393: Peeping Tithingman

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. We made the feed change, Brian. How'd that go? Seems to be fairly painless so far. Did we do better than Disney Plus? I think we did better than Disney Plus, yes. If anything, everybody got more content than they paid for. Oh, wait, nobody paid.

Well, we do have some people that pay and they keep the lights on, so praise be to the people that pay. But, yes, seem to be fairly painless. As we go through the weeks, I will be expanding out the back catalog so the rest will be in the full feed. There's only 15 shows right now.

As of this one, there will be 16. I'm going to keep adding to it as things kind of roll out and fall off so nobody gets, you know, 100 to 390 downloads at once. One bit of note, somebody slid into our DMs.

I can't remember who it was at the moment, but thank you for the update. He did mention that in Overcast, we've lost our stars on the older episodes, so feel free to restart them. Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, I know what I'll be doing after this show. Thanks for the heads up there.

Don't want to lose our position. Still can't beat Rogan, but we can beat the New York Times Daily Podcast. Excellent. Yes. So I put out a question last week about who owns the copyright to an AI-generated piece of art.

Well, it turns out that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has that same question. Right. And this came out on The Verge this week after I made my question, and it's apparently been in the works for a while. But the Patent and Trademark Office is asking for, you know, some public opinions on, what the hell do we do here?

Because we don't really know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, I think it's going to come down to whoever wrote the software owns it, unless they do, you know, basically Blakent licenses or whatever to, you know, here's our tool. You use it. You own it. But that's going to come down to the lawyers and the businesses, of course.

Yeah. And the terms of service that people adopt on this. So you have until December 16th if you want to go put in your two cents on this. Look how interactive we've been recently. This is the second thing that we get to go comment on. I know. What about that? Oh, crazy. We talked about Disney Plus a second ago.

Turns out they had 10 million subscribers that first week. Wow. Depends on your definition of subscriber. Well, it says it's signed up 10 million users since its Tuesday debut, which is, you know. Because a lot of people are on free trials, which I don't consider subscribing. True that. True that.

Yeah. When the card gets a ding, then they're not a subscriber. That's a subscription. Yes. We have like three people that are subscribed to us on PayPal, but I get a notice every month that their credit card has been declined. So they're not subscribing. They're not subscribed. Yeah. They're just jerks. Yeah.

Man. Yeah. So are you still liking it? Yeah. Yeah. I actually watched an old classic. I love the Disney Robin Hood, the animated version. I watched that the other night. Just for the feels and the nostalgia. I'm looking forward to the next episode of The Mandalorian.

Haven't really digged in too much, but there's a whole ton of movies that my son is pretty much ready to watch. So I'm pretty excited about it. I think we're going to try him out on either Toy Story or one of the older Disney classics this weekend and see about that attention span, because up until now, it's been about 20 minutes.

Okay. Okay. How did Robin Hood hold up? Does it have legs? It has legs. Awesome. It's very funny. I've heard. Actually, I was talking to a couple of friends of mine about how this is probably the best idea that Disney has ever had ever, because, you know, they're just pouring through those logs and checking those stats and seeing which old movies get the most dings.

And then it's like, oh, right. Guess we'll be remaking this one then. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hmm. That kind of sucks. But the thing about it is, yeah, everybody posted about Robin Hood. You were like the seventh or eighth person I saw that posted about it.

I don't know why. It came out in 73. It is, I was born that year, so I obviously, Disney used to recycle their movies into theaters every couple of years, so I remember seeing it at a very young age with my dad. I mean, it is perfect time frame for, you know, people our age. Yeah, exactly.

It's one of my favorites, too. It was just, it's a classic. Plus, it's also, it's damn funny. It is funny and it's heartwarming and it's extremely well done. Ah, unlike Song of the South, which will never see the light of day again. Well, some people consider that funny and heartwarming. Oh, yes, that's true. They tend to wear red hats.

They tend to be in the South. Oh, man. Anyway, yeah, I did see, I don't know if we, do we have this in the show notes for later about the warnings about possible racism? I don't know if we put it in the show notes, actually. Yeah, because we probably would have saved it for media candy, so we might as well mention it here since we're talking Disney+.

Yeah, they're putting in different warnings for different racial things, like the ending of Dumbo with the crows and the lead singer Jim Crow. Yes. Hmm. A lot of things have not aged so well from simpler times, as it were. Yeah.

I wonder if they're going to have a warning in Fantasia, because I believe that's rated G, but there are boobs. That's right. There are. Animated boobs, but yeah. What are you going to do? Well, Disney Plus is also not going to get their panties in a bunch if you decide to share your login. Done and done already.

Send me an email, Brian. Send me an email. Yeah. I've mentioned before that we share Netflix as my sister-in-law. We use her Netflix, so she hit me up for My Disney Plus this week, and I sent that over to her. The only one that you're, and this is where Apple is smart, nobody's ever going to be sharing their Apple Plus login.

Well, first off, because there's nothing on the damn network. And secondly, it's tied directly to your iCloud account, so you'd be a fool to pass that around. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. There's some lock-in there. Yeah. For sure. And it's funny, on Netflix, I have an account. I have one of the accounts that has three devices at one time, because I always run into the three-device limit, because me and two of my friends have access to the account, and it's invariable that when somebody really wants to watch TV, all the slots are taken.

So I've just said, screw it, and bought slots for everybody. Right. That's nice. So I mentioned in the last episode, when Disney Plus had first launched, that it's quite complicated to figure out how to attach the Hulu and the ESPN Plus if you have that bundle.

I still haven't figured it out. And I've got a game on Saturday that I want to watch that's only on ESPN Plus. Nothing in the accounts or billing sections really work yet. I've read the facts, and they tell you exactly what buttons to click, and the buttons aren't there. So, and forget about getting help.

