363: 99 Cent Store Mushrooms

This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG and get 10% off your first purchase. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Just a few words before we start today's episode. Brian and I are both deathly ill and Brian is in Canada. So this is not going to have the same quality of a show that we normally do. So we apologize in advance, but thank you for listening. Thanks for that. Thanks for that, Brian. Thank you very much.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I think you're a much lighter Jason DeFillippo. Yeah, just a little bit. I'm about 10 pounds down since Monday. I don't recommend 99 cent store mushrooms as a diet plan, but hey, whatever works for you, man.

Yeah, well, that was it seems like my food poisoning might not have been food poisoning, but something a little bit more viral. But still, yeah, 99 cent store mushrooms kick this off. I started puking in the middle of doing a show with Jordan on Monday, and it has been just a shit show ever since.

No pun intended. Yes. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better. Well, as much as we decry everything that's going on in the world and whatnot, I do believe we're living in one of the golden ages of satire right now. We've got, you know, the onion is firing on all cylinders. We've got the Waterford whispered news, which is amazing.

And I just saw this headline and the story, and I just, well, sorry, Jason, crap my pants laughing so hard. Thanks. So local millennial man Brandon Waller saw his friends posting their selfies from a new app that makes you look older. Thinking it looked like fun, Waller downloaded the app, quickly granted it permission to access all of his personal data, and ran his face through the old age filter.

His smile turned into a look of horror, however, when he saw what the app did to him. It made him look a few years older, working a steady job, presumably living in his own place. He took the picture in his parents' basement, where he currently resides, but the app's advanced algorithm automatically put him at a desk job, working hard to provide for himself.

It removed his tattoos, gave him a suit jacket that fit him, and combed his hair. Oh man, I can't even, he said as he saw an image of what his life would be like once his parents finally kicked him out. The struggle is real, brah. The 35-year-old dependent tried different poses and angles to see if the old age filter would show him living at his parents' house indefinitely, but all it did was show him working, mowing the grass, getting married, and settling down with his family.

Disappointed, the man asked his parents if they could find an apartment and a job for him sometime in the next decade. Nice. Oh, how true. Face app. In the news. San Francisco is an odd beast these days, Jason.

How so, Brian? Well, on the one hand, we've got the man poo everywhere, which their big solution was to make an app. For it. Income inequality is running wild. We have people that are horribly, horribly hypocrites about trying to fix homeless situations, but yet they do things like, you know, they pass banning facial recognition, which is good.

Six of one, half dozen of the other. There's a new bill working its way through San Francisco right now to tackle income inequality. What they're going to try to do is basically find the crap out of any companies that have CEOs that make a hundred times more than an employee's, which seems fair to me.

Okay. How do you think that's going to go over? It's probably not going to go over well, but, you know, they're trying, I suppose. I mean, a hundred times is ridiculous. We've talked about this in the past on shows before about how the CEO pay versus the average employee pay has just risen steadily over the last 30 years to ridiculous amounts.

And so the proposal is basically trying to say, Hey, let's knock this off. Let's, let's get back to the way it used to be. You can make a lot more. That's fine. A hundred times more. That's ridiculous. Well, you know, they can go up to 99.9 times more and, or give one, one employee a really big raise.

That's true. Bring up the average. Yeah. Or normally do what they do with creative accounting. Exactly. So there are always ways to be around it. The idea with this, they would get taxed basically, and the tax would hope to help to raise around a hundred million dollars for mental health services in San Francisco, which would probably help with the man poo.

Yeah. You know what else would help with the man poo? I thought about this one the other day. You put pooper scoopers on front of the scooters. So they're pooper scooters, pooper, scooper, scooper, catchers. Exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking. Little poop catchers on the front. Then we can little pooh Roombas. I think we talked about the Pumbo before.

It might've even been a show title once. It might've been. Yes. So we'll see what happens with that. I seriously doubt it's going to pass. And we've talked in the past before about people trying to get around the strangleholds of the Android and the Google and the iTunes marketplace for their apps.

And the fact that, you know, you have to do all your credit card processing and payments through them and they take a cut. Well, Tinder is said to hell with you, Google app. And how are they getting around that? They're simply ignoring what the store operators want, breaking the rules. And they've introduced a default payment process into the app itself that skips their play system entirely, taking payments directly.

And if you go this route, you lose the option of switching back to Google Play after the fact. Okay. So how are they still in the marketplace then? Why hasn't Google just given the boot? Well, they're thinking right now is they're too big of an app for Google to do anything about it. Oh, too big to tax, eh?

They're basically doing an Uber and saying, we're going to do what we want because we're awesome. Okay. I can't wait to see how that plays out for them. However, they have couched it. Remember, this isn't Tinder is no longer just Tinder. Tinder is part of Match Group, which is a bunch of dating apps. So it's a big company.

And they've said that this benefits the user's experience. So we'd rather do this for our users than deal with Google. Oh, what a crock of shit that is. Right? Oh, yeah. Let me have to use a totally separate payment solution instead of just saying yes to the credentials that I already have stored inside of Google.

This is not for the users. It's for the users, Jason. It's for the users. That is the tech equivalent of it's for the children from politicians. Exactly. It's for the users. We'll see how this plays out. But I don't see it gaining much traction inside of Google this week.

No, I haven't heard anybody else doing it. I mean, Spotify is the other big company that's kind of pissed off about this. But they haven't. Tinder kind of went for it. Spotify has been dancing around with it and arguing. So we'll see what happens. Yep. Dude, you got to pay the ferryman. You have to.

Yeah, you got to pay the ferryman. You're playing in their backyard. You got to pay the tolls. Yeah. I mean, it's not like their servers are free. Their platform that they paid for, it's not free. So if you want to get on there. I mean, granted, it may be a little bit. Okay, they're charging a little too much. Yeah, it's a little usurious.

But we can all agree on that. But still, it needs to come down a bit. But we'll see how this plays out. It's fun. I'm not going to go check it out. But yeah. And we had some interesting drone news while you were down for the count, Jason. Although interesting is also vaguely terrifying as it could very easily lead to war.

Okay. It is what it is. The U.S. took down an Iranian drone using this new jammer technology, and it's the first time it's been done over water. So it's been, apparently this has been tested and used on land, but the USS Boxer did this in the Strait of Hormuz, and apparently represented a baptism by fire for the new technology.

It's the U.S. Navy's first use of the MADIS, the Marine Air Defense Integrated System, an anti-drone system adapted for the sea. So it uses jammers to block a drone's communication and forces it to crash. So they did it. All right. I wonder if they put the MADIS strapped to an eagle and then fly the eagle around.

Maybe it's the eagle from that presidential seal holding the golf clubs in the cash. Oh, it could be. It could be. That was pretty funny. It could be. That was hilarious. But, you know, we don't want to talk about that. Nope, we don't do that. And we have some Elon Musk news, Hyperloop, which he is still, it's weird that they still connect him to it.

I guess he technically owns the patent. No, he doesn't. No, he gave the patent away. He came up with the idea and said, go for it. Yeah. But he's still being attached to it. There is a new competitor, well, not a competitor, somebody using the technology. So SpaceX runs a Hyperloop pod competition every year in the 2019 one.

