336: You'll Get Used to It

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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. I have some Lyft Stockwatch news. How's that going? As of this morning, it is down to $58.36. Okay. Don't. Don't. I guess that shortened thing really kind of worked. Maybe they have a point with their potential lawsuit against Merrill Lynch.

Maybe. Maybe. We'll see. Or they could have just had a better business model and they thought they were worth a lot more than they actually are. Losing money, not a business, not a business plan. Yes. Not in my mind. No. Ah, but speaking of money, Jeff Bezos has come out and laid down the gauntlet with his other brethren in retail saying, Hey, we're paying $15 minimum wage.

Your turn, bitches. I suppose that's good. I don't, you know, I don't know too many people that can get by, at least certainly not in LA on 15 bucks an hour. But, yeah. Okay. Yay. Well, not where we live and not in a single family home.

I guess you could live in a studio by yourself. Maybe. Yeah. Somewhere out in Simi Valley or something. But that's good. Good. I'm glad he's using his clout and power to kind of push it forward a bit. Yeah. He said, today I challenge our top retail competitors, you know who you are, to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage.

Do it. Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It's a kind of competition that will benefit everyone. Well, I found a bit of e-scooter news this week. I kind of let you take that over briefly, but I'm back. Actually, this is thanks to a hat tip to a friend of the show, Mike, who sent me this link from the Santa Monica Daily Press.

Over 100 scooters impounded in the first six months of the pilot program. Yes. Over 105 scooter and bike parking zones have been stenciled on city streets and sidewalks. That was the first part of the kind of our attempt to corral these things when they were dumped upon us. Police have issued 1,542 citations to riders at this point.

All right. That's significant. It's funny. I was getting ready to ask who's paying for all of this work that the city's doing, but apparently they can make money off the citations. Yes. Well, Santa Monica is well known for making money off of its citizens, so let's get them. I'm okay with that. So they've released an update on what they're calling the Shared Mobility Pilot Program this past Monday, six months after it launched last fall.

It's going to last another 10 months, and it authorizes Bird, Lime, Lift, and Jump, which is owned by Uber, to operate within city limits with a combined 2,000 scooters and 1,000 bikes. The city has impounded more than 100 unauthorized devices from other companies since last fall, so nobody's paying attention.

Yeah, people are trying to sneak in. So the initial phase of this program revolved around public education and signage about scooter safety, which we've seen. Bus advertisements everywhere. Painted stencil marking out no-ride zones, which I take my bike over on the bike path every day as I dodge people on scooters because nobody's paying attention.

They're doubling down ahead of summer because it gets very busy here, so there's more signs coming up, and there's the partners with the four companies to educate riders on the rules of the road. They have already installed 100 permanent signs indicating dismount zones downtown and in other areas and 35 signs along the beach path here.

But they're going to take it one step further now. The city is going to require that these four companies slow down devices in prohibitive areas instead of halting them completely so they don't just get dumped there. They're going to have to go under one mile per hour so you can move your scooter out of the areas you're not supposed to be riding them.

So we're getting some geofencing, which I'm happy about. I don't know if one mile an hour is really going to be the change you need to see in the world for people to stop piling up scooters. No, if my scooter all of a sudden started going one mile per hour, it's time for me to get off, and that's where it stays. Exactly. Dump it.

Dump it and go. Yeah. Right now, they're working on developing incentives for riders to use parking zones and use the scooters legally. If the incentives don't work, and I'm betting you they will not, the city will then ask them to develop disincentives, citing Breeze's bike share $1 charge for leaving a bike outside its station as an example, as it should be doing, and that money should be going to the city.

Yeah, seriously. Yeah. Well, remember the guys down in San Diego, scooter removal? Yes. Yeah, well, they're getting sued by Bird and Lime. This is the company that they're basically a mom and pop towing company that was like, hey, we can make some money on these scooters and have businesses call us and we can remove them from their doorstep because they don't want them there.

Interesting. Well, you know, okay, so Santa Monica has impounded 100 scooters. Yes. Well, these guys have gone a little bit farther. Oh, my goodness. Scooter removal has 2,500 Bird scooters locked away, and they've also got 1,300 Lime scooters and 285 bikes.

Look, I have no doubt in my mind that the numbers in Santa Monica would be above that if Santa Monica City had the infrastructure to store them. That's the whole thing is they don't. The reason they've only impounded like 100 is we don't have a warehouse to stick them in. That costs money. Again, my argument with all this stuff is these companies just showed up, dumped their crap, and expected the city to build up the infrastructure to be able to handle them.

That's a load of crap. It's the new economy, Brian. But hey, that's what this company found a niche, and they're fulfilling it. This is something the city couldn't afford to do. They're doing it. I don't have any problem with this. And I got a laugh out of reading Bird and Lime alleging that the towing company is breaking the law in order to profit from the tech companies.

The tech companies broke the law in the first place with these fucking scooters, just dumping them. I love it. A Bird spokesperson said, San Diego residents are being bamboozled by scooter removal and robbing people of the environmentally friendly scooter options. They've come to rely upon each day to get to and from work, as well as to local businesses.

Being bamboozled. Who's doing the bamboozling? Who's doing the bamboozling here? Because the scooters that are being picked up are the ones that are being left illegally in places. Illegally. They're not just running around and picking up the ones that are just standing out where they should be standing. They're getting the ones that should be picked up.

Yeah. Bird and Lime are trying to weasel around this by saying that scooter removal, they're supposed to, by law, send them a notification of each individual vehicle that they have, quote unquote, towed. But they were sending batch emails because they had so many of them.

But yeah, I don't know how this is going to play out, but it'll be fun to watch. I am all I'm on team scooter removal on this. Me too. If scooter removal has a Patreon, I'm signing up. Well, I got a little bit more follow up here. We covered the Ned Flanders metal band a while back.

Oakley Doakley. That's right. Well, they they hit the jackpot. They got their music video for White Wine Spritzer played during the closing credits of The Simpsons episode 659. But good for them. Good for them. And get something out of their hard Ned Flandery work. In the news.

We have had a rash of tech employees banding together and saying, no more, Mr. Company that writes my paycheck. We don't want you to do this or that. And there's been some notable companies that have not had this happen to them. Amazon being one of them. That has changed as of this week.

An unprecedented move at Amazon. More than 3,500 of the company's corporate employees, not the warehouse people, corporate employees, signed their names to a letter published on Wednesday that urged Jeff Bezos to create a comprehensive climate change plan for the company, which would be nice considering sometimes I get 17 boxes the size of my house for a razor.

Or an SD card. Or an SD card. So, yeah. I mean, it's definitely going to mess with their main strength, which is logistics. But I think it's smart. It's something that they should be doing, especially because there's just no bigger company in the world right now.

Full stop. Also, no bigger company in the world right now probably, you know, putting up more plastic boxes and cardboard boxes and all the little plastic packaging that's there to nestle that SD card in a box the size of a Prius and all that sort of stuff. So, good on them.

And good on the employees for bringing this to light and saying, hey, how about we do something about this? Yeah. The thing, though, that they say that they want a complete transition away from fossil fuels. Now, that's a little ridiculous. That's a little ridiculous. I don't know about you, but I don't know any solar-powered 737s that are flying anymore.

And that would be a hell of a lot of electricity for their fleet to go to. So, we'll see what they can get out of it. But I guess, you know, you ask for the stars and you take the moon. That's right. You swing for the fences, right? And you hope you get a double. Yep. Seriously. Well, somebody who's going to hit a home run, unfortunately, which makes my stomach turn.