I tried to stay in the queue once, and it basically told me two hours, and I let the laptop sit open for two hours, and at some point, it just reset itself. So I can't get help. I have no idea if I even have the right bundle. You can't find out what bundle you have, or at least I can't on my account.

When you go to the account or billing sections in Disney Plus, basically, it just shows your credit card information and the name of your account, and that's it. I don't have any options. I don't have anything. So I have no idea. I've resigned to the fact that I'm not going to get ESPN Plus in time for the game.

Hopefully, they'll figure this all out. Growing pains. It is the first few days. So, you know, how mad can I get? Except I can get mad because they have my monies. Yeah, yeah. Don't you? I mean, you had a regular ESPN Plus account before, didn't you? No, I've never paid for ESPN Plus. ESPN Plus is the premium.

They led the charge in adding Plus to the end of something if you want to pay for it. You know, Apple Plus, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus. Do you know that there's a Smithsonian Plus now? Smithsonian Channel Plus. Really? Yeah. Everybody's got a plus.

It's crazy. That's it. Plus. Oh, my God. Yeah. Plus is minus. Grumpy old geeks plus. So there's no phone number. You can't call anybody? You have to do online chat? I think there's a phone number, too. But who has the time for that during the day? Because the queues will be just as long, right? So at least with the online chat, I can open up the window and go about my business and take care of the stuff I need to take care of.

And hopefully, at some point, somebody will show up. Yeah. I mean, who knows? People are so afraid of the phone anymore, you might get through faster. That's a good point, actually. Maybe I'll try that later on today. In the news.

Google is now trying to take over banking. They're thinking about offering checking accounts next year. Thank God they're not trying a cryptocurrency. I'll give them that. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I am not going to do my banking through Google.

They know enough about me. Well, it's going to be run by Citigroup. So it's basically just a white labeling, just like Apple did with Goldman Sachs. Pretty much, yeah. But I guess this is going to be better than what Apple has done, because Apple is apparently pissing off the banks, and Google wants to be part of the ecosystem and not be jerks like Apple.

There are jerks in so many other ways. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, not going to be doing that. Yeah. Do you remember? I totally forgot about this. When they first started running the Apple credit cards, they ran the line designed by Apple, not a bank.

And apparently Goldman Sachs got their panties in a bunch about that. But now that this whole credit rating thing with the new card came out, I think Apple might want to dial that one back for sure. Apple might want to go, we didn't do it, actually. It was them. It was all them. We just put our name on it and made a shiny, really heavy card that you don't ever want to take anymore.

I never use the damn thing. It weighs my wallet down incredibly, and I never take it out, because most people are like, we've got an old system and there are no numbers on here. I can't type in the numbers. I'm like, okay, here's my other one. Well, we've been talking about YouTube's many, many flaws recently.

Most specifically, one that we've been discussing a lot is kids content and what they're going to do with that, because obviously they have paid versions of YouTube where you don't get commercials and all that sort of stuff. But they've really got a problem with the kids. And on Tuesday afternoon, they formally announced their plans to have creators label any videos of theirs that may appeal to children.

I assume this will help with the algorithm and sorting things out and creating kids-only zones. So starting in January 2020, if creators mark a video as directed at kids, data collection will be blocked for all viewers, resulting in lower ad revenue. And those videos will lose some of the platform's most popular features, including comments and end screens, which makes it sound like a bad thing.

But as a parent, I'm going, good! Can we get that on every YouTube video, please? Yes. Why save this for just kids? But the obvious problem here is the revenue stream, because some of these people do make a ton of money and make a living. There's this Blippi.

Look up Blippi on YouTube. My kid loves Blippi, and Blippi's entire living is based basically on YouTube revenue. Sure, he sells merch and CDs and all that. But it's almost all YouTube. So that's going to be rough for them. The reason YouTube is really doing this is mostly because they got fined $170 million by the FTC for allegedly violating children's privacy, which is the largest fine ever collected under COPPA.

And it forbids collecting data from children under the age of 13 without explicit consent from their parents. So content creators are starting to freak out about this because, unsurprisingly, YouTube's definition and rollout of these rules and regulations is exceedingly vague.

Oh, really? And the other thing that they're doing is basically saying, we're just a platform. We're going to give you some guidelines. But if the FTC comes after that video, you're on the hook. We're not.

It's all on you, content creators. We're taking the money away from you, and we're making you responsible. Oh, God. So we'll see how this plays out. But yeah, it's what happens, man. It's what happens. Just a platform. And remember, as we said last week, YouTube has absolutely no reason or right to host your video.

They can basically just do whatever they want. No shirts, no shoes, no service, no coin. They are definitely going all in on we're just a platform. Even though the $170 million is couch change for them. Nothing. Yeah. It's the coffee budget. Yep. So Facebook has finally put out a transparency report.

It's been a while since we've seen one of these. We actually talked recently. Do we trust transparency reports put out by the very company themselves? I'm just going to throw that out there. I guess you kind of got to. I mean, what choice do you have? I mean, we don't have a choice, yes. Yeah. I love this.

Yeah. Facebook removed 11.6 million pieces of content related to child pornography in the quarter that ended in September. Facebook says it is out. Christ, that's a lot. What is wrong with people? Well, a lot. It says its algorithms identified 99% of that content.

Instagram removed another 754,000 pieces of content with automatic detection just under 95%. So they're really working on that. But by comparison, in the first quarter, Facebook removed just 5.8 million pieces of content related to child porn or exploitation.

All right. So they cast a wider net. Now, what the stat I want to see, which I don't see in here anywhere, is how many of those were false positives? How many did that involve the person who posted it getting a huge fight going, of course, this isn't wrong. Look at it. Yeah. I also want to know how many arrests this led to.

That's what I really care about. Seriously, that's all I care about. I don't care if the content was removed or whatnot. How many people went to jail because of this? Right. I want that number. Here's a head scratcher. Facebook said it removed 1.7 billion fake accounts. 500 million fewer than it took down in the first quarter, where it took down 2.2 billion accounts.