The prototype hit a record speed of 288 miles per hour, which is pretty damn good. It's important to keep in mind that this is a one mile straight shot, though. Yeah, no turns. So no turns. But they have said that next year's tournament will involve a turn.

Okay. So looking forward to the crash footage here. Yeah, 288 miles an hour, it should have gone back in time. Exactly. To the future. Yes. Yes. And the last bit of news that I had this week while you were down and pooping all over the place was, I've determined you no longer have free will, Jason.

Okay. I pretty much know that. But free will has taken a real hit from neuroscience this week. Yeah. In a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in Australia were able to predict basic choices participants made 11 seconds before they consciously declared their decisions.

Now, I've seen this report before. Yeah, it is. But the thing about it is, you know, that just that doesn't mean your free will's gone. That just means that you're cognizant of it. But, you know, you could be making that choice of your own free will long before, you know, it bubbles up to the top.

Because I think I think there are. Well, I don't think the argument is so much that everything is fixed and we're just going to do some predetermined thing based on the exact settings at the Big Bang and what butterfly was farting where. I think it was more along the lines of we think we're making decisions, but the decisions are being made completely subconsciously by processes we don't understand.

Well, even when I'm conscious half the time, I don't understand the shit that I do. So it doesn't really matter. Well, again, you're always a fringe player, Jason. That's true. That's true. You are always an outlier. Anyways, it was a really interesting study and a really interesting article about it. So I'd suggest to check it out. Link is in our show notes.

But they used fMRI machines and, you know, pretty basic tests like throw up a colored stripes and which one do you prefer? And they'd figure they could see the patterns being made in the brain that said, oh, this person's going to choose horizontal and 11 seconds later, horizontal. Oh, that's good. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, not honestly, not too surprising to me. Just no, I'm sure we don't understand anything about our brains. And I think the more that we just start to discover that stuff, the more our minds are literally going to be blown. Yeah, they are the black box.

It's just like AI, you know, stuff goes in, stuff comes out. We don't understand why. And then also Jason's week. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out. He didn't really understand why.

Media candy. It is Comic-Con, which we never discuss. Well, it was Comic-Con. It was Comic-Con. Last weekend. But yes, the Picard trailer, the extended trailer dropped. And oh, my God. Yeah, that pretty much was all the feels, all the chills.

Yeah. Yeah. My roommate was just wondering, why is this 47-year-old man sitting on the couch yelling, yes, yes, yes. And then crying at the end. Oh, we don't know. Yeah, I was very excited about it. We've got some people returning. I'm a little surprised that Jerry Ryan is in it, but I'm excited about it.

I always loved Seven of Nine, and I thought she was fantastic in it. She still looks really good. Oh, God, she's still gorgeous. Yep. She always will. That's what happens also when you marry a billionaire. That's true, too. But I can't say that much for Data, though. He looked a little chubbs. Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, they're going to have some splaining to do with that one. But then again, why splain anything? Because they just change how Klingons look every season now. That's true. That's true, too. Yeah. So there was a really funny article over on Slate about it. So I just want to read the little quote. And I just can't express how excited I am about this.

So here's the quote. Orderly vineyards, precise enunciation, existential questions about one's place in the world that seem to have answers. Even the dismembered corpse of a broken-down robot neatly stowed in a dismembered broken-down whoops, dismembered, sorry, I'm on cold meds, neatly stowed in a broken-down robot corpse pelican case with perfectly sized cut-out trays to hold each dismembered robot limb.

There also appears to be some space-related drama, Borgs and Phasers and Jerry Ryan and so on. But even that is set in a world in which interstellar exploration invokes a sense of wonder and excitement rather than dread and shame. Imagine meeting an alien race or even a Canadian without being afraid you'd have to answer for Donald Trump.

Tell me about it. In short, Star Trek Picard looks exactly like the kind of thing you'd program into the holodeck if you wanted a vacation from America in 2020. I thought we weren't supposed to talk about that stuff. Well, that wasn't us. I'm just reading a quote. Okay. Okay. I just happen to agree with it.

It's just going to be fun. I can't wait. I cannot wait. Yeah, I'm very excited about it. CBS will be getting my monies. And Jake writes in into feedback. I moved it up here because this was relevant to our interest. He says, gentlemen, thought you'd like to know that Hulu has saved the Orville from the chopping block. I did. I wasn't aware it was on the chopping block.

I thought it had been renewed by Fox. I think it was. But then what happened was they wanted to put a lot more effects in it. And it was going to blow the season because it wasn't going to come out when they needed it to come out in the windows, but they needed it. So what they're going to do is they're just going to push it over to Hulu and let Hulu run with it.

And then they can do the season that they want to do because, you know, Seth MacFarlane makes them all the monies. So they're like, here, here's a bone. Go make your, go make your little show on the side. We'll keep all the rest of your shows and you can go do that one over there. Yeah, that's kind of it. So I'm very happy that it's coming back because it would suck to have no, no wrap up on it whatsoever, but, and I like the show.

I still like the show a lot. Yeah. But you've said that you like it more than some Star Trek, but I don't think you're going to like it more than Picard. No, no, no. I think that that would be kind of ridiculous. But, you know, I mean, look at, look at the Star Trek we've had. I mean, just the first season of Discovery was meh and, but the second season of Discovery was woo and, you know, definitely overtook the Orville in season two and just kind of made the Orville like a, just a parody show.

Yeah. Maybe in some ways, Seth MacFarlane forced Star Trek's hand and made them better. Yeah, it could be. It could be. He's a smart dude. Mm-hmm. This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Hover. You need your own domain name. If not for your business, then for your family.

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That's hover.com slash GOG. And we thank Hover for supporting our show because we love them. 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. Welcome back, Dave, and I hope you're not sick because we sure as hell are.

Oh, no. Both of you? Yes, yes. I was doing fine. My family and I flew to Toronto and we came off the plane disgustingly sick. So thanks to whoever was on our flight. Oh, and Jason, I saw earlier that you were sick. You ate something that didn't agree with your sensitive tummy?

Yeah, some 99-cent store mushrooms that my roommate made for me. And yeah. The kind you buy at the second-hand store. It's like gas station sushi. To be honest, I didn't know they were from the 99-cent store till after. I'm like, she made me some, you know, sautéed mushrooms, which are some of my favorite foods that I like to nosh on. And then, like, when I just started exploding them, she's like, oh, I got them

from the 99. They're usually pretty good there. Oh, man. Did you sprinkle them with cyanide, too? Oh, no. Oh, well, sorry for both of you. It's good to be back. Sorry I wasn't around last time, but happy to be back.

Excellent. I wanted to kick things off this week to sort of take you guys through the little adventure I had recently. I bought my father a Chromebook on Prime Day. Okay. Now. I Ted-pegged you as smarter than that, Dave. Well, thanks a lot, Brian.

Jeez. If you had asked me, even a year ago, nine months ago, if I would have ever purchased anything but a Macintosh laptop for any of my family members, I would have said you were nuts. But I have to say that for my elderly father, the combination of price and having

everything stored in the cloud and all of the security stuff that comes built into having Google handle your email and stuff like that, it just seemed like the right move at the right time. How's it working out for you? So far, so good. He likes it. The transition was actually easier than either of us thought it would be.

