367: The SnuggieNet

This episode is sponsored by Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for credit cards. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, go to Privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere you want by just signing up, Privacy.com slash GOG. 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. Got a little follow-up on the people in a tube thing that's been going on. Microsoft has jumped into the fray now with being found out that they are listening to some of your Cortana activity.

But the one that's really scary is Skype. There are people out there who are listening to Skype calls. Now, as a caveat to this, this is only for when you're making calls that use the automatic translation. So they're trying to figure out if the translation is working.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I had some thoughts about this because I was out the episode that you and Christopher Lockhead really talked about the first wave of this sort of stuff. I mean, we've been talking about it for a while, but you guys got really into it about people listening to Siri and people listening to the ladies in the tubes, basically.

And I've just thought, well, of course they are. Of course they are, because we know there is no AI. We know AI is people. The only way that these things are going to get better is through teaching them. And you need people to do that because the machine learning and the AI is not there yet.

It doesn't exist. It is not good enough. You need people. The only way these products are going to get better is by them doing this. So it's not terribly surprising. I am happy that they're allowing you to opt out now that they've all copped to the fact that they're actually doing it. And you can opt out if you want to.

But this should be no surprise to us at all. No, I mean, it's because you have to have people that train the AIs. That's kind of the trick, you know. So if the people don't know what the hell is going on, that's what's going to happen. Well, Microsoft hasn't given you any opt out juice yet.

So we're waiting on that one. But well, I mean, there's a simple opt out. Don't use the translation. Exactly. Yeah. And I love the title on this. Microsoft contractors listen to your Skype and Cortana activity, but don't freak out. It's like, look, man, everybody's got zero fucks to give anymore.

Everybody's already freaked out. Now we're done. Now we've got tube fatigue. So it is what it is. Well, Microsoft, again, has a pretty strong track record of being pretty good about this sort of stuff. So I will expect in the next few days they will be announcing opt outs. Yeah, absolutely.

In the news. Well, it's been a few days since Cloudflare stopped providing security protections to 8chan, which led to the site going offline. 8chan's leaders are trying unsuccessfully to bring the site back at the moment.

God knows why. But some users have found a way to reach it through some rather unusual and potentially problematic methods. Also, there's a report over at the Daily Beast, which details how some users are accessing the site now via ZeroNet, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer network for hosting content that's similar to BitTorrent.

So basically, the website is being hosted on your computer, which means you're probably hosting child porn. Yeah, that's a little bit of a gotcha. Well, also, if you have a copy of the blockchain for Bitcoin, you're also hosting child porn. You're also technically hosting child porn.

Don't forget that. Yeah. So basically, obviously, this is a ZeroNet works much in the same way as torrents do. So you're seeding part of the site. And by default, if you access the site and you use ZeroNet, you can download up to 10 megabytes of data from it to share. So, you know, if you want to get on, you have to share as well.

So you can basically choose to download and seed more if you're inclined, but you don't really have much of an option about what it is you're hosting. So you could be in big, big trouble. The interesting thing is this ZeroNet technology, pretty cool. It is. I think it's pretty damn cool. I think it's a great way to do a decentralized web.

Like, it's pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Just the fact that, you know, you might be hosting something that you didn't like. But the thing is, you're only hosting it if you go to the site. Yes. So if you use ZeroNet for, say, you know, the Muppets.com, you're fine. Yeah, you're totally fine.

And I just, I really dig this. I want to dig, like, dive into it and see how it works. I kind of want to look into it, too. I thought that was super interesting, the idea of just basically taking websites and making them torrents, basically, that you can then access through a ZeroNet browser, which is a bit, it's cool tech. It's really interesting.

Shame. It's, you know, well, just like everything else. It always starts with the nefarious stuff, doesn't it? Well, I mean, that's the way the web works, you know. Thank God for criminals and pornographers. Otherwise, we'd have nothing. Exactly. Exactly. It's a short hop from child porn to Blue Apron.

I'm telling you right now. I'm sure that's not the tagline they're going to go with. Probably not. Probably not. And related, I found an opinion article over at the New York Times, How to Force 8chan, Reddit, and others to clean up by Jonathan Taplin, who is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California, my alma mater.

And he says a lot of the things that we have been saying as well, which is basically safe harbor laws need to be changed because they're not fucking platforms. Right. Once they start modifying the content that you see, they're not just, you know, hands-off distributors.

They're actually publishers. They're publishers and they're editors and they're making decisions. Yes. With publishing comes great responsibility and what should come with it are great big fat fucking fines. Yes. Yes. Yes, they should. So that's the gist of this. I know you had a couple issues with some of the points he made.

I have to be completely honest. I didn't read it all the way through because it's quite long. But I just, you know, I like articles that basically say what we've been saying for a long time. Yeah. You like to live in your own filter bubble. I get it. I do. It's great. I am so awesome. Fee. Yes.

It's like the Snuggie of information. That's right. So, yes, of course, Snuggie, Jason, the Snuggie. Oh, that's what we need. Snuggie net. So this is at the very end. He says changing the safe harbor laws so that social media platforms are held accountable for the content that users post would incentivize Facebook and YouTube to take things like deep fake video of Nancy Pelosi and the Christchurch shooting videos more seriously.

Well, sir, you need to do your research because that was not a deep fake video of Nancy Pelosi. Somebody just slowed it down. That is true. It does not qualify as a deep fake. Yes. Which really kind of pissed me off because it's a very video at the very end of the article.

I'm like, OK, well, you just lost all credibility with me. God damn it. So but we do need to revisit safe harbor rules. Yes, yes, we absolutely have to. It's getting ridiculous. And let's get on that, Brian. Yeah, let's get on that. Let's do it. I think we've been screaming or not platforms for six years now.

Nobody's paid attention. Nobody cares. Yeah, we've done our bit for king and country. Anyways, the tech lash has come to Stanford. I thought this was a very interesting article as well. As we all know, Stanford is one of the epicenters of computer tech and unfortunately has spawned many of the people that have ruined our lives.

And we scream about all the time. But, you know, it's where a lot of people go if they want to get into information technologies and anything of that sort. And there's a lot of stuff around the area as well, like Palantir. It's a 15 minute walk from Stanford. And that's helped when a group of Stanford students perched on the third story of the parking garage across the street from the company's entrance and unfurled a banner to greet employees as they walk into work.

Our software is so powerful, it separates families. Oh, damn. Damn. Zing. Zing. Zing. Ooh. So basically, the kids are pretty woke at this school and in a good way. Not in the, you know, we can't listen to anybody else's opinions way that a lot of higher education is gone.

