381: Self-Deflating Morale

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for your credit cards. Go to Privacy.com slash GOG and get a $5 credit free for just signing up. 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.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Let's get right into it today. All right. So remember when I first did my iOS 13 update and I said to you, is your battery draining really fast? And you looked at me like, well, sucks to be you. Ain't happening to me. Yep.

Yeah. Well, apparently it was a real thing. They fixed it. iOS 13.1.1 update tackled a number of glaring problems, including a battery drain issue plaguing users across the board. So that's fixed. All right. And also old news already because iOS 13.1.2 came out the next day with even more.

So this was over at BGR.com. And I just want to read the first sentence here. We probably should be surprised anymore at this point, since Apple apparently releases new software updates every single day. Dear Zach Epstein, it's called fucking proofreading. Well, Clippy isn't going to get that because it's not a misspelling. The misspelling ones are the ones that always have me shaking my head. This is just somebody being super lazy.

Yeah, it's just lazy proofreading anyway. Now, Brian, I woke up this morning and I saw this one and I just had to chuckle because we've always talked about the scientific research about eggs on this show. Turns out meat. It's the new eggs.

It's bad for you. It's good for you. It's bad for you. Yeah, this is over at the New York Times. Eat less red meat, scientists said. Now some believe that was bad advice. They say the evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings erode public trust, other critics say.

So the scientists, there are scientists who say, yeah, yeah, we told you to eat less red meat. And it turns out the news on that was just a little, it might have been overblown. Right. I'm OK with new findings eroding public trust as long as they're accurate. I just want, I want, I want facts. That's it.

Yeah, well, you know, one person's fact is another person's fiction, turns out. Yes. All right. So, yeah, I love that the scientists are saying that, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't jump to conclusions yet because it might erode public trust. Well, you know.

That ship has sailed. I think public trust has long been eroded. Yes. Yes, it's called eggs. The S.S. Egg-a-muffin has long since sailed. Well, I'm still just going to have a big old bowl of meat and eggs in the morning and say to hell with it. In the news. Well, Brian, Casey Newton's at it again.

OK. Casey Newton, as you'll remember, is the guy that broke the story on the Facebook contractors who had to look at horrible things all day long. Yes. Yes. Well, his new post is called All Hands on Deck over at Vox slash The Verge slash Recode.

And this goes through two hours of leaked audio from a Q&A that Mark Zuckerberg did to the employees. I guess their phones were listening to them. Somebody was listening. That's for damn sure. I'm sure there's a witch hunt going on right now. Yeah. It was interesting.

Did you get a chance to listen to any of this? I know it came out pretty early this morning. I didn't listen to it, but I did scan through the article. Well, OK, he sounded pretty calm and, you know, the things that he said as a billionaire should. That's true. That's true. I got ninety nine problems and three billion or three hundred billion dollars in one of them.

Exactly. So but, you know, he talked about just some of the existential threats against Facebook, that the main one being Elizabeth Warren. So now the thing that gets me here is, OK, he knows that if Elizabeth Warren becomes president, that they're probably going to have to go to, you know, legal war with the government.

Yes. What's to stop him from swaying the election away from Elizabeth Warren? But nothing, because remember, as we talked about in last episode, they threw their hands up in the air and said to hell with it. We're not going to try to do anything anymore. I'd be a little worried if I was Ms. Warren right now.

You're kind of you're kind of poking the pig there. So. I guess it would be more more like a bear. But yeah, I was about to say that. Is this a new saying I'm unaware of? Lipstick on a bear. And pig in a poke pigs in a blanket. No, that's not right either. No, poke the bear.

That's the one. Yeah. So it's an interesting thing to go listen to. There's just a few of them on there. And then there's a link at the bottom that says, read the full transcript of Mark Zuckerberg's leaked internal Facebook meetings. And the subtitle of this article is highlights from the two hours of leaked audio from recent Q&A sessions with Facebook CEO.

I'm sorry, clickbaity headline. That is not the full transcript. Yeah. I think we basically just to start making all of our shows completely false and misleading headlines. Yeah. We can just do all of our episodes based on that. We can do that.

That would save us a lot of work. That's for sure. It would. Kickstarter is back in the news because we talked previously about how they fired a few people who were trying to organize a labor union. Yep. Well, they've kind of thrown their hands up in the air as well and said, go screw yourself.

Go die in a fire. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go Kickstarter you a fire that you can go die in. It'll arrive three months late, but it'll still be there. Yeah. They're basically just saying, no, drop dead. We're not going to let you do it. That's what a lot of these companies are doing.

And gee, I wonder why. Exactly. And you've got one too. Yeah, I do. Elon Musk. Oh boy. I've actually originally had this in Moron of the Week, but then I saw that you had the Kickstarter union story, so I moved it up. Yeah. Tesla is also attempting to stop people from unionizing.

And a California judge has ruled on Friday that Elon Musk himself and other company executives have been illegally sabotaging employee efforts to form a union. The administrative judge pointed to 12 company actions that violated U.S. labor laws, which includes letting security guards harass workers who are passing out union pamphlets in the parking lot, banning employees from wearing pro-union t-shirts and buttons, and repeatedly interrogating union organizers, eventually firing one of them.

And, of course, there's Musk, who just, much like our president, can't stop tweeting. Somebody take it away from him. Take it away from him already. Rule number one when I was working with bans is I took away their phones. You do not get to tweet yourself. The judge said several anti-union messages he posted on Twitter in May 2018 were illegal, such as this one.

He tweeted, Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tomorrow if they wanted, but why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is two times better than when the plant was UAW and everybody already gets health care. Also, UAW did not offer job security in last recession.

Dropped Fremont like a hot potato to protect their core base in Detroit. UAW chose to exit this plant before Tesla even arrived. We had nothing to do with them leaving, but everything to do with why people here have jobs. And as they point out, Musk's tweet can only be read by a reasonable employee to indicate that if the employees vote to unionize, they would give up stock options.

