387: Cringeworthy

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That's GOG.show slash VPN. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I had two healthy days in there, Brian. Two. Congratulations. Two. Yeah, full relapse. Been in bed for 24 hours. Yay for sickness. Down with the sickness.

I'm actually a bit jealous. I could go for a little sickness and being in bed for 24 hours. No. If it didn't hurt so bad, it would be great. It's like that old Adam Carolla line about, God, I wish I could just go to a minimum security prison for a couple months. I'd get so much stuff done. I know. It's kind of true.

It's kind of true. Except it'd have to be federal. Yes. You don't want to go to county. You don't want to go to county. So since I have been down, I woke up this morning, and I found out that NaNoWriMo is back. NaNoWriMo, the national, what is it, national writing month.

You're supposed to write a novel in November. That's really not a very catchy name. I did not recognize that that's what that was. Yes, NaNoWriMo. Okay. Well, I know that it's coming back, not just because November is right around the corner, but because they sent me 10 emails in the past 24 hours letting me know that NaNoWriMo is back.

I haven't heard from them for a year. And then the interesting thing, though, is five of them came after I unsubscribed. So it's more like NaNoSpam-o, I think, than NaNoWriMo. But if you're a writer, get those fingers limber because you've got a month to write your novel, the great American novel.

I guess you've got to write a novel and grow out a mustache. That's the deal for November. Oh, that's right. It's Mo-vember. That's right. Yes, NaNoVember. I'm actually debating doing it for the first time ever because, you know, I'm married and I have a kid. What the hell do I care if I look ridiculous?

Oh, God, I can't. I need like six months to even get stubble. I need about six hours. Yeah, for me, it basically comes down to I look like an old Italian woman after about a month. That's it. I get my five o'clock shadow at noon, so it's a bit easier for me.

That's true. You are one hairy bastard. Yeah. Well, what is, wait, wait, wait, what does, what does Mo-vember, uh, what are you supporting with that? I forgot. Uh, I believe it's, it's, uh, prostate cancer. Prostate cancer. Men's cancer thingy. Yeah. Okay. I knew it was some kind of man thing. And technically you're not supporting it.

You're, you're supporting the fight against it. Okay. I support testicular cancer. I grow out a goatee for, for my balls to get cancer. That's it. That's the plan. Oh, yes. Go to manscaped.com slash G-O-G if you want to. Make sure it's pretty for, for, uh, the camera.

Yes. All right. So moving on to some follow-up here. The, the long confusing saga of the Ikea future blackout smart blinds is continuing, uh, as we call, when we first discovered them, I was like, these are cool. I would like these. Uh, they were supposed to come out April 1st.

Then they were delayed to October 1st. There's still nowhere to be found until this week. Apparently, um, some people have sourced out, uh, some, uh, a site called HomeKit Hero has trolled through the Reddit reports and found out that they're starting to appear in certain stores, such as Covina, Sacramento, uh, someplace in Colorado, one in Indiana, basically random, completely random.

And, um, you never know what you're going to get. You can't get them online, but apparently there's an online inventory tracker that suggests that, uh, they'll start stocking the blocks nationwide on October 20th, the blinds. I mean, but who knows who the hell knows. Okay. Well, good luck. Yeah.

Good luck to you all. If you need those, uh, little WeWork news, just because I know they're not, but I, I just love following up on this one because it looks like, uh, SoftBank is going to be taking over and, uh, the, the deal that they're working out with them is, uh, between 7.5 and $8 billion.

Huh? Considerably less than they thought they were worth. Considerably. Yes. And apparently, uh, former CEO Adam Newman stake will fall to low double digits. Why can't it just fall to zero? Well, that would be nice. I'm sure it will eventually.

That's true. That's true. Speaking of things that aren't working out as planned, Libra is back in the news. Okay. Uh, the G7, the G7 has put out a, uh, a report about their concerns. We have concerns as the G7. Wait, governments have concerns about an un, untested and unhinged cryptocurrency?

Yes, they do. Imagine that. Yeah. Yeah. There are concerns about the digital currency being used for money laundering and financing terrorism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yada, yada, yada. We heard that one before, but they're really scared about the impact on the world's monetary system and financial stability.

Yes. Like we've been saying, told ya. Yes. No country is going to let this happen. Yes, they say private sector entities that design stable coin arrangements are expected to address a wide array of legal, regulatory, and oversight challenges and risks.

Yep. Said that one too. You know what governments don't like? They don't like being, not being able to get your tax money. That too. They like taxes. Yeah. I like money. And in a, in a, in a comeback to that, well, cause apparently originally Libra was going to be pegged to it.

Like they, they basically would make a big pool of money. Right. Of different international currencies that were weighted differently. Like a mutual fund of currencies. Yes. You got dollars, euros, yens, pounds, and all sorts of other things in there. I don't know if I'd want any of those pesky pounds right at the moment. That's true.

That's true. Yeah. Well, you might want to short the pound. You can, I don't know if you can do that kind of thing, but anyway, so they've come out and said now that, uh, Oh, David Marcus, your friend, David Marcus, um, he's come out and said, well, you know, we could do things a little bit differently because, uh, I guess everybody's got their panties in a bunch and they're talking now about doing different stable coins for different currencies.

So you could have, you know, the Libra pound, you could have the Libra yen. You know what you could have? You could just have the pound. You could just have the yen. Yeah. How about, how about that? Yeah. They're industrializing. The middleman is what they're doing.

It's like, we've already gotten middlemen for currency. We, why do we want another one that's run by Facebook? I know they say it's not run by Facebook, but come on, come on. Yeah. What a great gig though, right now to be working on Libra.

You're just getting paid for nothing. That's kind of it. Yeah. Uh, write press releases and go on TV and say, it's coming. Really? We're trying. We're really trying. That's those pesky governments. In the news.

