever going to want to watch these things again. Right. Yeah. So you just never know. I, I, and those sorts of things I think drive this impulse to just save everything. I, on the, I, I can't blame Google for sticking these in a vault somewhere just in case.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I mean, I wish these guys had, had better funding and just a whole better team behind it. And it, the, the crazy thing about it is any of these billionaires out there could write them a check that would keep them in business for the next like 50 years with, with, you know, as a rounding error for their, you know, their vacation budget or their, their plane budget.

Right. And it would be really nice because I think it's, I think they're doing, you know, I'm not going to say the Lord's work, but maybe the flying spaghetti monsters work to save this stuff for the future. Yeah. And it's, it's important. Yeah. Even though we know Google doesn't delete it, they're just never going to give it back up.

But it's, I mean, the Wayback Machine is one of the coolest things on the internet. It's true. Yeah. So I highly recommend checking out the episode because he does talk about a lot of stuff when it comes to the internet archive and the work that they're doing to, you know, to save these, these dying sites because, you know, things do actually go away on the internet, you know, contrary to popular belief.

And the off the hook show, I do enjoy it. You know, those guys are, they're hit or miss. They're definitely hit or miss. They get some things right. Something's wrong. Something's very, very wrong, but so do we. So what are you going to do? That's true. They're kindred spirits. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, that was a lot. Yes. Covered a lot this week. All right. Turtles all the way down. Turtles all the way down. Yep. Bucket of turtles for everybody. All right, guys. Turtle cancer. Great. All right. Talk to you next week.

Talk to you next time. Caps and doodads. I've been working on some scripts lately for my courses and I've been using Scrivener 3. I think I've actually reviewed Scrivener 3 on the show before. I believe so.

And I really liked the software too. When I was, you know, as everyone does that writes or creates or anything, once you have a kid, you think you have insights that nobody else has had. And I briefly played around with the idea of writing something about being a new dad. And I use Scrivener. It was nice. Yeah, it's really nice, especially if you're doing a lot of research and putting things where it needs to go.

And I haven't really dug into Scrivener 3 until recently. And it is a really nice upgrade. I've used Scrivener since version 1. And this new version is much nicer. It's just cleaner. It has a lot of nice features in it. And I really like it because it syncs with Dropbox so I can keep things in one place.

And I can work on my Macs. I can work on iOS, which is the next thing that I've been doing because I've got that massive monster 12-inch iPad now. And I've been going back and forth with my computers. And it works really well. And Scrivener for iOS is not as, you know, not as nice.

But you still can write in your, you know, write in your chapters and do everything like you normally would because all you need to do is put some words onto the page. Right. Well, that got me thinking. I'm trying to type on, you know, the 12-inch iPad, you can type on the screen. It is big enough where there's a full-size keyboard on it.

But I'm like, I would kind of like to get a new keyboard for it, like a Bluetooth keyboard or like a case keyboard. The only option right now is that ridiculously expensive $160 Apple Smart Cover with the keyboard. Right. Never buy those. Those are terrible. So did a little research and found the Logitech K380 multi-device Bluetooth keyboard, Windows Mac, Chrome OS, Android, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV compatible with flow, cross-computer control and easy switch up to three devices, dark gray.

Now I got a $20 case for my iPad instead of the $120 like regular case. And now I have a $30 keyboard that goes with it. Right. So good savings there. And this new keyboard is heavy, though.

It's a nice size. It is almost exactly the same width as the iPad Pro 12-inch. So I can set up the iPad on the table, put the keyboard up to it, just turn it on and it goes. It's Bluetooth. So it requires batteries, though. It doesn't, it's not one of those like rechargeable keyboards, which is great.

I love that. Key action is pretty nice. It's quiet. It's very quiet. The only problem is that I didn't research this before I bought it. It's not backlit. So there's no typing in the dark, which is fine, I guess.