Uber has filed for their IPO. And Travis Kalanick, he stands to make about $9 billion off of that IPO. Yep. Yeah. That's kind of sickening. Kind of sickening for that guy. But I guess that's what happens when you disrupt.

That's when you disrupt. You disrupt and you fail upwards. And one of the interesting things out of their IPO filing, their S1 regulatory filing, is that they talk about how much of a reliance that they have on Apple. And they warn about, they warn the investors about their reliance on the App Store.

Because if Apple one day just decided to pull Uber from the App Store, they're screwed. Basically, yeah. They are really screwed. Well, one of the things that always stuck in my mind, Jason, when all these years that we've been talking about Uber is, I remember you said quite plainly, all Uber as a company really is, is an app.

That's it. This billion-dollar company is one app. Well, two apps, I guess Android. So that's all they are. That's it. And again, I mean, we look at Lyft and how quickly their stock has fallen. There's no way in hell I would invest in Uber either.

It's ridiculous. They've fought tooth and nail to basically not have any employees. Their main business, as far as they are concerned, is moving people. It's transportation. All of those people are contractors. None of them are employees. All they are is an app.

That's it. Yeah. And they've gone out of their way to make sure that these people are contractors and not employees because they don't want to pay the money for them. Now, they also are, since they're going into autonomous vehicles, they do state that, you know, Apple is going to be a competitor. Yeah.

And that also, like, brings up some issues. It's like, oh, well, you know, Apple has a history of taking competitors out of the App Store when they feel like it. So I'm pretty sure Apple wouldn't do that because the backlash would be pretty crazy. Like, like when they removed Facebook from the store for violating their terms.

No, they wouldn't. But it's one of those things when, as an, if you're going to be an investor, you look at company fundamentals and you look for points of failure. This is a huge point of failure. I found another article about, obviously, there's, everybody is writing about this this week. This is the biggest story in the world. And Uber is finally kind of, you know, basically, we got to look behind the veil for once at Uber because they had to make a lot of these things public.

If they're going to go public, we need to know what's going on. And Slate has a really good breakdown of some of the other big points of failure that Uber has right now, which I thought was very interesting. So about 24% of all of Uber's bookings, meaning all the money the company makes through their app and cash and driver's earnings, occur in only five cities.

New York, LA, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo. This is a company that's in more than 700 cities, including basically all the big ones in the world. And they're only making, they're making almost all of their money in just five. That's not good. 24% isn't almost all. 24% is quite a lot.

It is quite a lot for five. 700 cities, five cities making 24%. Yeah, that is definitely a definite interesting distribution curve for their funds. So it's another potential point of failure because what if New York and LA decide to basically go to war against Uber again?

Cut them out and things of that nature. Another example of a company's vulnerability, according to this article, is the concentration of its ride types. 15% of all their bookings are just airport trips. That's it. Yeah. And airports can actually do something about this because airports used to make a lot of money from parking.

They do not make money from parking anymore. In fact, they say the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, made more money in 2017 from parking fees than it did from American Airlines. Wow. So the parking accounted for more than a quarter of the airport's revenue. And as passengers are shifting to ride hailing, airport revenues are declining.

And airports have an easy way to make that money back up by putting fees on Uber rides coming in and out of airports, just like they did taxicabs. Yeah, definitely. There's a lot of problems with Uber's business model. So if you're thinking about hopping on this IPO, I highly recommend you do some reading first. Yeah, definitely.

Because I wouldn't put my money there. Yeah. Now, you use Google Calendar, right? Yes, I do. Yes, I do as well. And I have it tied into my Apple stuff so I can see everything and use all the calendars quite well. I do not use Google Hangout. Do you? Oh, God, no. I don't want to see anybody. Well, apparently, spammers have now figured out how to infiltrate both of these things, which is pretty impressive.

I personally have not gotten any spam in my Google Calendar, but people are starting to see it. It's showing up. You start to get events that you don't even remember scheduling, and you open it up, and it's, of course, a spam note saying, you know, whatever. Send me money. Here's my information. I thought that was pretty interesting, and it's definitely happening with Hangouts as well.

And, of course, Google does not have the infrastructure put in there to block people that you don't know, which seems pretty simple to me. Yeah, that seems very simple. But it's not there. Okay. I'm guessing with all the news coming out about this, it will be there soon. It will be there soon.

Yes. Somebody's working on that right now. That's interesting. And finally, not finally, but over at, we've got a little bit more Bitcoin news because, you know, we love our Bitcoin. China wants to ban Bitcoin mining because it is seriously wasting resources. Uh, yeah, and?

Yes. So they're trying to cut back on air pollution right now because they obviously have severe problems with that there. And now they're also taking an aim at cryptocurrency mining. The National Development and Reform Commission, the NDRC, not at all close to NRDC, but, you know, similar in letters.

Yes. They've unveiled a paper with a proposal to ban Bitcoin mining saying it has seriously wasted resources. And I just love how all tech journalists are getting on the bandwagon of bashing on it here. In a typical Bitcoin mining operation, powerful banks of computers are dedicated to crunching out blockchain numbers that serve absolutely no purpose, but have value because people think they do.

Yep. That's pretty much it. Well, that's, yeah, that's cryptocurrency in a nutshell. Yeah. Nearly three quarters of cryptocurrencies are mined in China, generating anywhere up to 10 million tons of carbon dioxide, according to a research study in Nature's Sustainability. So, yeah, they're going to try to basically crack down on this, which will not help with the Bitcoin bit grows.

No, it won't. We'll see how that kind of plays out. But, you know, it's China, so I can see them actually having, you know, the wherewithal to make a dent in this, for sure. Yeah. If there's any country in the world that can actually shut it down completely, they're the ones. Yeah. Yeah. Here, we'd have to have debates and people would be calling, like, trucking out the old spotted owl and shit like that.

So, sometimes there's points for autocracy. Yeah. Seriously, sometimes it's just like, oh, we say it's so-so. It is so. It is now so. LinkedIn is trying to up their social media game. They're adding reactions. God. Yes, the career-focused social network is introducing reactions that behave not so subtly like Facebook's, just with a decidedly business-like flair.

On top of liking and loving posts, you can celebrate to pat someone on the back for a new job. Insightful when they've posted a nugget of wisdom and curious when they get you thinking. Oh, why do people still use LinkedIn? I know there are a lot of people that do.

A lot of people live and die and swear by LinkedIn, and they're very business-connected, and this usually tends to be a lot of salespeople. So, I get it. But why you would want to water it down and make it just silly like this is unbelievable to me. I did like the tagline of this article. Look at it this way, though.

Whenever they do show up, they'll give you an easy way to acknowledge someone's career update without having to write some generic platitudes. Isn't doing a generic reaction basically even worse than a generic platitude? Yeah, at least then you had, you know. It's even less. Yeah, at least you tried, you know.

That makes no sense to me. It's even less generic, or it's more generic. It's even less meaningful just to give them a pat on the back instead of writing something. Yeah, I like it when I get LinkedIn mail, which I get every now and again. People, you know, it's like, hey, I like the show, blah, blah, blah.

And there's a button in the reply. You can, like, type in a reply. Or there's a button that just says, thanks. You just press the button that says, thanks, and it goes about your merry way. I use that button a lot, I got to say. I actually haven't checked my LinkedIn in a while. I get a request every other day or so because people that listen to the show actually want to follow us on LinkedIn for God knows why.

I get about five to ten a day because I'm also on Jordan's show, which has a lot more people listening to it, unfortunately, than our show. So I get them both. And generally, I just say yes because I'm never going to go back. And there's a thing now, too, where people will write a really nice reply or, you know, hey, I want to join your network, love the show, blah, blah, blah.

