395: We’ll Fix It in Post

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Yes, Brian, I fucked up. Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know, I got the nest thing wrong. Normally I would jump on you with glee, but ever since everybody else did, because this is the world we live in now, everybody's like, ah, ha, ha, you made a mistake, asshole.

Yeah, pretty much it. But I have to say that for the most part, yes, so here's, if you didn't listen to the last episode, I screwed up on the nest thing saying I couldn't schedule simple things. And I was just looking in the wrong place. I was looking in the settings, and I kept looking in the settings, because that's where the AI version of scheduling works, where it says, would you like to auto-learn?

I'm like, no, I just want to set a schedule. I didn't realize it was in the other spot that I never use. So when everybody was like, hey, dipshit, go look here, and I did, and I found it, and I'm like, nope. RTFM, if there was one. Yes, there isn't one. Therein was part of the problem.

Now, the thing is, everybody who wrote in was very civil, very nice. And this is coming off of, of course, this slew of feedback is coming off the Jedi guy who was bitching about our mid-rolls last time. And we got this bit of feedback.

AJ, who I'm just going to call anonymous jackass, because he left an anonymous email. I used to like you guys. I still do. But you both have been saying things nowadays without doing any research. Nest doesn't support temp scheduling? Really? The smart devices are smart enough.

You guys are not. Sick burn. Sick burn. Oh, my God, man. So I bet he still doesn't like us now. Anonymous jackass. Whatever. Oh, God. But speaking of the mid-roll kerfuffle and the feedback we got and how we closed out the show.

And we normally leave these iTunes ratings for, you know, our Wednesday show. But I thought we'd have to read these, because this is just, this is, this is the grump army in full unity here. This first one comes from Jay Poole from the U.S. Five stars. Great show.

Really is the best technology show out there. Excellent combination of laid back fun with tech nerd dashed in, which makes for easy listening. And the ad strategy is amazing. Couple exclamation points and a smiley face. Well, thank you, Jay Poole. Excellent. Thank you. And another five-star rating from Anakin, which is a nice sick burn on Jedi.

Episode three, Anakin, even. Oh, episode three, Anakin. Yeah. Ads are great. Five-star rating. I give the show five stars simply for the amazing ads. They have helped my network stay private and virtualized. Helped me get fresh meat delivered to my door and never has my manscape been so manscaped. The other segments of the show could really use some work.

However, I can never unsubscribe because there's 120 seconds in the middle of the show. Make listening to the other 50 minutes of the show all worth it. Grump on. Snark away, guys. Thank you, episode three, Anakin. Yes, and we also got a bunch of feedback on this via Patreon and via Twitter.

Most importantly, via PayPal. And via PayPal. So that is great. Thank you so much, everybody who took that as a reason to step up and give us some donations. We really did appreciate that. And, of course, for snarking on the guy. Yeah, and we really do love you all. It's amazing. And now, Brian, I got another little bit of follow-up here.

I built a goddamn WordPress website this week. Oh, but that was fun. Oh, God, I did it for CalmTheBeast.com, which is the podcast with Dan Nitro-Clark that I'm working on with Dan. And I had to build him a website because he needed one.

If I'm going to be involved, it better have a damn good-looking website. I used the Divi theme from Elegant Themes, which, hands down, I paid for the lifetime membership. It was like $275. I can use it on as many sites as I want. Best money I've ever spent.

Oh, my God. If you've got to do a WordPress site, that is a very flexible and perfect plugin to do it with. Yeah. Oh, my God. It just made it so easy. But, of course, there were, you know, hiccups and roadblocks because it is still WordPress and things don't always work the way they should, or at least the way they should in my mind.

I'm going to have to take a look at that because I am executive producing another podcast right now. And it's a little too early to talk about it because they aren't ready to launch. But I assume the website duties are probably going to fall to me as well. Well, I tell you what, man. You could do worse by just going and setting up a quick Node host instance, plopping on Divi, and going to town.

That's right. In the news. First story this week comes from Mike Swannigan, friend of the show, and it's how a gig worker revolt begins.

And it turns out the people over at Rev.com, they are a transcription service, more on transcription later in this episode, who basically saw their money cut down even more than they were already, down to about $0.30 per transcription, which is ridiculously low, or $0.30 an hour less.

