353: Reality Apathy

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How are you this week, Brian? I'm doing okay. I'm doing a lot better than most of my Canadian friends. They're all a bit hungover this morning, so congratulations to the Raptors who won their first ever NBA championship. Yeah, I guess, what does that N stand for? Wasn't it national? What's up with Toronto winning?

Canada's a nation. Not ours. Not ours. Look, let's be honest about this, and this is something that always drives me crazy. None of the players, I think maybe one player, is actually Canadian on the Toronto Raptors. These are all guns for hire from all over, mostly from the U.S., so it's not like a rah-rah, we're losing anything here.

Let them have it. Come on. The Blue Jays have already won the World Series, too. Let's open things up. Okay. It's not the World Series, if it's only U.S. teams. That is true. That is absolutely true. I was reading up this week on a cognitive bias called rosy retrospection. Have you heard of this one?

Not by this name, but this is always everything from the past. We remember the good things from the past and forget the bad. Yeah. I don't know how that – I must be miswired because I seem to only remember the bad things from the past. You are an edge case scenario in many ways, Jason.

That's true. That's true. That'll be the follow-up to my bio, the edge case. It's a fairly interesting article over on Wikipedia just talking about how we may have evolved to have this built into us just for memory consolidation because it's easier to remember things in certain ways, to group them in our brains.

It's an interesting little read. I think we'd also be miserable little pricks all the time if we actually remembered things the way they really happened and if we remembered all the bad things. I can't imagine being able to live a happy life. There's some definite psychological usefulness to this idea of being able to just kind of remember things.

Like, do you want to remember every relationship that you had and just a horrible, like, the reality of what it really was? I mean, I remember my past relationships relatively fondly because I've forgotten about all the horrible shit that made us break up in the first place. Yeah, yeah. Remember that part where I said I remember all the bad things?

Yes. Yeah. Well, again, this almost kind of ties in with I can't remember the name of the book offhand that I just finished reading that I talked about the other week, which basically said, you know, everything that we're thinking about in the world, how we framed it, is wrong. Things are actually continually getting better, and that goes directly with this.

We don't remember the bad things from the past. We kind of remember it as all being good, but the world, slowly enough, and with some setbacks, is continually getting to be a better and a better place. Yeah, and it's funny because the rosy retrospection cognitive bias is also related to the concept of declinism.

So, you know, we look at the past like it's all, you know, happiness and hearts and kittens and all that. Everything was better back in the day. And you look towards the future, and it is a steaming pile of shit ready to fall on our heads. That's how we work. Of course, in the tech industry, that's actually true. Oh, man.

And I saw that your women's team kind of kicked some ass. Biggest victory ever. A lot of arguments about whether they should have kept piling on the score. My rebuttal to that is things will be at this level of play in this particular tournament.

Point differential is important if you end up with a tie. It's how many points you scored versus points scored against you. So it's also a sign of respect. You don't take off the throttle at this level of play. You play to your best abilities. End of story.

So well done. I mean, the team's phenomenal. I'm pretty sure it's France or the U.S. that are going to take this. The women's team is absolutely phenomenal. So good for them. I noticed that you put in a link talking about how they should be actually paid.

Yeah. Yeah. They have a case right now against U.S. soccer about the pay disparity. I have an interesting graphic statistic about that, which we will put in the show notes. But basically, yes, women are vastly, vastly unpaid less than the men's team is.

And let me let's let's be honest with us as a country right now for a second, Jason. Right. OK. You and I are not a big fan of Trump. That goes without saying. But there is one particular part of his thing that resonates well with all Americans and even us. Americans like winning.

We like winners. Yeah, we do. We like so much winning. We get sick of winning. The U.S. women's team are winners. The U.S. men's team at best, I think, could be described as in a rebuilding phase. And the rebuilding is not going very well.

I think it's going to be a minor miracle for the men's team to even get into the next men's World Cup. We've got the Gold Cup starting this week. And I'm sure that they're going to crash and burn out of that. The women's team are phenomenal. And the argument that I always hear against them getting paid more is that the men's team make more money.

No, they don't. We have got this total profit projections through the year 2017. The women's team has earned five point two million dollars in revenue. The men's team has lost a million dollars. That's because Americans like winners. Winners.

I don't know many people that are not super into soccer that give a crap about watching a men's soccer game anymore. But everybody I know is like, oh, when are the women playing again? I'd like to watch that. So let's stop this lie and let's move on and let's pay these people equally.

End of story. In the news. I have a great sense of, well, no, we already did that show. I don't feel vindicated, Jason, so much as validated this week.

I feel validated for the opinions that you and I have been spewing out for six years now, because it seems the world is finally coming around to everything that we've been saying, at least from what I saw in the news this week. The first example of this is a wonderful long article over at The Atlantic called The Platform Excuses Dying.

What have we been railing against for six years, Jason? Platforms. They're not platforms. You don't get to call yourself a platform. And this entire article, the TLDR, is that excuse is wearing thin. You're full of shit. You aren't platforms. Correct.

Correct. I read this article and it was very well done. Very well. Extremely well done. Well, much better said than anything that we've said, but basically exactly what we've been saying. So, yeah, there's a lot of bullet points, but why bother reading it? You've heard it on the show a thousand times. Go read the article. It says everything that we've been saying.

Yeah. I mean, I think the long and short of it is a platform is something that can be programmed against from outside developers. That's the long and the short of it. And when you just when you start moderating the content, even even the platform excuse is, you know, completely dismissible. Yeah. You're not a platform anymore.

You're a media outlet. You're a media outlet. Yeah. And so we've seen these companies struggle to try to do content moderation, which they only do kicking and screaming because there's been massive outcries. Again, what we've been talking about, especially with YouTube in the news recently, and certainly it's happened with Facebook as well.

God knows it happens on Twitter is the uneven hand with which they go about this. They pick and choose when they want to apply their rules and when they don't. And that is editorialism. And that means you're not a platform. Right. More on that later in the show. We have a couple articles about that.

Now, have you ever played around with Facebook Watch? No, it's just an annoying. You know what? Facebook Watch has gotten me over my need to click and get rid of all the little red dots. Oh, good. I constantly have a little red dots saying that there's something new in Facebook Watch that I probably want to see.

And I'm telling you right now, Facebook, I fucking don't. And I've stopped ever clicking on it. Oh, that's good. That's good. Because that's a deep, you know, that's that's deep within our psyche, that red dot, because it signifies danger. It's painful. Yeah. I mean, yeah. When you have them lined up like that, it's really hard.

I find myself in the crapper every morning, double tapping on the Instagram stories to make them all go away. Yeah. Well, I'm starting to train myself. If I could get a badge for that, that would be, you know, maybe it would be a little bit more satisfying. I'm like, I really don't care about what you're cooking at three in the morning.