And I write them back. And I'm like, oh, cool, thanks. Where'd you find out about the show? Blah, blah, blah. Crickets. Nothing back. Nothing back. Almost ever. It's like, why bother? Why bother? You know? So I don't even bother replying anymore. I'm just like, accept. So I stopped getting emails about it. That's about it.

So I found this one today. Wing officially launches Australian drone delivery service. They're finally in business, which is kind of interesting. There's a couple of cool videos in the article over at IEEE.org. And the thing looks cool. I got to say, it's pretty neat.

And the airport that they have for them is kind of cool, too. This is a pretty sparsely populated area, right? No, that's the problem. It's not. Oh, OK. Yeah. These are a couple suburbs right north of Canberra. And there are, it's like the birds.

All right. I'm going to set myself a Google alert right now for the first death that occurs from one falling out of the sky. Yeah. The thing about this is the people. There are a lot of people who can't stand the noise. Oh, yeah. They're loud. Mm hmm. And it's it's a new type of noise, not one that we hear in nature that we're used to.

And it's really pissing people off and triggering them. And yeah. Wing's response to the noise problem is it's a new noise that human ears aren't used to hearing at this point. That's basically what the company said addressing the problem is they said, you'll get used to it eventually.

Oh, man. Yeah. This is Australia, right? So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if these get taken out of the sky pretty soon by some pissed off locals. Yeah. They're sharpening up their boomerangs right now.

But yeah, they're but they're cool things. They just really need to work on those engines to quiet them down. There is that story I did a couple of shows back about that new sound dampening technology that they found. They got to put that on the drones. We'll see. We'll see. But you can have silent death from above.

That would be I would like silent, you know, hamburgers from above. That would be fine by me. You know, if I could if I could just dial up some in and out and it would be here in six minutes from a drone. Count me in. I'm in on that, too. Yeah. So I don't have to drive through. Yeah. And these drones, if you look at them, 14 engines on them or motors, not really engines, but 14 motors.

Wow. That's a lot. That's that's good. That's going to be loud. Yep. This episode is sponsored by Privacy dot com. Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online.

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Privacy.com slash GOG. No brainer. Get on it now. Privacy.com slash GOG. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is a co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. And I don't have a pithy Maryland quote because the Star Wars trailer just dropped and I didn't have time. I'm actually surprised we're getting to this segment at all because we just, you know, we could have easily done about another 30 minutes off air talking about that trailer.

Right. We could just drop security and talk Star Wars for the next half hour. I mean, well, we'll get to that. We'll do another spoiler cast once the movie's out. We can discuss our amazement and or disappointment. We'll do our review. Yes. Yes. But yes, we're all, if we sound excited, it's because we're all still tingly from watching the trailer.

First and hot take impressions from the trailer. Yes. You know who's not going to get to see that trailer is Mr. Julian Assange. Oh, yes. King of the transitions. Very good. He's in the who's cow now. So he's not, he's no YouTube for Julian.

Oh, poor baby. No. It's interesting. I mean, one of the things that I take away from this is don't be a jerk. Right. I mean, a big part of this, the reason he got kicked out of the embassy, he probably could have stayed in that embassy a long time had he had he simply been a gentleman.

Yeah. But he was a terrible house guest to clean up after himself. He didn't clean up after his cat. He wiped poo on the walls. My favorite part of all of this was the the article that The Onion came out with, which you only need the headline. Ecuadorian embassy runs ad seeking no drama tenant for newly vacated room.

Right. Right. Yeah. Now, what do you guys think about there's there's this notion that this could have a chilling effect on journalism. There are folks who are saying that him being extradited to the U.S. is troubling because he he's a journalist.

Do you guys follow that line of thinking or do you think by the things he did with Chelsea Manning trying to crack codes and so forth, take him out of the journalism category? I think he's definitely straddling a line between vigilante slash guy with a little bit too much power and trying to cover it up as journalism.

I think he crossed the line a while back. I think he's shown no remorse for crossing the line. I think he's made it clear that he has no problems crossing the line. We'll continue to cross the line. And that puts him in a troublesome category. It's an interesting charge that they came up with out of everything they could have done with him to come up with this one charge using was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to say that he tried to crack a government computer's password.

I think that is the best of both worlds where he can, you know, we can say, oh, we got him for something. But I think that using that charge is what will distance this from the journalism question. Yeah, because even as a journalist, you can't do that. Yeah, exactly.

You know, so that's really where it comes down to. And we're not going to get him for a while because he's got to deal with the, you know, bail jumping issue with the Brits right now. But there is a very good chance that they're just going to say, well, we're just going to give him back to you. You know, time served.

Just tack it onto a sentence and we'll call it a day. And you can have him because it's going to be in the courts for a long time. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting that the Obama administration had looked at this and decided not to go after him. But evidently, the Trump administration thought better of it.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting. I don't really know the politics at play there. It's a bit of a head scratcher. I'm not quite sure why this administration is going after him. Well, especially since a couple of years ago, Trump was like, I love WikiLeaks. They're great. And now they're like, he's like, who's WikiLeaks?

Right. I don't know anything about WikiLeaks. I'm not familiar with them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Either that Alzheimer's is kicking in or he's full of shit as usual. But strange times we live in. Yeah, it is. And like Jason said, this is going to take a long time to play out.

Yeah. Part of why this happened when it did was he was coming up on the end of the statute of limitations for this particular charge that they hit him with. So it's now or never. I mean, they were coming down to the day where it would have run out. So I suspect he probably knew it was coming.

Also, seems to really let go of his grooming routine while he was there in the in the in the embassy. That's really yeah, I saw the photo and I just did not even realize that was him. The video of him being carried out hogtied was just beautiful.

It was just like, oh, that's his feet. They literally are carrying him out of that embassy. I think it's pretty clear we aren't particularly fans of him on this show. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he like you said, he crossed the line a long time ago and I lost all respect for him, you know, years.

Having said that, I don't have an issue per se with WikiLeaks, particularly if it's being run by somebody that is not Julian Assange. So what are you going to do? Well, if you have some Bitcoin, you can actually send some donations to WikiLeaks because apparently their donations have spiked since Julian was arrested.

So, yeah, I guess that's not surprising. No, not surprising at all. Lots of PR and folks who support his side of things would reach out and give some money. Yes. I don't know how far that's going to get him. But the article said it's really not that much money, though, is it?

It's like 15 grand or something. It's not a whole lot. It's going up. It looks like about 40 Bitcoin so far in April. Yeah. It depends on what day of the week it is. Yeah. So what's Bitcoin trading at right now?

Probably around two, three grand, I think. That sounds about right. Yeah. Well, you know what? I don't even have a care to go find it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this next story I dropped in here, it's from a company who's responsible for a lot of robocalling.

Their name is Stratix Networks. Now, one of the reasons I put this in here was there's something in here that I was unfamiliar with. Are you guys familiar with ringless voicemails? I get these all the time. Really? Yes. I don't think I've ever gotten one or noticed other – maybe I thought, oh, I must have missed that call.

But I really don't remember ever getting one. What about you, Jason? I've never gotten one either. Really? I thought that was really interesting. I'd never heard of them until I read this article. I get them quite often. I would say one a week minimum. Really? What network are you on? I'm on Verizon. Okay. Jason? AT&T.

Yeah. I'm on AT&T also. Interesting. Maybe there's no backdoor in AT&T. Yeah, maybe. I wish Verizon would fix it because it's quite annoying. Yeah, I mean, I will have my phone on me. It will not ring. I have my Apple Watch on me. I can tell my phone is not rung, and I will get a notification that I have a voicemail, and it's always some finance-related bull crap.