Musk's threatened to take away a benefit enjoyed by the employees, consequently for voting to unionize, wrote the judge. Well done. Yep. Sorry, buddy. You're screwed. You don't get a union, and you don't get a union, and you don't get a union. Nobody gets a union.

So, you know who might be unionizing? Pedophiles. This is really, really scary news. There's a couple articles over at the New York Times, and we'll go with number one because it's a summarization of number two. All righty. An explosion in online child sex abuse. What you need to know.

Great. Tech companies are reporting a boom in online photos and videos of children being sexually abused. A record 45 million illegal images were flagged last year, exposing a system at a breaking point and unable to keep up with the perpetrators. So, this is getting out of hand, and technology is to blame, surprisingly.

Once again, you know, the thing I don't understand is I could fire up my BitTorrent client and go to Sweden, and somehow or other, my providers realize that's happening and are able to throttle my bandwidth, but we can't catch these guys? Well, sorry.

Cryptography is a big problem. Right. Using secure apps is a big problem. Oh, yes. Kitty Porn on the blockchain. There you go. The biggest problem is there's not enough law enforcement to go after these guys because there's so goddamn many of them. Yes, we need the internet police again.

Yeah, and apparently the bulk of the reports last year came from Facebook Messenger. Oof. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So, it's a massive problem, and it's just getting worse. And where are all these assholes coming from? I don't know.

I don't have a woodwork. You know, I guess it's a much bigger problem than we were led to believe. The internet certainly doesn't help, does it? No, no. It just exacerbates the problem. But, you know, everybody's looking at this as a technology problem. This is a human problem.

This is a people problem. Yeah. These people need help. Yeah, they need help, and a lot of them are getting help by life in prison. That'll work. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't know what the hell's going on. But, yeah, they're trying. They're trying their darndest, and I love this one.

Last year, tech companies reported over 45 million photos of kids being abused, double what they found the previous year. And Haney Fareed, who worked with Microsoft to develop technology in 2009 for detecting child sexual abuse materials, said tech companies had been reluctant for years to dig too deeply.

And he quotes, the companies knew the house was full of roaches, and they were scared to turn the lights on. And then when they did turn the lights on, it was worse than they thought. Ah, lovely. Yep. Yep. Stick your head in the sand for only so long. That's true. And speaking of how technology is undermining everything, this was from the Washington Times.

Hat tip to a friend of the show, Jeff Donaldson, for this one. It's called iCoyote, How Snapchat Broke the U.S. Border. Right. Yeah. So people who are, you know, gig economy workers have found another way to make some money. Right. And that is using WhatsApp and Snapchat and other services to basically get notifications when somebody is coming across the border and they need a ride.

And these guys can make a pretty decent chunk of change smuggling in illegals. Ooh, border. Yeah. Yeah. And they've got a, like a whole network of people who are spotters who will tell people which routes to take because they'll be able to know which checkpoints are, you know, power down for the day and, you know, how to avoid border patrol and things like that.

It's kind of crazy. That's amazing. Not surprising. Yeah. And it's interesting that they just mentioned Snapchat and WhatsApp in here. But you know that, like, why isn't this on Signal? You know, why isn't this on Telegram? Telegram. Yeah. And maybe it is.

They just can't see it because it is all end-to-end encrypted. But, yeah. Rosabella Martinez, arrested in May at a border patrol highway checkpoint in Texas, said she was recruited to drive through the WhatsApp chat group Sexy Time. Okay.

Yeah. She's having her own sexy time. Orange is the new black for her. Right. And, yeah, this is apparently a problem. And I don't know what they're going to do about this one. So, maybe switch to Facebook Messenger. Maybe. And I found a really interesting article over on Engadget called, Even the Tech Expert from Mr. Robot Can't Figure Out This iPhone Hack.

So, Mark Rogers is the tech expert for the show Mr. Robot. And his kid has an iPhone. And you'd think, since he's the technical advisor for realistic hacks, sort of, on Mr. Robot, and he managed your gadgets, you'd feel okay. And he did everything.

Like, he does way more tech stuff and tech-savvy stuff and security stuff than I think you or I would ever think to do. Oh, yeah. But his kid's phone was still stolen. It was up to date. Had a strong password. Face ID was enabled. Activation lock was turned on. And as soon as the phone was found to be missing, it was switched to lost mode and a wipe command was sent to it.

Which is exactly what you, I guess, would do. Which I didn't even know there was a wipe command that I could send to my phone. Oh, yeah, yeah. Have to look into that. So, it was a loss, to be sure. Except that lost mode activation and wipe command didn't go through. Hmm. So, these guys are getting smart enough that they basically have Faraday bags that they shove the phones in immediately.

They power it down and put it in the bag. And what I thought was really interesting is you can just use an empty potato chip bag. Yeah, which is great for, you know, urban camouflage. You just got a laze bag and you just drop it in the laze bag, pass it off to your handoff, and go about your day. Yep. So, yeah, that stops activation lock, find my iPhone, and remote wipe.

So, they basically just throw it in the bag and take off. And they can boot it back up inside the system and basically check and see if they can hack into it if it's not up to date or if there's a software vulnerability. If it is, they can take it apart and sell it for parts. And it's pretty crazy.

And then the step beyond that that happened that really took them aback is they got into some serious attempts at phishing with the kid, basically sending all these false links to try to get the Apple ID and password and all that sort of stuff. So, pretty crazy. These guys aren't just swiping phones and, like, putting them on the chopping block anymore.

This is a – there's a whole new thing going on these days. Right. Because they shouldn't have been able to get anything off the phone, even if they, you know, took it back to their apartment, which they, you know, had lined with tinfoil or however they make their own little Faraday cages in, like, you know, a safe room where they can work on these things.

They got into it and found his Apple ID, at least, and were able to start, you know, going after him. It's really strange. So, I'm with him. This is a head scratcher on how they did it. Yep. Pretty crazy. Yep. Did you ever hear of Ubiome? I believe we mentioned it in passing once or twice on the show.