Speaking of Facebook. Well, they've come out with, uh, I knew they've come out with a blog post, Brian, because that's what they do nowadays. Right. Uh, it's called helping to protect the 2020 U S elections. And they're talking about fighting foreign interference, increasing transparency and reducing misinformation.

And this is all in line with foreign governments, because as we know, if you are an American and you're a politician, you can have misinformation out the wazoo, you just have to pay them for it. Yes.

They have no problems with that whatsoever. In fact, we've just been talking about how they refuse to take down false ads from, uh, from the Trump administration. So, yeah, if you pay them to run an ad, none of this applies to you, but if you're a foreign government, well, they're going to do their gosh, darndest to make sure that we have a fair and just election this time around.

Right. Yeah. How about just everybody quit Facebook, but I guess that's not going to happen. So they're trying, they're trying, and they put in some new security measures too, for politicians who don't want their accounts hacked, you know, so people can go in and either, you know, raid the data or things like that, which is fine.

They should have that for, I don't know, let's say everyone, but that's just my two cents on the matter. Right. It's like, Oh, but you have to opt in if you're a politician. So, okay, where's that button? Okay. So it's just, it's mind boggling and head scratching that they can be talking out of both sides of their ass at the same time on this.

They're very good at it. And, uh, continuing on with the Facebook news, I found this really interesting piece by Sarah Hahn over on Slate called the authenticity trap. Now this gets into the speech that the Zuck just recently gave, where he basically came out and said that rather than focusing on the content, whether that's true or not, we're going to focus on the people themselves and how authentic they are.

Okay. So that goes on with him describing the Russian content that went out in 2016 as distasteful, but that it was mostly unobjectionable. The real issue, he said, was that these were being posted by fake accounts coordinating together and pretending to be someone else. So what he's saying is we just need these people to be real people, not fake accounts.

And that's going to solve everything. First off, we know that's not true. Uh, but the second part of this article that I found really interesting is that pushing this idea of authenticity and authenticity regulation is actually good for Facebook and not for us. Why is that?

Because Facebook's entire business model is based on knowing who we are and trying to force everybody to be real people who espouse their real views and have only real information about themselves just lets their advertisers dial in even better. I was going to say, so they can push you real ads.

Exactly. So that's why they think it's so important. And that's why they're pushing for it. Well, as we all know, sometimes a bit of anonymity online is a very, very good thing. Yeah, if you want to be anonymous online, don't use Facebook, though. That's really kind of it. So they're kind of pushing forward on some more stuff.

And I'm sure this was in a blog post as well. They unveiled revisions to the community standards back in September with authenticity front and center as one of its five important values. The other values being voice, safety, privacy, and dignity, which need little explanation. They're all described as individual human rights.

Authenticity is not like these other things. And she gets into that and basically, again, says all authenticity does in this case for Facebook is advances their own company business model. So more bad news for Facebook. Yeah, it really is. I just I there's been a couple of things that have happened recently where I was really annoyed that I didn't have a Facebook account because a friend of the show.

Well, I don't know if he's a friend of the show, guest of the show at one point, Zane Lamprey. Yes, is he's on a kind of a tour drumming up investments for his adventure. Yes. And they were having beers right down the street from my house. And you had to RSVP, but you had to RSVP in their Facebook group.

Right. And that was annoying. But I'm glad I didn't RSVP because I ended up being sick, of course. And that was one instance. And there are a couple other people that I've been trying to do things with. And it's like, oh, we're only on Facebook now because nobody else is giving us any value for our time.

That's kind of it. That's that's the sad part about Facebook. Really? I mean, they've got a stranglehold on everything. I mean, I've talked to a couple people that are running different programs and charities and things of that nature, and they don't even bother building more anything better than a landing page for a website anymore.

And they just drive people towards the Facebook page because that's where everybody is. Yeah. I mean, I thought we were going to get past this at some point. In fact, if anything, even with all the problems that they're having and all the jokes that we know about all, you know, the advertisers and the privacy and how they take things away, you know, that were free.

If you build your business now, you have to pay to do this or that. More and more businesses are almost entirely Facebook only. It's crazy. Yeah. You know, Cambridge Analytica was just free advertising for them. It really was. Nobody actually paid attention to what happened.

Yeah. So I'm just wondering how hard it is to actually do a fake Facebook account that I can actually use to talk to people without them tracking me. And I know that that is just an absolute fool's errand anymore because, you know, I'm going to, well, yeah.

And I'm in a house with somebody who has a Facebook account already, and she gets ads on her Facebook account for stuff that I search for when I'm not even logged into Facebook because they just do IP matching now. And I was thinking about this, too, because Christmas is coming up, right? Yeah, this is going to ruin Christmas.

Exactly, because I've seen stuff that she's searching for on her Amazon account that is showing up in my Amazon account. This whole retargeting thing is just so unbelievably crappy now that I'm like, okay. That's why you have to go to gog.show.vpn.

That's true. I'm not kidding. Everything. I use my VPN when I do my Christmas shopping now. Otherwise, my wife's going to find out everything. Yeah. Honestly. And, you know, get that, what is it? Is it the new version? Oh, no, yeah, the new version of Opera with the tracker Turner Offer. The Turner Offer thing.

Oz's technicals. Yeah, you almost have to do that now. You have to be a damn computer genius to, you know, not let anybody know what they're getting for Christmas. Yep, pretty much. It's stupid. All right. Anyway, moving on. Let's move on from Facebook to Google. A group of dozens of full-time Google employees at the company's largest mainland European office, which is in Zurich, Switzerland, met to discuss unionization on Monday.

In defiance of their employers' attempt to cancel the meeting. So this is great. The talk, titled Unions in Switzerland, was led by two representatives from a Swiss media and telecoms union called Syndicom and organized by Google employees. However, Google's site leadership team attempted to stop the event by sending out an email announcing that it was canceled.