Now, how many people are supposed to be on Facebook? I don't recall anymore. A lot. Yeah. But I mean, how many of them are just fake accounts? That's a lot of fake accounts. That's pretty crazy. I just realized how we placed our stories, which I'm a little concerned about because we just went from a kid's story to potential child pornography story.

And now we're about to go to another kid's story and then roll directly into a Pornhub story. Oh, well, it is what it is. We got to cater to everybody here. That's how it works. So Netflix and Nickelodeon have formed a multi-year output deal to produce original animated films and series for kids and families around the world.

I'm pretty happy about that. That's pretty cool. They're pouring a lot of money into kids-based content, which I will be a consumer of for the foreseeable future. So they're going to be based both on the existing Nickelodeon library of characters, as well as all new IP for kids and families around the world, as said.

So I was immediately interested in this because right now, I want to know if this is an all in deal because most of Nickelodeon stuff is on Amazon right now. And that's the only place to go. You know, you have your like Nickelodeon app or your Nick Jr. app, which carries a couple of the most recent episodes of stuff.

But beyond that, you have to go and buy it on Amazon or use that buy into one of the streaming packages on Amazon, which does legacy content. So if this is all in, is this only for new stuff or is everything going to get moved over to Netflix for streaming there?

That would be awesome. Since it wasn't really specifically mentioned, because they would definitely mention that if that was a thing. I'm guessing no. Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah, I think this is just going to be for new content. Yeah. Well, yes, let's go back to porn again. PayPal has cut off Pornhub's payroll system, which is what they paid for their like, you know, crowdsourced porn.

Yep. People could go up and put up their own videos and get paid for it. The Pornhub model program. Right. And so now they have to go around and find new ways to pay people. And of course, there's crypto involved in some of it and some other payment processing things. And it was very vague on how PayPal really just said it says Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission.

We have taken action to stop these transactions from occurring, meaning we're just shutting you down. And what they don't say in here is if like Pornhub actually got their money back because PayPal is notorious for freezing your account and keeping all the money and making it ridiculously hard to get it back and just tying you up in in legal and litigation until you can get your money back.

And I'm guessing Pornhub's bank account was pretty damn big. Yeah, I'm sure it is. I find it interesting that PayPal of all the tech companies that we're always talking about as if everybody wants to claim that they're just a platform and PayPal could very easily make that same claim and just not bother with any of this nonsense.

Why doesn't PayPal just say, look, we're just a platform? Who cares who's using our platform to transfer money around? What's wrong with Pornhub users using it? Who cares? You're a fucking bank. Well, there are other things in here. I mean, I guess they're under, because PayPal came out of the gate as like the first kind of e-bank, they're certainly under more government restrictions and things of that nature.

But to me, it just seems so ridiculous. Just let them get their money. Who cares? Yeah. Well, I mean, Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal. That's very vague, but also could be something else. Like, you know, somebody could have been using these accounts to launder money. Right. We don't know, because PayPal hasn't actually said what it actually did, and Pornhub has not said either.

So it's, but, you know, PayPal is kind of sometimes the devil, and hopefully, knock on wood, they're good to us. Yes. We rely on them a lot now. We do. We rely on them very heavily. So we won't be posting any nudes up on the site anytime soon.

Let's just say that. I know, but people have been clamoring for it, Jason. Oh, yeah. The dickies. They want to see that sexy dicky man butt. That's what they want. Sexy dicky man butt. John Carmack is actually stepping down from Oculus. I found this kind of interesting.

He wants to pursue his passion project of making general-purpose AI. So we'll see how this goes. All right. So he's going to go to an office and sit there and do nothing. Well, he's one of the smartest programmers in the world, so if anybody has a chance at it, it might be him.

But, you know, I've played a lot of his games, and his in-game AI characters are really not that up to snuff. So we'll see. We'll see how this plays out. But, hey, you know, we'll see how the—I don't know. He's going to stay on at Oculus with just kind of, you know, a little title.

He's going to be a consulting CTO. All right. Which probably comes with a paycheck 10 times what we've ever made in our entire career. Most likely, yes. Yeah. Hey, man, it's a good gig if you can get it. Yep. Good gig if you can get it. Alibaba Singles Day sales topped $38 billion.

And if you don't know what Singles Day is, imagine Black Friday except for the rest of the world and 20 times as big. Yeah. That's—the stat that got me on this one is that it netted its first billion dollars in sales in 68 seconds.

Yep. Amazing. And $10 billion within a half an hour. That is absolutely insane. And I'm very glad I have Alibaba stock. Oh, nice for you. Yeah. I wish Disney had some Alibaba stock because maybe they could have used some infrastructure tips for the Disney Plus launch because you have to understand that the size of the infrastructure to make this happen is just mind-bogglingly huge.

Yeah. It's ridiculous. It's like five or ten AWSs, you know? Mm-hmm. It's insane. It's insane. And they're able to scale up every year, every year when they do it. That's amazing. Yep. And it all still has to go through the Great Firewall of China. That's right. Well, most of it is behind it, so it doesn't have to really leap over it or anything.

Well, I'm sure they're filtering quite a bit through there. But you know, that Great Firewall of China run on a good old American tech. We built it. We did. We built that wall. Yeah, we did. Those are the walls we should stick to building. Yeah. Okay. This one was an interesting bit of news.

14 years after launching, 1Password takes a $200 million Series A. All righty. Now, some people are, like, pissed off at this. And some people are excited about this. The people who are pissed off about it just are scratching their head going, why did you do that?

Because now you have to become a billion-dollar company to pay them back, which is, you know, a long shot for them. But I see no option for them at this point. They are profitable. You know, they've got 174 employees, and they're doing fine. This is the only way they can grow. Yeah, because their main competition, who came out of the gate a couple years ago, is Dashlane.