Hmm. Well, according to this article, these folks are using some sort of a backdoor system that's built into some carriers where they can leave a voicemail directly to a person's mailbox without having the phone ring. This seems to me like – Magic. Like, as we have just said here.

Well, and also, who would want that? I do. I question the utility of it. And again, once it started happening to me, as we all know, I think we've all now been trained to be entirely suspicious of any phone call that we get from any number we don't recognize.

And now I've been trained for these as well. When I have a voicemail from a number I don't recognize and my phone didn't ring, I just delete it right away. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm still getting, like, you know, 15 calls a day from every other number in the world. Yeah. And Eastern Europe has become, like, the number one caller.

I get calls from Uzbekistan every day now. I'm like, what the hell? I've noticed that even just in the last week it's really picked up a lot, those international calls coming in. Yeah.

Well, anyway, this company, Stratix, they – turns out they had a database of calls that were left exposed, hundreds of thousands of recordings from thousands of folders of people who had information left with them.

And I guess there's some way that people use this system to record both sides of a conversation. There are some people who hire this company to be able to do that as well. And that's problematic because in many states, including your state and mine, California and Maryland, we all have two-party rules.

So you have to get permission. Yeah. You have to get permission to record someone's calls, and they were not doing that. But they're Toronto-based, so can they just get around that and say, screw you guys, we're in Canada? I don't know, Dewey. Do we have an extradition agreement with Canada?

We're just going to send Brian up there with a can of gasoline, I think. Right. Right. Bring back some maple cookies. Hi, is this Stratix? Yeah. Yeah. And, of course, the folks from Stratix say we take compliance and data security very seriously.

We're investigating to determine – We're ethical douchebags. Yeah. Yeah. So another big bucket of information left out there waving in the wind. We're getting used to seeing probably one of those a week these days.

But, again, what was interesting to me about this one was this whole notion of ringless voicemails. That was new to me. Yeah. Well, not new to me, so I'm glad I could bring you guys up to speed on it. Yeah. Maybe I need to switch to AT&T, except I actually like getting my phone calls. Oh, snap.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually – last week, I noticed that my home is now being served by AT&T's bogus 5G evolution. Oh, yes. Oh, nice. So there's a 5G-E on my phone now.

That is not 5G at all. It is not 5G at all. However, just for grins and giggles, I did a speed test on this 5G evolution. Any guesses for how fast it may have been? Half the speed of 4G?

No, no. Any guesses, Brian? No, no. Just wild-ass guess. 4G plus one. I got – you guys are really going out on a limb here, aren't you? We're being realistic.

Wow. Yeah. I got 158 megabits per second download. Okay. Okay. Which is pretty damn fast. What were you getting before? Well, I don't know. And that's the kind of studies we do here on Grumpy Old Geeks.

Yes. I have no idea, but I will – all right. Yes, you're fine to laugh at me. I deserve that, but – Let's compare and contrast. This is fast. Yeah. What's the other? We have an orange. No idea. Where's the apple? Ate it. I can count a potato.

Yeah. Yeah. So downloads was about – or uploads, rather, were about 40 megabits per second. But, I mean, that's – It's good. That's good. It ain't bad. So, I don't know what is something to expect on a regular 4G network.

It could be, you know, I do have an up-to-date phone that's able to take advantage of whatever this thing that this 5G evolution is supposedly doing, which is just a version of 4G that's a little bit better. Okay. So, here, for the sake of science, I actually ran a speed test.

Science schmiance. Come on. I'm on AT&T with LTE, and I have three bars. So, my download speed is 9.22, and my upload is 4.54. That's megabits per second, not megabytes. Mm-hmm. So, mine would be faster, then.

Yes, it would be. By an order of magnitude. Yeah. Yes. That is impressive, then. So, I kind of felt – There's an ad that came up on my speed test app that says, 5G only on Android for the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip because they're the only ones that have a 5G chip.

So, there you go. I did see – somebody did the first 5G test in the past week or so with a real phone and with a real 5G tower, and they got something like – something insane, like 800 megabits per second. That would be nice. And, of course, they're the only person on – in the world on the network right now.

Yeah, that's the way they can get it because they're the only one using it. Yeah. That Skype call was the clearest ever to myself. Right, right. Right. But, you know, I guess it shows that what's theoretically possible. Anyway, I digress. What else do we have this week? Well, a Symantec study of more than 1,500 hotels found that 67% of them were unwittingly leaking guests' personal information.

These hotels are all over the place, spread across 54 countries, including the U.S., Canada, and some in the EU, despite strict GDPR protections. And they ran in quality from two-star motels to five-star beach resorts. The main issue involved booking confirmation emails. Many of these messages include an active link that directs to a separate website where guests can access their reservations without having to log in.

Again, the booking code and the guest email are often in the URL itself, which in and of itself isn't a big deal. But, like many businesses, hotels share your personal data with third parties. Of course, they do, meaning that their booking code and email are visible to them as well, and they would only need access to that in order to find your address, full name, cell phone number, passport number, and all other highly sensitive information.

Awesome. Yeah, it's interesting. Hospitality seems to lag behind a lot of different industry verticals when it comes to this security stuff. Yeah, it's not really part of their – they don't think of it as part of their expenses, right? They've got enough that they're dealing with, and, you know, it's just a code to confirm you're staying here, right?

What's the big deal? We don't need any security here. And I suppose – I'm just trying to think what the consequences for them are. Obviously, you've got reputational stuff. What was it? It was at Marriott got hit with the Star Wars – Star Wars. I'm stuck on Star Wars. Star Wood.

Yes. Big difference. Star – yes. Star Wood is the Star Wars porn. Yes. Star Wood. Very nice. Very nice. I'm half step behind today. When Star Wood – so I think it was Marriott acquired Star Wood, and after the acquisition discovered that there had been a data leak, so they took the hit for that.

So there are those kinds of things, but it's not like in finance, where if your securities lack, somebody takes your money. Yes. This is just more data leaking. Mm-hmm. Speaking of data leaking, let's talk about – oh, wait. I have one here in the studio now.

Let's talk about your Amazon Echo. I just plugged it back in today. I don't want to disturb the lady in the tube. Mm-hmm. Because now I know that Amazon workers are actually listening to the things that I say. Are we surprised by this?

I'm not. Not really. I'm not. No, not at all. Okay. Not one bit. There's some interesting bits in here where some of the people say that they are doing over a hundred transcriptions a day where the trigger word was not said or just activated on its own. Mm-hmm.

That is disturbing. Yeah. Yeah. And I've had a few occasions of that myself where I would see it light up, and then I would say, I don't understand what you're saying, Dave, or whatever it does. And I was like – I had to think back, and I was like, did I say anything that sounded like the trigger word?

And usually it's no, not even close, but mistakes do happen. Yeah. Now, if anyone was – Me too. I have – I used to have one of the dots next to my bed in my bedroom, which is where the bed is, so I guess that's where it is.

Bedroom? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're following you. We're coming along. This 4G brains thing is going great today. Yeah. Yeah. So mine would be triggered, and you're going to laugh at this one, when Bam Bam would snore. Right. Her snoring would trigger the device, and the light would turn on, and it would start talking.

I'm like, what – like, the whole room is bathed in blue light, and I'm like, okay, well, that's a bug, and wake me up. And the only noise in that room was Bam Bam snoring logs, like, really loud right next to it. Right. Huh. And that was only with the dot, you know, because I used to have the big one, the big Gen 1 tube in my bedroom, and it never happened then, but only with the dot.

