382: Zuckerberg Blue

This episode is brought to you by Hover. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. And get your domain today. 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. Now, we don't have feedback loop in this particular episode. That's a Tuesday, or I guess Wednesday when it comes out thing.

But we just got an amazingly massive donation from listener of the show, Martin. So thank you so much. He writes in, hope you enjoy my PayPal donation. Love the show. I've only managed to donate once before, but I hope this will make up for all the episodes that I've consumed over the last year or two. Grump on. Thank you so much, Martin. That's, wow. You value us highly.

Yes, yes. And let that be a lesson to everyone. Be like Martin. Be like Martin. So I could take that money, and I could finally buy those IKEA smart blinds that we keep talking about on the show, except I can't. Yeah, except you can't. The future blinds are, what's going on there?

It's been delayed again. This is the second time that they've delayed these blinds release in the US, and we don't know why. The IKEA website doesn't say why, and it hasn't provided a planned revised release date. They were supposed to be out April 1st. Hmm. That's a suspect date to begin with.

That is a portent right there. Yes. They pushed them back to October 1st, and these are the blinds that can integrate with all your smart devices and, you know, go up and down by themselves. Pretty cool. Very futuristic. But, yeah, not for us. But they are available in the UK, and they're even available for home delivery.

So they're not vaporware. We just don't know why they're not here. Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. Well, thanks to Martin, hopefully we can both get a set where they eventually become available here, because I would definitely like a couple of those. Me too.

We've got a little follow-up on Google Assistant and their search history. Mm-hmm. They're actually coming out with a feature that will let you say, hey, Google, delete the last thing I said to you, or delete everything I said to you last week, along with some other features. But they're going whole hog on the letting people dictate, literally, their own privacy.

Hey, Google, set visibility to zero on the last thing I said. Exactly. Well, way to crap on a good thing, Brian. Well, we know that's what's really happening, don't we? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, Amazon's got that already, right?

I know that they certainly have the last thing that I said, but Amazon did roll out, like, last week as well, didn't they? Is that voice, you can do it with your voice, or was it just in the app? Because before it was just in the app. I believe you can do it with your voice. I'll have to check in on that, because, again, I don't really care.

You've got a couple hundred of them, so you should be able to figure it out. You'd think. You'd think. I'll do that during a break. Yeah, good thing. And we've got so much WeWork news, and I wish they were a high-tech company so we could make fun of them. But let's not. So let's move on. In the news.

So, WeWork. So much for that grand plan. Well, I can't resist, because this is, you know, confirmation, you know. I always enjoy when what we've been screaming about to the heavens actually occurs, and it's happening. WeWork is planning to lay off thousands of people, up to 25% of its employees, as the new CEO focuses on the core business, which is real estate, not technology.

True that. True that. Yeah, they've pushed back their IPO. Actually, they've not just pushed it back. They've tabled it for now. They're saying they're hoping to look forward to going public in the future, but right now they have to focus on their core business. They will cut about 1,000 to 3,000 people, which could be 10% to 25% of its staff.

And they're getting rid of all the We family of products. They're basically just going to go back to being real estate and deal with everything else, you know, like a normal company would. Yeah, you know the irony here is that this wouldn't have been happening if they didn't get greedy and won an IPO.

Because as soon as they went down the IPO route, everybody started looking at their books. That's when you have to open up the books, and the books were bad. Books are very, very bad. Heads are rolling over there. Apparently, a lot of his friends have left already. $60 million personal jet was on the books.

They're selling that. I saw it come through this morning that everybody is shorting. We work right now. It is massive. So couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Yeah. And a hat tip to listener of the show, Jolene, who says, you know, when you're taking a course and you learn all of the terms before you find out what they look like applied together in the real world, based on the recurring topics of scooters and ring discussed on your fabulous podcast.

This is a pretty good example. And this is a link over at Gizmodo. I also have found it on the BBC. A Florida man is arrested for cutting electric scooter brakes. Now, as much as I don't like these scooters, don't go cutting the brakes. That only hurts the riders.

See, I laid out that scenario when these things first came to town. Remember when I was black hatting all of these? He did one of the things that I said to do, but he did it with stickers. He put a sticker over the UPC codes. I said use black spray paint, but because you can take a sticker off or you basically replace the the UPC or the the QR code with the same sticker of like you find scooter prime and then you copy that sticker and you put it on everyone.

So everyone is trying to rent the same scooter at the same time. I thought that would be a fun one. That's a good one. I like that one. But yeah, cutting the brakes is a dick move because people can actually get hurt. Seriously hurt because we've talked a lot about how unsafe these things are at any speed. I love the BBC article because it's like they couldn't find his motivation for doing it.

I'm like, it's pretty straightforward. America. But I was looking at. Yeah, I was looking at his face. We screw things up. Yeah, exactly. And I'm looking. Well, it's also Florida. Come on. Yeah, I know. And I'm looking at his face and he's apparently been fairly roughed up. And I thought maybe he just suffered a bad scooter accident and this was his vengeance.

But no, he resisted arrest. So those are those are cop marks. Those are not scooter marks. Right. And let's move on to our good friend Palmer Luckey, the Oculus co-founder and his new company, Endurial Industries. They've gotten a lot of flack because they're basically all in on let's make stuff that is for war and military contracts and all that.

They have unveiled the Interceptor, a counter drone built solely to take down other robotic flyers by ramming them at high speed. It requires human operators permission for takedowns for now, but it can be queued through AI and automatically acquire targets using computer vision. They are selling these.

They're already out there. They've sold quite a few of them. The highly automated nature raises concerns about the rise of killer robots and the potential for abuse. It won't take much to have an Interceptor attack targets on or on its own. But in their defense, you know, workers at companies like Google have have screamed about Google not working on military drones and things like that.

This company has flat out said this is what we're doing. We are making weapons. We are military contractors. So fair enough. Well, yeah. I mean, it says it on the tin. So, yep, you're going to do what you're going to do. I think people need to buy Interceptor Interceptors now. Well, yes, it's a card game, right?

Yeah, it'll be it'll be Interceptors all the way down. And the thing about these. OK, so you have these drones that ram other drones to get them out of the air. Anybody think about the people that might be underneath them? Well, I guess, you know, the idea is it's a war zone, Jason. Yeah, I'm sure they're putting these out on the border, though.

I'm going to get one when they start the fucking Amazon drone delivery. I'm taking all those down. Oh, yes. Well, you don't have to wait for Amazon because UPS is now the first official drone airline. They beat Amazon to the punch. And I am sure Jeff Bezos is just screaming to the heavens right now where his drones should be.

