354: Viva Le Libra!

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Private Internet Access, the VPN trusted by the Grumpy Old Geeks and battle tested in court. Go to GOG.show slash VPN to get yourself protected. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. And this episode is also brought to you by beer and your child who I hear in the background. Yes. Apparently you and my child share the same bedtime because we're recording a little bit later today and he should be in bed already. And my wife better be getting on that right now. And you just told me that you should be in bed already as well.

I should be. This is 54 minutes past my bedtime. I brought the dogs in the studio here and they are already sacked out after about 30 seconds because they're like, dude, what's going on? This is not, it's not natural, man. This is not natural. Yes. And speaking of not natural, yes, I know I screwed up. Thank you to everybody that wrote in as a testament to how tired we are.

I said LeVar Burton played Data. Obviously he plays Geordie LaForge. Correct. We fucked up! I fucked up. And, you know, as a testament to how tired we both are, you did not catch me on it. I did not at all. It just rolled right through. It's like, oh. It just rolled right through.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That was probably wrong. I think that wasn't it, Brent Spiner? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what you going to do? Whatever. What are you going to do? We're tired. Yes. Always tired. I've been up since four in the morning. Oh, man. Okay. So a little follow up here. We missed this one by mere minutes last time. House Intel chair sounds alarm in Congress. First hearing on deep fake videos. So we missed this one. This is over from CNN. And I say that much by that much. And I

swear to God, the guy who is in the video on CNN, it looks like a deep fake. Yeah, I watched it as well. It looked a little odd. It was very Max Headroomy. Yes, that dude has a giant head and that beard just makes it seem to float in the ether. I don't know. But yes, they were holding some deep fake hearings on the on the hill. And we'll see if anything comes of it. But I can tell you right now what exactly is going to come of this. And it's going to drive me mad in the same way that machine learning

and AI is driving me mad. Now, everything that has been manipulated will be called a deep fake. Of course, it will. Deep fakes are very specific things. The Nancy Pelosi video was edited. It was manipulated. It was not a deep fake. Yeah, they just slowed it down a little bit. Exactly. But now that's just like they do on the thing is, was it Jimmy Fallon where they do drunk Trump? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they just slow him down and make him sound drunk. Like we'll sound at the end of this episode. Exactly. Exactly how we'll sound at the end of this episode.

So, hey, man, at least they're trying. We rail against the machine and say, hey, come on, guys, do something. And at least they're doing something. I'm with you on that. And some more follow up on the wonderful job that people are doing. I'm attempting to get unionization going on, which is not happening. BuzzFeed journalists have walked off their job in four cities because it's been four months since they voted to form a labor union. But BuzzFeed still has not recognized them.

So dozens of frustrated employees walked off the job Monday at 2 p.m. I would argue that's not really showing your balls there very much. Put it in a half day's work. Yeah, seriously. More than a half day's work. I would have just done the old call in sick. But there you go.

So managers at BuzzFeed, which employ more than 200 journalists in the U.S., have been fighting with union representatives for months about how many employees can join the bargaining unit. And of course, it's come down to they said this, but he said this, but they said that. So nothing's happening. Okay. Yeah. And in San Francisco, they just all walked out at 420. That's just the way that goes.

That's just the way that goes. Yeah. No, I mean, keep going, guys. You know, power to the people, down with the man. That's right. I never thought I would be the one to say that. But hey, what are you going to do? BuzzFeed has actually turned into a decent journalism source. So strange times, my friend, strange times. Oh, very strange times. And this one comes from CNBC. Disconnecting to spend time with your kids could sabotage your career.

In the United States. Fuck it. In the United States. Yes. Everywhere else in the world. It's called fucking normal. Yes. But, you know, it's called having work-life balance and enjoying your life, not just being tied to your desk. And it goes on to say more companies are offering flexible work arrangements, including paternity leave and shortened work weeks. Yet studies reveal that taking advantage of these benefits could hurt your chances for advancement. According to a recent study, parents who work part-time have a

21% chance of being promoted within the next three years. Full-time counterparts have a 45% chance. And the average mother waits two years longer for a promotion than the average father. Yep. They also go on to say the key to instituting change in the workplace is for top executives to lead by example. Yeah, that doesn't really work anymore. Their example that they lead by is how big is my golden umbrella? Yes. And how many maids can I employ? Because I pay myself

10 times what I pay anybody even close to me. That's true. That's true. And it's probably golden parachute, not golden umbrella. It is golden parachute. It is golden parachute. But, you know, the golden umbrella does keep the shit from falling on you when you leave. I was going to let it slide because, you know, data.

Data. Exactly. Hey, man, at least I self-corrected on that one. I did, too, as soon as somebody tweeted me. And tweeted me and emailed me and tweeted me again. Thanks, guys. I'm glad you're on the job. Cheers, everyone.

In the news.

Unless you've been living under a rock today, Facebook has announced Libra, their cryptocurrency. And yeah, this is interesting. This is going to be a partnership between 100 organizations who will steward Libra into the future.

And I have to say, Facebook is about to understand what real power looks like. Yes. Congress is already calling for hearings. France says no fucking leeway. Putin is already wondering how he can get in on it, you know. And 27 companies so far have ponied up about 10 million dollars for a seat at the table to oversee and control how this thing is going to turn out.

And have you looked at the list, Brian? I have. We have Women's World Banking, which they put at the top. I'm sure that was a PR move. Kiva, also at the top. Booking Holdings, Andreessen Horowitz, Farfetch, because this is pretty fucking far-fetched. Iliad, MasterCard, Uber, PayU, Mercado Pago, Coinbase, PayPal.

I love this one. Creative Destruction Lab. Bison Trails, because this is a whole bunch of bullshit. So they're in on it. At the very bottom of the circle, of course, it's Facebook and Calibra, because they want to, you know, they want to stay away from the spotlight. Zappo, Anchorage, Spotify, which is a head scratcher.

eBay. I can't even read this one, even with my new glasses. Something initiatives. Stripe, Lyft, Visa, Thrive Capital, Ribbit Capital, because there's a lot of rabbit shit in this one, too. Union Square Ventures, Vodafone, and Mercy Corps. Those are the 27 companies that have ponied up $10 million each to start this thing out.

Notice there are no nation states in there. There's another big thing to notice in there. Not a single major U.S. bank. Not a bank. Not a single major U.S. bank. Yep. So if the next 73 or anything like the first 27, then that's kind of a world I don't want to live in.

So I'm just curious. What's going on with the timing of this? Because, you know, Facebook trust is at an all time low and they come out with wanting to disrupt the global financial system. The timing is based on numbers going down. People are still leaving Facebook.

Growth has stopped. That's going to cause big problems with shareholder value because right now the only way that Facebook continues to make money is growth. And their advertising model is being called into question. Their privacy policies are being called into question. They're getting fined left, right, and center all over the world.

They don't entirely know what's going to happen. They don't have a plan for anything. This is a pivot as far as I can tell, and it's an interesting pivot in that they've kind of figured they've known for a while now that what they what the last thing that Facebook really wanted to get out of us information wise was they wanted to get into our wallets and they realized that we were never going to give them our credit cards or our bank information.

They've tried and tried and tried, and we would not do that to them. So rather than trying to get our bank information, they're just going to try to turn themselves into our bank. That's the play here. It's a little more nuanced than that, because I watched a bunch of interviews with David Marcus, the guy who was on a beach in I think it was the Dominican Republic when he came up with this grand idea, and now he's the head of Calibra, Facebook's wallet division.

And I watched a bunch of interviews with him tonight because I had some time to kill while you were putting the kid to bed. And he envisions Libra to be around for hundreds of years, hundreds of years. So I looked it up. The closest translation for hubris that I can find in Latin is Superbia.

So, hey, Superbia. Yeah, they're coming for you. And he thinks that because they're just stewards and a single wallet provider that we should trust them because they're not they're not the you know, they're putting the they're putting the band together, but they're not the leader of the band. He says that the social data and financial data that Brian, try not to laugh.

OK, says they will never be commingled. Right. Yeah, sure. They won't. He said on national TV, many on many of these interviews where they hit him pretty hard. He's like social data and financial data will never be commingled.

