383: Gimme the Damn Coconuts!

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Eero. Go to Eero.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout to get free overnight shipping with your order. This episode is also sponsored by Casper. Get $100 towards select mattresses by visiting Casper.com slash GOG and using GOG at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. It's Catalina time. Oh, really? You're going to get on the little boat and go out to the island? You know I would love to. I would actually like to take the helicopter, but that's pricey. Yeah, that's a little pricey. But, you know, Apple has released Catalina, and if you upgrade, that could also be death-defying to your workflow.

That's for damn sure. Well, one thing I've learned doing this podcast is that there are always, always audio issues with new updates, so I will wait until you say I should update. Yeah, you're not allowed to update. I didn't think so. There's also another caveat this time.

32-bit apps have gone bye-bye. Yes, and that is a problem for me, as I just recently managed to save my old versions of Microsoft Office and do not want to subscribe. And I believe that my old versions of Office will not work with Catalina. No, they won't. Office 2019 will. You can still buy that one off the shelf, but if you don't have to buy anything, you shouldn't.

Yes, that's unfortunate, because I really don't need to upgrade, but I do use Word and Excel. For what? Why don't you just use Google Docs, Matt? It's the way of the future. I suppose I could transition. Yeah, I mean, they work just as good, and they're free.

I know. I know. So, something else that's free that we talk about all the time on the show, Opera. We love Opera. Yes. And I was looking at TechCrunch today, and they said, Browser Maker Opera today announced the launch of version 68 of its flagship browser. The marquee feature of the launch is the addition of a tracker blocker that will make it harder for advertisers and others to track you while you browse the web.

At least until they figure out how to block the tracking blocker. Exactly. And which has the additional benefit of speeding up your browsing session. Indeed, Opera argues that turning on both the tracking protection and the built-in ad blocker can speed up page loads up to 23%. Now, I would like to point out one flaw with the crack jack reporting over there at TechCrunch.

It's not version 68. It's version 64, because I upgraded today, and they put me to 64, and I'm like, okay, well, they said 68. So, I had to go look, and I went to the Opera website, and Opera's like, hey, look, it's version 64 with tracking. And even the URL says, Opera 64, faster, more private, more fun.

Okay. How did you fuck that one up, TechCrunch? In a world, Jason, where spell check has existed for 20-plus years, and we still see spelling errors in published documents, what can we expect? Well, we can expect a little bit of pride in your work, but I guess not.

Maybe the AI wrote it. Maybe. And Elizabeth Holmes is back in the news. Oh, Elizabeth Holmes from, you know, from Theranos, who is being sued into non-existence, much like her product was, non-existent. Well, it turns out her lawyers have petitioned the court to be taken off the case.

And why is that, you ask? Oh, because she hasn't paid them in more than a year. Oopsies. So, yeah, we'll see how that plays out, but I just thought it was very funny, and some friend of the show sent that to me, and I can't remember who it was. Oh, I think it might have been Eric Huntley who sent me that one.

But that was, that's all the news that's fit to print that we have in the follow-up. All right. Well, I hope her and her dead eyes end up in jail. In the news.

We've talked quite a bit about all the genetic testing companies out there, the biggest, of course, being 23andMe, and there's this great article that I came across in Slate because they're playing a little fast and loose, as we assume that they were, with these genetic results. Are you my cousin or half-sibling, is the title of the article, and it gets into a couple case studies.

This woman, Jenny, who participated in a study that gave her free 23andMe test results, she'd all but forgotten about it when her cousin messaged her on Facebook, why does 23andMe think we're half-sisters? When she logged into her account, sure enough, the site's relatives feature listed her cousin as her half-sister.

Earlier this year, a shocking discovery had rocked Jenny's family, says Jenny, leaving her questioning whether 23andMe might have revealed another one. She played it off as a funny mistake, but it got her thinking. They are actually just cousins, so. But she was wondering if her parents had might have slept with one of her aunts or uncles.

So that could be quite upsetting. And there's a lot of different things like this that have happened. There's the man who donated sperm in college and discovered years later that he had 17 biological children. The husband who discovered his daughter is actually the biological child of his ex-wife and the man she had an affair with. And the woman who was adopted at birth and reunited with her siblings.

So sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don't. And what they've discovered is there's a bit of an algorithm to this relatives thing that just takes things like age and possible genetic matches and just they kind of guess. Which is probably not the best thing for something that's claiming to be science.

Yeah. Guessing with, you know, people's lives like this. Bad. Bad. Very bad. We're just going to put that. We're just going to find the little checkbox marked bad and we're going to check that one. Yeah, so take it all with a grain of salt if you're checking out that relatives feature because they are definitely doing things like calculating an age and other ideas like that and just kind of going, yeah, this could possibly be your second cousin twice removed or your uncle.

Who knows? Bob's your uncle, literally. Yeah, I get about 100 new relative notices. They're chunked. So I get like, hey, you got 15 new relatives. You got 30 new relatives. You know, would you like to check them out?

I'm like, no. God, Christmas is getting expensive. Yeah, seriously, man. So I just hit no on those and don't share my data with any of these people because, you know, I just don't care. I really don't care. So, yeah, I'm going to stick to my plan now that I know that it's probably just bullshit anyway.

Right. Speaking of bullshit, Waymo is coming to L.A. Okay. Do you have thoughts, Brian? I have thoughts. If you were running one of these companies and you wanted to kind of figure out and get things going and have some test cases and then, you know, in your heart of hearts, the technology is there.

Do you pick the city in the world with the worst fucking traffic and drivers? Yeah. Yeah, I know. Are you kidding me? Just what we need on L.A. streets, more cars. Thank you. These people are morons. Well, here's the thing.

They're only bringing three cars so far. Some minivans, to be precise. And they're going to have human drivers because they're mapping the city. Okay. Well, that's not quite bringing self-driving cars. Well, this is a precursor to them actually bringing cars because once they have the... No, it's not.

It's one day into the experiment going, we got to get the fuck out of this city. Yeah, once they've figured out that they can only do like one or two square blocks a day because they can't move because they're stuck in gridlock. Yeah. So, yeah, we're going to see how this one goes out.

