377: I’ll Be Watching You

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

Just a quick note of housekeeping here before we get into the episode. We had a million technical difficulties on this show, so it took a little bit longer to get out than usual. So sorry that it's about 12 hours later than it should be. And another bit of housekeeping. We are going to be taking Wednesday's show off.

It is our last chance to have one day off before the holidays. So we're going to take it because we've got a lot to do and we're fried and just need one day, one day to not look at the news. So we're going to have an extended episode next Saturday with all of the stuff from the week and hopefully you'll stick around and enjoy it.

And yes, we are a little bit slower and grumpier this episode because of the technical difficulties and all apologies for that. So without further ado, on with the show. Welcome to Extremely Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I'm listening to the wonderfully compressed version of your voice through Skype since everything else broke today. Yeah, it's a wonderful day. Nothing is working. Zencaster isn't working. Squadcast isn't working. But I tell you what is working. The two wood chippers outside my garage door today.

So this has just been lovely. Oh, my God. Well, here we are. Adversity and all. Yeah, exactly. So we've got a little follow up here. So I like to I like to think that even though my day is sucking, it's not sucking as bad as Milo Yiannopoulos is because he's broke.

Wow. Poor guy is going to have to go get a real job now. I know. Who knew that just being a troll isn't a job that's sustainable? Really? He has since he has been deplatformed everywhere. He's like trying to make a living on on Telegram now.

It's like, wow, you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're going to Telegram to try and get your message out there. But they wouldn't let him on to Patreon. Yeah. And it also comes back to what we always say. You know, if you build your house in someone's backyard, don't get upset when they turn the sprinklers on and kick you out.

You should have basically just had everything pointing to your own website, which, you know, would still be running. Probably. But nowadays, you never know. Cloudflare could just go. Now, we don't like you either. The open DNS could say, no, we don't like you either. So it just doesn't pay to be a douchebag anymore. Well, douchebags are definitely having a hard time right now.

Let's put it that way. Oh, poor babies. So I see some other people are having a rough time right now to Ryan's toys review. Ryan toys. Yes. Well, yes. I unfortunately am quite familiar. Sadly, he's going to they're going to be OK because they have more income streams.

They're not just on the tube of the U anymore. They have a show on Nick Jr. that we struggle to keep my son from ever seeing or watching because it is the most annoying show in the world. I can't stand it, but he loves it. So, you know, the annoying things about everything like the Internet, like what we should have been promised is when I bring up the Nick Jr.

app on my Apple TV, I should be able to customize it. Why am I not able to customize it? Why am I not able to only put up a couple of shows, which are the ones that I want my kid to see? Because every time I launch the app, the first thing he sees is this stupid Ryan kid and he goes, I want to watch Ryan and we don't want him to watch Ryan because his TV show is as annoying as his YouTube videos.

There's no way to block it. No, no, there is not. That's an oversight or maybe it's not. Maybe it's not. I think it's not an oversight because they know damn well that the kids see the things and then scream and yell to watch them. So thanks a lot for that, Nick Jr. But getting on to his first how he how they became famous and rich and popular and managed to get a TV show in the first place.

Yes, he has a YouTube channel where he basically reviewed toys and it was very, very popular. Right place, right time kind of thing. And now they're in a bit in trouble because they're basically promoted ads and they don't tell people that. What I really like about this is the the problem that he's targeting preschoolers and that you have to make these disclosures so that the consumers notice, process and understand the message that this is a sponsorship, a paid advertisement of sorts.

My child has no idea what an advertisement is yet and cannot process that information. That's the slippery slope they got here. And they're like, well, how are we going to going to explain it to him in a manner that he's going to understand? Well, turns out you probably can't. So what's going to happen?

Well, you know, we've been talking about YouTube and the problem with kids for quite some time now, and this is definitely another extension of it. You know, when we grew up, guess what? We had Sesame Street. Scooby-Doo. And the electric company, which were funded by the government to help so they didn't have to push things on you to sell things all the time.

Well, this is this is not that kind of program, right? And this is free market advertising. Yeah. Well, maybe toddler shouldn't be getting that. Yeah. Well, this is this is one to watch for sure, because it's interesting to see what the FTC is going to do. Yes, it is. And to hell with Ryan.

God, I hate that show. I can't explain how bad it is. So annoying. OK, well, let's move on to somebody else you probably hate. Adam Neumann, the CEO of We. We work and we play and we we do lots of things like make an IPO and pretend that we're a tech company, even though we just have real estate.

Yes. And they're just opening up a factory now to make glass and concrete for their, you know, their there's basically the places that they work out of. So I don't get this at 200000 square foot facility. But that's not the article that I have. I have WeWork's shrinking IPO will erase billions from CEO Adam Neumann's payday, but he's still likely to come out a multibillionaire.