And we know we know from his that's a complete load of shit. Of course, yeah, Facebook's Facebook's never updated their EULA. And he says that if people are sending money through Calibra, that Facebook can sell more ads because people will be spending more time on Facebook. Sure.

That's why you want to do it. No, that's that's that's a complete load of shit. Oh, and Jim Cramer thinks Libra is a good idea and that you should buy Facebook. So enough said there. Yeah, pretty much. Bang. Yeah. Boom. Exploding sound effects. Yeah. I wish I had my soundboard open anyway.

So the thing here is that, you know, if Libra actually got market penetration and saturation to all of the people that use Facebook and all of the people that would be coming online who are the unbanked and the unwashed masses and, you know, the billions of people who could use Libra to actually, you know, do banking transactions and things like that, they would be a threat to basically the currencies of any nation.

Because if Libra decides one day, it's like, no, we're not going to take Ukrainian pesos or whatever the fuck they use in Ukraine. Not pesos. They can. I know it's not pesos. They can destabilize a nation's currency. And, you know, that's what they want.

That's what they want. Of course, that's what they want. But it's never going to happen. We're already seeing nation states shut down on almost all crypto. Anyways, the fact that you think they're going to let this happen. And I still don't even believe that it's going to happen anyways. Just because Facebook has the user base doesn't mean that they're going to rush to give them their monies.

We've already seen that nobody trusts them. We've already seen a backlash towards crypto in the first place. People are pulling out the we know it's a fucking scam. We've been talking about how it's scam and the house of cards is coming down. It's the Winklevii twins are the only people who are going to make money off crypto and Facebook rolling out their own crypto, even though they say it's going to be backed by whatever.

Who knows what? That's the real problem. It's going to be backed by regular fiat currency. So it is a stable coin. It is not a it's not like Bitcoin that has nothing behind it. It's not an investment thing. So right. Exactly. It is supposed to be a unit of transaction that is not going to fluctuate with use.

So I don't see what they say. That's what they say. That's what they say. And there's a really good article over at the Wall Street Journal that starts to talk about this. And then people over at the Wall Street Journal, believe it or not, know a thing or two about money. And there's a professor, a Wake Forest University professor named Rana Hock, I believe, who says, what makes us better than what exists?

That's a real question, right? Like, we already have all these things. Why is Facebook rolling out something like this going to make it any better? And she said, it's almost like the term crypto is so sexy it puts the blinders on anyone asking all the questions that should be asked. Amen. We've been screaming that from the rooftops all the time anyways.

Yeah, I mean, that's the whole point. It's like this guy, this guy, David Marcus, is just like, look, we really wanted there to be a coin that we could use. The technology is not there yet. And we want this to be part of the world. So we just said we can't wait any longer and we're going to make it.

Nobody wants you to make it. That's the problem. And Facebook does not have a good track record about these sort of things. So why would we trust them? That's the real question. And we have a lot more. That's not there's many questions. Facebook said that Libra would be regulated, but they didn't say who or why or how we don't.

They just said it's going to be regulated. OK, how about some deets there? There's, you know, David Marcus does go into a lot of detail on regulation. But the problem is there are regulators in every country and in a lot of countries, every state. It is a morass of regulation.

The amount of people that they're going to have to hire to get this off the ground is almost going to make it instantly like a money loser. Anyways, just in the U.S. Now, and they're talking about being global, but just in the U.S. If they want to do this, they will have to comply with U.S. anti-money laundering rules, including staking steps to verify who is sending transactions through its platform.

That would collect with the social that would connect with the social graph then if they wanted to be able to tell who was sending money. Right. But wait, they thought they were going to keep it separate. They said they're pseudonymous transactions and not anonymous transactions. So you're basically in the same boat you're in with Ethereum and Bitcoin now.

So it can be reverse engineered to figure out who's doing the transaction. So law enforcement will be able to do the same thing that they can do right now with, you know, currently backtracing the blockchain and track these people down over time. So that's that's where he comes at with some of the regulation with around money laundering and that kind of thing.

Right. I recommend going to check out some of these interviews he's done. He did like probably 100 interviews this morning. He looked pretty frazzled. I think if you look at the timeline of interviews he did today, it's like, you know, he started the day really peppy and fresh. And by the end, he's like, I know you don't like Facebook anymore.

We're still going to do this. Leave me the fuck alone. I wonder why he's frazzled as he was laying on the beach in the Dominican Republic and thought he came up with the original idea of Facebook bringing out their own cryptocurrency since everybody's been expecting that for years. Well, yeah. I mean, do you still have any Facebook credits left that you can redeem?

Come on. This thing is a flash in the pan. Nobody's going to nobody with real power is going to let this happen. The central banks and there's no way. Nobody trusts these guys anymore. They have pissed in the well. Yep. So, I mean, look, France is just like, like I said, no way.

It's not going to happen. So, no, nice. Nice try, Mark. Nice try, Mark. But you should have laid low for about five more years and actually fixed your problems. But you didn't more than it is a completely separate entity, not even connected to Facebook at all. But there you go.

Anyways, on to real things going on in the world. Shit is going down in Hong Kong. Shit is going down. It is going down and masks, cash and apps. How Hong Kong protesters are finding ways to outwit the surveillance state. This is a great article over at The Washington Post. Hundreds, if thousands, if not millions of protesters are filling the streets of Hong Kong right now to protest a proposed bill that would permit the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, thus meaning they're totally fucked.

So they're organizing on an unprecedented level to deter government identification and punishment. They're using secure digital messaging apps such as Telegram and otherwise went completely analog in their movements. They would buy single-ride subway tickets with cash instead of prepaid stored value cards.

They're forging credit cards and mobile payments in favor of, sorry, they're forgoing credit cards and mobile payments in favor of using cash. And they're taking no selfies or photos of the chaos, meaning they're not Instagramming it and they're not documenting it and they're not being millennials. Awesome. They're professional protesters.

They're professional protesters that realize the reality of protesting in this current day and age, especially with, as we know, China's insane government surveillance system that's going on. And all of that is coming against Hong Kong, which is why they're freaking out and protesting. So good on them.

Keep at it. Do you remember the last time when they had these giant protests like, you know, several years ago? Yes, I do. Yeah, remember what they did back then? They used those mesh networks to stay off of Wi-Fi so they could all communicate with each other just on their cell phone, cell phone to cell phone to cell phone.

Yeah. I don't know if they, did they use that this time? Because maybe, I guess maybe the government figured that one out and how to get into it. I think the government figured that out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. China's pretty good. It's like, oh, fool me once, you know. Yes, and we will get you. Yeah, those mesh networks are really cool, though.

I thought that was a good idea. You know what they should have done? They should have just done this whole protest on AirDrop. There you go. Smart move. Call back. Now, going back to Facebook again, this is a fun time. Hundreds of active and former police officers are part of extremist Facebook groups.

Yay. Yeah. So a non-profit news organization called Reveal, which is run by the U.S. Center for Investigative Reporting, did a big study on this. They did a deep dive into a bunch of private Facebook groups where they found that they were either opened by, run by, or extremely populated by current or active retired police officers.

So more than 50 departments have now reportedly opened up internal investigations. In some cases, departments say they'll be evaluating officers' online activity to see if it may have influenced past policing conduct. At least one officer has been fired for violating department policies as a result of participating in these groups, some of which bear names like White Lives Matter and Death to Islam Undercover.

Oh, my goodness. Yes. The unifying thread to all these Facebook groups is that they are frequented and sometimes founded and operated by active and retired police officers, and they actively recruit other police officers to join. Yay. It's often difficult for Facebook to take action against individuals without large followings or specific groups if those groups are private and if those groups have taken measures, and this is where it gets crazy, to conceal the nature of their purpose.

So, as such, some organizations on Facebook use in-jokes and other far-right dog-whistling tactics to circumvent Facebook's algorithmic filters. Once again, the algorithms are never going to be enough. We need real people looking. So, rather than name their group something like Ku Klux Klan, which will easily get taken down, they will call themselves the Confederate Brothers and Sisters and be okay.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, not really. Also, not really that covert because they're not really that clever, but, you know. Well, that's the thing. Then Reveal says it identified these officers with the strategy that involved using data Facebook has since stopped providing to third parties due to develop or misuse, yet it's this data that allows watchdogs to reveal, like, reveal to do the investigations Facebook seemingly won't do.