Right. I spent a better part of an afternoon taking care of the transition, just getting everything working and copied over and getting printers working and email and passwords and all that kind of stuff. Finesseing his shadow profile.

Yeah, right, exactly. There's still a few things I've got to get copied over. He's got some stuff from his old Mac Mail program that I have to figure out how to copy over to Gmail, which evidently is not as easy as you would think it would be this time and place. But I don't know. So far, so good. So this is a grand experiment. I have to say this computer was dirt cheap. It was a couple hundred bucks. Got a nice 15-inch screen on there, which for him is great. A friend

of mine said, he said, you know, that screen's not full HD. I said, well, neither are my father's eyes. They do not. They could use new retina display. They could use new retinas. Exactly. You know, this is not a computer that would work for me because it is a piece of cheap crap and I would just be upset with the aesthetics of it, the build quality and all that kind of stuff. But

you know, for him, it seems like it could be fine. And if it's not, it's disposable. So it's cheap enough, right? Right. I got my dad a Chromebook about three years ago for Christmas for the same exact reasons. I thought, oh, it'd be easier. I did all the transition for him and got him all set up with it.

Yeah. It's still in the box. He put it back in the box the next day and has never taken it out again. Really? I'm really glad it was cheap. I'm really glad it was cheap. Yeah. Well, I'm interested in these stories because it is time for my mom to get a computer upgrade and she's, uh, yeah, this may be, that may be a good thought for me.

Well, the other option would have been to go to an iPad and I don't think he could handle that much of a transition. This is, yeah. Switching to full touchscreen is, is, is my, I've have tablets for both my parents and my dad never cottoned onto it. My mom's slowly coming to it, but we're talking three years of using the tablet that she's starting to get it.

Right. He was used to using Chrome on his Mac. And so it was also easy using, uh, you know, a Google account to transfer all of his bookmarks and things over. So it just, it looked the way he was used to it looking. Also, this Chromebook is a dead knockoff of a MacBook Pro. So it even looks like the computer he used to have. So that helps a little bit.

Yeah. My dad, I, the thing with my dad is I bought him a big ass iPhone around the same time and he just uses his big ass iPhone. Didn't even need an iPad. He just does all of his email and stuff on his phone. And then he's like, uh, anything else? I'll have somebody else do it.

I don't want to, you know, that's about, that's about where he's at. He does not like technology very much. So yeah, I hardly ever use my iPad after I went to the plus size iPhones. My iPad use just went off a cliff basically because it's big enough. Yeah. I still have a Wii iPhone. So I, I quite love my iPad. Speaking of our parents and their computers, I ran across this article

and, um, as they say, it gave me pause. It's something I didn't think about too much, but, uh, a German court has ruled in favor of two parents suing Facebook for access to the private messages of their deceased daughter. Um, we don't need to get the specifics on this, but if the ruling holds and becomes part of the European union's aggressive stance on social media, this has recently resulted in billions being spent by businesses to fall in line with GDPR could

quickly come to represent a new standard and make deleting one's history part of the digital hospice experience because the basic ruling is our relatives have access to our digital data if they want it. Should this terrify parents, most of whom will be outlived by their children? The article says, no, not if they're behaving themselves.

If you got nothing to hide. And there is, therein is the rub, my friends, because I certainly know what my behavior was like pre, uh, meeting my wife and even, even things I can, I can't imagine like reading some of the texts that my wife and I send, which, uh, you know, had, had I been the next generation instead of the one that I am, my parents would be sending to each other.

Yeah. Our son is an idiot. Our son is an idiot. There's also nothing on Netflix tonight. Want a bone. I mean, these sorts of things. Yeah, exactly. Um, so yeah, this is getting once again into our, our privacy and digital communications.

Um, this, the assumption of privacy and digital communication is obviously no longer a given. And in fact, the law seems to be coming down saying that anything that we have out there, our family will have access to in the future. For me, this is of little concern as I, uh, anything I've been saying on the podcast for six years now will surely mortify my son, but, um, the rest of the rest of my digital communication, him having access to in the future is somewhat of a frightening prospect.

And as we know, delete does not equal delete. So I'm curious to see how far these cases get taken because it's one thing if I have not deleted, say my Facebook messages and my, and my, and my texts, he will have access to those if he showed so chooses.

But we also have access to the records of things that have been kept that I have theoretically deleted. That is, that is a real, really weird and terrifying prospect. Of course, at the end of the day, I'm dead. What does it matter? But still. See, I, I'm on board with this.

I think it shouldn't be hard for parents to get their, you know, their children's records from social media if something happens to them. And I think it should go the other way around too. You know, once you're dead, you're dead. But something will happen to all of us eventually. Yeah. And here's the deal. If this is the case, put it in the will.

So the executor of the will can say, no, you can't have it. We're going to delete it. So it should be. Will that, will, will putting that in your will trump further cases on this? That's, that's the question, right? Well, it's got to be tested. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the way it should be.

If, if it's, we all have to put this in our wills now that, you know, hands off my iPhone, let go my ego. Um, and that's that. So, um, I have a friend who is an estate attorney and she tells me that folks are, are already putting these things in their will and have been for the past five years or so that this is a rapidly growing part of her business as people become aware of and have to deal with

what do we do with digital online, you know, just even to the point of who has responsibility for deleting dad's Facebook account. Right. Well, as my, as friend of the show, Mike has always told me if anything were to happen to him, my first duty and only duty for him is to take a baseball bat, go over to his place and destroy his laptop.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. Uh, there were, yes. I want to say it was in my mind, I think it was Andy and not go who wrote an article way back. I think back in the nineties and the, and the title was burn my laptop. And it was exactly that point that we all need to have a close friend in our lives whose job it is.

If something bad happens to us to come and destroy the laptop. Yes. The problem now of course is that it's, it's no long, it's no longer on our laptop. It's all in the cloud. That's true. I mean, in the old days before we all had laptops, we had porn friends. Did porn friends.

You never guys didn't have porn friends. So if you got, if you got hit by a car, your friends had to sneak over to your house while your parents were at the hospitals, go into your bed and get all the porn you've been snatching and get it out of there. Get the stash. Yeah. So we had porn friends back in the day. Now you got laptop friends. I had friends that had weed friends.

Seems like a concept, yeah. Well, you know, that reminds me, I have a friend whose father passed away recently and she was telling me the story of, of going through her father's belongings and coming across his porn stash and just, it's not, not a pleasant experience.

Cause she's like, well, so I found my dad's porn stash. I was like, oh, well, you know, okay. You know, he's a man. Been there, done that recently. The only thing is I had, I had obviously, as we all are, we were taxed, taxed with fixing our parents' computers throughout the years.

Right. I, and fixing a computer many years ago, I discovered that my father did not know delete history and that's all I ever needed to know about that. And when my father passed away last year and my mom basically handed me his laptop and said, I don't know what to do with this, uh, have at it as you will.

I did not explore. I just immediately wiped. Yeah. I don't, you know, let his privacy be his privacy. I like the way my friend described it. She says, so I found my father's porn stash. Um, and let me just say his interests were specific.

