372: My Little Homies

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. I had a little visitor yesterday on International Dog Day. My roommate was leaving and she texted me frantically saying, come outside, come outside, there's a dog loose. So I go outside and I'm like, don't chase him. Don't chase him. I know this dog. I've seen him before. And it's a husky, a little boy, like year and a half old husky, beautiful dog.

But if you chase him, he runs and we're like right by this giant street with all the rush hour traffic going by. So I just stopped there, looked at him and said, come here, buddy. And he ran up to me and like he walked into the backyard with me and I was stuck with him all goddamn day until he could find the owner.

I do like because we were talking with each other a little bit and you just kind of assumed that I knew what was going on. Because you're like, well, did you check my Instagram? And I was like, of course, I posted it. Everybody should know. Yes. Well, first off, algorithm. Maybe I didn't see it. And secondly, you have to remember my brain.

I have trained my brain not only to not see ads, but to skip over any pictures of pets or children. Ah, OK. So none of this registers. So I never see pictures of your kid. I think I have the same mental algorithm going on. Oh, yeah. So it took all day, but we found the owner. They came and got him.

So it was a happy end for little Arlo the Husky. Arlo. Arlo. Arlo the Husky. All right. And the family's Iranian. So I don't know how Arlo fits into that, but I don't know. They were very nice, though. You know, I didn't get to spend any time with my dogs on International Dog Day, but I had a little visitor in the in the studio.

Very gorgeous, very gorgeous puppy. You can see the pictures on Instagram if you don't have Brian's Brian's brain filter on. It's a good brain filter, people. I suggest you apply it. Of course, you'll never see updates from Jason or me ever then, because exactly. Which is fine. So I've got a bit of follow up.

We talked a little bit in the past about how people were spoofing Google for businesses and putting things in there and all that such. And we've gotten into a bit of a kerfuffle about this, really, because some people were telling us, oh, yeah, they do. They do try to police it. They send postcards. You have to return them, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, this article seems to be following along with what we've been saying, which is while Google says that they have some sort of system involved, it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job. And some people, much like gaming, the Amazon reviews or doing funny stuff, are basically just screwing with Google Maps.

And it's very easy to do so. This article talks about a couple locations like balls deep in the bullshit and all these different things that are being set up and talking about how fun it can be. And, you know, it is just kind of a fun thing to do to create fake locations.

But then it also, you know, gets into the more nefarious uses where people are like, you know, plumbers are putting in 15 different locations around town. So they always seem like you're the closest one, even though it all just goes to one phone number and one location that's somewhere else and all the different ways that Google Maps is being scammed.

But it is fun for the little Easter eggs. And that is kind of neat. I have to say, yeah, my favorite is the guy who listed DMV as hell, which is, you know, that actually is not a mislabel. That is kind of a perfect description. Yeah, exactly. So that was kind of fun.

And a more follow up on the e-scooters here in Ground Central, Santa Monica and Venice. There had been talking about doing some geofencing for a while to keep scooters out of the Venice canals, particularly because they ended up in the water all the time, which is not good. And that legislation has finally gone through here.

So there is now a geofence preventing scooters from operating on the canals, pedestrian walkways and surrounding alleys, with the caveat that, of course, because apparently they can't afford a decent server. If there is a server overload, some devices may slip through the geofence. Oh, this is like 2019.

How can you like not have enough capacity on your server? Yeah, just spin up an Amazon service and make sure you don't put a password protection on it. You're good to go. That's true. Yeah, a little elastic database with all the geocodes with everybody on it. That would be perfect. Exactly. Something for us to talk about later.

Exactly. And why can't they offload this to the app? Why do they have to have a server for this? Your app that you signed in to get the scooter with knows where you are. It knows where everything is. It should know where the geofences are. So your phone should shut it down, if nothing else. It should. I agree.

Yeah, but that's why we're unemployed still. We say common sense. We say things that make sense, yes. Yeah. And apparently some people are coming to their sense about Libra. So I found this over at Business Insider. Facebook's key partners on its cryptocurrency, Libra, are refusing to publicly support it.

You can have our money, but we're not saying anything. Yep. MasterCard, Uber, and PayPal are ignoring inquiries as to whether they're still committed to Libra. A bunch of other ones will not actually even talk about it publicly. So there were a few that said, yes, we're still on board.

But for the most part, I think everybody's kind of like trying to backpedal on this one quite a bit. Oh, regulators. Regulators, roll out. I'm not so sure of backpedaling. More like soft pedaling. Because they want to stick in just in case. But they're not going to support it publicly.

Yep. There's a lot of craziness going over in Hong Kong right now with the protests. Yes, there is. And I found one video that I just loved.

It's very short. It'll be in the show notes. It's protesters in Hong Kong are cutting down facial recognition towers and destroying them with great aplomb. So it's pretty funny. They're going after the man at the source. The AI. Yeah. And it's pretty funny how many people are carrying umbrellas in Hong Kong, even when it's not raining nowadays, just to try and thwart the cameras.

Yep. Good on them. Hope they figure out a good way to do it. We'll see what happens. I found an interesting article over on Slate by Kentaro Toyama, who is, according to him, he's a researcher studying digital technology, societal impacts. And it's his job to stay informed about upcoming technologies and to project future outcomes.