So, Facebook could do this, but they won't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about them shutting down the access to, you know, all of the researchers who are actually trying to investigate war crimes. Yes. Ah, well, we're not, well, we are in many wars, but not domestic wars, but this seems like one of them.

I'm not going to say anything about the police because I got my ass handed to me on the platter last time I did. So, let's move on to the next story. All right. This is good. I was going to hold this one for more on of the week, but you've got a good one in there already. So, this is just going to go here. An image of a tech event in which two women CEOs were poorly photoshopped into a group of 15 men reignited a discussion last week about tech companies' ongoing failures to meaningly diversify their workforces.

This was a really bad Photoshop job. It was a horrible Photoshop job. Anybody, I'm not trained in Photoshop, and I do a better job than that. Well, I don't know about that. I've seen some of your show art, but at least there was no Pepe LeFrog in there.

Whatever. So, yeah, this has been ongoing. In 2018, Twitter put out the misleading diversity data that made it look like it was becoming more diverse, when in reality, the share of underrepresented minorities of the company had declined. So, they lied there. In May, a Google employee accused the search giant in a lawsuit of using bait-and-switch tactics to hire minorities in lesser positions than what they applied for as a way to juice its diversity stats.

BuzzFeed News found last week that a photo of the tech CEO event published in GQ showed 15 mostly white male executives and two women, but the two women CEOs, Lynn Jurek and Rizwana Bashir, had been Photoshopped in. The design house hosting the event said its doctored photo was a well-meaning attempt to get everyone into the picture, which prompts the question about why the two women weren't in the photo and why they were the only two women present in the first place.

Awesome. Well, as we know, women always go to the bathroom in pairs, so they had to actually wait for them to get back and the light was fading, so they just did it. Yeah, exactly. Or perhaps they were getting it on with former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who were also in attendance, but who were not pictured and did not get Photoshopped into the photo.

Wow. Okay. That's interesting. Right? A dick and a guy named Dick and a guy whose logo is a dick. And a guy who is a dick. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. All right. Well, yeah, this was definitely a step on your dick moment. If only we could use curse words for our titles.

I know. Sadly, we cannot. And finally, the big news came out this week. What we all wait for, the most powerful woman on the Internet, Mary Meeker's most important trends on the Internet report came out. Okay, I'm going to go take a jacuzzi right now while you go through this. So I'll be back in like 10 minutes.

I kind of feel like we have to since this is what we do, but here's all the bullet points. Some 51% of the world, 3.8 billion people, are Internet users as of last year up from 49%, 3.6 billion in 2017. Growth has slowed a little bit because so many people have come online that new users are harder to come by.

Right, Facebook? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. But also, you know, I think the big news here is that more than half of the world is now officially on the Internet. Yeah, which is pretty insane. Sales of smartphones are also going down because almost everybody has one already. And we don't need to upgrade like we used to.

As of last week, 7 out of 10 of the world's most valuable companies by market cap are tech companies, with only Berkshire Hathaway, Visa, and Johnson & Johnson making the top 10 as non-tech companies. All your usual suspects are in there. E-commerce is now 15% of retail sales.

I actually thought it would be a bit more than that, which is surprising to me. Growth has slowed. Yeah, I mean, retail, yeah, for retail, you still have to think about grocery stores and things like that, you know. No, that's true. Even though you can get Whole Foods deliveries, but yeah, retail still has, go to the mall on the weekend.

They still do a decent trade, even though mostly people are going in to try on the clothes because they don't have anything in stock and then go home and order it online. But, you know, there still is some retail going on, unless you're Sears or JCPenney's or Kmart or any of the other massive companies, big box companies that have shut down most of their operations at this point.

Internet ad spending is up 22% in 2018. Most of it, the lion's share, still on Google and Facebook, but Amazon and Twitter, I guess apparently fixed their ability to buy ads because I wasn't able to back when I tried to, are getting a growing share. Some 62% of all digital display ad buying is for programmatic ads, which will continue to grow.

Customer acquisition costs is going up. That's unsustainable because in some cases it surpasses the long-term revenue those customers will bring. Shocking. Well, that's interesting because that's how the porn industry ate itself because they kept upping and upping the cost to get a new user.

And it's like, okay, for our affiliate program, we're going to pay you $87 for a new user. That means that that user has to stay with us for three months and then we'll make $2 on that and then we're just leveraging the fact that they might stay for month four. And that's the same mechanics that happened before.

So that's interesting. That's very interesting. It's very scary though, too. Yes. There are a number of problems ahead for targeted advertising, including GDPR impact and other regulation, as well as pushes for more privacy from hardware and software companies like Apple. And I will interrupt here, Mary, and make a comment on here.

You included Facebook, but we know they just lie about it. So, you know, they're not pushing for any more privacy. True. Yep. Americans are spending more time with digital media than ever. 6.3 hours a day in 2018. Get off your fucking ass, people, and go outside.

6.3 hours? A day. Jesus Christ. People are also getting more concerned about time spent online. Shocking. Well, then get offline. Here's how it works. If you're concerned about being online, don't be online.

There you go. Innovation at tech companies outside the U.S. has remained robust. Popular areas include fulfillment, delivery, and payments. Okay. Images are increasingly the means by which people communicate because nobody can read anymore. The number of interactive gamers worldwide grew 6% to 2.4 billion last year as interactive games like Fortnite became the new social media for certain people.

The number of people who watch those games rather than then participate is swelling, too. And if anybody can explain that to me, please do. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard. If you're a gamer, it is kind of zen-like to watch somebody else play. It really is. I can't explain it. I don't understand it.

But it is actually kind of fun. All right. As privacy becomes a bigger selling point, expect more options to make your online communication safe. In quarter one, 87% of global web traffic was encrypted, up from 53% three years ago.

So there's a bit of good news there. Check out private internet access and toss us a few bucks. Yeah, that would be a gog.show.vpn. Thank you very much. I love this one. The internet will become more of a cesspool. No shit, Sherlock. Getting rid of problematic content becomes more difficult on a large scale, especially since the scaling involved here by all these companies.

They just didn't bother because they're just the platform. Remember? Yeah. I did a lot of interesting interviews this week, and I was reminded of the tragedy of the commons. Go look that up. And when you apply it to the internet, that's exactly what has happened.

Of the top 25 most valuable tech companies, 60% were founded by first or second generation immigrants. They employed 1.9 million people last year. New stricter immigration laws could negatively impact the tech industry and perhaps prevent our next Elon Musk from getting to the U.S.

Because they will be in Toronto. I do believe Steve Jobs comes from Syrian parents as well. And healthcare is steadily becoming more digitized. Expect more telemedicine and on-demand consultations. And hopefully, hopefully, some goddamn security and privacy to go with that.

Yeah. And reform around healthcare. Please. For God's sake. And that's, that's your Mika report.

Media candy. Jessica Jones, season three, the final battle. I don't know what to call it. The last stand of Marvel's Netflix universe. Yeah. Has dropped.

I have watched two episodes. They've both been fantastic. Loved them so far. I'm two in as well. God, I'm going to miss her playing that character. And I'm going to miss the show. You know what's funny? I always hated the, the blondie. Yep. Uh, like her, her, like, how do you hear her? Sister. Sister.

Yeah. Sister-ish. Yeah. Uh, I think she's great this season. I really like her. I'm actually liking her more than Jessica. Yeah. It's a, it's a good season so far. I'm really liking it. Um, you know, season two wasn't the best. It certainly wasn't as good as season one. Season one was amazing, but this has some potential. So I'm looking forward to finishing it up and then being really sad that there will be no more.

Yeah. It's very sad. Very, very sad. And, uh, did you finish Good Omens? Of course I did. What'd you think? Fucking loved it. Yeah, it was good. It was good. It was picture perfect all the way through. It was everything I wanted it to be. So I have, I have zero complaints about Good Omens at all.