As are, I think, most people these days. This is one of the things that has happened to human psychology and sex and sexuality. And we've been given so many options. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Not a bad thing, but I guess if you can, if you can spare your children that, wouldn't we all want to spare our children that?

Once again, Jason, we're doing it for the children, Jason. For the children. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, back to the story though, I don't have a problem with parents being able to access their kids stuff. I do have a problem with adult children automatically being able to access their parents stuff.

Well, and then when there, when is the cutoff as well? Is it 18? Is it 16? Like when do parents stop being able to have access to their kids? Right. There's, there's a lot to figure out here. As you know, this is no longer a case of getting Kurt Cobain's notebook. There's a lot more going on here and it's a lot, the world's moved on a bit.

So the law needs to catch up. Now we need to start talking about these things and figuring it out. I do like the fact of, I love the idea of being able to put it in your will that basically, you know, what's out there digitally is none of your business and shut it down, delete it, get rid of it as best you can. And that's that.

Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, maybe I can, I can imagine people putting money in their will that the executor of the will has the responsibility to hire a computer person to come in and handle all the wiping by a third party. What an interesting new job position.

Yeah. Digital cleanup guy or gal or whatever. Digital porn stash guy. Right. Yeah. It's interesting. Virtual porn stash guy. I think my will is just going to end up being my one password password and saying, do whatever the hell you want to with it.

I'm dead. I don't care. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And everything else goes to the dogs. Yeah. Fight over it. I don't care. First come, first serve. Right. Right. Right. Are you guys familiar with Google's new confidential mode? I know it's confidential.

Nobody told me. I've heard of it. I'm not a Gmail user. So I crossed paths with it today and I have to say it was pretty annoying. So a fan of the Hacking Human show wrote in with some nice stuff for us to use on the show.

And I responded and thanked her and said, hey, this is great. By the way, if you'd like us to send you some stickers, please send your address and we'll send you some stickers. So I want stickers. I'll send you some stickers. So she she sent an ad. She sent her address and I go to forward the message with her address in it to the person here who sends out stickers and I could there was no forward button.

And I went, what what happened to my forward button? Like, oh, no problem. I'll just copy and paste the address into a new message. Can't select the text. And I'm going, what you got and I go down to the bottom of the email and it says something like this email will expire on this date and can't copy and paste.

So I did what any good person would do. I did a screen grab. Yes. Screenshot. Problem solved. Yeah, exactly. The screenshot will not self-destruct. Right. And if that happened without without a hitch, I was half expecting to get just a screen full of black because, you know, that'll happen sometimes if you're trying to copy something out of a video window or something like that.

There are some players that are no, no screen grab. No problem at all. So this led me to my conclusion that while interesting, this really doesn't do anything. You know, again, it goes back to it goes right back to the meetings I used to have in the record labels where how do we put how do we stop people from copying the stream?

How do we stop people from making copies? And you can't. You don't. Why even try? Yeah. So the other real story I have this week from actual cybersecurity stuff is there's a U.S. company who has started selling a weaponized version of the Blue Keep exploit.

Now, we've talked about Blue Keep. It's a RDP remote desktop protocol exploit. Very bad to the point where the NSA has reminded everyone, hey, everybody, this is really bad. Please patch. Please patch.

Please, please, please patch. So there's a company called Immunity and they have a pen testing suite of tools that they call Canvas. And they've put a live version of a Blue Keep exploit in this Canvas pen testing toolkit.

And so this is the first release of it in the wild. This is not a cheap toolkit. I believe it costs tens of thousands of dollars to be a member of this Canvas kind of thing. So it's not like they're spreading that they're not posting it on GitHub and, you know, sending it out for everybody to to grab.

But it's the first occurrence of this. And of course, that means that it's only a matter of time. And people are saying probably days or weeks before we see somebody taking this and using it for an actual exploit. I was wondering what your guys take on this was, that putting something out there that's bad for good purposes is what they're saying they're doing.

Do you guys agree with that? It's already out in the wild, though, and being used, correct? Not much. There's been reports that some folks have found it in a crypto mining package that there's a crypto mining package that's I think it's called DeskBot.

It's looking for vulnerabilities to Blue Keep, but I'm not sure that it's actually been seen spreading around on its own yet. And it's sort of like a wormable version of it. Okay. If that's the case, then no, they shouldn't have released it. If it was already in the wild, then absolutely. Because if you're a pen tester, you want to be able to test your networks for something that is actively being exploited.

If it's not actively being exploited, then I think it's irresponsible to release it. That's my simple take on it. Yeah, I agree with Jason. Shockingly enough. Yeah. They've said that the version they released is not self-propagating.

It's not a worm. So it won't go and, you know, run off on its own. But I have mixed feelings about this. I suppose there's the argument that it was inevitable. So why not put it in the hands of the good guys first to be able to go out and test for it?

But I guess with everything, it's kind of complicated. Mm-hmm. So this next story isn't really cybersecurity, but it comes back to DNA testing and somewhat security related. But we've talked about this on the show. And I know you have talked about DNA kits and your adventures with them, Dave.

This is a story from a friend of mine who was just very, it's a very incredible story. We covered this on Feedback Friday over on the Jordan Harbinger Show, but I wanted to run it by you guys as well. We'll do the abridged version here. And I get your feedback on this because this is, this is a head scratcher.

So friend of mine went out and got some ancestry DNA kits for his wife and himself for holiday. And they did it. They sent the data back here. They spit in the tube, sent it back in and got the results back. And my friend went in to go put in, he was excited.

He wanted to put in some more stuff about his family history and build out the family tree and do all that stuff. Well, he got a genetic match for someone that was his father, who wasn't the guy he grew up knowing as his father. And there, there, there, the story begins.

Well, after that, it turns out he had known this guy because he lived down the street and they were actually Facebook friends. They were Facebook friends before he spit in the tube and before he even bought the kit. So this is somebody that he had known, but now is in a, in a, he's in a, in a pickle right now.

He confronted his mom about it and she basically name dropped the guy and said, yeah, I had a torrid past and blah, blah, blah. And he's not talking to her anymore because she basically lied to him his whole life. He doesn't know what to do about where to go from here. And I mean, I have my thoughts on it, but I want to hear your guys' thoughts first on how would you handle this situation?

Would you start accusing other people in the family? Go after the father, go after your, you know, the guy that you called dad or talk to your biological father? Would you immediately call a therapist and get some help? Or what would you guys do? It's like starting at phase one.

It's like, oh, well, dad's not dad. Thanks, Ancestry. Where do we go from here? I'm never taking one of these tests. I'm not spinning in a tube. I'm not going to do it. I don't see any reason to, um, DNA tests, keeping families together since 2012.

Um, you know, if, if nothing's wrong, if there's no rocking the boat, why, why even do this? Um, you know, the only reason that I understand doing a DNA test is if you are actively searching for something there, there is a question that you have, there's a specific need that you have to, to get all this data and information and frankly, share it with the world and the government and the police department.

Um, I, I, you know, if I found out my dad, wasn't my dad, my dad was my dad and I don't care to find out any further information about that. Um, but that's just me. I'm pretty happy with everything the way it is. And I don't have this curiosity about any of this stuff.

