390: I’ve Fallen and I Can't Get Up

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for your credit cards. Go to Privacy.com slash GOG and get a $5 credit free just for signing up. 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 a very grumpy Brian Schulmeister. Oh, goody. I can tell this is going to be fun when I see your name coming in and it's set for annoyed. Yeah, I'm annoyed. I think like a couple episodes ago I was talking about my battles against entropy and they are continuing.

I'm just so pissed off. I've spent most of this week trying to fix some stuff around the house and that involved including some fixing on wood floorings and some other stuff like that. And I mean, this is a good thing, but we've had a bit of a wild weather week.

We went from, you know, all of California was burning and it was 100 degrees and we had Santa Ana winds to the last two days. It's been positively frigid in the morning. Not so good when you're doing some woodwork because wood warps when temperatures change to that degree. So everything I fixed around the house is now warped. I'm going to have to redo it.

It's so bad my front door bottom lock won't even close. Oh my God. Because the wood is warped. So if I really want to lock my door, I have to use the second deadbolt. And that's just the stuff around the house. You should get those birds from there outside on your lawn and just pile them in front of your front door at night so nobody will come and bother you.

Are you kidding? All the people are going to come to take them to charge. That's true. Anyways, and they might try to steal my power and just come into my house and charge there because, you know, makeup is unlocked. Yeah. And then the technology stuff like I came to sit down to start a recording and my shock mounts broken.

Oh, Jesus. It's lost two of its little strands somehow. So I have to get a new shock mount. My boom actually desperately needs to be replaced anyway. So I'm going to ask you. I know you had recommendations for that. So off the air, you can give me what you've got because I will be ordering that patreon.com slash GOG.

Yeah, I'll just, I've got this. I've got spares. We're okay. We'll hook you up. All right. Yeah. But we see each other once every blue moon. So we'll see about that. And that audio interface you gave me, which, which works so well for me. Yeah. It has a touch screen on the front, right?

Yes. It's a very, I'm not touching it and it is just annoying the hell out of me because it's just cycling through pages as if somebody is tapping on it constantly. Oh, well, that's not good. Hopefully nothing will go wrong with our recording because of that, but I am watching it just page through screens, page through screens, page through screens constantly.

I've lifted it up. I've, I've wiped it down. I've dusted it off. It is just cycling through menu pages. How odd. Okay. Well, we'll see about getting that fixed. I also have a spare interface that you might be, might be in need of. Sounds like it. We'll see if I make it through the recording. Anyways, uh, on with the show. I'm in such a great mood.

Fun times. Fun times. Well, we talked about Google possibly buying Fitbit. Well, it has come to pass. It is official. Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion. All right. I can handle that, that Fitbit being evaluated at $2.1 billion because they actually have a real product.

Yes, they do. For quite some time. Yes, they do. It's not just an app. All right. Well, good on them. We also have some, uh, some follow-up on Alphabet and their plan to build a smart city in Toronto, or I guess technically it's called Waterfront Toronto, uh, which was going to be the super high-tech smart city that tracked every move you made and reported it all to government authorities.

Who would have thought that people wouldn't have been into that? Especially Canadians. Yeah, especially Canadians. It was originally going to be a 190-acre project. It has been scaled back to just 12 acres. Now, um, there's no guarantee public transport will be extended into the site at all, which is how people get around in Toronto.

Personal information collected in the development will be stored only in Canada now. It was not allowed to go to Google Home. And, uh, Alphabet has also scrapped its plans for an urban data trust, a new and largely untested solution. It will comply with existing and all future regulations. So, basically, Toronto wins, according to a Toronto activist and critic of the project, Bianca Wiley.

The project has been defanged. All right. Well, there you have it. We knew something was going to come down after that, what, 1700-page manual that they put out not too long ago saying everything they wanted to do. Yes. That was a little nuts. Yeah. Yeah, they're going to do basically nothing now.

And we've talked a lot about everything moving to a subscription model, and it annoys the crap out of us every time. Uh, turns out Tim Cook just wants to make everything Apple subscription. Of course. We're not going to own anything anymore. Not going to own our computers, not going to own our phones, nothing. I know. It's just getting to the point where it's ridiculous.

I don't know. I don't know about this brave new world, but, you know, I kind of like owning things every now and again. I own my iMac. I own my studio. I don't own my phone. AT&T owns my phone, which I found out yesterday when I went to go try and upgrade. Nope. Can't do that. Oh, man.

Well, you know, they sell you on the idea that if you do subscription, it'll be cheaper in the long run. But what we always end up finding out is it's not. It's not because there's finance fees. There's interest on those loans. It's a loan. It's not really a thing. But I found out that on the new iPhones, if I use my Apple credit card and set it up for, you know, 24 months of payments, I don't pay interest on that.

So I was like, oh, let me try that. Right. Yeah. Try and figure that one out. Anybody figures that one out. You call me and tell me. You won't be calling me on my new iPhone, though, because I can't figure out how to buy it with the credit card to get the thing. I have to sign up for another loan. I'm like, it's a credit card. Why I'm putting it on my credit card that I've already signed up for.

Why would I be signing up for another loan? This makes no sense. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. But at least with your new iPhone, and I didn't put this in the show notes, but it did Apple Plus launch today and you get a free subscription. Right. Shockingly, it's wonky how you sign up for it because I signed up for it and I got the email saying the $0 charge had gone through and I'm now an Apple Plus member, except for the fact that when I launched the TV app, I don't.

It still tells me I haven't signed up yet. Yeah, it's kind of janky. I was looking this morning, too, because I bought my Air at the beginning of August, which should be in the window because I think it was a three-month window. At least I read a three-month window on one place because I thought it was two, but then I read three and I'm like, I'll try it.

But anyway, yeah, it didn't work. What annoys me about that is it's only for iOS devices, Apple TV devices or Macs. Yeah. I just spent $500 on a fucking Apple Watch. Why don't I get it for that? You can't watch TV on a watch.

It's got watch right in the name. Come on. I've still just spent $500 on Apple, so why can't they just toss it in for that? No, I agree. I don't care what you bought from Apple. You should just get it for free. They need the user base anyways. Exactly. Come on, guys.

Don't be cheap. Now, I think we should have a new segment. I think we should call it Revolting Employees because the companies think that the employees are very revolting. They stink on ice. Yes. And the employees seem to be revolting because Deadspin had a really big thing this week where a bunch of their writers said, screw you guys, I'm going home.

They picked up their typewriters and left because they were, you know, it used to be tech writers and now they want them to write sports articles. Are you kidding me? It's like ridiculous. All right. And yeah, I found my own version of this story, which took a little bit of a different take on it.