So I'm just wondering if the processing power is weaker on those dots, so it's just – it's not as good at the trigger word recognition. Oh, I'm sure, and I'm sure the acoustics aren't as good, and et cetera, et cetera, because those dots are horrible. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a couple of them, and they're sitting in a drawer now. I never use them.

Mm-hmm. The thing that bugs me about this is that, like these things are these days, you have the option of opting out rather than being given the option to opt in. Opt in. Of course. Yeah, I have no trouble with this as a thing that they do, but it should be this – like, you get a new computer, say, from Apple, and it says, hey, we'd like to collect some information from you to make our products better.

Are you okay with this? Say yes or no, and if you're okay with it, then you're okay with it. But don't just do it without asking and say, well, you could have disabled this. To me, that's no good. But we also have just the standard statement, and I just feel the need to repeat it from them because why not?

I think we should do this every time now. We take the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously, an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Of course they do. How much does this bug you guys, though?

This doesn't really – I guess because I'm not surprised by it, the notion of people halfway around the world listening to little clips of audio to – and these people have got to be bored out of their gourds, right, if this is what you're doing for eight hours a day.

Yes. I don't know. I'm bothered but not. Yeah. Does that make any sense? It's like the idea of it is disturbing, but it's so commonplace now, and it's just – I'm asking for directions. I'm asking what time a store opens. I'm asking about the weather. I'm asking how badly the Orioles just got beat.

Mm-hmm. What – I'm sorry, what? So for me, I'm not doing – but I guess the concern is where this stuff is headed and where it's going because we spent a lot of time on the show talking about how they're moving into the health arenas.

And people are starting to use it for more sensitive information than they ever used to. And, you know – where's all this machine learning and AI? Why – it's always people. We always know it's people. It's never machine learning and AI. It's always people. Yeah.

Well – That's a given nowadays. But I'm thinking about, you know, the drunk, lonely people who are trying to have conversations with the Echo in the middle of the night because they've got nobody else with them, nobody else around. And, you know, I can – you can see a script coming out of this where some poor guy in the Philippines falls in love with some woman that he's got to transcribe who's, you know, lonely and sad and is sitting in her apartment in Manhattan.

Wasn't that that stupid movie Her? Kind of. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. But, you know, it's just one of those things where, like, people use these for off-brand purposes sometimes. I love that turn of phrase. That's good. Off-brand and fresh talent. I mean, there was that story – oh, gosh, it's probably been a couple years ago now about – I think it was an autistic child who relied on Siri because she had infinite patience.

He could ask her all the questions he wanted to. And so it was really soothing for him and kept him from – God, I need this for my toddler. Well, exactly. It kept him from driving the rest of his family nuts. So it worked out for everybody. It was really very helpful for him.

Interesting. I don't remember that story, but that's really nice. Yeah. That is nice, except for the fact that, you know, there are reams and reams of data of this child now being monitored by a human. Right. Yeah. I just don't really – I just – was it ZFG is pretty much where I land on.

Yeah, for me, it's okay. Is it not being stored? Is it not being filed away under my personal account name somewhere? Is it not being – Got your idea on it. Yeah, it's got your account ID. That's the concern more than some really bored employee just having to listen to it to check in to see how things are going.

I mean, you know they're storing everything because you just look at your app and it has a history of everything you've said to it. So it's going somewhere. That's a given. I'm hoping it's being deleted after certain time periods, but I'm sure it's not. Yeah, and honestly, it's like, okay, if you want to sit there and retranslate by toilet paper, that's fine.

I'm okay, but just don't use it off-brand. The concern is as these things become more and more a part of our everyday lives, it's going to be more than just us ordering toilet paper. Yeah. Echo, where's the nearest hooker?

You know that there are some frat boys that say that, and in the future, could they get profiled for that in some kind of Me Too sting? And how's that going to come back to them? There's all sorts of ways that you can dystopianize this, but then you can also just look at the fact that they're just trying to make the service better and they really don't care about that.

There was some bits in this article that were disturbing where some people thought they heard sexual assaults happening, and when that happens, can they call the supervisor to call the police and get them involved? What really are the processes there when they do hear something illegal happening?

Yeah. That's one of the things. What are their obligations? Yeah. Yeah. What are their obligations? Especially since, like they say, that this data collection and what they're doing with it is not in the terms of service. So it's a little slippery slopey, but I see that there's a need for them to make this thing better.

But, yes, not being opted in by default, I think, would fix 99.999% of those problems. Yes. Yeah. They're wearing us down. It's how they wear us down. Mm-hmm. Well, Activision is wearing down their employees because they're tracking when they're getting busy.

Oh, yeah. Are they? Are they, though? Are they really? I fucking called this. Oh, yeah. I said this was going to happen. I've been screaming about this for a year. I thought we were at least a year or two away from this happening. So thank you, tech companies, for not disappointing me.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I don't know that they're... Take it away, Brian. You can take this one, Brian. All right. Well, we've... As soon as I started hearing about this, about healthcare companies offering incentives for people to use their apps and their Fitbit gadgets and all of that information being funneled straight to the healthcare providers.

But don't worry. We're going to give you a $1 gift card in exchange for you doing this, or we'll take a little percentage off your premium in exchange for doing this. I was like, don't fucking do it. Don't fucking do it. And what are people doing? They're fucking doing it. And what's happening? They're getting fucking tracked by them.

Well, they're fucking. Yes. Fucking. It's more things than just that. Obviously, in this particular story, that's... That's... You know, this is the glossed-up, sexy version of the story. It's the clickbait version. This is very, very bad. I'm pissed.

Clearly. Now, Brian, I would like you to explain why it's bad to our faithful listeners. All right. Who might just be tuning in for the first time. I like this particular sentence in the story. The Washington Post this week reported Activision Blizzard has been using various apps to track its employees' health data, including their pregnancies and sexual activity, by receiving, air quotes, anonymized data from health apps the employees are in no way absolutely not compelled to use.

But don't worry. They're properly compensating these industrious workers by offering them a $1 per day in gift certificate cards. So, the report detailed data collected by pregnancy tracking apps, specifically Ovia. Ovia's main claim to fame is its algorithm, which helps its users figure out the best times to conceive a child based on their menstrual cycles.

Now, we do not have a long history in this country of companies penalizing women for getting pregnant, don't we? We do. Oh, okay. Interesting. So, I wonder why a company would want an app that lets them know when their employees are trying to get pregnant. Mm-hmm.

Well, a couple things here. They said that the company saves $1,200 a year per employee. Mm-hmm. So, they're making out on this. Yeah, because they're only paying out $365.

I'm sure they're probably paying, you know, five-day work week. So, you only get paid when they track you while you're at the job. Right. But the tracking continues. Yep. Well, and I saw another article. I'm not sure that it was exactly about this story, but it was making the point that with some of these tracking things, particularly if you're tracking pregnancies in an average-size office, it's not going to be difficult to de-anonymize the data based on who's pregnant and who's not.

Because there aren't that many at any given time. Easy to do the math on that to backtrace who's who. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not as wound up about this as you are, Brian, clearly.

I think I'm wound up about this in the same way that I'm not wound up about the previous story about the Amazon Echo, but I can see the writing on the wall. I can see the slippery slope. Mm-hmm. And I can see this no longer being opt-in. I can see this being, if you want to work for us or if you want health insurance through us, we're not just going to give you an incentive anymore.

You have to do this. Right. Right. And that's where I get pissed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I suppose we could, I mean, there's the larger story of- And again, this is wearing us down, right? Yeah. This is how they get us. Yeah. This is how they make us feel comfortable with it. This is how it starts. And then next thing you know, it's not an option anymore.