Okay. Which it wasn't. So Google said it was canceling the meeting because the company prefers to only host events on the topic organized in partnership with Google's site leadership team. So they said, yeah, you cannot have this meeting unless we're there and we're running it. But they had it anyways. So good on them.

Okay. That's one way to do it, I guess. And speaking of Christmas shopping and where most of us will be doing it over at Amazon, I know they've unrolled their now free one-day delivery for items that cost like zero cents. So that should be fun.

And there's more news coming about from the warehouses that people are beating themselves to death to try to meet the quotas that they've been given. They did a little bit of a study from the Staten Island warehouse employees and the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.

They basically are very concerned that employees are developing muscular skeletal disorders from the intense work pace. 66% of the 145 workers that were surveyed said they experienced physical pain while performing their regular work duties and 42% said they continue experiencing pain even when they aren't working.

And there's a graphic at the link in our show notes that shows that basically lower backs, knees, feet are just getting beat up. One of the warehouse workers surveyed in the study said the quota system pressures workers to package 2,000 units in a day, four items per minute, which is crazy.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. The quota system pushes you to really not work at a pace that's normal, but at a pace where you're almost running for the entire 10 hours. You're constantly turning, bending, running. They say they make a big deal about safety, but when you're working so fast, you're not going to follow those mandates, the workers said.

So good times. Man, I would love to put Fitbits on everybody that works there. Oh, my God. They would smoke me, man. It's crazy. They're in shape, but beat up. Yeah. Bring on the robots, man. For this stuff, definitely. Yeah. It sucks.

Have you ever been a picker? No. I have, and it's hard enough when you don't have to do 2,000 a day. Wow. I mean, it's ridiculous. It is hard work. You know, you're just, you're always moving. You're never standing still. And I did notice one thing about those warehouses.

They're concrete. That is hell on your feet and knees. Right. They need to put in a little, like, kiddie bouncy stuff. Yeah. Rubber, rubbers. Or wood chips, like, from our childhood. Well, if you didn't have enough reasons already to go to GOG.show slash VPN, I'm going to give you one more.

Nord VPN confirms that it was hacked. Whoopsies. Yeah, here's the issue. They found out a few months ago. Didn't tell anybody. Right. And it was like, yeah. This is back from March 2018 when this happened. Okay. Not good.

They probably should have said something. But they also claim they have a zero log policy. So what exactly did the hackers get? They got one of the three main encryption keys. So they could, you know, technically have done a man in the middle attack and watched people's traffic go by if they got into other systems and things like that.

So that's not good. No. That's not good at all. They might be a fine no log VPN, but the fact that they waited 18 months to confirm the breach is really not good. No. Not good at all. And Nord said it found out about the breach a few months ago.

But the spokesman said the breach was not disclosed until today because the company wanted to be 100% sure that each component within their infrastructure was secure. A senior security researcher that they spoke, that TechCrunch spoke to, basically said that, I love this.

While this is unconfirmed and we wait for further forensic evidence, this is an indication of a full remote compromise of this provider's systems that should be deeply concerning to anyone who uses or promotes these particular services. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can't be a security company or claim to be a security company and not announce immediately if there's been a breach.

Like, how can you ever trust this company again? I don't think you can. Exactly. And I love this. They spent millions on ads, but apparently nothing on effective defensive security. Oopsies. So, yeah, they say they have installed breach detection and things like that.

But, you know, horses have left the barn on that one already and probably on fire and unencrypted. So, you don't want your horses to be unencrypted. No. And a little more security news. Alexa and Google Home, they have been abused to eavesdrop and phish passwords.

Now, this is an interesting one. I found this over at Ars Technic and it's been making the rounds. And what this is, is a German security research lab created for Alexa skills and for Google Home actions. Right. Got them through the store and got them on to Alexas and Google Homes.

Right. And what they, what they could do was they basically would stay on and listen in the background. Great. They would give you like, in the app itself, they would put the fake, okay, we're done, ding. And say, okay, you know, thank you for the, you know, one of them was like asking for, it was like a random number generator.

And the other ones were horoscopes and things like that. But, and the videos are pretty interesting. But, and then they did some phishing ones that basically said there was an update and would you please enter your password or tell me your password. All right.

There's, there's absolutely no way this should have ever gotten through either Amazon or Google's security processes. Somebody was asleep at the wheel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it's pretty fun though, watching the demo videos where the girl was actually talking to her Google home and just, they showed the server log with, you know, the, the speech to text of everything she was saying.

I'm like, that's actually pretty good text or speech recognition on that. That would be a, you know, you could just actually create an Alexa app that is like just note taking. Right. And it would just send you, send you your transcripts when you're done. Hey, we can finally have transcripts of our shows. We'll just make Alexa listen to our show.

Yep. Yep. And on good news, I am actually working on that. We should actually have transcripts next year for shows going forward. Yeah. So we're, we're, we're moving ahead. We're, we're, we're upgrading and doing fun things over here. And we'll talk about that more once we get the feedback, but yeah, these should have never gotten through.

Yeah. I mean, it's okay. It's bad that they got through, but obviously they're going to have to tighten up their, their, their vetting process a bit more. Yeah. I wonder how they would do that. I don't know. I don't know. I've never written, written in an Alexa skill. So I don't know how, how, how much introspection they have on the code, but it should be pretty easy because most of these Alexa skills nowadays are just drag and drop builders that you can.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, and there's gotta be key commands to search for, you know, simple shutoff points where's it search for the shutoff point after something's done. Yeah. So anyway, this one was pretty fun. The air force has finally retired their eight inch floppy disks from the missile launch control system.

Yeah. We talked about this many, many years ago, right when we first started the show that it was actually didn't make sense for them for security reasons and financially to go off the floppies. But apparently now they, they've decided it's safe enough. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're updating the strategic automated command and control system.