Right. And Dashlane has already taken $210 million in funding. So with what they had, there was no way that they were going to compete, and they were just going to get crushed in the market, just from the advertising budget alone. So I see this as self-preservation for them. It basically is, yeah.

It's the only way to keep going. Otherwise, the option is get acquired. Yes. And the really good news about all this cash that they have in the bank now is that now they can afford to actually advertise on our show. Hey, more than just an affiliate link, guys. Let's have some ads. They paid last time. Remember?

They paid cash. Oh, that's right. They did. They paid cash. Yeah, if they actually had an affiliate program, we'd still be running their ads. That's right. I got them confused with private internet access. Yep. Use your VPN when going over that great wall in China. That's right. GOG.show slash VPN.

Security? Ha! We're here this week with Obi-Wan Bittner, Darth the Filippo, and Jar Jar Schulmeister for security, ha! That's just mean. Obi-Wan Bittner is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans, with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat, with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

Misa, ready to talk Mandalorian, Brian! Oh, yeah. I just watched it last night. This is a tough one to talk about, because there's a hell of a spoiler at the end. There is. Oh, we don't have to give the spoiler away. It was good. It was good. I liked it. I very much enjoyed it.

I loved the appearance of a particular droid character midway through the episode that was mysterious in previous films, and I thought that was a lot of fun. I would say it felt like Star Wars.

Yep. In all the good ways. Yep. The one thing that I did not like so much was the music. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It didn't feel very Star Wars. Yeah. Yeah. There was one part where they're kind of flying around in Boba Fett.

Not Boba Fett. Well, can we just say that this really is the Boba Fett series we've all been waiting for? It kind of is. And some very, very, very, very bored, or I guess underemployed people have done some screenshots and lightened things and claimed that Boba Fett was in the background in one of the scenes.

Okay, well, that's fine, but they're flying around in the Mandalorian's ship, and the music was almost techno-like, and I found it a little jarring. Yeah. A little jar-jarring? I saw that one coming a mile away.

I've got to start stockpiling some Star Trek jokes for when Picard airs and Jason loses his mind. There you go. Right, right, right. But there was nothing so horrible in Star Trek as Jar Jar, you have to admit. Oh, I don't know. The tribbles were pretty lame.

Tribbles are awesome, man. My biggest problem with it, it was just too damn short. It was only 38 minutes. It's a TV show. Yeah. TV shows are usually 42. Yeah. It got ripped off for four minutes. Well. Damn Jon Favreau. And that was the other, okay, that was the surprising bit that it was Jon Favreau.

I didn't realize it was him. The big surprising thing casting-wise for me was Nick Nolte. Yes, that was funny. And I didn't realize it until the end credits. Like, I saw the character that he plays and it was ringing that thing in my brain where I said, who is that?

That is familiar. And then at the end credits came and I went, oh, Nick Nolte. Perfect. Perfect. So, yeah. I'm looking forward to the next episode. My son enjoyed it very much. My wife watched it with us.

That's, you know. I think she enjoyed it. My wife went to the bedroom to read. Yeah. But I'm happy that there's more Star Wars, good Star Wars in a good way. Didn't frustrate me in any way.

Right. There is one thing frustrating that occurred in the Star Wars universe with the launch of Disney+. I don't know if you heard, Dave, but Lucas went at it again and once again tinkered with the Greedo and Han shot first scene. Oh, I heard.

Oh, I heard. Yeah. I can't. He made it. Apparently, Lucas made it a condition of the sale to Disney that he'd be able to modify that scene one more time. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. A million Twitters cried out. Yeah.

Yeah. My favorite meme based on that is someone cut together a scene of it where Greedo says, you know, I don't know, you're not going to be able to leave this town or whatever, you know. I don't know.

I don't have it right. But basically, Greedo ends up doing a commercial for Casper mattresses. Somebody said, I'm really uncomfortable with these changes that they made to the Han Greedo scene. And Greedo says, you know, I'm almost as relaxed as I was after I got a new Casper mattress.

Nice. Yeah. I don't have to find that one. But yeah, I really thought that we were going to be left enough alone. But no, I guess no one can. From the grave. Yeah. No one can. George Lucas has a long. And what struck me with this was, though, what the hell?

Like, why can't, what is it about this scene that Lucas can't leave well enough alone, that he has to keep changing it? What is going on in his mind? Han has to be a good guy. Is he just trolling us now? Han has to be an unequivocal, in George Lucas's universe now, things are black and white and there's no room for scoundrels with hearts of gold.

Yeah. See, this, he's just, first of all, he's wrong. Yes. And this whole thing just changed Han's character. The whole thing where Han shot first, that meant that we didn't know if he was a good guy or a bad guy.

And the heroes were getting on this ship with someone who we had demonstrated could be a cold-blooded killer. Totally changes the tone of everything. And changes Han's journey because the whole three movies is Han's journey as much as it is Luke's. Yes. Yes. There you go. Well, when we get back together next week for Star Wars chat.

I think we need to start a, you need one more podcast, Dave. Yeah. Yeah, it's another podcast. You know, the thing is, that's probably one I would be up for and I could talk for hours about that. So, yeah. I'll leave you two to it. Okay. All right.

Should we talk some security then? Sure. We should. I threw this first one in for you guys because you seem to be the most concerned about this because you travel so much, especially Brian. U.S. border agents can't randomly search phone. So is a judge. Yes. Good.

Ben Yellen and I discussed this. This will be on the latest episode of Caveat when this episode of our show posts here. This is good news. Very good news. And thank you, Judge Denise, ironically, Casper, who made the ruling today.

I haven't felt so comfortable since she made that ruling. Yeah. Use code UNLAWFULSEARCH for 25% off your first Casper matches. With free shipping. Yeah. So, according to Ben, there's some uncertainty as to the degree to which this would apply nationwide and there is all sorts of, you know, legal stuff that he understands that I do not.