I'm not interested. And I only see downsides like this personally. So I come at this from a different direction. Um, I am adopted and I have known my whole life that I was adopted. Um, have never, uh, known anything about my birth parents.

Um, never had any strong desire to find my birth parents. Um, I would say the first inkling of, of really caring about anything with my birth parents happened when my wife and I had our first child and all of a sudden I was faced with, Oh, this is what having blood relatives feels like.

You know, this is, this is what having someone who looks like you is like. Isn't that interesting? That's, that's a little different than what I'm used to. Well, there's also the, the question of what genetic things have you brought to the table for your own offspring, right? Correct. And my wife is also adopted.

So our kids had no medical history at all. Right. Um, and just for me, if I would go to the doctor, the doctor would say, what's your, you know, is there any history of heart disease in your families? No idea. Don't, no idea.

Um, so when the DNA tests came out, I was curious. I waited for a little while. Um, my primary interest was to find out what my background actually was. Um, but if I'm honest, of course, you know, on the back of my mind, I always thought, well, what will I find out as well?

And, um, so two sides of this, the family lore. My parents were, was that I was Native American, that I had Native American in me. Um, and my parents being my sweet, uh, parents from, you know, the generation that they're in, uh, my parents are basically June and Ward Cleaver.

Right. Uh, from the fifties. And so my parents trying to, their best to, um, honor my heritage, my Native American heritage did things like dressed me in moccasins. And is this where I go with the, okay, Pocahontas?

Yeah, basically that's, yeah. Um, and, uh, I had, when I was growing up, I happened to be a pretty fast runner. And of course, the reason I was a fast runner was, you were Native American. It was the Indian in me. Yes. So, uh, you know, all these kinds of things and great, wonderful.

So anyway. It was a different time. It was a very different time. So, got the DNA test back and sure enough, not a lick of Native American in me at all. I am straight out of England. Right. Um, and, you know, so this caused a little bit of surprise for my parents.

Um, uh, so there was that. Um, now I also have a little bit of experience of being on the other side of one of these things where, um, I recently got a message from someone who got tagged as a first cousin over on 23andMe.

And she said, hey, uh, this thing says we're first cousins. I don't, I don't know you. Who, who are you? And I, and I responded and I said, hi, this is who I am. Um, here's my story. And I understand that my very existence might be a surprise and perhaps even unwelcome to, uh, someone to find out about that.

I respect that. I don't, not my, uh, notion to upset anyone's apple cart. I would love to find out anything that I can find out, but I understand if, you know, there's nothing more to share. Um, had a couple of back and forths with her. She was interested.

Who else was I related to? And then she went silent. So I assume the answer is she did some checking around and somebody probably said, stop asking around. We don't talk about that in this family. Right. Exactly. And you know, what else am I going to do with that?

But that. So, um, I suspect that as more of the, more folks get the tests and more things get filled in, will, is it inevitable that sometime I'm going to be able to fill in the gaps and figure out who is most likely one of my birth parents? Yes.

Yeah. Uh, my wife, who is quite good at all the ancestry stuff has, has narrowed it down to about half a dozen people in this particular side of a particular family that, you know, these are the most likely candidates that one of these folks are one of your birth parents. Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard in the, in the library.

They did it. The other side of it is, you know, we are kind of hitting a race against time where I'm not getting any younger and neither are they. So we're in that zone where it's possible they could already be gone. I don't know. Um, but the, the flip side of that, I think to, uh, to a point Brian made earlier is that, um, I feel as though I hit the jackpot with my adopted parents.

So it's not like I'm longing for anything or missing for anything. My dad is my dad and my mom is my mom. And so is it, would it be interesting to find new family? Yeah. Um, on the plus side too, I mean, just on the purely medical aspect of things, you could have your, your kids tested for numerous diseases now that don't involve having to find out your ancestry about certain things.

Right. Um, so just purely on the medical side of things, which is, uh, speaking as parents, you and I know is, is one of the main concerns. You want to know what your child is, is, um, facing and, and what probabilities they have of certain things. Um, that could be done without delving into the pool as it were.

Right. Now, the other thing I'll say related to this specific story is that, um, this person, your friend's feelings of betrayal of being lied to. Um, I don't understand those feelings because I've never had that sort of attachment that blood relatives are my relatives.

Mm-hmm. Um, that, I guess that doesn't change how it would feel to find out that something I thought I knew was a lie. Um, you know, I'm not native American, but who cares? You know, it's not, not, not a big deal. So I can empathize with this person's feelings.

Um, I don't know, I don't know that I'd torpedo their relationship with my mother though. I, and I guess it's not fair for me to say that because his feelings are authentic, right? He's feeling what he's feeling. His feelings are his feelings. He's doing the best he can. Um, yeah.

But I guess after, after so long, you know, after 40 some odd years, then you get the rug pulled out from under that you've been basically lied to the whole time. But who knows the story of maybe his mom was doing the best she could 40 years ago. Right. What was the motivation of the lie?

To sit there and judge somebody's actions 40 years ago. I mean, I get it. It's your mom and you feel that, yeah, what's, what was the motivation? Was it a selfish lie or was it a, a generous lie, you know, to protect, and it's probably a mix of both, but where on the spectrum does it land?

Yeah. Lie of convenience. Let bygones be bygones. I mean, have you had a good life with your mom until this point? Can you forgive something that she did many, many years ago? Right. You know? Yeah. Do you want to throw away the entire relationship that you've had for your entire life over Yeah.

Because of something that occurred before. Yeah. Yeah. Long time ago. You know, as, as someone who doesn't talk to his mother anymore, I'm a, I, you know, I'd be a huge hypocrite by saying, go patch things up, which is why I'm asking for outside opinions. But, you know. I mean, I guess you could say, I mean, he literally had nothing to do with this.

Right. His mother's decision, this, you know, this, his mother's decision was, was what created him. But, um, this all happened before he was, the decision she made that led to his existence happened before he was considered.

Isn't this interesting how neatly this ties in with my article? Because maybe you could have found this out from a text record if it would have been 40 years later. Oh yeah. Isn't that interesting? You know, it's kind of the same thing. It's, it's DNA versus like, she could, you could find out that they were, somebody had, your mom had an affair from Facebook messages that you got access to after she passed away.

And what does that do about your feelings about your mother then? And now she's gone. She can't give you a story other than, you know, she didn't write her feelings in those naughty texts. Yeah. She just wrote the naughty texts. And if you look on the bright side, she's still around so you can patch things up and get the actual story so you're not always wondering and find out, you know, after the fact.

Yeah. Yeah. It, it sounds to me like he is, um, in the middle of his journey through the various stages of grief. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it's actually just beginning. Yeah. And so I hope that this ends as, as well as possible. And I hope that, uh, you know, he finds peace with this.

So I, it's, it's certainly shocking. Yeah. Um, but I guess my advice would be just from my perspective, which is admittedly not the same as his, just try to, try to look at it from a different perspective that, you know, your mother is your mother.

The person who raised you as your father is your father. And, um, you know, I, people were probably, everyone was doing the best that they could and they were trying to do it with, I would guess with his best interest in mind. At least what they thought was his best interest at the time.