Good to hear. All right. So what about you? Well, I loved it. I loved every second of it. I thought it was really well done. It was a bit cheese, but it was good cheese. I enjoyed it. It's Good Omens. It's supposed to be cheese. It's Terry Pratchett. Cheese is built into the premise.

Production values. Oh, those were fine. Those were absolutely fine. It was fine. Yeah. Come on. I liked it. So it was very good. Um, this is weird news for us to throw into this show, but I've got to say I'm kind of excited about this, particularly since I've been seeing Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on Frankie and Grace on Netflix, just knocking it out of the park and just having amazing chemistry.

Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin are set to return for a nine to five sequel. One can only hope it's set in the Bay Area and it's called nine to midnight. Six, six, seven. That's what it's going to be called. Yes. There you go. The funny thing about this is when I woke up the other morning, I would, I had the theme song to nine to five stuck in my head and I had one of those moments of just like drop

my coffee cup almost when I saw that you put this in the show notes. I don't know how it got stuck in my head. I don't know. Maybe I probably saw it like on a news headline scrolling by and it just got stuck somewhere, you know, some Bader Meinhof happened somewhere along the way, but I was just like gobsmacked when I saw that this was in the show notes and I'd been humming the song in the morning trying to get it out of my head.

That's amazing. It was very, very strange to see this, but I'm very excited about this. It's one of my favorite movies. I actually have this on the list for Does It Have Legs? Excellent. Well, you better get to it before the sequel comes out. Well, we'll do it in 2027 because that's pretty much our production schedule on that show.

That's true. That's true. And in this, in our show, I've talked an awful lot about the band that I really loved, Lush and Mickey Barini, the one of the two lead singers and main songwriters, new band, Purushka, have come out and she has penned a really great article over at a site called The Creative Independent, which I'd never heard about, but I've gone through a lot of their articles now and they just reach out to really creative people and have them write stuff.

And I've liked a lot of the articles over there. This is called On the Peaks and Pitfalls of Being a Songwriter in a Band. And it is a no hold bars write up about what being in the music industry is like, particularly if you're a woman, what actually happened with Lush, which it was kind of always shrouded in a bit of mystery.

It is just very, very brave of somebody to come out and just write this. It's absolutely fantastic. And even if you're not a big fan of Lush or of Mickey's, if you're a fan of bands and the music industry, read it. Cool. I'll definitely check it out. I'm going to subscribe to that website, too, because I kind of like that.

Yeah, it's very cool. I don't know how I ran across this one. It's over at Mail Magazine. It's called The Youths Are Bringing CDs Back. And it's kind of interesting that, you know, kids have been talking about the vinyl. We got, you know, a friend of the show, MXV, always bitching and moaning about vinyl, vinyl, vinyl, vinyl, vinyl, vinyl.

But I'm thinking about CDs when I was reading this and I'm like, you know what? If you're on a budget, CDs are actually a pretty good way to really build a solid music collection nowadays. As opposed to, you know, just going on and downloading everything for free.

Well, yeah, but if you want to build a music collection that is physical, you know. And you know what I've always said about it. My biggest problem with, as much as I love Spotify and the fact that everything that I could ever possibly want to listen to in the world is on there, I don't have a curated collection anymore.

No curated collection. The closest I have is my iTunes library. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I miss liner notes. I miss opening up either an album or a CD and having the lyrics, which we'll talk about very shortly, and photos and things from the band.

I mean, you know, these are just kind of cultural relics now. And I think that I was actually looking in my studio. I'm like, maybe I could put up a, you know, a bookshelf over here and just fill it up with some of my favorite CDs. So I have them around for when, you know, when the power goes out and I just have to plug in my generator and fire up the old disc man and listen to it.

But, you know, and the thing, the thing that I had always pushed for, because, you know, that was my career for almost 20 years. As I saw CDs going away and it was all moving towards streaming, my push with all my bands was to make the websites that to put the time and the money into the personal pictures and the stories and write a write a little get that get the band members to write something about every single track on every single album.

So it was all there on the website, but then all the money went away and nobody wanted to put any money into the website. And they're all just fucking WordPress piece of craps that point to merch or ticket sales. Yeah. Yeah. You did some really interesting stuff with Coldplay, though, with didn't you make an iBook for them? Yeah.

Yeah, we did. Yeah. An iBook. And we tried to make sure that their website was as in-depth as possible, which they've continued to do. I have to say, even though I'm not working with them anymore, they put some money into it and they have a big timeline and and they've kind of done all the sort of stuff that I pushed all the other bands to. To do as well.

So good on them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, things like that are what the web was for originally. Not the not the cesspool that we have turned it into nowadays. But, you know, this digital archive of all knowledge and things like that. I think I think you were on the right track with that.

And it's sad that, yeah, nobody's no money for it. Well, that and there's no money for it anymore. Yeah. At the library. Brian, I have finished Fall or Dodge in Hell.

Yep. Okay. How far are you into the book? I got stuck into the morass at about 35 to 45 percent of the way through that I think you told me that I need to power through. And I've been unable to power through. Should I power through?

I'm thinking that if you're at the point where you have to power through at that point in the book, you can probably throw it away. Oh, damn it. So I subscribe to the Recommendo podcast, which is Kevin Kelly, one of the founding, the founding editor of Wired magazine.

Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing and somebody else who I don't know. You mean mailing list, not podcast, right? Because I'm mailing list. My bad. My bad. I'm on a podcast right now. So and it's late and I've had I've had a few little somethings from Laganita. So cut a brother some slack here.

Okay. Well, in the Recommendo podcast, Kevin Kelly actually reviewed Fall or Dodge in Hell. And he and I agreed to a T. The first 400 pages of this 850 page book are excellent. They're excellent.

The last 450 pages can you can just go burn them in a hellfire as far as we're concerned. Okay. So here's the problem I have with that. The 400 or so pages that I've made it through so far were well written, but I wouldn't call them excellent because they were obviously all built up for something.

And if the something that it was building up to was 400 pages of shit, then it's all shit. Yeah. Here's the problem. Basically, what it does is it skews from the real world where everybody is figuring out how to run the computers to keep the afterlife going.

Yes. And then it goes into what happens in the afterlife. I just read about 350 pages in a row of somebody building leaves. Yeah, it kind of there's a there's a spot where it comes back and then it goes back into it. For the rest of the book with about maybe 20 pages at the end.

That wraps it all up. So I should just go read the last 20 pages and call it a day. Yeah. Yeah. If you want even even if you here's the deal. Don't even bother. Don't even bother. I'll just read the Wikipedia entry. Exactly.

Go read a 15 page synopsis of it because it is it is such a slog. As as we say in the industry, the juice was not worth the squeeze. So I think I knew Neil Stevenson rule is if it's over 500 pages, I'm out.

Honestly, my new Neil Stevenson rule is when you feel like you need some Neil Stevenson in your life, go back and read Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Actually, just go back and read Diamond Age because Diamond Age is better than Snow Crash. Well, see, here's what screwed me up.

Then he wrote Seven Eves. I love Seven Eves. I know. Here's the thing. Seven Eves follows the same thing, though. So you've got this technological buildup and then you've got this non-technological follow up, right?

It's exactly the same fucking format, except Seven Eves was 80 percent lead up and 20 percent follow up. This is like sporadically in between like 40 percent lead up and 60 percent follow up.

All right. And it's eight hundred and fifty pages, so it is not it is a significant time commitment. And I'm pissed off. I am pissed off at Neil Stevenson for writing this fucking book.

That's all I'm going to say. I really I mean, it's a 31 hour audio book. That is almost a work week. It's ridiculous. OK, you know, I mean, look, Kevin Kelly, who I'm sure is friends with Neil, came out on a public forum and said, yes, get more than half of the book because it wasn't fucking worth it, you know?

Great. Oh, man. Waste of my time. Waste of time. Waste of money. I'm going to return this damn thing because I think I'm still in the window. I'm going to return it with prejudice and say, can I get two credits back? Because that was 31 hours. 31 hours.

Oh, and yeah, yeah. So Neil does not have a good track record with me right now at all. On the plus side, he's releasing a short story, a novella in a couple, a couple of months, I believe. So it'll be short. I'm going to buy that in paperback and use it to wipe my ass just in it's just just in sheer vindictiveness.