But these kids are basically saying, you know, we like technology and we don't like what's being done with it. We don't like these companies. We don't. We're not a fan of Google. We're not a fan of Facebook. We're not a fan of Palantir. And there's a group that started called Slap, Students for the Liberation of All People.

Okay. I want to workshop that one a little bit, kids. Yeah, yeah. Stanford is known for its tech skills, not really their marketing skills. That's true. The marketers come from Berkeley. So that was founded by a Stanford freshman the winter after Donald Trump was elected president. At first, they focused on concerns shared by leftist activists around the country, but they've kind of morphed into basically a technology complaint department.

Obviously, they're listening to our show. Yeah. So, yeah. So they're just doing a lot of protesting about it. They're, you know, when Facebook and Google come onto campus to do their, you know, their recruiting drives, they're getting harassed by a bunch of these students. And that's, they're waking up a bit about the dangers.

I have some hope for this coming up generation here. Well, I wouldn't hope too much because to pay back that Stanford education, you basically need to work at Google or Facebook. So I don't know if they're fighting the hand that feeds them. This is a fair point. Yeah. Unless these kids come from pretty nice, you know, family money, they should probably, like, you know, temper their rage at this point and work to fix things from the inside.

Rage within the machine. Hey, there you go. Rage within the machine. Now, do you remember a while ago we talked about the lovely state of Illinois when I lived there? I can't remember which time it was when I lived there. It all blends together. It does all blend together.

But Illinois passed some facial recognition, basically laws that say that companies can't really use biometric data without explicit permission. And Facebook has been collecting data on Illinoisans for a very long time. So there is, of course, a class action lawsuit claiming that Facebook illegally collected and stored the biometric data of millions of users that live in Illinois.

You might be able to get into this and get your $2. I can, I think. But, well, I was going to say Facebook deleted my account, but we know what that means. Nothing. Nothing. It's still there somewhere. But, yes, I lived in Illinois and I was on Facebook when this was actually going through.

But I have not been part of the class action. So I don't know. Since I moved, I don't think I'll get the postcard for my 26 cents. No, too bad. But anyway, what they're what the ACLU is saying and everybody is saying that this is this could be an actual decent fine for Facebook instead of this, you know, little five billion dollar joke.

Yeah, more than five billion. So that could hurt. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But, yeah, U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the lawsuit can proceed. So. We'll see how this is going to play out. Yeah. Definitely see how this is going to play out.

I'm excited about that. We'll see what happens. We have some good news for once. Maybe. Well, here's some not good news. Speaking of marketing, Amazon's doing a bang up job. Sort of. OK, so they've had a flurry of negative coverage recently and coming from us as well last month, denouncing their treatment of its warehouse workers.

We've talked about the different stories that we've heard about people having to basically take a pee breaks in line while still working. We've heard about the gamification of moving boxes around, et cetera, et cetera. And this this week, the company shared a different kind of article on its Twitter account, an essay from an Amazon worker that sang the praises of his employer.

It's piece was published on the intellectual dark web publication, Quillette, which called Amazon a financial lifesaver and derided critical reporting on its working conditions as tourist journalism. Unfortunately, it began to immediately attract criticism for promoting a publication that publicizes dangerous ideas like race science.

Because Quillette is not the best site in the world for these sorts of things. You think they could have just gone with medium. Medium. Like everybody else. But in addition to that particular story that was published in a not the best place, Amazon.

Why didn't they just put it on Breitbart? I know. Amazon is on the Daily Stormer. Well, now they're basically pressed some of their warehouse workers into additional work to become Twitter ambassadors for the company and their jobs. These so-called FC ambassadors joyfully tweet about how great it is to work in Amazon's fulfillment centers and then try to quell persistent criticisms of the company.

They have talking points. They get free cupcakes in an actual break room. They say Amazon takes safety seriously, even posting cartoons at water fountains, reminding them to stay hydrated. Who the fuck needs to be reminded to drink water besides my three-year-old son?

I was going to say, is this daycare? I don't know. And they say it's easy to get paid time off, while others have accused Amazon of pressuring them to work long hours, including six-day work weeks. So, yeah, the reverse public relations is in full swing.

Hopefully, they are getting paid extra for their social media work. I doubt it. Doubt it. Doubt it. And speaking of Facebook, now they are trying to sell you video subscriptions as well. This is the dumbest thing I've read in a long time. They're not even doing good video.

Everybody else is doing it. Why not them? But, yes, they're not doing anything good because they didn't seem to want, even though they have the money, they didn't. Well, maybe they're holding it back for this class action lawsuit. They have not. They're not buying in on HBO or other big networks. They are starting with smaller things like Tastemade and College Humor.

Although, I guess, I suppose, to a certain degree, that's targeting the younger audience, right? Because, you know, they watch those kind of channels, while you and I, not so much. Yeah, but isn't College Humor free on YouTube? I've never heard of Tastemade, but I'm old. Tastemade is mostly cooking and food stuff.

In fact, I actually ran across Tastemade just last week. So, you know, I've got a little bit of that, are they listening to me thing going on here? But not really, because I was looking up online cooking classes, and they have a number of them on Tastemade, which are quite nice. Are they any good? Maybe I'll get a Facebook account and sign up. I am going to take the Mexican cooking class, but I'm going to take it directly from their site, not through Facebook.

Because Facebook will never get my credit card number, ever. Right. Or the 30% that they would take off the top. So, go straight to the source. Yes. We'll review that on the show when you finally do it, because I'm curious about that. Yeah, I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to hopefully try to start it next week. Uber has more than 100 million users, they say.

Yay! Buried under that, they lost $5.24 billion in one quarter. Well, to be fair, $3.9 billion is the result of the IPO, and they had to pay out stock awards to employees.

I'm just going to say, Jason, as I've been running my business for 20-plus years, if I had a quarter where I had lost $1.24 billion, I'd be wondering what I'm doing with my life. Um, yeah, I don't know. I would be amazed that you had $1.2 billion to lose.

Oh, wait, they don't pay us other people's money. No, it's not. It's other people's money. Exactly. Exactly. They did pay out $298 million for driver appreciation awards. Ooh. There you go. You get your $2, and you get your $2, and you get your $2.

Well, they've got 100 million users. I wonder how many drivers, are they lumping in, like, users and drivers in the same pool? I don't know. That would be interesting to find out. I'm sure it's in the numbers somewhere, but I just can't look at Uber anymore. It's just weird.

