357: Precious Little Dolphins

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Private Internet Access. Go to GOG.show slash VPN and get protected by the only no-log VPN that's been tested in court against the FBI. That's GOG.show slash VPN. 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. Bong, bong. Yeah. Oh, man, yeah. I have been in court a lot, and I'm going back very shortly. As soon as we're done with this, let's splash some water on my face and head back to lovely Santa Monica.

Yes, I've enjoyed your photos of birds. Yes, my bird shit. God, those things are everywhere. I can't believe I haven't seen anybody die yet. I've seen it come close several times. No, you're kind of a, you're over by the courthouse. It's a bit of a low traffic area. Come on down to the boardwalk or Main Street.

It's a block away, and I go down there for lunch. I went to Shea Jay from the TV show Goliath. I would recommend that no one ever go to Shea Jay if you're looking for food. It's more of a watering hole. It really is. I did have a couple beers there, but I almost broke a tooth on the cold French fries.

So, stay away from Shea Jay. But, yeah, down there, that's where I took that picture on my Instagram. Instagram.com slash JPD if you're interested in playing along at home. They're everywhere, and people are just, they don't know how to ride them. They just really don't. Yeah. You see, I mean, it's crazy.

It is crazy. It's insane. This summer is going to be insane. There will be deaths. There will be blood. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. And I saw those new scooters you're talking about, too. Oh, those are going to be trouble. Oh, yeah. They're fast. Yeah, I bet. And they're big. And they're heavy. Well, they look like the Honda 50s that I used to ride as a kid, but like that we used to ride on the farm, you know?

Yes, but now you're going to be riding them on the sidewalk. Yeah. No, thank you, ma'am. No, thank you, ma'am. That's fun. But jury duty's been interesting. I got picked on Wednesday, put on a case, and today they fortunately, we're going faster than anticipated, which is great, but they didn't have anybody lined up for witnesses this morning, so we got to go in late, so we get to do the show.

Right. Well, I'm looking forward to your true crime podcast that will come after this case is over. Well, this one isn't really a barn burner, so I can't really tell you what it is until it's over with, but it's actually fascinating watching the process. I'm enjoying it wholeheartedly, and we have enough Hollywood production talent on the jury panel to actually start a couple TV shows if we wanted to.

Yeah, I figured as much, especially when you decided to move your court to Santa Monica. I was like, oh, you're going to have quite a few people in there that probably work in the biz, because that's what a lot of Santa Monica locals do. Yeah, well, I did get to sit down next to Harry Belafonte's daughter, Gina, for about a hot second until she was dismissed from the jury.

I was picked. She was let go. But so far, it's fascinating to watch the process, so I'm actually kind of enjoying it, and it's a nice vacation. I get to not really think about work, because, well, I spent two and a half weeks getting ready for this in case I got called, you know, 14-hour days.

So shall we get to some follow-up? Sure. There's an interesting thing over at The Verge, and this was covered in a couple different places. Bill Gates accidentally makes the case to regulate the hell out of platform companies. I'm not so sure he so accidentally did it. Yeah.

He's out of the game. He doesn't care. Yeah. He was talking about his biggest mistake, where he basically should have had the Microsoft phone platform. That should have been the Android, not Android. Yes, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, because they screwed up. But in his talks, he's like, you know, that's really the problem with these big platforms is it is winner-take-all, and you can have two companies, and that's it.

Nobody else can compete. Exactly. Exactly. And that goes for almost anything in tech, or anything in the world these days. That's what it's gotten to. There's no mom-and-pop shops. There's one or two places for everything, and that's that. And if Microsoft can't actually do it, then who the hell can, you know?

Exactly. You've got to have a lot of luck in just insane timing and a huge bankroll. Yes. Or at least other people's money. Yes. Looking at you, Uber. Speaking of San Francisco companies, this just had me scratching my head.

Most doctors will, if push comes to shove, will come out and tell you that they'd much rather that you vape than smoke. It is safer. I'm not FDA-approved or anything yet, but hey, cigarettes aren't FDA-approved either. So San Francisco, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to ban all e-cigarettes.

You can still buy regular cigarettes, mind you, but no e-cigarettes anymore. The ones that have been proven to kill you, you can buy, but the ones that are still on the fence, yeah, no go. No bueno. No bueno. So, well done, San Francisco. How about you sort out the homelessness and the human feces first?

And, you know, basically the plague is coming back, and thanks to you, San Francisco. But hey, thank God you stopped the scourge of vape. Exactly. Big shake-up at Apple.

I don't know how big this is, yeah. Well, I mean, it definitely has, you know, gone everywhere in the headlines. I was trying to get some news to slot in, and then I realized, oh, it's all Johnny Ive news. There's nothing else. Johnny Ive, Johnny Ive, Johnny Ive.

He's leaving Apple. Whoop-dee-doo. Big deal. Yeah, this has been in the works for four years. He hasn't really done much except work on that damn building, and now that the building's done, he's just like, eh, I'm done. Drop the mic. Get the hell out. Enough people have bashed their heads into the clear walls. I'm done. We've got enough Dane Bramage going on.

Yeah, so he's going to start his own design company. Fair enough. With his main client being Apple. Yes. So, basically, he's just been outsourced. Yeah, that's all he did. He outsourced himself. They don't have to pay for his health insurance anymore. And he can work from home. Yes. See, I'm looking forward to this new era of Apple, even though it's hard to tell because he has been working on the building for so long and other things.

What has he actually had a hand in recently? Because I'm looking at you, MacBook Pro, and yes, I know you're trying to make it thinner, lighter, sexier, and now we've got probably 16-inch screens coming soon. And the thing that bugs me about these things is nobody can fix the keyboard.

And I miss ports, you know? God, I miss ports. I've been on the fence, so I don't want to buy one of these damn new MacBook Pros, but my MacBook Pros that I have are, they're on their last leg. You know, they're 2015 models. I've done everything I can for them, but they're just long in the tooth.

Time to take them out in the back of the shed and shoot them. Exactly. And the problem is I've just, I've been really not wanting to buy one of these because they're so expensive. Yeah, they're crazy expensive. Like I said, I'm thinking, I'm seriously thinking about when it's time for me to upgrade going back to a PC.

I've been looking at the MacBook Surface, or not the MacBook, the Microsoft Surface Pros. Yeah, they're nice. They are nice. And it's like, okay, for what I need, you know, I've got my iMac to do video and audio editing on, so I can just still do that where it's at. But when I have a laptop, I'm like, okay, I'm checking email, doing Word docs in Google Docs most of the time, Dropbox.