Yours is just the facts. This is kind of more of a, you know, people, we've done this to ourselves. And they're talking about how the Deadspin writers, who used to just write sports, are now being told that they must write non-sports material to go on Deadspin as well, basically turn everything into early BuzzFeed news and make listicles and clickicles and everything is about nothing but page views rather than news.

And it's called zombification, basically. And it's happening everywhere. It's happening all Sports Illustrated, Newsweek. I mean, all of this stuff is, it's all come down to shareholder value and it's all come down to make clicks. And part of the reason is because we keep clicking on it.

And this whole article is saying, stop it. Stop clicking on spam stuff. Stop posting it. Stop sending it to your friends. Stick with actual real stories. Yeah. Yeah. That's never going to happen. I know. Been on the internet. It is what it is. No, it's a little crazy.

But what you said was backwards from what I had read is these people were supposed to be writing only sports stories and that's why they left. And you said they were supposed to be writing non-sports stories. I'm just, I'm all kinds of confused. Here's the deal. Because there's a whole bunch of different sites owned by the same parent company, right?

Deadspin is supposed to be just sports. And the Deadspin people have gotten fired as well because they were pissed off that they were having to do stuff that wasn't sports. Yeah. Okay. So here's the deal. The new CEO over there, Jim Spanfeller, he needs to go.

He needs to be replaced immediately because his troops, he can't, he can't, you know, right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Everybody's confused, but you know, I think this might be the curse of Gawker. I think this really might be the Gawker curse coming back to, to haunt, haunt them.

Cause you know, Gawker was a dead property and then it got picked up and, and merged in with all this other crap. And it's just this, it is a weird zombie website right now. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. So here's the deal. Just don't go there guys and save us some problems. And this one was really fun.

Cognizant is going to be shutting down its entire content moderation division in 2020. They're going to be winding it down. Oh, well that's great. Yeah. They're going to be shutting down all of their content moderation stuff in 2020. And Facebook is just going to move some of their stuff to another company, Genpact, which is going to stay in business.

You know, Twitter is going to be losing, you know, the contract with Cognizant as well and a couple other places, maybe some YouTube in there, but it's just fun that this company finally says, you know, we can't take this anymore. We're done. Is that, I mean, is that why they're quitting? Are they basically just, we don't want to do this anymore?

That's what it seems like. It says that we have determined that certain content work in our digital operations practice is not in line with our strategic vision for the company. And we intend to exit this work over time. This work is largely focused on determining whether certain content violates client standards and can involve objectionable materials.

Well, it's kind of a, it's a lose-lose situation for any outsourced company that's doing this because there are no clear rules to follow, are there? I mean, all the companies have made it clear, Facebook in particular, that we have standards that we don't apply at all equally. And, you know, and, and basically they've just set it up to be a middleman in between.

So Facebook can just turn around and blame them. Right. And those, those rules change every day in those articles where they were talking about Cognizant, they would get new briefings from Facebook every morning. They would contradict the day before. And also community standards vary from community to community to community.

Yes. Yes, they do. Yeah. It's kind of a mess. So I, you know, there's just going to, it, this is a Hydra, you know. Okay. So Cognizant goes out of business. GenPact is still in business. This, this, this whole outsourcing of this problem is ridiculous.

It's really ridiculous. Facebook should be required to do this stuff in-house. Hey, you know, it's economy 2.0. Why have employees when you can just outsource? In the news.

Jack Dorsey has come out and said that Twitter is not going to be taking any political ads. So basically he just mooned Zuckerberg. That's what I was saying. It's a big F you to the Zuck. So, but everybody's saying that that's great.

How are you going to actually enforce that on your platform? Yes. And who decides what's a political message and what's not? How is it straight from politicians? Are you going to let PACs do it? What about things like school boards? What about things like firefighters associations? How's that all going to work? And by the way, I guess this is news that they finally fixed their ad platform.

Remember two years ago when I attempted to basically place any ad on Twitter and couldn't? I was going to say breaking news. Twitter actually lets you buy ads. I know. Oh, so yeah, we're going to see how that kind of rolls out. But that sounds a little silly, silly Billy. I don't think it's going to really work.

Neither does anybody else on the internet, apparently. Yeah, nobody's really buying this yet. I mean, I like the idea and I think that would solve a lot of problems. I wish Facebook would do something similar. But again, we have to come up with standards and then apply them equally. Now, I don't know if you saw this one yesterday.

Aaron Sorkin wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg on the New York Times. Did you get a chance to read that? I did. I did. I'm a little over open letter culture. But, you know, it's Sorkin. He's a beautiful writer. He is. That's what I was saying. This was a great little piece. And, of course, the best thing about it after, like, you know, tearing Zuck a new one about his free speech stances.

He's like, if I'd known you felt that way, I would have had the Winklevoss twins invent Facebook. Just go back and do a director's cut. Exactly. Considering that the Winklevoss twins probably did invent Facebook, there you have it. Yeah. But, actually, the Winklevoss twins didn't invent anything because everything that was Facebook was invented long before any of these three yahoos got involved with it.

There was nothing new there. There was nothing new at all. Yeah. Well, what we figured was going to happen here in California is happening. We had passed AB5, which required Uber, Lyft, and all these, you know, Web 2.0 companies that outsource everything to basically hire their workers as employees, not as independent contractors with limited exceptions, which all kind of made sense.

And the drivers were very much for this, but $90 million has been collected by companies that don't make money to start a campaign to basically stop this thing from going through. They want people to ask voters to give ride-hailing companies an exemption to AB5, which is the state law that was passed.

So, they managed to get together $90 million, yet can't give employees balloons for their birthdays. Yeah, $90 million, honestly, though, is a drop in the bucket. It's a drop in the bucket. I have a bucket right here if anybody would like to drop it in. Yeah, they can drop it in over here because it'd actually be more useful if they dropped it in your bucket than what they're going to blow it on trying to get the same change.

Exactly. If somebody gave me $90 million, I could rebuild Uber from scratch and make it a decent company. That's true. That's true. Hear that, people? Get on that. Get on that. It's just an app. Yep. Well, speaking of being just an app, Uber is actually suing Los Angeles.

And this is kind of a strange turn. Yeah, LA Dot wants all of the info on scooter rides, which we've talked about before. Yes, makes sense. They want it anonymized. So, there's no personally identifiable information. Well, it turns out GPS data kind of is personally identifiable information under some rulings.

And Uber said no. They could pass just on, off, drop-off data as long as it's not connected to the user's account. And then it would be completely anonymized as far as the LA is concerned. Right. No user IDs. Yes. Just the data.