But this is the larger, the big picture here is decoupling health insurance from companies because- Yes. That needs to be done, I think. And I don't know. Do we need a, this is sort of a preexisting conditions kind of thing in a way.

You can't, do we need regulations that preclude healthcare providers or health insurance providers from this sort of tracking or not? Yeah. I think we would. So I think we do.

And related to that and everything that we just talked about, this is nothing we don't know, but I found this to be an interesting interactive story on the New York Times by Farad Manjou, who I've always liked his writing, tech writing anyways. And it's called, It's Time to Panic About Privacy.

And if you click through the scrolls, much like a PowerPoint, everything that we always talk about is in here. All the scares that we've talked about is in here. And it's basically sounding the alarm call to people who don't follow it as much as we do, saying, we need to start figuring out what we're doing here.

Mm-hmm. So. Yeah. Once again, as we've talked about before, the New York Times is really killing it with the interactive stuff. I don't think there's anybody else consistently. It's very old school web. Yeah. They're going back to 1997 on this one. But I just mean consistently putting the effort in for these sorts of things.

Yes. This could be a very bland, like, three-page article. But instead, they've done a very good job of designing it and making it interactive and interesting. Yeah. It's pretty. It is. It's pretty. And it's pretty in a retro kind of way. Oh, way retro. The purple gradient is, ooh, calling.

This is not out of, this could easily be on Wired circa 2000. I feel like I was playing the old CD-ROM game, Spaceship Warlock. Yeah. There you go. There you go. But content-wise, it is everything that we scream about quite a lot here. It is.

I guess my feeling after it ended, and I felt like it just sort of ended, and I thought to myself, well, why should I panic? I didn't feel as though, I felt it pointed out a bunch of things, like we always talk about here, but I didn't feel like it rose to any sort of crescendo or anything at the end to make me go, everybody panic!

I don't think it's detailed enough for you and I, who just read 10 stories that make us panic more than this particular interaction does, to panic. But, I mean, I'm staring at one slide right now. Here is the stark truth. We in the West are building a surveillance state no less totalitarian than the one the Chinese government is rigging up.

That one makes me panic a bit. Yeah, but, I mean, it's all problem, no solution. Right. I know. There you go, Jason. There you go. I am with you 100% on that. So, maybe even part two. Well, do you agree that our surveillance state is just like China's?

Well, much like the next slide says, we are doing it through corporations and consumer products rather than the government. And that I do believe. So, we've talked about that in this segment a number of times, that what we're watching China do as a government, we're doing to ourselves through our own businesses, Facebook, etc.

But I would say that a main difference and an important difference is that the consumer companies don't have guns. Yet. I don't know what they're putting on their drones.

Amazon's going to put a flamethrower on a drone and we're fucked. Well, here's the difference, I think, between the two. China is 1984. The United States is Brave New World. China is having it done to them. We're doing it to ourselves. We're doing it to ourselves. Yes, they're George Orwell.

We're Aldous Huxley. That's kind of the two differentiators between the two. I think you're right. I think I'm going to start adopting a Top Gear-esque exit for this segment. And on that depressing bombshell. All right.

Fair enough. Well, let's go watch the Star Wars trailer some more. That'll cheer us up. Yes, that'll cheer us up. Yeah. All right, gents. Good as always. I will talk to you guys next time. Apps and doodads. Hey, Brian. Have you seen that with your Spotify Premium account, you now get Hulu for free?

No, because I have a Spotify Premium account and I'm not aware of this. How do I go about getting my free Hulu? Well, you go to gog.show slash 336 and you click on the link in the show notes. I've clicked on the link. It is somewhat unclear here.

This is, I guess, because I'm not signed in on the desktop client. I'll have to try this again in a little bit. Do it on the desktop. Yeah, it's much easier on the desktop. But yeah, you get set up with a free Hulu account. It's the one with the commercials. You can, of course, upgrade for a few bucks if you want to.

But the commercials are fine. I don't care about commercials. I get free Hulu now. And I guess I will find out if there's anything I want to watch on Hulu. Yeah, that's the thing. See what's on there. Now you can go watch The Handmaid Tale. I think I need to wait until we have a new election before I watch.

I think you should. Like I told you, I started to watch season two and it was so depressing in the first five minutes that I just could not. I could not. It was so bad. I don't think I can do that. Well, I will check into that and see what's going on because it does say that there are limited spots and blah, blah, blah, blah. And this seems to be promoting it to just people who haven't signed up for Spotify yet.

So I will log into my account and click on the link in the show notes and see what happens. Yeah, I created a new email address for my Hulu account because I had a previous Hulu account that I used to pay for. And I even tried Hulu TV, which was just a fuster cluck. So I just used a different email address and signed up for a new account, linked it through, went fine, signed it up to my Roku TV, and boom, Hulu's your uncle.

I like it. There you go. I like free stuff. Okay. Yeah, especially since I'm already paying for Spotify Premium that I barely listen to. It's nice to get something else for my money. Do you remember BBEdit, Brian? You have to. You have to have used BBEdit. I still occasionally use it. I don't do much web work, but I'm taking care of a couple of things for a few friends.

So I actually had BBEdit open a week ago. I see. I have BBEdit open 24-7 because I just use it as a scratch pad. Not a fan of the notes, huh? No, because this is just stuff that I'm like, if I'm doing show notes for the show or just other text stuff, I do a lot of text work. So I always just have it open because I've got a little side tray now where they've had it since like version 10 where you can just have like a ton of open files.

Yep. I've actually complained on the show that I had a bunch of open files one time and it crashed on me and I had to go back to like some kind of weird cash thing to recover all of those, which is a pain in the butt. But I finally upgraded to BBEdit 12 this week after. Is it free?

Oh, no. It was like 39 bucks. It's 49 bucks. If you don't have a previous version of it, it was 39 bucks for version 10. If you had version 11, it was 39 or 29. And I'm still on version 10, which does the job for me. See, that's the thing.

I just wanted to see what was new in it. There's some new dark mode stuff. But yeah, if you've got 10, you probably don't need to upgrade. But I like to support these guys. They've been around for over 25 years. And I mean, I've been using them since version one. You know? Yeah, I'm a little torn on this one because I've been a fan for a long time as well.

But I do so little web work now and I very rarely use it. And 10 does everything I need. So I don't think I've tossed them quite a few bones in the best. Yeah. Yeah. I just want them to stick around because I do. I do rely on them for a lot of stuff because there are a lot of macros and things that I use in there for just formatting different text files.

I don't do web work anymore, but for a lot of just the little basic stuff that I do, it's still fine. It's still totally fine. And like I said, I like to support them. Excellent. Yeah. And they still have the same tagline, Bare Bones. It doesn't suck. That's right. They just added the registered trademark after a while.

I remember when I was running Spew, my first website from 1994, they had a little promo going where if you put a Powered by BB edit bug on your website, you got a free t-shirt. Do you have the shirt still? Oh God, I wish I did, but it would probably be dust by now.

But it was a great t-shirt. I wore it for like five years. It was awesome. But the new ones, they changed the t-shirts. I looked at it. I'm like, oh, maybe I can get a new t-shirt just to have a little BB edit shirt. But what they did was, because the old tagline was, it doesn't suck. But now they put in a little carrot and said still in it.

And it's just not the same. I want the classic. I want the, yeah, this is like the 25th anniversary shirt. So guys over at Bare Bones, if you're listening to the show, yeah, right. Bring back some classic merch. Bring back the old ones. And I want to talk about CleanMyMac 10 or X, whichever one you want to call it.