I don't edit on a laptop. So I can theoretically switch over to PC with almost, you know, no problem, no pain points. Yeah, and iPads and iPhones sync effortlessly with PCs these days. There's no issues there, so you can keep the rest of your Apple infrastructure around.

The one thing that I'm going to try is I ordered a new Logitech keyboard for my iPad to see if I can actually get that to the point where I need it to be, to just use that. Because, you know, the Apple keyboard that comes with the iPad, the only thing you can get for the iPad is crap. I, hopefully this new Logitech one will be decent enough that I can take it with me and use it as a keyboard.

The biggest problem is they, they never work right when you put them on your lap. Yeah. You know, no, they don't really like that. I would really like that. So eventually at some point, somebody will come out with a better keyboard for the iPad, the new iPad pro biggin, but they're just not there yet.

And in between that time is when I'm going to need a new laptop. So hopefully now that Johnny has gone back to the whole point of this, that now that Johnny's gone, somebody will come in and say, hey, you know, everybody that's buying these things hates the keyboard and really would like some more ports.

Can we like maybe dial that back a bit? Time for a bit of a shakeup over there. Let's get somebody else in charge. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm ready for it. Please, pretty, please with sugar on top. Now I found this, uh, this kind of think piece over at the Atlantic, uh, by Arthur C.

Brooks called your professional decline is coming much sooner than you think. Uh, given my age, uh, a lot of people from my high school were actually posting this because if you did four or say eight years in college, you'd be about at the point that this, that Arthur Brooks says, uh, your professional decline has started.

So yeah, the TLDR on this one is, uh, basically you've got about 20 years, the first, you know, five, six years of your career. You're kind of learning things. Then you get into the groove of things and about the 20 year point you have peaked. That's it. That's as good as you're ever going to be at what you do.

And it's all downhill from there, which is why I quit at 21 years of programming because it was just, well, me too. I mean, I was thinking about that and it was basically, well, a little bit longer than that because I ran, I basically ran my company for 20 years. I was programming a few years before that. So, but my company lasted 20 years and that's about when I had to call it quits.

So, you know, if you guys are listening to this podcast and about 14 years, we're going to be at our peak. Oh God. We have 14 more years to peak. Oh, great. Some may say we peaked in season two. Some may say we will never peak.

We've been flatlining since the get go. But it was a really interesting article. I highly recommend that everybody read it. It just kind of gets into, this is very like a Malcomy Gladwell kind of study. So he goes through and just kind of finds all these averages and a lot of the people that he's talked to and goes historical.

And it is really interesting and it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it goes 20 years is a long effing time, even if you're not just like peaking in in terms of your actual performance, you get bored and you get tired and you get sick of what it is you're doing. So this whole idea of secondary careers is not necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah. I mean, I switched seven years or six and a half, seven years ago ish now. And so I got 13 more years to peak there, but I'm loving my new career. It's much better than programming. And there's something new and exciting every day, usually trying to figure out how we're going to pay the bills. But I do have to say, I love Arthur Brooks.

We did a show with him not too long ago over at the Jordan Harbinger show, and it was one of my favorites of the year. So there'll be a link in the show notes to go check that out if you want to, because he's a fascinating guy, very intelligent. And well, Trump's having a bad week on the Internet. Good. Yes, I agree with this.

So a couple of things have happened. The big one for me is Reddit. Reddit finally quarantined the Donald subreddit that they had, which is everybody's allowed to have their opinions and everybody is allowed. You're allowed to like Trump if you like Trump.

But what is going on on this subreddit has been insane. These are the these are the these are these are not some very nice people in there in general. So the social media site put the subreddit under quarantine because of threats of violence made on the message board against police officers, which Reddit does not allow these threats from reaction to the state house fight in Oregon involving GOP lawmakers or refuse to vote on a climate bill and fled the state.

So, yeah, people basically, this place has just been a cesspool of horrible memes, and now they're threatening police officers with death. So Reddit finally said enough is enough. That's it. And it's kind of surprising that Reddit would be the place to do this, because Reddit obviously has the reputation of being kind of the biggest free for all of major social sites out there.

You can get away with almost anything there. So good on them. It's a refreshing example of a social media company actually following through with enforcing its community moderation policies and explaining what broken rules led to the action. Yay. This is something that nobody else seems to be able to do, and I can't believe Reddit did it.

They are the homepage of the Internet for a reason now. So that's right. Good done, Reddit. Now, Twitter. Twitter is attempting to do something sort of about it. Really? Twitter. Jack continues to let Trump do whatever the hell he wants to do.

He's just constantly breaking their terms of service and going against their community guidelines that they haven't yet to do anything about it. Their main reasoning at this point, because they consider his tweets newsworthy. So attacks from the president to normal people are newsworthy.

But they finally striked a new policy. They're going to make it a little bit harder to see his craziest tweets. OK, I'm going to delete them. They're not going to remove them, but there'll be a little announcement saying that, you know, this tweet may be offensive or whatever, and you have to click through to see the president's tweets when he does stupid crap on Twitter.

Oh, presidential treatment. That's that's what this is. Yes, he's getting presidential presidential treatment on Twitter so he can continue to do whatever and break whatever rules he wants to break. But there will be a little warning saying, hey, this guy's breaking some rules. Click here to read it. They should put a little dunce cap on his tweets.

I think that would be perfect. That would be great. Maybe like I originally said, just put the poop emoji there. Yes, that's true. The poop emoji. That would be a good one, too. So I'm sure he's up in arms about this. I'm sure I have him muted. So I never see any tweets from him. Thank God.

So you're going to have to let me know how this shakes out. I'm sure it will change nothing. Cops and doodads. Brian, did you get a chance to put that Harry Potter app on your phone? No, I didn't think you would.

I'm not going to. I gave up on the I even asked my wife because my wife is a huge Harry Potter fan. I was like, are you going to try this out? And she said, no. I was like, OK, we're out. Easy breezy. I am a level seven wizard right now. And it's funny. I didn't even think about it.

When I'm in Santa Monica, there's so many things that I could be walking around, you know, zapping with my wand. And I just haven't given it. You can go super meta if you get out early or if you want to stay in Santa Monica a little bit later today, Jason, because the Stranger Things pier experience is opening.

So you can go catch Harry Potter stuff in the Stranger Things land. Oh, my God. Even more traffic. Yes, it's going to be crazy today. The courthouse is three blocks from PCH and it takes 30 minutes to get on PCH. It is so stupid. Oh, great. More traffic.

Fun. But no, I'm not going to. I'm probably going to have it off my phone by the end of the week, which is today. It's the same thing as Pokemon Go. There's really nothing changed there. You're doing the same thing. And, you know, everybody's like, oh, you're going to get exercise walking around doing this stuff.