SAC. And, uh, so yeah, there's SAC. The air force has updated their SAC. Manscaped.com. Coupon code GOG at checkout. And, uh, so yeah, they have SSDs now, but they still have these old ass IBM systems because they say that, and I love this, they're IBM series one computers.

Right. I think we've come a long way since system one. Yes, we have. But, uh, you know, I'm, I'm sure they're air gapped. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They really didn't come with ethernet cards back in the day. No. But anyway, the interesting thing about those is, you know, because they're so old, they can't get replacement parts anymore.

So they literally have to build them, you know, fix every component. Yeah. And it seems like it's a very expensive, time-consuming process for some of these things. Right. And, uh, yeah. And there's, there are a lot of old systems like this that run a lot of the government infrastructure that are no longer made.

And, uh, yeah, you can, you can, I'm not, I can't go into it. I had some, heard some great stories at one point that I, I literally can't say. But, uh, anyway, that's a good on them for updating their sack. About time. And this one, uh, Brian, when you take an Uber, which I know is very rare, do you ever, do you ever tip?

Because that's the whole point of Uber, right? That's what, that's what they came out with their business model as, and I am respecting their business model. See, exactly. I thought that was the whole value proposition that the tip was baked into the ride. Yes. Yeah. And, uh, then of course, you know, there was the whole kerfuffle where the drivers were like, hey, we're not getting tipped.

Can you put tipping in? And Kalanick back in the day was like, no. But then, you know, the shit hit the fan and he was trying to make nice with everybody for, you know, I think this was after the video came out where he was yelling at one of his drivers. But then they put in tips.

Well, turns out you're not the only one, Brian, that doesn't tip. Why should you? That again, that if you were riding Uber from day one, the whole point was it was all baked in. You get in, you get out there. You can have no interaction whatsoever with your driver and just go. That is the only plus of Uber as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah. And there is another feature that I'll talk about in a second. Actually, I'll talk about it now. Why the hell not? Let's go off on a tangent. I think it was Lyft that was rolling out the new feature that let you say, how much conversation would you like with your driver?

I would like zero. Would you like to be chatty, medium, or none? And I obviously would default to none. I put in the app where I'm going. I want to get in the car. I want to go there. I want to get out and never hear about your family or your dinner or where you're from.

But anyway, so only 1% of Uber customers always tip, while nearly 60% never do. Interesting. The average tip is $0.50 a ride, but for those who do tip, the average is more like $3. Right. Hmm. Men are more likely to tip than women, but female drivers get tipped more than male drivers.

Go figure there. Yeah. You can't deny human nature. We do what we do. Yeah. Roughly 16% of Uber rides are tipped, yet most riders, 60%, never tipped over the research that they did with this four-week research that they did.

And it says of those who do tip, very few, which is 1% tip on every trip. The remainder of the people only tip on about 25% of trips. I will give somebody a tip if they do an amazing job. Like, I am late. I'm like, don't spare the horses.

Let's go. Something above and beyond, right? Yeah. Exactly. But for a regular ride? Nah. Just a... But then again, I use Uber once every two years and only in an emergency. Yeah. I very rarely use it as well. I just brought up my Uber app and yep, never once tipped.

Still a perfect 5.0 rating. Mm-hmm. No, not bad. How about that? So, and that's the other thing. It's like, because when you, the tipping is so far removed from the actual ride, it's like you get out of the car, you go do your thing. Yeah. And later on, you log back in and it's like, would you like to tip?

It's like, no. It's gone. I don't care. You know? With cabs, it's a little harder to do that because you're there and you have to pay the guy and do all the stuff. But, you know, there's a little more social pressure on it. But with Uber, it's like, yeah, I'm getting the hell out of here. I got shit to do, man.

Do you tip when they bring you a sandwich? No. No. All right. Because the prices are already inflated. I don't know if you've, when they first launched Uber Eats, prices were reasonable. Now, my $7 sandwich that I get from Bay Cities, all of a sudden is $12 if I'm getting it delivered.

So why am I going to tip? There's already a $5 upcharge.

Media candy. Well, I don't know if you heard, Jason, but a really big trailer just dropped. I'm talking, of course, about Silicon Valley Season 6. Oh, my goodness. Oh, the Twitters must be abuzz. No, I haven't watched the show for like two seasons, but I did check out the trailer and actually it was very funny.

I'm, you know, the concern is, of course, every single funny moment from the entire Season 6 was in that trailer. But it did make me laugh and I'm considering just watching it. It's the last season. It's only going to be seven episodes long. I might give it a go again just to watch the end.

Okay. Be my guest. We'll see. I stayed one season longer than you. Yeah. And I regretted it. Right. So. We'll see. The trailer was very funny, though, I've got to say. So another big trailer dropped. I'm talking, of course, about The Crown Season 3.

Ooh. I love The Crown and this looks great. Helena Bonham Carter's in it. It's going to be fantastic. Well, isn't Helen Mirren in it too? Is Helen Mirren in it? No. I don't think so. Oh, she's in a different one. Yeah. She's got another British royalty show coming out.

Yeah. I heard about that too. I'm very interested in that as well. Okay. I started to watch The Crown Season 1. I couldn't get into it. Oh, I just love the show. So I'm very much looking forward to it. And it does look great. Have you seen the Downton Abbey movie yet? I have not. I have not. Did you see how much money that thing made?

A lot because it was a great show. It was ridiculous. I thought, who's going to go see the Downton Abbey movie? Apparently everyone. Apparently everyone. My mom never watched the show when she went to see the movie. Wow. Now she's going to go back and watch the show. I bet, I bet you that at some point they're going to make another movie because they made so much money more than it, like, you know, over what it costs.