It's whatever it is. They're not making a living. Nothing. The people that are doing it are not making a living. They're on food stamps, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I don't know what to say about this because this is an industry that is obviously not going to be around very long. Well, here's the thing. It's actually picked up quite a bit because what happens is you get these machine transcriptions that are almost good enough, and you just need a human to run through them real quick and just tidy them up and make sure everything's where it needs to be.

There's a lot of people out there that are paying for that stuff, which I know I pay for some of that stuff, and it's a great service. But the fact that Rev.com is so damn greedy, taking like 70% of the money, it's like 65% to 70% of the money for running a website that puts people together, why?

Absolutely why? It's their platform. Yeah, and this article has other transcription platforms where the owners are like, that's robbery. We don't charge anywhere near that. We take like 20%, 25%, which is what a good broker should take. Brokers don't take 65% to 70% for putting a deal together.

Only in Hollywood. Yeah, that's true. I'm pretty sure Rev came from the Philippines, not Hollywood. Right. Yeah, well, good luck to them. Leave the company. Go work for another one. You're working from home anyways. You're a gig worker. Move gigs.

That's what gig workers do. Yep. All right. And speaking of the gig worker economy, Uber. Uber is embracing videotaping rides, raising privacy concerns, and this is over at the New York Times. I'm a little torn on this one because right now, without the videotaping, what we end up with is a he said, he said, or they said, they said, using the non-gender specific pronouns.

Yeah. It said, it said. If there's a dispute because there's no proof anywhere. But on the other hand, have we really gotten to a point in society where we have to have cameras on everything all the time? Uber seems to think so. This is an initiative that they're rolling out, and obviously, this will help with their PR.

You know, you can't really claim rape unless it's on the tape, as they say. Where the hell did that come from? I don't know. I was thinking about OJ this morning and the, if the glove fits, you must acquit, kind of, if the glove don't fit, you must acquit. Bullshit was in my head.

You just made that one up? I totally just made that up off on the fly. Dude, okay. That is going in the lexicon. That is there with Dickies now. Can't call it rape if it's not on the tape. Yeah. So this is kind of what Uber's thinking is. And obviously, the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have some issues with this because Uber already has massive amounts of highly personal data about people.

And now you're going to be preparing surveillance during the trips. And obviously, you know, if you get facial recognition into the mix, it's kind of interesting. The one thing I do like, the one safeguard that they seem to be building it in right now is that either it's not on by default, either the driver or the person that the rider gets to turn it on by if they want to.

Well, you know, I take a lot of taxis when I'm in big cities. And most taxis have this built in now. Yeah. And I prefer it. I actually prefer to have the camera on because if there is some kind of dispute, go to the tape. I think this should be on by default, personally.

I mean, that's just my take. I agree with you, but what I want is I want a very set of rules that are very transparent to rider and driver about what happens to these videos. When we get out of the car, do they get deleted unless we flag it?

It should have a 90-day rolling deletion policy. That's what I'd say. Well, that would be fine by me as long as delete actually means delete. And I want no facial recognition algorithm running on top of it. They shouldn't have that. They've got your credit card information and your name and the app that you use to get in the car with, you know?

Yes, but it's not always just one person that gets into an Uber. Right. But, I mean, you can run facial recognition when there's a claim and figure out if there is – even if there's a need to because the other person can say, no, I'm with Joe and Mike in the back seat and this guy just wouldn't stop playing his goddamn Christian rock. And we said, please turn it off.

And he tried to throw us out on the 405. Oh, wait, that was me in a Lyft. Never mind. Well, Jason, I agree with you 100 percent, but when have these companies ever implemented things the way that we suggest they do it? And five years after the fact they do when they finally go back and listen to the archives. Yes, after many, many, many lawsuits.

Yes. Yeah. Oh, wait, Brian. According to AJ, we're not so smart, so never mind. Oh, that's right. We're not so smart. Moving on. What else we got? Well, let's just have our smart speakers do the fucking show. There we go. All right. Alexa, start show. This is about Apple now.

So we've talked in the past about the right to repair movement and how it's basically just dead because all these technology things are so complicated and they try to make them so compact and they're so impossible to pull apart and fix, as we all know. But they're kind of pissed off and they've raised some lawsuits and some of the things.

And one of the biggest targets is, of course, Apple, which is they're basically black boxes. They're really difficult to tear apart anything that Apple makes these days and try to fix them themselves. So they have there's been a lawsuit. And well, not a lawsuit.