But they're not right. Yeah. No, the FAA has given basically it's a thing called a part 135 standard certification to UPS to start rolling out their airline. And they've been doing trial runs in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Since March and doing actual revenue generating paid flights of medical supplies between hospitals and labs and labs and labs and things like that, which is what we talked about a long time ago is a great use for drones. Exactly. It's a fantastic use. Yeah. And apparently the FAA prioritized UPS just for that very reason.

So apparently if you need to get, you know, some porn and peanut butter at three in the morning. Not a good enough reason. Not a good enough reason. Yeah. That's why Amazon has not has not been approved yet. Yeah. So this is they're moving in the right direction.

I think at least I'm OK with that. I'm OK with with the limited use scenarios that they're rolling out. Yeah. And right now you have to get FAA approval for each individual flight if the drone is going to be out of the line of the site of the operator, which makes it a little bit tricky if they're going to roll this out, you know, wide scale, because that obviously have a stupid helicopter flying next to the drone.

And then what's the point? Yeah. So I think that this will you know, this is a great first step. It's a great first step. And apparently it's funny. They say the FAA are helicopter parents and all over them for for this right now. But yeah, I think this is this is fantastic is moving forward.

So soon you'll have that that buzzing noise all the time. But hey, if you need a kidney, you're set. That's just don't, you know, live in the flight path between two hospitals. You should be OK. Yeah. More good news coming from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

I increasingly like this guy. He, along with the company's senior VP Deidre O'Brien, Deidre, I'm not sure how she pronounces that exactly, filed a Supreme Court brief on Wednesday to personally voice support for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the DACA program that we haven't heard about in a while.

But it is the program that President Trump tried to terminate in 2017, but has been kept alive through never ending and incredibly expensive court appeals. So good times for that. The Supreme Court is slated to hear the arguments in November, which is hopefully when all of this will end one way or another.

But, you know, good on Tim Cook for supporting it. He put his own name on the brief. He and Apple have long supported DACA. They say they have 443 individual employees that came through that program at Apple itself. And he says, we did not hire them out of kindness or charity. We did it because dreamers embody Apple's innovative strategy.

So good. Cool. Good for Tim. Well done. Now, moving on to more, isn't it, ironic news. We've talked a lot about how the Silicon Valley pioneers are basically trying to keep their kids off social media and all the games and all the things that they roll out and make their millions and billions of dollars on because they know they're bad.

That is also moving into the self-driving car area. This is a great long form article over at the Washington Post. Silicon Valley pioneered self-driving cars, but some of its tech savvy residents don't want them tested in their neighborhoods. So not in my backyard. Yeah, this is the definition of not eating your own dog food.

Yes, they're familiar with the tech industry. That's why they're worried about what the self-driving revolution will entail. And this gets into a. Yep. Yeah. One very specific woman they talk about a lot here, Karen Brinchley. She's a computer scientist with expertise in training artificial intelligence, but she has pangs of anxiety whenever she sees Waymo self-driving cars maneuver the streets near her home.

She's worked for Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, and she wonders how engineers could teach the robocars operating on our tree-lined streets to make snap decisions, speed and slow with the flow of traffic, and yield to pedestrians coming from the nearby park. She's asked her husband, who is an award-winning sci-fi author, who doesn't drive, to wear a shiny vest while cycling to ensure autonomous vehicles spot him in a rush of activity.

The problem isn't that she doesn't understand the technology, it's that she does, and she knows how flawed nascent technology can be. What have I said from day one about self-driving cars, Jason? It's all or nothing. It's all or nothing. Yep. It's got to be. Now, here's the thing. She's on the right track with the shiny vest for her husband, but what I've always said is, we need shirts that have stop signs on them.

So, you know, that's all you got to do. Just hold up a stop sign in front of a self-driving car, and while it stops, just paint a white circle around it, and then it can't figure out how to get out. You effectively trap the self-driving car. It's perfect. Yeah, so she basically wraps up with, I'm not skeptical long-term, and she's lived in Silicon Valley for 30 years.

I don't want to be the guinea pig, and I don't want my husband to be the guinea pig. Yeah, exactly. It's too early. They're too excited. They're chasing the rainbow, and I just don't want them driving down my street. Oh, well, move. Yeah. Go to Arizona.

Oh, wait. No, all to Arizona as well. And, you know, in a shout-out to Jack over at Twitter and Zuck over at Facebook, try this out for size. TikTok has opted out of paid political advertising entirely. Now, the funny thing about this is they don't really have the infrastructure in place to view and vet all the ads coming in, so it's kind of unsure exactly how this is going to work for them.

But you know who does have the infrastructure to vet all the ads coming in? Who would that be, Brian? Facebook. Yes, they do. So how about, Zuck, leading up to this election, you just say, we're not taking any political ads? No, you can't do that.

Shareholder value. It is weird that a Chinese company based in Beijing is doing this, and we can't seem to get it together here. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Hover. Building your online brand has never been more important, and your online identity begins with your domain name.

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But Hover is the best. Hover.com slash GOG, 10% off your first purchase. Security? We're back this week. Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. Dave is also the co-host of the Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. Hi, Dave. Hello. Brian, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you?

Pretty good. I got a flu shot today. Oh, I'm on deck for one of those very shortly. It was easy. I signed up online to go to my local CVS. And I went in and on the couple minutes beforehand. And I was a little annoyed because I was, I was, how do I say this?

I was about to give CVS a hard time because when you go in and you check in on their little kiosk, they text you a code ahead of time. And you go in and you, you sign in with this code and you give them your name and it asks you, do you want to use, do you want to allow us to use your phone number to send you messages about your interactions with us, your appointments and things like that?

And marketing messages. No separation, huh? No separation. Yes. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, I'm going to shame CVS. So I took a picture of the screen and- Fire up the Twitter bot. Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to fire up some anger because there's not enough of that on the internet. I need some righteous indignation. And, but it turns out in the next screen, you were able to disable the marketing stuff. Yeah, because I thought that was like a law.

Well, you'd think it should be. Yeah. I was, I was mad that they wouldn't allow you to separate those two things, but they did. It's just bad interface design. Anyway, got my flu shot. And the interesting thing is I got this fancy new Band-Aid that they put the Band-Aid on your arm first.

And it's a little circular thing, like a little bullseye. And they put the needle through, there's a little window, like a little plastic window in the center of the Band-Aid. They put the needle through that little window. So a little bit of plastic goes into your blood. I assume so. That's where you get the autisms.

It's going to kill me slowly, but that's happening anyway. There's no stopping that. You know what actually makes me very upset about the CVSs and all this sort of stuff is I am, it's, they have a touchscreen to kiosk check-in.