And he does his best to explain it to me in the episode. He suspects that the Justice Department will appeal and in which case it will go probably before a three-judge panel. And then they'll make their decision and it could go to the Supreme Court, but Ben didn't think it was likely that it would.

All right. Well, this is a good thing. This is what we've been wanting. So, it's a step in the right direction, which is rare for this segment. It is. It is. It's very good news. Very good news. Well, would you like some bad news? Sure. Bring it to us. All right. Well, I got this one from the Washington Post.

Soldiers with top secret clearances say they were forced to use an app that could endanger them. Facebook? Now, this is – yeah, not quite. Not quite. This is an interesting app. It's kind of a logistics app that Army Colonel Dieter L. Trotter, the commander of Fort Hood's 504th Military Intelligence Brigade – what's the intelligence in intelligence there – told her soldiers that she had to – that they had to install this new app.

And turns out people that actually can read looked up the app and it's, you know, it's a third-party app and has ties to overseas owners. And has a lot of permissions that are given. And the people in the intelligence bureau who actually do have intelligence said, hey, hold the phone.

Hold the phone here. This is not good. A lot of us go undercover. This could actually compromise our cover and many other things. And they kind of rebelled against them. Did you guys cover this one, Dave? We didn't cover this story specifically in the podcast.

It wasn't our daily news brief. It's interesting for sure. The app has since been pulled. The folks who make the app claim that the control over the data is in the hands of the people who request the app.

That all of the permissions that the soldiers were having trouble with, they say, are standard conditions for the app store, for both the Google Play Store and for Apple's app store. I wonder if – what this made me wonder was if these types of folks who are doing this sort of secret work, shouldn't this be a custom app spun up just for them where all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed?

Yes, made by the actual military. Developed by – or at least a military contractor with all the appropriate permissions, et cetera. Somebody called Booze Hamilton. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I suspect those apps exist. And I don't think there was any – I don't think Colonel Trotter was out to do anything bad here.

I'm sure – No malicious intent. She must have done – yeah, she must have done some due diligence. And, you know, she – I doubt she has the permission to just insist on something like this without it being checked out to some degree. But, you know, good for the soldiers for being vigilant about this and pushing back when they thought it could be a problem.

Yeah, agreed. All right. Good end in the end. Yeah. So last week we talked a bit about the Cashmere Hill report in the New York Times that went through the companies that were amassing huge amounts of data on customers. And she had some links and some basic instructions on how to at least get the data that they have on you, if not actually request them to delete it.

Now, Jane Hugh over at Slate bravely leapt forward to do what I knew would be a massive suck of time and an incredibly infuriating process. And she decided to try to do all of that. And it was, unsurprisingly, a massive suck of time and an incredibly frustrating process.

Took one for the team. Yeah, so she took one for the team there. So she came back and said basically that it's a cumbersome process. None of the companies appear to have a streamlined system to allow for processing of such requests. It feels like an afterthought tacked on for legal compliance rather than designed with the expectation that consumers might actually use it, which is kind of what we figured, unfortunately.

So she's saying it's at least a good thing that it's there, but it's obviously they're not putting any money into it. And she'd been waiting over a week for responses for some people. It feels like intentional obfuscation to require customers to call 800 numbers designed for complaints, not data requests, then wait on hold for forever and provide ID numbers.

But, you know, at least these things are there and the legislation is going the direction that they're going to have to be there. So maybe in time these things will actually be useful and work. Yeah. To me, this is just an indication that somehow we've got to turn the tables on this and give the advantage to the consumers, not the companies.

And, you know, things like GDPR and CCPA are a step in that direction, but we ain't there yet. Yep. And to Jason's point, it's right here in the article itself. And the same words Jason used anytime you're buying these things online or buying things online using social media or food delivery apps or even just browsing the web, just know you're adding to your permanent record.

Mm hmm. One of the interesting things in this article, I thought, was the fact that in order to get access to your information, you have to give them more information. Yes. Yes. And people were reticent to do that. You give them your driver's license information, which on the one hand, you think, OK, well, that's good.

You have to prove who you are. You have to provide a government ID so that not just anybody can claim to be you and get your information. But on the other hand, if you're if the whole reason you're doing this is because you're unhappy with them having all this information about you, the last thing in the world you want to do is give them more information.

Yeah. So that was my immediate thought looking at it, too. I was like I went to one of the ones and one of the ones and I was going to fill it all out. And I was like, scan your California driver's license. So we can match it to the scan we have on record. Is that my point about is they've already got it. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.

There's there's like one hundred and twenty different companies, Jason, and they may not have my driver's license, but they certainly will when I give it to them. Right. That's true. That's true. I mean, we're filling out the request to find out what information they have. So, yeah, you know, I was talking to somebody just this week about the whole right to be forgotten thing in GDPR and one of the catch 22s of that, which is that you put in a request to be forgotten.

And somehow they have to keep a record of your request to be forgotten, which they so they cannot actually forget you because they have to keep track of that. You asked to be forgotten and they have to have proof of their will that they did delete your data.

So it's this. It's like memento. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unintended consequences. And this next one, Jason, I threw in particularly for you because I think you're probably dealing with this more than than Dave and I are because our wives seem OK with the insane amounts of stuff we like to put around our house when couples can't agree on surveillance in the home.

And this is getting into this rising problem of online forums being riddled with emerging domestic conflicts of people whose spouses or significant others aren't into the idea of having, say, cameras in the house or ladies in the tube sitting around. And, you know, it gets into that whole slippery slope idea.

Well, you know, where the one person will argue, well, if you've got nothing to hide, what's the problem here? And all that sort of stuff. So it's really interesting, you know, because you've you deal with this on a daily basis, Jason. You had to give away all your ladies in the tube. Yeah, I don't deal with it on a daily basis because I've dealt with it.