Yeah, I've had – It's the poop one, right? It's the poop one, yeah. I've had a kit that I got sent in one of – when Tim Ferriss used to do his little boxes every month or every other month, he sent me a Ubiome kit in one of them, and it sat on my shelf forever because I just didn't have the time to go through the rigmarole of – because it's not just spitting a tube, and I don't think it's as far as shitting in a tube.

But you've got to do some extra stuff to get your gut bacteria because I think it came with, you know, you couldn't eat for, like, 18 hours or something like that. And I'm like, ain't nobody got time for that. So, well, they're gone. They're dead. Dead in the water. Plushed down the toilet.

Yeah. This is crazy. Silicon Valley microbiome testing startup Ubiome filed for bankruptcy earlier this month after months of challenges and setbacks. Now a Ubiome spokesperson confirmed that Ubiome no longer has the lab certification required to run clinical tests, which I'm pretty sure is their entire business model.

Yeah, yeah, unless they want to go rogue. Ubiome once convinced Silicon Valley that testing poop was worth $600 million, but insiders previously told Business Insider they questioned the validity of the science behind its products. Okay. Yep.

Here we go. This is, uh, what's her name from, uh, the, the other one, um, Elizabeth Holmes. This is Elizabeth Holmes 2.0. Yep. Except less money, but still pretty crazy. Yeah, it's still, it's still pretty shitty. And I just love this story.

Drivers in Auburn Hills, Michigan got a bit of a surprise last Saturday night when an electronic billboard started playing porn. Love it. The billboard located alongside the I-75 North between University Drive and Highway M-59 in Auburn Hills began playing the X-rated movie not long after midnight.

It was shut down after 20 minutes when police made contact with the science owner, Triple Communications. Unlike previous billboard shockers, this was definitely not a paid for stunt. They've released a photograph and video of the two men suspected of breaking into the billboard's control room and hacking its computer. If found, the pair could face a potential penalty of 90 days in jail and or a $500 fine for promoting pornography.

I did not know that was a, that was a finable offense. Oh, yeah. You can actually get fined even if you're playing it in your car, like on those seat-back entertainment systems. Which, surprisingly, a lot of people do. Why would anybody do that? People do that. People are weird. People are friggin' weird. Leave it at home, people.

I've seen it here in LA. It's crazy when you're driving at night and you see some people getting it out of the back of a truck and it's like, what are you doing? Either you're the worst parents ever or you're, I wouldn't want to be playing porn for people in the back seat. You've got to clean that mess up. Come on.

It's gross. Well, self-driving cars are going to be the most disgusting places in the world, as we've talked about. Shudder. This episode is sponsored by Privacy. Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private, while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online.

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Media candy. Oh, that's me. I was waiting. All right. YouTube TV is now available on Fire TV devices. Apparently, Google and Amazon are starting to do the makey up. They've kissed and made up, which is great.

Now I can pull up YouTube TV on my Fire device in my bedroom and scare the crap out of my kids because YouTube doesn't police anything. Right. And this is YouTube TV, which is so you can watch TV. Oh, right, right, right. If you have a Fire TV device, do you need YouTube TV?

Kind of. If you don't have cable. If you don't have cable. I mean, I guess. And you want to just watch TV. Now, I tested YouTube TV when it first came out when I lived in Chicago, and it was god-awful. I don't know if it's gotten any better. You can't run it on a first-gen Fire TV device, stick or TV, but as fast as they rev these, that could be like two months old.

Who knows? But anyway, I'm glad to see that they're finally making up because it's just bad for consumers when these companies fight. Yes. Yeah, you all got to get along. Paying for too many damn things. And a Stranger Things 4 teaser trailer has dropped. We're not in Kansas anymore.

I'm sorry, we're not in Hawkins anymore or whatever it is. I'm hoping this is the last season. I think it's time to wrap it up, but I will watch it, of course. Yeah, I'm going to watch it. I'm fine. I'm cool with him keeping going as long as season four is okay, but I'm enjoying it, so keep going.

Keep going. All right, and The Good Place is back, and this is the final season for The Good Place, and I watched the first episode already. Great writing, hilarious, hasn't missed a beat. Awesome. Pretty much the same, yeah. It's good stuff. Yeah, good stuff. Speaking of things that are not good stuff, though, Mr. Robot season four trailer is out, and the final season drops on October 6th.

All right, I gave up on it a couple seasons back. I know. I'm still watching it. I'm going to see this one through. I was actually thinking about going back and just binging one through three, and then I thought about it a little bit more, and I'm like, no. I have better things to do with my life.

I really do have a lot better things to do. I've been diving into master class at night because I'm like, instead of watching TV for like that last hour before bed or doing anything else, I'll pop up my iPad, kick back, and I've been going through learning how to make electronic music with Deadmau5.

Right. He's not the greatest teacher in the world, I've got to say. But he's an interesting cat, and I am getting some stuff out of it. But, yeah, not the greatest teacher in the world. But it's still fun to watch his process and watch him make a song in Ableton. And, man, Ableton's pretty swank, I've got to say.

Yeah, yeah, Ableton's a great program. I basically stopped writing music about when it became powerful enough to really do stuff with it, so I kind of missed out on it a little bit. But maybe someday when I've got some time and my kid's in college, I'll spin it back up and see what happens. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty amazing, though.

You can tell that he's been doing this for a long time because he's like me in Logic when I'm editing. It's just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's almost impossible to follow along. Yeah, that's why he's not a great teacher. It's like, slow it down, bro. Slow it down. At the library.

I've got two books this week, Brian. All right. I broke the rule. That's okay. I know. We make these rules for a reason. And the first book I have is All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault by James Allen Gardner.

This is a kind of a parallel world story, sorta. Okay. It's on an Earth that has basically magic and superheroes. Okay. So you've got Darklings and Sparks. Harry Potter and Superman. Kind of.