The thing about it, though, is I do more stopping than walking because I get to a place. You got to sit there. You got to find the things you got to wave your arms around. You really look like an idiot while you're playing. You do. I can. I know a lot of people in this area are playing it because I can see them. Yeah. They stop in the middle of the street or wherever, and then they start like it looks like they're having a seizure.

Yeah. You can turn the AR off. You can turn the AR off so you don't have to, like, look around like you're drunk. Going, where's my shoes? Where's my shoes? So you find something. But you can turn the AR off, which makes it a little more covert. But the thing still is, you're like, you know, you walk like 10 feet.

You got to stop and do it again. You got to walk 10 feet and do it again. So you're not getting that much exercise. If you just go for a walk, you're going to get way more exercise and probably not run over by a damn Prius. Right. So all in all, yeah, it's exactly the same as Pokemon Go and the numbers are shaking out.

Like, you know, the first week of Pokemon Go, I think they did $110 million and Harry Potter did about 10. Right. So I think the I think they're a little late to the game. It took them a little too long to get together. Yeah. It did take a little while. Yeah. People are kind of over it, although they're going to try and keep it going because they're going to throw a Harry Potter party.

Wizards Unite Fan Festival in Indiana, of all places. This is why is this not in London? I don't know. I have no idea. It's the Pokemon Go is in Chicago, which I thought was strange enough. But now they're going to be in Indianapolis, Indiana. OK. I didn't realize Indianapolis, Indiana was the the hotbed of Harry Potterdom.

Yeah, me either. All right. Yeah, I'll be passing on that one. And they're going to you got to buy a ticket. So no, no, they don't know how much it's going to cost yet. And then there's going to be a lottery because they're anticipating so many people are going to want to go to this. They have to have a lottery.

Right. Yeah. We're going to see how that goes. So I got some doodad news here, too. OK. I have I have I bit the bullet and I'm trying sous vide. OK. I got to swear by it. I got the instant pot SSV 800 AccuSlim sous vide immersion circulator for six or eight quarts.

Now, this thing is built to work with your pot from your instant pot. Right. So you just pop it in there and go and sixty five bucks, which is cheaper than most of them on the market. That's why I went with this one. I'm like, if I'm going to try this, I'm going going cheap first just to see if I like it. And I also got the food saver V2244 vacuum sealer machine with starter kit pipe safety certified.

That was even more because that was like 90 bucks. But that I'll use a lot more because I freeze a lot of food. So that thing will actually get way more use than the sous vide did my first a couple attempts with it. Yeah, it's pretty badass. I got to say I cooked some chicken in there and it was just delicious.

And this was like the 89 cents a pound chicken from Ralph's, not even the good stuff from butcher box that I got ready to go next. I didn't want to do my experiment on the good stuff. Right. But man, it's it's pretty amazing. I'm going to do some steaks this weekend just to see how that goes.

You still have to like pan fry them when they're done to get some sear on them. But I got to put the sear on. But man, man, is it is it good? That is some of the best chicken I've ever had. And it's just like a crock pot. You throw it in and you just come back in five hours and boom, you get some chicken. It's it's pretty good.

I got to say, you got to try this thing out. You especially since you have a kid and it's like you just pop it in in the morning. You don't have to think about it. You pull it out and there's dinner. Right. You know, just like a crock pot, but better. And this morning I came in and one of my hard drives was utterly dead.

And I don't know why it just decided to stop working. And it's like I tried to open it up in disk utility and there's nothing. And then I listened to it when I plugged it in. It's just like chunk, chunk, chunk. I'm like, OK, pretty sure that one's dead. And this is one of my three eight terabyte drives that I have that I always cycle through.

This is why, children, we have three drives. Because if one dies, you have two more with your backups on it. Now, let me ask you a question, Jason. Why don't you ever buy like the RAID drives? Well, I have a Synology with a four, you know, four striped RAID array and that thing.

It wasn't big enough. And I was going to replace those with SSDs. But then I'm just like, yeah, this works really well. I would prefer because this way, if you have a RAID, it's all in one place. That's true. So I've got three hard drives, which are in three separate locations around the home in two separate fireproof boxes.

And I also ship one off every now and again to my dad. So it's just I prefer the standalone drives to having one single point of failure. OK, fair enough. Yeah, that's why I like that. And carbon copy cloner makes it super easy. I plug it in. And as soon as I plug it in, it automatically starts the backup.

And then every couple hours, it just keeps everything up to sync. So and the drive that died was a Seagate backup plus hub, eight terabyte external hard drive, desktop HDD dash USB 3.0 comma two USB ports comma for computer desktop workstation PC laptop comma two months Adobe CC photography.

And this was like one hundred and fifty dollar drive, and I'm replacing it with a Western Digital eight terabyte elements desktop hard drive USB 3.0 and then some crazy string for one hundred and thirty nine dollars. So it does not have the two USB ports on the front, which I've honestly never used. So adds complication to the system anyway.

But yeah, the Seagates for me have been hit and miss. It seems like as soon as the warranty is up, they die. I've been basically only getting Western Digital for probably the last 10 years. Yeah, those things are workhorses, man. They really are. They just don't die. So I'm going to slowly replace these out with Western Digitals.

And it's also good to have multiple manufacturers in your setup because of the what I call the Seagate problem. I was hoping that they fixed it after all these years, but no, no such luck. What are you using for backup nowadays? I've got two Western Digital RAID drives.

So it's, you know, that that kind of does the trick for me. All right. There you have it. Back up your stuff, people. Yes. It's very important for you. And a new app out from my friend Greg Cohn, who does the burner app, the one where you can get burner numbers for your phone.

Yes. He's got a new one called Firewall, which is a robocall blocker. Nice. Yep. It is. You can get it with a 14 day free trial and it's four bucks a month after that. But what you do is you basically forward your number to them. They take the calls and send them back to you after they scrub them and make sure that they're not coming from a robocaller from their big list of robocallers.

So far, it's gotten like three calls. I think that's all I've gotten so far. So, so far it works as advertised. So I'm going to keep trying it for a bit, but give it a give it a shot if you want to. There's links in the show notes to go download that and they're introducing Firewall blog post where you can read all about it.

Now, I think he may have had some unlucky timing with going out and building an app to Firewall robocallers because the FTC and Justice Department are taking coordinated action against robocallers. They have actually finally started going after some some of these people, more people they've gone after some before, but they're they're really like putting the hammer down now in the operation is called Operation Call It Quits.

And how clever. Yeah, they brought four cases so far, at least last week. And here's the crappy part. The FTC has fined companies more than two hundred million dollars, but only collected less than zero point zero one percent of the fines because they don't really have very good enforcement powers.