This is, see, everybody that's going in there is sick. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. These touchscreen things, like at restaurants and at places like this, I mean, they've done studies at the one, like in the UK. We talked about it on the show a while back. In the UK, a lot of McDonald's have gone to touchscreen kiosks and they've tested them and they all have poop on them.

Oh, we have those here. Yeah. All of our local McDonald's have the touchscreens. We use them. I used one yesterday, actually. Yeah. Well, you've got a little poop on your hands and a little plastic in your blood, buddy. Yeah. Well, it's not different from any other day, really. That's true. They should have a little saran wrap pull-down thing that you can, like a little kiosk condom that you can pull over the- That would be a good idea.

Touchscreen. Or a little spray bottle of disinfectant or alcohol or something. I don't know. Well, I have a little security news from the year 2000. I jest. I actually still do play Words with Friends with a couple people, but most people have moved on from this game by now.

But even if you've moved on, your data has not. Around 200 million players of the popular Words with Friends and Draw Something games from Zynga have had their accounts information stolen by outside hackers, as the company describes. If you were dumb enough to put your credit cards into these games to begin with, that's probably safe.

But your logins have definitely been compromised, so go change your passwords. Does anybody remember what their Words with Friends password is? I sure don't. No idea. Apparently, they're going to try to identify specific users and reach out to them, so I will just be waiting for an email because I couldn't tell you what my password is.

Yeah, I thought it was all just in-app registration. Like, use your device ID to create your account, and you just put a name on it. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like they could force a password reset for everybody, and that'll also weed out all the people, probably out of the 200 million, the 150 million who never play anymore.

But why would they want to take them off their books? That would be bad for their evaluations. Yes, yes, there you go. It is better to have dead users on your system than clean them out. That is true. Zombie users. Yes. Yeah, so in the shadow of that data breach, they also had, they launched their Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign.

Yes, everything is pink within the game now. Oh, great. Glad I don't play anymore. Is there anybody left on the planet that is unaware of breast cancer? I don't think so. Okay. I don't think so. I think we're all pretty aware. I know. Well, here's the funny thing. It is also Cyber Security Awareness Month.

It is, yes. Yeah, so if we can just have cyber boobs, then we can kill two birds with one stone. More about that a little bit later. Yeah. I'm trying to think what the, I guess the color for cyber awareness would be a black hoodie. I was thinking like the black and green monochrome monitor, so.

No, I think we need to move on. I think it needs to be the Zuckerberg blue hoodie. No. No. No. That should be a color name at this point. I should be able to go to Home Depot and paint my walls Zuckerberg blue. Zuckerberg blue. Can I get the icon in cornflower blue?

Have you seen, have you guys run into this thing when you go to get paint at Home Depot that some of the colors are copyrighted? Yes. Which I think is total BS. I don't, like, and so they will not color match copyrighted colors. Yeah. It's kind of ridiculous.

I think it is ridiculous. It's a color. It is the world we live in. It is. Do you guys remember back, like, when you were college aged, and there would be ads in the local college newspaper that would say, looking for research subjects.

Yes. I was actually a psychology major, so I posted some of those ads. Ah, okay. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. So, you would be looking for a certain demographic of people, and how would you do this? You'd go say, we're going to give you 10 bucks to be part of our survey.

What did you generally do with these? Yeah. It was usually, it was either money or, like, a discount coupon for, like, the on-campus subway or whatever, something like that. And you just come in, and, you know, mine specifically were generally just kind of quizzes and things of that nature.

So, you know, we didn't really, there wasn't a lot. Everybody had email, sort of, but not a lot of people checked it. So, you know, come to this room on this date, and I'll give you this thing, and you spend 10 minutes filling this out, and then go on your merry way. Right, right. Well, you know, we've been talking about how a lot of the facial recognition systems have trouble with people with darker skin, with minorities, that there's a much higher error rate than there is with other folks.

So, Google decided to try to do something about that, but they're getting a lot of criticism for one of the ways that they decided to do that. There's an article in the Daily News. This is written by Ginger Adams, Otis, and Nancy Dillon. Did they point their Googlebot at the Ebony Magazine website?

Yeah, I'm trying to decide if this is worse than that. Okay. So, they sent people out on the street with these facial recognition scanning devices. They look like big, they look like phones that have big, giant cases on them, because that's basically what they are. And they sent folks out through a third-party provider, a contractor, to go out and basically gather up scans of black people.

Excuse me, person of color, can I scan your face? Right, exactly. I don't know. That must have been fun. Yeah, I don't know how that would set up. Well, but it gets better. And by better, I mean... Worse. Worse. Here comes the other shoe. They were targeting homeless people.

Oh! Oh! He's not black, he's just filthy. Yeah, so they had these folks going around, and they would hand out $5 gift cards as an incentive. They also, evidently, according to this article, didn't tell people that their faces were being scanned.

They told them that they wanted them to try out this new game. Does Google not have boards of people that vet these things before they happen? No, they have boards of people who come up with these ingenious ideas to get scans. That's what they've got. Wouldn't it be cool if...

That's the name of the division. Yeah. I'm willing to put a lot of this on whoever the third-party contractor is, because Google probably hired them and said, go out and get some facial scans. 500,000 scans of people of color, and then they just kind of ran with it. Right.

It's the distancing method. Yeah. There you go. So Google has plausible deniability that they knew anything about this. They ubered it. They just ubered it. They would give $5 gift cards to homeless people for scans. Right. Right. There was one source who was one of the people out doing these scans.

They said, if the person were to look at the screen after the task had been completed and say, oh, was it taking a video? We were instructed to say, oh, not really. No, it's a 3D scan of your face. It's not a video, technically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We were told to tell people that it was, that it was, we were, we were told to not tell people that it was video, even though it would say on the screen that a video was taken. So they were, they were telling them that it was some sort of mini game and they just keep telling them, oh, just hit next. Just hit next. Thank you. Here's your $5 gift card.

Um, and, uh, now you're in the, now you're in the system. Yeah, I would have probably been dropped from the psychology program had I done anything near that nature. But you'd have had a job at Google waiting for you. That's true. Wow. That's a, that's an interesting one.

By interesting, I mean completely skeezy. Well, but I mean, let's, so let's swing all the way back around to the beginning of our conversation about this. Suppose they were doing this at a university and they put an ad out in the newspaper, I guess it'll be on the website these days.

And they said, looking for research subjects, uh, particularly we're looking for people of color. We're going to pay you a $5 gift card. It'll take two minutes of your time. And we want to do a 3d scan of your face. Right. No problem. Right. No problem.