It was like breaking it in. Most international. Yeah. All right. Good for them. And then a small little trailer dropped as well. Star Wars, The Rise of Skywalker, the final trailer before the movie drops in December. What did you think? Goosebumps. No bumps.

I can't wait. Did absolutely nothing for me. I'm very excited. I mean, nothing. Even when Lando was there, I'm like, eh. You're probably the only person on the internet that feels that way. In fact, judging from my Twitter feed this morning, you are.

Apparently. Okay. Oh, man. I'm looking forward to Picard. Fuck Star Wars. Me too. Me too. I don't know, man. Did you get your tickets yet? Because you got to get them soon. No, you don't have to get them soon. It's only two months.

It's only two months till the movie comes. Tickets are on sale now, Brian. You don't have to get them soon. Yeah. I'm not going to be at a midnight show. I have a kid. I will see it two to three days after it's released, and I will have no problems walking up and buying a ticket. Sweden. No way I'm watching that through Sweden.

This is definitely a cinema experience. Maybe the last one. If you say so. Well, since I was sick and stuck in bed, I've been watching The Deuce on HBO, and I think I may have mentioned it here before.

You did. Yeah, yeah. It's almost over. There's only one episode left, and this goes with Brian's rule. So now I can say you should definitely watch this show, man. It's only three seasons, but God damn, is it good. All right. It's, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, Times Square in the 70s to the 80s, and just a bunch of great stories, and I know you don't like James Franco, but man, is he good in it.

Dude, he is so good in it. All right. I'm telling you, you're probably going to like it, and there's lots of boobs in it, too. Just saying. It is really. James Franco's? No, no James Franco boobs. That's definitely one boob in the show.

Yeah, there you go. Well, he plays twin brothers, so there are two boobs. Oh, two boobs. Okay. Yeah. Oh, my God. Anyway, I didn't know it yet, because I thought this was coming out in November. Watchmen's already out on HBO.

How could you not know it? The advertising is everywhere. But I thought it was still the run-up. I didn't realize that the first episode actually dropped, so I'll be watching that this week. Do you have any plans to watch it? I don't. I've got to be honest. I've never been into The Watchmen. I tried to read the graphic novel, didn't care.

Tried to watch the movie, didn't care. So I'm guessing I'm not going to care about the show. I'm going to give it a shot. I wasn't a fan of the movie. I never read the comics either. I thought the movie was kind of, eh, you know. And so I would give it a shot, though, because there's really nothing else on.

What's the deuces over? What am I going to watch? You know, Succession's over for the year. I've got nothing else. Hey, man, I've got something for you to watch. Apple TV Plus. Oh, God. I hear Ron Moore's got a series coming out on it. Oh, yes, he does.

And I actually know a couple people that are in it, and they're telling me it's actually really good. And I'm like, well, wait until the end. And he's pitched seven seasons of it. He pitched seven seasons. Well, if you've bought a new Apple device, you're getting Apple TV Plus for free for the first year, apparently.

So I guess I'm getting it for free because I just recently bought a Mac. So if you've bought a new iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, or Mac after September 10th this year, you can get a free year of Apple TV Plus. Link in the show notes, which tells you how to do it. So I don't know what that says about a network when they're basically giving it away for the first year.

I guess they're not that confident with it. But there you go. You can get it for free. And I guess I will. You know what? I bet I bought my iPad Pro on September 9th. That's kind of how things tend to work. Things do tend to work for you, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I do have to get a new iPhone soon, though.

So maybe I'll get it with that. I did sign up for Apple Music, though. I'm trying it out. No, this is actual. Well, that won't count to get you Apple TV Plus. But good for you. No, I know. No, but I did sign up for Apple Music. You know, I've just been using Spotify for so long. I don't see any reason to quit. And it's seamless. And it works everywhere.

So whatever. I don't know. Like, the interface just still bugs the hell out of me. It's not pretty. But I'm on the free trial right now. Because I've got to get rid of my Amazon Music. Because I use it, like, twice a year. Right. Yeah. No reason to keep that.

Well, the only reason I have it right now is I forgot to cancel it last year. I can't go back and cancel it. So I'm going to get rid of that and try Apple Music just to see how it is. I've been using the Apple Podcast app, too. Yeah, it's not bad, right? Yeah, it's gotten a lot better. It's gotten better. Yeah.

I use it for, you know, it's a serendipity engine for me. Because I'll just scroll through the list and find something I haven't listened to and just start streaming it to see if it's any good. Right. And I found a couple really good shows on there. Like, I think there's one called What About Pam that came from Dateline that was really good. Just a six-parter.

Right. You know, I generally don't go for the true crime thing. But I like to keep up on what's going on. But I've got to say that the app has gotten better, for sure. The fact that they don't put links in the show notes is really annoying. Yeah. There's a couple interface quirks, particularly I find with the desktop version.

But overall, it's not too bad. I haven't tried the desktop version yet because I've only got it on my air. But I think I checked it a little bit. But it's nice that you can just rate right from the show now. You don't have to go through all the rigmarole and stuff like that. You can just pop in and give something one star when it really sucks.

Or five stars if it's us. If it's GOG.show, then definitely go for the five stars and a snarky review. Yeah. And speaking of new podcasts, I believe this was a listener suggestion at one point. I've listened to a couple episodes of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast. I've never heard of that.

I don't think we've mentioned that. Yeah, I think one of our feedback sections, somebody told us about a topic that they covered about a little bit deeper than we did. They sent us a link to it, and that's how I found it. That would be any topic. That would be any topic, yes. And I listened to that one show. And I've listened to a couple now.

And I've got to say, I love their content. Whew, the production, they need some help. It sounds horrible. So if that's going to bump you, don't bother listening to the show. I know it kind of bothers you. That's why you stopped listening to Adam's Untitled.

Yeah, Adam Savage's show. Adam Savage's show, because the production on this is even worse. They could be in a gigantic hallway. It's just really muddled audio, and it's not very clear. And for being on episode 745, I believe that they're on.