But yeah, that's, I agree with that a hundred percent. And I would say for people that haven't gotten to this point yet, obviously the Pandora's boxes have been opened for, for your friend, Jason, but for people that haven't been there, I would remind you of, um, or I will tell you about my strident youth, um, when I was very angry about things and, and my pursuit of truth at all costs.

And I felt that truth was the ultimate ideal and there was nothing more important in the world than knowing the real facts about everything. As you grow older, you discover ignorance is truly bliss. It's so true. It often is. It is so true. Yeah. Some things are best left unknown and uncovered and just live your life and do you, you do you people.

Yeah. You learn the difference between knowledge and wisdom. But I also think he needs to go see therapy immediately because, you know, yeah, he's got a lot. He's got to unpack here. Yeah. And it only takes a phone call to ruin somebody else's family because he can get in touch with his biological father or the siblings because he grew up around them and blow up that entire family.

And is that really something that anybody would ever want to do without, you know, making damn sure that because that's a you can't put the pin back in that grenade once it's you can't undo that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right on.

Get yourself to someone who can help you work through these things. There's no shame in that. Gosh, I feel like we're doing an episode of Frasier. Right. Well, just imagine also, you know, we're talking about we're talking about attorneys who are going to be talking about these digital death rights after after the fact.

And that's coming. Think about therapists are going to have to this is going to be a whole other industry from people who find out that their entire family was not exactly what they thought when they were growing up. So look, let me just play this out for everyone right now. Everything that you think is true probably isn't true. And it's best to just let it go, especially since we know our memories are bullshit anyway.

And everything that we think we know is just a fabrication. So I like to think of everything is provisional. Everything is provisional. Everything is subject to change. And if you can be at peace with that, I think you're going to be at peace more so than if you can't be.

Agreed. Well, I think that's all we have for this very strange episode of Grumpy Old Geeks this week. It's a very special episode of Grumpy Old Geeks. It's an after school special episode of Grumpy Old Geeks. That's right. Exactly. Remember, kids, don't do drugs. Feedback loop.

Well, apparently we've been getting a lot of Patreon subscribers, but there was a hiccup in our notification system. So here's here we go. Thanks to all the new people. Chalene, Michelle, Timothy, Stephen, Jason, Nathan, Michael, Aaron, Steve, Dan, Matt, Jody, and Jeremy.

Thank you all so much. And sorry we haven't given you a shout out yet. I blame Patreon. Yeah, it's either Patreon or our email server. We're not sure which, but we found you all. We found you all. So thank you so much. And over at PayPal, we got donations from Joseph, Ryan, Mark, and Chris.

And Chris writes in, double thanks for recent episodes. With family, I just switched to T-Mobile. And because up to date on GOG, I knew to opt out of forced arbitration. Grumpy Old Geek wisdom slash cynicism for the win. I'm glad we could be of use there, Chris. That's awesome. And thank you for the ducats. Thank you.

And over at Facebook, Andy writes, Facebook? Hey, we got a Facebook review. Okay, Facebook review. The only podcast I actually get excited about. It's educational. It's funny and downright grumpy. Exactly what it says on the tin. Brian, would you like to take this? Shocking.

And over at Twitter, Maggie writes in, Wichita has only had them for a week, but this is them in a nutshell. And it's a story over at KWCH. Talks about the first big weekend for Wichita's new scooters. And says, when you're doing a story about following the rules and someone fails to follow the rules. Yes.

I don't know if you watch this, but literally as she is reading off the rules about not riding on the sidewalks, a guy without a helmet blows past her on the sidewalk in a scooter. It's too fun. It's too fun. Yep. Karthik writes in, a report on the new dockless bikes, aka Lime Bird on ITV London.

Yep. The bikes are a menace here this side of the pond as well. And there are cycle firms, cycle hire firms are being urged to help clear the dump bikes from the canals, which is exactly what Fergal told us would happen in Dublin, but it's also happening in London. Everybody's just dumping them in the water.

Please don't do that, people. Yeah. Batteries, it's bad for the environment. By all means, vandalize these things as much as you want. Don't toss them in the water. No. Put them in a landfill where they belong. Exactly. In front of the show, Fogarty sent this one over. Speaking of Comic-Con, San Diego impounds 2,500 scooters over Comic-Con weekend.

Of course. And it's like $67, I think, per scooter for them to pull them out of impound. There you go. That's some good money for the city. Mm-hmm. Alex writes in, found myself nodding to some of the suggestions given on GOG Podcasts about Apple curating the podcast directory better.

Automatic archive of podcasts that haven't been updated in three months. There are so many abandoned podcasts. I want to believe a lot more smaller podcasts could be suggested or brought to the surface if abandoned podcasts were not something that showed up. I also think the podcast team should listen to and curate lists of lesser-known podcasts.

Hear, hear. Yes. That would involve them putting money, time, and effort into it. Yep. And apparently iTunes is completely screwed up right now because they rolled out their new gazillion categories, but they haven't updated iTunes in their latest shipping version of iTunes for the current operating system.

And it's completely borked. You can't, nothing's, nothing's, I mean, it's barely working right now. It's crazy. Crazy. So it's usual. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's true. It's par for the course. Par for the course. Right Film Sleeper Pete writes, rabbit hole over on Twitter. So I'm freaking out. I went to Home Depot at two and purchased a ceiling fan.

It's almost seven. And on Facebook, they're showing me ads of Home Depot ceiling fans. They've never shown me these ads before and I haven't searched on my phone. How do they know? It's not the first event. Well. You searched on your computer. That or they tied it in with your rewards card at Home Depot, which is tied to your every purchasing account.

Remember, we've talked about rewards before, or if you use your credit card, you know, there, there are a lot of vectors. It's not just buying all that data. Yeah. All that data is getting shoveled around and that's, that's the way it's going to go. Just get used to it. I'm seeing things that my roommate searching for on my suggested Amazon pages now, which is getting really kind of weird.

I've got a photo that I'll share with you later, Brian. I was like, I thought my Amazon account got hacked and I'm looking at it. I'm like, okay, this is really weird. Excellent. Can't wait. And Sergio brought to light a story that we talked about a while ago. And this is the rare single occasion that we have found so far of your phone.

Actually. Yes. Listening to you. Hey guys, in this episode, you're, you said your phone is not listening to you. Actually in every episode, we've said your phone is not listening to you. Take a look at these gangsters. It's been a big deal in Spain. And this is the story about that soccer league that released the, uh, the app that was actually really was listening to you because they were trying to see if games were playing, being played illegally in bars.

Yeah. Yeah. We did cover that one and it was true. Yeah. But they said they were just fingerprinting the background noise so they could find out if the bar was stealing the show. So yes. TrippinFool writes, just what we need, more AI contracts for the military. Army named Silicon Valley's data mining company Palantir to lead battlefield intelligence.

Yay. Oh, Palantir. I'm glad we're outsourcing defense now. Well, what are you going to do? Yep. And, uh, Matthew writes in, Facebook and Google's trackers found on thousands of porn sites. Color me shocked. Yeah, this is. Hold on a second. Shocking.

Yeah. This has been around forever, you know? I mean. Yes. I, this is honestly, so not news. This has been around since the first Facebook light button was around and people were putting like buttons on, on porn sites. And we're like, yeah, I mean, we were joking about this. Yeah.