It's been dealt with for me. There are no there is no ladies in the tubes in the house. There are a couple of security cameras in the house, which are mainly for dog watching. Right. But or when we both leave the house. But, yeah, there we have communal access to the camera so we can make sure that they're off when we don't want to be on camera.

And that's that's as far as I could go. But there are no no ladies in the tube anywhere in the house from any provider anywhere. And I have been told in no uncertain terms, there shall never be in our home any ladies in the tube. Well, on the plus side, your disagreement or the situation is very benign.

The article gets into the kind of more domestic abuse and domestic dispute issues that could arise from all of this, of course, because a lot of it can just be power dynamics and that sort of thing. So at least yours is benign, of course. And I like this little bit at once that once the camera is there asking for it to be removed or turned off is suddenly harder than saying no.

Why now all of a sudden asks one wife or as one wife asked her husband who never wanted a camera in the first place when he asked to get rid of it. So, yeah, once it's there, it's even more weird because then it's like, well, why don't you want it here now? What are you going to start doing? Yeah, my guess here is that it's ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent women who don't want these in the home.

I have a couple of thoughts on this. First of all, I have often thought about how the arrangement of our bedroom is such that if I'm sitting up in bed looking at my phone or my wife is sitting up in bed looking at her phone.

If either one of us come out of the shower naked, which happens every day. The other one of us is likely aiming our camera at them. Right. You know, now this thought was compounded by the fact that this week we discovered that Facebook was accessing the camera in the background.

Yeah, but it was it was a bug. You know, I'm sure it was just a bug. I'm sure it was. I'm sure it was. So I guess my point is that we've all become numb to the fact of how much we're pointing cameras in both directions all the time.

Whenever whenever we're using these devices, there are multiple cameras pointed in both directions all the time. It's funny. I remember back in the day when we were first really kind of getting our first generation of digital cameras. There was there was discussion about how it should be mandated by by law that they make a sound when you take a picture.

All of that's gone. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I thought about no more red light when you're recording yet. No red light when you're recording. No sound when you're doing something. It is all basically built perfectly for for nefarious activities if one desired. The other thing that this reminded me of was not long ago.

I saw a Twitter thread go by where someone was asking if other people thought it was OK that she insist that her therapist unplugged the Alexa that was in his office. What are you doing? What are you doing with one in your office when that's your job? I would I would unplug the therapist and get a different one.

A lot of people. Yeah. That was the response from a lot of. OK. But other people said, yes, absolutely. It is totally within your rights that if you do not feel comfortable with the with it being plugged in, you request that.

And if there if the if there's any resistance from the therapist, then go find yourself another therapist. Excellent. And I found this one article that I just thought was hilarious. If we had like a budget and we could do like drunken security, ha and reenact some of these things.

But this was just great. Eight historical things that prove privacy issues aren't just a modern problem. And the first is called the the Peeping Tithingmen. The Puritans were stunningly good at privacy invasion, apparently. In colonial America, Puritan villages had professional snoopers called Tithingmen.

And part of the job was to peek into their neighbor's windows and spy on their every move to ensure they weren't doing anything naughty, such as going for a stroll on the Sabbath. Is it Tithingmen or Tithingmen? It might be Tithingmen. Like you tithe, you know, for the church. Oh, yes. Yeah, like the church. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, but I suspect it's probably right.

And then it gets a bit into snail mail breaches about how, you know, basically mail people were opening mail all the time. Anyways, they were notorious for peeping at mail. They're not just stealing your Netflix DVDs. Yes. Back in the day, we used to do public voting out loud.

So there was that. Everybody knew what was going on. Publicly posted census had nosy questions back in the day in the 1800s. They asked if you were crippled, maimed, or deformed. Financial status. Sounds like the thing with the postal people.

Yes. Mail shall not be crippled, maimed, nor deformed. I did not know this before our lovely HIPAA laws. Newspapers printed when you were sick. Huh. Interesting. For instance, an issue of the 1885 Philadelphia Inquirer told us that 53-year-old Hugh Daddy had to go to the hospital after he received a head cut from a falling barrel.

Huh. Newspapers also used to print full addresses, which is insane. I remember that. Yes. I've seen that. Yes. Yeah. Usually in the police blotter section. Right. Yes. Pretty crazy. Papa Bittner of 23 Crazy Lane was caught in his furry hat after midnight with no pants strolling down Happy Lane.

Getting a little close to home there, Jason. Yes. All right. To take a turn to the more illicit and, of course, the scatological, people used to poop in public. Used to. Have you ever been to San Francisco? San Francisco, some still do. Yes. Yeah.

This was interesting to me just because of the change in sensibilities that, you know, why are we so private about those sorts of things? Yes. I don't know. Because it's gross. Well, it is, but there's that strange thing that we as Americans have, which is when it comes to those sorts of bodily functions in public, we want to have privacy, but not too much privacy.

Europeans who come here think the design of our public bathrooms are insane with the way basically the stalls are made of netting. You know, you can see through underneath through the cracks and all that sort of stuff because God forbid we gave someone a private room in a public bathroom. Yeah. You know, anyway, I digress.

And finally, I did enjoy the last one, which I assume if somebody over at Pornhub finds, we will have an actual reenactment of this that we can watch. It's just going to get paid through PayPal. That's all. That's true. Yeah, this is an impotence trial in pre-revolutionary France.

A woman could ask to end a marriage on the grounds that her husband failed to consummate a marriage, but you had to prove it in front of witnesses. There was a notorious trial in 1659 when a marquee had to attempt sex with his wife in front of a 15-person jury, including doctors. So the trial was so public, they placed bets on the outcome.

You'd kind of want it to be all doctors, wouldn't you? Well, you know, whatever. Once you get past the first extra person watching, I think you don't really care anymore. It's France. I mean, it doesn't matter. Unfortunately, he did fail.