But, you know, there's this whole thing that L.A. DOT's trying to do where they're trying to get everybody to share their data, you know, with scooters. It's called the mobile data specification. And they're trying to get... Yeah, use our roads, share your data. And it hasn't come out yet if Waymo is going to actually do this or not because Waymo would not respond.

So, we'll see how that goes. But, man. You'd think that that would have to be part of the permit process. And they did have to get a permit. So, we will see. Yeah, I mean, did they really have to get a permit just because they're mapping? Yeah. Under California law, companies need to obtain a permit from the State Department of Motor Vehicles in order to test self-driving vehicles on public roads.

At this point, though, they're not actually testing self-driving vehicles. All right. It is just a map. Yeah. So, we'll see. Once they get to the next level, we'll see if they... They'll probably get hung out over a barrel to say, hey, yeah, sure. We'll give you a license, but we want your data, too. Right. Yay. Well, you know that nifty sign-in-with-Apple feature that we're all quite excited about?

Sure. You're excited? Yeah. Well, you know, I like it. I think it's great. You know, the generating unique email addresses and all that sort of stuff. It's a great little feature, one that'll probably put things like, I don't know, 1Password out of business. But apparently, somebody's already claiming that they got put out of business by Apple because blue mail creator Blix is suing Apple for allegedly violating a 2017 patent on the share email feature in its own app.

They claim that the generation of unique email addresses for sign-in copies, their ability to share a public email address for messaging while hiding your actual address. This should not be surprising to anyone. Apple always finds good features and steals them. Yeah, they do. I think... I don't even know if they would have even known about this one, though.

It's kind of... I know. This one is a bit... The patents on these sorts of no-shit Sherlock things is kind of a strange thing. Yeah. As, you know, we've mentioned several thousand times in the past, we don't really believe in software patents, but it's one of those things.

Yeah, I don't really think that Blix has too much of a leg to stand on because I'm sure that there's prior art out there. And Apple will certainly send their people out to dig it up and have the patent violated. Or, you know, what they could do, just buy Blix. Because who the fuck's heard of Blix?

You know? I've never heard of Blix either, so I've never heard of Blix, never heard of Blue Meal. So, you know, I think it's probably cheaper just to buy Blix and say, shut up, here's a cubicle, try not to run into the glass. And we've got a new California law. Well, a set of California laws that are seeking to crack down on deep fakes in politics and porn.

Two peas that taste great together. Our lovely Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the greatest people on the planet. On Thursday, he signed in AB730, which makes it illegal to distribute manipulated videos that aim to discredit a political candidate and deceive voters within 60 days of an election.

Why such a weird number? I don't know. You're totally fine up until 60 days. Yeah, so everybody, make sure that on 61 days before an election, you set a reminder to stop sending out your... Put it in your buffer app. Stop sharing those on the 60 days on it.

Yeah, you got to take them down, I guess, you know. He also signed AB602, which gives Californians the right to sue someone who creates deep fakes that place them in pornographic material without consent. AKA Photoshop that anybody's ever had from day one.

But I guess this is videos. Yes. I'm all right with this. I think they're both good laws. Again, the 60 days thing doesn't make any sense. Why not just make it illegal outright? It doesn't... No, I don't understand the time frame on it. Yeah, I'm sure there's a legal reason for that because you do have to have some kind of window.

So if I make a deepfake video now about, you know, the 2024 election and then somebody actually gets on the ballot for a video I made back then, you know, it's just... Right. Okay, I get it. Okay, I see. I mean, it's a windowing thing for the lawyers to make it easier. But, you know, if I posted 61 days before and it's still available on day 59, does that mean that I'm still in violation of the law, even though I, you know, posted on 61, so...

Yeah, that's a good point because, you know, once you put something out there, it's no longer in your control, right? Yeah. Like, other people can be posting it and just because you created it and authored it, like... And who's policing this anyways? Do we have California Net Police now? I don't think so. We barely have regular police.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't think so either. It's designed to make illegal distribution of the videos. So it's not the creation of the videos, it's the distribution. So if you're posting videos... Oh. So who then would be responsible? Would the platform have responsibility for taking these things down?

Hmm. Yeah. And what's newsworthy then? Can somebody show it as part of the news and say, here's a manipulated video that we found? It's, oh, it's 45 days of the election. Are they going to sue CNN? They need to... We got to dig into that one. We're going to flesh this out a bit.

Yeah. And we just talked a little bit about how Opera has put out a new version that will stop people from tracking you, at least until people get around that. Well, the Russians already have, in their own method. Kaspersky has detailed attempts by the Russian group Turla to fingerprint TLS-encrypted web traffic by modifying Chrome and Firefox.

They infect systems with remote-access Trojans and use that to modify the browsers, starting with installing their own certificates and then patching random number generators that negotiate TLS connections. That lets them add a fingerprint to every TLS action and passively track encrypted traffic. Clever.

Why are they doing it? We're not entirely sure, but there might be something to do with the fact that Turla is believed to work under the protection of the Russian government, and all initial targets were located in Russia and Belarus. So they are going after specific dissidents and political targets in a completely state action that has hacked the hell out of some browsers.

For now, it's state action. You know, they're going... For now. Yeah, they're keeping it internal right now. But I'm sure that now that they have the technology, it'll be interesting and it'll be really interesting to see what Chrome and Firefox can do about that because... Exactly. Yeah, this comes down to the certificates, you know?

So they're going to have to figure out some way to really start locking down certificates, but, you know, people have talked about this for over a decade now, so... Yes, they have. And we still have bad certificates. What are you going to do? Come on, guys. Clock's a-tick in here. Jesus Christ. That's right.

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Media candy. Brian, I don't know if you've paid too much attention to the internet lately. I try not to. Yeah, because I put two things in the show notes where I was very surprised you didn't beat me to it. The first up is Star Trek Picard. The trailer dropped at New York City Comic Con.