I had to use them recently, and it was a fine experience. It was a fine experience. We had no other option, because Lyft didn't have big SUVs, so we had to use Uber. And, you know, it did what it said on the tin. It didn't cost a lot of money, and we got a nice car. There you go.

Yeah. At least we, I mean, we actually did talk about taking scooters, but then we're like, we've been drinking for six hours. It's probably a bad idea for us to get on a scooter, and we don't have helmets. There you go. Good call there, Jason. Yeah. See? Listening to this show really makes me smarter.

Mm-hmm. The drinking for six hours in the hot sun probably doesn't know. Not so much. Yeah. But we're at the zoo. What do you want to do? Anyway, Uber and Lyft have finally admitted that they are making traffic congestion worse. They're like, no, our services are going to cut down on traffic because everybody's going to use our service.

Well, it turns out we're not. I would do my shocking here, but some user or listener wrote in and said he hates it. So there you go. Okay. I'm not going to do it. This is not surprising at all. I've been screaming about this since they first started. Uber drivers pull over in the middle of the road. They never pull out of the way to pick up stuff.

They just stop in the streets wherever they want to. They do illegal U-turns whenever they want to. They cruise up and down streets really slow looking for people. It's absolutely ridiculous. They follow no, no rules of the road at all. What do you think? What do they think they are? Scooter drivers? I know.

Yeah. This is not surprising. Of course, there's all these cars on the road that are just driving around waiting to pick up people now. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's called deadheading. It's just like taxis, you know? Yeah. But they can't go sit at the taxi stand because you have to pick them up on the app, whereas taxis can wait in queues where they're supposed to be until they get a ride.

But there are no queues for that. It's kind of like docked scooters. They're docked cars. They are. They are docked. Dock taxis. Yeah. Anyway, this next one really pisses me off. Oh, man. So Yelp. Yes. Yelp, basically a bunch of other scumbags who, we've talked about many times, who, you know, they strong arm people into paying for their services and promote nasty reviews for people who don't pay up.

It's just extortion. It's strong arming and extortions protection money. It's just like, you know, what do they think they are? Fucking Italian? I mean, I know. I know these rackets. What they've been doing now is they've been adding in a phone number for delivery for different restaurants and basically moving down the actual place's phone number and replacing it with a Grubhub number.

So they, they're, they're hijacking the actual point to point interactions with the restaurants themselves. So Grubhub can take a cut. And so Yelp can take a cut. So you have to like click on the information link to get the phone number for, for an actual restaurant.

It's like, you know, questions and information. Well, ridiculous. Yep. It is ridiculous. I got this cannot be, this cannot be legal. It really can't be. They're just a platform. Well, you know, once they start editorializing the phone numbers in the actual business.

No, I mean, this, this should be illegal. They shouldn't be able to do that. It's, it's absolutely in a world where we've, you know, the white pages and the yellow pages are just gone and we're using these private companies. Um, you know, it's, it's sad.

It's just sad that this is how everything is going. That everybody is just so damn evil. Yeah. And it's just cutthroat and stupid and, you know, it's just short term gain. And in reading that article, I found another one that really made my blood boil.

GitHub has been, I'm sorry, not Grubhub. Grubhub. Yeah. That'd be funny if GitHub was buying restaurant domains. That would make no sense. Would you like some open source sauce on that? Grubhub has been buying tens of thousands of domain names that resemble those of businesses they either work with or are pitching to get on the platform.

They own as many as 23,000 domains. And then they make landing pages that resemble the official business. No, that's gotta be illegal. That has to be illegal. Oh my God. It's one thing to buy the domain names. That's nothing. But then when you're actually consciously creating websites that mimic the real business, that's ridiculous.

Yeah. I mean, they should be sued into the ground for this. I mean, honestly, this is just, oh my God. I mean, talk about a class action lawsuit right here. This is it. Everybody who has a restaurant, get on this because, you know, this makes my blood boil.

It's like, guys, be ethical with your business. I mean, you're... Oh, I forgot what year we're in. This episode is sponsored by Privacy.com.

Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online. Privacy lets you generate a brand new Visa card number for every purchase you make online with one click with their amazing browser extension and very convenient mobile app.

We all buy stuff online more and more. In fact, that's often the only place we buy things these days. And Privacy gives you a temp credit card number for every site you buy from. Never forget to cancel subscriptions or trials ever again. That alone is worth the price of admission. And oh yeah, the price of admission is free.

They make their money the same way debit cards do with the interchange fees paid by merchants. You know how skeptical we are of free services here at GOG. And since these guys actually have a business model to back it up, they get the grumpy old geeks seal of approval. I actually reviewed this product when they first launched. So we're not just pimping them because they paid us.

We're both actual customers and love what they're doing. It is so damn convenient. If you use a password manager, and why don't you? If you listen to the show, you should use this. You don't use the same password everywhere. Why use the same credit card number? Sign up takes less than two minutes. And like I said, it's completely free.

So far, they've saved their customers over $115 million in unwanted and unauthorized charges. About two million of those were me. You can freeze cards and set spending limits. And cards locked to merchants, making them useless to thieves and hackers. And you can protect yourself from online fraud with the virtual credit card numbers.

It's fantastic. And you can delete cards anytime and kiss those forgotten subscriptions goodbye. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, just go to privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up privacy.com slash GOG. This one is a no-brainer.

Get on it, people. Privacy.com slash GOG. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven, cybersecurity news service based in the lovely state of Maryland.

Dave is also co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Welcome back, Dave. Hello, gentlemen. And Brian, welcome back. It's good to be back. Yeah. How's everything going? Good. Can't complain. I was going to ask you if there's any follow-up on the great city of Baltimore.

Have you guys come out of your cyber heistings? My sense is that things are slowly but surely returning to normal, which I think for Baltimore means that they're still way underfunded and understaffed and all that kind of stuff.

Right. Like many cities these days. But, no, nothing new, really. It was a hard lesson learned for them, I think. All right. Well, I have an interesting story to start off the show with. Kind of a light story. It's by Joel Stein over at Bloomberg, and it's called I Tried Hiding from Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets.

Right. I read this, and I was like, okay, this reminds me of that series that we watched a while back where the girl was trying to get off, you know, the big five. Right. And use alternate tech and things like that. But this guy took it a little bit more in the funny vein. And some of the gadgets that he got, I actually kind of thought were pretty clever.

He's got these IR reflective glasses that, you know, won't let anybody do facial recognition on you, including your phone, which is a pain in the butt when you're trying to log into your phone. Right. And he's wearing a license plate spoofing shirt, which has a bunch of license plates on it.