Now, I mean, here's the thing. You know, we've talked about how you can de-anonymize data. But if you have nothing to de-anonymize it against. Exactly. Or no reason to de-anonymize it, which is what LA Dot has. They have no reason to de-anonymize the data. They don't care who's on it. They just want to see patterns. Yeah. They just want to see the patterns so they know how to plan the city.

Which, right. God, the city needs some fucking planning. The city needs to be fucking bulldozed. But, yeah, I mean, I'm half and half on this one because I like that Uber is standing up for the rights of the peoples. But is that really what they're doing?

Or do they just not want to put in the work? They just don't want to put in the work because they could easily provide completely anonymized data to the city. Easy. Yeah. Well, you know, here's the thing. It's a slippery slope now after Cambridge Analytica and people seen giving out location data to other entities.

That could be a PR nightmare for them because stupid people can spin it a really stupid way, which would be every major news organization. Yes, that is the problem, right? Uber is giving away your data. At some point, you have to trust someone and the someone you should be trusting is your government institutions, not the private company.

I don't know about that either. You have listened to our show every now and again, right? Yeah, I know. I'm trying to be a little bit less cranky. Okay. I don't – look, I don't use any of these services anyways. Very rarely use an Uber.

I never use a scooter. I never use a bike. But I would not at all be bothered if anonymized information was being passed on to the city for city planning. That's what they're supposed to be doing. That is what our tax dollars are supposed to be paying for. Right. I mean, you have anonymized data for bus riders who are out there.

You have anonymized data for all sorts of other travel information, like how many people ride the train going from this time to that time. So I can see this as very useful information for the city if they know how to use it because that way they can, you know, change the routes and maybe build new passageways.

And maybe, I don't know, put aside some place for docking stations or the fucking scooters in everywhere. But, yeah, we'll see how this one plays out. So I just wanted to bring it to your attention, Brian, because we have talked about it before. Well, there you go. Something else we've talked about a lot before is monopolies and the fact that we actually pretend to have a free market but generally don't in most different venues and avenues because we have full-on government-supported monopolies in a lot of different areas and how that's bad.

I've read this really interesting long-form article over on The Atlantic by Thomas Philippion, who is a professor of finance at New York University, who's arguing that we only pretend to have free markets in this country and everybody else in Europe seems to have them for real. He writes about his personal experience when he arrived in the United States from France in 1999.

He felt like he was entering the land of free markets. Nearly everything from laptops to internet service to plane tickets was way cheaper here than in Europe. Twenty years later, nope, no longer. Internet service, cell phone plans, plane tickets are now much cheaper in Europe and Asia than in the U.S. And the price differences are staggering.

He talks about this data gathered by this comparison site, Cable. The average monthly cost of broadband internet connection is $29 in Italy, $31 in France, $32 in South Korea, and $37 in Germany and Japan. And that's not even mentioning the fact that they actually have better connections than we do.

The connection cost is $68 in the U.S. Well, they haven't. Because of monopolies. It's basically what it comes down to. Because of workplace. It says in 1999, the United States had free and competitive markets in many industries that in Europe were dominated by ugly oppies.

Oligoppies. Oligoppies. Oligoppies. And today, the opposite is completely true. Yeah. They're just, the monopolies have destroyed our free markets here, which we talk about very often. Yeah, that's what it's going to be. And yeah, the plane thing over there, I talked to my friend Jason who's over, he lives in Prague now.

He left because of Brexit. And he's like, fuck this, I'm moving to Prague. He's always traveling and bouncing around Europe, like, all the time. And it's like, oh, I'm going to Spain this weekend. I'm going here. I'm going there. And I'm like, how can you afford to do that on a podcaster's salary? He's like, well, the plane tickets are like 35 bucks.

Like, damn. Yeah. That would be nice. I mean, the distances aren't as far, to be fair, as many of us often travel in the U.S. Right, but it still costs me 100. Look, I'm just going to San Francisco. Yeah. It's 300 miles away. It's 120 bucks. Yep. And it would be a lot cheaper with Europe and actual, you know, free and open markets.

Well, there we go. Yep. Moving on. Moving on. And something else that I keep monitoring pretty, pretty continuously because I have a kid is stuff and the different studies about screen time and all that sort of stuff. This is more a socioeconomic one, which found that tweens and teens from families that make less than $35,000 per year spent nearly two hours more with screen media each day than their peers with incomes over $100,000.

This came from the media profit Common Sense. Lower-income teens spent more than 8.5 hours each day on smartphones, tablets, video games, and other screen media compared with six hours and 49 minutes for their higher-income peers. So that's a big difference. And that's despite higher-income kids generally having greater ownership of all matters of screens and smartphones and computers and TVs.

So this is basically because once you have this stuff and you've paid for the little small amount of streaming, it is way cheaper to have your kids do that than activities that cost money, which is what people with higher incomes do with their kids. They sign them up for soccer and baseball, all of which requires gear purchasing and fees and uniforms and all of that sort of stuff.

So to some degree, it seems that lower-income users are going to media to compensate for lack of opportunities in other areas of life, whether that's learning, connecting to others, accessing information, or for entertainment. And this kind of reminds me of the different studies that we've heard so far or the reports that we've heard so far about, you know, people up in Silicon Valley that absolutely refuse to let their kids use their own products.

Yeah. Yeah, it kind of does. Yep. The more education and the more money you have, the less you want to use all these things that we use all day. It's interesting. I think Khan Academy needs to really, like, you know, tie into that market and say, hey, look, if your kid's going to be staring at a screen for eight hours a day, have them learn something.

Send them over to us. We'll take care of them because you can learn for free. Yep. I know it's not as fun, but I tell you what, you know, it's going to leapfrog you once you get into the job market in, you know, 10 years. That's right. Whatever. So I think the parents need to be educated on the fact that, hey, you've paid for this screen.

You have it, and your kids are going to be sitting in front of it. Make them learn something. Teach them, you know, if they've got an iPad, you know, go to Swift school and learn how to program. Things like that. There's lots of things that you can actually use the time for instead of just sitting there watching YouTube and melting your brain.

So that's up to the parents. And this one, I just had to put this in because, you know, talk about kids looking at screens. Spotify is launching a dedicated kids app with curated playlists and, wait for it, playful art. I'm down with that. I don't mind that idea.

I can't wait to see it. I want to check it out first because what I found is, like, you know, the YouTube kid stuff. The stuff that they decide to curate themselves, I don't necessarily agree with or they leave out things that my kid really likes. And that's always a problem. So. Yeah, well, I'm hoping that, you know, this will at least give you some recourse so you can set up playlists for for the young one.