Leave me alone. Anyway, CNN has decided to pull out of Facebook Watch and they had one of the most popular shows. They had the fourth most popular show called Full Circle with Anderson Cooper. Ah, does he not have like five other shows, too? Yeah.

Anderson Cooper is just always on TV. I think he's a construct. I don't think he's actually a real man. You think he's a deep fake? I think he might be a deep fake. I have seen the original Anderson Cooper one time outside the CNN building when I used to work there. Handsome man. My God. He's a good looking man. Yeah.

Very striking. I was like, that's Anderson Cooper. Like, it was like, wow, no wonder. No wonder you're on TV. But I like Anderson Cooper. I think he's a pretty smart guy. So it was interesting when I saw that they were pulling his show. Now, what I really like about this is Andrew Morse, the executive vice president and general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide, said the decision to take Facebook or to take full circle off of Facebook was in keeping with CNN's longstanding stance toward the platforms.

We were able to use Facebook as an R&D opportunity rather than the platform uses us as a guinea pig. Yeah. They paid us significant amounts of money. It's the way everyone should be looking at digital media these days. We've always said it was important to be wherever our audience is, but also said it was important to receive value for that content.

So apparently they didn't get enough money to stay on. Not enough of the monies. Right. Nope. And a lot of people are signing off of that. I guess they only renewed. Facebook only renewed their partnership with a quarter of the shows that started out on there. Facebook is subsidizing this subsidy.

That is the new business model. Yep. Yeah. We'll get to that in a second, too. Let's start with some more Facebook stuff, though. Facebook is worried that emails could show Zuckerberg new of questionable privacy practices. Now, this begs the question, since Zuckerberg was able to completely erase his past history of instant messaging, why didn't they use their own platform to discover all this stuff?

So it might have been deleted in time. But I guess it's good for us that they haven't. Now, we don't know exactly what is in any of these emails yet. There's a little bit of talking about it. But this is obviously these emails have been unearthed in the process of responding to the continued federal privacy investigation that they're under right now.

And apparently, according to some of the people that have seen these things, it is not good, not looking good for Facebook. There's one in particular that caught regulators' attention that's being discussed right now in which the Zuck asked employees about an app that claimed to have built a database stock with information about tens of millions of Facebook users.

That in and of itself is not terribly surprising, but the developer had the ability to display the user information to others on its own site, regardless of those users' privacy settings on Facebook. So Zuck wanted to know if such extensive data collection was possible. You'd think he'd know. And if Facebook should do anything to stop developers from displaying that data, which the answer is yes!

But they didn't say that. So, yeah, so that's where it's at. There's a trove of emails that may be pointing to the fact that Zuck and the other high-ups knew of everything that was going on and didn't really do anything to stop it. But his emails. But his emails. Yeah, when did Messenger come around?

I don't recall. Pretty quickly. Because these are from 2012, so maybe Messenger hadn't been around yet, and these were on some backup. Because as we know at Facebook, nothing's ever deleted, apparently. Unless it's Zuckerberg's instant messages. I'm sure there's a tape drive somewhere with those sitting around, too.

There's a drive somewhere with those and the Hulk Hogan tape. Yeah, really? That's going to be the next Indiana Jones movie. He's going to go try to find them. Yeah. Somewhere in the warehouse. Yes. So, in the continuing vindication, slash, I feel completely correct in everything that I've said all along, I wouldn't even call this a long-form article.

This is a book over at the American Affairs. And it's written by this guy, Hubert Horan, who is a very, very, very, very, very well-knowledged in the transportation industry. This is what he's studied and done his entire life. And this book basically goes through and rips Uber a gigantic hole in its ass and says that Uber is a complete load of crap.

There's nothing about it that's good. It's weaving a path of destruction throughout our economy and our society. And they should go burn in hell, basically, is what the article says. So, when we hang up our hat, we just basically hand this guy the mic and he takes over the show. Yeah, pretty much.

Exactly. So, since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue and has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic reality.

As we say all the time on the show, Uber is an app. That is it. An examination of Uber's economics suggests there is no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply too high than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate.

They not only lack powerful competitive advantages, but they are actually less efficient than the competitors has been driving out of business. Uber's investors never expected that their returns would come from superior efficiency in competitive markets. They basically pursued a growth-at-all-costs strategy financed by a staggering $20 billion in investor funding.

The investor funding is underwriting your cheap rates and your cheap shares. That's the only way they're staying in business. That's the only way they're staying powerful. That's the only way they're still driving other people out of business.

It is a house of fucking cards. It's a joke. Yeah, we've been saying that all along. It's unsustainable, and it's going to fall over at some point. That's why they went public, because they needed more money. And if self-driving cars don't come along before all this money keeps running out, then they're just going to fold, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.

And everybody's going to go back to, well, maybe riding their bird scooters to work. Who knows? Because maybe that'll be the only division left of Uber that's still profitable. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, until all the lawsuits come in from everybody, basically, getting injured.

Good times. Yeah. Speaking of other companies that don't make any money, Fiverr. Fiverr went public, and I didn't even know this one was coming. I don't know how this missed my newsfeed. I didn't know Fiverr was going public. I did not either. So just to refresh everybody's memory, Fiverr is where you can go to get things that we used to get paid to do for $5.

Yeah. Things that we used to get paid a lot more than $5 for. Yeah. Yep. So their first day of trading, they climbed at 90%. Amazing. That is pretty crazy. What's even crazier is they lost $36.1 million on revenue of $75.5 million in 2018.

Oh, well. It's a bulletin board. It's a bulletin board. Yes, it's kind of a bulletin board. And yeah, well, there you go. Losing money, but there you go. People want to invest in losing money. That's great. CEO Micah Kaufman said, we are on the path to profitability.

That's the balance we're trying to keep, focusing on growth while building a business that would be profitable in the long term. Why don't you try and be profitable before you'd like take money from the public? Yeah. I don't know. Like, I would think that would probably be table stakes. Yeah. Yeah. Not anymore.

Not anymore. So. Yep. Maybe I can hire somebody on Fiverr to go ride my Uber around for me. Now, I ran across a really interesting article that is kind of a little out of what we would normally find ourselves, because this is over at The Stylist in the UK.

I found it because of Lily Allen. I'm a huge fan of Lily Allen. Not so much her music. Her music, I could give or take. But I like her as a person. She's very outspoken. She's very witty. And she certainly, I mean, she came, she basically ended up with a music career because she knew how to use MySpace really well. And she's very, very active on Twitter and very, very vocal about everything, which is great.