Because they are, they are choosing themselves to come do it. Yeah. Right. With full knowledge of what is being done. Yes. Yes. You're not deceiving them. No. Yeah. Although there are some interesting, I mean, we won't get too into it here, but there are a number of psychological studies that require deception at the front.

So it's, it's a, you know, it's a, it's a weird ethics thing. But again, at, at universities, if you have a study that requires deception, there is a board that has to approve it. Like there, there are processes by which they have to go through as opposed to just hire a third party contractor and let them do whatever they want.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the problem here is they can't say that they're probably from Google because they'd be like five bucks. That's it. You're Google. We want more. They were keeping costs down. That's all. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. It doesn't take very long to do, but I don't know.

It just, it's, it's just icky feeling. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How rare for Google to give us an icky feeling. Oh my goodness. Well, uh, let's talk about, uh, some, uh, Zuckerberg blue again. And I love this.

The, the, the article is called Facebook is being leaned on by us, UK and Australia to ditch its end to end encryption expansion plan. Basically we're back to the old backdoor scenario here. And I just love that tech crunch because I read that and I said to myself, ah, shit, here we go again. And of course the first line in the article is here we go again.

Here we go again. Yeah. And, uh, everybody's trying to get Facebook to give them a backdoor. And we, we all know that encryption with a backdoor is not encryption. It doesn't really matter. And Facebook saying, no, no, we're not doing it.

So this is going to be interesting. We're going to see if Mark Zuckerberg has the courage of his convictions to Tim Cook his way through this. If he's going to stand his ground or he's going to cave. We'll see. I think he might stand his ground, but the real reason, well, it's not the, I guess the main reason I think that these governments want to make sure that they have a backdoor is not so much for communications as it is for cryptocurrencies.

That is the big fear for all these governments because untraceable money will basically destroy governments and economies. And that's, that's their major worry, especially with Facebook is Facebook keeps, you know, they won't give up on Libra and they just don't, the governments don't want Libra to come to be able to go through.

That's, that's it. Yeah. I mean, but we're talking about the messaging aspect here. Yeah. But that's just step one, right? They get that in place and then boom, there's your currency. Yeah. But it also, I mean, the governments are going to roll out terror, terrorism, but they're also going to roll out, you know, human trafficking, child porn, like we talked about on the previous episode where it's making it harder to catch these, these horrible human beings because they are using encryption.

But here's the thing. It's like, there's going to be other options. It's not just Facebook that's going to be doing this. You can still use signal. You can still use telegram. You can roll your own because a lot of this stuff is open source. And I imagine a lot of people are going to be doing that if they're going to be avoiding capture. And, you know, this is to catch the low hanging fruit, the dumb criminals, the criminals who don't really want to put in the effort.

Yeah. And just, they just want to use Facebook Messenger to do all their stuff. Yes. They want turnkey crime is what they're going for. So, I think, I really hope Facebook stands their ground on this because this is, you know, nobody's going to trust them if they, if they cave on this. Well, nobody trusts them anyway.

That's true. But I mean, that's just fuel on the fire. What do you think, Dave? Well, I just, over the course of our conversation, you got me thinking about this in a different way that, you know, what if, given that folks who need strong encryption know that they need strong encryption, does everybody need strong encryption?

No. In other words, most of us have a certain amount of security on our house. We have a, you know, we have locks. We have maybe 11 cameras. We have security cameras. Yeah. Those sorts of things. But we all know that if anybody really wants to get in, they're going to be able to get in.

And we're okay with that because we have, we've dialed in the amount of security that we think is appropriate for where we live and the types of things we think we need to protect. And I wonder, I don't know.

It's, uh, in other words, is it worth it to go after, to be able to go after the child pornographers, the traffickers, you know, those kinds of people, the, the low hanging fruit, um, while still having a reasonable amount of security for the every, for the day to day kind of stuff.

In other words, I guess, here, here's the thing for me. I don't have a problem with searches that require warrants, right? But the problem is no one has been able to, that I've seen, has been able to come up with a backdoor that allows for that in a, in a secure way.

Right. Right. That, that there's no way anyone else is going to get in other than the people who have the warrant. And so I guess until we are able to do that, then I'm on the side of, we just need to, there's, we'll allow it. Do we need like the old school nuclear bunker?

You need five people sitting there in a room with five different keys turning all at the same time to be able to open this up for a warrant kind of situation, some sort of cyber version of that. Uh, maybe.

Yeah. That would make sense to me. That doesn't scale though. I mean, we're talking about lots and lots of stuff here. So I don't think. Well, but that's, that's part of it too. But I mean, there's only so many warrants. Yeah. Right. Are we? How often do you get a search warrant? How, how often would you, do we think, and someone should be able to answer that question.

How often do we think we would actually need to be able to go in and do this? Don't they get on the, on the average, like over a hundred thousand subpoenas every year for data? So yeah, I mean, they used to, they used to put out transparency reports, but those have started to go the way of the dodo.

Nobody's been publishing that stuff anymore. Or there was a time when we would get these reports from, you know, Facebook and Yahoo and Apple that would say how many times law enforcement has asked for access to data every year. And they would, they would spell it out. Haven't seen one of those in quite some time. And I don't know if that's because the government is clamped down saying, look, if we're sending you these requests, you can't talk about it.

The old gag order. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of moving parts. It's very complicated. It is very complicated, but I think just, just putting in a bad, it's something I think we need to figure out. We definitely do. And you know, Facebook has thrown their hands up in the air so far and said, ah, fuck it.

So with, uh, with the political advertising, so maybe they'll do it here with the encryption. Ah, fuck it. We're just gonna leave everything encrypted, figure it out later. But who knows? Mm-hmm. I just think, I mean, remember the ghost protocol? That was an interesting one where they would let you just join. They weren't actually decrypting the, the conversation as it was going back and forth.

They would let you join the conversation as a invisible participant. And I should just not tell anybody else that you're in the room. And that's what the UK was, was proposing, which obviously, which got huge negative press. And we jumped on that bandwagon too back then, but it didn't break, it did not break the encryption.

It just lets you eavesdrop, which you can do with a warrant. So I think that might, you know, it might be time to bring that back and talk about that a little more to let people do it. You can't go back to historical data, but then you can at least put a wiretap on. Like, like the old days, you couldn't go back and listen to other people's phone calls. But, you know, if you wanted to build a RICO case against some gangsters, you had to get a warrant and you could listen to a certain amount of the conversation.