So you're not you're not getting, you know, I'm already doing that. See, the problem with it is right now that it would require a Spotify premium family subscription, which is more than I pay right now. I just have a single premium subscription, but that's because my kid doesn't, you know, have his own phone or anything yet.

Obviously, by the time he gets to that age, I would have to upgrade to Spotify premium. But right now it's, you know, I just I he tells me what he wants to listen to and I'll start playing it. He's actually getting quite good at telling Alexa to play a couple songs, which is shocking at three. But it's it's fun. But yeah, I'm not quite there yet.

I will look at it when it's released here right now. It's just in Ireland, apparently. So actually, I should talk to a friend of the show, Fergal. And he's got a kid that's the right age for this and let him know about it and get a review. Yes, get a review. Reach out to the network. So it's interesting. You know, I'm fine with it.

You know, they said it's both GDPR and COPA compliant and all sorts of other stuff. So it's not going to slurp up your data and spit it out to anyone else. It's just just for the kids, which is the way it should be. Yeah. And speaking of kids, an EU report finds that music piracy is declining among ages 15 to 24.

This is not surprising at all. No, it's not. Because streaming is finally cheap enough where you can get just about everything. Yep. You can get a family plan and you can hear basically everything that's out there. We also know that people this age, possessions aren't that big of a deal anymore. So like having this gigantic own MP3 library, nothing they care about.

They also don't give a shit about full albums. They listen to singles and just, you know, individual tracks. So none of this is surprising. Nope, not at all. And, you know, it says that the main reason that people actually do go to Sweden to go steal some music is because of the price.

So if they can't afford it, then they have to go steal it. But, you know, and I think that the prices are so low now that that's why it's declining. We're seeing that line, that line of delineation between people that can't afford it and can't afford it shrinking. So it's to the point where more people can afford it than can't.

That's right. I mean, Amazon basically gives away their music service at this point. It was like 80 bucks a year for the main service that I just canceled. Really? I thought, okay. I keep seeing. You know what, though? It's all gotten so confusing. It's like what my dad used to scream about with like cable providers or, you know, DirecTV.

For your first year, it's basically free. And then after that, they screw you. There's all these, like, deals. Just like with Apple Plus right now. If you bought an Apple product, you get it for free for a year. There's all kinds of weird deals out there all the time for these different streaming things. They don't make it easy. Yeah, they don't. They don't at all.

So you are a fan of Will.i.am, I believe. Or at least making fun of Will.i.am quite some time ago. I am not a fan. Will.i.am. I know. I do not like him in a boat. I do not like him on a float. Well, apparently nobody does because he's out of money.

Well, did he ever release anything besides those stupid headphones we reviewed? I don't actually know. I think they do have some products because people are saying that they've gone dark. And, oh, as I say, yeah, other hardware, like a poorly reviewed smartwatch and wireless earbuds.

Yeah, we talked about the earbuds. I don't remember the smartwatch. But, yeah, they raised $100 million in venture capital. But, apparently, the pivot to AI has not done well for them in any way, shape, or form. And people haven't been paid for weeks.

And they're waiting on some deal to, like, go through with this guy in Dubai. And he's just kicking it and not signing the deal. So, at this point, they're just kind of floating. The office has been closed. Support's been closed. Seems to me like those two things mean the company's closed.

Yeah, they're done. They've been done. Yeah. I can't even remember when those headphones came out and reviewed them. I feel like it was, like, three years ago, maybe even four. And I remember doing a follow-up, like, maybe two years ago. Because when the headphones came out, they came with this.

Well, first off, it came with basically a book of photos of Will.i.am and really hot people wearing these really ugly headphones. The headphones sounded fine. They looked ridiculous. But the big selling point through all the press about it and all the product packaging was the game-changing AI app that was going to interface that never, ever showed up.

It just didn't. Right. It was total vaporware. Yeah, they were just headphones, basically. Not good ones and very expensive ones. Right. But thanks for the free ones, whoever sent those to us. What did you end up doing with those? I think they went in the trash at some point. I'm not kidding.

It's like, what the hell do I need them for? Those are primary gifting opportunities there, man. Okay, not the trash. Oh, I do remember. I took it to my kid's school for, like, a charity donation thing. Hopefully you cleaned them first. Have some DNA and shitty headphones.

It came with, like, 7,000 different ear adapters, because apparently, you know, Will.i.am knows people with lots of different ear shapes. He's big in the ear community. And here's a fun one. You were talking about trees the other day. YouTubers have raised $10 million for a tree charity.

Okay. And, well, two of those, you know, million dollars there. One million came from Elon Musk, which is not bad. And the Shopify CEO donated $1,001, so he could be on top. Don't be a one-upper. Yep.

He's truly the 1%, or 0.1%, even. And looks like a lot of other people have donated, too. Even Jack Dorsey. Although it's not been confirmed by Twitter. It's like, he showed up with two different donations, and nobody at Twitter will even say if he did it or not.

So, either way. Sounds very Twitter. Yeah. I think it's a decent one. Even PewDiePie donated. He donated almost $70,000. Wow. And Ninja donated $15,000. Hmm. A lot. Didn't PewDiePie get in a lot of trouble?

I guess nobody cares anymore, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he got deplatformed because he's racist. Remember, he was the guy that was having people on Fiverr hold up Jew signs or, like, anti-Jew signs. Oh, that's right. And he thought they were funny. So, he's been deplatformed, but he's still donated a bunch of money in the hopes of, what, getting replatformed?

I think he's been replatformed somewhere else or has moved on. I don't follow the saga of PewDiePie because I find him to be an utterly disgusting and deplorable human being, so I don't even give him the time of day. This is honestly the first time I've seen his name in quite some time.

Let's keep it that way. Yeah, I'm down with that. This episode is sponsored by our good friends at Privacy.com. Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your information private and is even more convenient than using a regular credit card online.

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That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up. Privacy.com slash GOG. Once more with feeling. Privacy.com slash GOG. Security?

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

And also Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they cover law and policy and surveillance and privacy. Okay, your resume is getting a little long here, Dave. I feel like we're not doing enough podcasts, Jason. I know. Keep up, gentlemen. Keep up. I believe I am now up to 10 per week.

Wow. That's impressive. Not bad. A lot of sucretes going through. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's fun. So we have a bit of follow-up, which Dave, you yourself pointed out on Twitter. Sometimes we come up with scenarios on this show.

Usually from Jason's evil mind about how we can take different things and turn them around and do nefarious deeds with them. And one of the ideas that we came up with the other week was, you know, Facebook has decided that you can lie as long as you're a politician and you pay for the ad.