Now, I saw you put this in the show note. I have CleanMyMac 3 and I went to update. Yes. And it says there's no new updates. I have the most recent release. No, you don't. No. Well, there are programs telling me I do. You know what probably happened? It came up with an update one time and you closed it because it was a paid upgrade.

They don't show it again if you dismiss it once. They'll show you the, because it's really nice. They don't nag you about it. It says, hey, this is a paid upgrade. If you'd like to, you can, but if not, ignore this. And then it never shows up again. And then somebody was telling me about the new version, CleanMyMac 10 X.

And they said it was really good. So I went and checked it out. And there is a bunch of stuff in there that's really nice now. And I need it because all of my Macs have just 500 gig hard drives. Right. I didn't want to spend the money for an extra, you know, 500 gig drive for a terabyte, which I should have in hindsight.

But it requires me to like, you know, keep stuff off of it and keep it up to date and clean it off a lot and clean my Mac just every two weeks. It just pops up a thing said, hey, time to clean your Mac. Press the button and I can get back, you know, anywhere from 10 to 30 gig just with cleaning system crap out.

It's really nice. It is fantastic. For that, I still I use it. Like you said, I use it almost once a week, basically. Yep. And now they've got speed optimizations. They I love the uninstaller, too. So if you want to get rid of an app, it gets rid of everything, not just deleting the app. It gets rid of all the files that go with it.

It's got an updater built in now, too. So we can update apps without you having to go to the app, go, you know, check for updates, all that stuff. It does it right in the in the clean my Mac interface. Oh, yeah. It's really nice. They've got a large and old files section where you can find things that you haven't opened in ages.

And it's got this new thing called Space Lens, which lets you visually look at big files on your drive and be able to get all this for my brain. Seriously, I need a defrag for my skull. Well, Mac Paw is going to get some of my money, then all those updates sound pretty good.

And this is a program I use regularly, religiously. So, yep. And they've also added and they've also added malware removal. So it scans for malware, which I haven't had any yet because it's a Mac. Yeah. They've got some privacy stuff in here, too. So it'll get rid of, you know, browsing history and stuff like that.

Chat data. But all in all, it's well worth it. I went for the the paid version to get to own it instead of the subscription because you can either buy it or you can get the subscription. So I'm going to buy it. Yep. I just bought it because the last version, version three, lasted me a goodly long time, like, you know, several years.

It's still working for me. It'll still work. Yeah. But these new features are actually worth it. I sounds like it. Yeah. I recommend picking it up. So the the next app that I got, I got an app for my iPad. OK, I got Pixelmator photo that just came out. Now, I am a fan of the Pixelmator for the Mac is a cheap version of Photoshop that if you just need, it's like 30 bucks to be able to just open and edit Photoshop files if you don't have Photoshop.

Right. And it's a great little app. It's a little hard to get used to. And I've actually moved away from Pixelmator on the Mac and I've moved to Affinity Photo. And I've also moved to Luminar 3. So I don't really use Pixelmator anymore. But when I saw this, this is an app that is built specifically for the iPad.

It uses lots of machine learning. Oh, yes, it does. It uses the core ML framework inside of iOS. And for doing just photo retouching on your iPad, it's so cool. I was playing with it this morning and they have some things in there like their repair tool is unbelievable.

You can just basically draw on a piece of the photo and get rid of just massive things. Like the first time I tried it, I had a picture of me up. I was I was doing one of my profile photos that I needed to put on another site. I'm like, oh, let me try this. And I hit the repair tool and just dragged it across my eyes, my nose and my mouth.

And it completely removed them and gave me a clean slate so I can put anybody's face on there that I want. But all in all, it's really cool and it supports raw images, too. So if you have a bunch of raw images from your regular camera, like, say, in Dropbox, you can open them up in this and edit them there and then save them locally and then post them to Instagram if you want to do stuff like that.

It's amazing. It's like a really nice raw editor. I feel like such a dinosaur still using Photoshop. I you know, every time I open it, I'm like, why do I still have Photoshop on here? I almost never use it's just the muscle memory with using Photoshop since version two really is just like I can do it so fast in Photoshop.

Anything that I need to do, I can just do it super fast. But for the iPad, this thing is really nice. Here's the kicker. Four dollars and ninety nine cents. Wow. For four dollars and ninety nine cents, I'll try anything. And this actually turned out to be a really nice surprise.

How good it is. It's super fast on my iPad, 12 inch third gen. And it's beautiful on that thing. That's I mean, that thing is just gorgeous to begin with. But I was I was playing around with a ton of photos this morning. The editing tools are really spectacular. I really enjoy this app. So if you've got an iPad and you do anything with photos, it's well worth the five bucks.

Now, does the desktop version have all these same features in it? I don't know, because I don't I think the maybe the pro version, because they've got two versions now. They've got Pixelmator and they've got Pixelmator Pro. Pixelmator Pro is like 40 bucks and I'm not I don't need it. So I'm not going to buy it or try it.

But I'm not sure. But, you know, I might try it because I'm thinking about ditching my Adobe subscription, given how little I use anything other than Photoshop. Oh, yeah. Get rid of it. Yeah, exactly. And a 40, 40 dollar one time cost for for a photo editor program for me just to do the stuff that I need to do to replace Photoshop and the nine ninety nine or whatever a month I'm paying right now.

Yeah. It's like a no brainer. Yeah, definitely. And on Pixelmator Pro, I do believe. Yeah, you can try it for free so you can go grab a copy and try it. Yeah. OK, it looks like and it looks like it's also kind of a blend between Photoshop and Illustrator. So it looks like it's got Basier, Basier curves and things like that, too.

Oh, nice. OK. Honestly, I for photo stuff, you should also try Affinity Photo. There's there's two apps there. There's Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, which is the, you know, Photoshop and Illustrator respectively. Right. I'm not sure how much those are running nowadays, but Affinity Photo is super nice.

It's super nice. Both. If you can get free trials for both, try them both and see which one you like best and then get get rid of that Adobe subscription. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Time to go. Seriously, it's not like you're going to be using like, was it Adobe Audition to be editing shows or anything like that? There's nothing left in there.

I own I own a copy of Lightroom 6, which is the last copy of Lightroom I'm ever going to own because I moved everything over to Luminar 3, which which does the same thing that Lightroom does, but better and cheaper, a lot cheaper. And especially since this is probably the last version of Lightroom you'll probably be able to buy.

Right. You know, so, yeah, screw that. CCC Creative Cloud Crap and I bought an actual piece of hardware this week. So I got apps and doodads all in one. I got the APC UPS battery backup and surge protector with AVR 1500 VA APC backups Pro BX1500M.

Nice. Yeah, this is my second APC UPS. I've got I've got kind of the older version of it as well. And I had a smaller one that died on me, so I had to replace it because I need two UPSs here. Yeah, because I with all this gear when the power goes down, I need to be able to keep everything powered for at least a while.

And I've got another one of the same thing in the house that powers the router. So when the power goes out in the neighborhood because we've got summer coming and California blackouts and brownouts are a thing that I need to always have these and they're they're affordable. I recommend everybody get one of these at least one of these for your house.

It's 158 99 right now with prime shipping and they're great. They're great. They and especially if you live in earthquake country like here, as soon as you can shut everything down, unplug it and leave it juiced, because if you're out of power for a couple days in an earthquake that can charge everybody's cell phone like on the block for a long, long time.

Good point. Yep. So I highly recommend everybody get one of these. Now, finally, I have a hat tip to Quantum Leap over on Twitter. He sent me a note saying that Reader 3 for iOS updated a few days after my last rant about them being broken on my iPad 12 inch. And I went back this morning and redownloaded it because I'd moved everything over to Feedly, which I was enjoying.