You got a warrant and a tap. Yeah. And if they weren't talking about the thing that you needed them to talk about, you had 30 seconds and then you had to turn it off and go back to, you know, sitting in a van, drinking coffee. And so, right. Yeah. Is, is it illegal for me to have a safe in my house that is so secure that no one can break into it?

Yeah, that's legal. Yeah. Well, I think so. And am I allowed to booby trap it? You're not allowed to booby trap it. No. Well, I mean, booby trap it in turn. And I don't, booby trap is probably the wrong word. Am I allowed to, if someone tried to open it who was not me, incinerate everything inside of it automatically?

I do believe that would be legal. Yeah. I think so. Remember the old hacker days when, when people would put magnets, big electromagnets in the door frames. So when, when they were raided, they could hit a button on their desk. So anything that was in the house, if it was taken out, would have to pass through the magnets and get the bust on the way out.

Oh, wow. That's like that Breaking Bad episode. I don't remember that one, but I just remember that after, after the first couple of times that the feds got nailed with that, everybody was required to carry a compass on a raid. So they, the magnets would, they would, they would tell them which doors were, were triggered so then they could cut the power to the house and then safely remove the hardware.

Yeah. There's a Breaking Bad episode where they get a, I think a laptop confiscated. And so they drive up next to the, the place where they store all of the things that have been confiscated with a, basically a van full of a, with a giant, uh, one of those magnets they used to pick up cars at the jump yard. I remember that one, yeah. Yeah.

They melt one of those. That was great. Yeah. Yeah. And they power that, yeah, they power that up. That was fun too. Yeah. Yeah. It is. That's practical. I'm sure you can get one of those off Amazon. Yeah. eBay at least. I mean, come on.

There we go. Moving on. We have an ex Yahoo engineer pleads guilty to hacking 6,000 accounts cause he was looking for boobies. He was looking for the cyber boobies. Yep. Was he unaware of the fact that most of the internet is boobies, but I guess he was looking for specific knockers.

That's what, that's what his plan was. Right. So, uh, yeah. 34 year old guy from Tracy, California. All the security in the world will not stop something like this happening. Nope. Because this was an inside job. You know, that's what happened.

You gotta, you gotta look from without and within when it comes to these guys. So he's facing a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 plus restitution. And, uh, uh, as we've known from the previous cases where this type of thing has happened, he's probably not going to get anywhere near the maximum on either of those.

So even, uh, with the guy who got busted for the fappening barely got a slap on the wrist. And this is only 6,000 people. Yeah. I mean, you think there could be systems in place where 6,000 times would draw attention.

And I guess, unless this was this guy's job, you had to provide him with access to this stuff. Remember, we are talking about Yahoo. I mean, let's, let's, let's, let's call a spade a spade here. You know, this is Yahoo. They have not been known for their, their diligence on cybersecurity.

And when, when they're, when they are good at it, they just set up a pipe for the CIA and the NSA to just take all your data anyway. Thank you, Edward Snowden for that revelation. One thing we were curious about when this, when we saw this case come through is so he's, he's, he's pled out, um, but he's not going to be sentenced till February.

Is that just how, is that the first date they could get on the, on the docket? Is that just how long it takes? Probably. I've heard it's all pretty ridiculous these days. I guess so. Yeah. There's not going to be any trial or anything. So, but he's home on $200,000 bond.

And probably no access to a computer. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. High creep factor in this one. Yep. Yep. That's what happens. You know, I, I, I would act surprised, but I know it happens every day. This guy just got caught. What are you going to do?

Not send your boobies an email. That's true. Well, he was using it to, uh, basically use the Yahoo account and then go into their iCloud, Facebook, Gmail accounts and, uh, go and search in there. So yeah, just keep your boobs off the internet. How's that? Will do.

Never, never going to happen. Never going to happen. I've solved the problem. Keep it off the internet. Yeah. Uh, Google's password manager now warns you about compromised accounts. This is good. This is good news. I want to end on a good news account here. This is good.

What do you think? Yeah. More transparency. Let's do it. Let people know. Yep. Yeah. I mean, we've got this. I know I have it in one password. They have a watchtower feature that snarks up all of the, have I been pwned data and checks for your email address and tells you, I get an, I get an alert on any of my accounts that have been shown up in a breach so I can go change them.

Yeah. And it makes sense that anybody who's running anything that is storing passwords nowadays should have this baked in by default. So I'm glad that Google is doing it. I don't think my, uh, iCloud key chain does that yet, but hopefully someday Apple will get on that as well.

But, uh, yeah, I think this is a good, uh, good step in the right direction for Google. Yeah, I agree. I, I looking through this, I couldn't tell if, if they were referencing the, have I been pwned database? I suspect they just rolled their own pull from the same publicly available databases, but, uh, yeah, they should all be this way.

It should, every time you go to, to either use a password or create a password, it should be able to check it against the database and say, Hey, by the way, this is no good. Yeah. I agree. It's easy. Why not? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it would be a public service if they made this whole thing just completely public. So if I ran a website that took logins and I could just, you know, every time somebody logged in, I could just do a quick check to the database to see if they've been in a breach lately and say, Hey, look, uh, we saw that you were part of this breach over here.

If you're, if you have good password hygiene, maybe it's nothing to worry about, but if you've been reusing passwords, you might want to reset your password. Here's an easy link to do it right now. Now, if only this password manager also informed you if you've been, uh, if you've had your face scanned by Google. Well, that's the thing.

When you log in, they have a brand new, uh, avatar for you. Right. It looks just like me. Is this you? Is it, and is this your blood type? We're just asking. We're just asking for a friend. Friend.

Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. It is good. I'm happy. It's, yeah, it should be the standard. Everybody should be able to do this now. There's, there's, it's getting to the point where there's not a lot of reason why it shouldn't just happen everywhere. So hopefully we're headed in that direction. And I think it's just good hygiene for everybody right now just to go change your passwords everywhere because we know that everybody's been hacked at some point.

So just go spend a Saturday, pour yourself a glass of wine, go through your password manager and just change everything. Yeah. Why not? Jason, your life just gets better and better. Now you're Saturday nights are changing passwords. Your, your new year's day is uninstalling software and your birthday was purchasing software.

I know you are just a fucking great guy. It's a great guy to hang with, man. It's party nonstop. It's a brave new world. Live in the dream. It is a brave new world. In between monitoring all those video cameras. They see him rolling. All right, guys, I will see you next time.

Apps and doodads. Little Fitbit update, Brian. I love this new one. It's, it is the last of its kind. It is the last Fitbit that you can actually wear in your, on your hip, in your pocket. And so I'm thinking about getting another one just as backup in case this one dies or in case I screw up and wash it.