And why not just register yourself as a politician and do the same yourself? People are doing it now. And not just some people. Elizabeth Warren has done this now to say, you know, here you go. I'm just going to put out a fake ad now. And we actually had somebody who was a member of a political action group who tried to place an ad and were told, no, you're not a politician.

So we fact-checked yours. Well, he just went and filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for California governor. And now he's a politician. So now he can run as many political ads as he wants. Right? Sometimes I'm a genius. No. Aww. Well, Facebook said, you know, that's not the spirit of the law that we were trying to propose.

So you can't do that. So he's going to take up to court most likely now and say, well, why not? This is the rules that you proposed. I am following the rules. Yep. I saw one last week where they – it said something like – basically it was saying that Mark Zuckerberg was dead.

It said Mark Zuckerberg who, you know, died tragically last week. And so it's funny how so many of these are targeting him specifically. Well, it's his hot potato that he started. And he gets all the money from the acid to run anyway.

So the only one that wins here is Mark. So what are you going to do? Yeah. I was just like sometimes we get it on the nose. Yes. Hats off to you, Jason. You were well ahead of the curve on this one. What do we think of Twitter saying no political ads?

Well, we discussed it a little bit earlier. It's great to say that. Now, what's the nitty-gritty? Where's the 10,000-page document detailing the exact rules? What is the body that's going to determine things? You know, how's that going to work? Like just nothing political at all?

Who's going to vet that? Who's going to say it isn't? What if I come up with a code that only the MAGA people will understand? Hmm. That hasn't happened anywhere. You know, I want to see how it's enforced. It's great to say that. And basically what we determined is just a middle finger to Zuck.

But we'll see what happens. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Especially since the people like, you know, Cognizant might be some of the people that would actually be checking out those ads. They're going out of business or going out of the moderation business. So Twitter might have to do it in-house. But we know that nobody does it in-house. So how are we going to get all of the different election materials to all the people in the Philippines so they can tell if it's a political ad or not?

It's a sticky wicket. Oh, Jack. Yeah. And I think this goes back to a foundational thing when it comes to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which is that from the get-go, they all sort of hid behind this notion that they're platforms, not news providers or services and that sort of thing.

And they still do when it serves their purposes and they don't when it doesn't serve their purposes. Right. Exactly. And but so they all say, well, it's impossible to do content moderation at scale. And there's a part of me that thinks, well, then you shouldn't be operating at this scale.

Yes. So the voice of reason. Yes. That does make some sense. I mean, it's the same thing as saying, you know, we can't operate. It's simply impossible for us to operate our factories and not pollute the rivers when we are at this scale. Well, good point.

Scale it back. Then your factories are too big or your business model is broken that you need to, you know, not pollute those rivers. Yeah. I mean, at the scale that these companies are at right now, I don't think that the advertising model works anymore.

Well, what do you mean by works? By works for the people. It's not working for us. Right. Yes. I totally agree with you there. No, no. It works fine for them. But the same in the same way that, you know, the company that's polluting the river. Right. Their business is going just fine. Right. It's all gangbusters here.

Yeah. Yeah. As long as you stay within these factory doors, never mind the big fires outside. Right. Yes. It's the flaming river of blood. There's your show title. So I got a little, I want to talk about the Apple Watch Series 5 for a second.

Okay. So Dave, after our last episode and you told us about Joe Kerrigan's wife, Lisa, who had the very nasty run in with a heart issue, I went and listened to that podcast and it was just like, I was a gut wrencher. I was like, holy shit.

And after that, I'm like, you know, I'm in that, I'm in that cohort as well. I could pretty much fall over any second. I'm 48, about 35 pounds overweight, have used my body as an amusement park, not a temple for 47 of those years.

Not to mention that in the few years we've been doing this podcast, you've fallen over at least twice. Exactly. That's what I mean. Not from heart attacks, but you know. Carlo Rossi attacks. Yeah. Not to mention all the wagons you've fallen off of. That's exactly it. Yes.

Goddamn wagons. So I, you know, I joined my local gym and I thought maybe I should upgrade to this new watch and just to have that as another backup because I do fall over a lot sometimes. And I just, my heart is not really great. That's why I'm going back to the gym.

My resting heart rate's at like 92, which I know is not good for a six foot tall, 235 pound person. Yeah. So yeah, I'm going to start taking care of myself a little bit more, but I did go out and I traded in my old series three.

They gave me 60 bucks for it. And then I threw my Apple watch series five on the old Apple credit card so I can get some cash back and it got here and it's amazing. It is so much nicer than the series three. I think I'm just going to get you life alert too. Let's, let's cover all the bases here.

That's right. We need to do it. I've fallen and I can't get up. You need a life alert necklace. What you need to do is you need to get one for Bam Bam that I can put on her collar because every time I fall over, she'll come and lick my face and say, are you doing okay, dad? But I, so I can reach up and grab her collar and press it.

So what's better about this one that's so remarkable versus your series three? It's thinner. It's lighter. It's brighter. It's bigger. It's faster. It's got great new faces on it. It's a floor. It blends.

It parses. It slices and dices and it is a, you can cut through a can pretty much. That's about it. Yeah. There's nothing, there's nothing on it. That's worse than the old one. Let's just say that. Apple Ginsu watch.

It works. It works really well. And I did the EKG stuff and you can save out your EKGs and send them off to your doctor if you need to. I like it. I feel just a little bit more safe, but you know, I just, I got to work slowly into getting back into shape and I thought, why not get one of these?

So since you were on the, you know, you're on the bandwagon to get one, if you, I think you should move up the timetable a little. Christmas can come a bit early this year, Dave. Yeah. Really? What? Is there something you know that I don't? Is there? I mean, you're doing 10 podcasts a week.

That's true. I know, man. Come on. Burning the candle at both ends. Yeah. At least the stand up and move feature would get you going because it reminds me every hour if I'm not up and about, but I do work. But the three did that, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But I, but I work at a standing desk.

So yeah, I do have to take vitamin D supplements because of all the time I spend in this dark windowless room. Yeah. Me too. Oh, get, get, get a, get a Phillips go light. I've got one of those, the blue lights. They really work. Really? Yep. I've had one for years. I love that thing. Totally, totally elevates your mood.

Really? Yep. As you can tell from every episode of this podcast. That's right. Imagine, imagine what it would be like if I didn't have that. Here's your, there's your dream sponsor, right? Yep. Oh man. I think they pull their ads immediately. They'd be like, it's obvious not, not working.

Right. You want that guy to be our poster boy? Imagine what he was like before he got the link. Oh man. So I'm going to put a link into the show notes for the verge guide, the verge guide, the verge guide to the Apple watch.