You do realize that's about the same level of vindictiveness as all the like crazy God people that bought the Beatles albums and just burned them, right? Still made them a lot of money. I know because I still hold out hope that someday he'll write an actually good book again. He did. Seven Eves. That was only like three years ago. It took two and a half years to read.

That's the problem. It keeps screwing us around this way. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. Great book. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I still, I, Seven Eves for me, I liked the beginning. I hated the end. I love the whole damn thing. It's not a great book. Nah. Well, and then there was what, Anathem, or?

I hated that one. Yeah. But then Read Me was good. Reemdi. Reemdi. Whatever. Whatever. Reemdi was not that great either. I liked it. Data. Well, at some point, William Gibson will finally publish this next book. It's been pushed another year. It's been pushed to January next year.

After being pushed to January this year. I'm convinced William Gibson and George R.R. Martin are sitting on a beach somewhere laughing their asses off. They're seriously sitting there having Mai Tais going, these guys think we're actually going to write another book? We're going to live off these pre-sales for the rest of our lives.

Moron of the Week. Ryan, I have two Morons of the Week this week. All right. Actually, I don't know if this is a Moron of the Week or a Hero of the Week. But Brooklyn Burger King delivered beef whoppers to customers expecting impossible burgers. So.

I'm going to go with Hero. I'm going to go with some heroes don't wear capes. They wear crowns. They do wear crowns. Exactly. I think a friend of the show, it makes me say the same thing. So, yeah, the Burger King in Brooklyn were taking online orders.

And so they thought that these, they, the people that were ordering thought that they had the impossible whopper. 100% whopper, 0% beef. And turns out they didn't. Well, these were delivery people who were taking them to them.

These were online orders. So they were getting delivered, you know, by the Brooklyn version of Deliveroo. And turns out the driver was supposed to tell them that their whopper has actually been swapped out with a real whopper. Their impossible whopper has been swapped out with a real whopper.

Well, turns out a lot of the drivers didn't actually follow instructions. Go figure. Shocking. Yes, fresh talent, as we call that. Look, if you're so lazy, too lazy to get off your ass and put on your skinny jeans and walk yourself down to Burger King, you fucking hipsters.

What are you doing eating a Burger King anyways? And you have to fucking order somebody to deliver it to you. You get what you get. Yeah. Some people didn't even find out until later when they went into the store to find out that they actually don't sell the impossible whoppers, which is great.

I was incredulous. He says it's maybe 20 percent poisoning. This is a city where there are a lot of reasons why people don't eat meat from religion to health to ethics. And OK, if you care about religion, health or ethics, don't eat a Burger King. Exactly.

Exactly. You're eating a fucking Burger King. You idiot. Oh, my God. You're in Williamsburg, man. There's like you can get vegan patties like next door to your shitty walk up apartment.

What are you doing ordering in Burger King? Artisanal tree bark shaved off of the oak tree right outside of your your brownstone. You know, you can get that kind of thing. Burger King is drunk midnight food like what we're going to need when this podcast is over.

Oh, no. Taco Bell. I'm going. All right. Del Taco. Actually, I'm back in California. I can go to Del Taco. Man, maybe I'll get a maybe I'll get a Deliveroo from In-N-Out. But anyway, yes, here's the deal. Nobody died. So shut the fuck up. You're all fine. It's not that bad. My second moron of the week.

And I don't know how to how to handle this one because it was just the funniest thing I've ever read. Elon Musk tweeted, just deleted my Twitter account. Is it still there? He took down the tweet and he took down the tweet, but his Twitter account is actually still there.

Man likes the 420. That's all I got to say. Apparently. Yeah. Apparently that that thing on Rogan really kind of, you know, sat with him pretty well. I would give Elon Musk the same, the same advice I gave many of my, shall we say more fun loving music clients.

Yes. Delete it off your phone. Let us do it for you. Exactly. And I don't know if you saw, he did post a fantastic GIF of the, the, one of his rockets, the Falcon, and it said Falcon rising.

And so I had to retweet that with this, which is exactly what Elon says every time he has sex. Feedback loop. Over on Patreon, we have zero new Patreon subscribers. So what the hell people, where's the love?

Where's the love? Vinny writes in though, deep fake Zuck action. How lovely. Some tongue in cheek action for this happy hump day. And this is an article about the deep fake of Mark Zuckerberg that has been making the rounds, which is pretty awesome. And I got to say to Facebook's credit or just instant karma, since they refused to take down the video of Nancy Pelosi sounding drunk, they had zero legs to stand on.

So Facebook had to leave it up. Yep. Hilarious. It's down on YouTube, both of them and Nancy Pelosi, but they have to keep it up on Facebook because they didn't take anything else down. So yeah, there you go. Uh, Adam also writes us that piece about the new drone tank instantly reminded me of one of my favorite toys as a kid, big track from Milton Bradley.

It was about as close as we could get to a remote controlled tank way back then. And he sends us a YouTube link to it and it looks fun. I was so pissed off. I never got this at Christmas. That's why I want this new tank. So goddamn much. But here's the thing. I live with a 60 year old woman who will mock me incessantly if I go around with a remote controlled tank, a drone I can get away with, but pretty sure she does anyway.

So you might as well bite, bite the bullet on that. I did catch her making fun of me to her friends the other day. So there you go. Yeah. Over at PayPal, Linda sent us a donation. And so did Joseph. And he said, here's $10 for Jason. I'd appreciate it if he can provide me with the information as to where those eager to please $5 horse are located.

Can I get them through Deliveroo? It's difficult to afford higher priced ones in the current gig economy. Stay grumpy. I'm just going to say, as a comment, our hashtag no tell motel challenge should let you know where you can find a lot of these. That's true. That's true. Or also Detroit.

And Young Woo writes us with another donation as well. I was rather surprised to hear your take on YouTube's crackdown on Steven Crowder. Granted that YouTube or Facebook stance as we are just platforms have allowed many sexist, racist, alt-right, anti-vaxxer, flat-earther, conspiracy theorists, and hateful voices to creep in and prosper.

But once we start expecting platforms to moderate, the power to shut down certain voices will almost always be put in the wrong hands to suppress opinions they politically disagree with. As the media regulation is concerned, both traditional and social media do have a clear standard on where to draw the line on content that is obviously harmful.

Do they? But certainly the devil's in the details when drawing that line on gray areas, especially in the age where you can make anything sound racist, sexist, and hateful if taken out of context. Hmm, I can. Steven Crowder provides quite a lot of context.

Steven Crowder provides a fuck ton of context. Yes. Accompanied by just enough Twitter outrage for grumpy geeks who slam technology for dumbing down to the millennial generation, surely you guys can also see the consequence of the platform silencing the voice some people disagree with. The solution is to have more conversation.

No. No. Not in this case. Not in this case. And yes, it would be nice if the recommendation algorithm does not make someone spiral down to hold extreme views. Keep on doing the God's work and Jason. Deliveroo! Well, my take on Steven Crowder, he's a homophobic piece of shit.

That's all there is to it. He's a homophobic. He's providing plenty of context that he is. He's a shit. Yes. So I'm sorry. I have many gay friends who I count as some of the most beloved people in my life and anybody that shits on them, I shit on those who shit on them. So and my big point about this, my main point about this is the real evil about this is the algorithms and you cannot separate the algorithm from the platform right now because that's how they make money.

It's a feature, not a bug. So until that gets sorted out, what do we do? I agree with you that perhaps some people that are borderline and just have opinions that aren't popular could potentially have a place out there and should. But the algorithms push us down these rabbit holes.

They push people deeper and deeper into crazier and crazier and crazier opinions. And it really causes some severe damage. Now it's causing damage to the fabric of our society and the story. So fix the algorithms and then maybe I'll agree with you. But until then, get them off.

Yeah. And for me, it's not even the algorithms. It's the fact that they haven't banned him because he has three million followers. They care about it's about money. Yeah, it's literally about money. Like Google needs more fucking money. Seriously. Do they do they really need more money?