Kind of. Kind of. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very funny. It's extremely funny. Very well written. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it. Right. So as soon as I was done, I found out, oh, there's another one. The second one's called They Promised Me The Gun Wasn't Loaded.

This one, it comes from a point of view, because it's about, the main thing is it's about four people who get their superpowers, like right at the beginning of the book. And it's like four girls who live together in college in Canada. And I think it takes place in. I had a dream like that once.

I'm sure you did. Oh, man. Were you watching a lot of cosplay before we went to bed or something? Cosplay and Strange Brew. There you go. And so the first book takes, you know, is from the point of view of one of the girls.

And the second book is from the point of view of another one of the girls. And it's got the same, on Audible, it's got the same narrator, which is really nice. And for being written by a guy, it's very surprisingly, you know, well done. I would have think this would have been written by a woman, but it's not.

But it's, I love these books. They are just awesome. You know, they're perfect popcorn books. So I highly recommend them when you want something that is kind of sci-fi, kind of fantasy, but also really funny. Okay. Yeah. This is like if Brandon Sanderson had a sense of humor.

That sounds great to me. I might actually have to give this one a go. Oh, you're going to love it. I think you're really going to love it. Excellent. Well, it may look like I broke the rule as well because I just finished Eternity by Greg Bear, but technically I did read a book in between it. I just didn't think anybody would give a shit about childcare books because there's a lot going on in my little kid's brain right now.

So the wife and I are trying to figure out what's going on. So I read a childcare book and then went in to read Eternity by Greg Bear, which is technically book two of the Eon series, but they make it book three because after he wrote this one, he wrote a prequel. So that'll be up next.

I enjoyed Eternity book two, not as much as I enjoyed book one, but it was still good. It's a good universe. I'm glad I've gone back to revisit it and read the continuations of them, but it's no, it's not, it's never going to be top tier sci-fi.

It's no foundation. It's no Dune, but it's good. It's good. What's the basic premise? Uh, the basic premise, it gets a little complicated, but, uh, humanity has moved on and moves into a hollowed out asteroid and creates this thing called the way, which is infinity long thing.

And they can open up, uh, open up portals to other worlds and universes, but then somehow gets thrown back in time to right before they built the thing on earth. And it gets really complicated, but it's quite good. Okay. Now, uh, it's high, it's hard sci-fi.

So it's, it's a lot, a lot of physics and craziness like that. So it's really good. It really interesting. Excellent. Okay. Um, I got a little story about face it, a memoir by Debbie Harry. Yes. So there's a lot of, a lot of news about this going on right now. Um, somebody made a boo-boo.

Somebody made a boo-boo. Uh, so I was going to buy this over the weekend because the Kindle version was 1499 and the hardcover was 30 bucks, 29 99. And I'm like, okay, I'll just pick it up on Kindle and I'll get it tomorrow. Cause I just didn't feel like doing it from where I was at. Um, cause I was on my phone and you have to go to the browser and do all this stuff.

Cause it's a, you know, an electronic book that you can't buy in the freaking Amazon app. Yeah. Thank you. The dumbest thing ever. It's Apple. It's all because of Apple. Yep. So, um, even though, you know, uh, Amazon did find a workaround for the audible app because now you can actually buy books in the audible app.

If you have credits already, because technically you already paid for it. That was their workaround, but we don't have Kindle credits yet. Uh, so yeah, I'm like, okay, 1499. So Monday reload the page. Kindle version has jumped to 25 99 and the hardcover dropped to 25 67.

What the fuck? That's ridiculous. Yeah. There are a lot of people who are very irked about this. Uh, me and my roommate for starters, cause we were both going to buy it. Uh, nope, not going to buy it now. But then I start to read the reviews on Amazon, which are coming in right now and they are scathing.

Yes, apparently, uh, it's not good. No, it's. The Kindle version is, uh, is useless. Yeah. It says this is not readable in Kindle version at all. It's formatted to read landscape and you can't adjust it to read vertical, nor can you adjust the font sizing. The way it's provided, the font is incredibly small. Plus there are dozens of photographs in the book also, which really are meant to be viewed in color.

Well, whatever on that one. But the fact that you cannot change the orientation or the font size kind of defeats the purpose of it being on a Kindle. I didn't even know you could do that. I thought Kindle had standard that you had to fit into that all, all that stuff was adjustable.

That's crazy. Apparently not. Apparently there are ways to lock it down and they did, or they provided it in a non-standard format. Something that, uh, yeah, a lot of people are complaining about this. And also the fact that the price is so damn high.

Yeah. There's, there's no reason that a, uh, an ebook should cost the same as a hardcover or even close to. Here's the thing. All the press, all the press recently about this book, uh, I think they just got greedy and jumped it up. I checked it this morning and it's still at $25.99 for the Kindle version.

I want to read it too, but I'm not paying that for it. And I'm certainly not going to pay for something I can't modify and read. Exactly. Cause I got to change the font size all the time, depending on, you know, what time of day, even like in the morning I can read smaller fonts, but in the evening I need that thing giant. Yep. So being old is awesome.

Oh yeah. It's, it's fantastic. So hopefully by, you know, in the next week or so I'll be able to read it if they'd knock the price down. Um, I'm not going to go to Sweden for it. I want to pay for it. So yeah, me too. I really want to read it, but I'm definitely going to wait until they get this all sorted. Yeah.

Seriously. Come on, Amazon. Well, I guess this is a bit of followup for you, Jason, because at one point in time you did a test out the auto blow. Ah, the auto blow too. Yes. The auto blow too. Well, they've got a new version out now.

The auto blow AI. Yeah. A sex toy that promises, and this is in quotes, surprise. Now, I'm not sure how much surprise one wants when getting a blow job. Surprise can go many different ways and mean many different things, but there you go.