Well, I think that's why the IRS here. Yes, seriously. Well, I think this is why they're teaming up with the Justice Department to at least get some teeth in this. Right. But, you know, they're really starting to go after this stuff. It's it's finally hit a tipping point where everybody's tired of it and nobody can deal with it anymore.

So until they're until they're really ramped up and go try Firewall 14 days for free. What can go wrong? What could go wrong? Check it out. Well, Jason, we have Star Wars furniture. I'm not talking about like your Millennium Falcon futon here. This is high and crazy ass stuff.

Disney and Lucasfilms have tapped Filipino designer Kenneth Kobukwu. I have no idea how to say his name to create a Star Wars furniture designed at adults. He has run a furniture design practice for two decades. He's been named designer of the year and has, you know, many prestigious awards and all that.

He's known for creating delicate looking hand woven chairs and recliner structures that float on airy lattices. So if you go to the link in our show notes, you will see the subtle Star Wars nods in his furniture. This stuff is cool looking. I would love to have the TIE fighter chairs. They are badass.

But, you know, prices range from $1,345 to $2,800. So it's a bit pricey. That's a little stupid for a wicker chair. That's really all it is. It's a wicker chair. It looks cool as hell, though. If you say so. I'm not really buying it, but I'm literally not really buying it because it's too damn much money.

Yeah. And then they've got the little table that looks like the 3D chest thing and they've got a Chewbacca recliner thing. That's pretty funny. I like a lot of this stuff. It's great. It's interesting. I like the Darth Vader one. Yeah, that one's cool. I think that has to be my favorite. But what's with the Chewbacca rocking horse?

That one's a bit odd. That is really odd. The lightsaber chandelier is pretty interesting. That one, yeah. I owe to be a bachelor. Yes. Because if you weren't before you bought this stuff, you'll definitely be after. You will be after.

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.

Hello, Dave. Hello, gentlemen. You know, before we jump in today, I had a couple of things I wanted to chat about just quickly here. First of all, I wanted to talk about, Jason, you having jury duty. Yes. Justice. Ha! Right.

Right. I have been called in to – I've been summoned to jury duty. I've never actually sat on a jury. The closest I've come is having to go and report to the place and then wait for a little while and then be sent home. And I think I only did that for one day.

All the other times I've been summoned and then you could call in in the morning and they would say, congratulations, you don't have to do anything. Yeah. I think once or twice they said, congratulations, you don't have to do anything and you're done for the whole week. I did it online so I could see basically as soon as you were able to, I'd go in and like Monday and Tuesday, I was excused.

And then on Wednesday, nope, got to show up. So I go in, it's pretty straightforward. I got called, everybody's like, it's going to be so boring, bring a book, blah, blah, blah. I was sitting down, we had to watch this like 20 minute just introduction to being a juror video.

Oh yeah, I remember that. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. And then about 25 of us or 30 of us were called, had to go down to the courtroom. They sat us down and they put me in seat number 13. And I'm like, I'm getting on this jury. It's like, I know they're going to be kicking some people off and then I'm going to have to slide up.

Yeah, I'm just like, okay, and I answered the questions. And there were a lot of people who were chatty and talked a lot and all those people got kicked off. And I actually wanted to be on the jury. I wanted to do my civic service and actually see what the process was like. So I kept my mouth shut.

That explains why you didn't wear your comeback with a warrant t-shirt, which definitely would have gotten you off. Right. Yeah. I do know a lot now about how to get off a jury if I need to in the future. But for the most part, I just kept my mouth shut and just went through the process.

And I'm juror number four. Oh, wow. You moved way on up. Yeah. Yeah. If I was if I was actually in number 14 instead of 13, I would have been in slot number one because number one got kicked off right after. Well, actually, juror number five got kicked off because that was Harry Belafonte's daughter.

So she got kicked off right after I sat down and then they just kept filling things up and moving people around. But, yeah, I got I basically got picked and we went through a whole bunch of stuff and I've been going ever since. And I've got today and then three more days next week and should be done, should be done.

But it's fascinating. I'm actually really enjoying it. Well, my thoughts on it were, of course, my initial I was trying to think, would I want to have you on my jury if I had done something wrong? And, of course, my initial thought was, oh, God, no. But then the more I thought about it after I got past the snark and the humor and all that sort of thing, I actually thought to myself, you know what?

I would really want to have you on my jury because, number one, you're very smart. And number two, you have a whole lot of life experience. And the combination of those two things, I think, would make you a very thoughtful juror. Well, thank you. I actually agree with that analysis, believe it or not.

Yeah. But I did wallow in the snark a bit longer than you probably did. Yeah, I'm sure you guys did. I'm sure you're mad that I'm actually here today so you can just make fun of me the whole episode. Well, maybe. Well, we did have that thought. Yeah, I'm sure. But the other thing, too, is that since you're a good communicator, you could be influential among the other jurors and make the case for coming to reasonable, well-thought-out conclusions, I think.

Yeah, and that's what I plan to do once we get to deliberation. So I've got my opinions and I've got some background in what we're going through right now. And I can't really say anything else until I'm excused, but I'll tell you all about it once we're done. Yeah, yeah, I'm really looking forward to hearing your take on the whole experience.

I think that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. No, we'll cover that when I'm finally free. So the other thing I wanted to just briefly touch on today is that, as I've said here, I think before, my favorite iPhone accessory is my car. And today I updated the firmware on my car.

Okay. Because one of the- What could possibly go wrong? Well- Hopefully you did that while you were still at home and not at the office. No, I did it at the office because why do it on my car? Oh, you're a brave man. Yeah. Well, he's also probably got some tech support there at the office. You can call IT. That's true. Yeah. But it was supposed to be a pretty meaningful update, making the infotainment system much more peppy and responsive and that sort of thing.

I haven't heard infotainment since the 80s. Well, you just did. Okay. I changed my opinion on you being a juror. You probably suck. Hey, I can still be citizen dickhead, but- What would you call an infotainment system? That's a good band name. Citizen dickhead?

Yeah. What would you- How would you refer to an infotainment system if not that? Um, I don't know. I just have not heard that word in a very long time. Hmm. Okay. That's all. It was a blast from the past. I just remember, you know, making infotainment titles for CD-ROMs.

Right, right, right. Yeah, me too, me too. But he's right. I haven't really heard that term recently either. It's interesting. Yeah. So, anyway, I found the update online, downloaded it to a little USB stick, and I was able to plug that into the car and walk through.

I printed out the instructions and walked through- The next thing I knew, my car was speaking Russian. Right, exactly. My car was asking me for five Bitcoin to drive it home. Well, yeah. My Mazda had transformed into a Porsche. It was amazing. So, it went very well.