And, oh boy. Oh boy. Riker, Troy, I am so excited. I know, I know. I just, I haven't seen Geordi yet. We haven't seen him. We don't know if LaVar is coming back. And, you know, Colin Meaney doesn't really do the movies, but since this isn't really a movie, maybe they can get him back.

Yeah, well, they gotta save something for season two. That's true. That's true. I would love to see O'Brien back on the ship somehow. And his haughty wife. That's true. That's true. So January 23rd, start the countdown. It's not that far off. Time's a ticking, so I'm very, very excited about this.

CBS will be finally getting my monies. Yep, they will. And in between then and now, though, on December 13th, The Expanse is back for season four. Oh, yeah. I was actually wondering just last week. I'm like, I have not heard a damn thing about The Expanse. When is that company coming?

Company. Company. When is that coming? And December 13th, that's very, very near. I can't wait. I'm very excited. I think I might have to go back and at least watch season three again or something, just to refresh the memory on what's been going on. Be nice if they, Amazon, put together a little recap. Yeah.

You know how Netflix does that when you come back? They do like a three-minute recap of the entire previous season or the entire series. When Orange is the New Black came back for the final season, the recap took like 10 minutes. I'm like, they went back to season one.

Yeah, we don't need that for The Expanse because season one and season two were so significantly different than season three was. Yeah, they were. I kind of want to go back and watch the whole thing again, though, because that would be good. And like I mentioned last week, I was talking about going back and watching Mr. Robot from the beginning to get ready for the final season.

Watch the first episode of the final season and man, I'm glad I didn't waste my time. Wow. Yeah. I've heard it's very dark. Oh, it's extremely dark, but it's always been dark, but it's dark in a good way because there was a lot of Christian Slater in this one, which I enjoy.

I enjoy seeing the Christian Slater on the screen. You know, it was JD and Heathers. I have an affinity for him. I mean, pump up the volume. I love that movie. I've seen that movie once. That's the funny thing. I've only seen that movie once and I thought it was okay.

That's funny because I was going to ask you if it had legs. I don't know. Well, we might have to do an episode for that one. Uh, I did see it. Chapter two. Did you? Yes, I did. Okay. Wow. What a long ass movie. That's not what I was hoping for.

Two hours and 45 minutes. All right. Um, it's a big ass book. It is a big ass book. And I have to say that I, I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than the ending for the TV series or the mini series way back in the day with Tim Curry.

Right. Um, they did some, some interesting stuff. It took a long time to, you know, get there, but it finally got there and I thought it was decent. I thought it was actually decent about halfway through. Man, I had to take three P breaks because it's so long.

I'm only halfway done, but I have to say, I think they did a good job with it. I, I thoroughly enjoyed it and you know, a lot of good, a lot of good actors in there. So yeah, it, uh, I, I think they deliver on it. Honestly, I do. Excellent. I will have to watch them.

I'll, I'll, I'll do it around Halloween time, but I have to watch them after everybody goes to bed. Cause kids too young. Wife doesn't like horror movies. Uh, yeah, there's your problem. Yep. And I watched the thing called inside Bill's brain decoding Bill Gates on Netflix. It's a three part documentary.

Mm hmm. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Okay. There's billboards all around me for this. So I was thinking about watching it as well, but I wanted to wait and see what you thought. No, I totally enjoyed it. And even my roommate who's like, you know, 61 year old woman who has no desire to do anything about tech.

I can't even get her to like learn how to use her iPhone properly. Um, thoroughly loved it and was the one badgering me at night. Can we, can we watch more Bill? Can we watch more Bill? I'm like, okay. Cause it goes through a bunch of his different, uh, projects that he's working on, you know, one's toilets, one's a nuclear reactor, which I really hope they make someday and, uh, some other stuff.

And it's just a cool look into Bill Gates and man, he looks old for his age. Cause he's only like 63, but he looks like he's in his seventies. He's got Obama syndrome big time, but, uh, yeah, he's a, he's a smart, cool cat. And the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim spent two years with him to make this, to make this documentary.

So it's, it's well done. It's well thought out and it's pretty interesting. Highly recommended. I will watch that. One of my favorite bands of all time has announced that they will be doing a tour of North America and Europe next year. So I'm very excited about that. Dead Can Dance. What? They announced a celebration, life and works, 1980 to 2020.

Been around a long time. Yeah. So they're going to do 10 dates in the U S including a stop in Los Angeles. Very excited about that. No new album, which is a bit of a bummer, but they did put one out last year. So what are you going to do? But, uh, they are so phenomenal live. I cannot even express it. They're one of my favorite live shows of all time.

So I will be there. Definitely. They're playing at the Greek. Hmm. Yes. It's a great venue. I might have to, I mean, uh, I'm not even going to bother. I'm going to say, I'm going to go and then I'm not. It's okay. I know you're not, but, uh, I will be there. Okay.

And believe it or not, my wife and I actually got out this weekend and had a date night, got the babysitter and everything. And we went out to see one of her favorite standup comics, Ali Wong on the milk and money tour at the Wiltern. It was awesome. I hope she puts this out as a Netflix special as well. If you have not seen her comedy, Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife are both on Netflix right now.

Very, very funny. Had a damn good night. Now I'm always, I'm always curious about this because I've never gone to see one of these big like comic shows because it seems like, you know, you, you get all there, you got driving, you got parking, you sit down and it's like shorter than a movie and then you have to drive all the way home and it's expensive.

I mean, do they have opening acts or? Yeah, she had an opening act and she did a solid 90 minutes, I'd say. Okay. Okay. Good. Cause you got to remember the, the, the specials that are released are edited down. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I know there, there's a lot more material that they do. And all that sort of stuff.

So it's, it's, you get your bang for your buck, I'd say. Okay, cool. Very cool. Siri apparently had an opinion. And everybody in the world has sent me this link. Le Creuset has announced the Star Wars line of cookware.

We already have our Le Creuset cookware and 450 bucks for a Han Solo Carbonite signature roaster is just not going to do it for me. Besides that thing's supposed to be cold, not hot. Patreon.com slash G-O-G. Come on. So if I'm going to get any Han Solo item where he's in Carbonite, it would be the fridge.