Are those do those new delivery drones cost that much? No, they don't. Get rid of the assholes over on Twitter. Ma 6502 writes in. This is cool. Lyric site accuses Google of lifting its content. This is the greatest thing I've seen in a long time.

In a long time. Lyric site genius are geniuses. That's all I have to say about this. So what they did was they literally embedded Morse code into their lyrics using commas and apostrophes to spell out red handed.

So when Google took their lyrics and posted them on Google, when you're searching for lyrics, they could catch them. I love this. I love this. I do not know what the financial arrangements genius has about posting song lyrics, but I don't care.

I really don't care. Even if they're thieves, Google is thieving from the thieveries. Well, I have some comments to make on this, having been somebody who has coded. But first, there's a bit of follow up, because since we got sent this, I discovered that Google is not sitting idly by as part of the larger defense of its lyric search practices.

The company has mentioned that it will, in quotes, soon attribute the third party providing song lyrics. This should, in quotes, make it clear as to where the lyrics came from. The company said, in theory, this would point complaints to the third parties instead of making Google should share all the blame.

Basically, Google gets its stuff from third party vendors as well. So like one's called Lyric Find, a key supplier for Google's lyrics, which is saying that they didn't get lyrics from Genius and even ruled it out as a lyric source as a courtesy. Those alleged copy lyrics were available on many other lyric sites, the company argued.

As such, Lyric Find may have inadvertently grabbed lyrics from another company that was using Genius lyrics without permission. So stolen from a stolen from a stolen from a stolen from a stolen to get to Google, which makes me wonder how much money are lyrics really worth anyways? Because apparently there's a bunch of companies out here.

And I will tell you for a motherfucking fact, as somebody that ran every goddamn artist websites for years, you stole it all from fucking me because I got the actual lyrics. I typed them in. I put them up in HTML on the official artist websites, and that's where you fucking got them.

So send me a goddamn check. This whole thing is thievery all the way down, and it's such bullshit. It is such bullshit. And the fact that Google is saying that, oh, we're going to give attribution to the site and still show the content of the site, they should be sued into oblivion for that because it's like, okay, I'm going to show you a page on someone's website that now you don't have to visit their website.

So you're not going to see the ads on their website, which are probably fucking provided by Google to begin with. Yep. And they're just, oh, it's ridiculous. This whole thing is ridiculous. Song lyrics should just be public domain, and we need Lyricopedia. Put it out there, Jimmy Wales.

I'll send you $5 a year when you put up that sad photo of you on the header going, it's like, yeah, children in Africa need Wikipedia, too. Please donate now. So anyway, moving on, moving on. Third in command writes us.

I can't think of a worst case of data privacy going wrong. CEOs dabbling with sensitive data with zero skills. And this is a link over at the Times in the UK. Parents anger as child sex change charity puts private emails online. Whoops. Oops. Daisy. Yeah.

It's a controversial transgender lobby group that campaigns for children to be given sex change hormone treatments has published part of its email database on the Internet, including intimate details of the vulnerable youngsters. It seeks to help. I have a feeling GDPR is going to have something to say about this. Well, they self-reported, which was very interesting.

When they got busted, they actually self-reported themselves. So, you know, they came out of their own closet. There you go. Good for them. Yep. And David writes in, the GOG curse has struck again. The grumps have killed ThinkGeek. We did just talk about them.

Yeah, we did. We did. After 20 years of serving the nerds of the Internet with a wide variety of geek-related merchandise, ThinkGeek will officially close down its website and will migrate its operations over to its parent company, GameStop's website instead. I did not know that they were owned by GameStop.

Now, in the meantime, the store is holding a 50% off, quote unquote, moving sale. And David goes on to say, do you all take turns riding atop the pale horse or is it more of a sidecar set up? Oh, I drive. Well, I don't know. I mean, actually, yeah, you did kill David Bowie and ThinkGeek, so that's all you.

And I got to say, they deserve to go out of business because I went over and I did a search for Unix and I got, don't! Our robot monkeys found zero results for Unix. The bread and butter of ThinkGeek when they started were those clever Unix t-shirts that we all wore. It's like there's no place like 127.0.0.1.

Now, if you got it, then good for you. But that's that is not ThinkGeek anymore. It's just shitty Star Wars and Harry Potter and just it's just crap. So they deserve to go out of business. Jason, you remember when we started this segment before we started recording and we said, OK, we should just burn through this really quickly.

You're definitely getting buzzed. Yep. Sorry. All right. David writes in quick question. What are you thinking? Carbonite or Backblaze for online backup? I used to use Backblaze for a few years and never once use it as a retrieval service. So I canceled it. I got too much data. So I just handle it myself and, you know, data transfer fees.

You don't have too much Geordi. Oh, God. Call back. Dad joke. That's a dad back, I guess. Yeah. No. So, yeah, I just I handle that myself. I don't use online backup for anything anymore, except for iCloud for my photos from my phone.

That's it. Mustafa writes in Pakistani government officials accidentally turn on cat filter doing Facebook live. Hilarity ensues. This is by far the best thing I've ever seen on the Internet ever. I don't know if it's the best thing, but it's pretty fucking close. Yeah.

So it's the provincial government of Pakistan's Khyber. I can't even pronounce that, sadly. But yeah, they were doing a live stream and they were speaking with journalists and somebody in charge of it forgot to turn off the cat filter. It is amazing. It's amazing.

It's just you have to see it to believe it. You do. You do. And they left it on for the whole thing. By the way, having now seen this, I would like the ability to turn on cat filters on my TV for, say, the everything, everything. Yes. But certainly the next State of the Union.

That would be very fun. Well, I've got other filters that I'd like to turn on for State of the Union. But all right. Over at GOG.show, Daryl wrote in, I found this article on potential viruses in Samsung TVs. Stay fuzzy, grumpy and paranoid. And this is Samsung TV should be regularly virus checked.

The company says a how to video on the Samsung support USA Twitter account demonstrates the more than a dozen remote control button presses required to kill the evil baddie in some video game because that requires a lot of weird button presses, right? That's supposed to be a gaming joke. How'd it go?

No, no, it failed. Failed miserably. So the interesting thing is they took down the tweet after like they got all the press about it. Yeah, because everybody went saying, oh, or you could just fix it yourself and push out a software update. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I would like to point out, since I've been doing mental models and cognitive biases, this would be the Barbra Streisand effect.

You don't take it down. You just don't even point to it again. Anyway, yes, Samsung stepped on their dick this week with that. But if it's connected to the Internet, it's going to get hacked. So there you go. Yes. Raj writes in, nice summary in the New York Times regarding how horrible electric scooters are.

And it's called Scooter Madness. And it's a fun read. It's everything that we've said. Yeah. Yeah. And Francois writes in, I greatly enjoy listening to your show on my way to work. It's both informative and enjoyable. And you're not afraid of discussing the political side of things when appropriate. This is why I was taken a bit back lately, as I didn't hear anything about the U.S.

crackdown on Huawei as part of the trade war with China. And look, I even got the name right. I was going to say, look at you. You said Huawei right. Finally. And I'm buzzed. As part of the trade war with China and all repercussions, it might. Maybe I have to be drunk to say it right. I'm saying this, man.

Yeah. Yeah. Now we've figured out your speech impediment. You're sober. That's your speech impediment. Totally. When I started reading articles about the events, I was really looking forward to hearing your views on the situation. But as I went through the recent podcast, nothing. The usual discussion about Facebook, bad.

Electric scooters, bad. And sometimes Apple, great. And quite a lot about your favorite shows and books. I know these things are close to your heart and you cannot possibly cover all tech related news. But the schism between USA and China in this area is important enough in my mind that it should at least have been mentioned. Okay. So he goes on a bit.

We mentioned this a lot. We have talked about this so much that Jason knows I can't even say the name of the damn company. Yeah. The fact that Brian can't actually pronounce Huawei. We cover this on security sometimes. We've covered this quite a bit. So I understand that maybe we haven't covered it as much as you'd like us to have covered it.

But we've definitely covered it. I think what he's talking about is the trade war with Huawei based around the 5G networking equipment that they're going to be selling us. And everybody thinks, which we also discussed in security. Oh my God, they're going to listen to the phones. Yes, we did discuss this. I did look at the Wall Street Journal article.