It took about an hour to do, to go through, and I didn't have any issues. One of the funny things in the instructions, it said, you needed to, it said, this is going to take about an hour to do, and make sure you set an alarm for yourself for about the 20-minute mark so you can come in to the car and pump the brakes so the auto sleep system doesn't kick in and basically- You would think that they could switch that off as part of the install process.

You would think, you would think, wouldn't you? Yes. Yeah, exactly. But evidently, you'd be wrong. So, I did that, and it was uneventful, which is good. But I have to say, this is my first car that I've owned where this sort of thing was both possible and necessary.

And just an interesting thing to think about, how this is the shape of things to come, I imagine, well, certainly for many cars. I mean, for Teslas, these just happen automatically over the air. Yeah. Yeah. My Beamer does it over the air as well, which is kind of nice, because I don't have to mess about with the USB stick.

Yeah. My Explorer does it over the air, too, except for one new one that I got yesterday. My car got recalled, because they have to update the anti-lock braking software, which I thought they would, because my car's had multiple over-the-air updates so far, but I have to actually take this one into the shop to have them do it. So, apparently, the anti-lock brake system is separate from the rest of the systems in the car, which- Which is quite smart security-wise.

Yeah, that's good to know. I'm good with that. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Sure. Well, look, this is the way that things are now. And we look no further than the fact that Jason has a bed that has an app and a subscription. That's right. I mean, this is the world we live in now. That's right.

That's right. Oh, it's a great time to be alive. Also terrible. Yes. Yes, also terrible. All right. Well, let's dig into some stories here. What are we kicking off with this week? So, we have talked before about people using AI to clone someone's voice.

And we actually, a bunch of us, we tried the liar thing, L-Y-R-E, online. And this is a different one. This is an update on that. This is some folks from actually one of Facebook's research groups have come up with a different way of analyzing voice and speech patterns.

And we'll include the link here, but this is pretty good stuff. They use Bill Gates as one of their samples. And sure enough, it really, they have not only his voice, but his cadence as well. Well, that's a big part of it, right? And that's what most of these systems are missing so far.

Because you and I and Jason, we all have different pausing and cadence manners to our speech. And it's part of how we actually recognize each other's speech. Right, right. Yeah. So, I continue to be maybe more excited about this than I should, because I really want someone, I just really want someone to do me.

I just want to never talk again. Yeah. I strive to never speak again. Yeah, I don't know why. I really want someone to, I just feel like I'd be a great guinea pig for this. I have all the data is out there. There are transcripts, there are recordings.

So, I'll drop a note to these guys and say, here, here's all this information. Please feel free to use me as your guinea pig. Make a BitBot. I think I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to do that. The BitBot. That's good. I like it. I like it. All right. So, it's just a quick one. And if anybody out there is listening and has access to these folks, drop me a line.

Well, I've got some disturbing news, or at least a disturbing story over on The Intercept. We spent a lot of time talking about traveling internationally and coming over the border and the kind of gray area of the law right now in terms of what they can and can't ask you about, what they can and can't have access to.

And we spent some time talking about, you know, shipping our phones through UPS or whatever to get around these sort of systems. And there's a really great article, again, on The Intercept by a journalist named Seth Harp. And it's long, and it covers in great detail exactly how frightening traveling, coming over the international border can be now into the United States, particularly if you get somebody who isn't very nice, which is most of them.

I don't know if you guys read this, but it scared me a bit, speaking as somebody who goes over the border a lot, at least four times a year, how gray this area is and how much power these people apparently have. It's weird.

And at the end, he just says, he says to the guy when he finally gets out hours upon hours later, it's funny, of all the countries I've been to, the border guards have never treated me worse than here in the one country I'm a citizen of in the town where I was born. And the security guy says, welcome back to the USA.

Yeah. Nice. This is where we're at now. You know, it's I didn't get any bullet points from the actual story because it's very long and it's very detailed. But they took his phone. They took his laptop. They took everything. They said he couldn't leave. They took his dignity.

He could not call a lawyer because he was not being, he was not being detained. He was simply not being granted entry into the United States, but he's also wasn't being allowed to leave the area. Right. They had fully complete and total control of his life and him. They owned him. Yeah.

Let me explain what detained means. Let's get a dictionary here. Yeah. Well, they wouldn't even let him call a lawyer and that's when they took his phone and didn't give him his phone back. So this is some scary shit going on. It is. I find it pretty chilling. I understand sort of where this came from.

But boy, that that whole no man's land of of non-existence. Right. You do not have access. You don't. There's no due process. You're at the mercy of these folks. I mean, I suppose could he have gone back to Mexico?

He was traveling from Mexico. No, they wouldn't let him leave the area. They stopped him from leaving. He tried that. Right. Yeah. So how is this different from being detained? How is this different from Guantanamo Bay? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Well, there's a little more travel involved in a snappier suit that you get to wear in Guantanamo.

But right. Right. You get music. Well, and it also, I think part of the story is his description of how he believes that once they were in for it, that the folks who are dealing with him basically said, you know, to themselves, well, I know how I'm going to fill out the rest of my day.

Yeah. And which is anybody who's had brushes with power knows that's the only way it can go. Yeah. Once, once you've been, once you've been a bit flippant and you've pissed them off, you're fucked. Right. Right. I do know. I mean, there are some cases that are trying to make their way to the Supreme Court about this.

Part of the issue is that I forget what the percentage is, but a huge percentage of us live within the, what is it? 100 miles, 150 miles of border crossings that give the CBP officers the ability, basically give them jurisdiction over you.

And so there are cases that are trying to make their way to the Supreme Court to try to get some clarity on this, whether or not these are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment and other restrictions. Another thing this reminds me of is that there are folks who have worked up systems of encryption where basically you spin up a password for your device before you cross the border, but

you don't have access to what that password is until you get back home. Right. Like a geolocated sort of thing. Right. So if the officer says, what's the password to this device, you can, you don't have to lie to them. You can honestly say, I do not know and I do not have access to it.

Right. And so presumably that, now what that leads to is they can basically keep you there as long as they want. They can keep you and keep their phone. Right. They will confiscate the device. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, part of the story is questions whether or not they're targeting certain people.

There's some folks who are suspecting that they're targeting journalists. And this gentleman was one. So if that turns out to be the case, that, of course, is even more chilling. I don't know how much evidence we actually have, how much of a pattern we've established with that.

But I find the whole thing troubling. And I hope that we find some clarity on this sooner than later. Unfortunately, as we all know, these things wind their way slowly through the system, but at least there is some, some motion happening on it.

At least there still is a system for now. Yeah. All right. I've got some facial recognition follow up here. Okay. A Boston suburb has decided to ban facial recognition software. This comes from Somerville in Massachusetts, right outside of Boston.