Life is not fair. But no, no, it is not. So, yeah, you know, suppose I shocking that basically the evaluation valuation is way too high and they're not going to be able to sustain any kind of movement on their stock price because they've just been valued way, way, way too high.

And they're not going to be able to create more value. So the stock is going to tank like we said it would. Yeah. And that's going to happen. And I'd feel bad for him, except he can still just go retire to an island. He can go we island and he'll be quite happy for the rest of his life. Yeah. So they were having it at about 47 billion valuation and they're looking at knocking it down to between 15 and 18 billion now.

So, right. That's a that's a chunk of change that they're getting hit for because they had to open up their financials to do this IPO. And everybody's like, hey, wait a second here. You're really not worth that much money. No, you're not. And what are all these shenanigans that Mr. Neumann's been pulling? Oh, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense now, does it?

No. And this one, I just I can't believe this actually made it to the courts. Court rules that scraping public website data isn't hacking. Well, of course it's not. Of course it's not. Now, the problem isn't having the courts understand it. The problem is having journalists understand that.

Yeah. So this comes back to a lawsuit between IQ Labs. HiQ and LinkedIn, because IQ is basically scraping all of the publicly available LinkedIn data. Yes. And then creating another database, merging it with databases and selling it to employers, which is what people do nowadays.

Well, LinkedIn didn't like that very much. So they said that, no, they're violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Well, no, they're not. Fortunately, yes, exactly. Fortunately, somebody at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has a brain and said, no, you are actually not circumventing anything by downloading public website data.

So there, you know, so there, there it is. Yes. If you have something out there and it is public and somebody takes it and makes a copy of it, they are not hacking you. They are not stealing from you. They are taking public information and making a copy of it.

That wasn't even theirs to begin with. It's not LinkedIn's data. It's your data. Well, so. Hey, Jason, that's not true. I know. I know. It's their data. Yeah. They do say it's not really hacking if you're not bypassing some kind of meaningful authorization system, which loading up a web page last time I looked is not bypassing anything.

Yep. And it's doing what it says on the tin. It's the web. Yep. And I also, I also agree that it's not hacking if somebody gets onto an Amazon web service that hasn't been password protected and downloads that database. The fault is not with the person who's downloading it. The fault is with the person who put it there in the news.

Huawei CEO, Ren Zheng Hai, I think that's how you'd pronounce it, said that the company is willing to help boost Western rivals in the global 5G race as a way to ease tensions with the West. He did a recent interview with The Economist, and he said he would give perpetual access to its existing 5G patents, code, and technical blueprints in return for a one-time fee.

He will claim the license will give the buyer the freedom to modify source code so as to address any possible spying concerns. So this may be a way out of our little issue that we're currently having right now. As part of this hypothetical deal, they will keep all existing carrier contracts and continue to develop new 5G tech as well as to work to secure new sales contracts.

Essentially, the company wants to reset the playing field and go from there. However, as The Economist notes, it's hard to say whether the plan is likely to work. First, it's unclear if the Chinese government will agree to this because they're basically selling off a portion of its most valuable asset to a foreign company. And similarly, it's uncertain if there's a company out there on our side that is actually interested in buying the patents.

So we will see what happens. Very interesting. At least they're trying something. Yeah. We'll see. And I love this next one. Uber lays off 435 people across engineering and product teams. Yeah. About 8% of the organization is out the door.

That's quite a lot, especially since they still claim, and we'll get into that in a second, that they're a technology company. They're not about the cars or the drivers. Yeah. So what it really comes down to is like when Uber was staffing up, they just hired a really shit ton of crappy engineers in their cleaning house.

Right. And so I really want to see the gender breakdown of the people that got the boot because, remember, they had some serious engineering team issues when Kalanick was running the show. That's true. This is a good way for them to weed out any people they see as problematic or bitching too much.

Yeah. I just thought it was interesting that they're still cutting costs. Yep. They are. And they've got some problems right now because California has just disrupted the gig economy, in theory. In theory. Yeah. The Senate lawmakers have passed the controversial bill known as AB5 on Tuesday evening after months of uproar from businesses and gig companies like Uber and Lyft.

This bill will require businesses to hire workers as employees, not independent contractors, with some exceptions. That will give hundreds of thousands of California workers basic labor rights for the first time. And despite the aggressive lobbying campaign, Uber and Lyft are not exempt from this. However, the very next day, Uber and Lyft said, tough shit, we're not doing it.

That's basically what they said. They will continue with business as usual, and they have no plans to change how it classifies drivers. The company argues that the new legislation doesn't mandate the company to make a change, but only applies a stricter legal test to determine if Uber's workers are truly independent contractors.

That's basically explained as to hire an independent contractor businesses must prove that the worker is a free from the company's control.

B, is doing work that isn't central to the company's business. That's the one that they're going to go after. And C, has an independent business in that industry. If they don't meet all of these conditions, then they have to be classified as employees. And as we know, Uber and Lyft are basically saying, we're technology companies.