Oh, my God. Really not a lot of personality or polish to the presenters, which I would, is kind of a, I'm really not selling the show very well, am I? No, you're really not. The content is fantastic. Okay, okay.

So it's one of those ones that I can just put on in the background while I'm going around the house doing my errands or whatnot, and you just listen to little bits of news here and there. And you're not paying too close attention, so the sound and the lack of personality doesn't bother you so much. Okay, okay. I mean, Jesus, they've got over 100 million downloads of the show.

Well, they're doing something right. I mean, again, like I said, the content is very much there. Are they local? Can I, like, help them in any way? I don't know. Oh, well, I figured you would listen to it, though. I don't go this in-depth to things. I've just listened to them. I don't know where they're from. Okay.

I don't even know their names. I went to the About page, and it's just a picture of a bunch of people in a room with, it looks like, oh, crappy lav mics in a large room with a lot of people. Exactly. It gets a bit muddled. Okay, okay. Well, maybe I'll try one.

But they're smart people. Just to see. I don't care if they're smart. If I can't listen to them, I can't listen to them. Well, they are LA-based. There you go, Jason. All right. Well, the 107 million downloads, they can afford an audio engineer.

On my way. I've got a little follow-up to Last Tango in Cyberspace. I finally finished it. Skip it.

Sadly, skip it. What did I say last week? It's all about the ending, right? You've got to stick that landing. He did not stick the landing. No, he did not stick the landing at all. It's a little too highfalutin for his own good, is the problem. So, yeah.

Like I said, I would just rather go back and read the Big End series by William Gibson because it's so much more entertaining and so much more satisfying and has a good ending. So, yeah. You know what I just thought about? I wonder if any... Has there been a new Bobaverse book? Gosh, I could go for one of those.

I think it's done. I'm pretty sure it's done. They kind of wrapped it. That's disappointing. It is. It is. I was thinking about going back after we talked last week and going back to the Long Earth series. Oh, yeah. You should definitely do that. Those are really good. So, I read Rebooting AI, Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.

Well, I kind of read it. Didn't like it? I read the first half all the way through. Well, I mean, I liked it, but it's like, okay. That's what we've been saying on the show for a long time. It is nice to have very learned people agree with us. Right, isn't it?

It is. It is. And it's everything that we've been saying. And it started to get a bit boring as they just went through every variant of current AI and then proved that it has the exact same problem, which is it's not intelligent at all and will never be intelligent. Correct. And we're building all this wrong to begin with.

And I got a bit bored with that. So, I kind of just skimmed the whole second half of the book and didn't see anything terribly different. So, yeah, I agree with everything that they say, hands down. I think it could have been a pamphlet rather than a full book. That's just me.

See, that's why 2X comes in for Audible. Right. I just cooked through it. Yes. But I thought, you know, basically breaking down why things don't work and like how to come back and fix them later, which was the second half of the book. Yeah. Was, I thought, a little bit more interesting. I thought the second half was better than the first because the first half was just, you know, us's validation for everything that we've been saying about machine learning and artificial intelligence.

It's like, okay, smart people agree with us that this is not AI. It will never be AI. You need to burn it down and start over again. If you want it to be actual general purpose AI. The fact that it can't even read is, you know, kind of a thing. You can't do anything. It's all so narrow focused with no concept of the world at large around it.

And so, they're never going to function the way that all the press releases say they're going to. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, maybe I should put a pin in that and get back to it and actually go read the second half of the book rather than the quick skim that I did. The reason I did a quick skim is because The Body, A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson came out this week.

Ooh. And I love me some Bill Bryson. Who doesn't? So, I downloaded that and I'm like two chapters. I just got two chapters into it. Loving it so far. Bill Bryson is just a goddamn treasure. He is. He's had a couple misses, but I mean, I mean, you still, if you go back to a short history of nearly everything, it's one of the best books ever made.

Right. So, it's awesome. So, I will give this one a shot. Thanks. Oh, I'm not even following him. I am not. I am following him. Oh, no. I'm not following him because when I click follow on Amazon, it says something went wrong. Please try your request again later. They must have heard me bitching about their warehouses. Right.

Anyway. Feedback loop. We've got a new Patreon subscriber, Steve. Welcome to the club. And over at PayPal, we have Nicholas, Joe, and Mark. Thank you very much for your support. Thank you all so much.

Over at Twitter, Neil writes, I heard Jason complain about having another remote right on the back of Brian having the issue of getting the voice assistants to work with his TV. I use a Harmony Hub and it solves both issues in one for me. I have only one remote that controls everything now, as well as being able to say, Alexa, turn on the TV and have everything I need come on to the correct inputs.

It only ran me about 60 bucks and was well worth the investment. Check it out. Keep on grumping. I think I had like the Gen 1 Harmony Hub or something like that right when the ladies in the tubes just came out. And regardless of their imploring me that it will all work correctly, I spent like three nights getting insanely upset not being able to get it to work.

So I have a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to Harmony Hubs. So I will not be getting one. The Fire TV Cube thing is on its way. Ironic that Amazon cannot ship its own products one day. So it should be arriving today, even though I ordered it on like Friday.

So when that comes, I will see how that works for me. Okay. I might try this out as long as it works with a Roku TV. That's all because it needs the Roku set of remotes in there as well, which has always been a pain. Right. So I'll take a look at it. 60 bucks might be worth it because the well, I mean, the other thing is it's a Vizio sound bar that I have.

So I'd probably have to train it for that. But if I can get one thing to work with everything. Yeah, except, you know, I wonder if you can get like one hub and two remotes because two people control the TV in this house. I'm sure they sell additional remotes.

Could be. Could be. And Ryan writes in MoviePass resurrects from the dead to charge bank accounts. Okay. Yeah. The service was shut down for good on September 14th has allegedly resurrected from the dead, appearing as a variety of mysterious charges on credit cards, former members tell The Post.