And they kind of hold her up as an example of why now is the time you should be expressing your opinions online. Because fear of online reprisal is sucking the originality out of celebrities and forcing all of us to self-censor. That needs to end. And they give a few pointers about what you should do online to not be a troll, which is helpful, I suppose.

And the article states we should be pressuring public figures to promote ideas when they have the platform. Their voices can make a difference. When Taylor Swift, after a decade of refusing to make any sort of political statement, endorsed Tennessee Democrats Phil Bridgeson and Jim Cooper and asked people to register to vote on her Instagram, voter registration surged in the state.

She knew it would alienate some of her Republican fans, but she did it anyways. And the article is basically saying, hey, you've got this platform that you're standing on. You've got the people looking at it. Express yourself. Don't be a pussy. All right. I like that. Me too. It's kind of what we do here.

Yes, it is. You know, our platform is considerably smaller. Considerably smaller, but we do express ourselves. Yes, we do. Back to the big platform topic, though. Content moderation is impossible. You can't expect moderators to understand satire or irony. Or often English.

Yeah. Yeah. This is just a quick little piece over at Tech Dirt. And it goes into the story of the tweet of God. Oh, I love the tweet of God. I follow the tweet of God. Yeah, he's hilarious. He's hilarious. And his account was banned. I know. I saw that, too.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been it's been restored. He, you know, basically waved his hand and the heavens opened and Jack Dorsey saw the light. No, no, no. That never happened. He just bitched a lot. He got it back. The author of this piece apparently has a very sad opinion of the tweet of God because that's most of the article is him saying, I don't really approve of this guy.

I don't think he's funny. But but other people do. Yes, exactly. Like me. Mm hmm. So the whole point here is it was a very satirical tweet that got him taken down because if you didn't really understand how it how it was supposed to be read, that you could just see it as hate speech.

But it's not. It's not. It's hilarious. I'm going to read it. If gay people are a mistake, they're a mistake. I've made hundreds of millions of times, which proves I'm incompetent and shouldn't be relied upon for anything. Yeah, there you go. That is very funny. It is funny. Most of his tweets are very funny. Yes.

And I do say he because there is a picture of a dude with a white beard. Yes. Yeah. So I'm not just I'm not not being God sexist. We don't judge here. We don't judge. And if God is female, she should be paid the same as the male God. Yes. And hopefully it's still played by Alanis Morissette.

Oh, yeah. I forgot she did that. 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 co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Hi, Dave. Wow. That is the worst connection I think we've ever had. Yes. Skype's really shit in the bed today. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I talk about. We'll talk about that in a little bit here.

First, I want to talk about. This 90 or 1950s game show clip that I ran across with Samuel J. Seymour. Yes. And he was the last living person to see Lincoln assassinated. And he lived long enough to be on TV. Yeah.

Pretty cool. I have seen that clip and it is pretty cool. And what I love about it is how it kind of recalibrates, at least my notion of time, of how long ago this was. I had another incident in my life where this happened.

This is probably about 15 years ago, back when I was in the broadcasting biz, and I was interviewing a woman who was in her 90s, African-American woman. And she said that, I was asking about her life, and she said that her father was a slave. And I stopped and I said, I'm sorry, your father?

Don't you mean your grandfather? She said, no, my father was a slave when he was a child. And she explained it to me, and sure enough, the math worked out. She was in her 90s. She was born when her father was in his 50s, and her father had been a slave when he was basically a toddler.

He got freed when he stopped being someone else's property when he was a toddler, which just blew my mind. That I was talking to someone here whose father had, in his lifetime, had belonged to someone else. Really recalibrated that whole thing for me, that it really wasn't that long ago.

Betty White is older than sliced bread. Literally, yes. It's literally true. Wow. Time is weird when you go down that rabbit hole, let me tell you. Yeah. Wow. Yep. Well, I bring that up because Mr. Samuel J. Seymour is buried in the Luton Park Cemetery in lovely Baltimore, Maryland.

So there, today, is your Maryland factoid. That would be Loudon Park Cemetery. I see. Oh, there you go. You say Loudon, I say Luton. Fine. Now, our first article I've brought up mainly for its title.

Dave, this has kind of been my validation episode. Okay. We talked about a lot of the things earlier in the show that, basically, Jason and I have been screaming about since day one. And, apparently, the media is coming around to our point of view. Things like Uber is horrible. These social networks are not platforms.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, this is another one. The title of this article is, This is Exactly What Privacy Experts Said Would Happen. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. So, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced this week that hackers had stolen an undisclosed number of license plate images and travelers' ID photos from a subcontractor.

Privacy and security activists have long argued that as law enforcement vacuums up more data without legal limits, the damage of a possible breach scales up. The lack of restrictions on data collection is why, for many experts, this hack feels like an inevitability. Yes. We knew this was going to happen. Yes, it does.

Yes, it does. This is a bit of a scary one. This is a lot of detailed information from people with all their different ID photos and their different documents that were being used and scanned and stored. So, not good.

No, and this particular story points out that this was, according to Customs and Border Patrol, this was a subcontractor, someone who, it sounds like, basically had copied a bunch of information to their computer so they could do work at home or over the weekend or something like that.

But, these days, it doesn't take long to copy a whole lot of information over and there's your weakness. Yeah, yeah. My uncle runs a machine shop and he is, the government is one of his big contracts and there is an insane amount of paperwork and vetting and different things that they have to do, which they should as a subcontractor to the government.

You have to meet all the kind of security restrictions and things of that nature. But, as per usual, I just don't think the digital is keeping up with the physical. Yeah, absolutely. Told ya! Yes. That should be the, that really should just be the.

Title of the episode. That should just be the name of the show. Screw the build geeks. We're just going to change it to told you so. Told ya. Mm-hmm. Well, speaking of told you so, there's a new suit out, a lawsuit, that alleges that Amazon is recording children without their consent or the consent of their parents.

I think I would have to argue here that if you buy one of these, you're consenting. Mm-hmm. Yeah, let's get into this for a second here. You know what it does. You're putting it into your home. You are consenting.

What if you take your child to someone else's home who has an Alexa and then their kid, your kid is recorded on their Alexa? Just a blue sky for a second. We ran into this, though. We talked about this with the Airbnb thing where, remember the thing where the people were recording their guests in their Airbnbs and they couldn't go out, the police couldn't go after them because technically it's not a rental unit.

You're allowed to do that. You're just a guest in someone else's house. Yeah. And so there's no restriction. If you come to my house, there's no restriction against me. You are consenting to anything I want to do. Mm-hmm. Maybe not anything, but we're certainly recording.

Yes. Well, they say Alexa routinely records and voice prints millions of children without their consent or the consent of their parents. According to a complaint filed on behalf of a 10-year-old Massachusetts girl on Tuesday in federal court in Seattle, and another nearly identical suit was filed the same day in California Superior Court in Los Angeles on behalf of an eight-year-old boy.