And it's not a small city, 81,000 people, you know, pretty decent size. This follows San Francisco for banning social or not social recognition, facial recognition. Social recognition would be fine, too. Well, one can argue that San Francisco did ban that as well.

Yeah, that's true. So it's interesting. It says, in addition to a ban on active use of AI by city departments, the ordinance outlaws use of data or evidence produced by facial recognition software systems in criminal investigations or legal proceedings. The local law does not have the scope to restrict facial recognition use by state or federal law enforcement, though, which makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, you know, it's pretty good. It was unanimously approved by these Somerville city councils. Yeah. I like it. And I wonder, does it mean that if the state or federal law enforcement folks came up with some facial recognition generated evidence, would the locals not be able to use that evidence?

I think it probably does mean that. Yeah. It depends on who's got jurisdiction over the case. Right. So if the city is prosecuting a case with help from, you know, local or state or federal, then they have probably have the option of not using that evidence in court.

Yeah, I like this. I think, and I think this is recognition that this technology just isn't there yet. And there's too many risks of improperly targeting certain groups of people or the error. Too many false positives. Yeah.

Yeah. So good, good for them. Yes. And following up on something with that, which really I'd shaken my head on this one because I was like, what? Wow. The company formerly known as Taser, which is now known as Axon, they supply tons of body cameras to law enforcement.

They actually have an AI and policing technology ethics board. What? That's right. And they've got a group of 11 experts from a variety of fields and they put out their first report and it says it's largely focused on the threat of facial recognition.

And it says the advice they give is unequivocal. Don't use it now or perhaps ever. Right. Okay. They specifically, their findings are facial recognition simply isn't good enough right now for it to be used ethically. Don't talk about accuracy. Talk about specific false negatives and positives since those are more revealing and relevant.

Any facial recognition model that is used shouldn't be overly customizable or it will open up the possibility of abuse. Any application of facial recognition should only be initiated with the consent and input of those it will affect. Until there is. Yeah.

Until there is strong evidence that these programs provide real benefits, there should be no discussion of use. Facial recognition technologies do not exist, nor will they be used in a political or ethical vacuum, so consider the real world when developing or deploying them.

Bravo. I am gobsmacked. Yeah. This is a very good development and coming from a very unlikely source. Yeah. Because you know they've been pressured to put facial recognition in those body cams so they can get a little alert when somebody pops up as being a villain.

Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't mean that all the video that comes from the body cams can't be run through facial recognition when it goes back to the station, but they're just not going to actually bake it into their software or their hardware, which is great.

Yeah. And a large enough or an organization that is so connected with law enforcement to come out this strongly and this unambiguously, I think is, I agree with Brian, both surprising but also very good. Refreshing, I think, is the word that we're looking for.

Like a cool cocktail on a summer's eve. Like a cold Coors Light after mowing the lawn. There you go. Right. So this next one I put in here, Facebook recently put out their white paper about Libra, which is their cryptocurrency that they're proposing.

And there's been lots of talk about that. But buried within that white paper are two sentences that have caught some folks' attention. And I will read them now. It says, an additional goal of the association is to develop and promote an open identity standard.

We believe that decentralized and portable digital identity is a prerequisite to financial inclusion and competition. Libra's mark of the beast.

Here it comes. I mean, we've talked about Libra quite a bit, but this is definitely something very disconcerting. Well, what people are suspecting here is that Facebook is making a play to be the digital identifier, the keeper of digital identity, as they kind of are already.

Well, and they have the the user base to be able to do it and have it be meaningful. Someone pointed out on Twitter, I think it was Andy Anotko, who's a tech writer, said that, you know, what we're looking for here is the ability to to check in with some online service and basically say, I'm not telling you who I am, but I'm going to verify that, yes, I am 18.

Right. And that's that's the goal here to be able to dial in what information you turn over to be able to to to prove that you are either who you are or what you say you are, but not turn over everything. And Facebook has such a good track record of not turning over everything.

You read my mind. Yes. That led me to my next thought, which was, are these really the folks who should be doing this? But also remember, this isn't just Facebook that's associated with Libra. There's going to be a one or ninety nine other companies, ninety nine other companies and Facebook ain't one of them.

Facebook is one of them. I'm sorry. And so all of these companies are going to have to come together for this standard for open identity, which is going to be interesting. So do you have to create this open identity to use Libra? I'm guessing, yes, that you have to do that.

Yes. Yep. Mm hmm. And how is that going to play out over over time? And honestly, yes, you can do that to I think, honestly, why they are trying to do this is because of the anti money laundering that they're going to have to do for regulators.

Yep. Mm hmm. You know, it's going to be one of those things where it's like they can say that it is for that. It could be used for a million other things, as we all know. But I'm sure that they're going to couch it in. This is to prevent money laundering. So we need to know who is who and whose wallets are whose wallets.

Right. Right. Yeah. And right there. That's a nonstarter. For you. For me. Yeah. For me, too. But at the point being, again, because it's Facebook and they've got two billion users and a lot of people are going to hop onto this and a lot of people are going to use it.

So I can't see it becoming a standard. But what the hell do I know? I can't believe Facebook is still in existence. So, yeah. Yeah. We've been wrong on that so many times. It's not even worth going into. Yeah. I mean, I suppose if all the other organizations have a hand in this, could is it possible that they could together come up with a truly open standard that meets the needs, the global needs of everyone for identification?

It's something we, I think we agree we need. It's something that we want. Yeah. But the question is who keeps it? Yeah. Right. And that's the rub, right? Yep. Yep. Yep. Log in with Libra. You know, it's coming. Yep. Well, we still have Apple login for now.

Or at least that's coming. So NASA has confirmed that its deep space network has been hacked. And they've confirmed that the JPL here in Pasadena has been hacked with those responsible reportedly gaining access to the deep space network or DSN. This was done by an unauthorized Raspberry Pi computer, which got into the networks.

So they actually shut down the Johnson Space Center. They disconnected it from the gateway completely because they wanted to make sure that that's all secure. And this is very important because it isn't just space stuff. There's all kinds of crazy tech and all sort of stuff in their systems that they don't want any third parties getting access to, particularly foreign governments.

So that's good. How does the recipe for Tang is in there? Right. Ooh, I haven't had Tang in years. That stuff was delicious when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trust me. Tang does not have legs, my friend. I would say just treasure that memory and don't go back and revisit it.

Yeah. Do they even make it anymore? Oh, man. I think you'd still have to get Tang from the 70s. I'm sure you can get it on Amazon. Yeah. That's true. The same people who are still making pop rocks are probably making Tang. Yeah. All right. So that all happened. The other story I had related to the military and all that sort of stuff, the Pentagon has a laser that can identify people by their heartbeat.