The people that actually do our service aren't central to our business. Right. Good luck with that one. Good luck with that. So, it's going to have to go to court now, of course, because, you know, there you go. But at least they're sticking by their guns. It's like, we're going to do whatever we want. Suck it. That's really, that's the mantra.

Yeah, that's basically what they're saying. So, screw you, California government. We're going to court. Yep. Fun times. And over at Kickstarter on Thursday morning, they fired Taylor Moore, an employee who is one of the organizers of a unionization effort within the company. This is the second firing of the union organizer since last week when Clarissa Redwine was also fired.

Interesting. And the company claims that this was not anything to do with the fact that they were trying to organize the unions as performance-related issues. Sure it was. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. So, they're going to get sued now. So, these two people are going to go after them and they were, you know, just let the people do a damn union.

Yeah, seriously. Come on. Collective bargaining power. People. Yep, exactly. Power to the people. And it's kind of obvious when you just fire the two people that were heading the charge. Yeah, really. At least Uber fired, you know, a couple hundred to, you know, put in the people they want to get rid of.

It's like, hey, if we fire enough people. Stick them in there with all these other people. Yeah, we can get rid of the real assholes. And Google has actually done something that I theoretically applaud. We'll see how it rolls out. But they have updated their search algorithm to give more prominence to original reporting. The company's vice president of news, Richard Gingras, wrote in a blog post that it should be easier for people to find the origins of a news story.

And Jason and I agree because we spend a lot of time trying to track down the original stories when we do this stuff. This move could be a boon for local news outlets and others who invest time, effort and resources to report stories before national publications or networks catch wind of them. And as we know, once a news story is posted, everybody else has to post a copy of it because got to have them clicks.

So they do note that there's no surefire definition of original reporting or how to determine much information in an article is original. But as such, they will continue to refine their algorithm or, you know, thank God he didn't say the AI. This next one I just chuckled at Facebook warns about iPhone privacy change.

They could unsettle Facebook users. Yes, because we learn what you're actually doing. That's going to be unsettling to a lot of people. Yeah, they publish a blog post about how its app collects and uses background location data. Well, it comes just days before Apple is expected to release a new version of its iPhone software that will tell users when their location is being collected in the background.

Facebook also said in the post that it can collect location data using things like check-ins, events and information about your Internet connection. That means that some Facebook users may soon be confronted with an Apple-created pop-up telling them that Facebook has used their location in the background some number of times over the past few days.

Like every five seconds. And including a map marking where Facebook asked the phone for its coordinates. That's amazing. I cannot wait to see these maps. I know. I cannot wait. People are going to go apeshit and they're going to be posting it everywhere. It's going to be awesome. Yeah, this is going to be the new meme.

It's just going to be one big red dot over the entire country. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by our good friends at Hover. Look, you need your own domain name. If not for your business, then for your family.

You're just way cooler if you can drop an email address with a custom domain name. Trust me, I do it all the time. Hover is the single best place to buy your domain names. If you've ever had to buy a domain from any of those other registrars, you know how difficult it can be. Terrible interfaces and a constant barrage of upsells make it almost impossible to even just find the domain.

Hover has an incredibly clean and intuitive user interface without all the insane upsells. And you know me, if you've listened to the show for a while, I think life is too short to use ugly software. And Hover delivers on beautiful design and ease of use. They have free who is privacy on supported domains, which you usually have to pay to keep your details private, but not with Hover.

And every month they have great sales on some awesome top level domains. Like right now, you can get .design, .inc, .online, .site, .space, .store, .tech, and .website. All for huge discounts off the regular price. Now, these prices do change often, so make sure you check their on-sale page when shopping for your domain.

And Hover has over 400 domain name extensions to choose from, including all the classics to fun niche extensions. The days of having to spend a fortune on .com domains is totally over. My main domains? All new extensions, because it's just the new normal, as the kids say. It also lets you get something more aligned with who you are as a company, individual, or family.

It's just a breath of fresh air in a market that's traditionally been one of the worst to use on the internet. So get started today. Go to hover.com slash GOG and get 10% off your first purchase. That's hover.com slash GOG to get your awesome domain name today and get 10% off your first purchase.

Security? We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast. The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is also co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering.

How are you doing, Dave? I am doing pretty good, pretty good. Good to be back. How's everybody on your end of the continent? Just enjoying this fine Friday the 13th, full moon, debacle, nothing works. Can we just have a zombie apocalypse already and end it all?

That's the kind of day. It's just a podcast, Jason. We don't need to end the world. No fires or earthquakes or anything? Not yet, but day is young. Day is young. All right. That's true. That's right. Yeah. I forget that it's earlier in the day for you than it is for me.

I'm closer to my weekend than you are. Yeah. And it's going to be 104 out here in the valley today, which means we can't all just burn to death by the end of the day. So who knows? Who knows? Yeah. We had a bit of a heat wave earlier this week, but today it's nice and cool. It's season-appropriate cool weather for us today.