Basically, he does what we do. Yeah. Except he gets paid for it. I was going to say, he's got a better paycheck. Yeah. Now I'm depressed. Okay. Anyways, there's a pretty good article that basically says what we've been saying.

On the horizon is a flood of digital innovations that could be at least as powerful, wide ranging and controversial deep fake videos, the Internet of Things, constantly monitoring private homes, manipulative virtual reality, self-driving cars, overwhelming communities, et cetera, et cetera. And he's saying that as there is more and more innovation, there is less and less time to reflect on the consequences, which is what we do all the time.

And he says, many of my colleagues feel the same. I will count myself as one of your colleagues. And yes, I do feel the same. Say it, brother. Say it. Yeah. So to tame this onrushing tide, he says society needs dams and dykes or what I like to refer to as regulations.

Or just time to breathe and people to think about the consequences of their actions. That's exactly what the whole point of this article is. And I think it's pretty well, pretty well written. He says there's not even a pressing need for most new digital technologies, which I agree with. Some innovations, of course, are also completely positive.

But today's society often celebrates innovation for its own sake, even when the benefits are questionable and more and more of the benefits are indeed questionable. Correct. Yes, indeed. And I was going through this article and I don't know. I think I might have to be done with slate because at the very bottom they had their recommended articles.

Yes. And one of the first ones was my girlfriend stopped shaving her armpits. Now she's mad that I've retaliated. Okay. And then underneath Emily Ratatouille has armpit hair. Why is that so annoying? Okay. Big, big day for armpit hair over its slate.

They're really, really running the gamut over there. Hey, man, bitch, bitch has got to make some money. This is what happens when we don't pay for journalism. And of course, they finally wrap up with Dear Prudence podcast. Help. My husband took a DNA test. We're first cousins. Someone called Jerry Springer. Yeah. Well, they got to make money, Jason.

They got to make money. So we got to pay for the good articles with the clickbaity stuff that actually makes the cash. Okay. Well, this next one is pretty fun. The ISS now has better internet than most of us after its latest upgrade. And that's true. They do. They have a 600 megabit per second connection, which is pretty damn good.

They get those dog pictures on Instagram real quick. Yes, indeed, they do. And we haven't heard much from them lately. So I wonder if the robot has actually taken over and killed the entire crew. So we'll be finding that out soon when the next Soyuz comes back to Earth with just the carcasses of the ISS crew.

All right. And over at Business Insider, as we've discussed, this is a very difficult site to pull show notes out for these days. There's an article about Facebook reviewing hundreds of its official Facebook marketing partners over Instagram data scraping issues. Yes. Well, once again, Facebook, too little, too late.

But yeah, shouldn't they be reviewing them before they give them access? That's usually the way these things used to work, right? Yeah. Somebody would fill out an application and you would look at it and you get vetted and then you would be given access and you'd think that they would be thinking about this, given everything that's happened in their past.

All the time with everyone. But no, no, it is. It is a go ahead and have access. And then when somebody complains about you, maybe we'll go look at you. Yeah. See, here's one of the things that, you know, Facebook is a victim of its own success here because they've got enough hardware to just basically give everybody unlimited API access.

In the old days, servers cost a lot more money and server time was expensive. So when you gave somebody API access, they had tokens that they could use per hour. And if they went over that, somebody would get an alert and they'd have to request more tokens. And then, you know, you could tell if somebody was abusing the platform because they would keep running out of their allotted tokens for requests.

But nowadays, you know, Facebook has so many servers and so much compute powers that drop in the bucket for these people to do millions upon millions of queries without anybody even noticing. So bring back rate limiting on APIs, Facebook, and it might solve some of your problems. Not all of them because you've got a lot, but I think it would solve at least some of the problems with these trusted partners.

Yes, I'm using air quotes going rogue and just taking everybody's information. That's right. Let's try that. And speaking of taking everybody's information, I found this great article over at The New York Times by Farhad Manjou, who is a really great technology writer. I've always enjoyed his writing. I visited 47 sites, hundreds of trackers followed me.

Now, I think we all know that we're being followed around on the web, but this is an in-depth and kind of horrifying real-time study of exactly who was following him and how many people were following him and how many widgets and trackers were following him and how his information was being shared across the web to completely different advertisers that aren't connected to each other at all.

But they've all gotten together to decide to share unique identifiers to try to track us even better. And wow, quite a read. Yeah, I haven't dug into this one yet because I know it's just going to make me go. It's infuriating. Well, you know, it's you know, it's there, you know, it's happening.

And then you just kind of turn a blind eye. And then when you sometimes you don't want to see how the sausage is made. Yeah, I just think I mean, imagine how much faster the web would be if all these shenanigans weren't going on. Oh, well, that's the one of his big points is that there's almost as much, especially for like a news article that may only have one or two pictures.

There are way more widgets and tracking scripts than there are actual code for the page itself. Oh, God, yes. Yeah. Especially look at Business Insider. I have to turn JavaScript off just to copy something. But and they've got just all of the JavaScript that are on these pages. Something's bound to break.