So there you go. Aw, that's too bad. That's a lot of pressure. It is a lot of pressure, actually. That's a lot of performance anxiety, for sure. It takes a special type, you know. I'm sure he was no Ron Jeremy. Nope. Nope. Now, I found this last one. I think this was on Sean Bonner's newsletter. I love this. Inspired by the protests, I made a cap that blocks facial recognition when used.

Plans are available for free to anyone that wants to use them. Great. And basically, all it is is a hat with drapes. So when you pull it off and shake it out, somebody else's face comes down over yours. Yeah. And I guess you can see through from behind. It's some sort of... Yeah, it's fairly see-through.

Because when she turns her head, you can actually see, like, her chin and stuff. So it looks like you should be able to see through. That's pretty fun. Not as exciting as the one that threw up the 3D laser imagery. No. But on a budget. Yeah. If you were distributing this to a bunch of protesters, I mean, yeah.

I think it's effective. I could get behind this. Clever humans. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Check it out. All right. Well, that's all we have this week for security and Star Wars. Tune in next time. Pew, pew, pew. Over time, it'll become Star Wars and security and then just Star Wars.

Remember, always light your lightsaber when you're on a FaceTime chat with someone. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. All right, gents. I'll see you next time. Ups and doodads. Apple has announced its new 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, same amount of ports. Zero. No, there's four. There's four Thunderbolt ports on there, USB-C ports. But Phil Schiller did an interview with 9to5Mac, and they asked him, do you think there's ever a chance the SD card slot makes a comeback?

Here's the TLDR. No. No. No. I don't mind that I would like Apple to make some adapters then, rather than having to get these Frankensteinian ones designed by other people. Mm-hmm. That would be nice. How about you make a nice-looking adapter?

Yeah. I mean, the ones that we have aren't bad-looking. They kind of match, at least. Yes, they match it, but like I said, it does look like the bolts on Frankenstein's neck. I don't think Apple's going to do any better. That's true. How are you going to do it? I don't. I mean, honestly. Mm, put them back in the computer themselves.

Yeah. Oh, man. Oh, well. And it's funny that they still keep a headphone port. I know. It's so weird. Because they try to push everybody away from corded headphones, and they still keep it. It's so strange. You know, and they make this big deal because now they've got this new Dolby Atmos six-speaker system in the laptop.

Take out the damn speakers and put the ports back in. I don't care about six speakers in my laptop. Yeah, nobody. Well, I guess all the kids use their laptop speakers, sadly. Yeah, but you don't need a six-speaker Dolby Atmos system in a laptop. No, not with all the Bluetooth-related speakers systems that are out there now, anyways.

Or everybody's using a lady in the tube for whatever. Yep. Yeah, and apparently there are new mics on the new MacBook Pro, too, which also I don't want. Because more people are going to think they can just do a podcast by talking at their laptop, which you can't. No, you can. You can, but it's not going to be any good.

Let's just put it that way. And in other Apple news, they have finally launched their research app, where U.S. users can now enroll in three different health studies. So they talked about this a while back. It's actually finally out now, so users in the United States can sign up to be part of these following health studies.

Women's health. Well, I suppose only women can sign up for that one. Heart and movement and the hearing study. The women's health study draws data from the cycle tracking app on watch OS6 with the aim to improve scientific understanding of menstrual cycles. The heart and movement study uses a variety of signals from the watch, including movement and health rate information.

And the hearing study examines the impact of sound exposure on hearing health and stress levels, which I might actually sign up for. As always, they're promoting the privacy angle of its health efforts, saying that the research app will only share appropriate data with the studies that the user explicitly signs up to. So if you have an iPhone or Apple Watch Series 1 or later, although I suppose you need to be able to run watch OS6, which probably may not run on a Series 1 watch at this point, and live in the United States, you can download it today and help out.

So if there's any tech company that you would trust to kind of take this data and put it out there with appropriate entities, I guess it would be Apple. Here's the thing about it. It's really hard to find in the App Store. So I actually had to go to this 9to5Mac story to find the link to go get it, which was a pain in the butt.

But I got it. I installed it. And I was looking at the different studies. And I was going to sign up for the hearing study. The hearing study is five years long. Oh, boy. Yeah. It's five years. I cannot guarantee that I will be having an iPhone or an Apple Watch for five years.

Yeah, that's the interesting thing. And you also, every now and again, you have to take hearing tests. Yeah. And they quiz you on things. And you have to listen to different stuff every now and again. Well, it is a health study. It's like a bunch of work. Yeah. It's a health study. There will be work involved. You're doing it for the betterment of mankind. It's not like, here's the study.

Wearing a watch. That's right. Count me in. Count me in. You can have my data as all you want. Do you actually want me to do something? Pay me. They are planning to roll out additional studies. And because the watches collect so much biometric data at this point, I'm sure there will be studies that you could sign up for that involve nothing more than just wearing your watch in the very near future.

Count me in. I want the lazy bastard study. Let's get John Hopkins on the couch potato epidemic. I'm down for you there. All right. And Brave has come out of beta. They have launched their 1.0 browser. All right. Yay. Slow clap.

You know, we really should like probably be supporting this one rather than Opera, which is, you know, run from behind that great wall of China. I have been testing it out. I have been testing it out. And it almost completely works.

Almost. Except we can't do what we're doing right now on Brave because it's based on a buggy version of Chrome. Right. That doesn't let you actually do audio stuff because of the autoplay crap that they put in. I think it's based on Chrome 77, which is where the bug was introduced.

If they updated it to Chrome 78, then that might work. But yeah, because that bug was still in there till 78. And what it is, it's like an autoplay bug. And you have to go to the preferences for a site and say, you know, enable autoplay on this site.

And in 77, it doesn't actually stick to that setting. That was a fun day we had. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. And you didn't you didn't have to edit that shit. Oh, God. So, yeah. Once that goes and then it can be a full time browser.

But right now it does support Chrome extensions because it basically is Chrome under the under the covers. Right. So you can install Chrome extensions, which basically is all that we need. You know, the here's the other problem, though, drives me completely bug nutty.