Right. I wanted to kick off with a little bit of follow-up. Last week we were talking about this alleged deepfake incident where there was a company that turned over, I think it was a few hundred thousand dollars, and they said that it was a deepfake, that they had used AI to imitate the CEO of the company and an employee had fallen for it.

A reporter from Spiegel did some digging and actually contacted the folks at the insurance company who admitted that there's no evidence that it was AI or deepfake or anything. It's just a possibility.

So my skepticism was well-placed. Excellent. Well, we're going to see what happens with that, though. It's going to be soon that we're going to have a real one that we're sure of. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. So our old friend Sidewalk Labs, who have been trying to set up basically the future city in Toronto, which tracks everybody everywhere at all times and removes any vestige or belief and hope of privacy ever again, has spun out into a new company.

So they're now called Replica, and they're moving forward. They've gotten some Series A funding, and they're now hiring for new roles in Kansas City and San Francisco offices. So what they want to do is they want to be able to track large numbers of people on local streets and see what mode of transportation they're using and then collect all that data and process it and sell it to urban planners.

And they're hoping that this is going to be great. But, of course, there are the privacy concerns that we have always talked about. The CEO and co-founder, Nick Bowden, has tried to address them in a blog post announcing the spin out. He stressed that no single user's location would be identifiable under Replica. Replica is not interested in the movement of individuals.

We are interested in the collective movement of a particular place. For this reason, we only start with data that has been de-identified. This data is then used to train a travel behavior model, basically a set of rules to represent the movement in a particular place, he wrote. My question would be then, well, then, do you delete all the individual data once you've put it into the model?

Once you put it into the hopper? Or do you hold on to that? And, of course, others argue the sensitivity of mobile phone location data when held against Big Tech's poor track record and safeguarding user privacy isn't exactly encouraging. And critics maintain that location data is easy to re-identify, even if it has already been de-identified, as we all know.

So, yeah, not good. I would have been more excited if they named it Replicant. This is kind of like Waze for humans walking around rather than, you know, it makes me think of how Waze is free because they aggregate that data and they make money selling it to cities and so forth for this sort of thing.

But I guess this is done at a smaller level. Yeah, a little more granular, a little more individuals. But, of course, we're de-identified, so no worries, right? We're fine. They should have called it Heard. Yeah, you know, I was thinking the same. I was thinking of cow paths. Like, on one level, I think it's interesting that to have this data is good for a city because you can figure out, oh, that's where we need to make the sidewalk bigger.

Or what's going on here? Why is there a bottleneck here? And those sorts of things. So, it has value. But, yeah, does anybody really? I wonder if there is a, you know, we joke about the de-identification of data.

And then the re-identification of data. And is there a actual mathematical proof of being able to do that? I have to ask Jonathan Katz about that. Can you, is there a way to know that when you've de-identified data that you can't actually get it back and you can prove it?

Right. I wonder. That would be good information to know if that does exist. Yeah. But, by all accounts, it doesn't. That's what everybody keeps telling us. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Don't hold your breath. Don't hold your breath. Or bet on it. Yeah. Yeah. True.

So, and here's my favorite story of the week. And I, I, here we go. We, the three of us collectively had, went kind of apeshit over, over the fact that President Donald Trump continued to use his iPhone when he first took office.

And then we, of course, got so used to it that we've stopped worrying about it too much or at least complaining about it or, you know, it just got normalized, right? Our president is not using a secure phone. Every other president has used a secure phone. Our president isn't. Oh, well, moving on. But it's gotten a bit worse now, this week.

So, we know he's pretty lax in security protocols. And Russia and China are reported to have active Trump surveillance operations. But they're not the only ones. Our friends, our friends are doing it too. Israel is also engaged in presidential snooping, Politico reported on Thursday, and went so far as to place cell phone surveillance devices known as stingrays near the White House to intercept unsecured mobile phone usage.

U.S. security agencies discovered them. And, you know, they were right there. And they were being used to target the president and people in the administration. And they were able to basically solidify the knowledge that, yes, the Israelis put them there. And they were getting all that information.

And they told the administration. And the administration hasn't done anything about it. A couple of things. It has been reported, I believe, by the Secret Service that they have gotten on top of the president's cell phone being more secure than it was when he started.

So the password is no longer one, two, three, four. Yeah, I think I think they have gotten on top of that, that he is using a more secure phone in terms of like, for example, who has access to his Twitter account.

There are lots of people who track trying to figure out who wrote what, because sometimes they're obvious tells when he didn't actually write something like grammar and punctuation. Like it's civil? Yeah, yes, yes. There are very clear tells when it wasn't actually him writing it.

But there's concerns because that could be a national security issue when you have someone else writing on behalf of the president as the president. That's problematic. Getting to this stingray thing. I continue to scratch my head about stingrays. I don't understand how they are legal for anyone to use.