What do you think they're, I mean, obviously they were trying to pivot to more medical and B2B stuff, but they're still going to keep their line of watches going, right? Yeah, but I don't want another watch. The whole point of this is, yeah, I've got an Apple watch. It just doesn't work when I'm on my treadmill. And last week, since I had it, you know, I'm, I'm walking more.

I chalked up almost 57 miles last week. I did 125,000 steps. Congratulations. You know what we need to do? We need to get you a little, like a, a little swinging trebuchet almost that goes at the exact same speed that your treadmill is going on. And then you just put your Apple watch in there and then you're good to go.

Yeah. Wasn't it? What was that company that had the little swing set that goes on the desk? Yeah, that's, that's all you need, man. Yeah, I'll just do that. Sorted. Then I'll just go watch TV. Say, fuck it. Well, that's cheating. See, that's gaming the system. Well, you know, that's the part. Like we figured out, like we figured out with your Apple watch that you can just set it to yoga and you'll get all your exercise minutes.

I have had so many 1155 yoga sessions on my Apple watch. It's crazy. Why does Jason like to do yoga so much? I should be really fit. I know. I can barely touch my toes, but man, I'm good at downward facing dog. It's fantastic. So I just love this thing.

It's definitely getting me, getting me moving again. And since the weather here is finally gorgeous going out of the house and listening to books in the morning, I get my 10,000 by 10 a.m. It's great. Congratulations. Yeah. And I've been listening to the new Debbie Harry book, which I, I end around the, the Kindle problem and I just got it on audible, which is, you know, no pictures I was going to do anyway.

Yes. You can download the PDF. They think ahead. They think ahead, but we'll talk about that on the next show when I will give it a review and hopefully by then it'll be fixed and maybe you can grab a copy. I'd like that. So we've also talked in the past about how Apple loves to kill the people that, you know, develop for their platform.

Sadly, undercover, one of my favorite apps for my laptops to track, if it gets stolen, I can report it and, you know, do screen captures and key logging and report it to the police and all that. Yeah. They're, they're calling it quits. They're saying, you know what? Not really worth it anymore because the new find my Mac app just does so much more than they can do.

So. Yeah. Cause they don't get access to some of the key level stuff anymore. Right. Yeah. Cause they've got that whole new Bluetooth mesh that they're, that they're building out. And so they're like, you know what? It's not even worth competing anymore. So fare thee well, fare thee well, fare thee well undercover and orbicule software.

So you have till January. Um, yeah, I think it turns off on January 1st, everything is getting shut down, including the servers. So, um, they do have instructions on how to uninstall it on their website. So if you're running it on, um, if you've got nothing else to do on new year's day, you can go uninstall undercover.

Ooh. Hey, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's something to do when you're hung over. Come on. All right. Well, in the same way that we never, uh, really cover Apple's orgiastic self-congratulatory events when they announce all their new products, we certainly don't cover Microsoft's and they just had theirs, but I did see something that piqued my interest.

They've got a bunch of dual screen devices that look kind of cool. I've got to say the surface duo, which will run on Android across two 5.6 inch screens. So you get 8.3 inches of space for multitasking or thumb typing. It can fold 360 degrees to help you take phone calls.

That's currently scheduled skip ship for the 2020 holiday. And then they have the surface Neo tablet, which is two nine inch screens. It's pretty cool. Did you look at these? Yeah, I did. I saw this when you put them in the notes and I was looking at it. They lost me when they said that they're going to run Android. Well, yeah, that's the problem.

Yeah. But what I'm hoping is maybe this will push Apple into exploring some sort of dual screen device. It is pretty bitchin. Yeah. Yeah. I do like the, the second one, the bigger one. It's pretty cool. The Neo. I see what bugs me is they made the surface Neo and they really should have made the surface Morpheus to go with it.

I really think. I agree. Or the Trinity. You know, I think that might have been some IP issues with doing that though. Microsoft has enough money. They can, they can, they can license that. Yeah, but they're not cool enough to think about stuff like that. That's true. That's the problem with Microsoft. They're never cool enough. And speaking of that, the Microsoft surface earbuds, they're just not cool enough to make them look cool.

But the specs on this are awesome. They really are. They just look horrible. They're touch and voice enabled. Omnisonic sound. They boast a pair of mics in each bud. These are way better than the Apple product, but they look stupid. I tell you what though, the problem with, uh, AirPods, they look stupid too.

That's they do, but these look really stupid. Yeah. These look like some hipster, like, you know, ear disc things. Yeah. But they've got a battery life of up to 24 hours that blows the AirPods out of the water. I can't get more than an hour on my AirPods now. Well, minor, minor down to an hour and a half, even after the cleaning and everything.

So yeah, those, the, the, the, the power degrade on these things are just ridiculous. I mean, if I was all PC, I would have a pair of these surface earbuds. They look phenomenal and they have, they've got some really cool stuff in there. If you're in the PC environment, cause they're designed with office 365 and outlook calendar and email access to your voice and all that sort of stuff.

Do they come with Clippy? If you wear, no, no Clippy, sadly. If you wear them while giving a presentation, they actually will display captions of what you're saying in real time on screens and even translate your speech into more than 60 languages. How cool is that? That is from the future. That is some future ass shit.

Apple, you got to up your game. Microsoft's gunning for you. Yeah. Shame it's all on Android. This is kind of like the, you know what I bet they're using? I bet they're using the same, um, uh, translation stuff that they use on Skype now. Cause like on Skype business, you can have calls translated in real time. Yeah, I'm sure they are. Yeah.

Now I really like these and I really like the surface pro X or 10 or whatever. Right. My only problem with it is why isn't there a 15 inch version? That's a good point. All of these are 13 inches. I want a 15 inch version.

You know, I would seriously. Size queen. Well, yeah. I mean, I've got, if I'm going to do serious work on a laptop, you know, yeah, the airs are nice for, for just convenience. But if you're going to do real work, you need a little bit more real estate. Yep. I agree. That's why I've been sitting in my office more and more often with my dual monitor set up because the, the air by itself is not enough.

I find it enough. If you use spaces, you can get around pretty well. You just gotta, you gotta, you know, bake that into your workflow. But, uh, I really like these, these new surfaces and, you know, I know a lot of people that have them, they swear by them. Yeah. They look really nice. I might have to dip in a little bit, especially if we get some more very generous donations like Martin.

Yeah, seriously. Get a couple more Martins. We'll be, uh, we'll be living in Redmond soon. All Microsoft out. Yeah, seriously. Right. Uh, so I put this one in here because I know that you're very sleep focused. We talk about sleep a lot because you have your issues and you have all your different things that you use.