And on Business Insider, by the time I can even get console open, there have been over a thousand bad requests to certain scripts. And it just you can it just pegs your CPU. And it's I mean, the web is a crypto miner. But yeah, the web is just a it's a fetid shithole with all these trackers now.

And the best part about this whole article is the fact that he also did it with his own site that he writes for the New York Times. Yeah, there's a little caveat down at the bottom of the page. Like other media companies, the Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more details, please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of the Times practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections.

Yeah, everybody go download Privacy Badger helps with some of them, not all of them. There's there's all these different ones that you can get to cut the tracking out. But yeah, the problem is half the time when you use them, half the web doesn't work.

So that's true. That's the problem with this is once you start to like you start to shut off all the ad blockers and you start to use Privacy Badger and you start to use all these other things, everything starts to break down. Yeah, I get lots of sites I go to. The CSS won't even load because it's housed off site, you know, because I mean, it'll be under a subdomain.

But some geniuses in the IT departments for some of these companies who have multiple magazines, they'll put like all the CSS for all the magazines under one different named host. And it's like, OK, well, that is, you know, that could be a cross site scripting problem there.

So a lot of things just go boom when they see that because they're trying to cut down on cross site scripting attacks. And it's just like, come on, guys, this shit ain't that hard. You know, it's not that hard. But, you know, it requires thought and maybe a little extra work in a lot less fresh talent.

Yes. Now, Jason, when's the last time that you updated your phone? My phone is about two and a half years old. I got an iPhone eight plus. Right. And I'm still rocking a seven, which, you know, we are bleeding edge technology people.

We always have been. And I think we could have very easily predicted that cell phone sales were going to slow down because you and I do not rush out to get the latest phones anymore. We wait. Yeah, because they're so damn expensive now. You can't. I used to do it every time. That's definitely one of the reasons.

I mean, now that there are upwards of a grand, if not more for a phone, you're not going to do that every year. And my eight plus works fantastic. I don't need another phone. They get to the point where why upgrade? And that is the exact other reason. A new study released by strategy analytics. All these fucking names.

I am hyper mega global media corporation reflects the current state of the smartphone industry. Consumers in the U.S., baby boomers in particular, are increasingly delaying their smartphone purchases for three or more years. And the average iPhone now remains active for 18 months, which I think is low, while the average Samsung phone remains active for 16.5, probably because of all those features.

I mean, bugs that get into those phones, the era of yearly phone upgrades is over. And yeah, this is basically for the exact two reasons that you just said. First off, price. It's ridiculous. Of course, some would argue that it was always that expensive, but the cell phone carriers offset the cost, which, you know, maybe they should be doing again.

And the other reason being, of course, that the new phones don't really offer much in terms of the price for them, like their marginal upgrades at best. My iPhone 7 works perfectly still. I have no problems with it. And honestly, I would only upgrade because I feel like I should, because it's been a long time, maybe when the next one comes out.

But I don't really need to. I really don't. So we'll see. Yeah. When the new ones come out, when the 11s come out, I think I'm going to go to a 10 R because I do want I do want face ID. Face ID is really nice since I have it on the iPad Pro now. Oh, yeah, I don't have it on anything yet.

So I don't know what I'm missing. Yeah, it's really nice. It really it works. It definitely works. So but the 10 R has like apparently exceptional battery life. So, you know, it's not the latest and greatest. I'm fine with not having the latest and greatest because the second best is still better than what I've got now.

So it's an upgrade and it's a cheaper upgrade. Right. And I don't have to wait in line forever. This episode is sponsored by NutriThrive. Is your dog slowing down a little, having skin issues or digestive problems?

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Media Candy. I'm not sure how I ended up watching this. I'm going to blame whiskey because after you told me it was horrible, after getting a couple episodes into it, and I said, good, now I don't even need to bother. I did watch all of the first season and probably last season of Another Life.

Okay. And? It was rocky the first four episodes, but, you know, Katie Sackhoff got me through it. And it actually got better. It got better and then it got worse. No, I liked the end. It even got into that Dark Forest universe theory that we like so much, which I don't think I've really seen too many sci-fi shows tackle.

They didn't do it well and they didn't do it deep enough, but they were at least touching on some really interesting concepts and enough so that I would like to see a second season if they touched on those concepts more. But the reviews on this show are so bad that I don't see that happening. Yeah.

It is what it is. I didn't mind it at all. I thought it was pretty decent. So when you put this in here, I went back and said, oh, Jesus, I'll hate finish it. And I did. And some parts got better, some parts got worse. But there's no there's not a single new idea in this entire show.

Everything is pulled from somewhere else. Everything. But that's 99% of sci-fi these days. Anyways, it's incredibly rare if there's a completely new idea. That's when we lose our minds and go nuts. I mean, The Expanse doesn't have anything particularly new in it.

Yeah, but it's better written. Yes, it is. No, I'll agree with you. The writing was shabby. It was it was struggling to find out what kind of show it was. And sometimes it touched on things that made it a good show. And sometimes it touched on things that didn't. But, you know, it is what it is. Millennials in space.

Whiny millennials in space is kind of what it came down to for me. That one girl who just bitched the whole time. I'm like, who? What? What? You know, launchpad psychologist would let you near a spaceship, you whiny piece of crap. Yeah, that was a little bit annoying. Yeah.