Cause that would make more sense. That would make more sense. Yes. Um, yeah, this looks way overpriced. So, well, I mean, they're expensive anyways. The pricing isn't too out of line with what their normal pricing is, but, uh, I just can't see myself having, although I do like the Millennium Falcon and Darth Star trivets.

Those are pretty nice. And they're only 20 bucks. Only 20 bucks. Trivets. Come on. I mean, it's just, it's a fucking trivet. And I, yeah, but it's the Falcon, man. Yeah. And I'm not going to pay $400 for the Darth Vader Dutch oven. Come on. Well, you know, they're owned by Disney now.

So the pricing is going to be pretty high. And speaking of Disney, Disney's new streaming service has been out in the wild for a little while now, but only in, uh, in Norway, I believe. Why Norway? You'd think it'd be in Sweden. Oh, the Netherlands. Netherlands. Yeah.

You'd think Sweden. Yes. So they're testing the service out because, uh, almost everybody speaks English there. Uh, there's a big Disney, uh, following there. Apparently they watch a lot of, uh, you know, movies in English and watch a lot of Disney stuff and it's a relatively small controlled community.

So they're able to, much like almost everybody tests things in Hawaii, the Netherlands is apparently is a good place too. So they've launched it there to, uh, gauge consumer response and iron out any technical kinks before it launches here on November 12th. And, uh, so far the, uh, the reviews are pretty good in terms of how the service actually works and what you're getting for it.

Um, you know, it's basically Netflix-esque and the feedback they've gotten so far is make it more like Netflix. But the, uh, the one downside I saw is because, uh, they're basically putting all their content up. Uh, older folks such as us sought out older titles they were nostalgic for, such as the Rocketeer or Race to Witch Mountain and, uh, found out that they do not have legs.

Oh man. So he was sorry to find movies didn't hold up as well as he thought they did. For adults like me, I think Disney Plus will shatter a lot of good memories. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. That's the worst. When you, when you, when you find something like that, it was a classic and it doesn't have legs like, oh, I don't know, like the movie airplane, which definitely does not have legs.

Oh my God. It's terrible, dude. We, we covered it on, on does it have legs and it was just not good. It was not good. Have you ever been in a Turkish prison? Yeah. Have you ever seen a grown man naked? See, the problem is it's just, yeah, it doesn't hold up. You, you've heard the jokes. You, you know, what's coming. It's just not funny.

And the worst of the bunch was a weekend at Bernie's. We actually didn't even do a show. We like started talking about it and we're like, this is such a piece of shit. We can't even make a show out of it. I didn't think that one was good the first time around. That's true. That's true. We might've, we might as well have done Encino man, you know, come on.

That's probably better. Actually, I think Encino man probably does have legs. Uh, don't wheeze the juice, man. Don't wheeze the juice. Uh, so the interesting thing I'm wondering about here is, is everything up there? Do they have the, you know? I guarantee you song of the South. Yeah.

That's, that's not the, what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about the Mandalorian. Is that up there right now? Are they, are they holding back some of the launch day stuff? I'm sure that they are because otherwise that would be all over Sweden. It would have leaped from the Netherlands to Sweden. I tell you what, the first thing I was going to do when we hung up the phone today was go look for it because somebody in, in Amsterdam has to, has to have a BitTorrent client.

Come on guys. Let's go. At the library. Brian, I got a couple of books here this week. Alrighty. I got face it, a memoir by Debbie Harry that we talked about previously that was all jacked up on the Kindle.

It's no longer even available. I know they pulled the whole, they pulled the whole thing, which is crazy. I have not read it yet. I, uh, I grabbed it on audible because Debbie actually reads it herself. Nice. Uh, the first half of the book, I have to say was interesting, very good.

I enjoyed it. It wasn't as rip roaring as I was expecting, but it was decent. Well, she is still alive. Yeah. And, but the second half of the book, uh, I was like, can I get a 10 X speed on this audio book because I was so bored. It really didn't have the punch that the first half did.

And it's yeah. And she ends it in a really weird way. I don't, I don't quite know what to make of the whole thing, but, um, really I, I'd say if you get it, don't feel too obligated to keep going at a certain point.

If it starts to get boring, it doesn't get better. I'm just going to say, say that. All right. Well, I mean, there's not a lot that really happened in Blondie's career post nine nineties. I mean, even post eighties really. Um, so I could see how it'd be front loaded with the more interesting stuff for sure.

Yeah. I mean, the, the interesting stuff was definitely New York in the seventies, you know, hanging out with Basquiat and, you know, Warhol and all those guys and Joan Jett, the Ramones, all that, all that stuff is, you know, the classic CBGB stuff. That stuff was fun to listen to. Uh, but yeah, when she starts talking about her film career and all that, which like you really want to call that a film career, but.

Okay. Granted, you were in more films than me, so I can't really talk. I've only been in one film intercourse with a vampire. Yes. I was an extra intercourse with a vampire. Your IMDb pages of legend. I know that's what happens when you know people in the porn biz, you get roped into standing in line at two o'clock in the morning for really, really crappy, crappy porn videos.

And I also got Embrace Your Weird, Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity by Felicia Day, one of the nerd queens. I was about to say Felicia Day is a name I hear all the time, but know absolutely nothing about. Well, I mean, the, her breakout success was with the Guild, the YouTube series, which was, which was funny.

You know, you kind of had to be a Warcraft player to get a lot of the jokes. There's my problem. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was decent. It was funny. A friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, turned me onto that one way back in the day. But since then, she's, you know, she's been in TV and lots of stuff.

And also Dr. Horrible. She was amazing in Dr. Horrible. I loved, loved her in Dr. Horrible. But the book, yeah, there was a lot of, I, I, you're going to make fun of me for this, but she, she has you go back to your childhood a lot to come up with these creative things.

It's like, remember when you were in third grade? Remember when you were in fourth grade? Try and do this. And I was totally like, I was getting like a panic attack. I'm like, the last thing I want to do is remember my life before 15, because it was so fucking miserable. I do not want to remember any of that.