Congress is demanding answers, basically. And they're saying that because they're so difficult to repair and there's seemingly increased failure rates on devices, which I have to say I found to be true. Let me ask you, Jason. I switched over to basically exclusively Mac.

I'd say roughly six years ago now, maybe five. About five, yeah. Yeah. And when I first switched into the ecosystem, everything ran pretty great all the time. I find many, many, many, many, many, many more bugs and errors and little hiccups over the last two years than I certainly did five years ago.

Yeah, I don't. I don't see that at all, especially with the hardware. I mean, because that's what really this comes down to. It's about the hardware. Software is always going to be buggy. The more complex it gets, the more buggy it's going to be. I had issues just this morning, even with my USB plug-in for my second monitor. It wasn't working for random reasons. Couldn't figure it out.

The USB plug wasn't working. I had to unplug, replug like 19 times, and all of a sudden it came on board. I'm always having little issues with my phone. We've talked about our AirPods. Those are buggy as hell. Well, no, those are just end-of-life batteries on the AirPods. I mean, the batteries are minuscule, and they're going to run out sometimes.

I understand that. Apple apologist. Well, no, I'm not. What I'm pissed off about is the fact that you can't just pop it open and replace it, which is you should be able to take it to your mom and pop store down the street and have it replaced. You can do that with the screens. Up until recently, Apple has said, we're not giving you guys any parts because we think you guys are shysters and shamsters.

I have to say, from anecdotal evidence from my friends who go to people who are not authorized Apple repair, they generally are shysters and shammers and give you crap repairs. And a lot of that is because they can't get official Apple parts, but Apple has rolled out the program where people will be able to buy official Apple parts to do repairs on.

Well, this is exactly the response that they're giving to the antitrust committee is a lot of what you just said. Also, they pointed to their best spare repair partnership and its new system to verify independent third parties. But, you know, the basic reason that they wrote back as to why this is happening is, our shit's too hard.

Right. That's basically what they said. Like, it is really difficult to replace all these things. And actually, the cost of providing repair services has exceeded the revenue generated by repairs, according to Apple. Although that is a bit difficult to swallow when you've seen some of these charges.

When it's been caught charging $1,200 for a repair that a third-party store fixed for just $75. Replacing an iPhone X display out of warranty costs $279 through Apple, but $170 at iPhone Dock New York City. So, they are kind of overpricing things a bit, I'd say.

Yeah, well, they can't. They're Apple. Did you tell me that everything that they make is not overpriced? Come on. That is very true. It's one of the reasons I'm considering going back to PC again. Oh, God. Here come all the, come on, Brian. Windows 10. Emails. Ubuntu. Yes.

Anyways. We're sorry, Mattias from Sweden. We know you got butthurt about that. We'll talk to you on Wednesday. That was not our intention at all. I'm sorry. Not nearly our intention at all. I may not be getting those emails anymore, Jason. I haven't seen that. Oh, you have to go to the website. I think you missed probably about 75 of the recent feedbacks in there.

Okay. I haven't been getting them either. That's why I logged in. Okay. I don't think I even have a login since you moved it. So, you'll have to, why are we talking about this on the air? Okay, okay. All right. Move that offline. Okay. Speaking of offline, Uber and their self-driving cars.

Yeah. Well, it seems like everybody's at fault, but mostly the driver. Right. Which was not really the driver. It was the person that was supposed to be watching the road with the foot on the brake and was playing with their phone at the same time. But pretty much everybody gets a ding on this.

Uber gets one. The driver gets one. And the state of Arizona gets one. Everybody's at fault. You're at fault. You're at fault. You're at fault. So, there's all sorts of bits going on here. But, yeah, the National Transportation Safety Board is not happy about this.

So, I don't know what's going on with self-driving cars anymore. It's been a long time since we talked about them. Oh, but remember, we were supposed to have it two years ago now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think we're still on board for our original prediction of a good 25 years. Yeah. Yeah. And here's the thing.

Is it still rolling? Is it still 25 years from now? Is this the theory of self-driving relativity? Every time you get caught up to it, it's still 25 years ahead of you. Yeah. Pretty crazy. I've been spending a lot of time on New York Times this week. I don't know quite why. But I found this awesome think piece by Farad Manjoo, who we always do love as a tech writer.

And, oh, boy. If you want to be happy, don't read this article. The title alone, the next decade will be just as bad. We will remember the 2010s as a grifter's paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture, and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindor, huckster, influencer, troll, and hacker.