So I thought this might be of interest to you. Insomnia by Endel is a procedurally generated Twitch channel that wants to help you sleep. Whatever that means. It streams relaxing sounds and visuals. The company says the channel uses psychoacoustic effects, which is basically a fancy way of saying nice sounds and masking effects, uh, where multiple sound signals are layered in a way that makes some of them inaudible.

They also claim that the channel generates sounds oscillating on certain frequencies in order to modulate the brainwaves during the deep sleep state. So there you go. Have you, uh, given this a look? No, because the lovely people at Marpok sent us a bunch of domes and the dome that I can control with the, my phone.

Actually, I, I, I used it, use my phone once and I set a timer for it. So it turns on at nine o'clock at night and it turns off at six in the morning. That's all I need. And because when it turns on, I know it's, oh, it's sleepy night, night time and get the dogs in the bed and go to bed. Yeah. So I gave it a listen, but at the end of the day, I'm perfectly happy to just stick with what I put in as a sleep aid back in like the first year we were doing the show, the Star Trek TNG ambient noise idle for 24 hours YouTube channel.

Yeah. Which I love that sound. Or you could just turn your drone, your dome on. Or that. Yes. Because, you know, you can make it sound almost identical. Yeah. I just like the little, you can't do, there's the one that has the little blips and bleeps. You occasionally get the little Star Trek computer sounds. I just love that.

Okay. Okay. If that, if, if the ambience takes you back to the, takes you back to the future, make it so. Yes. And back to a little PC news. I installed, well, I didn't install first. I opened parallels for the first time in a little while. And of course, every time I opened parallels to do something on PC on my Mac, it's another 50 bucks because they've invariably upgraded again.

So I was running version 12, which ran just fine. But of course, every time they're like, Oh, you were running 12. It's not optimized for this. Can't do that. Can't do this. And I'm like, here's my credit card. Fuck. Take my money. Bend it over. And so I upgraded to parallels, desktop 15 now.

And of course it's a fucking subscription. Yeah. I got upgrade pricing though. It's usually a hundred bucks a year for parallels business. But since I've bought every version of parallels from like one to 12, they were generous enough to give me half off.

So it's only 50 bucks a year, which still comes back to almost exactly what I pay anyway, when I open it up that one time a year to use it. But the new one is pretty nice. I got to say, because you just basically pop in and say, would you like to install windows? And like, okay. And it just gives you a copy of windows 10.

I'm like, well, that was easy. I didn't have to go to the old was a browser dot IE or whatever to get the test version. And then, you know, hack that to just like, you have to like uninstall it, reinstall it every 90 days or something to get the warnings to go away, but cause they give you free versions of all of the OSs to test for the browsers.

And that's what I used forever. But this time it just popped it up into windows. I'm like, Hey, thanks. That was quick. Yeah. It doesn't look like you can even purchase a standalone anymore. It's purely subscription. Yeah. It's a shame. Yeah. It really sucks. But you know, eh, what are you going to do though? That's the way of the world now, but, uh, it, it does run pretty damn nice on my iMac 5k.

I gotta say it is fast, faster than 12. I'll give it that. The boot time is at least half. So if I save some time for that one time a year when I really need to run on a PC on my Mac, so be it, so be it. And, uh, I use iZotope software for a lot of the audio editing stuff.

Yeah. And I just bought for my birthday, bought myself a present. I bought, uh, iZotope Ozone 8 Advanced. Wow, Jason, I've got to say, uh, you know, for your birthday, you buy yourself software for New Year's, uh, New Year's Day, you're going to uninstall software. You need to get out of the fucking house, man.

Well, that's why I got a Fitbit. That's why I got my Fitbit. You're just, you're just living it too large right now. I don't know. I know. So I was just pissed off because I bought it on August 3rd and they wanted 150 bucks to upgrade. Right. I'm like, I just got, the shrink wrap's barely off this. Like, I, I'm barely getting out of the preset phase.

And so I, of course, did what any responsible, almost 50 year adult, 50 year old adult will do. I bitched about it on Twitter. Yes, of course you did. It's exactly what I did. Within three minutes, the guys from iZotope were like, uh, send us a DM, send them a DM.

They're like, here's the installer. Here's a serial number. Shut the fuck up. Uh, yes. Well, going back to it, Twitter is the only customer service left. You have to shame companies into giving you stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not even shaming. It's just making, that's the only place anybody's listening anymore.

Squeaky wheel, right? Yeah. I wish I could, I wish I could shame Ford to get, cause that, remember a couple episodes I talked about how they're, they're merging logins across their system. Yeah. I still can't. Which always goes smoothly, doesn't it? I still can't pay my bill. I've been on the phone.

I had like 12 emails back and forth with support trying to explain it to me. And I gave them the logins for both accounts. I'm like, these both work. Well, at least you'll see the repo man coming on all of your cameras. Exactly. And here, you're going to love this one. So on my ford.com, I gave them the email address, which is my login and the password so they could log in and check it.

And they're like, hmm, your password seems to be out of bounds for our, our, our password format should be eight to 15 characters. I'm like, okay, well, welcome to 1999. Cause I had a 25 character password, but it still let me log in. That's the crazy part. It still let me log in just fine.

So I went and reset the password, made it 15 characters, sent it back to them. And they're like, yeah, yeah, we gotta, we gotta push you to tech support. We're really sorry. You can still pay your bill by the phone. And I'm like, I had to write them back and say, look, when you pay by phone, you need your account number.

Guess where my account number is on that page that you won't let me get to. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I love it. So fortunately they, they were able to get me my, my account number. So I can, I have to pay by phone.

I have to type in my account number. Then I have to type in my bank account number and then my bank routing number just to pay over the phone. I'm like, Oh, come on guys. Seriously. And, uh, Oh, I, Oh, that's right. I got a new toy. I got the DJI Osmo mobile three combo.

All right. Cause I had the DJI Osmo mobile one, which in the old days worked with like my iPhone seven and it was a great little gimbal and you could put it on a desk in the holder and you could walk around the room and it would track you and do videos. Cause I was, if I was, you know, doing videos with someone, I could, it would follow you around.

It was great. Except when I got an iPhone eight plus didn't work anymore. Cause everything was out of balance. They didn't think of that. It wasn't really future-proofed, right? It was way more expensive than this new one. This new one was 139 bucks for the combo, which you get a tripod that comes with it. And so I can do the same things that I wanted to do.