So, uh, what I particularly liked about this review is this could have come straight from us, at least this first paragraph. The phrase artificial intelligence conjures all sorts of ideas about a synthetic consciousness that knows us better than we know ourselves. But it's more often hollowly used as a buzzword, providing a little excitement to systems that just identify patterns.

This pattern recognition has been apparently harnessed by the auto blow AI, a device that claims to use AI to offer users the perfect blow job. They've somehow managed to receive more than half a million US dollars in backing, and the first units are now making their way to backers.

Yeah, apparently it's unique enough that they've patented the internal workings and received plenty of coverage in the press before the device is even launched. Viewers would mark by dragging the mouse up and down a digital phallus the rhythm of the action on screen. Wondering why you just don't do it yourself.

No, well, here's the thing. I think they may have put this out of order because in a making of documentary made by the company, we see the system was trained mostly by people. A group of people in Serbia were tasked with watching hours of clips on Pornhub while running a custom browser plug-in.

Controlled with a mouse, the viewers would drag the mouse up and down a digital phallus, the rhythm of the action on screen. The data was fed into a deep learning algorithm to create a series of programs that match the most commonly used oral sex patterns. If they're the most commonly used, there's not much room for a surprise now, is there?

No, there's no surprise, really. So there's nine pre-programmed patterns reportedly created by analyzing all the data from the movies, and you can get this wonderful thing for $259. Yeah, yeah. I definitely won't be buying this one. Patreon.com slash GOG. Jason needs a new set of shoes.

No. You know how hard... I was living with friend of the show MXV when I had this thing, and we had a garage sale, and I so wanted to put it out on the table to see if anybody would buy it, but he would not let me do it. His fiancée was helping out with the garage sale and her kids, so it definitely would have been inappropriate.

I think it would have been funny as hell, because I had to put a camera on it to watch people's reaction. But, yeah, I eventually had to, like, you know, wrap it in three layers of plastic and put it at the bottom of the garbage can so nobody found it while our garbage cans were outside. But, yeah, I sold the guy that owns this company a domain.

I sold him twatbot.com. Well, can't wait for that one to come out. Yeah, he never did anything with it. But, hey, I made five grand on it, and he gave me a free autoblow, too, to try out. So, there you go. Excellent. And I put this one in just because I know we have a couple listeners that are hardcore Giants fans, and when things were well for the Giants and not great for the Dodgers, they gave me shit, so I'm returning the favor.

The Giants accidentally give free car to Dodgers fan on fan appreciation day at Oracle Park. Yes, they did not have a picture-perfect season, and they are missing the postseason for their third straight year. But as a thank you to their supporters, the Giants had fan appreciation night on Sunday against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It's a great idea in theory, but there was one problem. The car that they gave away, the big giveaway, the Toyota RAV4, ended up being won by a Dodgers fan wearing a Dodgers shirt. Really, though, it's kind of a perfect ending to an already disappointing season for the Giants. Now one Dodgers fan is quite literally driving into the postseason.

Also, we beat them 9-0 to end their season. Feedback loop. Sadly, over at Patreon, we have no new subscribers this time, but we have a note from Project Princess. I found you guys about three years ago while searching for podcasts that I can listen to on the way to and from work.

I really enjoy learning while I'm laughing on a dreadfully long commute. I have 20 years of IT software and infrastructure program manager experience, hence the Project Princess handle. Well, I was promoted and have been moving into the security, compliance, and risk space over the last seven years. What a ride. Listening to you, I've formulated my exit strategy from big business and have started to take action.

Love, love, love your podcast, even though I may not agree with your political views. I enjoy hearing the other side of the story. Thank you both and to Dave for taking the time to make my commute a little easier to manage. Keep up the grump. Well, thank you, Project Princess. Thank you. I just want to point out she actually is a new Patreon subscriber. Ah, excellent.

Okay, so we got one. Woohoo! We got one. And over at PayPal, we have Scott, Jorge, Steve, and then the biblical Michael, Simon, and Peter in a row. And Peter says, sending a hello from Sweden. Love the show and appreciate you making me smile and shake my head all at once. Stay grumpy. Thank you.

Over at Twitter, Fourth in Command writes in, I'm most intrigued about what an upside down O looks like. I bet he's got some app that's tracking his location history. I checked there first. And he sent us an article from Sky.com. Teens Corsa missing for a week after he parked in a hurry.

This is about a kid who lost his car after going to a music festival and hopped in a taxi and can't find it after a week. It's a fairly fun read, but he does give the license plate number and says that there's a sticker on the back of the car with an upside down O. So, yeah, not really sure what the upside down O is.

Me either. I always drop a pin in Google Maps when I park somewhere like Dodger Stadium that's gigantic and it's difficult to find your car. So that's easy enough to do, kiddo. Yeah, my car has it built in, basically. So I just launch the app and it tells me where it's parked and I can start it and cool it down or warm it up while I'm hiking back to find it.

It's kind of nice. Fourth in Command continues. Just how stupid can Facebook be? It was an infographic, for God's sakes. And this is a link back over at Sky. Facebook bans charity breast cancer awareness video over nudity. This is so ridiculous. It is beyond belief.

Yeah, it's a plastic model. I mean, it's realistic looking. You know, get that and you're Autoblow 2 and you're off to the races, right? Off to the races. But most of the video is literally an infographic about how to check for breast cancer. It is a cartoon. Yes, very dumb.

So Facebook reinstated it and said, sorry for the inconvenience. Yep. And Third in Command writes in. Okay, first off. Fourth in Command and Third in Command, same person, right? I don't know. Got it. Who knows? Do you guys know each other? Inquiring minds want to know.

Anyways, Third in Command writes in. Control plus V and just leave your money at the door, okay? And this is a link from the register. YouTuber charged loads of fans $199 for a shoddy machine learning course that copy pasted other people's GitHub code. Yes. Here we go.