Anyway, I cannot recommend it. So I thought it was just fine. It was perfectly acceptable. Did you finish Discovery yet? No. Brian, I hated Discovery. It was a terrible show. So I think I think you should never watch it.

All right. Which means next week we'll have it done. That's the only way. If I tell you something is good, forget about it. If I tell you something is a piece of steaming dog shit, you run right out and binge it. Oh, God. And I've waited long enough for you on this one. I'm going to review The Great Hack. Guess what, Jason?

Did you watch The Great Hack? I watched The Great Hack. I watched it before you put your passive aggressive bitching in the show notes. Well, every time I ask, you're like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. So I have a kid. Media is rough. You watched nine hours of a shitty fucking sci-fi show that I told you was terrible, but you won't watch the good one.

And then now you finally get around to watching this one. OK, the kid is not an excuse. Kid is not an excuse. You know why I didn't want to watch The Great Hack? Who wants to fucking relive Trump winning the election and Brexit? Who wants to go through that again? I still have PTSD.

These are the two worst things politically that have happened in my lifetime as far as I'm concerned. And I know we're going to get a lot of hate mail because I just said that, but it is what it is. It's how I feel. So I did not want to watch a show about it. OK, well, I hear the thing. Star Trek Discovery is 100 percent Trump free and there's not even a Brexit reference.

So get what did you think of it? I actually thought it was very it gave me PTSD. It did what it was supposed to do. It was really interesting. You know, it's it's nothing that you and I didn't know because we're into this and we pay attention to it.

I think that the focus on the elections, while interesting, wasn't the main point for me. The main point for me was the the other character that I can't remember his name right now, the professor that sued for trying to get his data back. I think the whole point, the big point about this was exactly the idea that data rights are human rights and we need to start fighting this battle because if we don't, we're we're screwed.

Well, there was another character that I didn't know about that I never paid attention to. Brittany Kaiser, who is kind of the focus of the whole movie seemed to get enough news play at the time when this was all unfolding, because I don't remember even talking about her much. But I guess she came out a little bit later as the bigger whistleblower or not a whistleblower.

It was not a whistleblower. I say, no, but yeah, that was called damage control. And, you know, I when we first started watching with her, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. And then as the movie went, because I watched it with my roommate and every time she come on, she's like, that is one nasty bitch, which is what she would say.

And she's like, you know, she's this woman is just untrustworthy. She's a liar covering her own ass, you know, silver spoon up her ass. I was not willing to give her the benefit of the doubt from the opening sequence, which is her going to Burning Man, writing Cambridge Analytica on the thing and then tying a whistle to it.

That is fucking bullshit PR move. And, you know, she came up with that herself. Screw her. No benefit of the doubt for her. She is totally saving her own ass. And it's so fucking transparent to me that that's what she's doing. However, having said all that, whatever her motives, whoa, they were up to some sleazy ass shit.

Yeah. Yeah, they were. But they're not the only ones, you know. No, no. And again, that's that's my main takeaway from this is is really we've got to start got to start the battle to own our own data. We have to absolutely have to. They're Palantir light. I mean, there's nothing like Palantir.

But what I like is Micah Siffrey did a article over at The Nation called What Netflix's Great Hack Gets Wrong About Cambridge Analytica? And it comes down to the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica didn't steal the 2016 election and they couldn't have if it tried.

And apparently there's a lot of research that has gone into, like, all of the stuff that Cambridge Analytica is accused of and tried to do. There's no real proof that it actually worked. Yeah, that's the thing. It's it's unprovable, right? You can't prove if this is what we've said.

Statistics are bullshit and meaningless. We don't there's no way even with all the tracking that we have. We cannot really tell if advertising on the Internet and nudging people towards certain behaviors works or not. We don't know. Yeah. Well, in some cases, we know. Well, in some cases we do.

But for when it comes to this kind of, you know, fuzzy election hacking with just trying to push sentiment, I think the Russians definitely did a better job than Cambridge Analytica. Because they were just trying to foment dissent amongst the people, not trying to actually, you know, go after what was the term that they use?

The the persuadables. The persuadables. Yes. Yes. Yes. Neighbors to the deplorables. Yes. And live down the hill from the Incredibles. But anyway, yeah, so it's an interesting read. Mike is a very smart guy. He's the smart older brother of my friend Dave Siffrey, who used to work for at Technorati.

It was it's a good read because it helps temper all the anger, I think, or some of the anger from the film, The Great Hack. But I walked out of The Great Hack wishing I had an hour and a half of my life back. I actually think it was worth watching. I enjoyed it. A lot of behind the scenes stuff about how it all went down, particularly the legal cases that I wasn't aware of.

So I do have to say the the motion graphics were really nice, too. I thought they did a good job. Oh, they did a great job. What was that other the big the one about the banks recently that the guys did? I can't even I can't remember the name. They all kind of run together. Yeah. But these documentaries, man, I mean, the the quality level of production and graphic design and everything on it is phenomenal these days.

Yeah. Most of us probably shot with an iPhone, too. That's a funny probably. So the Mandalorian trailers out. Did you watch it? I did. It got me very, very excited. And I particularly enjoy after seeing a stormtrooper heads on spikes, the Disney logo coming up after that.