I don't understand how the FCC turns a blind eye to them when it comes to law enforcement using them. In this case, clearly, you know, the so, OK, the Israelis set up stingrays around the White House. I would be shocked to hear that they were the first ones to do it or they were the only ones doing it.

Yep. It's not hard to get your hands on a stingray. And because it's all wireless stuff, you can set it up in a hotel room across the street from the White House and off you go. Yeah, I don't understand how these things are out there in the wild either. I really don't. Well, even the the LAPD told us about him like years ago, saying that criminals in Los Angeles use them all the time.

What are you going to do? Ban them. Yeah, ban them. I mean, right. So if you make the actual device illegal, that's one thing. Make the manufacturing of the device illegal. But I think we're stuck in one of these funny places where law enforcement legitimately finds them very valuable for certain things.

So they don't want to shut down the manufacturing of them. But, of course, they fall into the hands of of other people. And and here we are. Yeah. Good times. So this next story came to us. A couple different sources have written about this.

The one I've I've linked to is from the folks at Security Week. The folks over at Dragos, which is a company that we know well, their CEO, Rob Lee, is on Cyberwire pretty regularly. They have taken a closer, deeper look at the attacks on the Ukraine power grid that happened back in 2016.

And they've come to the conclusion that the attackers probably intended to do more damage than was actually done. And that doing there were some bugs in the programming that they did that made it not work. But it's likely that they that they had intended to turn the power off for days or weeks rather than the hours that the power was actually off.

Shouldn't have got that code from India. Zing! It's an interesting thing also from the point of view that this whole notion that when you use one of these techniques, then you've burned it essentially. Right. So when you use it and it doesn't go right, you can't just go use it again because now people know how you used it.

And so nation states are including our own are reticent to use these sorts of things because when you use them, then the cat's out of the bag. So, you know, the ongoing concern there is that the vulnerability of things like electrical grids continues to be a focus.

Folks at places like Dragos tell us, yeah, be concerned about it, but don't panic about it. The odds of someone doing that are slim. It'd be interesting to see. I'm certainly going to have a conversation with Rob Lee to see if this changes his view on that at all.

I suspect it probably doesn't, but it's worth getting his take on it since he certainly has expertise in that area. Right. Moving on, an interesting story here from ZDNet. This was about something called SimJacker that was used to track the location of mobile device users.

And they think that it's been going on for a couple of years. It's a company called Adaptive Mobile Security. They released a report and they've found a way that people were using the functionality built into SIM cards, some very old functionality, some legacy functionality built into SIM cards to be able to track people's locations.

And that company was called Replica. And it would send your location to the nearest Stingray. Are you guys at all familiar with any of this functionality? This was new to me.

I guess it's called a SAT browser. It's the letter S, the at symbol, and a T. I guess you call it a SAT browser. And it's an application that is actually on the SIM card rather than on the phone. So my understanding of this is you can send instructions to the SIM card and you can request that the SIM card, this is all via an SMS message, you can request that the SIM card return the cell phone's location data.

And all this can happen without the user knowing that anything has happened. They get no indication on their phone that there's been any SMS activity at all. Well, that's lovely. See, Brian, it's a feature, not a bug. It's a feature, not a bug. Yes.

Is this something that was just baked in in the early days for necessary reasons and then just never taken off of SIM cards? Precisely. Precisely. Yes. Great. That is what it is. In this article, they say, this SAT browser software is not well known, is quite old, and its initial purpose was to enable services such as getting your account balanced through the SIM card.

Globally, its function has been mostly superseded by other technologies, and its specification has not been updated since 2009. However, like many legacy technologies, it is still being used while remaining in the background. Great. Now, the cases that they've seen of people using this, it seems to indicate that it's a targeted type of affair, as these things often are, where they're going after high-value targets.

They also say that it would be pretty easy for the mobile providers to shut this down. There are specific, you know, signatures to the code that's being sent back and forth that they should be able to look for and put a stop to this. But how interesting.

An old, old protocol that's still baked into our phones can be used to report back your location without you ever knowing it. Amazing. And it even goes down to IoT devices with SIM cards, too. Basically, if you've got a SIM card in it, you can read it.

How crazy is that? Yeah, I wasn't aware that the SIM cards had this level of independent functionality of the phone itself. Yeah, I thought it was just a data store, not actually capable of running its own apps. Right, right. Yeah, me too. Me too. Well, I'm looking forward to getting a new SIM card sometime soon, then.

Yeah, well, and I don't know. I mean, I don't think that's the solution. I think this has to be stopped at the carrier level. Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, hopefully they'll get on that. And I'll bet you if you call your carrier, the folks on tech support, the phone line, they'll know exactly what you're talking about.