So thousands flocked to an online course titled Make Money with Machine Learning fronted by Siraj Ravel. And here we go. And this is why you never would have gotten my money. A self-proclaimed AI educator, rapper, and entertainer with nearly 700,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Yeah, yeah, $200 course, he got 1,200 people to sign up, which is a nice chunk of change. It's over $200,000. Well, the funny thing is he said he was capping it at 500 people per course, but what he did is he opened up multiple Slack channels, so they didn't know that there was more than 500 people.

Yeah, then he moved to Discord because he didn't want to pay for Slack. So then he moved to Discord, and then he wrote a bot that basically deleted any messages that had the word refund in it. Yeah, so his course should have just been scripting Discord for fun and profit instead of AI.

And Jose writes, it turns out there are women named Fred, and we have a link to Fred Butler, who is a designer. So there you go. Well, I'd like to see the birth certificate on that one, but go ahead. The next comment you might as well do as well, because it proves you right.

Of course, Ray writes in, regarding women named Fred, the Social Security Administration provides a data set of baby first names by year. From 1880 to 1982, there have been at least five baby girls each year named Fred. It peaked in 1928, with 64 females being named Fred before tapering off, and then having a resurgence in 1984 with 14.

Note that this data is taken from Social Security records, so it should reflect the individual's legal given name. Boom! All right, I give it to you. There are some women named Fred out there. Yeah. And Bonut, or let me make that, Bonut, 2443640 with zero followers, tweets, is there a way to donate directly to Jason?

That Brian guy is the worst. Ruins the podcast. Okay, so I like how- This is the same Bonut that gave us the rating of, it's a great podcast, except for Brian, he's an arrogant asshole. Could be. So, somebody out there does not like me and is going out of his way to troll me. Oh, I love that. I love that you had to, like, actually point out that they had zero followers.

Well, you know, it's the whole same thing. Like, ever since, unfortunately, they changed the egg symbol, but he's an egg symbol, too. Like, you don't take those comments seriously. Yep. Rob writes in, dog traffic control system. That's a great idea that I want in my neighborhood. Yeah, me too, Rob.

Me too. Yep. Moz6502 writes in, hope your computer woes resolved quickly. They reasonably did. We switched from Macs to Surface a while ago. I still miss Omni software and a few niceties, but our keyboards don't go to shit, and we save so much money. We may go to cheap Kindle fires at some point, but we will stick with iPhones.

Speaking of Amazon, I'm so glad their phone was a failure. They sure learned from that, and they're trying so much stuff. Interesting time for experimentation. I wonder about the support for products once they lose interest. What about the support for products even when they have interest? Not so good. Not so good. Garthick writes in, spending my Saturday listening to the best guys in the biz, the podcasts that tell us all what's happening on the interwebs.

And he's talking about episode 380. I also have an iPhone 8 and have the same trouble with cell slash modem data with iOS 13. It's annoying, but I hope the 13.1.2 will fix it. Well, seems to have. Seems to have. So, so far. Martin writes in about the Amazon gadgets being able to recognize pantry items for the blind.

Check out the app, Be My Eyes. Real positive use of tech, although this involves humans. Guess you can call it AI then. That's true. Yeah. The link for that's in the show notes. It's actually really cool. It is. I take a look at it. Yeah, yeah. So, the blind or semi-blind person will actually start a video chat with someone who is sighted and, you know, point the camera at something that they need identified, and the person on the other end of the line will help them identify what it is and walk them through stuff.

So, you're basically a seeing eye phone for them, which is pretty cool. Nate 1.0 writes in, did you find young gentlemen have to re-sync your Apple watches with your phones after updating to the new watchOS? The wife and I both had to because the notifications weren't going to our watches.

Just curious if this was an isolated incident or what. I didn't. It seemed to keep working just fine for me. You, Brian? It didn't happen to me, although I did notice that a lot more notifications were coming through than had before, so I had to go in and make some changes. But, no, that didn't happen.

But, hey, guess what? I woke up this morning to see that there's a new iOS update for the watch, so we'll see. We'll see what happens when I do it overnight tonight. Don't forget, Jason, turn off Bluetooth. Turn off Bluetooth. So, you start it first, right? You have to start it, then turn off Bluetooth after it starts.

Exactly. On the phone. Yes. Okay. On the phone. Got it. I'm going to try it. I will report back next week. And over at GOG.show, James writes in, I don't think you talk about Uber enough. Sounds like things are going just fine there from this story. And this is over at the Washington Post. Inside the new Uber, weak coffee, vanishing perks, and self-deflating morale.

Fast-deflating morale, actually. Oh, sorry. Fast-deflating morale. My bad. Yeah, so, you know. Oh, the self-deflating morale is pretty good. It's about the same thing. Yeah, self-driving cars and self-deflating morale. Yep. So, yeah, stock units are down.

People aren't happy. Layoffs everywhere. They don't even get good coffee anymore. Blah, blah, blah. It's not going well. Uber is turning into an operations company, not a product slash tech company, said one former senior employee who declined to be named publicly, citing a separation agreement with the company.

So, there you go. Grumpy Sean writes in, recently, my father moved into a new house. While updating appliances and such before moving, he decided to head down to the local power company to pick up a few Google Nest thermostats for the house. The power company was offering these devices at a large discount.

However, there's a catch. You need to allow the power company access to your heating and cooling data, as well as control of your Nest in power surges. Meaning, up to four times a year, the power company can manually increase or decrease the temperature in your house without consent. You can change it back almost immediately, however.

They still have access to all your data. With his house becoming ever so smart, his Samsung washer and dryer even give notifications to his phone, and Samsung TV, when the cycles are finished, what other access-required devices do you think we'll see in the future? P.S. Deliveroo!

All of them. Pretty much. Every single device is going to be offered at discounts in exchange for the data. And that's what I was screaming about last show with Dave Bittner. I loathe the idea of third-party companies having access to anything that I've purchased. It's mine.

I bought it. No. Well, the point here is they get a discount. So, yeah, don't go for the discount. Yeah, I got my Nest for free from the city of Los Angeles, and they didn't require me to give them any access to data or let them change any, you know, settings on me, which is odd.