It was pretty good. Oh, yeah. I'm looking forward to this one. I am, too. It looks phenomenal. It looks absolutely phenomenal. It's got Werner Herzog in it. I know. How random is that? That I mean, that kind of took me out of it.

That's kind of like Adam Savage in The Expanse for me. Right. It was like, I get you. I can see that. I hope he's not narrating the whole thing, because that would be annoying as hell. Oh, God. He's just got that voice. I know. But it does look great, doesn't it?

And it looks like it's going to be really dark, which should be fun. Disney gets my money. Damn it. Yes, they're definitely getting my money. And we had more Disney news come out this week. There was a whole new special look. They're not calling it a trailer of Rise of Skywalker that came out at D23.

And it is on the Internet now. Have you watched it? I have indeed. Wow. I mean, I skipped all the beginning part because it was just a recap. The recap. Yes. Just to, you know, pull on the heartstrings and then they get to it. It's all about the last cut scene. Honestly, that's really it's all.

It's about Ray with that double edged red lightsaber. That's all that matters. Yeah. It was. It's got me pretty excited. So I'm looking forward to it. And hopefully the wrongs will be righted from the last movie. I don't think there's a long enough movie to right those wrongs. Oh, yes.

Misa skeptical. Anyway, Breaking Bad has a new movie coming to Netflix in October, which is interesting. Very interesting. I'm wondering when Better Call Saul is going to come back, but I'll take this. Yeah, I'll take this instead. This will be good.

I mean, it takes place right after the end of Breaking Bad. So we'll see. I mean, it's a Jesse Pinkman movie. It's a Jesse Pinkman movie, but it is very up in the air as to whether what's his face is going to be in it or not, because he hasn't come out and said he's not in it. OK, well, I mean, it takes place after he's dead.

So we'll see. Well, after he's supposedly dead, we shall see. Yeah, it's worth a shot. I'm going to watch it. It's free. I paid for it. That's right. And I found a new podcast that I haven't listened to yet, but I just want to throw it out there in case you want to check it out.

It's called The Tapes Archive, and it's a podcast from a guy who has a friend who is a journalist and used to do a lot of interviews. He's got like over 300 tapes of the interviews that he did with celebrities for stories that he wrote. But they never released anything with the taped interviews because they were just for his notes.

And the first two episodes are George Carlin and Billy Joel. And so I really want to check these out. They're not too long, which is good. But I'm curious about the rights on these. That's why I wanted to bring it up and ask you about it, because, you know, I doubt they signed a waiver for the recording of the interview process just for the, you know, the article.

I'm just wondering how legal this is. It's probably straight up legal, because I don't think that you have to unless you're saying, you know, this is off the record and you can just use it as kind of you heard or whatever. If you're just doing a straight up interview, it's a straight up interview.

You don't usually sign anything. It is what it is. So that's true. And it's even in a two party consent state. The tape players right there. So I guess they did know that they were on tape. Exactly. So I don't think that there are any legal issues here. OK, well, that's good to know. I can't wait to check it out. And I want to talk again about your Undivided Attention podcast.

Have you had a chance to listen to this yet? I have not. You're going to want to start at the beginning and it is going to be your favorite podcast ever. OK, it is. You know, it's Tristan Harris and Azaraskin. And these are the guys from the Center for Humane Technology.

Right. Who we love. We love these guys. They go deep into everything we talk about with how we're being manipulated by the algorithms and all of this stuff. They have like scientists on and people who actually know what's going on. Some of the data guys from YouTube that used to work there.

All sorts of stuff. I'm only three episodes in and I'm taking my time with it because I actually go back and re-listen to it quite a bit. It is incredible. And it pisses me off, too, because these guys have a new shtick in the podcast that I was going to try and do on another podcast, which is like a couple of times through the show.

You break out and you do a recap of everything you just heard and talk about it a little bit, have a little discussion, then get back to the interview, then break again. So you can like kind of cement what's going on. I totally had that plan. Yeah, exactly. I totally had that plan for a show and then they did it and I like it.

So it's a it's a new way to do an interview show and it pisses me off that I didn't do it first. Damn it. But I got to say, yeah, your undivided attention just added to your podcast player and start at the beginning because it does go in sequence. All right. We'll do. Definitely cool.

And my favorite news of the week, Death Row Records is now owned by Hasbro. I love this. I love this. I love this. Hyper mega global media corporation. That's right. But as we all know, Hasbro owns My Little Pony. So for Christmas this year, you know, we're going to get my little homie.

I'm telling you right now, Princess Suge is going to be overseeing Twilight Dre and then we'll have we'll have the other cast of characters. We'll have Rainbow Snoop and Tupac Alou, which is only in the series for a very short time. Or is he or is he?

Yes. So, yeah, way too much about My Little Pony, man. That's all I saw. I you got to watch that brony documentary. It is awesome. And once you once you watch a brony documentary, you're in, you know, way too much.

But I'm basically just looking forward to the new theme song done. Rap style should be. Oh, this is going to be fantastic. But yes, wait for the adventures of Homeyville coming soon to a toy store near you. Social media seriously harms your mental health, reads model Delilah Bell's iPhone case.