The complaint, which seeks class action status, describes Amazon's practice of saving a permanent record of the user's voice and contrasts that with other makers of voice-controlled computing devices that delete recordings after storing them for a short time or not at all. Which ones might those be?

Yeah. Every other one? No. I doubt that very much. And also, we have to keep in mind that Amazon has rolled out the feature to delete all these things. Right. But they don't have the feature that turns on that says, just delete them automatically. You still have to go in every day and delete them by hand.

Mm-hmm. Well. Or tell it to do that. This just reeks of frivolous lawsuit and money to me. That's all. Right. The suit alleges that Amazon's failure to obtain consent violates the laws of Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington, which require consent of all parties to a recording, regardless of age.

Mm-hmm. Now, this comes into the two-party consent states, and we've talked about this before on the show. And I reached out to you guys before about doing a segment on this to see if Alexa actually could bypass that requirement in case you wanted to maybe entrap someone like your spouse who may have been cheating on you.

Right. And to obtain a recording that you could then play in court, because the Alexa is there in the house, so you could say the trigger word and say a bunch of gobbledygook and then say, why were you cheating on me? And just try and get her to say yes. So then you can play it for the judge. And would that violate two-party consent?

Because the microphone is right there, and you know it's recording. Yeah. So this whole thing, I'm with you, Brian. This reeks of BS to me in just a money grab. Well, I just think the lawsuit's completely frivolous for the reasons we just stated. First off, I believe if you purchase one of these as a parent and put it in your house, that is implicit consent that this is going to happen.

And as Dave points out, if I go to somebody else's house, they're allowed to do that to me, too. I am consenting to it by entering their house. If I see the lady in the tube there, I'm consenting. I can ask them to please turn it off. Yeah, there's a mute button on top.

Yeah. But they're also saying that Amazon has the technical ability to differentiate people who are talking to the tube, and that them not actually, or them keeping recordings of people who are not authorized to talk into the tube is a problem on their side, and then they should be held accountable for that.

Because just because they can do it and they don't do it means they should do it. But these rolled out without that technical ability. They've added that later. So it now exists. So, okay. But I still, I disagree completely with the whole consent issue here. I think that's a load of shit. If only one of us were a lawyer.

I'll get Ben Yellen on the phone. I think my initial response to this was, isn't this an interesting, perhaps, legal test? And then when I saw they were going after class action status, I shifted over to Brian's side and thought, okay, here's the real story.

Yeah, I agree with you there. I would not mind at all if this were just a single lawsuit to see kind of, well, how's this going to play out? Because we do need the law to catch up to these sorts of things. We need those kind of lawsuits happening right now so we can kind of figure out which way this is moving and how it's going to go. But, yeah, the class action thing just means some lawyers want some cash.

Yeah. And they smell blood in the water. Mm-hmm. Well, this next story that I dropped in here, this is from Ars Technica. And I have to say this is upsetting to me and I think it will be to you all as well because this goes against something that we've been saying a lot on this show where we're kind of wrong about something.

This is a big GDPR fine. It's a Spanish soccer league's app has been caught eavesdropping on users in an anti-piracy push. Mm-hmm. So, the La Liga, which is evidently Spain's top professional soccer league.

Yes, it is. They've been slapped with a $280,000 fine for violating user privacy. Now, what was going on here is that if you were a fan of soccer, you would download this app and you'd put it on your phone. And you would give the app access to the microphone on your phone.

Consent. The app would also be tracking your GPS location, which I'm sure you consented to when you clicked through. I'm sure it was in the TOS. When the app saw that you were in a bar or another venue that might show soccer games, they would occasionally turn on the microphone to sample the audio, basically do a Shazam kind of thing, to see if that bar was playing the game.

And if they were playing the game and they didn't have a license, the league would send a nasty gram to the bar and say, pay up. Right. And that's the problem here. So, the GDPR violation, they're saying they weren't allowed to do that.

But to me, okay, that's great. And I think it's great that we're seeing these sort of – to me, this is what GDPR was for. But I have to say, how long have the three of us been saying, folks, your phone is not listening in on you?

They're not using your microphone. To be fair, we said Facebook isn't listening to you. Oh, all right. All right. I can get behind that as a loophole. Yeah. I mean, first off, hats off. This is ingenious. It is. It flat out is.

It's fucking ingenious. It's very clever. Should they be doing it? No. Did they say that they were doing it buried in some legalese somewhere? Probably. Is this a good test case, just like we were talking about, in that now there should be some laws making sure that people don't keep doing this in the future?

Yes. That is exactly what I would like to come out of this. Big fine. Knock it off. You're not allowed to do this. Nobody else can build apps that do this anymore. By the way, phone manufacturers, can you figure this out? Lock this stuff down. Nobody wants it. It should be massively implicit beyond just the launch of the app and you just clicking through and not even reading things to allow this sort of behavior to happen.

But my God, ingenious. And at the end of the day, it didn't even hurt the user. It just hurt the bars that they were in, which is kind of hilarious. The league says that they claim that the technology that they were using was not capable of recording human voices or human conversations, that it only used a little sliver of the audio information to match it to the broadcast.

I find that hard to believe. I don't believe that either. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this stuff, we knew this stuff is possible. We just said that, you know, Facebook wasn't doing it and bigger companies weren't doing it.

And we also said at the time that, you know, if they were, if people were actually doing that with their apps, somebody would have found out. And this is a perfect case of that. They just rolled this out a little while ago. They're doing it and people found out. Right. There's just no way Facebook would be doing this at that grand of a scale and nobody would have figured it out yet.

Nobody would have caught it. It's just not possible. Right. So I think this actually, I think this actually goes in our favor, not against us. Well, you got you. You want me over there, Brian? Yeah.

Looking at the scale, Facebook has, you know, how many billions of users. And this was, this was no small sample size here. This was on 10 million phones. Yeah. So there's still a decent amount of data, but it only was triggered when you were in a bar watching the game. So it, you know, came on and off. You had to be in a bar at a time when a game was on.

Yeah. The GPS had to match up with blah, blah, blah. Yeah. And then they would switch it on theoretically for a few seconds. I mean, yeah, nefarious, but again, also ingenious. Okay. All right. Well, I find it fascinating and disturbing, but again, I'm glad that, uh, that this, that GDPR has, has, uh, stepped in here and levied a large fine.

Yeah. They're going to appeal, but because they think that they're in the right because of their terms of service. So yeah, we'll see how it goes. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, we got a bit of feedback. The first, uh, is from Tim who asks you, Dave, uh, if someone regarding, if someone stole your identity to buy a phone, couldn't they just brick the phone?