And sure enough, they have actually updated the iOS app. So it works on the new iPad 12 inches. So there you go. I think I'm going to stick with Feedly, though. I've kind of got my got my my moves down. You got your groove on. Yeah. And it's I can see more headlines in one easy chunk than on Reader.

So I think I might be sticking with Feedly. So they may have screwed themselves on that one. But yeah, it does work again, though. So if you want to check it out, check it out. The link will be in the show notes. Go. Now, sometimes even doing two shows a week means that we are woefully out of date from something that's already hit the zeitgeist.

We can talk about the first ever photo of a black hole, but everybody's talked about it. It's cool. Although technically, it's not a photo of a black hole because you can't take a photo of nothing. But it's a photo of orange stuff around the black hole kind of looks like an orange donut. Boing Boing had a very funny photo of Homer Simpson holding it.

It was quite cute. But, you know, proves they exist. Very cool. Science for the win. Science for the win. And I was seeing some versions of it today that were like the zoomed out version that look even cooler than the zoomed in version. Right. Definitely worth checking those out. And in more space news, because this is a space bric-a-brac this week, it turns out space is hard.

And you think space is hard. Israel's first privately funded moon lander didn't quite make it. Well, it made it to the moon, but it didn't quite make it down safely. So there it was it was sad that it didn't quite make it, but it did do a quick selfie 13 miles up before it took a nosedive.

But hopefully they'll try again. They got close. More space. I want Britain to try to go back to Mars, too. The Beagle, I believe it was, that didn't quite make it. I think the more the merrier. The more the merrier. That's right. Let's get out there. Let's spread our junk all over the cosmos. Exactly. We put our junk everywhere.

That's right. And there was a lot of news about the twin study from NASA this week on Scott Kelly and his twin brother. And some bad news coming out of this one for people who are going to be in space for a long time. It ain't good for us. No, it's really not looking good.

Radiation, not good. Yeah. 48 times more radiation than he would have been subjected to on Earth in his 340 days aboard the space station. So high, like higher risk of cancer because there are genetic mutations that are present. And even after he got home, they stuck. Not good.

The other really bad one, he did worse on cognitive tests six months after landing, and he's not getting any better. So that could be there are a couple of factors that could be at play there. It could just be he's not that motivated anymore to give crap. He's like, I'm home.

Screw it. And one of the really weird ones, though, was his telomeres actually grew longer when he was in space. And as you age, your telomeres get shorter. And that's really what is, you know, that's your your age gauge. Yeah.

That's the thing that basically starts to shut you down. Yeah. And that's really interesting that his telomeres grew. So I want to figure out what that is. You can live with cancer for a long time. Yeah, seriously. So we've got a couple of links in the show notes about about that whole thing.

And one of one interesting one on The Verge is like it talks about how a big of a logistical nightmare it was to get the blood back to Earth in in the time frame. It's pretty cool stuff, though. And I got some flying car news. University of Michigan and Ford have published a study indicating that electric flying cars wouldn't be as environmentally sustainable as cars for commutes less than 22 miles.

Right. So you're not going to be hopping down to the mall in your flying car anytime soon. Now, I didn't think so. Yeah. Well, since flying cars still don't actually exist. But they do say that after the 22 mile mark, actually, they do gain an efficiency. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And that's a cruising speeds of 150 miles an hour.

So 22 mile trip at 150. You're going to get there pretty quick. You get there about 10 minutes. And that's pretty quick. Eight minutes. Something like that. But it's interesting that they're they're checking this stuff out because by the time the cars actually get here, you know, they might actually be more efficient as it goes or might be working from because they're they're basing these on electricity, that these flying cars are going to be electric.

And they talk about how greenhouse gases and all they did. They had a pretty interesting model on how it works. But yeah, so far, it's not looking good for short hop flying cars, at least if you care about the environment, if you don't give a shit, then fly away, dude. Fly away. Just don't work at Amazon.

You can't fly to work at Amazon. Yeah. And this story just stuck in my mind because I thought of the good old GOG Clash Royale group that you've got going. Yes. This is based more on Battle Royale, but it did stick in my mind. Anyways, a millionaire is looking for someone to help them design a 100 person battle royale inspired event to take place on a private island.

So if any of you out there used to build your own little attack vectors in Doom or all those other games or your own levels, maybe there's the job for you. Hush Hush, which is a website. I love how they described it here. A website designed to come up with creative ways to part millionaires from their money, selling things like high-end billage stables, private jets, and islands.

They say they were approached by a customer who was on the lookout for a private event island for help in setting up the championship. They will be handling registrations for the event when the time comes. Contestants will be provided with airsoft guns, ammo, and touch-sensitive body armor for a three-day event. The last person standing will win a 100,000-pound jackpot.

So, as the event is currently planned, the event has attended the last three days with 12 hours of competition each day. Competitors will then camp for the night, food, camping, gear, and all the necessary equipment will be provided. So, as this article says, let's run down the list together. Anonymous Millionaire, Private Island, Last Person Standing Contest.

Surely we've seen enough films to know how this is going to turn out. Even if it doesn't turn into an island massacre, we've all seen the Fyre Festival documentary. Yeah. So, yeah. I don't think this is going to fly, but we'll see. I don't think it's going to happen, but you never know. Now I want to go back and watch Battle Royale.

That was such a fun movie. Yeah. Well, speaking of movies, there's a video that I found highlighting every pop culture reference in Shaun of the Dead, because Shaun of the Dead is now 15 years old, which is crazy. Oh, man. I love that movie so much and saw it the week before it opened with a friend of the show Robert and his now wife, Stacy.

And it's one of my favorite movies of all time, without a doubt. It is one of the best, most hilarious movies ever. I remember my wife absolutely refused to watch it because she hates anything scary. And she's like, it's a zombie movie. I can't watch a zombie movie. And it was on one of our flights back to Toronto.

And I said, just watch it. And now it's one of her favorite movies, too. Of course it is. Of course it is. Because it is one of the greatest movies ever made. By the time you've heard this, you've already seen the first episode of the last season of Game of Thrones.

Or if you haven't seen the first episode of the last Game of Thrones, it's been all over your news feed. It's been everywhere. And every single article on every single website is talking about it. Yes. Everything has been ruined for you by this point. Everything has been ruined. I am very excited that the show is back. I think I'm more excited for the show to be over so that we can move on with our lives and talk about other things, too.

Now, the one thing that I want to be over is this damn Avengers movie. Oh, that too. Everywhere in my feed. Everywhere in my feed. Like all my RSS feeds and just on Twitter. Everybody's like, hey, you almost missed this great thing in the Infinity Wars trailer that is a total spoiler alert.

And I'm like, well, then shut up. And I don't care. I really don't care about that movie at all. I briefly I briefly fired up on the Netflix the previous one, because I remember saying at the time that I wanted the two and a half hours of my life back. Yeah, I want the 15 minutes of my life of attempting to rewatch that again back to not where I could care less.

Yeah, I watched it all. I watched it halfway through and then I went back and watched it all the way through. And yeah, I don't know what the deal is, but I just have zero shits to give about superhero movies anymore, I guess. I'm done. I don't even think I'm going to see this this one.

I think I'll just read the Wikipedia entry and see who died and what they came up with. And if they all stepped out of the shower and realized it was all just a dream. All just a dream. Oh, man. Until next time, I'm Brian Shilmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Toss us a book 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. And if you're listening to the show on the Overcast player for iOS, keep clicking those damn stars. The Accidental Tech Podcast is still winning, the lazy bastards. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 336.

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