Captured in a mirror selfie that also highlights her artificial nails, clear skin, expertly applied cat eye and pouty lips. The bottom half of the case sports. What is a parody of a drug label advertising likes, which are defined as loneliness reliever, depression reducer. Fuck you. This is a case made by urban sophistication that is taken off as an accessory for proportionally attractive women.

So F you. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. How meta. Oh, God. These people. These people. Not a brain cell amongst them. Anyway, I found this over at. Well, this is I didn't find it at YouTube because this is making the rounds.

This is a video from Nicole Arbor, who is one of the aforementioned beautiful women on YouTube on the Internet with perfect teeth and makeup and everything like that. But she has a love that I share, which is taking down self-help experts.

Quote air quotes right there. Now, she goes after Jay Shetty. Have you ever heard of Jay Shetty? I have not. Jay Shetty is like he's the big, big dog right now. You know, he's got billions of views on Facebook Live and YouTube and all over the place.

But it turns out he is a bald faced thief. Every single thing he says can be attributed to someone else. And in her video, she actually breaks it down and shows quite a few of the things that he says.

It's I love it. It's this video where he's supposed to be talking like off the cuff and just speak into the camera, speak in the truth. And every line that he says that she'll just put up the actual person who said it next to it so you can check references. And it's not the fact that he just says things other people say.

He takes credit for them. Now, there are a lot of self-help gurus out there, which I still can't stand. But people like Tony Robbins, who will also steal things, but sometimes, sometimes not all the time, give credit. Now, there's a place for self-help, quote unquote, curation. So if Jay Shetty was saying all these things and said this was said by the great Mark Twain, instead of saying it was by Jay Shetty, there would be a case that he's just, you know,

a parrot is parroting what other self-help gurus say, which there are a lot of parrots out there. Now, he just takes credit for it. And this guy's been on Ellen. He's, you know, they literally built Facebook live around like one of his shows to start off with all the views.

So, you know, there's a big fight here. Like he, nobody wants to really come out and say our golden boy is a thief because there's a lot of views at stake. Kind of like that guy from what was it, Engadget or the guy that was making fun of the guy on Engadget and Gizmodo on YouTube. Oh, right. Calling him.

Yeah. Like just harassing him for years. Well, YouTube, you know, didn't want to do anything until critical mass really hit that said, oh, you can't really be saying stuff like that. We're going to leave you on the air, but we're going to demonetize you. Yes. So, but apparently Jay Shetty's website is bleeding content because they keep taking down post after post after post.

And yeah, the guy is just a full on fraud. But so Jay Shetty is my moron of the week, but Nicole Arbor is my hero of the week. Excellent. Well, I also have a hero of the week, Don Wells, a.k.a. Marianne from Gilligan's Island. Oh, I love Marianne. Who doesn't?

And this just makes her even better. There's a columnist for the L.A. Times named Chris Erksine, who is basically just doing a series of stuff about local things in L.A. And he was chasing down a tip that Gilligan's Island was actually filmed at Echo Park Lake in the middle of downtown Los Angeles.

And so he reached out to some of the people on the show and Don Wells, Marianne, got back to him and he invited her to a tiki party in the middle of the lake where some of this stuff may have been shot. And she showed up. How cool is that? And she settled down into a beach chair and she grabbed a drink and then she started to remember shooting different scenes in Malibu and Santa Barbara, but probably not in Echo Park, although she does think that maybe there was a few publicity shots done there.

But she showed up to a tiki party just because she was invited. How cool is that? Yep. And she looks pretty good for being in her 80s. Yeah. Marianne. I always was a Marianne guy. Me too. Me too. I wasn't into Ginger, but her and Ginger are the only two left alive, sadly.

I know. That's sad. Yeah. Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, which we're still working on, by the way. So the $1 tier is still up there. Patreon has the worst UI of any site I've ever seen. So having some issues over there. But over at Patreon, Richard Alexander, Michael, Scrody Ballsack, Wesley, Tom, and Killer Paper Mice are all new Patreon subscribers.

So thank you guys very much. And gals. Thank you so much. And over at PayPal, we have donations from Mark Andrew, who says, thanks, Grumps, for your hard work. Keep churning out the crank and the sober, distortion, fieldless view of tech news. And Jack, who says, thanks for the show. Please say, deliver you for me.

And actually, we just got an email from a listener named Mike, who has a left Patreon and wants to go to PayPal, but he's getting PayPal issues and asked me about it. We don't know. So you definitely have to follow up with PayPal. It's working because we're getting donations from other people. So I'm sorry you're having some issues with that.

Write them, please. And over at Twitter, Robin writes in standard e-books is a bunch of volunteers headed up by Alex Cabal. Don't worry about the costs. They're minimal. OK. All right. That's it. Good enough. Yep. And Gustavo sent us a link from luxury launches dot com and a first of its kind.

Dubai University is offering a full time diploma course in being a social media influencer. Of course, Dubai is doing that. And over at GOG dot show, Bob writes in the Matrix sequels aren't as bad as you think. I love your show and hope this video from Patrick Willems will help your Matrix Matrix angst.

Cheers, Bob from Massachusetts. Well, I started to watch it, but it's 45 minutes long. That's almost as long as the movies. Yeah. But it goes into a lot of the philosophy behind the movies, which I know all that stuff. I just didn't think it was done very well. But the philosophy behind all of it is great.