He says, yes, in most countries they do block the IMEI by law, but in the U S that is not required. Hence, Americans are more likely to get their phone stolen abroad. Yeah. This was fascinating. Thanks, Tim, for reaching out when the, the thing too, is that if you are abroad and someone can identify you as being an American that puts a target on your back because your phone, if someone's out there stealing phones, your phone is more desirable than someone who's traveling from some other country.

So yay us time to get out those Canadian backpacks again. Right. Mm-hmm. Now we also got, uh, some response to our hashtag no tell motel challenge, uh, most six, five Oh two writes in here are the websites of some of the most famous no tell motels near San Juan, Puerto Rico.

They are very close to each other. There are many more on the West. Uh, so he's got a couple of different links there. Um, the pages are in Spanish, but you should have no problem checking them out. They don't really have lobbies. Attendance run to your car for the transaction prices are for eight to 12 hours. Each room or cabana has a discreet, poorly lit parking for maximum privacy.

Uh, some of them, you could put a camera in a nearby gas station, looking at the road into the motel. The traditional way of catching cheaters is by smell. They all have the same acts by way of Irish, uh, by way of Irish spring smelling soap. So if someone sneaks out for a long lunch and comes back smelling like that, you know, where they showered nice.

I was going somewhere else with that, but okay. Yeah. Uh, let's see. We also had a Steve wrote in. So here is his target. I guess he's actually going to go out and try to figure out if he can get into the camera. I'm from a small Eastern Kentucky town full of hillbillies.

So this may be fun. I'll keep you updated. And his is called the Winchester Inn. It looks suitably. No tell motel. It does. I'd say that's the dumpiest of the ones people sent us. It's delightfully dumpy. It's delightfully dumpy. Yeah. Not as nice as the Winchester from Shaun of the Dead.

That's for sure. I love that Winchester. Joy Local, I think, has the winning name. Um, it's been here for a while. It's called the Jolly Roger. Yeah. Does what it says on the tin. Right there. Yes. Now, you'll note the photos on the website do not show the outside of the building.

Um, that's because you don't want to see that. Oh, okay. It looks, it looks just like it should. And, uh, the name belies its purpose. Mm-hmm. Even though it's close to the ocean. It is the cheap, cheap, cheap motel right around here.

And it's been there for years. And I believe probably in the sixties and seventies, it might've actually been kind of nice, but, uh, it, it has discovered its purpose and not invested any in its infrastructure accordingly. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, they do have a cafe. Mm-hmm.

Strip clubs have buffets, too. That's true. That's true. Point taken. Or so I'm told. I've heard, I've heard. Yeah, I found my original no-tell motel, the Downers Grove Motel in Downers Grove, Illinois. The first hotel I ever snuck off to with my girlfriend back in the day.

Oh, that looks suitably shady, too. Very nice. Oh, it was, it was. Yep. Now, you definitely needed a shower for more than one reason when you left that place. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I wonder how the, the rise of the bedbugs has affected places like this, where the, you know, bedbugs are back.

They were gone for a while, and now. Just like measles. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I, you know, we're fulfilling a need, but. Bring your own sheets. Right. Right. Your preferably rubber ones. I was going to say, your waterproof tarp.

Yep. Yes. Look like Dexter. And some kerosene to wash with when you're done. Mm-hmm. Well, thanks to everybody for sending these in. That was, it's been fun looking at them. Yeah, let's just keep it up. This is enjoyable, actually. Yep. We can put together a coffee table book at the end of this. So over at the Washington Post, they have a great article.

Top AI researchers race to detect deepfake videos, and they say, we're just outgunned. There's no money to put towards research for detecting deepfakes. For every one researcher that is working on the deepfake problem, there are 100 engineers out there trying to make it better.

Well, there's a term coined in this article that I love called reality apathy, which I think is something that we can all get behind. Yeah. We've had, we've had breach fatigue, you know. Now we've got a reality apathy because we just don't know what's true anymore. And it's kind of, kind of insane how fast this is moving towards the side of, hey, we can really figure stuff out.

Yeah. And the laws are not catching up. That's the, the, the paragraph in here that I liked was no law regulates deepfakes, though some legal and technical experts have recommended adapting current laws covering libel, defamation, identity fraud, or impersonating a government official. Seems that that would apply to me, but concerns of overregulation abound.

The dividing line between a parody protected by the first amendment and deepfake political propaganda may not always be clear cut. I knew when it was weird Al singing the fucking song night, Michael Jackson, there was no doubt what a parody was being done.

You don't need to do deepfake to do a parody. Saturday night live would not have existed for 20 years. If you had to deepfake things to do parody, you can do parody without using deepfake and without crossing these identity frauds or impersonating government officials. I don't understand why the laws don't apply.

Anyways. Well, I would imagine they're coming at it from the other direction and saying that what I've done here is a parody. Right. This deepfake that I've made is a parody. It's not, it's not fraud. It's a parody. I'm, it's hilarious. Don't you see how funny this is? I guess you just don't have a sense of humor.

Yeah, that must be it. Yeah. Well, Adobe is ramping up their side of things. They've got an AI tool now. Of course, it's called AI. And even in the, even in the URL, Adobe machine learning AI tool. Okay. Which one? Which one? Cover all your bases. Yeah.

Automatically spots Photoshopped faces. Unfortunately, this is still in the lab stage and they're not planning on releasing it as a tool, but I guarantee you they'll have to at some point. Oh yeah. And it's, it's pretty cool how it actually figures out what's been shopped and what hasn't been shopped.

I'm sure it's using like, you know, histograms and those kinds of things and edge detection to see if it's too blurry or not, but their tool got 99% of the fakes that they ran by it. So the technology, at least for Photoshop, uh, images is ramping up, but video is, you know, 99 fakes, but a bitch ain't one, but people are on it.

People are on it. Just not as many as we'd probably like or need or need. Now this last one I got here comes from Buzzfeed news. Of course, Buzzfeed news, the people who actually turned a shit show into an actual news organization.

Surprisingly, except for this one was, I used AI to clone my voice and trick my mom into thinking it was me. And this guy uses a website called liar bird. I'm guessing it's liar bird. Unless Dave would like to correct me. No, I think it's liar bird. I think that's right. All right.

And he used their, their tools, which you heard at the beginning of this episode or the beginning of this segment to basically build out a voice that could fool his mom. He spent an hour training the, the voice AI and he used a pretty crafty trick.

He just said he had, was having really bad cell phone reception. There you go. And play social engineering. Yeah. We'll sprinkle the social engineering in there. Yeah. You, uh, you lower the expectations for the call and then you can walk through it. There's a video of how he did the whole thing. Or also called.