And it's got some pretty cool new stuff in there that I learned about because of the five has a bunch of new features. Oh, it's also got a compass on the watch face that you can plug in, which is kind of cool. If you're out for a walk and you're not like in a new place, like, which way am I going? And you just turn the watch and you have a compass built in. It's got a bunch of cool new stuff.

I do. I do like it. I got to say. All right. Well, maybe I will accelerate the purchase timeline for my Apple watch. Highly recommended. And another bit of follow up here, because we've talked about the car apps and things of that nature.

Chris Calero sent this one in. Thanks, Chris. Five months after returning rental car, man still has remote control. So he sent us, he sent us this email and said, I hope you bought this. I hope you bought your new Explorer new. Fortunately I did, but this is kind of crazy. I find this so implausible.

I don't understand how this got out of testing. Wouldn't you, even when you're testing the car, wouldn't you sign in with the app and all that? And at some point when you're done testing, go, huh, there's, there seems to be no way to disconnect this. How does, how did these roll off the factory floor?

Well, he can, he can probably just delete the app or he can probably take it out. But the point is it's not being, it can't be done remotely. They're not remotely kicking them out. He's like, so if, if a rental car company has, is giving people access to the car through an app, they should have a way to, once the rental period is over, revoke your access.

I don't think there's any access tokens with this. It's like, if you know the VIN, you can, you can pair the app and you can get in the car and press okay on the, the entertainment center. That's it. They didn't do any more testing than that, which makes me think, okay, every valet guy is going to have a copy of the Ford app, gets the VIN number off of it while he's parking the car, plugs it in, makes a photograph of your house keys, and then can tell when you're home or not.

It's sure to be in the news next week. Yeah. Or at least next year, because we're usually about a year ahead, but yeah. Well, it's just like the election running for office story. Next week, we'll, we'll hear it. Well, there'll be a story about some valet who.

I think we need to rebrand our show and make it for criminals. For the smart. I can do that. For the smart industry-minded criminal. Yes. The forward-thinking criminal. For the discerningly nefarious. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think we've certainly talked about it here. The story that I, I know about from a guy I spoke to at least a year ago, probably a year and a half ago, who was a security researcher who bought and sold a, I think it was a Ford Mustang and found that months after he had sold the car and turned it over to the new owners, he was still able to track it, uh, started up, uh, just, uh, I think he could adjust the HVAC, things like that.

And, um, he reached out to Ford and was like, uh, guys, this is not good. And, um, it was a similar situation. Yeah. This guy's reached out to Ford and Ford said nothing back. I mean, cars are basically computers now.

Yep. You'd think somebody tech savvy would be working over at these places. Yeah. Cause they're, they're networked computers. They're not just computers. My car has a cell modem in it. It, it phones home. If I don't have a, if I don't bring my phone with me, it still gets GPS from its own like cell modem and lookup system.

So it's, uh, yeah, uh, it's very strange cause it's not like the car manufacturers aren't actively working on security. It's not like they don't know that this is an issue that is front and center. You know, they know that they're working on this now, evidently they're not very successful at it, but I'm about to say, I, are you sure they're working on it?

Because it doesn't seem to be the case. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of people that write software that actually just aren't very good. Remember that. Well, there is that. I also wonder where we stand today with software because, you know, cars have really long lead times, really long development lead times.

Yes. And so I wonder how much that plays into this. You know, I've had my, my car for about a year now and over the summer, there was a firmware update that was great. It really improved functionality of a lot of things.

Um, it isn't, Joe, you, both of you guys have cars that can, that have connectivity built into them, right? Yeah. My car, my car updates all the time. Yeah. Updates itself. Yeah. Yeah. Mine does not. So mine required a, uh, you know, a SIM card or not a SIM card, um, you know, a little memory card to, to do that.

But, uh, that's, I know. Well, my car allows you to turn it off and, and choose to do it, which I highly recommend if you have that option to choose turning it off, well, to choose updates so you can go online and Google it first and see if it, if it's bricked anybody's car, anybody's car.

Yeah. Right. The GPS is driving you into lakes all of a sudden because yeah, I actually have to go in this week because there's software that needs to get updated for mine was problems with the anti-lock brakes. I'm like, okay, I think that one I'll get updated. That sounds good. That sounds good.

I've had three recalls on my Explorer since I got it and I got it six months ago. Wow. But it, mine, mine set to explore version two now. Yeah, exactly. Uh, mine actually just updates when it's close enough to my home wifi, which means like parked outside the garage or in the garage.

Oh, okay. It'll just automatically use the home wifi. It won't use their system or my phone. It's just set for the home wifi. What I want to test Brian, cause I think I'm going to have to come to the rescue and see you soon because you need a new boom arm and your interface has gone all exorcist on us. Uh, when I see you, I'm going to have you basically, you know, sign into my car and then I'll see if I can get rid of you because I have a feeling, I think I know, I think I know how to do it just

since I, you know, know how these things generally work, but I want to test it. I want to see if you can own my car and that'll be fun. That'll be fun for all of us. I will enjoy that, uh, remotely. Well, Dave, if you just want to send me your VIN number, I can probably take care of yours too.

Sure. Sure. I'll just put it on Twitter. Yeah. Why don't you do that? Or go take a super high quality selfie with it just in the background slightly. Yeah. I'll make sure that my house keys are next to it and my fingerprints as well. Perfect. Yeah. Just hold up your hands and hold your key in your mouth and go, here you go.

Okay. So we've got a fan question in here from Levi. He said, I'm using private internet access and loving it. However, would love to hear your guys' thoughts on VPN security, e.g. about the risks of them being wiretapped like this guy's comments on how, or if they do or don't protect from fingerprinting browsers and system metadata, blah, blah, blah.

So this is an article over at Medium that says, do VPNs actually protect your privacy? And I read this article and I thought it was interesting. Did you guys get a chance to go through this? I breezed through it. Yep. Yep. Yeah. The long and the short of it is if you're not under investigation by the NSA, you're going to be fine.

If governments want to read your VPN traffic, you're actually making it easier for them. That's the long and the short of it. Which is fine. Again, VPNs for me are just a way of saying to, you know, Spectrum, stop tracking me.

Or the guy at Starbucks. Yeah. Using, getting online at Starbucks so they don't get my passwords. That's, I'm not trying to fool the entire U.S. government, at least not yet. I would say also, just as a general rule, that if you're going to be using a VPN, make sure it's a VPN that you're paying for.

And it's not a free VPN, because if it's a free VPN, there's something else going on the back end for them to make money. And that is your data. Well, that's why everybody should go to GOG.show slash VPN to check out private internet access. The only VPN tested in court by the FBI.