It's fine. It's, you know, just the 45 minute sequence of just stupid things coming down and being shot and yelling and the rave sequence. And oh, boy, there's so many bad things about those movies. Yeah. Yeah. That whole big party sequence was really not good.

Gosh. Anyways. Yeah. Steve writes in. I'm assuming this is a. Woman named Steve regarding girls names, Fred. She's fictional. But here's one. And this is a Winifred Burkle from. Let's see. You've probably got several responses. We did get quite a few with her given.

Angel was a pretty popular show among us geeks. So there was a character in a TV show that went by Fred instead of Winnie, which was what most women do. Ah, shut up. Okay. Someone will vindicate me someday.

And a bunch of people wrote this one in a cut on camera. Three sided for riding scooters on I-94. Oh, so people doing stupid things. Yeah. Future Darwin Award winners is what we have here. So that'll be in the show notes. And Christopher sent us a link from the BBC.

Baffled student tells Twitter. I am not a Chinese agent. Okay. I didn't actually read all of this, but apparently, yes, there was a Luca Ivisic, a 24-year-old student at King's College London, whose account at Tech Politicist has been suspended and appears on the list of those said to be run by and out of China.

He was born in Croatia and says he's never been to China, recently completed his thesis, the subject disinformation and how artificial intelligence can empower the tools that China and Russia have to misinform us. Whoops. Nope. There you go. Keyword search fail. Yes. So thanks to Frag, Demaster, and let's see.

I think there were at least two or three. Oh, no. Demaster wasn't one of those. There were a couple of people that wrote in about Hue. There was a lot about this. So, yes, apparently the Hue actual smart dimmer switch, full dimming in wall, including white and large light almond paddles, repeater, range extender, Z-Wave hub required, works with smart things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Apparently that actually does what I needed to do. Of course, the fact of the matter is you still need to actually have your original physical one locked up and you just use that instead, which will not ever work with my wife. Oh, I've just found the other people that did it as well. Brian and Ben and Bo.

A lot of the bees. All the bees came out to tell me about how the Hue thing actually works. So thank you. But I don't see it happening anytime soon. What's really funny is a lot of these people are saying that the problem is the wife wants it to work that way. So here's the thing. Just get rid of your wives and your children and shit should just work as advertised.

Yeah. If you get rid of your wives and your children, you can sit in a house and you can control your lights just the way you want to and be lonely in a nice blue light. There you go. Okay. Just playing Bela Lugosi's dead on loop over and over. All right. So catching back up to where we were, Demaster actually wrote in episode 368, shameful admittance of living in Bakersfield.

I would also only stay at the Taco Bell hotel if it was just a giant bathroom with comfy pillows. You only rent Taco Bell anyway. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, they had such an opportunity and they really did. Yes. Alexander writes in, hey guys, best show out there. And I love the recent addition of the little sound effects and general increase in banter.

Just started supporting y'all in an attempt to help you on your journey to 10X. In that vein, do you sell any GOG merch? I would love a grumpy old cup on my desk and it might help you make a dollar or three on the side. Oh, we'd love to do it. We just haven't had time to design it. That's always the problem. We lost our designer.

She moved to the woods and we don't have her anymore. So sometime when Brian and I get around to cracking open Photoshop, maybe we'll slap some stuff on some stuff. Yep. Slapping stuff on stuff. Sissy writes in, I started my annual search and removal for my personal information on public databases.

I'm two hours in and the databases are multiplying like rabbits. That's how they work. Yep. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of public search databases that are out there. You guys have a list of databases available to you to go through to remove your information. Is there a master government opt out area to register myself? Insert laugh here.

Any ideas on how to keep my eyes from crossing, trying to accomplish this in a reasonable fashion, maybe in under eight hours? Love you all. If you could do that, they wouldn't be in business. Yeah. There are services that there are services that will do that for you that will go to all of them because they've got all the opt out stuff and they probably just offshore the Philippines.

But there are services that will do it. I don't have any off the top of my head, but there was an article that had some recently that were doing the exact same thing. Like once a year, he goes through and does that. Right. I'll see if I can dig that up because I was thinking of doing that, too. Yeah, that's probably probably do for it as well.

So let's we'll get that in the next show for you. Hopefully, hopefully we should never promise things because we don't always deliver. All right. Tristan writes in podcast. You'd like We've Got Worm, an analysis of the excellent web novel book Worm, a superhero story fueled by tragedy and more villains than heroes.

Perhaps even our main character is becoming a villain herself. Listen to at least five episodes to grasp brutality and hard sci-fi-esque world of Worm. This sounds more like an ad, Tristan. Tristan, did you write We've Got Worm or the podcast? I'm feeling like you're doing one of those.

But yeah, Patreon.com. Yeah. All right. So JD writes in, which I'm assuming is not you. Hey, guys, love your show. I first heard about it mentioned on Feedback Friday a while ago and have been hooked ever since. Jason asked for anyone who knew any woman named Fred to write in.

Oh, here's another one about Angel. OK. Yeah. I did watch Angel a lot because I was a Buffy fan. So maybe maybe that's where it came from. But I don't think so. I got to remember this. Fuck off. Andy writes in thought you would find this interesting after episode 369.