So license plate readers will pick it up and some other stuff. But it was just, I thought it was a fun read. Did you guys, like, get through this one? It's very funny. And I love the one particular sentence he wrote in here. If I wanted to regain my privacy, I had only one choice as an American.

I needed gadgets to combat my gadgets. Yeah. Yes. Quite funny. Yes. I, too, liked the license plate shirt. I wonder what that actually does. I mean.

Does that work when you're in your car and they're scanning your back license plate? I don't see that as working. I think it might work as you're walking down the street and you, like, pick up license plate readers and, you know, crosswalks. So it's helping other people. Yeah.

It's adding noise to the signal, I think. Yeah. Because of the license plate numbers, I do believe, are from abortion clinic doctors. So they're trying to add in because people will take people will take the license plates of abortion clinic doctors and harass them and try and find them. So this shirt is by an activist who, like, tries to work for, you know, proactively for abortion clinics and security at abortion clinics.

So she made this shirt. So it actually does add to the noise with the license plate of the actual doctors, which is a clever idea. I, yeah, okay. That's, I like that. That's, that's, that's very interesting. That's a lot more, uh, there's a lot more to that than I, than I gather to read the article.

More nuance than I realize as well, yes. It got me thinking about, uh, I wonder if you could wrap your car, do a vinyl wrap of your car in other license plates. Ooh. Ooh, that's a good one. Would that be. I like that. Would, is that, is that legal?

I don't think the law has caught up to that yet, has it? Yeah, I think we may have, I'd say it's legal for now. Right? I don't know. Uh, yeah. You still have your real license plate where your real license plate goes, but. Yeah, it depends on how good the recognition and if it's, if it's looking in just one spot when it does the car scan and says, okay, this is where the license plate should be.

But I'm guessing that it's just trying to recognize a rectangle with numbers in it. Yeah. Because license plates are all over the place. Right. And it's, it's coming to the camera at all different angles and, and so on and so forth. Um, although I did see an interesting bit of AI recently, um, where it was just video footage and it was tagging, it was reading the license plate, but it was also tagging the car, the type of car, the brand of car.

The color of the car was, the model year of the car, like it was. Yeah. Can it tell me when I got to get an oil change? Right. I'm sure that's in there too. Yeah. Front tires low on air pressure. Exactly. It scanned the stick figure family stickers in the back window.

So now it knows how many people are in the car at any point in time or in the household. Yes. Right. Because I have a Rottweiler. Yeah. And that the empire doesn't care about your stick figure family. My favorite. I want that so bad, but my wife said no. Yeah.

So I, uh, yeah, that's what it made me think of. I agree. This is a fun article of taking something to the extreme, which, which also as an American was his, his duty. So I, my hat's off to him. Also, you know, also the end where he basically just throws his hands up in the air and says to hell with it.

Yeah. He says within three weeks, I got tired of being careful. My Faraday bag is somewhere in the back of my car because I like to use my phone for GPS and playing podcasts. I stopped wearing my reflecticles, which are the glasses, which is a great name. I got to say reflect. Reflecticles. Yeah. I haven't scrubbed my old tweets away with jumbo in a while.

I use my visa to buy stuff from Amazon, which it delivers to my house. I plugged Alexa back in. Dan Gilmore of the ACLU wasn't surprised. He says, I don't think the fix to privacy is something that can be done by an individual alone. In the same way, I can't solve the pollution problem by recycling on my own.

Hmm. Right. Yeah. That's a good way to say it. It reminded me. I did find some good software in here, though. That MySudo software, which lets you get new phone numbers and email addresses that are disposable. That's actually a pretty good service. I'm going to try that one out. Yeah. And reasonable, too. It's not expensive.

No, it's 99 cents a month. Yeah. And he does PimpPrivacy.com, which is a sponsor of this show, which I still recommend everybody use anyway, because the subscription fees will kill you. You can just go in and turn them off. It's great. Without having to sit in tech support hell for two hours. Right.

It reminded me that I actually have here at my desk, I have an RFID blocking sleeve, and it's from NSA. Nice. Yeah. Somebody had a cool swag. It works on 99.99% of scanners, just not ours.

Right. It's not ours. Or does it? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I had somebody in here I was interviewing from NSA, and part of their swag package, which, first of all, NSA has a swag package. I want. I want. Next time, get two.

Please. Yeah. Was this NSA RFID thing. Actually, Jason, by just saying that, they'll be sending one to your house. Right. Yeah. That's all I had to do. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Like NSA doesn't already have your DNA. Yeah. That's actually pretty funny.

We've been waiting on the FBI report for my roommate for a long time now. I think she put in the request back in April, and they keep pushing it. Every time she follows up, it's like, oh, it was going to be here at the end of June. Then now they're saying sometime in September.

Well, it's because they have to keep transferring files back and forth between the L.A. and Chicago office as they continue their investigation of you, Jason. Probably. Probably. But it's interesting how long this stuff takes, and you have no way to really light a fire under their ass. No. And they don't even tell you how much it's going to cost.

You have to pay for it. But it's like, okay, am I getting just a manila envelope with 12 sheets of paper? Are they going to show up to the house with 15 legal boxes of paperwork? Right. It's all been redacted, you know? Yes. Right. And you have to pay for all the black ink.

Yeah, exactly. How many El Marcos did this cost, you know? Right. Or even worse, inkjet printer cartridges. Oh, God. Yeah. So, I put this next story in here. This is, the folks over at Pentest Partners have come up, they've discovered that there is a group sex app called Three Fun.

That's the number three and the word fun. And this is an app that is used by people who are looking to hook up with other folks to have threesomes. Okay. As you do. Mm-hmm. And- It says it right on the tin.

Right there. And the reason I included this story was just so I could say that one of the things that they have done is they've identified users in the White House and the Supreme Court. And I just want to say, whoa, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is even more of a badass than we thought.

Serious. Can you imagine being on this app and she comes up? I mean, you'd have to, right? Just for the story. I think you'd be constitutionally obligated somehow. I don't know.

Sorry, I'm downloading the app right now. I'll be right back. Set VPN for Washington, D.C.? That's right. Yeah. You'd have to be the dissenting opinion, if you know what I mean. So I wanted you guys to take a look at this article because there are some details in here.

They dig into some of the technical things. The folks over at Pentest Partners, this is what they do. And this seems to me like just so incredibly sloppy with the information that this is giving away. One would imagine it's not a very high.

There's not there's not they're not making a lot of money here. So I'm not terribly surprised that perhaps they didn't spend the most amount of money in building their app and making sure it's secure. But even at that level, when you're doing an app that involves such activities, you'd probably not want that app to be leaking near real time locations of you at all times.