And I put that problem here. Oh, you put this in. Okay. No, no. He didn't send that. I put that in because I was just going to say the thing is, it's so dry for us. It's trade war. We don't really talk. It is trade war. Yeah. Yeah. We're in a trade war. It's not really our thing. Also, Huawei phones run Android and, you know, we hate Android, but I think the downside of this is US companies are going to lose $11 billion in selling our stuff to China and

China is now going to go out and Huawei is going to go out and actually rewrite Android. Well, actually, what they're probably going to do is fork it and then we'll get forked. I don't know. Yeah. But either way, it's like, yeah, it's just it is just boring shit. And then the other huge drawback, as we've discussed, is we're going to fall even further behind with 5G technology and become even more of a third world country in terms of our internet service here.

Yeah, that's the biggest issue. It's like, OK, 5G, I'm still not sold on 5G just because of the distance of transmission that you get and you need so many goddamn towers to make the thing work. But yeah, Huawei is the leader in 5G cell tower tech. Yeah.

Yeah. This is not very exciting stuff. No, it's not. But just one last comment since he listens and he's into this right now. I did find it very telling. We have to remember that this is a Chinese company and I cannot trust Mr. Ren, the head of Huawei, who says that if the if the Chinese government asks him to to spy on somebody, he will say no.

Bullshit. Yeah. I'm sorry. If the if the country of China comes to him and says you need to do this, he's going to do it. So there's that. OK, just like when just like when the CIA or the NSA goes to Google and Yahoo and we have back doors built in where they read all the emails, you know, this is not a China problem.

This is not a U.S. This is a government problem. We've got it everywhere. So anyway. OK, moving on. Jason writes in about the no tell motel challenge. Have you guys heard of another dirty room on YouTube? It's a series on Dan Bell's channel that will make you never want to stay at a hotel again. He also has a dead mall series and often explores abandoned and creepy places.

And here's his channel. And he sent us a link to that. And as somebody who likes to travel, I will not watch this. I know. That's the thing. It's just like I really like to stay in hotels. I don't want to have that room. I've got so many so few things in my life to look forward to. And going to a hotel is one of those.

I love sheets and freshness and mints on the pillow. No, I'm not going to watch this. But thanks. Anyway, those aren't two mints. Oh, God. Planes, trains, and automobiles call back there from Brian, the old man. Michaela writes in, burn Facebook to the ground and sends us a link from The Intercept.

In court, Facebook blames users for destroying their own right to privacy. To be fair, they have a point. They have every fucking point in the world. Yes. Only months after Zuckerberg first outlined his privacy-focused vision for social networking on his blog, his lawyers were explaining to a California judge the privacy on Facebook is non-existent, representing Facebook before U.S. District Judge Vance.

Oh, man, there's some names today. Chabri was Oren Snyder of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, who claimed that the plaintiff's charge of privacy invasion were invalid because Facebook users have no expectation of privacy on Facebook. The simple act of using Facebook, Snyder claimed, negated any user's expectation of privacy.

Fucking love it! There is no privacy interest because by sharing with a hundred friends on social media platform, which is an affirmative social act to publish to disclose to share ostensibly private information with a hundred people, who have just, under centuries of common law, under the judgment of Congress, under the SCA, negated any reasonable expectation of privacy.

No, this is so good! He went so far as to claim the social act of broadcasting your private information to one hundred people, negates. I already said that. That's just a re-thing. Sorry. Yeah. Anyways, there you go. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more elegant, concise description of Facebook than the social act of broadcasting your private information to people.

So it's not only Facebook's legal position that you're not entitled to any expectations of privacy, but it's your fault that the expectation went poof the moment you started using the site. Yeah. Welcome to the internet, morons. Amazing. Oh, God. That is...

I mean, I seriously had such a grin on my face when I read this article because I'm just like... Derp. Naveed writes in, Hey, Grumps, have you ever used Set App before? We actually talked about this on the show, and what it is is you sign up for one service and you get a bunch of apps.

And it's like a subscription service to a bunch of, honestly, mostly low-rent apps. There are some apps on there that we use and we actually talk about. But, you know, I don't use PDF Pen anymore, but it's got CleanMyMac X, which I just spent $40 on.

They've got iStat Menus, which I use. They've got Bartender that I use and Flume that I use. The rest of them, nope. The only other one that I would like is Gemini, which removes duplicate files because I have so many of those. But the rest of this stuff is just... It's all kind of low-rent software from independent developers, so...

Yeah. And I'm not into the subscription models. Hate them. Yeah. I mean, I just buy once and upgrade when necessary or not because sometimes you don't have to. But, yeah, CleanMyMac X, iStat Menus, Bartender and Flume, and eventually Gemini, which is $15.

You know, I pay once for Gemini, that's it, which I think is like pretty much what it costs for a month. No, it's $10 a month on set app. But still, that's $120 a year. For the stuff that you're going to use, you're going to spend far less than $120 a year.

Yep. There you go. And John writes in, I thought I heard Jason say that Hulu now came as part of Amazon Prime, but I can't find anything about this. Not Amazon Prime, Spotify Premium. If you've got a Spotify Premium account, you get Hulu. Yep, I did not. Basically, you get MASH. Yeah. Is there anything else on there?

Well, you can get that really depressing, was it Handmaid's Tale? Yeah, I'll watch that when Trump's out of office. Yeah, yeah, no Handmaid's Tale. Cameron writes in, after hearing the comment about women's soccer, I wanted to bring up the other argument that men's soccer is a higher quality product as a whole, where the objective skill level is higher.

For example, when the U15 Dallas boys team beat the USWNT 5-2, as outlined here. Um, I, okay, Brian. I will just read a quote from the article itself, which you probably should have read, Cameron.

Of course, this match against the academy team was very informal and should not be a major cause for alarm. The US surely wasn't going all out, with the main goal being to get some minutes on the pitch, build chemistry when it comes to moving the ball around, improve defensive shape, and get ready for Russia. They weren't playing hard. It was a warm-up game.

I'm sure they would have beat 15-year-old kids. And somebody else that decided to piss on me about this, Beta Bucket, writes me. Is US women's soccer getting shortchanged? A link over at cbcnews.com. He says, I agree that women's sports figures should be paid more, especially the dominant US women's soccer team.

However, as all sports exist, to transfer money from fans to players that's who require many more people to become fans, which will attract advertising. From a story on CBS, quoting FIFA on the pay disparity. This year's figures have not been released, but four years ago, the Women's World Cup brought in almost $73 million. The 2010 Men's World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion.

These players got $348 million, or 9% of the total revenue. The women's team got a higher percentage, with 13%, but the bottom line was still much less $10 million. Let me tell you how much FIFA should really be understood about this. So, first off, they're under constant investigation. It's a fucking corrupt organization.

That's insane. Outgoing FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, was once quoted as saying, women's soccer players should wear shorter shorts to raise the popularity of the game. So, and again, regardless of the international competition numbers, given the conceit that supposedly we as a country are somewhat more progressive towards women's rights than, say, I don't know, Saudi Arabia, the U.S.

women's national team has made more revenue than the men's. They do. I am not watching the men's play right now, because I'm doing this podcast, and I don't care. I will wake up for the women's, and I will watch that. U.S. soccer's, U.S. women's soccer games out-earned men's games. Wall Street Journal article goes in-depth into somewhat unquantifiable numbers about this, but at the end result, even this author agrees that women need to be paid more.

It's really hard to tease out specifics, because a lot of this is broadcast-based. It's packages. It's the, it's the, it's a whole bunch of things, but just read it. Go read this article, Beta Bucket. Yeah, go check it out. Nancy writes in, can't help but be triggered by the sound of the Vuvuzela at the end of 352.

It sounds like what our world would sound like if drone delivery becomes an everybody-everyday thing. Ugh. Well, Nancy, Nancy, I would just like to say, how do you think I feel having to go find the sound and actually put it in the show? You know how many Vuvuzela YouTube clips I had to listen to to find that perfect sound?