He just had T-Mobile. That's, uh, that's true too. Yeah. Mom, it's Skype. Sorry. Uh, but it's a really fun, it's a really fun walkthrough. I, I, it's enjoyable. I'm going to keep trying to train my voice a little more in liar bird to see if we can get it to anything usable.

But, uh. I did mine a few months ago. Um, someone pointed this out to me and, and I, I probably did 15 or 20 minutes of training on it. Um, and actually used it over on the cyber wire. Um, it, it, you know, it kind of, I mean, it sort of sounds like me.

If you know what I sound like, it kind of sounds like me. The thing I think about is there's a huge library of recordings of my voice available online and there are transcripts available for most of them. And the transcript list is growing. So if somebody wanted to take my voice and match it up, I mean, they have everything they need to make a virtual version of me with a high degree of accuracy.

If only there were current laws covering libel, defamation, identity fraud, or impersonating a government official that could be applied in these cases. Yeah. Yeah. If only part of me would just like to hear it. Cause I think I could call my mom and see what she thought, but, uh, right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, I don't know. It's gone that way. I'm sure there's going to be an open source tool based on with about the same capabilities of liar bird at some point where you'll just be able to feed in something like that. You'd be able to upload podcasts to it and get the voices out of it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that day so I can just stay home.

Yep. When do you leave? That's, that's true. Well, I can stay in the house. I don't even have to come out to the studio. I can just stay in my one room. That's it. I'm just trying to shrink everything down to one room with a toilet. There you go. We call those prison cells, Jason.

Solitary. There's no puppies in solitary, unfortunately. Mm-hmm. So I got some good news here. A hospital has been ordered to pay $300,000 in damages in a medical records case. Did you guys get a chance to skim through this one? Yes. I did. Yes.

I really like this one. It's about a woman who had her, basically her medical record stolen by a doctor who was not her doctor that was then passed off to an attorney in a custody battle. Yeah. And she got $295,000 were punitive damages and because they were just like, you can't do this stuff.

But it turns out the hospital knew about this and their own privacy officer found 22 separate violations of HIPAA against this one doctor, Dr. Dive Fenderer. Defenderer. Defenderer first. Yes.

Defenderer. And basically got, got busted. They get the other $5,000 was for pain and suffering and humiliation. Right. But it's good. Somebody's actually on the case for some of these, these HIPAA breaches. Now, is this a situation where somebody came to this doctor and said, hey, let me, you know, do me a, do me a solid and can you, you have access to this database.

Can you look it up for me and just send me the records under the table? That's what it sounds like to me. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I wonder how does this differ because they had HIPAA to back them up? Does that, was that one of the mechanisms that made this possible, made this payout, payout and punishment possible?

You know, speaking towards the need of something like a U.S. version of GDPR for things that are not medically related. Yeah. The woman went to the Department of Health and Human Services and they're the, uh, the people who enforce HIPAA. And then they filed, she filed a formal complaint with them.

And then they said they put the, uh, the hospital on notice, but the hospital didn't do anything about it, which is a violation of their own privacy policies. Yeah. So they eventually took it to court and she won. So that's, that's some good news. Yeah. 100 grand's not bad.

Good for her. Yeah. Hopefully that'll motivate other hospitals and medical organizations to keep a closer eye on these things. Right. And in the final little bit of news, uh, Radiohead's unreleased, okay. Computer audio was stolen and, uh, the band has decided to take the high road on this and released it all for, well, not for free.

They want a donation, which will then go to charity, which is pretty cool. So instead of having to download it illegally, you can pay a couple bucks and do something good for the world. Um, now my problem with all of this is the, all the articles were saying hacked. These were physical mini mini discs that must've been stolen.

That's not hacking. Is it, you're right. It's unclear. It's unclear. It's unclear. It's unclear if maybe Tom had digitized them and then they were taken from something somewhere. But if the story is about mini discs, one would think that those were stolen and that's theft, not hacking.

So there's that. Uh, the other thing would be finding some way to play the things back. I think I've got a mini disc player somewhere, somewhere in my box of crap. It's right next to your Zune. Yes. As a matter of fact, it probably, and my zip drive. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Remember the zip drives? Yeah. Oh yeah. So yeah. Jazz drives. Yeah. I was going to say, obviously these things had to have been digitized because if the, if the mini discs were stolen, they wouldn't be able to release it. So unless they tracked down the person who did it, so they've got it digitized because they're going to release it through their band camp page.

So. Oh yeah. Yeah. So who knows exactly what happened here, but good on them. I've got to say of all the bands in the world, they're probably radio head and fish as far as going concerns, uh, would be the two bands that have, uh, fan bases so rabid that they would sit and listen through 18 hours of noodling around and besides and stuff that didn't make the record.

So, so I have many friends like that, that are that into radio head. So I'm glad I know exactly how they spent their entire week. So I'll seem very happy about it. Yeah. I heard one of the radio head band members say the stuff is not good, but if you want it, here it is. Yeah.

Basically. Yeah. We, we never really meant for anybody to hear this, but here you go. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, maybe that's why they're not going to keep the money because they know how bad it is. It's like, we're not going to profit off of this because we have morals, but yeah. 18 hours for 18 tracks.

They want 18 pounds and it's only available for 18 days. There you go. Good on them. A wise move to, I think that was a really good move that they did. So I like it for them. I like it. All right, gentlemen. Well, uh, I think we've covered a lot this week. And, uh, so I look forward to, uh, next week when we have more, uh, no tell motels to look at and, uh, find out new ways that our devices are listening to us and, uh, all, all this fun stuff.

So, uh, until then I will see you guys soon. Jason, you and I are pretty much against most crowdfunding campaigns just because there's so many problems with them. People not understanding the basics of bringing a product to market, not, uh, completely screwing up timeframes, not understanding logistics, uh, things that are like just way out of reach

anyways, pie in the sky dreams that are never going to come true, or, you know, just developer teams taking the money and fucking off and party. I was good. Yeah. Scams. Also, a lot of scams. So, but occasionally I guess there are, there are some good things that have come through those kinds of, um, alternative markets.

And, and there seems to be a kind of a cool little thing coming through right now that I ran across, which I kind of like Lily, a new smart speaker available now on Indiegogo can help you learn Chinese writing and speaking faster than anything else on the market, according to its creators. That's a course equipped with, you have to say it, don't you?

Because you need the monies artificial intelligence. Oh, of course. That allows it to engage in real-time conversations. So beginning to advance students can learn to speak the Chinese language of Mandarin, correct pronunciation, perform translations, and help you learn vocabulary through interactive games.