Yeah. That probably doesn't work for everybody. Yeah. So about, you know, about 20 per, actually 15% in, I'm like refund. I couldn't, I couldn't do it. And it's, it's also a lot of homework. You have to like, you know, do a lot of work. Well, it's a self-help book, right?

Yeah, but it's kind of, but it's a creativity book. I mean, I've, I've taken college level creativity courses. I know how to be creative. It's not, it's, this stuff was just, it was kind of fluff and filler and just really not up my alley. If you need some help to be creative, then maybe check out this book, but that's all it was.

And I'm just like, no, I immediately got a refund. Then I spent like two days on BetterHelp trying to talk to my therapist about why this book fucking made me so miserable. I'm like, thanks, Felicia. Okay. Jason really does not want to revisit his childhood.

No, I don't. This is the lesson we've learned here. A tip of the hat to David and Doiji, both who sent us this particular news story. Russian man sues Apple for turning him gay. I love the headline on this one.

Me too. A Russian man has filed a lawsuit against Apple for moral harm, claiming that an iPhone app has turned him gay. According to a copy of the complaint seen by the AFP, the man filed suit in a Moscow court asking for 1 million rubles, approximately 22,000 Australian dollars, because I guess this comes from Australian, after an incident this summer in which a cryptocurrency called Gaycoin was delivered via a smartphone app rather than the Bitcoin he had ordered.

His lawyer insists the case is serious, saying that her client was scared and he suffered. The Gaycoin cryptocurrency arrived with a note saying, don't judge until you try. And here's where it goes sideways for me, as if it hadn't already.

I thought, in truth, how can I judge something without trying? I decided to try same-sex relationships, the complainant wrote. Now I have a boyfriend and I do not know how to explain this to my parents. My life has been changed for the worse and will never become normal again, he added. Oh my god, see, we've talked about the evils of cryptocurrency for years now.

And now we know what happens. Now, now, there's nothing evil about being gay. So, you know, don't judge until you try, Jason. Now that I've said it, you must try, apparently. Try before you buy. Okay. Wow. Wow. Oh man, well, it seemed to have worked, because he does have a boyfriend now, so.

Yes, well, you know, I guess he's happy. Except, you know, not, apparently. Gaycoin. Gaycoin. That's the best. Yes, he was forced to get an iPhone, forced to download cryptocurrency, forced to get gaycoin, and now, obviously, because they said, go try it, he was forced to become gay.

Feedback loop. Over on Patreon, we've got a couple new subscribers. Alan Murray. And Murray writes in, in case you want a book recommendation, read this. It was really good. And it's called Rivers of London. And we have a link to that in the show notes. Yes, we do. And a lot of people have been jumping ship from Patreon to PayPal.

We don't care. We'll take your money anywhere. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal, we have Sarah, David, Jody, Dan, Breed, William, Elizabeth, and Doug, who writes in, you guys are good, but since everything else is so bad, you look great. It was a bit of a slap in the case. Damning with faint praise. Thanks, grumps. And for Jason, go ahead.

Deliveroo! Or however that goes. That's kind of how that goes. Yes. I wonder how many people that are sending in the Deliveroo requests actually heard the original episode where that came out. I don't know. We've been doing it for so long now.

Yeah. I don't care. I'll keep doing it. You keep paying. I'll keep doing it. You deliver. I'll Deliveroo. How's that? Over at Twitter, Stuart writes in, deepfake videos double in nine months. Yeah. New research shows an alarming surge in the creation of so-called deepfake videos with the number online almost doubling in the last nine months.

There is also evidence that production of these videos is becoming a lucrative business. Now, before we get too worried about it, they found, okay, so they found 14,000 as opposed to 7,000 last year around the same time. 96% of them were pornographic in nature, often with a computer-generated face of a celebrity replacing that of the original adult actor in a scene of sexual activity.

Well, that's what technology is for. That's, you know, porn drives the world forward. Now, the funny thing about this is, don't we have a problem trying to discern if a video is a deepfake? Isn't that, you know, where we're at right now?

I'm, well, I'm reasonably sure Natalie Portman has never taken it up the keister on a film. As far as you know. That's a deepfake. Remember the fappening? You never know. Well, you never know, I suppose, yes. It's quite well lit. Okay. I'm just really wondering how they're coming across these.

And yeah, I mean, hell of a job if you can get it, I guess. Yeah. I suppose. I don't know. I think I'd end up with the same kind of emotional pain after a while that all those folks in the Philippines are experiencing going through Facebook. Or in the San Fernando Valley because, like, I worked in that business and it messes you up bad.

Yes. Stuart also sent in, I think you guys have mentioned how electric cars are unsafe. Well, they seem to have been listening. And this is over at the BBC. Electric car owners to choose engine sounds. So the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says car makers may give several sound choices to owners of the quiet cars and vehicles must generate the noise when traveling at less than 30 miles per hour.

So great. It's actually 19 miles per hour, 30 kilometers an hour. Oh, sorry. We don't do metric, man. Fuck it. Yeah. I got to get used to it. Canada, man. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I found this one because it was just awesome. Elon Musk wants his cars to fart and bleat in the name of safety.

Because why not? He's a big fan of Monty Python. So. Oh, boy, do I know that. My wife had to, uh, no, I can't talk about that. Damn. Okay. Tell me off the air. I want to know. So, yeah, he's talking about different sounds that he wants to put in his Teslas.

You know, the sound of goats, farts, and even coconuts. I think the coconuts would be great. Oh, that would be amazing. I would fall down laughing if a Tesla pulled up behind me and made the coconut noise. I know. And as soon as you hit the brakes at Winnie's, I would totally, I would totally be fine with that one.

It's just the no noise that drives me crazy. But the problem is, in the EU, the car's fake noise should sound similar to the sound of a vehicle of the same category equipped with an internal combustion engine. You guys suck. You guys are so boring. Come on. Well, here's the deal.

It's a software update. So here in the States, give me the damn coconuts. That's right. And Right Film Sleep Repeat sends us a link and says, and so it begins. And this is from the Wall Street Journal. Disney bans Netflix ads as streaming marketing wars intensify.