You know, I guess if you're trying to keep your work to certain hours anyways, that's true. That's true. I get a bed at, you know, between seven and nine every night. So there's not a whole lot of typing in the dark, but I do get up at four in the morning and it is still dark, but turn on the light, you know, and I don't travel. So for in the house and just being able to sit at like the breakfast table and jot out some notes, have some coffee in the morning and just chill, it's great.

It's a great little keyboard and it works with your iPhone and, you know, all of the other iPads I have. The really cool thing about it is you can set it up to sync with three different devices. Right. So I can set it to go with my phone or each of my two iPads and you can just switch it by pressing a button, which is really cool.

That's nice. Yeah. So, you know, one keyboard, three devices. All you have to do is just press one button to switch which one you're going to use. One keyboard to rule them all. Exactly. It's really nice for 30 bucks. Well worth it. Well worth it. Now, one thing I won't be buying, sadly, is the AirPower mat.

Rest in peace. Almost made it to market. Yeah, they couldn't get it to work, right? Yeah, almost made it to market. It was so close to making it to market that apparently on the packaging for the new AirPod 2s, they even talk about the mat. Right. So no AirPower for you.

They just couldn't quite get it to work. Yeah, well, I was waiting on this one, too, because I wasn't able to get my phone to work on any of the other third-party pads. So I think I will just, I'll be a plug-in power person for a while still. Yeah, you still have an iPhone 6, though, right? No, no, no.

I have an iPhone 7. Okay, well, 7 still. Yeah. Yeah, I've just, even my roommate's 8 Plus doesn't work on the cheap pads for some reason. Right. I don't know. It's just one of those things where it's hit or miss. So you should take it to the Genius Bar next time you go in and say, hey, I want this charge.

Maybe there's a setting that you're missing. I should ask. Yeah. Maybe. Eh, whatever. Or I'll just, you know, I have my charging stand that I very much like on my nightstand now. Oh, that's right. That does the job for me. There you go. So I'm okay. Okay. Now, I am a huge fan of Mexican food, and I stumbled across something that I think I must have if I do eventually take the leap and leave Los Angeles.

One of the reasons, I lived in London for almost two years, and one of the reasons I came back, and I shit you not, this is a real reason, was the state of Mexican food was so piss poor in London at that point in time, I just couldn't act. I need my Mexican food. And if I do pick up and move to Toronto, I've actually upped my Mexican cooking game quite a bit in basically preparation.

So at least I'll be able to make myself some delicious Mexican food when I'm living there. And I will have to, I'm just pointing this out. If I do end up making this move, this would be a lovely goodbye present for me. It is a tortilla blanket. It is beautiful.

It is amazing. It is made from 100% soft microfiber printed on both sides. It's available to order for under $41. It's five feet big, which makes it big enough to wrap around your entire body and make yourself into a burrito. It is so clever and amazing. Like, I love this thing. Link is in the show notes.

You've got to look at it. I was looking at it and I'm thinking it looks like the dog pooped on it. It's all I could think of when I saw it. It looks like a white blanket. If you are a dog owner, you may not necessarily want to have this laying around the house because it could potentially look like that.

But I think it's quite clever. It is funny. Did you scroll down and see the tortilla swaddles for babies? Yes, I did see that. And I was like, damn, why wasn't that around when my kid was that small? Very, very cute. I've got a shout out to our friends in Canada.

I got a care package from Canada of Mura coffee. I don't know if you remember this, Brian, when we were at the Fireside Conference. I do. This basically was the only thing that kept me alive. Yes. That and beer.

Yeah, well, it kept me alive after the beer because in the mornings, the mornings were a little rough sometimes. So you have a beer, then you go get some Mura coffee. And this is out of Toronto. And if you go to drinkmura, M-I-U-R-A dot com, you can check them out. If you're a Canadian, you can get some.

They sent me a care package this week. So I have eight cans that I have to ration until September when we go back for Fireside. But man, this stuff is good. It's the, you know, hot brewed and like nitro chilled coffee. Yes. Oh, God, this stuff is so good.

Highly recommend it, which is why I'm so chatty today. I did not ration it. Apparently not. Until next time, I'm Ryan Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 334. 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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