So they gamified it. It helps you to learn to write with an associated app, which, where you can practice using various Chinese characters, uh, and the curriculum can also prepare you for the Chinese proficiency exams necessary to work or study in China. So pretty cool. They're basically saying that, you know, the apps that exist now don't really immerse you in, in the language as much as having just a smart speaker around the house would, which I kind of get.

It's pretty cool. So, uh, it's not, uh, not ready to ship until April, 2019. Right now it's only in the prototype stage. Uh, they're planning on April, April, April, 2019 was two months ago. They moved the, they moved the target to August, 2019. Now this article is old then my bad.

Yes, it is. So they're already having the same problems that everybody else does. Exactly. They already pushed it and all the early bird pricing is out. So it's a dollar, $1,99, it's $199 now instead of $149. Okay. Uh, well, they're still keeping the original idea of being able to, uh, add various languages to it later through downloads.

Now, my one question about this is why did they build another entire device? Why are they not just focusing on building an app to run on the existing ladies in the tubes that we all have? I don't think that you can write your own app that, oh, I guess you can do some Alexa crossover.

I don't know. I don't know. Uh, lock in. It just seems, it just seems to me that, you know, maybe, maybe Amazon or Google would come out with something and, uh, then you wouldn't need a separate device because that's a little annoying. Yeah. But for $199, it's not bad. It looks cooler than, uh, it does look cool. And echo.

So if it ends up looking like that, once again, the problems with these crowdfunding campaigns. Yeah. Well, it was in the video. So, you know, yeah. So they've got one that they faked. Yeah. Reminds me of my Giro when I, when I first got my Giro, one of their big, uh, talking points was it was self-balancing when empty.

And of course, when I got mine, it fell right on its face and like, due to, due to production issues, we could not make it self-balancing while empty. Sorry about that. I'm like, that was one of your main selling points. Yes. Anyway. So I ran this by a friend of the show, Jordan Harbinger, because he's been taking Mandarin for six years.

Yes. And he immediately went and bought one. Oh, cool. Okay. So he thinks it's going to be awesome because he can practice his vocab around the house and ask it questions and things like that, because he often forgets to do that. But he does interactive YouTube learning like five days a week.

Right. And still thinks that this is a cool tool. So yeah. I mean, it seems smart doing it. Yeah. Yeah. So are you going to learn Mandarin? Is this for the, the, the little one? I think, uh, the goal is for my, cause my wife actually speaks Cantonese, not Mandarin, but Mandarin is the predominant language, uh, that's being used, uh, in business and things of that nature.

So I think the idea is we're going to pre-order one of these. And when, uh, when our son is around ready, we're all going to do it together. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. If it's not out of business by the time he's old enough. Well, I'm assuming something else will be around at that point. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Well, when he is old enough, you're definitely going to get him one. You want to get him one of these DJI's newest drone is a $499 tank meant to teach kids how to code. That's a lot of money. Oh my God. It's the Robo master S one. I swear to you though. I watched the video on this thing.

I want one right now. I want it. I want to program it to chase the dogs around the house and shoot them with little bullets, little gel bead bullets. Yeah. Yeah. It says they're non-toxic, but I don't want to test that on my dogs. Anyway, this thing is cool as can be.

You have to put all the pieces together yourself. And so you learn how the mechanics work and the coding tools look. Super cool. Everything about this thing looks so cool. I wish I would have had this when I was a kid, but since I am just a big, stupid kid, I think.

I was about to say, what's the difference? Get it now. This is going to be in my Christmas, under the Christmas tree for sure. It looks so cool. I mean, you can have it in battle mode when you're going up against other people. You can place things around the arena, like power-ups and special abilities and things like that.

So you can like, you know, disable somebody's robo for a little while or like power up. It's got sensors on it. So it knows when it gets hit by the beads or fricking lasers. It's got lasers on it. I mean, you got to go watch the video on this thing if you haven't seen it. And it's got those cool wheels that let it, you know, move basically in any direction, which is super neat too.

Everything about this just screams to my inner child, get one of these now. It does look cool as hell. The price tag is a little bit insane. I'm glad my son isn't quite old enough yet to just basically see this and start screaming at me that he wants it. Yeah. Yeah. By the time he's old enough to want one, it should hopefully come down a little bit.

Yeah. Well, speaking of other gadgets I got this week, I finally got my eight sleep pod bed. This is one of those cool beds that basically, it's a foam mattress with a kind of a smart grid on top of it, which runs liquid through it.

Water, basically, distilled water. It's a high-tech water bed. It is a very high-tech water bed with an app and a subscription. Of course. Of course it's got a subscription. My bed has an app and a subscription. I bet your bed has a privacy policy too.

I didn't see it anywhere. I don't know. If it's got an app, you've got to have a TOS and a privacy policy. I'm sure I clicked through it in my rush to get this thing juiced up and going. I do enjoy their tagline that they put on their website. The first bed designed to boost your performance.

My performance and what? How's this going to? Oh, you just mean sleep. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I got it hooked up. I spent two nights on it so far. And oh my God, I swear I've had the best night's sleep of my life. And everybody at the company knows.

Yeah, they do. Because I get a sleep score and it tells me everything that I need to know. And here, let me pull up the app here and I'll just tell you some of the fun things that it tells me about my sleep. So on, let's see here. I had a 90% sleep fitness on the first night.

What the hell does that even mean? I'll tell you. Okay. Because you have goals for everything. Of course you do. We've gamified sleep. Exactly. So I set my target goal between seven and nine hours. So I barely hit it. I got seven hours and nine minutes. So I got a hundred on that. Wake up consistency.

So I got out of bed when I was supposed to. A hundred percent on that one. Time to fall asleep. It took me 18 minutes to fall asleep. So I got a hundred percent on that one. Time to leave bed, though, was 25 minutes. You're supposed to you're supposed to get out of bed in under five minutes.

You are a single man. Well, I did get out of bed. I took a leak and then I came back and laid down for a bit because it was too damn early in the morning and the dogs didn't want to go pee. So I read a book. So it gives you a timeline of, you know, how you did during the night when you were out of bed, awake, when you're in light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep.

I don't know how it's calculating the deep and REM sleeps. I'm sure it's just movement of some sort. Yeah, it's got to be movement tracking. That's all anybody is using right now, which, as we know, is not terribly accurate. Well, the other things that are interesting, it's got my heart rate. So it's got my heart rate.

It's got my respiratory rate, bed temperature surfaces. So the minimum was 73 degrees. The max was 82 degrees. I can't wait to see the interactive fart map. Oh, yeah. Be nice. The other issue with this is I have two dogs in the bed who do move around.

So I'm sure some of this is going to be inaccurate. But I wore my aura ring at the same time. And the numbers kind of matched up, which makes me think since both of them use the health app inside of Apple, I think they might be cross pollinating. It's getting some of my data from my aura ring. Right.