And at least this one, you can put any phone in except like maybe some of the giant Android phablets, but, uh, works great with my eight plus and it'll work with any phone. It's pretty cool. And it's got a portrait and landscape mode now for the price. It's pretty, pretty nice. The only thing that I don't like is you can't replace the batteries in it.

Like on my one, I've got like a case with three batteries cause it doesn't last all that long. So you can swap out the batteries. It's got a big selfie stick with it and all that stuff. This doesn't do any of that stuff, but, uh, cause I sold my, my mobile one for the same price as this. So I, at least it's a wash. I didn't actually have to spend any money to get it.

Right. So, but it's really nice if you're into the, you know, taking smooth videos out on the beach when you're making your Instagram stuff, it's pretty cool. But, uh, yes, cause I'm doing that. I'm sure you are, Brian. I'm sure you are. You have, you have a secret channel for your kid.

That's right. No one knows about. He's an influencer. He is an influencer. I'm sure. I'm sure. But, uh, if you're, if you're into that kind of thing, check it out. There's a link in the show notes to it, but, uh, it is, it is definitely one of the better gimbals out there for the price. It's definitely really good. And finally, you know how many hard drives I have for my backups and all that.

Yep. Yeah. Fuck Seagate. You know, I am a hundred percent with you on that. I haven't used a Seagate drive in probably 15 years. Cause I had once, I just had such a horrific crash with them. I'm a Western digital guy. Yep. I was a Western digital guy forever.

I love the passports and now I've got another Western. I've got two Western digitals, uh, now because two of my Seagates, two of my eight terabyte drives, less than two years old, both of them died. Yep. That's, I just, I just don't use Seagate.

I never will. Yeah. I hate those drives. Never, never buy another Seagate. They're just so bad. Western digital, man, those things run forever. I'm surrounded by them right now. Yeah. So I got to, I have to get one more eventually. Thanks to Martin. Now I can get another one.

So I like to have three, you know, three layers of backup. So that's right. Now I'm down to, I'm literally down to one right now until this other drive gets here today. So man, you know how long it takes to copy eight terabytes of data. It takes a long ass time.

My God, does it take forever. I can't wait till everything's Thunderbolt three or four or whatever it is. And we all are covered in dongles. All right. This is a bit clickbaity and it's a bit buzzfeed-y, but whatever.

It's, it's fun and it's interesting. And I'm not going to go into the how's and why's because the link will be in our show notes, but I just love this article. Science still has no idea how these eight everyday phenomena function. And I'll just run through the list here. How we age, we don't know. How to cure hiccups, no idea.

Why we laugh, no clue. How anesthesia works, no idea. We just know it works. Wow. So if you're going in for surgery, I'm sorry if that just terrified you. Sorry. What dreams actually are for and what they do, why we sleep, why we cry, or why we itch.

We have no clue why any of this works. Trigger warning. There's a picture of a mosquito as I'm sitting here scratching my arms because I got chomped to death by mosquitoes yesterday. Fucking snowflake. We don't use trigger warnings on this show. I didn't say it was a trigger warning. I said, I just got triggered.

That's all. That's all. I just thought it was fascinating. So it doesn't get as super into depth on all of them, but there are links out to bigger articles that talk about everything. So very cool. Very cool. Caught my interest. Yeah. Well, if you want a long one on the brain, it's called to pay attention.

The brain uses filters, not a spotlight. It is a long read about Snapchat filters. No, not quite Snapchat. Is that why everybody I see has bunny ears? Could be. Or that might've been the drugs. I think you're having flashbacks, Brian, from those old Disney days.

Yeah. It's, uh, did you get a chance to check this one out? I did. It's very interesting. Yeah, it's very, very interesting. Like I said, it's a long read and they're just really kind of figuring out how we, you know, use our brains to pay attention and it's not what they originally thought it was. So, uh, if you're into the brain, go check this one out.

Link will be in the show notes. I don't want to get too into it because it is fairly complicated, but, uh, it is a fascinating read. Excellent. And, uh, as we have known in the past, uh, all the canceled Marvel shows from Netflix have done, uh, done auctions of props. The Jessica Jones props are finally hitting the auction block in December.

So I'm quite, I was quite excited about it until I went and looked, um, you will able to be, you'll be able to bid on more than 400 props from the canceled show. They have a preview, which only shows a few. And what I didn't see in there is what I want. So desperately badly, Martin, if you want to give the show another gift, uh, I desperately want a Jessica Jones whiskey bottle.

That's all I did not see it in there yet, but there are more than 400 props. So we'll see if one appears. And if so, I want it, you don't want a jacket. No, I don't want any of that unless she's going to self-deliver it, in which case I'm all in, but, uh, I'm definitely want the whiskey bottle.

Oh man. I kind of want Kilgrave's, uh, purple suit. I would like to see you try to squeeze into that. Well, besides being too short. He's a wee man, Jason. I was going to say, but he's a very, very skinny man. Very skinny. If I stay on that Fitbit for another, actually, if I stayed on the Fitbit long enough until I can afford it, then I wouldn't be able to fit in it because I wouldn't be eating anymore.

Because I'm sure it's going to be. Just start a yoga workout on your, on your watch right now and don't stop it for a year. I'm sure you'll drop all the weight in time. There we go. Closing shout outs. I'd like to give another closing shout out here to iZotope's customer service. You guys rocked it.

So, uh, thanks for the upgrade and thanks for doing it so quick and not making a fuss about it. So, uh, good job, man. I love your software and I want to keep using it, but, uh, that 150 bucks was a little much after August 3rd. So I appreciate you stepping up and doing the right thing.

Excellent. And I got another shout out to my man, Dan Clark, who played Nitro on American Gladiators. Make sure you go check out Calm the Beast podcast. I, uh, I helped produce it. So I'm a little, you know, it, it's near and dear to my heart, but, uh, he's, he's, you know, getting into it. So, uh, he could use a little hand.

So go subscribe, drop him a five star. He'd appreciate it. Awesome. And another shout out to Martin, just because it was such a unexpected surprise this morning. So we really do appreciate that. That was awesome. This whole episode is obviously dedicated to you and a shout out to post-season baseball.

It's the most wonderful time of the year, as long as the Dodgers stay in. So lots of games to watch this weekend. Very excited about it. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And now we know Brian, why Brian wasn't the lead singer of his band. I am not a singer. And I am Jason DeFilippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a few 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. Be like Martin. Your support really keeps us going, and we really appreciate it.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 382. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. What did you think of that? Well, I won't argue that it was a no-holds-barred, adrenaline-fueled thrill ride, but there's no way you could perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable amount of paperwork.

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