But we were joking about this in the bar when the first, the things first came out. We're like, who's going to like their favorite porn movie. So it shows up on Facebook. And then we're like, oh, that's right. People are dumb. Believe it or not. Lots of people. Lots of people will do it. That's right.

Dope. And over at GOG.show, we got a ton of people with Charles, Naveed, Craig, Quibble, and several others sent us this video of a dash cam in Dallas of a lime scooter riding on the interstate during rush hour.

And beating the traffic, beating the traffic. And it was dead. It was pretty fun, though. It was pretty fun. Yeah. And it black sheep writes us on the never ending quest. And eggs are good again. Nutrition science is broken. This new egg study shows why. And yes, this is just the continual.

Is it good? Is it bad? Who the hell knows? Well, it was a really good article talking about the science of science and how these studies are done and how they're just bad science. Yeah. So but speaking of eggs, Brian, I put these in here for you. Plant-based, plant-based eggs land their first major fast food deal.

And it just happens to be at Tim Hortons up in Canada. So now you can go check out Just Egg at a Tim Hortons near you. And you can tell me if this mung bean-based egg is any good. I saw that when I went to go get my breakfast sandwich the other day. And I said, oh, no, thanks.

I'll have the real one. Oh, you got to try it just so you can bring it back to the show. We need we need research. OK, I will try. But I wasn't going to do it for my first one. I will try it. And for next week, I will have a report on my mung bean eggs. OK, well, you can get your regular sandwich and then, you know, you can take it out of the show budget.

We'll pay for your mung eggs. OK, I'm going to have to do the currency translation. Oh, OK. OK, well, you know, it's fine. We'll let the show pay for it. Patreon.com slash GOG. Buy me a sandwich, people. John writes in, I've seen a bunch of Japanese animation with my kids, found most of it to be crap and annoying for adults.

But Naruto, Naruto, is actually pretty well written and no reason for you to care. Agreed. Yep, yep. I would say go check out Death Note, though, if you got to watch some Japanese animation. I love Death Note. Adelantiemi Cafe. I'm butchering that.

I'm sure it writes in. Hey, guys, love the show. In episode 362, Brian mentioned LastPass is no longer going to have a free version, and he was switching to another password manager. I don't need to read the rest of this because, Brian, would you like to take over now? Yeah, it wasn't LastPass. It was 1Password, and it wasn't a free version. There was always a paid version.

They're just no longer offering the straight-out purchase, and they've moved to a subscription-only model, which I can't stand. I'm going to keep my fully functional, continually using it, fully paid version 6 and not upgrade to version 7, and wait for the upcoming Apple password manager, which should be launching with the new OS updates.

Mike writes in, hey, guys, have you heard anything about the GOG contact us form not working from Opera? Well, I've heard it working from not Opera, not Firefox, not Chrome. We're having issues because that's why we're switching servers, because there's just so many issues. It's an old version of Linux running on Linode, Linode, Linode, whatever.

So, yeah, sorry about that. If you need to write us, you can just write to podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. We'll definitely get it, because that's where the contact form is supposed to go. Yes. But, yeah, and Mike also writes about Dan Carlin's recent podcast that nobody liked.

There's a thing at the end about the VR experience from World War I. Somebody else sent that in before, too. I haven't had a chance to go back and check it out, but I'm interested in that, except I don't want to go buy a VR rig, so probably will never see it in person. And he says, haven't heard you mention Fireside recently. Is that going to happen this year?

Fireside is happening, but unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, Brian and I will not be there this year. But check it out if you want to go. We had a blast. We had a total blast. Lots of booze. It was fun. Jake writes in, also, I've been using my Amazon Echo Auto for over a month now, and it works great.

It powers on the moment I start the car, and immediately it attaches to my Bluetooth. It's convenient to have access to my Alexa lists and to have her search things on the internet instead of pulling over. It also makes it a little easier to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, though I still prefer managing it from my phone. The phone calls are pretty good, and people seem to hear me over road noise, but my fan and the quality is pretty low.

There are two issues I have with it. They made it black and then suggest putting it on your dashboard. Hot. Problematic. Overheat. I've had a couple problems of it overheating and having to cool down before use. I solved this by putting up my sunshield. The second issue is that there are now two extra wires running from my power port to my dash, so it's not very clean looking anymore.

Overall, it's a great and inexpensive way to put Bluetooth into a car that lacks these options. I can see myself buying it and even putting it in my other cars that have Bluetooth already. I didn't intend for this email to be so long, so I'm completely okay if you paraphrase it or don't read it. Well, we didn't need to do either. I think at this point, I'm going to be waiting just for full-on CarPlay integration.

Yeah, get a new car. Get CarPlay. Yeah, I'm just going to get a new car. I've been using CarPlay since I got my new Explorer, and I have zero complaints. I showed it to you the other day. Yeah, it looked great. It looked amazing. You totally can't hear that I'm talking on the phone when I'm driving because there's just no road noise, and yeah, I'd rather just use the built-in, but they missed the boat with me.

If they'd have had this out earlier, I'd have bought one just for my other car, but just skipping. Rick writes in, where are you now on the shitty Mac podcast pages? I see the Cyber Wire and technology, which I enjoy now, too, but where is GOG located now? The Mac podcast pages really suck and need a renovation, don't you think?

Well, they're brand new, so I don't know if they're going to be renovating them anytime soon, but you should get a player and actually just listen to the show on your player, on your phone, or whatnot. If you have to use a website to do it through the web, just go to GOG.show. All of the shows are up there.

We've got a really nice player. You can do that. The Mac podcast pages. See, we got kicked out of the top 100 in technology and tech news a while ago because we shoveled everybody over to Overcast, so we don't get new subs on iTunes anymore, which is fine because those top lists are crap anyway.

We all have done the research. We know that. So I don't care that much anymore about that. And on the podcast pages, here's the deal. We get search results from them. Some people find the show that way. If they're showing up in Google, that's all I care about. I don't see them as anything else besides just Apple trying to catch up.

There's so many other places where Apple could spend their time in the podcast app and getting rid of old podcasts like we've just talked about that I don't even care about the podcast pages. There you go. Steve writes in, I just wanted to clarify how Apple has implemented notifications and why some apps have chosen to go to the subscription model because of it.

The app developer has two models to choose from, a server-based push system or an app-based polling system. The app-based polling system wakes up the app periodically, usually every 10 to 15 minutes, to check if there are any notifications. While this does not require any outside infrastructure, the notifications are not real-time and also use more battery life since the apps need to wake up even if there are notifications to be had.

The server-based model is just that. The app developer has a separate server to handle notifications that push any new notifications to the Apple servers, which then forwards the notification to the app on the device. In this case, the notifications are near real-time and the app only wakes up when there are actual notifications to handle, so less battery drain than the polling method.

In my opinion, the server-side implementation is better, but adds infrastructure costs to the app developer. Unfortunately, Apple's DevTOS explicitly states that you cannot charge extra solely for notifications, which is why you are seeing apps go subscription with features bundled with notifications, since notifications are usually an often-requested feature for an app.