Oh, yeah. We'll be able to tell you if they've shut it down or not. I'm sure tech level one, two, and three will be right on that. Yeah. Have you tried taking the SIM card out and putting it back in again? Right. Exactly. All right, gentlemen.

Well, it seems kind of like a sort of doom and gloomy kind of week this week, but that's where it goes sometimes, right? That's right. Hopefully next week we'll have some more lighthearted stories, but who knows? Yeah. Well, stay cool, and I'll talk to you guys next week.

Yep, and I'll be pinging you. I'll know exactly where you are the whole weekend. No problems. That's right. That's right. All right. Take care. Apps and doodads. Well, there's no lack of celebrity apps out there. There was a brief period of time where everybody had to have an app because having an app was the thing to do.

It was cool. Yeah, but some of them have gone away, and one just went away this last week, and I just enjoyed this article so much because of the writing, so I'm just going to read a little selection here. Jeremy Renner has shut down the official Jeremy Renner app. Jeremy Renner, the star of The Hurt Locker, The Town, and a whole lot of Marvel movies, was forced to shut down the official Jeremy Renner app on Wednesday after an onslaught of trolls made it unusable.

The app, Jeremy Renner Official, was designed to let Jeremy Renner superfans stay connected to Jeremy Renner through an in-app Jeremy Renner social feed, samples of Jeremy Renner's music, and official contests offer a chance to win amazing prizes like meeting Jeremy Renner. That's all over now is Jeremy Renner announcing a post to the official Jeremy Renner app on Wednesday.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. You know what, did you, I didn't check this article out, but you heard about what happened with it, right? No, no. What happened is what I assume happens everywhere on the internet with comment feeds. Well, if you have notifications on, it apparently says Jeremy Renner says, and people would make comments, and it looked like Jeremy Renner was saying the comments when you got the notification, so it was very confusing.

Awesome. Yeah, it was like, Jeremy Renner just took a poop, or whatever. So that was very funny, very, very funny. So I finally bit the bullet and ordered some new batteries for my old laptops from iFixit, because I got a 2013 and a 2014 MacBook Pro, and none of them really worked anymore.

The 2014 is so swollen, the trackpad won't work, and it like rocks on the table, which is not a good thing. That's called a fire hazard. These batteries are going to explode. And the other one had 20 minutes of battery time on it, so it always had to stay plugged in, which will eventually probably make the battery swell and also explode.

So I found out that on those old ones, the 2013s and the 2014s actually used the same battery. So I ordered two of them. I'm going to install them at the same time. If I screw up on one of them, I still at least have another laptop that can go.

Because as much as I love this air, it cannot power the workstation to do the show. Because I was setting it up, so I had another workstation here, because I was going to do a two-person here and a couple people remote interview today.

And the air is just like, nah, dude. Sorry. Sorry, bro. No, you're not. Yeah. It just ain't going to happen. And I looked, and it's like, oh, yeah. It's like these MacBook Pros have like 2.8 gigahertz i7 chips and like quad cores.

And the new MacBook Airs, it's like a 1.6 gigahertz i5. So built for battery life and portability. Not really a workhorse. So I'll let you know how this goes. It says it takes about two and a half hours to install these batteries. It looks fairly complicated, but.

I would avoid the alcohol until you're done. Yeah. I'm going to do those after a couple cups of coffee first thing in the morning. Well, maybe a cup of coffee. Good call. A cup. Yeah, because you don't want your hands shaking, too, because those parts are tiny. Well, I saw this in the news, and I thought this is great. Blind people often have a difficult time getting around cities because, you know, it's tough.

There's stuff everywhere. It's an obstacle course and a maze wrapped into one. And there's been no real updates in cane technology, but that has now changed. There is a smart cane set to change everything by revolutionizing the way blind people can navigate the world. In order to guide its user around both low-hanging objects and obstacles above chest levels, the WiiWalk smart cane uses ultrasonic sensors to warn of nearby impediments through vibrations in the handle.

The cane was designed by engineers from Young Guru Academy in Turkey, and it can also be paired with the WiiWalk smartphone app via Bluetooth. Using touchpad controls on the smart cane, the users can then control their smartphone without taking it out of their pocket, leaving one hand free for other tasks. There's also integration with Voice Assistant and Google Maps software, which enables the cane to use its built-in speakers to inform the user of nearby stores, infrastructure details that they might be able to see, etc.

Pretty damn cool, as long as the Google Maps are right. Yeah, we're going to talk about that in bric-a-brac coming up next. Yes, we are. Yeah, it's only 500 bucks. That's actually a pretty decent price for everything that it's doing. For something that does all that, yeah. I mean, this could be a real game-changer for people.

Now, does it come with Prius detection? That's all I really care about, because you can't hear those damn things. If you can't hear them, you can't see them. You're bound to get taken out by one. That's right. And Spotify is back in the news again. They've acquired a company called SoundBetter, a music production marketplace.