So here's the great part about that is that the folks at Pentest Partners disclosed this on July 1st. They say they say we contacted three fun about this on 1st of July and we asked them to fix the security flaws as personal data was explode was exposed.

They replied, dear Alex, thanks for your kindly reminding. We will fix the problems as soon as possible. Do you have any suggestions? Regards, the three fun team. Oh, my God. Well, let's just say let's use TLS SSL for starters here because you can send plain text API requests and just get JSON back.

If you just look at the maps, there are pinpoints in the White House. Yeah, this is amazing. 10 Downing Street, U.S. Supreme Court. You horny little bastards. You heart wants what the heart wants. You used to get into rock and roll for the sex, but it looks like it's politics these days.

Wow. Excellent. Well, yeah, I'm hoping that they sent out an email to their users. I'm sure they didn't. No, I'm sure they didn't. And it came up as four to one, four straight men for every straight woman. Yeah. Little did you know, your threesomes now included four to five million other people that can now see your data.

Oh, God. You're definitely going to get screwed if you use this app, just not how you thought. Yeah, there you go. Oh, man. And speaking of getting screwed, Instagram had a marketing firm called Hyper that has been basically scraping stories and tracking data for any public user for a very, very long time.

And have you guys dove into this one yet? Not deeply. I read the stuff you sent over, and it's fascinating and horrifying in a way we've become familiar with. Yes, exactly.

Because Hyper is a trusted marketing partner of Facebook and Instagram. I think the moral of this particular episode is don't trust any company that has a three in its name. Right, yes. Hyper is using a three instead of an E. Instead of an E.

It's very clever. Very clever. So, yeah. Well, of course this is happening. This is not shocking. I still can't. Well, I mean, I guess people think that they're influencers and whatnot, and they're making money off the platform. But I don't understand anybody that still has open social media profiles.

I guess I do for Twitter, but I don't do anything on Twitter that isn't really kind of related to the show. Everything else I have is private, and it's weird to me that people aren't private with their social medias. Or is it private? Or is it? Yeah, I guess. But, I mean, they are making the point that they only scrape things from publicly open profiles.

Yeah, which technically isn't really illegal. It violates the terms and services. Yeah, it just violates TOS, which, you know, nobody's read anyways. It's not illegal. The data's out there. Open. Public. Yeah. That's what you've done. As Mulder would say, the data's out there. But how much can they get from you if you've made your stuff private, but you're friends with someone who's made their stuff public?

How much of that, how much of your stuff, you know, it's kind of like when they gathered up everybody's address books because everyone's connected to everybody else? My understanding with Instagram would be that they would only be able to get a photo if you'd been tagged in it and it was on their public profile.

So they'd have you tagged on a photo, but that's all that they would have of you. Yeah, they wouldn't get you don't like Instagram doesn't leak the data of the private users. You have to be like, you know, off in to get that private information because it doesn't really do the friends of friends thing like Facebook did.

Like Facebook. Yeah. They don't build out social networks in quite the same way. Yeah. The social graph is much tighter. The social graph. I mean, yes. Yeah. It's much tighter on Instagram. So not that Facebook wants to keep it that way. I'm sure they're working on it. Yeah. But yeah, it's pretty, pretty crazy.

And of course, there's not going to be any repercussions from this whatsoever. They were just they were, you know, even now they're still like listed as like hyper will probably eventually just rebrand themselves under a different name. And that'll be a pooper. Yeah. With an E and a three.

There you go. So, yeah, I think this is just, you know, standard operating procedure. And we're going to see this as as we keep going. It's just I don't know if it was just clickbaity to make it this public, but I don't know. It just seems like they're doing things that anybody can do, you know.

Right. But the fact that they're doing it as a trusted marketing partner with Facebook is what kind of makes it a little bit egregious. Because, you know, yeah, I mean, that's has to know. I 100 percent know that we talked about a previous story about I believe it was a UK based company that was doing the exact same thing.

They just weren't the trusted partner of Instagram. Which I guess suggests that Facebook or Instagram aren't doing a very good job of auditing these trusted partners. Well, if you don't trust Facebook, why would you trust any of their trusted partners?

True. The transitive rule of trust. Yeah. You've broken the trust circle. Please step out. And I thought this one was interesting because it seems kind of like a tempest in a teapot, but I want to get you guys read on it.

A Boeing code leak exposes security flaws deep in a 787's guts. And this is over at Wired. And this is a security researcher Ruben Santamarta got into basically a source code repository from Boeing that they'd left unprotected on the Internet.

AWS, I'm sure. And this guy went through the code and he thought he found some ways to jump systems inside of the planes network because planes networks have like three layers. You've got the open layer, you've got the middle layer, and then you've got the completely trusted layer for the avionics and navigation and things like that.

Right. And this guy thought that he found a way to move things between those networks. And Boeing came back and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't work that way. You've only got like 85% of our code. You don't have the whole whole shebang and you don't have a plane to test it on.

So what you're doing is just kind of, you know, you're making suppositions here and they're very, you know, it's just not it's not responsible to say this stuff out loud. And how do they know he doesn't have a plane to test it on? Yes.

Did anybody try and check his CV? Because Ruben Santamarta works for Peter Thiel, who has seven 787s to fly into New Zealand at the drop of a hat. He's located in the EU or the the not the EU, the UAE is what I meant to say.

He's the UAE. Those are two very different things. Yeah. Very different. Yeah, we did some follow up on this today on the Cyber Wire and Boeing, like you said, I think I have the quote from them here.

They say that extensive testing confirmed that existing defenses in the broader 787 network prevent the scenarios claimed. And the FAA has looked at it and they say that they are satisfied with Boeing's assessment of the issue. So the FAA took a look at it as well.

The FAA also took a look at the code, didn't they, before the plane crashes? The 737 MAX. Yeah. So can we trust the FAA now? That's the that's the question. Back to Mulder. Trust no one. Yeah. Hey, look, if you want to go across the ocean in a ship, that's fine.

No, thanks. I'll take the Dreamliner. Exactly. I'm just going to assume that there isn't somebody trying to hack into it while I'm on board. I mean, it's funny. I was going to say when planes start falling out of the sky, then I'll start to worry. But that's kind of what happened with the 737 MAX. So I guess I shouldn't.

Knock on wood. Yeah, I shouldn't be so flippant about that. So this last story I put in here, this is actually a video over on YouTube, and it's called Pac-Man Ghost AI Explained. And I put this in here because I know how much Brian loves that everything in the world is called AI.