This is all to say that Airmail probably did not roll their own notification system, but rather went the server-side push implementation. There you go. I think Airmail did roll their own because they mentioned that specifically in one of their blog posts. But either way, just pay for it.

Just put it into the cost of the app. You know it's going to be there. Cost to do a business. Yeah. Just not a subscription cost. That's all. I mean, if you make a good app, do upgrades, pay for them. But there's no real upgrade when Airmail just went subscription. It's like, okay, here's the same app. We're just going to charge you more and charge you differently.

Like, uh, not really a fan of that, guys. Not really a fan. And here's the thing. Some people might have given them the benefit of the doubt if they had said this before they actually did it. You know? Yeah. They could have notified us. Yeah. Yeah. They could have sent us a freaking notification.

John writes, and I thought that Jason may be interested in attachments for his drone that can be used in self-defense. And this is the flamethrower drone that everybody's been sending around. What was the one rule of drones that Adam Savage and everybody professed right at the beginning? Don't put a weapon on them. Yeah.

Don't put a weapon on them. But they did. And I got in an argument with one of Charlie Strauss's Twitter fans about, he's like, oh, what if, you know, Al Qaeda, who has tens of thousands of extra dollars, wants to buy one of these and then can go crazy with it?

I'm like, well, they can buy a much cheaper drone, put some C4 on it, and then drop it out of the sky like they've already been doing, you know? Or I don't think spending $10,000 for a flying Bic lighter is really something that you're going to call, like, you know, a weapon of mass destruction. So. No. It's just a dumb thing.

And unfortunately, it won't even fit on my drone because you have to have the model up that has to have at least five pound carrying capacity. So. Well, there you go. My Mavic 2, I can strap a Bic lighter literally to my Mavic 2. And that's about it. Take it to a concert. Hey, man, play Freebird. Exactly.

James writes in, last show was my last show. The unsubstantiated attack on Julian Assange was disgraceful. Being older than both of you, I can differentiate between grumpy and parroting a government state party line. Nixon and Vietnam spring to mind. I'm glad you're doing well monetarily.

But success has made you both elitist. Okay. Well, let me stop you right there. We got to finish because there's so many things wrong with this email. Okay. Go ahead. I think by the end of it, he will prove his own point of being so up his own ass. Okay. Brian, especially with his business model life, putting down people who can't compete with his lifestyle, a bunch of homeless bums.

He should instead be working to bring affordable housing and fairness to the area. But Brian prefers to be supercilious. Your devotion to the DNC and your desire to subjugate a journalist with 100% reporting accuracy to illegal detention and punishment for exposing the crimes committed by the government and DNC leadership is beyond my ability to accept.

Good day, sir. Good day, sir. I hope your new listenership of Trump supporters and T-C-backers enjoy the new political nature of your show as opposed to the previous geek-centered format. I do not. Well, sir. Pistols at dawn. Okay, hold on a second. So now the far left and the far right like us, but nobody else does.

Nobody likes us. I'm very confused. And when was I putting down homeless people? And by the way, what monetary success are either of us having? Yeah, I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it either. Well, thanks for listening when you did, James. But I think you are a little bit confused as to our particular situation and the world in general.

Yeah. And if you want our substantiated attack on Julian Assange, go back and listen to the show from the beginning where we actually did like him, but chronicle all his foibles along the way. Yes, we started off supporting Assange and what he was doing, but then he kept fucking it up. Yeah, he turned himself into a villain.

It wasn't us. Yeah. Oh, well, that was entertaining. Thank you. No problem. I kept that in on purpose. Ah, TMNT Garcia writes, you said on the last episode, just don't break the law, but yet you constantly talk about getting shows and movies from Switzerland. Biased much? Sweden.

Sweden. Okay. Yeah. Uh, we've, we've discussed our own hypocrisy about this, uh, many, many times on the show. Uh, life is shades of gray, man. What can I say? Look, we, we are happy to drop coin on things that we think are valuable. If we think the coin is worth the value that we're getting and if it's easy enough to do so, but sometimes it's not.

And sometimes we can't get things. So, you know, we do what we do. And we never said that we were a hundred percent, uh, above, above, uh, reproach. Yeah, no, we've said many times we're not, as a matter of fact. And Florentine writes in, hi, I asked host hostile world to delete my data.

I guess they're hostile. All right. So here is your answer. Here is their answer. In response to your erasure request, we confirmed that we have erased all personal data that we hold in relation to you on our system. Other than a record of your erasure request, we have erased your personal data through a process that irrevocably anonymizes your personal data.

This means that you can no longer be identified from such data. Therefore, nothing is ever really deleted. It's only anonymized. And as we all know, anonymization can be reversed. Exactly. So no, nothing was deleted. They changed the, they changed the ID. Oh God. Over at iTunes, uh, Jay Schaller writes in with a five star.

Once you start, you can't stop listening to these guys. Arguably the best dynamic between Jason and Brian out of all the podcasts I listened to. Been listening to them since the beginning and don't plan on stopping anytime soon. For newcomers, check out the early shows. It'll make you appreciate the current, uh, quality of the podcast that much more.

We've said that. Yeah. Well, except I wouldn't count today. Today is definitely an anomaly. Sorry about that. Yeah. Today we're all sick and all messed up. Sick and traveling. And no, it's a mess. Uh, TMGP E gives us a five star rating as well.

Saying old, ha these whippersnappers moan and groan. Like they're the ones who typed out four trend programs on punch cards after walking to school barefoot in the snow uphill. Seriously. This is a great cast about things, internet. And for anyone who might object to some left of center opinion, sit down and shut up. I disagree sometimes too, but hearing someone out is the right thing to do.

Oh, amen, brother. Go find James and have a word with him. If you want your question, your comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air when the form works. We'll try to get to it. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review.

Feedback loop. We have a lost Rutger Hauer, the Blade Runner co-star. He died at 75. Very sad. I was going to go with the show title related to his monologue, but everybody else in the world has done it. So forget that. Yeah. Yeah. We'll be missed. Yes. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to remember Rutger Hauer, go watch Nighthawks or Ladyhawk.

There's a lot of Hawks with him. Those are, I think, I think two of his best movies. Rutger, Ethan Hawke. Have you seen both of those? I have. Well, I've seen Ladyhawk. I don't remember Nighthawk much. Oh, Nighthawks is great. It's him and Sylvester Stallone.

It's a fantastic. Rutger plays a terrorist in New York City. It's really, really good. It's like one of those old slow burn thriller movies. I think you'll really like it. It has legs. All right. I'll check it out. And I've got a shout out to Jordan and Jen Harbinger and their new bundle of poo.

Yes, they finally had their baby. So they're going to be elbows deep. Congratulations. Welcome. Welcome to hell. They still don't have a name yet. I still think they should name it Jamiroquai, but because they're looking for a J name, but I got voted down for that one.

All right. Anyway, hopefully next time we'll be we'll be a little less sick and that would be good. I'm glad that we got this episode done. I'm not sure all of you listening feels the same way. Yeah. Sorry. Sometimes there's a bag of poo and sometimes there's not until next time.

I'm Jason DeFillippo and I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks 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 or at gog.show slash three six three.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions and get links to stuff we like. Stay sick and grumpy.

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