Pretty crazy. MIT reports they can do it from distance. The technology, which is known as Jetson, uses laser vibrometry to identify surface movements on the skin caused by heartbeat. Everybody's cardiac signature is unique and unlike faces or fingerprints, it can't be altered in any way.

Now, right now, it only works the regular clothing like a T-shirt, but not through thicker garments. It also takes about 30 seconds to collect the necessary information. So right now, it only works if the target is sitting or standing still. But of course, this is going to get better. And of course, they will need some sort of cardiac database. But this is pretty intense.

This is like we may not need facial recognition anymore. If you can identify people with just a little laser from their cardiac footprint, as it were. Yeah. I wonder if can it not be altered in any way? In other words, I didn't think about that myself as well. If you're wearing some kind of backpack that's thumping against your back in a way that that makes you, you know, to simulate something just just introduces a murmur into your into your or or could

you could have something that we'll get a subwoofer and stick it to your back. Yeah, I was thinking also something that gave you just a mild shock. Would that be? You're not going to get me. Exactly.

Why is he walking that way? I don't know, but it's definitely not Bob. I was thinking the same thing, because this is always the way of things. People invented those stupid glasses that can fool facial recognition systems. People have invented like clothing that you can wear that'll fool this or that. And I'm sure that there's some way to fool this as well.

Well, everybody's going to be walking like James Brown. When I was a kid, I had one of those Radio Shack 150 in one kits. Do you remember those as a little like electronic project box with little springs and wires?

And one of the things in the kit was a little circuit that would charge up a couple of capacitors and then discharge them. And you'd hold on to two wires and it would just give you a little little ting, like like holding on to a nine volt battery. The things we did before we had cell phones, kids.

Yeah. And we shocked ourselves. Right. So the first thing that I did was figure out how much voltage could I handle? Right. I just kept upping the voltage and upping the voltage until I'm sitting there in front of this thing spasming, you know, trying and I'm lucky I'm alive.

But yeah, that's made me think of that. Yeah. Amazing. That's very funny. A little follow up on Tang. It's funny that you mentioned Pop Rocks because the guy that invented Tang also invented Pop Rocks. Oh, there you go. And Cool Whip. Maybe somewhere along the lines, I learned that.

Yeah, it could be. It could be. Yes, you can still buy it. It is run by a company called Mondelez that was spun off from Kraft quite some time ago. But yes, you can actually still buy it on Amazon. Fresh. There it is. Oh, man. It looks just like I remembered it.

I put the ingredients in the show notes here in Zencast if you guys would like to read it and figure out how fast you will get the diabetes. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not ordering it. Just look at it. Some things are the primary ingredient is sugar. Yeah. Primary ingredient is sugar.

Second is fructose. Dave, I won't go back and have Tang. You stop shocking yourself. There you go. Okay. Now, we've talked about the Chinese social scoring system. Turns out that we've been doing here in the country quite some time and using a what they call a social credit score system.

Have I not been saying the whole time that we've been doing the show on this segment that the only difference between us and them is them, their government run programs by them and their their company run programs here. Yeah, kind of. And finally, they're like somebody's being sued asking the FTC to look into this practice from a nonprofit called the Consumer Education Foundation.

And they're asking the FTC to start digging in on this because what they're saying is these social credit score scores can be used by online companies and other companies to change prices based on your social credit score and like actually push people out of the market that they don't want to be buying from them.

Like, you know, low income people or high income people. They like if you have a lot of money, then you get charged more. If you have no money, you get charged even higher because they don't want you as a customer. Right. There's there's all sorts of ways to gain the system that basically just spreads inequality. And somebody's actually going to ask the FTC to actually look into this with they will or not.

FTC better be staffing up because they've got a lot of plates they're spinning right now. Yeah. Between this and the robo calls and busting all those Instagram influencers who don't actually post there that this is a sponsored advertisement. Yeah. I remember Amazon got nailed for this a few years ago where they were depending on who you were and even whether or not you were logged in or not.

They'd show you different prices for the same things. Yeah. It still happens. It still happens occasionally. Yeah. Yeah. Just open up a we'll have a separate machine VPN to the different IP address. Open up an incognito window and you can price shop and you will see different prices.

Yeah. Actually, that's true. We I have I've seen different prices between my personal account and I have a work account if we're buying like office supplies and stuff. And the same thing will come up different prices between the two of them. And if you're shopping from the Pentagon, they just add a zero to everything.

Right. Right. Right. Exactly. This next one had me really kind of upset. Schools are actually installing these things called aggression detectors, which are basically microphones that they hide in the ceiling. And they're scanning people's voice prints to find out if they're possibly going to become aggressive and then alerting security and having people come and check out the situation.

And we can get into it a little more in a second into the details. But just just gut feeling when you when you saw this, what did you guys think? Because I was angry. Well, my initial reaction having a middle schooler was that there is no way this could ever work.

If you spend any time in a middle school hallway when classes change, there is so much noise that sounds like terror and panic and violence. And it's just the kids horsing around with each other. Just just kids being kids. Yeah. Yep. So I just I question that this could ever have any sort of really good reliability of of the millions of ways that we could be dealing with violence in schools.

This is quite possibly a million and one on the list that we should be looking at. This is stupid. There are a million ways to deal with this better than this. It's this is absolutely ridiculous. And again, teenage boys are aggressive.

That's biological. It happens when you get flooded with that testosterone. You become aggressive. That is just a kid being a kid and a story. I mean, I get that they're searching for most of the shooters were cold as ice. They weren't super aggressive.

Yeah, they'd had no friends. They were loners. So they're not going to talk to anybody before they start shooting anyway. Right. It's like, OK, yeah, let's look for the silence detector. No, that doesn't work either, obviously, because it is. It's cacophonous when these kids are in the hallway together. So this is just a way for these companies to get money from all these grants that the government's giving to schools to beef up security.

And almost everybody in this article says that this is not going to work. And they prove it in the article. This is a ProPublica article. And they've got tons of audio examples where things don't actually work. So I also wonder, is it a way for schools and administration school boards to have cover to say, look what we're doing?

Cover for surveillance. Yeah. But that, too. I mean, also, it allows them to record all these things and they'll have they'll have proof. Well, I mean, the school's already. Yeah, the school's already are full of cameras and microphones. So that's there. I mean, they're covered head to toe with my God.

Things have changed since I was a kid. Oh, my gosh. It's crazy. Yeah. Jesus. It really has. It really has. And they're saying that there are psychological problems with, you know, moving towards just a full on Panopticon where everybody is recorded all the time.