Have you heard of SoundBetter? I have not. It seems like it's built for music makers and music licensees to be able to basically do deals. It's a marketplace. Right, okay. And they've got 180,000 registered users and have paid out more than $19 million to musicians and producers to date.

That's not too bad. That's not too shabby. Yeah, so they're going to take that in-house. And Spotify is just on a tear. And figure out a way to make less payoffs. Exactly. And there's another article I found over at Seeking Alpha, where it says, Spotify, the future is content creation.

Because this goes back to all of the money that they're investing in podcasting now because they don't really have to pay for lots of podcasts. That's right. They've got their own studios. They bought Gimlet and that other one, I think it was an Acorn, but whatever, Acast.

That's probably not even them either. I can't remember. Once they go into the Spotify hole, I never think of them again. But this article is very long and has lots of graphs, if you're into pretty pictures, on how Spotify wants to pay less in licenses, obviously, because it probably isn't going to work long term, and get more free stuff out there or pay for it to be made.

And that's the future of Spotify. So everybody, start getting your shows together to sell to Spotify. Hopefully. Yeah, seriously, hopefully. We're here. Come get us, please. I was out playing with my drone the other day, Brian, and I came back in to charge it up.

And I'm like, let me find some drone videos, see if I can find something about, you know, learning how to fly mine because I'm still not that great at it. But I had time to waste. And I found this great, great video called Drone Rollercoaster Chase. And it literally is a guy chasing a roller coaster with his drone.

And I just, I just, I found it very peaceful because this guy's a really good pilot. It better be if I'm sitting on that roller coaster. They did. They ran the roller coaster with no people on it. Okay, there we go. That was smart, at least. But yeah, it's a great video. If you want to see somebody who really knows how to fly a drone, check that one out.

It's fun. I suppose one could have also just put a GoPro on the roller coaster itself to make very much the same video. Not really, because this way you get to see, you get to see more of the coaster itself. I thought it was pretty cool. All right. Well, I have a, I have a big love for Atlas Obscura, the website, and I haven't done any articles from there in quite some time, but I ran across this one.

I just love this. It's a copywriting cartography with fictional places. So, you know, people put a lot of time and money preparing their maps and selling them. So it makes sense that they want to protect their investment. And one of the ways that they do, although they don't often admit it, is by including false information or what they call trap streets, deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch unsuspecting copyright violators.

How cool is that? That's cool. So it includes fake streets, but is also applied to anything else that they want to put in there. Usually these mistakes are minor and entirely false bends in rivers or roads or slightly altered mountain elevations. And the tele-atlas directory, which is the basis for Google Maps, is said to have included many trap streets.

Really? So, you know, there's stuff all over Google Maps that isn't really there. According to a 2012 article in the cabinet, Moat Lane once curved its way through North London, at least in the view of Google Maps. But there's not actually anything there. There's no lane. It's just some trees and some houses.

They've also included other things like Oxygen Street, which supposedly ran between two houses in Edinburgh. It didn't. And a bunch of other different things that aren't actually there. And perhaps the strangest thing is the phantom town of Argelton, England, which appeared on Google Maps as recently as 2009. Online listings showed the town as having jobs, real estate, weather, and even a single scene.

But no one has ever put there because it doesn't even actually exist at all. That's lovely. That's lovely. So Google has finally removed that. But how cool is that? And the article goes on to talk about how dictionaries also did this as well. Recent editions of the New Oxford American Dictionary included the world exquivalence, which is defined as the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities, which was entirely made up just to catch plagiarists.

Nice. And there's actually a term for this called Mount Weasels. After the entry for Lillian, Virginia, Mount Weasel in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia, Mount Weasel was apparently a fountain designer turned photographer celebrated for photographs of rural American mailboxes. But alas, she never existed.

She was completely made up, basically to say if someone ever if they ever saw a Mount Weasel in somebody else's dictionary, they knew they'd stolen it. Nice. You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of those lyric sites that we're putting in the the honey traps for Google. Exactly.

Same sort of thing. So very cool. I found this one over at real life mag dot com. It's called pay to play by Jessica Balzana. And I love the sex robot technology will draw on tactics that have driven, quote unquote, engagement on other apps.

They've gamified your fuck toy. What? Well, of course they have. Of course they will. This is insane. Give it to me, baby. Push the button again. Yeah. And they're saying that, you know, if you don't use it enough, then it could turn itself off and withhold sex.

I'm like, how are you going to make that happen? Well, I don't know. You've never been married, Jason. This is true. This is true. It just makes it. It's kind of strange that they want to gamify your sex doll. No, it's not strange. It's sad. And it's where we're all going.

And I found this article over at a site called On Stride, which I've never heard of before, but it's kind of an interesting article. How much does it cost to produce an episode of your favorite TV show? And this is British, so there's a you in the favorite. And it's kind of interesting. They've got graphs on how much everything costs.