So across all of Disney's properties, they will not take any ads from Netflix because they're competing. Yeah, that's bullshit. There's got to be some laws. Is it though? There's got to be some laws. Because we choose what advertisers we take, Jason. That's true. But you have the right to do that.

But we're not major corporations in charge of the stewardship of the mind share of the country. I watch. We're not? Yes, man. We have a lot of listeners now, man. I watch DirecTV. I have a DirecTV, you know, system in my house. But I get Comcast ads all day long. I get Time Warner Cable ads all day long.

You know what? You know what drives me crazy? I have, uh, I have Spectrum. I get Spectrum ads. I already have you. Oh, you want the worst one, man. HBO Now. Oh, God. I'm watching HBO that I'm paying for every month and before every fucking show is an ad for HBO.

I'm just like, um, yeah, you got the money. Stop it. Come on. Yeah. Oh, by the way, speaking of HBO, if you have, if you've never seen the deuce, holy shit, what a great show. I have not. I've heard good things about it though. Yeah. It's the final season.

So we, it, that fits in Brian's rule of television. That's true. Uh, but man, we're watching the first season. It is so good. Highly recommended. Okay. And over at GOG.show, Stephen writes in Scooger, Scooger, scooter regulation done almost right.

Hundreds lose their driving licenses during Oktoberfest. E-scooter mayhem. Oh, I've actually, this is set. Well, this is good news, but I'm saddened to hear that the, the e-scooters have taken over Munich. Munich is a beautiful city and, uh, I, that's God, I can't believe they're there now.

That sucks. It is. Yes. But, uh, yeah, Oktoberfest is raging right now and a total of 414 people were caught riding e-scooters while under the influence and 254 lost their driving licenses as a result. Well done. Well done, German police.

Yeah. That's actually, I wish we could get that here. I really do. Yeah. And Jason writes in, Planet Money came out with a great summary on how startup culture got so overinflated with massive investment funds and how it changed everything from startups and the global economy in general.

They use WeWork as an example. And he has a link to, uh, the podcast on Overcast. I like Planet Money. That's a great podcast. I listen to it fairly frequently. They just come out with too many damn episodes. Yeah, it's a good show. I mean, I have, I stopped listening to it a while ago just because I had podcast overload, but, uh, whenever I go back to it and listen to it, it's really good.

You know? Yeah, I'm going to have to go listen to this one. Yeah, for sure. So Jason continues, can we coin the phrase monopoly as a service by giving massive and endless money to a company that can compete in monopolistic ways, selling at a loss for longer than their competitors or outspending on marketing? Yeah, that's what we've been saying all along right now.

It's, that's why all these companies are not profitable. It's, it's a race to be the only one left and then you win. That's, that's kind of it. Yeah. Let's get market share. Let's get mind share, put our competition out of business and then profit. In theory.

In theory. If we can hold out long enough. Barbara writes in, hey guys, maybe time to record a new intro since it still says a weekly podcast. Just saying. Well, I'm just saying we know we're not idiots. We know. I did talk to our VO guy.

He's trying to find the parts to his mic and then we'll get it done at some point. That's the parts to his mic. I, I don't know. I, okay. I'm not, I, it's best not to ask questions sometimes. No, we, he's got a microphone. We sent him and he's going to get it together and we'll, we'll have those re-recorded at some point.

I'd really like him to come up and do it here at the studio because a, I just want to hang out, but also it's a, yeah, that's mainly it. I just want to hang out with Bob. So Bob, come on up, hang out at the studio. Let's, let's make some new bumpers. There you go. Martin writes in a couple episodes ago.

You guys talked about the simply safe alarm systems and wanting to possibly get your hands on one of them. This video came to mind by the lockpicking lawyer and it's a YouTube link, which is in our show notes. And, uh, yeah, I apparently simply safe isn't all that safe if people know what they're doing. Right. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. Your best bet at security is still your giant ass dog who will deter any would be meth head that wants to look through your shit for all the professional thieves who know of all the gear you've got in your garage or where your cameras are, which alarm system you use and the various means of self-defense you stash next to your front entrance because they listen to your show.

They'll get in just fine. There's no zero risk. Unfortunately, even the guy that hid in the forest for 16 years to escape labor camps in China was found with a drone. Mind you, he was trafficking kids. So in my opinion, they should have roasted his ass with the flamethrower drones they also use over there. Oh yeah.

Look, if somebody wants to get into your place, they're getting into your place. Full stop. No matter what. So that's that. Yeah. And, and, you know, don't believe everything you see on TV. Um, what we're trying to do is deter the lazy. Yes. Those are the ones that we care about, but also, yeah, the, the, the high end stuff that actually costs money is not kept in the garage overnight.

That stuff is locked away. Nice and tight. Nudge, nudge, wink. Yes. With a, uh, with a big ass set of dogs next to it. So that shit's not going anywhere. If somebody broken to my garage and actually wanted to raid the studio, there is probably less than a thousand dollars street value on any, if they, if they literally could get everything out of here with a, with a truck, which would never happen because in 30 seconds, besides what are they going to do?

Start a podcast. Hey man, welcome to the meth head podcast. This school is sponsored by one 800 dentist. Cause you know, your teeth are fucked up, dude. So, uh, yeah, let's talk. Hey, that's a good library. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. That's what I'm sorry.

Never do your method. And I had to go, I had to have a bump. Sorry. Jesse writes in, in regards to the last episode, specifically the comment about the simply safe security system, the ADT guy wasn't entirely incorrect, though. I doubt he actually knows what he's talking about. Okay.

The wireless keypads transmit the disarm and arm pin, which is encoded to the base station, but it's easily sniffable with a cheap SDR receiver and some open source software. More information on the GitHub repo. So the source code to do that is right over there on GitHub.

Link will be in the show notes. Again, this involves some very industrious and hardworking thieves. Well, it's actually not that much. I think SDR stands for, was it software defined radio? So you can like, it's basically a receiver that you can tune with software. But, uh, yeah, I, it's pretty simple stuff.