You generally don't get things for free from anybody, but I got to say, I like my Nest. It's really nice to be able to sit in bed in the morning and just, you know, heat up the house without getting out of bed. I also have an eight sleep, so my bed's heated up. I get to heat up the house. I've got, I'm getting apps for everything.

Oh, so the bed. I'm guessing the bed would be one of those that have access required, you know, from your insurance company. I don't know. There's so many things that this can go into. I mean, Jesus, Amazon has microwaves now and clocks. Right. All right. And Greg wrote in a, basically a book.

So I'm just going to paraphrase some of this stuff here. Dear Grumps, I was disappointed to hear you jumping on the bandwagon of disparaging radiologists in your show of September 25th, 2019. Was not aware that there was a wagon to be banded onto, but I guess there is out there. I'm a radiologist with an undergrad degree in computer science.

I've been following the AI revolution for decades now and hearing about the coming apocalypse for my subspecialty for over 10 years, which I'm sure will not materialize in my lifetime. I was particularly disappointed and confused because of your usual stance on AI, which I agree with, calling out the emperor with no clothes is in part why I like and listen to your show religiously.

In the first part of the same podcast, you ridiculed the overhyped promise of machine learning as usual and proper. But then you said multiple times that radiologists are doomed because image recognition algorithms will soon replace our jobs and that anyone contemplating a career in this field should switch immediately. So this comes back from a lot of people that I've heard in the quote unquote AI sphere, but also in the medical realm, talking about that it's getting so good that it's not, here's the thing, it's not going to get worse.

It's only going to get better. So they're saying that, you know, by the time someone graduates, it's going to be, you know, you don't want to be in that field because it is going to be mostly replaced by machine learning to get most of the data from the x-rays.

Now, I don't think we were telling anybody to switch their careers immediately. I think the point being like, say, if my son were 18 right now, I would suggest that perhaps you pick a different major because by the time you're not going to have a 40 year career doing this. Right. Right. And here's one thing that I was thinking about on the, I was, I read this before I went on the dog walk this morning and we're training all these AIs with, you know, our human knowledge.

So in a couple of generations, we're going to just have the AI knowledge and we're going to start lacking the human knowledge. So what happens if, you know, we lose the AI knowledge, like say that there's, you know, some kind of catastrophe and we lose all the hard drives and we've got to start from scratch.

You know, yeah, yeah. So I think that in a couple of generations, this might not be good for the race in general because, you know, we're just losing all. Yeah. We're outsourcing all of our knowledge. You know, we're losing all that institutional knowledge that we've spent, you know, hundreds of years accumulating and we're just going to trust the computers with it.

And I just thought of that and I'm just like, yeah, this might not be a good idea because. Well, I mean, I think, you know, the best possible thing would be a two-pronged approach, right? Like we train up our AIs, but we still have some radiologists and some people still continue to go into that field and you still have the human aspect that's in there.

But I just don't think that we'll need as many radiologists as we currently have. A lot of it's, you know, there's going to be one human overseeing a bunch of AIs in theory until they flip that and we all die. But you also need to, yeah, you have to factor in edge cases because I think that's what he talks about later on is like, you know, there are doctors that have seen tens of thousands of patients and they know from their interactions with these patients, certain things that are like that a machine can't actually tell you.

It's like, okay, you've done this part in your life way back when. So this is going to have a follow on effect down the line. And this is what we're seeing because we've seen it before and we've learned this and that's not programmed into the AI, you know, it's like the old country doctor thing. It's like, you've seen so many patients, he can, you know, look at you and tell you what sex the kid is going to be just from the knowledge that he's had.

Just from where your belly is hanging. Yep. Exactly. And things like that. So I can see his point, but I I'm telling you though, the things aren't going to get worse. And the studies that I've read where they put up the machine learning against actual radiologists and the machine learning outperforms or performs just as well as the radiologist radiologists means that it's going to get to a point of inflection where you're just not going to want to have that job because there's not going to be that many jobs to be had.

That's that's the point that I was making. Yeah. All right. There we have it. Agreed. Jorge writes in short time listener from episode one to three seventy nine in three months. Wow. I think this man deserves deserve some stickers and magnets.

Get on that. Yes. Write us. I think you guys sound better when drinking during the show. Keep on grumping. I'd love to, but it's not. Well, if we weren't doing the show at nine in the morning. Yeah. We might have to go back and do a few late night ones. We'll see. Phil writes in.

Hello, Jason and Brian. In the recent past, there have been notices of breaches into medical information repositories. Some of these repositories may even contain information about whether a person is an organ donor. The following science fiction plot seems all too plausible in this day and age. A breach repository is leaked and it contains the health and donor status of many millions of people worldwide.

Donation recipients pool bitcoins on darknet sites to have the most promisingly harvestable bodies be accidented to death in order to move themselves up or off the waiting list. As if waking up in a bathtub full of ice wasn't frightening enough. This is only a scenario to illustrate that medical information security is truly some of the most important information to secure.

Yeah. That's a good little plot. You should write the book. Yeah. Seriously. Get on that. Write a short story, option it, and then we'll go pay to watch the movie or we'll steal it from Sweden. Sleep too little, right? And I had to, I had to break down and donate $10 a month via PayPal because the sponsor was tools for the jewels.

I get it. The bills have to get paid. Just please don't resort to selling chocolate salty balls. But hell, $20 is $20 no matter where you get it from. You should offer Moron of the Week ringtones. I would pay extra for that. Keep grumping. So I sent Sleep too little a copy of our drop for Moron of the Week and now I guess his little brother has it as a ringtone.

Perfect. That's fantastic. Are there still like ringtone stores where you could actually sell them? I doubt it. I don't think so. I don't even know. I don't think so. Yeah. It's too much. Hell, it's hard enough just to make a ringtone nowadays and get it on your phone. Cameron writes in, hey guys, I think I decided what I wanted to pimp out to you guys.