And of course, like Game of Thrones comes in at the top. Big Little Lies is right with them. But then it goes by the IMDb scores. Right. And tells you how much bang they get for the buck. And apparently the best value is Peaky Blinders. They've got an 8.8 IMDb and they pay 1.6 million pounds per show.

Then you have American Gods, which only has an eight, and they pay 7.9 million per show. Whoops. Well, that's some misspent money right there. Oh, well. It really is. And there were a couple in here that I was really surprised at.

Well, I look at, you know, Goliath is pretty high up there because I'm guessing, what's his name? Guy that was married to Angelina. Billy Bob Thornton. I'm guessing he's, I'm guessing Billy Bob takes all the money there. It actually costs more to produce an episode of Goliath than it actually does to do an episode of Westworld.

That's insane. That's insane. It's a drunk guy at a hotel at a crappy bar in Santa Monica. Yeah. It costs more than the Big Bang Theory, if you can believe that. That's hard to believe because of the Big Bang Theory. Those, those salaries were through the roof the last couple of seasons.

Yep. Then you come down and you get Star Trek Discovery. Jack Ryan and Stranger Things are all about the same level in the little over six million lost in space, like five and a half. And then you get down to the other cheaper shows, which is pretty interesting. And surprisingly, The Walking Dead is way down at the bottom at like, you know, just a little over two and a half million for an episode.

Right. I figured that one would cost quite a bit with the effects and all the CG that goes into it. But guess not. Guess not. I guess Orange is the New Black actually costs more than The Walking Dead because there's like 8,000 people in the cast. Yeah. Huge cast. Yeah. Yeah. But this is a fun one to look at.

So I highly recommend checking it out. Link will be in the show notes. GOG. Closing shout outs. Very sad. Closing shout out today. Eddie Money has died at age 70. Yeah. Cancer complications.

It sucks. Yeah. That does suck. You know, Eddie Money, not really my jam, but anytime one of his songs came on, I loved it. It was good stuff. Oh, yeah, man. He's got he's at least got two classics. So take me home tonight. So, yeah, just sad news this morning.

Yeah. Poor old Eddie Money. And I do have some happy news here. We've been we use Quip, not the toothbrush company, but the the the collaborative editing software by Salesforce. And they keep changing the interface. It drives me mad when they do it. And I went off on on them big time.

Like, stop changing the goddamn interface. And they because they took away something that we use heavily. They took away highlighting. So I wrote to them, said, turn it back on. And this guy, Alex, from tech support over at Quip got back to me with like a bunch of different emails.

He just kept going and going and going and finally, apparently I wasn't the only person that was pissed off. There's a lot of people pissed off because they turned it back on like in a couple of hours. She's like, yes. So I just want to throw a hat tip to Alex from Quip tech support. He was great or she could be could be a female.

And before you say before you say it, the girl, there was a girl, Alex in Orange is the new black. So there you go. Alex is. I've known female Alex's. OK, you're OK there. It's not whatever. Whatever. What was the name that you spread? I still can't. There are no female friends. Nobody's backed me up on this.

Damn it. No, nobody has because they don't exist. OK, well, I'm going to go adopt a daughter and name her Fred just just to do it. Damn it. That poor, that poor girl in so many ways. Yeah. And since this was Apple week, we don't talk about Apple stuff on the show.

Usually, unless it's privacy, we don't talk about the keynotes or anything like that. I was invited to go on the impromptu podcast for episode 200 to talk about the the keynote. And I don't know what they were expecting from me when we went on the show, because I basically told jokes for almost two hours that nobody laughed at.

They were very, very serious about their Apple stuff. I listened to some of the show and they were very serious about it. Very serious. So I only I only pretty much chimed in when I could make fun of something because I want I want dog walking mode on my new Apple watch or, you know, I want to get I want to I want to know how many times I spend over to pick up the poop, things like that.

And, you know, that didn't land. Nothing landed. So if you want to if you want to hear me bomb in front of a bunch of Canadians who really love their Apple stuff, check out the impromptu episode 200. There you go. And I want to just do a quick shout out to the club, my podcasting club where people are signing up and we're shooting the shit, talking podcasting.

And it's fun so far. I think we've got about 50 people in there now. So you can head on over to club dot podcast school dot co. Sign up. It's free and come hang out with some fellow podcasters if you are indeed a podcaster. And we'll yeah, I dropped in the other day and read some of the some of the posts.

We got some good conversation going on over there. Yeah, we do. It's it's going pretty well so far. And I posted up a bunch of videos for the people who always wanted to know how we make this show. There's basically a soup to nuts hour long video of me doing an episode with you. Of course, Brian, you had to show up.

This is back when Zencaster worked. Yes, thank God you didn't try to do that today. Let's end this recording before something else breaks, Jason. Seriously, seriously. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulman. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 eight bucks a month 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 recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and click that PayPal button. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 377.

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

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.