Thank God we had AI back in 1982. Right. Right. But I think there's more to this than just laughing at that part of it, which I think is laughable. Because I think those of us who, first of all, it's a pretty cool video.

I recommend you watch the video. It's well made. It's interesting. And I think those of us who grew up and spent a lot of time playing arcade versions of Pac-Man, if you asked us and you said, what are the personalities of the four ghosts in Pac-Man?

We could probably tell you. Right. Who's the most aggressive ghost in Pac-Man? I can't remember their names right now. The red one. Blinky. The red one. Yeah. The red one. The red one. Right. And the little turquoise one, who I think is Clyde, is kind of the dumb one. Slow and kind of dumb.

Yes. So what I find fascinating about this is that those personalities are generated with very simple rules. And this video explains what those very simple rules are.

But through those very simple rules, we recognize intent and personality and that each one of these little ghosts is its own individual.

And I thought that was an interesting cautionary tale or interesting insight into how do we define AI and what does it really mean and how many rules do you need to make something seem as though it's thinking in a different way than another thing is.

Yeah. What's that tipping point on the anthropomorphization curve? That's exactly what I was thinking. There's definitely some of that going on. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the interesting thing about all of this stuff is just a small number of rules combined with another small number of rules really quickly becomes extremely complex.

And that's kind of you're seeing complex behaviors based on just a small amount of rules with the four to five different iterations and things that they're responding to. So plus, they're also trying they're responding to human insanity as well, because they're responding to a Pac-Man that is following no rules whatsoever.

Right. Well, I mean, some of us did because some of us kind of figured out how to get past the first few screens. Well, some of us like me bought the book and learned the first hundred patterns. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the thing that I really thought of immediately about this, and this is more for you, Dave, and I, is can you imagine our kids being enthralled at this level of a computer game anymore?

Oh, I cannot imagine my son sitting down and playing this and being into it. Well, I have a story that kind of relates to that. I was in the attic. This is probably a couple of years ago.

I was in the attic and I happened upon my old AFX slot cars. Right. The little electric slot cars. Love those things. Plastic. Yeah, exactly. We all did. So I was very excited.

I brought them down from the attic and I set up this elaborate setup on the living room floor. And the cars, they still ran. And I'm zipping the cars around the thing. And I call my boys who are at this time, it was probably, I don't know, 15 and seven or something.

And I'm like, come on, boys, I want to show you. This is so much fun. And they come over and they look at it and they're like, that's it? What do you mean that's it? Yep. You're just, I mean, the car's just going around on the track. I mean, yeah. You can't control it with an app and chat with people and get hardcore pornography out of it?

Right. He's like, Dad, on my iPad, I'm sitting in the cockpit of an Indy car and it's all happening in 3D around me. And it's in stereo on my headphones and it's like real.

This is just a little plastic car going around on a track. And I was like, that's all we had. It is all we had, yeah. I guess you're right. I guess you're right. It is. Yes, you're right. He doesn't understand the nuance of the skill that you have to use the trigger and lay on and lay off going around the corner so the back end doesn't slide out.

That's what I thought. Yeah. We didn't always have magnetraction. Yeah. Man. Amazing. Yeah. Absolutely amazing. Yeah. Oh, well. But you know what? I mean, I think some of these games like Pac-Man, I think Pac-Man, my 12-year-old loves to play Donkey Kong on an arcade machine.

Yeah. Right. I love to play Galaga. I think that is the pinnacle. Oh, I love Galaga. Yeah. That's the pinnacle of the little shooting aliens, you know, the space invader concept. That's the one. I would have to say Gyrus for me is the one at the top. Uh-huh.

Okay. That's my go-to because it had the stick that you swivel. It was way more fun. Yeah. I'm definitely a Galaga guy. Yeah. I have to say you're wrong. Of course. I know I have a dissenting opinion here. And I will tell Ruth Gator Ginsburg later when I hit her up on the app.

As always, Jason, embracing your outlier status. Of course. So I think some of these have timeless status. But, yeah, if you stuck a Pac-Man machine or the equivalent of a Pac-Man machine in an arcade today and said, this is a brand new game, people would go- Also, it would be like five bucks a play.

Right. That's true. Not like the quarter it was for us. That's true. But I know that a friend of the show, MXV, he had a sit-down Ms. Pac-Man that I kept trying to buy from him. But his wife said, no, we're not selling that. We're going to keep that thing. Because his stepdaughter loved it.

And she was young. She loved to play Ms. Pac-Man with her mom on the tabletop version. So, you know, kids do, like, you know, if you indoctrinate them to the old ways before you turn them loose on the 3D extravaganza that's out there now, then, you know, they're still viable games.

They're still fun to play if you don't know what else is out there. I still think that there's something to be said for the whole experience of having the cabinet or the sit-down version, the physicality of it versus, you know, if you just gave them Pac-Man to play on their iPad versus the other games, I think, you know, you wouldn't have a shot in hell.

But if you've got the box, there's a novelty to that. The physicality, which I don't think kids these days spend a lot of time doing. So, it's very novel for them. Yeah, that's what I hate. Like, I got Mortal Kombat 11 and I have, like, just the control pad.

And I'm like, this sucks. I can't play this game on this. So, yeah, I have to go out and buy, like, a big console that sits on my lap so I can slam the buttons, move the stick. And, you know, that's part of the game. The part of the game is, like you said, Brian, that physicality to it. So, I think that still has legs when you can get really into it.

Well, for me, it was every year when we would take our family vacation to Ocean City and they had sit-down versions of the original Star Wars Vector game. Best game ever. And that one and Spy Hunter, which I used to play for the soundtrack.

Oh, yes. Toil slips. There was a sit-down version of Spy Hunter where the speakers were behind your head. We had Mark Cantor on the show who did the music for Spy Hunter. Yeah, you get that Peter Gunn ripoff. So good. So good. Yeah, he programmed that music. Wow. Oh, that's – well, if you run into him, please tell him – I tip my hat to him.

He brought me many, many hours of enjoyment playing that game. Not a problem. Because of the music. Yeah. The music is my favorite part of that game. Oh, man. I recommend going back and listening to the Mark Cantor episode because he talks all about how he did it. Yeah, that game was so enthralling for me.

I grew up around the corner from Disneyland and we would get annual passes as a birthday present every year or whatever. As a 12-year-old, 10 to 12 to 14 even, I would go to Disneyland and I would play Spy Hunter in the arcade rather than going on any of the rides at Disneyland.