By the way, in general, I mean, one of the things about the VPN market is that there are so many providers out there and it's really hard to vet them all. And they come and go and they change hands and all that sort of thing. It's actually an area that we, at the CyberWire, we shy away from taking advertising for because it's so hard to know that you've got a good VPN supplier.

I'm sure the one you guys have is fine, though. They've been around for about six years. So we've, I mean, we've been with them since the beginning. So we're sticking with them. Yeah, we do. They're not technically really advertising anyways. We're just, it's an affiliate situation. So, and we're, we're very happy with them.

Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. I use them on all my devices everywhere. When I, as soon as I leave the house, I flip it on and it works great fast and I can watch TV in other countries, which is really the main thing. That's the main thing I use it for. That BBC player. Gotcha.

All right. Well, until next time, everybody needs to go check out the CyberWire. And Hacking Humans and Caveat and probably the 17 other shows that Dave does. Yeah, that's right. All right, gentlemen, good talking to you.

I will see you next time. See you next time. Cops and doodads. Brian, I got my Echo Buds. How are they? Are they better than Will.i.am's? Well, I never personally got to try the Will.i.am's, but I'm guessing they're slightly better.

They're big. They're really big. You know the hipsters who have those big plugs in their earlobes? Yes. Kind of looks like that, but in the middle of your ear. So when you're wearing both, it looks like you have a big black rod stuck through the middle of your skull. All right.

They are heavy. I was amazed at how heavy they are. Well, that's because they actually have a battery in them. Well, the battery life is about the same. So I did do some tests with them. I have to say they sound amazing.

Right. The Bose noise canceling tech is great. The pass-through tech is really good. I've done some phone calls with them. Sound amazing. You have to turn on pass-through for that so you can hear yourself. I'm just not used to having things all the way in my ear canal now because I've had AirPods for so long.

Right. Right. So it's really weird. It feels like my head's underwater for a bit. Like when you put them in, you can't hear anything. So that part's really strange for sure. The charging case is fucking massive. It's massive compared to the iPod case.

Very heavy as well. And the actual interface and user experience is tricky to say the least. Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. Here's the thing. So you have to, I had to get the Alexa app to be able to, to use them and set the settings on it.

I was kind of hoping they were going to have their own dedicated app for it, but no. No, it's all built into the Alexa app. Okay. And you know, you can set different things. It shows you what the battery percentages are on different things. Now it also comes with three different sizes of the little ear, you know, condoms.

So I had to use the smallest and it's still a pretty tight fit, even with the smallest ones. And they come with a little shoehorn thing that you can put on, which is the other side of the condom. It's like a, you have a condom on one side, a dental dam on the other, and you have to get it just right. Well, so you have to though, because if you're going to go in your buns buds with noise reduction, it's got to be a tight fit.

I mean, well, here's the thing. They do, they do fit once I get them in my ears and I get them situated just right. But once I get those, the, the other adapter on for the outside of the ear, I can't get them to seat in the case. So you have to like take them off and on, which is a real pain in the ass.

Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Because the first night I put them in the case, I woke up in the morning and I was going to, you know, pop them in and use them for while I'm working in the kitchen. And the batteries were dead on everything because they weren't seated right, which was, that's a problem. So I had to charge them up for a while to get them in.

And then it turns out that only one of them was dead. Like the left one was at 4% and the other was at a hundred percent. And I'm like, okay, I just don't get that part. Now, the other side of it is you have to reprogram play and pause to be like one ear and the other ear can be noise cancellation on noise cancellation off because like, you know, it toggles between pass through and noise cancellation.

Gotcha. And it's, yeah, with noise cancellation on, you don't want to wear those around the house when you have a roommate because I can't hear her. Like she, she came up and started talking to me and I'm like, doop-a-doop-a-doo. And she's like, hey, you, like eventually had to tap me on the shoulder. That's how good the noise cancellation is, by the way.

It's really good. But the sound quality is like, I, like I said, excellent. It sounds, they sound really good, but they are heavy. They're going to take some time to get used to. I am going to keep them because my actual, you know, AirPod Gen 1s are now down to 34 minutes of listen time on a full charge, which makes them absolutely useless for 129 bucks plus tax, which came out to be like 143 at the end of the day.

They're still pretty good. Like I said, that just the, the interaction is not as seamless as with AirPods by any stretch of the imagination, you know? Well, I mean, that's not surprising, but like when the battery died, I had to repair them, which in figuring out how to repair them was a pain because I couldn't find the button on the charging case.

It's like, press the button on the case. I'm like, where's the fucking button? I couldn't find the button. But I finally eventually found the button. And they're like, if the button's not working, then recharge and wait 20 minutes. I did that, got them repaired and they work, but yeah, they're going to take a little getting used to.

And my roommate does, she always made fun of me for the AirPods. She's like, those are so stupid looking. And then when I put the, the new ones in, I'm like, I got my Amazon one. She's like, oh, the other ones are better. Can't win. Well, I'm really interested in what your battery life will be about in about a year with these things.

I might pop down to the Amazon store. I've got an Amazon bookstore near me and check them out in person just to see what they look like. But you know, I, I just, I, I'm really thinking about switching when these, when these AirPods die, I'm thinking about switching. So we'll see what the battery life is like on these in the long run.

Well, yeah, it's going to be a while before I get to that. Everybody is raving about the AirPod pros though. So, but they're just too, they're so expensive. They're too expensive. It's ridiculous. I'm not going to pay that much for headphones that don't even know. Yeah.

For 140 bucks and you know, just a little getting used to over the hump, I'm going to be walking all weekend. So like on the next show, I'll give you kind of an update to see if they still work. If, if, if, if I can't get used to them by the end of the weekend, they're going back and I'll figure something else out. But well, you know, maybe by the next time I'm ready to buy a new pair of headphones anyways, Apple will just have me on their all in streaming life plan and I'll just get them as part of my subscription package with my new Mac that I don't own and my phone that I don't own

and my headphones that I don't own and my Apple TV that I don't own. I know my God. I wonder if, uh, yeah, blue apron is going to have to have you sending back your poop when you're done because you don't own the food. Uh, yeah, you just, you just rented that. Yeah, exactly. It's just like beer.

You only rent beer. So I saw this one while I was, uh, bouncing around this week and this is really cool. I did not watch the Apple keynote in September, but, uh, apparently there was a demo. It was apparently a demo from filmic, which is a great video app for the iPhone.

I love it when I, when I need to do video, I'll use that. Um, turns out they're coming out with a new feature that will actually let you record both cameras, the front and the back, which I'm like, okay, uh, iPhone 12, this will be built in because it's such a no brainer.