Which is cool. You know, it's like if you got all these freaking devices, let them talk to each other so you can get a better picture of how things are going. But at the end of the day, I don't care. It's got a timer. So it just turns the bed down to the right temperature before I go to bed. So when I get in, it is chilly as can be. And then, you know, keeps me cold all night long.

And it's comfortable. It's really comfortable. But this is the first bed I've new bed that I've gotten in 13 years. Yeah, you were due. Yeah. Yeah. That old silly posture, Pedic was a workhorse. Got me through some, got me through a lot of times, but it was time to go. It was definitely time to go, especially when you had to like get up momentum to get out of the big valley that you're sleeping in because the whole thing is collapsed.

Anyway, if you're in the market for a bed, definitely check out Eight Sleep. It's not cheap, but man, is it nice. There'll be a link in the show notes. You have to go to the show notes. I can't tell it to you over the air because it's got a coupon code for $150 off. But we're not allowed to do that. Oh, look, you can connect it to your Amazon Echo.

Yeah, you can say, what's the lady in the tube? Make the bed cold. Which is kind of cool. Kind of cool. And I also picked up the SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable External SSD USB-C USB 3.1 SDSSDE60-2T00-G25.

All right. This is like a really, really tiny SSD, and it's battle-hardened. $327.99 is definitely not cheap. But what I was running into, I work off, you know, the old spinning disk 8TB drives.

Right. And they are pretty slow because I'm opening up pretty massive files for all the shows I do. So it does take a little bit of time. Not so much that I need to go do this, but what it really gets me is these hard drives, you have to have a power supply. Yeah. So if I'm in the house and I want to, like, work on something, I got to go find the cord.

I got to plug it in, find the other cord, or take my drives back out to the office, boot up the iMac, get everything going. And when I looked at all the data that I'm using, I'm basically under 2TB for, like, the day-to-day files. So I'm like, why not just get one of those? It's USB-C, so it's going to be super fast.

And it also has a 3.1 converter, so I can use it on my laptops and just keep that as my main drive now. And then just use Carbon Copy Cloner to sync it to my 8TB drive. So I always have backups. Right. But it seems like for $3.27.99 for an SSD, it's not too bad.

And it's, like I said, it's hardened. It's got, like, a, you know, a rubberized case, and it's dust and water resistant. So why not? Because that would be nice when I have to travel. When's that going to happen again? When you have to leave the house. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. But it'd be nice to have everything with me.

So I will have a review of that next time. It was supposed to be here this morning, but, of course, Amazon is late. I ran across a really interesting article. Obviously, I've been seeing a lot of things about my kid, because he's coming online, about to turn three.

Very aware of things, and it's just, man, things go fast, Jason. But I saw this, why kids still need analog clocks. Now, I love analog clocks. I have a couple, I keep a wall in my house that's kind of like a newsroom, where I have, you know, LA time, New York time, Toronto.

Well, Toronto is New York time. You get it. London, all that sort of stuff. I've got, like, five different clocks for different times around the world. And I've always liked that look, and I'll keep that forever. But a lot of people don't even have analog clocks in their house anymore. They only have digital clocks. And time management specialists are saying that analog clocks can teach kids something that digital clocks can't, and that is that time moves.

Academic coach, Leslie Josel, often gives parents this advice. Hang an analog clock in every room your children spend time in, including the bathroom. If you have a teen, definitely put one in the bathroom, she suggests. Hmm. Nefarious activities. The problem with digital is that it only gives you one time, the present.

It's not going to get any cleaner, buddy. Put it down and get out of here. As you can see, it has been five minutes of you trying to clean that thing. You can see what came before it or how much time you have left. With an analog clock, particularly one with a second hand, kids can visualize the passage of time as it happens, making them more aware of this moment relative to the past and future.

It can also give them a feel for how long it takes to complete certain tasks, such as washing dishes or writing a book report, and plan accordingly. So seeing time as a one-hour pie can also help them break down projects into smaller tasks more intuitively, something you don't ever really even think about, you know, and people just don't have analog clocks around anymore.

So if you've got kids, get some analog clocks. I thought this was a fascinating article. I was actually surprised because I, well, you know, it comes from my favorite website in the world. So what are you going to do there? Every now and again, you know, even a stop clock is right twice a day.

I've got analog clocks all over the house and I love them. I can still tell time. If I didn't have this Apple watch, I would be wearing an analog watch. But well, you can actually set your Apple watch to look like an analog watch. I do have a face for that, which I never, ever use. Yeah, never use that one.

Anyway, I like this a lot. And now you can get an, that's right, an Amazon Alexa enabled old school clock. Yeah, I'll pass on that. You can get a five pack of, or four pack of clocks from Ikea for like five bucks. They're great. Yeah, I think you're going to be able to get that Echo enabled clock for five bucks soon.

They keep dropping the price on it because nobody wants it. Nobody wants it. Yep. And I found this one over on Twitter. Mustavo Gaius sent this one in and I love this. Inception style photos tilt Russian cityscapes at dramatic angles. Did you get a chance to look at these pictures? Yeah, they look amazing.

They're so cool. Love to see this in other cities as well. It's very cool. Yeah, yeah. So you're going to have to go to the show notes to see this one because obviously we're an audio podcast, but that's kind of the point of this section. So definitely go check that out. The link will be in the show notes at gog.show slash three five three.

And thank you to Mustavo for sending this one along. Closing shout outs. My first closing shout out is to not a friend of the show, but somebody that we both love LeVar Burton. If he listens, if you're listening, let us know. That'd be awesome. Host of Reading Rainbow, obviously data on Star Trek, many other things as well.

He was honored in his hometown of Sacramento, California. They have given him a bench at a public park. How very cool for him. Yep. We did an interview with LeVar Burton on the Jordan Harbinger show, which actually comes out on Tuesday. So you might want to check that out. He told us about this, that it was coming and he was very, very proud of it.

Yeah, as he should be. Absolutely. Absolutely. And definitely check out his podcast because it is so cool. He's such a good reader and the stories he picks are fantastic. And Jessica Jones is out today. So I know what I'm going to be doing all weekend. That's fantastic because I just finished Good Omens.

So I'm ready for a new show. I got two to go. I think I'm going to knock those out first because now it's like, OK, now I now I want to get through it. They're really good. And I just I just want to finish it now. Well, media candy is on Tuesday. So finish it up. I will. I will. And finally, Monty Python star Sir Michael Palin is now a sir.

Obviously, he was knighted by Prince William. So he is truly now a knight that can say knee. Congratulations. It is a very cool video. I highly recommend checking that one out, too. So good on you, Michael Palin. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. 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 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 353. 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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