And Mike writes in Jason, I installed the simply safe system in my house when we built it five years ago. Overall, we have been very happy to listen to the links that we just said. Well, my big question here is, is he installed the simply safe system in his house when he built it? The whole point of simply safe is that it's wireless.

So you don't have to pull all the wires. You're building your house. You could have wired everything very easily when you built it. What are you doing? The wired system still suck. It's still ADT and all those old ones. Anyways, he says there are a couple of issues when the batteries on the keypad or sirens start running low.

You get some weird sounds and it takes a bit of time to figure out what exactly is going on. Okay. Okay. Right there. The keypad though, you should have wired up. That one you should have actually wired to the house current. Right? Yeah. Okay. The other, you built your house. You could have wired it, man. The other issue is that it loses connectivity with the monitoring service from time to time.

It does give you a spoken warning when this happens. The fix is to unplug the base station and take the batteries out for a minute. Then you put the batteries back in and plug it back in. That always fixes it. Turn it off and turn it back on. Other than these two minor irritants, which you could have not had by wiring it when you built your house.

It works great. Oh, God. Sorry, Mike. Oh, God. Yeah. I met Mike over at the club, my podcast club. He's got a great aviation podcast. It's called Taking Flight. Highly recommend checking it out if you're into flying and behind the scenes stories.

But yeah, if you were building your house, you should have wired that shit up, man. You could have had cameras everywhere and you didn't need to, you could have used the open source stuff that Dave Bittner was talking about the other day, which I still have to try. I'm too busy trying to worry about if I can do all my backups to get Catalina installed right now.

I'm breaking my computers and everything in one way or another every week, but that one. And if you're a budding podcaster, join us over at the club. It's club.podcastschool.co. We got, I think we've got about 100 people over there now. Pretty fun. Yeah. And Adam writes in, it sucks that we need this tech, but check out this face projector that helps protect against facial recognition.

This is a video over at Reddit and I think it's kind of cool. It's cool. I don't know how well it's going to work in Hong Kong and facial recognition, but I sure as hell want one of these for Halloween. It is cool looking.

It is pretty cool. I got to give them that. But yeah, here's the thing. If you're wearing one of those, you're going to get arrested anyway. Yeah, I'm pretty sure, pretty sure. Yeah. Carl writes in, in the closing shout out in episode 380, I heard you lamenting that people don't build stuff that much anymore.

I was listening to that episode while adapting a Raspberry Pi to an old sprinkler controller I got at a garage sale. I've had enough with sprinkler controllers crapping out at the wrong time and the horrible user interface. I've been building electronic stuff since I was in elementary school. Starting with vacuum tube radios, I still love it 50 plus years later.

I was an electronic engineer for 40 some years and with all these projects I'm working on, I have less free time now than I did while working. Love the show. Your grumpiness fits my demeanor well. Keep it up and stay grumpy. Well, Carl, I think you could adapt this into an actual product you could sell.

It's just, you know, slap the AI label on it. Yeah, get funding. There you go. AI sprinkler system. You're good to go. That's it. Profit. Well, you get funding. That's the profit. Then you move to Belize and say, fuck you all. I took your money. Thank you very much. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah. Quibble writes in, so disappointed in the way Apple handled this app. And this is the controversy is Apple removes Hong Kong protest app saying it's illegal. Yes, they did. But we have an update on that. They have reversed their decision and they brought back the Hong Kong protest app, aka HK map live.

So it's they reverse course. Yeah, well, they shouldn't have done it in the first place. Yeah, they shouldn't have. But it's a tough spot there right now. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And Doug E writes in for fun.

Ask Alexa, what is 100, 100, 100 in Welsh? Or look it up on YouTube. It's so funny. I have a link to the YouTube. I have a YouTube link in the show notes and you probably should have mentioned it's not safe for work because I pulled this up when my kid was around. Yeah. Whoopsie.

I watched the video. I'm like, oh, oh, that's that's funny. Neil writes in. Hi, Grumps. I thought you may like to see the short sightedness of this decision by the Australian government again. Here we go. OK, what is this? This is my moron of the week. Geoscience Australia to stop printing and selling topographic maps from December.

Oh, I saw this one. Yeah. Yes. Lack of demand. Nobody's buying physical maps. So, I mean, I understand where they're coming from with this because nobody's paying for it. But, you know, maybe do some print on demand or something. I don't know.

But everybody loves a good map. I've got maps everywhere. But the interesting thing is that he also talks about how they used to have fire warnings and evacuation warnings on on the radio on AM and FM. So when there was something that went down, you know, you could check the radio and give you information, which was the fucking radios for.

But apparently a few years ago, they shut it down in favor of SMS warnings. Well, in a disaster, guess what happens? The fucking cell network goes down and they get burnt in a fire like what happened around here. And you just want to be able to turn the radio on.

Well, that's silly. So I see. Yeah. And he also says, P.S. If the electronic maps fail, how will the Deliveroo driver find my place? Well, do they even have Deliveroo in Australia? I don't know. Maybe they do. Well, you know, if they don't have Deliveroo, they can get kangaroo.

Oh, boy. Sarah writes in. Hi, guys. I was listening to episode 381 and heard you mention that the Kindle version of Face It, the blondie book, would only display landscape. I had the same problem today, but with a different book and was wondering what was going on. At least I know it's not anything like my device effing up.

I also got around to finally making a PayPal donation and forwarding to Jason the cartoon I made of Trump in the style of all I see is Hitler cartoon y'all inspired a few months back. It's about as not safe for work as the Hitler one. And yes, I saw it. Yes, it was very funny. Also, I made my IT guy husband listen to your show enough that he actually asks independently if there's a new episode out.

I consider that a win. Go to subscribe, dude. You don't have to actually ask. We make two of these a week. Just subscribe to the damn show. Come on. Yes, Sarah. Thanks for the cartoon. They're very funny. Just just as your Hitler one was as well. They're a little bit too racy to publish to the website.

Yeah, those are just for us. So we're going to hang on to that. But very well done. Thank you very much. And Shiloh writes in Dear Grumps on the whole radiology thing. I work in tech transfer with a focus on imaging tech and AI. Main thing.