It's like having to switch between cameras. Like, why can't you just record both of them? And it's only going to be for like an interview. Yeah, the, the new ones are going to be like, you know, you have to use like some pretty high powered stuff to do it, but I will be able to test it out on my iPad pro, but I don't have any of the, I'm still rocking the eight plus because I can't figure out how to buy an, an 11 pro on my damn credit card.

So I might have to actually go stand at the store for hours to find somebody to say, can I have my phone, sir? Here's my credit card, please. Uh, so this thing won't do 4k, it'll only do 1080p, but honestly, who needs, if you're doing walk arounds with you and what's in front of you, you don't really need 4k, but either way, it's pretty cool.

It's, it's a, it's a cool feature and I'm looking forward to it. Brian scientists have been talking for a while now, maybe just a couple of years about trying to figure out, you know, some of the different reasons about why we sleep.

Um, there's a great book that I, I don't know if you read it, but I, I know I talked about it on the show by Dr. Matthew Walker and is a great book on sleep. If you want to get, get into the nitty gritty, but finally, finally, uh, this woman, Laura Lewis and her team of researchers finally figured out what it is and it's what people thought it was basically when you go into deep, deep sleep, a, a wave of fluid comes through your

brain and in my case, toxins, well, I don't know, I don't know if Carlo Rossi is there with a broom sweeping out your brain, but yeah, it's, and it just, it clears it out. So they finally been, have been able to prove this by putting people to sleep in an MRI machine with, uh, you know, an EEG cap and have been able to, to test this and it's nice and non-invasive, but they also think that they'll be able to put in, uh, like Alzheimer's patients or people

who are, have those kinds of, you know, cognitive illnesses that are coming on to be able to see how, like how their fluid moves because it's non-invasive. So that's a good bit of tech. That's cool. Uh, but do you know who I feel really bad for right now? Who? Bill Bryson.

Because I'm working my way through his 800 page, meticulously researched, well thought out. He spent years on his new book, The Body, which I hope to have finished in time for Tuesday's show to review. But I just literally read the sleep chapter last night and he talked about how we still don't know how any of this goes on and now he's wrong.

Yep. Yep. You know, that's going to happen eventually. I like that book. Hopefully I'll finish it by the time you do as well. And speaking of cool tech, Cirrus, the private jet maker now has a plane that can land itself, which is nice. And I love the fact that they just have a big red button in the cabin that will just take over.

Yeah. That's pretty much it. Now, if they had a sense of humor, they'd do an airplane blow up doll. I know. That would be awesome. Uh, yeah. So this thing that's, uh, this new system from Garmin that, uh, will basically look for the nearest airport, like private airport and talk to air traffic control.

It's got a bunch of canned things to run through it and it'll check the weather and see where it's got to go. You look at the inside of this plane. It is just a massive set of screens. And it looks like, it really looks like the inside of like a Lexus SUV with a joystick. It's crazy. Well, yeah.

For $2 million, I guess that's kind of what you want. You don't want to be getting on. Well, that's because you don't know anybody that has one. I would get on one of these in no time flat. Totally. Uh, so Airbnb, I found out during the fires, they have a program called open homes and the open homes program has a couple different, uh, you know, purviews in it.

One is for people who have homes. If they want to give out a room to somebody who is like, uh, working their way off the streets and in need of employment, need a, need a place to stay for a while, which is really awesome. I don't know how many people take advantage of that, but they also have a disaster relief program, which they were talking about on the news here saying that, Hey, if you've got room, check this out because people are, our shelters are overflowing.

And if you have a room, go to Airbnb and you can put your home, you can put it like a room in your home up for people who need someplace to go because the shelters are full and all the hotels are full, like in the area, which I thought was pretty cool. How crazy would that be? If you, if you put that up and LeBron James showed up, that would be pretty funny.

That did make the news here. He was, that actually happened to find a hotel room. No way. Oh, wow. Oh, what was the four seasons booked? I mean, the Beverly Hills hotel, the Bel Air. Apparently so. I don't think I'm sure he didn't go down to the local motel six and check that out. I know.

I mean, I know they left the lights on for him, but I don't see him going down there. And now, because Airbnb still sucks, there's a long article over at Vice called, I accidentally uncovered a nationwide scam on Airbnb. Shocking.

I know. It is a, it is a fairly long article, but it talks about how people who own basically, they're slumlords and do bait and switch. So what they'll do is they'll, they'll get you to come to a town and say, okay, this is the place you're going to stay. It looks great.

Pictures are beautiful. Right before you're about to check in, unfortunately, the toilet backs up and we can't get you in there, but we can put you at another place down the street. And they put them to the, one of their, like basically flop houses. And that way, you know, it's, it's a scam.

It's a total scam. They're taking money from these people and Airbnb is doing nothing to stop it. Period. They're just a platform. They're just a platform and a, in a shitty platform to boot because they're airing on the side of the, the people who have the homes. So it leaves this giant window open for people to basically scam the system.

And so I recommend anybody that uses Airbnb, read this article, because if you find yourself in a situation like this, know you're being scammed, know what to do and know your rights and just hammer Airbnb about it. So just to wrap this up real quick, I found the vampire apocalypse calculator.

All right. Which is a very fun little, little, little physics based calculator from this guy who just, you know, was messing around someday. His name's Dominic Sersnia and he's a physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Krakow, Poland.

I'm a little disappointed he's not in Romania. I know. I know. It'd be a little bit more, a little bit more telling there, but it's fun. You can move around sliders and things to see what a vampire apocalypse would look like. And basically the long and the short of it is in 99.99999% of the situations that I planned out, we're all dead.

We're all just dead, you know? Well, and you know, unless they start to matrix us, they'd all be dead too, because once you've gotten rid of all the humans, you've got no blood left. See, that's the one thing that I don't think he takes into account in his calculation, because I'm like, okay, there's not going to be 10 billion vampires because they're all going to be, you know, dried up.

What's the lifespan of a vampire? They don't actually, well, like once there's no blood, what's the lifespan of a vampire? Yeah, exactly. Who knows? Didn't they watch True Blood? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they watched The Hunger, because, you know, in The Hunger, you can just stay that way forever.

And I've got one last article in here called, The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable Was A Bold, Beautiful Failure. This is over at IEEE.org. It's a long read, but very interesting and very historically driven. But it's fun to go look at the pictures of the actual first undersea cable, which is really cool.

It's a good article. Highly recommend checking it out. Closing shout outs! As we record, it is November 1st, 2019, the official beginning of Blade Runner in Los Angeles. Oh, really? No way.

We're living it. It's Blade Runner Day. I don't see flying cars anywhere. No, no. I am pretty sure that Zuckerberg's a replicant, though. Pretty sure about that. Yeah. There you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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