And it just, you know, what does that do to your anxiety levels? I mean, you're already anxious enough and stressed out enough being in high school. I can't believe they're going to be videotaping me asking Susie to the prom. I can't fucking handle that extra pressure. Right. No, it's ridiculous. That's just what they're doing. Precious little dolphins.

Precious little dolphins. We have a show title. And we have a show title. Wow. Oh, yeah. Well, I just, I was just, this just really just irked me. Just the money that they're wasting. And the people who are even building this stuff says, yes, I can guarantee 100% of the time that we're going to have false positives.

Yeah, we can't. We cannot talk about gun control. But, hey, let's stick microphones everywhere and invest money in a program that's not going to work anyways. Yeah. Well, this last one I put in is just kind of fun. The folks who make Firefox have come up with a way to throw the trackers off.

They have, it's a site called Track This Wednesday, and it gives you the option of automatically opening 100 browser tabs to confuse ad trackers. You can choose one of four different consumer profiles. You can be filthy rich, a hype beast, trendsetter, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer.

Also known as the Jason. Yeah. Oh, I'll tell you about that in a second. Yeah. So you select these. Basically, it's supposed to just sort of cloud up your cookies and all the things that track you to make you harder to keep tabs on.

Right. Yeah. It's fun. I don't know. It was cute. It's cute. I don't know how much it'll. It's a clever little project, and I'm sure somebody is very proud of themselves over at Firefox for coming up with this. Right. So I actually did the doomsday prepper one just to see what would come up. No change whatsoever in your, no change whatsoever in the ads you were getting.

Yeah. I'm like, hey, man, if I'm going to get targeted, let's get hyper targeted here. And it's the sad thing is, of course, I found like six or seven tabs where I'm like, oh, I want to go read that later. Yeah. The food keeps for 20 years. Wow. I like that. Wow. Yeah. No, one really good one was the six things.

Oh, it's a tactical spork. I've got one of those. I'm good. They charge me more because they already have one and I need a full set. These six things that your prep is probably missing. It's like you don't have extra toilet paper, caffeine, nicotine, and something else.

Or tampons or whatever. I don't need that. But it's like, oh, yeah, yeah. You know what? If there is an earthquake, we are dangerously low on the teepee. I might want to sock some of that away. And the price just went up on Amazon for that. It's sure. Just for you. Just for you. Just for you. Yeah.

I'll tell you what. I'm going to see follow-on ads for chem suits everywhere now because it's like 80% of the tabs that opened up were chemical resistant body suits. I'm like, oh, but it was funny. It was very funny. And when you go back for jury duty, the guy's going to pull you aside.

Jason, we're kicking you off this one. We have a few words. Yeah. It was an experiment. I promise. It was for the show. Did you listen to my podcast? Good day, sir. Actually, we did. That's why you're not coming. I don't know what you're talking about, your browser tabs. We just actually listened to your show. You're not coming anywhere near this courthouse.

Right. Yeah. Next time I get my jury selection notice, I'm just going to send back a link to our show. There you go. Fair enough. All right, guys. I got to actually get to court. So let's wrap this puppy up. All right. Well, that is what we have. So, Jason, good luck with the jury stuff.

I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say. I'm hoping that my car gets me home today and that it doesn't crash, like not really crash, software crash. Although both, either one, any kind of vehicular crashes makes for a bad day. Next we heard from Dave, he was in Florida. Right.

Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. All right. I'll talk to you guys soon. Earlier this week, NASA sent an atomic clock into space. This is kind of cool. It's not just any old atomic clock.

It's up to 50 times more accurate than the atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites. Its precision only changing by one second every 10 million years. Who's going to be around to check their work? I know. We all know it's going to go at nine. So, it's only the size of a toaster, but it will revolutionize deep space travel.

It's called the Deep Space Atomic Clock. I wish they would have just called it Clockity Clock, but, you know, you can't have everything. So, basically, it's going to get out there and it's going to change the way that we navigate in space because it's basically going to be like a GPS satellite for space.

It will measure time delays from each satellite and cover spatial coordinates. And it's one-way tracking that will mean faster, more flexible navigation with minimal input from Earth, resulting in faster response times to unexpected events, course corrections, and spacecraft that can adapt on the fly, so to speak.

So, good on you, NASA. You're still doing stuff. Thank you. Okay. Nice. Nice. So, it's got space Wi-Fi so the other satellites can talk to it. That's really the point. Okay, cool. Nice. We talked about the Taco Bell Hotel going lowbrow after we've gone highbrow. The Taco Bell Hotel is going to open in August in Palm Springs.

And we joked on it. We shat on it. And it turns out, sold out in two minutes. We are in an Instagrammy age. Why are we surprised by this? You know, we could have a... We had a fucking candy museum that traveled around like a goddamn Lollapalooza festival that sold out everywhere.

Why are we surprised by this? Lollipopapalooza. We still have to go to our Cholula event over in Santa Monica. Maybe next week we can hit it at some point while I'm still down there for jury duty. Maybe, perhaps. I believe it's still open. So, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not surprised that this sold out. Of course it did. Of course. Of course. And I found a little something interesting over on Mental Floss. I kind of love this. This is high-speed MRI images of someone singing If I Only Had a Brain. You have to watch it. That's kind of cool.

It is cool as hell. So, this is a whole new MRI technology that they created because you couldn't... They weren't able to see, like, small muscles in the human head, neck, jaw, tongue, and lips work together before. So, they came up with this whole new MRI technology that catches up to 100 frames per second. And the video is pretty freaky.

I'm definitely going to have this playing on a big screen around Halloween in my house. This is really weird. Yes, it is. I mean, it's really creepy. Yeah. This is like something they would play at Perversion when we used to go dancing at night. That's true. And speaking of going and visiting a theme park or so, I'm going to France.

What? There is a wine theme park. Located in the country's capital of wine, Bordeaux, La Cite des Vunes, is an enormous event space and museum, which promises to give visitors a totally immersive experience in the history of wine, while I would prefer to just be immersed in the wine.

Yeah. Can you take a wine bath when you get back to your hotel room? They basically dunk you in and give you a straw. Yes. The park boasts a bar stocked with more than 50 different wines, around 14,000 bottles from all over the world. Yay. Better than Disney.

Way better. Screw the Millennium Falcon. Screw Star Wars land. Exactly. Closing shout outs. And speaking of France, the U.S. Women's National Team is about to play the French National Team today. By the time you hear this, we will have a winner.

This is basically the two best teams in the tournament playing at the quarterfinal stage rather than in the final. So this will be the best game of the entire Women's World Cup, most likely. So go USA. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulmester. And I'm Jason DeFillippo.

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