Maricar Tinio from Chicago says she was charged twice for unknown fees in September after service was terminated. One's for her $9.95 membership and another for $5.64. I think they need a class action lawsuit filed against them, she says. To get what? There's nothing left except for the money.

There's always something left. Okay. In an email statement to The Post, they decided to move it past stayed very on brand. CEO Mitch Lowe says reports that subscribers were charged following the September 14th service interruption are false and former subscribers are simply misreading their bank accounts.

Okay. I see nothing, nothing. Nothing here. You have not been charged. Move along. Showers on the left. And Stuart tweets us, what Jason said in the last episode about feeling better with less work reminded me of Lawrence from Office Space.

Yeah. See, I didn't know which one he was assuming that I was in this one. But I will go ahead and play the clip right now. What would you do if you had a million dollars? I'll tell you what I'd do, man. Two chicks at the same time, man. That's it?

You had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time? Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire, I could hook that up, too. Because chicks dig dudes with money. Well, not all chicks. Well, the type of chicks that double up on a dude like me do.

Good point. Well, what about you now? What would you do? Besides two chicks at the same time? Oh, yeah. Nothing. Nothing, huh? I would relax. I would sit on my ass all day. I would do nothing.

Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin. He's broke. Don't do shit. See, Lawrence wanted to do two chicks at once. But I am more on the other side where I just want to do nothing. Yeah, I think I'd be the Lawrence in this case.

Okay. Okay. You know, you just, well, I guess the whole point is, yeah. I get it. I get it. And Mustafa writes in, on the opposite side, let's trademark our faces. And he sent in a link to Oddity Central. It says, now you can license your face to be used on a humanoid robot.

And this actually comes from a popular mechanics article saying, $125,000? Just donate your face to some humanoid robots. And this is a company called Geomic, or Geomike. Hard to tell which one it is. But they want to use somebody's face to put on all of their robots that are going to be taking care of the elderly.

All right. So, yeah. I would like to see that contract. Yeah. Through the known universe, all perpetuity, blah, blah, blah. You basically never own your face again. Exactly. Exactly. So, I don't know. $125,000 seems a little light for me on that one.

Although, I wouldn't care. But I know they're not going to take my face. If I had a face that anybody wanted to put on a robot, I would want more money. If they want my face, they can have it for, like, you know, $25,000. I don't care. Right. And Thomas writes in, you recently mentioned the pain of using multiple authentication apps.

As you are both 1Password users, you should try the built-in TOTP feature. Although it may not seem strictly multi-factor. A threat actor would require both your master pass and secure key. If you use the 1Password X plugin for Opera slash Chrome, it will auto-complete the OTP for you. This has saved me hours.

I haven't used Google Auth since, and the solution is device agnostic. Well, the problem here is I can't remember which one I used for different things. So, I have them all as a backup when I need to log in. Because I know Blizzard uses one, and Google uses another one. Microsoft uses theirs, and all of that stuff.

So, they're just basically there just in case. And the one time a year when I do have to log in, and since it's keyed to my phone, I keep them around because it's like, ugh, the hassle of changing, you know, auth apps. Like, two-factor apps like that is such a pain.

So, I think I'll keep them where they're at for now. But thanks for the tip. Moss6502 writes in, I got a curious mind for two bucks on Chirp. For two bucks, it was fine. A curious mind is a book that I recommended last week. And Chirp sells you audiobooks on the cheap.

Excellent. He got Chirp for cheap. That's right. And over at GOG.show, Christopher wrote in with a link from Vice, what the downfall of WeWork says about tech capitalism. And he pulled a quote. This was a kind of Potomkin capitalism, a nice painted facade backed by absolutely nothing.

Yes. Yeah, that's about a lot of that going around right now. A lot of that going around. And Phil writes in, a podcast I recently discovered is by the BBC called The Missing Crypto Queen. It's about a young woman who holds a PhD in law from Oxford and completely made up a cryptocurrency, one coin, then scammed millions of people, made a shitload of money, and then disappeared.

The BBC journalists travel to her country and follow a very weird trail of private yachts, beauty pageants, and mafia encounters in an attempt to find the woman. It's only got six episodes so far. Enjoy. I might give that one a shot. I'm always looking for something good. There you go. Peter writes in, I was listening to your recent show where you were mentioning the problems with sex workers and social media.

It reminded me of another podcast I had heard on the subject, so I looked it up. The story is available at, and he sends us a link, an Australian thing here. Sex workers create their own safe space online, and it kind of gets into the sort of stuff that we had talked about, about hosting companies, you know, banning that sort of stuff.

So, some of these ladies are, one of these ladies started up her own hosting company to get around it and all that sort of stuff. So, good on them. That's one way to do it. Yep. April writes in, I've been a big fan for a long time and agree with your opinions on basically everything. However, grumpy and old, that makes me.

But recently, in episode 384, you said a few things that completely astonished and upset me. At first, I just rage deleted the episode and skipped the next couple. But I'm thinking the more solid choice would be to bring it up. I'm totally blind and access the internet, including your own contact form here, via screen reader.

I do remember when websites were putting out alternate accessible versions and they looked like hot garbage. How do you know if you're blind? Just asking. I'm sure she has friends that aren't blind. She doesn't live in a vacuum. I'm sure people have told her. I'm just curious. No, I'm legit curious.

And she goes on to say, that hasn't been the case for a long time now, though. Most large companies' sites work perfectly well. Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. Google, etc. Today, when magnification and other color inversion can help browser side, all developers really need to have an accessibility site, is add appropriate alt text, and follow best practices with their code.