That's how insane this stuff was to us as kids. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Fun times. Well, thanks for digging up this video. It was really cool. Yeah, I enjoyed it. So, yeah, check it out. All right, guys. Well, that is what I've got this week.

Jason, have fun with RGB. I will. I'll try not to break any ribs on her like that. Now we know she didn't fall down any stairs last time when she broke her ribs. First, no harm. She was getting a freak on, yeah. Yep. We'll be tracking your location as you head over there, Jason.

Thanks so much. See you, guys. I'll swing by Maryland and say hi, Dave. Excellent. Cops and doodads. All right. So I mentioned on the last episode, I got my new MacBook Air and I've been going through it.

And I would like to point out that, yes, some of the things that I can do in my bed, I can do it for my iPad. But the things that I can't do, like Logic or iZotope RX-7 Advanced, which I run all the audio through for the show, cannot do that on an iPad. But I did do it for the last show.

One might argue that since we discussed so much about the importance of sleep on this particular show, one should not be working in one's bed. Yeah. See, that doesn't bother me anymore. Since I got the eight sleep bed, it's like, here's what happens. I can go in my room, I can relax because my bed is just so damn comfortable now and it's got the water-cooled and water-heated aspect to it.

So I go in there, I just crank down the temperature on the bed. It's nice and cool. I just sit there with my laptop. And then at nine o'clock, my dome automatically turns on because it's app-enabled. And as soon as the dome turns on, I know to close the laptop, get the doggies ready and go to bed.

It's great, you know, I've got it down and I sleep more than most people that probably listen to this show. So I got the thing and like I said, last episode, all the audio was prepped on it. So it's good for that. I would definitely say that you don't want to run handbrake on it because I was trying to test the processor on it and run the battery down because I was doing a fruit juice test or the maintenance cycle when I first got it.

Because fruit juice wants you to do a maintenance cycle to test everything. So you got to run it down to 20% from full. So I'm like, OK, well, I usually just use handbrake for that. And the battery life on this thing is incredible. It won't die, which is good because handbrake takes forever.

It is. This thing is not very processor heavy. Right. I got it. And I do only have 16 gig of RAM on it. But yeah, it was very, very slow for handbrake. But everything else, even running Logic and running iZotope RX7 Advanced was actually really snappy.

So it must be, you know, the way it encodes or does something like that. But anyway, it's really comfy. And I don't know what it is about the keyboard. I know they updated the butterfly mechanisms and they're finally going to get rid of them. This thing is really nice to type on.

Right. It's a I mean, it's a complete full size keyboard. The keyboard is almost the same size as my 15 inch. So it's like I didn't have to change anything. I'm not used to it. The only problem are the stupid arrow keys because it's like the two left and right ones are full size and then the up and down ones are half size. I hate that.

I hate that so much. But this thing I also forgot comes with touch ID. It's got a little button on the top right. It's got the T2 chip. So you can use your fingerprint to log into different things. And here, but it's it's really weird because it's unbelievably inconsistent.

There are like, OK, when you first log into the computer, you have to type in your password. You can't use the touch ID. Right. So it's the same if you're like unlocking with your with your Apple watch. Yeah. Yeah. So log in the first time and the first time you open one password, you got to type in your whole passphrase every time after that with one password.

When you come in, you can just touch your finger to it and it opens back up, which is really nice. I like that part. Some system commands let you use the touch ID to use your password to. Do certain things like when you're here's the thing. It's so inconsistent that it's really hard to tell what what it does, which it doesn't.

Yeah, because you figure I just typed in my master password when I logged into the computer. So as I've been installing a ton of software to get everything installed that I need to use, I have to type in my password umpteen times because it asks for the master password when you're installing software.

You'd think that I could just use touch ID for that. No, not really, except for some rare occasions where you can. It makes no sense whatsoever. You think that'll get fixed with the new iOS update or the OS update?

I have no idea. Do you think they're just lagging a little bit behind on cleaning up their code? No idea. I was tempted to just say screw it and install the new beta and just run that machine with the beta because it's coming anyway, like in a couple of weeks. But I skipped it.

I'm like, I actually do have to get work done. So just tidy that puppy up. Now, I also had to go get TextExpander because I couldn't find the installer for the old version I have, which is ancient. And because I haven't really paid for it in, you know, six or seven years.

Right. So I go to TextExpander.com. Guess what? Let me guess. Subscription model. Subscription. Yep. And I go to CleanMyMac X to go do that. Yeah. Yeah.

I knew about that one. I'm still running CleanMyMac 3. Does the job. Yeah. And I don't have to pay a subscription. So this thing only has a 256 gig SSD in it. So I need to keep it clean. And I know that everything that's been installed on it is going to have just a ton of those language files that CleanMyMac will suck out.

And I'll get, you know, tons of space back. So I bit the bullet. And because it wouldn't let me use my, you know, I only have a one seat license and I keep that on my iMac. Yeah. And so I had to pay for that too. Of course. Subscription. It's been, it's been a interesting, you know, upgrade cycle for this thing.

Right. But all in all, it's a nice little machine. I mean, I love the Air back in the day. I used to run, run this show off of it. I ran a podcast with three USB mics run into a hub through GarageBand and did all the editing and everything on just an old Air.

I mean, way back in the day, the old Air. So this one obviously doesn't have any fucking ports to plug a USB mic into. So a little, a little hard to do that one. Without 17 adapters. But so far I like it. The screen's beautiful. The true tone is really nice.

I didn't think I was going to like that, but it is actually kind of nice. You know what the true tone is? You have it on your iPad, right? Where it changes the color palette to match the room. It's actually really, really nice on your eyes when you have that. So all in all, I think for the price, it was $1,500 because I got the 16 gig of RAM and the small SSD, the 256, because I never keep any documents on there.

They're just all in Dropbox, you know, off in the ether. So it worked out pretty well. And yeah, my poor old, you know, 2014, 15 inches. Not long for this world going back to going back to the recycle bin. Well, I've got some problems with some app technology as well.

My AirPods are starting to crap out on me. Already? Already. Well, it's been more than a year, unfortunately, because that's when the warranty kicks off. Of course. But yeah. That's right. I should point out that expect new airs in about 26 days after my return policy has gone on this one.

That is true. Yeah. My AirPods are not cutting it anymore. They start to lose battery life. I get the beeping warning about 10 minutes before the end of my normal 50 to an hour long bike ride. So they're not lasting very long at all. And unfortunately, it's going to cost me $69 per AirPod to change the battery.