Nobody's machine learning AI based imagery plays works well, very well. What the fuck? This includes card imagery plays work very well as in like the imagery play being. OK, gotcha. This includes cardiac indications, cancer imaging, and possibly most importantly, pre-surgical interventional studies.

I can't read today. The areas where image recognition programs are outperforming professionals are ridiculously specialized and the deck is stacked in favor of the AI. Additionally, the AI's ability to factor in any sort of comorbidity is basically non-existent. Will it get better? Yes. However, only in the same way self-driving cars will.

We're probably 30 years out from meaningful displacement of radiologists. And honestly, as the tech gets better, it's likely to only increase the demand for interventional radiologists, basically radiologists slash surgeons. All the best, etc. I really want to hear about your least favorite VC-backed company.

Well, tune in every week because that's what our show is all about. And because I can't resist poking the bear, and the AI newsfeed popped this up for me yesterday, pigeons are as good as radiologists at spotting breast cancer, scientists say.

Oh. So who needs AI? Yeah, a paper published this week, Levison Wasserman and their colleagues reported that the trained pigeons could tell the difference between cancerous and normal tissue, and the pigeons were really, really good at it.

Researchers first trained the pigeons to spot abnormalities using a process called operant conditioning. After only 15 days, the pigeons could easily identify which slides showed cancerous cells and which didn't. To make sure they weren't just memorizing the images, they used brand new images that the pigeons had never seen before.

The pigeons continued to ace the test, spotting breast cancer with 85% accuracy, and it only got better from there. When the researchers combined the results of four birds, the flock's accuracy rate reached a mind-boggling 99%. So fucking pigeons are going to take over your jobs before AI does.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, my friend. Oh, God. So Matthias writes in, so grumpy's kind of new listener, not binged, not binged listened to all the episodes, but one question though. What's the deal with Sweden, since I'm a grumpy Swedish geek?

Brian, would you care to take this one? Sweden is just kind of our go-to term for we're downloading something illegally from the internets. Right. The Pirate Bay was birthed in Sweden, so if we're going to Sweden, and I have to give credit where credit is due. We did not come up with that.

My brother Gregory did, because we're sitting there at dinner one night, and I'm like, hey, have you seen this yet? He's like, oh yeah, a guy from Sweden. And I'm like, what? He's like, get it? I went to Sweden and got it. I'm like, no. Like the Pirate Bay, you idiot. Yeah.

He gave me every opportunity to figure it out, and I was so dense that I couldn't, so yes. Yes. Had tip to Gregory on that one. And we got nothing on iTunes this week. Well, remember, iTunes doesn't exist anymore, because Catalina!

Now it's Apple Podcasts. Ah, well there you go. We got nothing there either. Well then, people, get out there. And we have some breaking feedback right now. I got this by about five different people while we were actually doing the show. This is an article over at Ars Technica, which I really love, because it starts off with, go home, researchers, you're drunk.

And it says, researchers completely made up claim about men's drinking before conception. And the first time I heard about this story was I was listening to K-Rock yesterday morning, and they were talking about it. And I'm like, okay, whatever, so you've got to stop drinking if you want a kid that wants to come out normal. Well, most of the people I know have to, the guys have to drink if they know they're having a kid coming.

So. I found it helpful. Exactly, exactly. So your kid's probably defective in about 45 different ways. But let's hope not. Knock on wood. But it turns out that the claims that have been making the rounds are completely bogus and absolutely made up.

Yay! Yeah, this is one of the first times I've actually seen a couple of my friends on Facebook posted this, and it came up with the debunk thing, right? Like, I've never seen that before. It was awesome. Good job on that, Facebook. Finally. Once. They claimed men should stop drinking for six months.

The problem is, they didn't study that. No, they did not. Yeah. No, so check it out. It's over at Ars Technica, and the link will be in the show notes. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Closing shout outs! I am sitting here with a sore arm today. My wife will have a sore arm because she's going today to get her flu shot, and I'm taking my kid to get his flu shot, which is going to suck the day after.

Get your damn flu shots, people. It's time. And it's not about you. There's a link in the New York Times there. Adults need to get vaccinated to provide herd immunity for others, especially babies and older people. Get it done. Everybody. Jason's excused because he never leaves the house. Well, no, I'm not excused.

I'm going to go get mine. But my roommate got me sick because she left the house and came back with the fucking plague. So I have to get healthy before I can get my flu shot. She got her flu shot last week and put her down for two days. So I know that I don't want to get a flu shot because it is going to make me lethargic and tired for two days.

Everybody get used to that. You're not dying from the flu shot. You're fine. You're fine. It's just going to have two shitty days that, you know, have a couple extra cappuccinos and you'll be fine. And a shout out to Bastion Schweinstagger, who is retiring at age 35. Oh, must be nice.

A soccer player played with my team, Bayern Munich, for many years, was part of the World Cup winning Germany squad, has played for the Chicago Fire the past couple seasons. There was a brief period of time where my wife was pushing to call our son Bastion. And I was like, no, we don't live in Germany. It's not a big name here.

So we had to say no. But congratulations. What a career. Amazing player. I used to watch Chicago Fire on NBC every week, and I've never seen him once. He only started like three seasons ago. It was a joke. I was talking about the TV show. Uneducated moron.

I've never seen Chicago Fire. Did not know it was a show. Oh, yes. Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and Chicago Med, and there was Chicago Legal for a while. Who knew? Yeah, there's a lot of crossover episodes. Every fucking week, yes.

And they really love to screw up Chicago traffic. Lazy writers. Yeah, I figured they were going to have Chicago sanitation at one point. Chicago Poop Squad. Exactly. Bunch of guys on birds, cruising around in the snow in the sleet, picking up dog poo and man poo.

Although I got to say, in Chicago, no man poo, just dog poo. If it is, it's frozen. Yep, makes it easier to scoop on the go, on those bird scooters with the knobby tires. Well, until next time, I'm Jason DeFlebo. And I'm Brian Gilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash gog.

Call 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 383.

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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