Far too many. So I am, trust me, I feel your pain, but it was for a greater good. Michael writes in, I was puzzled by your discussion about ring doorbells in show 351 and how the police may want to get access to video footage from those cameras. I am living in Sweden and I have a doorbell myself. I am not paying the annual fee because I don't want to pay for a service that stores my private data in Trump land.

This means I don't even have access to old footage myself, but only to live video when somebody is at the door. I would love to be able to share my video data on a local server, but that is obviously not possible with a non-subscription use of the devices. So what did you mean when you said the police might come to your house to ask for data? As Jason is not paying for his doorbells either, I would love to know what kind of data he has access to.

Thanks for a great show. So it turns out when you buy some of these ring products, you get the first year for free. It's like a drug deal, you know. And we were specifically talking about a deal that was being made that the police were going around and offering it for free to people if they subscribe to the service.

Yeah, yeah. You get a free ring doorbell and free service and then the police can come around and ask you for data. You can still not give it to them if you want. Now, if you do want a security camera in the front of your house, there are many, many options from China who will let you send it to your own server.

And I've got several of those in my I'm looking around my studio right now. I have a couple of them and they have SD cards and they do stream to the server. So there's tons of those out there. You just don't have to get it from Ring, the brand Ring. So I would recommend doing that if you still want to be able to save your local data.

And then Matt writes in, in episode 352, you talk about kids using Airdrop to form a kind of social media. I was surprised to hear about this because I do this. The article quoted on the show got it exactly right. As soon as the crowd is big enough to give some minor anonymity, you just change your device name to something no one would recognize and send images to get a reaction out of random strangers.

I'm under 20, but it has always been rare for me to see. Probably just due to location. Love the show. So it is a thing. It's actually been Matt says it's in the wild. Somebody under 20 is listening to our show. I find that to be fascinating. That is awesome. Thank you, Matt.

Thanks for listening. Thank you. Jake writes in just got my Echo Auto today. We were just talking about that vaporware. Looking forward to trying it out. And we'll give you a report back after a couple of weeks. Please do. I'm very curious. Yeah, I'm still on the waiting list. Yeah, me too. Also, Brian, I'm rereading the Game of Thrones right now.

And remember being really confused by the characters in later books. I decided to try watching the same episode that I just read. It helped a lot by giving faces to characters for me, which I've always struggled with. I'm also amazed at how closely the first season follows the book. Take care, guys. I moved from El Paso to St. Louis. So if you're ever in the gateway to the West, let me know.

Will do. All right. What do you think? Are you going to try that? Yeah, I think so. I'll give it a go. All right. Jose writes in. Hey, grumpies. Or should I say, Vietos Malhumarado. I guess that's my that's my Spanish take on that. Very good.

It translates to grumpy old men. I ran it through Google Translate. What would you advise somebody who wants to set up Switzerland in their living room to watch paint dry in 4K? Thanks, guys. What were those boxes we bought? First off, it's Sweden. Sweden. Yeah, Sweden. We go to Sweden, not Switzerland.

You get any. You get Switzerland for chocolate. What is it called? Kodo? Koda. Koda boxes. Koda boxes. Kodi. No, K-O-D-I. K-O-D-I. That's it. Yeah, K-O-D. You can actually. Yeah, we've been drinking. You can actually just get a $30 Amazon Fire Stick and you can you can sideload Kodi onto it and you're off to the races.

Yep. Check that out. Cheap and easy and use a VPN when you're doing Kodi. Use the VPN. GOG.com or GOG.show's last VPN. Oh, God, this is a mess. All right. Elaine writes in. Oh, God, Uber Air will be coming to Melbourne.

I'm just glad I don't live on the flight path for these things. And this is a link to the Guardian. Uber Air announces Melbourne is trial city for flying taxi service. The thing I loved about this is ride sharing company says test flights of Uber Air's helicopter like flying car will begin next year. Just call it a helicopter.

Well, they're saying, no, this is the new thing that they haven't unveiled yet. That's the crazy part. It's like, OK, has this gone through testing? Is, you know, is there any aviation administration in Australia or can you just throw it up in the air and say, oh, it flies? You know, it flies.

It's not landed on my head yet. OK, well, there we go. Let's go to the airport. I don't know. I don't know how this is going to work, but there's no hardware with this yet. So, yeah. MXV writes in the scourge was unleashed on our city today. And this is a Chicago debuts shareable electric scooter program.

So Chicago now has 10 companies out there with scooters on the streets. Good luck, my friends. Good luck. I just got to wonder, like, how vulnerable is your vinyl if you're riding at home on a scooter? Probably pretty fun. My MXV will not be on a scooter.

I can guarantee you that that man is more fragile than Mr. Glass. So he will not be on a scooter. Rachel writes in. Hi, guys. Not sure if you've mentioned this already, but I'm a big fan of the app Wide Protect to stop robocalls. You can stop number cloning robocalls and block all numbers that have the same prefix as your phone number.

You can, of course, allow exceptions for contacts or other specific numbers. I cut my spam calls down by at least 80%, so I thought I'd share. Long-time listener. Big fan of the show. Keep up the great work. Thank you. So I put a couple notes here. The guy who wrote this is called Valery Andrusyuk.

So probably, you know, I don't want to stereotype. I don't want to stereotype. Not all Russians are bad. Not all Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians. They're not all bad. It's a $2.99 app for iOS. Allows you to block spammers using phone numbers, prefixes, and all that.

And now the app supports blocking up to 50 million phone numbers. Why don't you just turn your fucking phone off at that point? At that point, just turn your phone off. Seriously, why just turn your phone off? Lizzie writes in, Brian, here's a very interesting and very long New York Times article on the UMG Music Vault Fire in 2008, where countless master recordings from some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century were lost, and how the disaster was successfully downplayed at the time by UMG's management.

Not really a tech story, maybe a cautionary tale about safeguarding data, but I know you're a music guy. Yeah, this was really sad news to find out. I mean, even at the time. But we were told that copies existed. We were told that they had all been digitized. We were told that not to worry about it.

Of course, these things weren't lost forever. Shocking, they lied. And they're gone forever. Yeah, that's really sad. I had this in bric-a-brac before, but I was just kind of too sad to even go through, because it's a bummer. I don't know what they were thinking, like why they weren't digitized is beyond me, but they don't listen to the show.

Yeah, it's kind of like the Library of Alexandria burning for music. I mean, except for the fact that the final products are out there, so we're kind of okay. We haven't lost them completely, but it would be nice to have all the master tapes. Certainly, the artists would have enjoyed having them as well.

So, there you go. Over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Baggerswell in the UK. Highly enjoyable tech digest. Been listening for a couple of years now from London and find it very informative and interesting. Also, it's insightful to get an outside perspective on EU laws from the other side of the pond and continuously make me worry about what state the UK will be in after Brexit.

I even got myself a password manager and VPN after listening to the show. Dashlane works best for me, which also has a VPN included on paid service. Yeah, it didn't help us any. I do prefer it when the show is one longer show a week as opposed to the two weekly shows it is now, but that is just a personal preference for me as someone who has OCD over his podcast feed.

Keep up the great work, guys. Ben, thank you. But you got a very long show today. Yes, you did. You did. And we got this one from BigD3544 over here in the U.S. Five stars. He says, great content. Great show. Funny. Man of few words.

He's a man of few words. Yes. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Closing shout outs.

Well, this was a bit of sad news. The world's last ferral. Ferral. Ferral. Ferral. Ferral. Ferral. Okay. I'm restarting that. Brian's had beer. I've had beer. I can say Huawei, but I can't say ferals. Oh, my God.

I almost just spit my beer on my microphone. All right. So this is a bit of sad news. The world's last ferals ice cream parlor has closed. Yeah, I used to go there when I was a kid. I was them. And there was another one. I can't remember that.

Swenson's. Swenson's ice cream parlor. Where I used to go as a kid with my family. And I'm very sad to say I won't be able to take my kid to these places either. So these old school kind of ice cream shops are just dated in the age of liquid nitrogen and gourmet vegan ice cream.

So no longer in existence. Sad to hear. Fuck vegan ice cream. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. 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 GOG.show slash 354. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay drunky! At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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