Well, just get the new AirPod 2s with the wireless charging. I could do that. Yeah. Just get the new ones. These are not cheap. No, they're not cheap at all. Do you know about the ear swap technique? Yes, I did. Let's not do it.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. For those listeners who don't know, if you're on a call or listening to something, you can take one AirPod out, put it in the case, and it will charge up to like 80% in like a minute. Yeah. And then you just swap it with the other one and you can just do that and it'll keep it going for a while.

But yeah, the ear swap technique does work pretty well if you've got the case with you. But while you're riding your bike, that might be a pain in the ass. Yeah. That's not really going to solve the problem for me with that. So... But when you turn around, you could just put them in for one minute while you turn around and get a drink of water and it should at least get you back for your bike ride without having to die.

Yeah. Or, you know, the incredibly expensive bit of technology I bought could just continue to work for more than two years. Yeah. See, that's weird because mine still lasts forever. I don't know. You might have got like a pair of lemons, but... I might. I might. Yeah. So I don't know what to do about that yet.

I might just take them over to the Apple Genius Bar and say, what's going on here, people? Yeah. Like, maybe is there a way to do like a battery reset on them or something? Yeah. Something like that. I mean... I'll have to look into it. If anybody out there has been through this and knows, let us know. Yeah. Please do. Because mine are first gen.

I got them like as soon as you could buy them. Yeah. And they're still working fantastic. That's why I'm not going to get a pair of the twos because I don't need them. Mine will still work. And I've spent a little time now with Philips Hue. I bought three of the light bulbs. You get the Hub. The Hub is a...

I guess I probably should have looked into that a little bit more. It's a bit of a pain in the ass because you have to plug the Hub directly into your cable modem. Ew. There's that. But, you know, whatever. It's just a pile of junk over there anyway. So it's just adding a little thing to the pile, right? No big deal. Hidden out of the way.

The light bulbs themselves are great. The color... I got the color changing ones and my son loves it. He's making me go red, purple, blue, green. And, you know, I just switch all the colors around. Some of the presets are pretty nice in terms of dimming and all that sort of stuff.

And tropical lights and things of that nature. And it's fun to make my lights blue when I'm watching a Dodger game. It's clever. It's fun. It's nice enough. The main problem is for smart lights, they're still not smart enough to be able to tell the difference between using a physical on and off switch and the app.

And that drives my wife insane because I'll have shut it off with the app and then she'll try to switch it back on with the physical thing. And it's a whole hullabaloo every single time about what state is it in and how come the light isn't going on when I want it to go on, et cetera, et cetera. And if you have a physical dimming light switch, it does not work well with those either.

It just it does the fast blinky thing. So, OK, so a little bit problematic. They're not smart enough for me yet. They need to even if Philips needs to sell light switches that can communicate and stay in different states with the app so that they stay synchronized.

I would I would buy into that. That would be a good solution. But they don't seem to have those. Maybe they should make them because that is the real problem for me right now is the when you have a virtual on off and a physical on off and they do not sync. That's the problem. Good point. Good point.

Have you tied them to the lady in the tube yet? I have. That's kind of a nice little fix as well. So it's it's it's fun to be able to control them. But, you know, the problems with the lady in the tube, as you and I have discussed a million times, is you don't remember the commands. Right. So, well, you just go, you go, lady in the tube, illuminate.

And then they come on. And then you go, lady in the tube, red alert. And they all start blinking red, you know, and then you get the Star Trek sound to play. And then you're you're off to the races. Yeah, that's a lot of work. Come on, man. You are you are a hacker back in the day. Yeah.

Anyways, I will get into that more and more. I've only had a month for like two weeks now, and I was gone for one of the two weeks. But it's it's a good times. I like the I like the idea. It just needs to catch up with the again, the the actual virtual versus physical on off switches, because unless that's solved, my wife will not allow these in the house anymore.

Oh, yeah. You'll save them for your man cave when you get that. They are in my personal lights, like the one by my bed right now. And then the one light that I use that my wife never used that by the TV. I wait until she goes to bed. And then I flip around with fun lights. OK, well, then tell him to stop bitching.

Now, your lights. Well, I know how I know that's not really an option and get those echoes back in there. I already gave them to you. I don't have any left. I've got a fun one. Hat tip to Chris Lockhead on this one.

And all I have to say about this one is I want to believe these are Romanian engineers have created a fully functional flying saucer. Did you watch the video on this? It kind of looks like a turtle. It kind of does. It kind of does. It looks really cool, I think.

And it flies really cool. And the tech behind it is really cool. But, you know, in two years when this thing's ready to hit the production line, it's just going to be a weapon, you know? Oh, yeah. The DOD is going to buy this. They're going to put cameras and bombs on it. And it is going to be death from above.

It's pretty cool looking, though. I like it. Yeah, definitely check out the website. And just some of the write up on it is pretty cool. It's actually on Vice. And the way they've got the science behind how it works and all that stuff. And it is kind of a janky prototype right now. But it does fly, and I think they may have cracked the nut on the flying saucer.

They may have. They may have. It looks cool as hell. And I was speaking about the Dodgers earlier, as I'm a big fan, and I saw this in the news. Fans can now order concessions ahead of time and skip the line at Dodger Stadium after the Dodgers named Postmates their exclusive on-demand delivery and pickup partner.

So do the Postmates people ride a scooter to your seat and give you your hot dog? No, it doesn't work that way at all. Well, you can just basically order your food through the app, and then you can go pick it up at designated pickup locations, which is not a delivery. Yeah, what the hell? That's so stupid.

I'm just saying. That's a load of crap. Let me go look up delivery in the dictionary and read it to you. Jesus. Delivery does not mean me get my ass out of my seat. I'll wait for the guy that comes around going, hot dogs, hot dogs, $5, hot dogs. I'll wait for that guy.

I think that's going to be a robot soon. That's fine, too. Hey, come on. Whatever. You can get pneumatic tubes if they come to the seat. That's still delivery. This is not delivery. It's DiGiorno. Closing shout outs.

And a shout out to Jason, who did all the paperwork this week to get us on radio.com. So you can now listen to our podcast there. Although I've tested it out in my lady in the tube, and it does not ever recognize our show. I can get to it through their website and through the app, but not through the lady in the tube, unfortunately. How odd.

I know. It's quite odd. Because I used to be able to just say, play Grumpy Old Geeks, and it would. It would grab the latest episode. You can still do that, but if you're using the radio.com app, you have to go openradio.com, and then they ask you for what you want to listen to. And then if I say Grumpy Old Geeks, it does not find us. Oh, weak sauce.

Weak sauce. Tube fail. Tube fail. Tube fails. Oh, well. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month, and we'll love you forever.

If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 367. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.