I bought a house about a year and a half ago and I've been thinking about getting a security system after some incidents happened in my neighborhood. I've heard about SimpliSafe, not on this show because they haven't advertised this with us yet, just every other podcast known to man. But a friend of mine who works for ADT said that those could easily be disabled.

Obviously, he is biased. So I wonder if you could all provide some insight and research on this topic. So for SimpliSafe, you need a cell phone jammer to make it stop phoning home because they're cell phone based. As far as I know, the alarm portion is still going to work. And yes, your friend at ADT is still selling dinosaur tech and is a little biased.

I don't have a SimpliSafe, but I've been looking into it and I don't know anyone with a working setup. So if any of you listeners out there have any info for Cameron, hit us up at GOG.show slash contact and we'll pass it along. Excellent. He also writes, also, I inherited a ring doorbell from the previous owners.

I had the app for a while, but deleted that stupid thing since it detected every car that passed my house, even though it was on the lowest setting. But I guess according to Jason, it didn't catch someone trying to break into homes. What's worse is since I didn't have a subscription, it didn't record shit. And when I tried to view the camera at work, it would always fail to connect.

So I deleted the stupid app. Yeah. Delete the app. Keep the ring on your door because it might deter somebody. But nowadays, who the hell knows? But yeah, I ended up having to renew my subscription for my rings, unfortunately. So it was like a hundred bucks a year for as many cameras as you can eat.

And you've got many of them. I got three rings. I got two outdoors and one doorbell. But since I got them, it's cheaper than buying another camera setup. And I've got it tweaked now where it won't stop recording after 30 seconds, just as the person is actually breaking into my house. Thank you very much.

So the video quality still sucks. Yeah. And then he also continues, on an unrelated note, what is your favorite episode of Dark Net Diaries? The two-parter on the Xbox Underground Hacking and bonus episode number three. Those are my favorites. There you go. And he continues again, not sure if you guys knew this already, but I found out that there is a way to use Facebook Messenger without having an account.

Since this is the only reason I have a Facebook account, I might be able to finally delete it altogether. And he has a link to Digital Trends. Now this makes a little bit more sense because I was like, how is so much child pornography being passed around through Facebook Messenger because it's tied directly into your, supposedly tied to your real personality Facebook account.

But if you can have Facebook Messenger without the Facebook account, makes more sense to me now. Yeah, they should close this hole. They should close that. Yeah, that does not seem kosher. Maybe I should try it though since I don't have a Facebook account. I can see if it actually works. I'd hit you up on Facebook Messenger, but I know you don't use it.

You know, I get too annoyed by the little red notifications. So if somebody actually writes me on Facebook Messenger, I'll eventually get around to looking at it. Eventually. Josh writes in, what do you guys think about the Echo Frames that are coming out? I see potential barring the privacy issues that come with them.

I don't see that many privacy issues, but not, not any more than just any, any Alexa or your phone, you know? Yeah. So the price is 180 bucks. We talked about them a little bit and, but today I went and I signed up for the invitation and I found this on the main page, which completely just ruins it for me.

What we want you to know. Echo Frames are not currently compatible with iOS smartphones. Echo Frames require a compatible Android smartphone and the Alexa app for connectivity and use your existing smartphone data plan. Carrier charges may apply. Echo Frames do not include prescription lenses.

Battery life is optimized for everyday Alexa usage. Long periods of playback like music streaming will drain the battery more quickly. So you can't even really use them if you want to listen to something while you're jogging, which kind of silly, but yeah. But I filled out the survey and put in all my info, but I'm probably not going to get in the list because I have a iPhone.

Now, when they say Echo Frames do not include prescription lenses, does that mean you can put prescription lenses in them? Yes. I could get the frames, take them down to LensCrafters and they have my prescription and then they can pop lenses in them. Gotcha. Not being a glass wearer, I didn't know how any of that worked.

Yes. Otherwise it seemed really useless. Like if you can't, I don't need glasses, but I'd wear them just to have Alexa on my glasses. Well, if you want to be like, you know, the hot lab assistant, you know, so she has her glasses on, then she takes them off and her hair falls down and she falls in love with the old professor.

And there we have the sci-fi novel, No Demand. Yes. All right. Over at iTunes, we have some new iTunes ratings, a five-star rating from Steve DTNYC, who says, funny and relevant. Listening to these guys banter back and forth about the week's tech news is like hanging out with your own geek buddies at the local bar.

That's exactly how we decided to do this show. They're funny and crass, yet witty and always entertaining. Each one is more miserable than the other, but they always get joy in the misfortunes of major social media companies and tech conglomerates. At the end of each episode, you come away more informed than most in the world of tech and just itching to bite someone's head off from the latest global privacy breach.

A must listen and keep up with the great work. Grumps. Go ahead, Jason. Deliveroo! And Yorg Rules writes in with a five-star review. Great show. Seven out of five would recommend. Grumpy news. Interesting topics from technology to politics. Jason and Brian will keep you up to date with what's going on on the whole interwebs and more.

You won't be disappointed by their great content. They always deliveroo. Everybody's putting in the damn Deliveroo! Okay. And we got a five-star rating from Rob A. Ross, who's titled it GOG, and then his comment is simply, racist, no.

Okay, good to know we're not. Which had me scratching my head, but thank you. Thank you for the five-star. We aren't, so thank you. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact 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.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And keep clicking those stars in Overcast. We're back in the running, working our way back to the top. Thank you guys very much. Closing shout-outs! And a shout-out to my L.A. Dodgers, who clinched the division and will probably, hopefully, move on to lose against the Astros in the World Series yet again.

Third time's the charm, though, right? Also, I'm very excited, and I'm hoping to wrap up this podcast immediately because Bayern Munich is about to play Tottenham Hotspurs in the Champions League. And I will be glued to my TV shortly. All right, well, let's put a button on this. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a 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 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 381. 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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