Like automated license plate readers. These shirts throw them off. And it is a place where you can actually buy the shirts we talked about on security. It's called adversarial fashion, which is a great name. Love that. Great name. But you look like a knob. You do. You do. Actually, you know, it looks like kind of like if you if you like have glasses off, it looks like a Hawaiian shirt.

So they need to make it in colors and then it could just be a Hawaiian shirt. Right. Don writes in. Hey, Brian, thanks for the response. And just to clarify one thing, I heard you read back what I wrote and how I wrote it. Yikes. That Star Trek fan made movie mention was meant as a jab on copyright lanes. It wasn't about not paying, not properly paying licensing fees or being able to get stuff for free.

I'm not crazy. Anti-rule or anti-regulation like that. Only a little. Hello, Sweden. Under the original copyright rules, Star Trek would have been in the public domain. Not by now. These changes made in the early 20th century would have had it starting to enter in a couple of years. There's the infamous Mickey Mouse copyright changes in the latter part of the 20th century.

Delay that until 2061 or something like that. Anyhow, keep up the awesome work. Love the podcast and don't stop with the shocking. Screw those guys. Oh, dang. Do I owe somebody some money now? You know, copyright laws kind of do need to change. I'm not sure if Star Trek should be in the public domain.

It's still a going. It's an ongoing show, right? Right. But the original. Yeah, the original. OK. Yeah. He's talking about the original series. Yeah. And if you want to know more about this copyright stuff, just follow Corey Doctorow. He's written about it ad nauseum for the last 15 years. Yeah, that's basically all he writes about now.

Yeah, pretty much. So definitely follow Corey if you're if you care that much about copyright, because I know way too much about it now because I followed Corey for probably 14 of those 15 years. Right. Oliver writes in. Hey, geeks, there was a problem with our Uber credit card.

So we went to contact support to ask about the issue. I found that they don't have a phone number, which was very concerning for the biggest ride sharing company in the world. I had to send a message to support, which I was told would be answered in less than 24 hours. That obviously won't work if you need a ride then and there. What are your feelings on this?

Stay grumpy. Well, my thought is fuck Uber. And since they are the world's biggest ride sharing company, not the world's biggest credit card company. You wonder why there's a there's an issue. My thought is. Hi, Oliver. You've listened to our show. Why the hell did you get an Uber credit card?

Seriously. All right. And over at iTunes, we have a five star review from Mr. Taco Man. Not so grumpy, but very entertaining. More like blunt, middle aged men. Yeah. OK, kind of. At least we'll take it. At least we're very entertaining. And Oliver.

Yeah, I want to go back to Oliver for a second there. You're not done with Oliver yet. I'm not done with Oliver yet. I understand the problem. But there should be an issuing company on the back of that credit card. And there should be a number on the back of that credit card for you to call for immediate customer support in case of lost card or fraud alerts.

I can't believe that there's no phone number, period, for a credit card because, you know, Uber doesn't. They didn't spin up a credit card division. They partnered with a bank. Yep. So I'd check your bill, maybe. And, you know, I'm sure they have to see who the issuing bank is. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, it's not going to go through Uber, you know, because what, like, even the Apple card goes through Goldman Sachs.

So you'd call Goldman Sachs if your Apple card. Well, if your phone gets stolen, because a lot of people won't have the cards like I don't have a card yet. But anyway, yeah, just check check for the the bank. That's what I would say. All right. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG dot show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG dot show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Oh, and I just want to do a quick shout out. A couple other people wrote us novels. Thank you. We appreciate it. But we just don't have the time. Yeah, guys, if you want if you want us to address stuff on the show, you got to keep it, you know, somewhat short.

These are walls of copy that would take longer than a couple episodes to read. We appreciate it. We read them. We read some of them. Yeah, yeah. Brevity, brevity, people, please. Brevity. Closing shout outs.

Shout out to friend of the show, Anthony, who runs node host. I finally ditched any remaining clients and fucking favor for friends hosting that I had, and I just moved all my personal stuff over to node host. It was pretty easy, pretty simple, had a couple hitches. So I hit him up on the Twitters, and I didn't expect a response for like, you know, a day or whatever, because I was kind of doing this fairly late last night.

But he immediately responded, fixed my problems, and I'm all set up and running. So thanks so much. No, they're great over at node host. I mean, I love their control panel because it is so simple. It's just like, boom, easy setup, prices, uncredibly. The price is unbelievable. He did ask, you know, why don't we just move our GOG.show site over?

So something to do. Well, I was working on it there. It might not end up at node host because I just don't have time with the new job and everything coming up to actually maintain a self-hosted WordPress. I got most of it set up on node host, and then you get back to the updates and cycles and stuff.

So it's just, I don't have time to maintain another WordPress website. So we're going to, sorry, Anthony, I love your service, but we're going to have to go with WordPress business for this because it is a business. We can write it off and they fix, they just do everything for you. I don't have to worry about getting hacked.

I don't have to worry about plugin updates or anything like that. So if I had time, we'd totally do it self-hosted because I prefer that, but just don't have the time now. So until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. It costs us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or a recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and clicking that PayPal button. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 372.

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

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