I 100% agree with that. And I've got to say, when I was coding, I always went out of my way to do the alt text. Oh, yeah. Alt tags and basic accessibility. When you and I were making websites, Brian, is a completely different thing than today when you're trying to do things with, you know, JSON and Ajax and all that good stuff and, like, you know, dynamically building sites on the fly.

You know, even just, like, the tabbing between different fields can be just a nightmare to get right, especially when, you know, giant blocks of your site are replaced based on interactions. It can be a nightmare. Anyway, she goes on to basically ream me about the ADA and my stance on Domino's and things like that.

And I went back and I found an article called Accessibility, the Future and Why Domino's Matters. Now, I just want to make a quick statement that my entire point about Domino's and this whole lawsuit was around the fact that it was going to basically be, you know, you legally had to do it nowadays.

And that was the thing that just really bugged me because a lot of websites, you don't want to have somebody tell you what to do with the point of a gun because then you're just not going to do anything and you're not going to be building websites very much. I think it just stifles, it stifles creativity on the website side. The people that should do it should or could do it should do it because there isn't a, you know, a cost to doing things like that.

And I just think that the way that the ADA handles these complaints, because the only the ADA does not have an enforcement arm. The only enforcement arm of the ADA is that you have to go to litigation. And that's a problem. The ADA, in my opinion, needs to be reworked.

So there is an enforcement branch and not just a bunch of skeezy lawyers firing, filing lawsuits against people who can't afford to pay or fight them. So, you know, I do believe that, you know, there is a very good reason that the ADA exists. It does a lot of good.

And she asked me in her email, like, who do you know that you hang out with that bitches about the ADA? Well, I used to live in rural Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh and hung out with a lot of very old people, World War II vets and things like that at the local town halls.

And a lot of them were business owners. And they would just bitch and moan about the costs, about having to put in different things that even though they were, you know, personally disabled, didn't need. And the people that were coming to their business didn't need. So there are two sides to every coin on that one.

All right. But yeah, I'm just going to say that, yeah, I think there's common ground here between what April says and what I think as well. So the Ars Technica article is fascinating. It's definitely worth a read. And there are just a lot of, it's a complicated matter is all I'm saying.

All right. And I just want to point out that I appreciate what April did here. Sure. She rage deleted us and didn't listen to a few episodes. And, but she didn't go on to like rage tweet us or rage write us. She wrote us a very thoughtful and detailed and long email with her opinions and her thoughts on it.

And she actually educated me a little bit about some of the stuff that I didn't know. So this is how it's supposed to work. People, we say stuff, you disagree, you tell us why we like that. It's great. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much, April, for, you know, being the voice of reason in this.

I would also like to point out that at one point when, when I changed the show notes on the website, I did so in a way where I would link the actual URL and people who listened to the show that use screen readers said, Oh, this sucks. Now we can't really tell what the links are because all you're doing is linking to a URL.

So I went back and I fixed it because they asked, because I did, had no idea that that was a problem, you know? So they didn't sue me. They asked and I fixed it. And actually, I do want to circle back to this really quickly and ask April a question, assuming she's still listening to us and not rage deleting this episode.

My question to you would be, does, if, if these companies provided alternative methods besides their website that were super easy, is that enough? Like we talked about, you know, you can use the ladies in the tubes or, or, you know, Cortana on your desktop or Siri on your desktop to get to the product.

Do you, is that enough? Or do they also have to do their websites? That, that, just a question. I don't really know. Let me know what you think. There we go. Moving on. All right. Matt B wrote us, Jason, they have beaten you to it and gave us a link.

Pornhub announces partnership with Tesla to capitalize on emerging driverless car market. I'm assuming, you know, this is a very Aussie specific version of the onion basically, but it is very funny. So thank you. Thank you. Graham writes in, much as I hate to support Apple against the little man, I think this patent is a complete joke.

And he's talking about the blue mail patent. I've got my own domain and have been using unique emails per website or company for about 20 years. A quick Google search shows me using multiple of them back to 2004. Should I be suing blue mail for nicking my idea?

Not that I'm claiming it was a unique approach even then. Sue them. Sue them into existence. I just said sue them into existence. That's not how that works. Sue them out of existence. I don't know. Everything, everything's backwards these days. Have I mentioned I've been sick? Sorry. And over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Warrior from Germany.

Stay grumpy. My recent highlight was that you grumped on ARS for mixing up opera version numbers and calling on their professional pride while you're self-pedaled deodorant for balls. Stay grumpy. That's Manscaped.com. That's G-O-G. Yeah, that's Manscaped.com. Use code G-O-G. Gotta pay the bills, man.

I sent this to the agency that brokered that deal and they were cracking up. Thank you very much, Warrior. And we got a five-star from Whoisbeauty. Great podcast, informative, funny, and entertaining. Cringy at times, but it's all good fun.

Definitely worth subscribing to. Well, thank you, Whoisbeauty. I myself cringed a few times during the recording of this episode, particularly when showers were mentioned. Anytime Brian mentions Trump, I cringe, so it's okay. We have it on both sides of the aisle. And we have a five-star rating from RealSwedishDude from Sweden.

Good and easy show. I've listened to every episode for some years now. I learn something new every time and I'm having fun while listening to it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to G-O-G.show slash contact and send us your feedback, your questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to G-O-G.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And if you're on the Overcast player, please click them stars. We just pulled ahead of Tim Ferriss. Woo-hoo! Closing shout-outs!

Congratulations, Canada, on a successful election that seems to have not been curtailed or misled by Facebook. It can be done. Well done. Yeah, and they didn't even have to use blackface book. Someone's been following the Canadian news.

I'm just saying, I follow my True Doe news. Until next time, I'm Jason Phillips. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jesus Christ, no maple cookies for you. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash G-O-G.

Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or recurring donation by just going to G-O-G.show and clicking that PayPal button. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at G-O-G.show slash 387.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay cringy. I'm going to go watch Office Space now. That was a good movie.

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