The close tab icon goes on the other side again. That's the worst thing about changing browsers. You get used to clicking the left that it's on the right that you get used to click on the right that it's on the left. So annoying. It's like driving going back and forth between England and France. You just never know which side to be on.

And if there's a question for the audience, if anybody has one of these. Extensions or can send me to one of these extensions, I want to double click to close tab. I cannot find any place that can do a double click to close tab. I think it's built into Chrome. If you if you do like do a deep dive on the settings and it's just one of those things where I'm always accidentally clicking a damn close tab button just on accident.

Right. And it would be. Yeah, you can go to history reopen last close tab, but it would just be nice to have a double click to close tab option. It would be. Yeah, I found a couple of them that let you like close all tabs with a double click. And I'm like, I don't want that. I just want to close the tab. I'm on not all of them.

Anyway, razors back. You're getting your phone your wish. I got my wish, but I not this wish. This is not the wish that I wanted to problems with the new razor. It's $1,500 for an old processor, which is not even remotely, you know, I guess it's usable, but not great.

Right. It's got old janky cameras, but it is completely flippable. It is a one screen flippable phone. It looks cool as hell. And especially the old razor mode, where it just uses the screen and turns it into an old razor, which is so cool.

Second problem, though, is it runs on Android. Yes. The best quote I saw on the internets about this is, the Motorola razor is back. I can't wait to hang up on people again. Sadly, it's running Android. Hangups will happen regardless. There you go. But man, you know, if this was like $700, it might be doable, because then you can get rid of your iPhone and just have this.

But $1,500 is a hell of a novelty item. Yes, it is. And speaking of novelty items, WikiTribune has launched WT Social. They're missing an F. Exactly.

Yes, WTF Social would be much more appropriate. Oh, God. We will never sell your data. Our platform survives on the generosity of individual donors to ensure privacy is protected and your social space is ad-free. We will empower you to make your own choices about what content you are served and to directly edit misleading headlines or flag problem posts.

We will foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom line. But this will only work with your help. So join today and help change the landscape of social media. I've got enough jobs. I'm not going to sign up, give you money, and then expect me to do all the work.

Yeah. What was the name of the social media company that we picked on a lot? Hello! Hello! I was trying to remember the name because I could not remember it for the life of me. And so I did a little Googling and I just couldn't remember it.

And here's the list that I'm sure WT Social is about to join. And I can't believe ILO is not on the list yet because I guess they're still around. They're still functioning. So this is the defunct social networking websites. Link is in the show notes. There are so many of them I couldn't possibly read this list to you.

But it is insane how many have come and gone. Let's see here. Oh, good Lord. Oh, Daily Booth. I remember them. We've got app.net. I remember them. Delicious. I kind of remember them. Forum Spring. Delicious was a social bookmarking. I don't know if it was a social network.

They're counting it. Google Buzz! Google Plus! Ping! Yes. Me today. I never heard of that. Meerkat. All those video ones. Oh, man. They went fast, didn't they? Yep. Oh, Pounce. I loved Pounce. Oh, man.

That was one of my favorite ones. Oh, they don't have Oink. Oh, Oink was a different one. That was a check-in. Orchit! The granddaddy of social networking. Oh, Orchit. Big in Brazil, though. Very big in Brazil. And I can't believe there was one called Yahoo Meme.

I don't even remember that one. Oh, Latin America. Okay. Right under Yahoo Mash. A friend of the show, Mike Walters, sent me this link. The best-selling music artist from 1969-2019.

It's an awesome, like, cool, you know, data visualization video. But as great as it is, it's nine minutes long. Who's going to sit through all of that? And I fast-forwarded it, and it's very cool. And there's lots of cool stuff on the channel it came from, which it's called Data is Beautiful.

I'll have the link in the show notes. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah. We actually covered this last week when a fan sent in this exact same channel in this exact same video. That must be how Mike got it. Probably. He listened to the show and gave it right back to you. Excellent. So, this is interesting news.

William Gibson's The Peripheral is going to get a new series at Amazon from the creators of Westworld. I don't like this whole process of creators of something really cool leaving the really cool show to go start something else. Let's focus on Westworld here first, people.

Well, they do get to finish Westworld. That's part of their deal. All right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was part of their deal, but they did get a $200 million deal to go to Amazon. So, this is Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Yeah. But this is going to be their first series over there, so this should be interesting. Excellent.

I have to go back and reread The Peripheral. I checked my Audible ratings, and I gave it a four-star across the board. So, it didn't suck, but it wasn't great, apparently. I don't remember the book. I'm not even sure if I've read it. Yeah, you did. We covered it on the show. I had to go back and check, you know?

We read so much stuff, it's sometimes it, uh... Sometimes it doesn't stick. Sometimes it doesn't stick. Closing shout-outs! I have a closing shout-out to our good friend, Chris Lockhead, who's dealing with some extremely and very heavy shit.

Hang in there, brother. We're here for you. Yep. And a shout-out to Brandon Hull. He is building a site called buildabetterpodcast.com, which is going to be taking over from the club, my podcast, Social Network, which I am shutting down. Defunct.

It is defunct. Add you to the list. That was a quick run, but a good one. It was a couple months. It was a couple months. Yeah, over a hundred podcasters in there. But the problem is, it costs me $60 a month to run. Right. So, I'm not making any money on it. I'm underemployed.

And it takes a ton of time to keep people engaged. And I just don't have that much time. So, Brandon has the time and the resources, so he's going to take over. And if you were part of the club, you should see a post in there about how to go join. But anybody who's a podcaster can go sign up. He's actually manually approving links right now.

It's a little bit of a manual process because he wants to make sure no riffraff get in. I don't know how I got in, but just go to buildabetterpodcast.com. Excellent. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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Sometimes it doesn't show. Your support really keeps us going, and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 393. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. And it's rock and roll.

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