Yeah. You know, I don't see the 2010s as a grifter's paradise. I see the 2000s as, the aughts. I think that's when it started, especially because you and I are coming and looking at it from the tech perspective. Yeah. For them, that was the paradise because nobody knew they existed. 2010s, it's. You know, a lot harder to be, to be like, to keep going and not get caught.

I don't know about that. I guess the big deal is they don't care if they get caught because then they just get more clicks. Yes. Yeah. So this entire article is basically like, basically it goes through everything, obviously politics and that of that sort. But he does a talk specifically about the tech industry because we had, he says, the tech industry welcomed hucksters with open arms.

Look at WeWork, Uber, and Theranos, all companies that we love to talk about here. Once high-flying startups that promise to change the world in big ways and small, each unmasked for peddling false prospects, unreal tech, or hiding systemic corruption and abuse. And don't even get them started on Facebook.

There's like three paragraphs alone about that. Yeah. Why are we being overrun by these scams? Society signals for judging, reputation, and trustworthiness haven't caught up with the changing tech, which is something that you and I have talked about many times, that we're not ready for this. We haven't been ready for this either individually or as a society.

And even though we know better, we reflexively mistake Instagram for reality and all that sort of stuff on your phone. The Fyre Festival looks irresistible. Our information systems have slipped their moorings. And as a result, lying and scheming and fraud have simply become too effective a life strategy. Like you were just saying, they get away with it, basically.

So, I mean, this all still comes back to there's one fateful day when the internet went to shit. And you know exactly what day I'm talking about, Brian. Which day was that? The day they let AOL on the internet. When the unwashed masses came into our pristine paradise and fucked it up. And it's been downhill ever since.

Well, you know, we couldn't keep Pandora's box closed forever, Jason. Oh, God. Can we just go back to gopher? I wish. That's what I've been screaming for for a long time. I think we should build a GOG gopher site. And you can get your podcast there. And sometimes we'll put ads on them and you'll fucking deal with it.

I actually tried to find a working gopher client the other day to spin up a server. It can't be done. Really? Nothing works anymore. There's nothing on GitHub. There's nothing. No way. I couldn't find anything. If there's anything out there, if anybody knows about it, since I'm not so smart, please feel free to shoot me some links because I think it would be fun.

I would totally spin up a gopher server right now. You know who's going to do it for us. Let's talk to our friends over at Nodehost. They'll do it for us. You know they will. Anthony, we're looking at you, buddy. Get us a gopher site. We want one now. Let's go back to knowledge workers in the robot revolution.

We've all talked a lot about the 2017 McKinsey study that said 50% of work activities were already automatable using current technologies, and those activities were most prevalent in manufacturing, meaning blue-collar jobs. But new data is suggesting that white-collar workers, even those whose work presumes more analytical thinking, higher paychecks, and relative job security, may not be safe from the relentless drumbeat of automation either.

Okay. So which ones? What are we talking about here? Well, this is a Stanford University study. The economist Michael Webb and published by the Brookings Institute, and they did a—this is where it breaks down a bit, which is why I kind of wanted to talk about it, because I'm not on board with this. What they actually did is they did—they researched looking at the overlap between subject-noun pairs in AI patents and job descriptions to see which jobs were most likely to be affected by AA technology.

For example, job descriptions for market research analysts, a relatively common position with a high rate of AI exposure, shares numerous terms in common with existing existing patents, which similarly seek to analyze data, track marketing, and identify markets. So he's saying—they're saying that white-collar jobs are now firmly in the sights of new AI patents that are coming out.

Now, the problem with this, which they realize in an article—here's the caveat. Some AI patents—and they say some, I say most—AI patents might never be used, and they might not be used for their initial intentions. Also, one's actual job is not wholly defined by the text of the original job description, but this study does provide a framework from which to view general exposure to automation.

Now, as we just finished talking about swindlers and hucksters, a lot of these patents are full of swindlers and hucksters and people that are promising vaporware, the stuff that's never going to show up. We know AI is bullshit. We know it doesn't exist yet. And it's not going to do this.

I don't believe this for a second. So for once, I'm on board with you on your side, Jason, saying this isn't anything to worry about. At least not yet. Yeah, it's definitely not. Because you know what you don't have to do when you file a patent application? Give them working code. Yeah, there's no working code that goes on.

It's basically a flowchart that says, if this, then that, then patent, please. Yes, there is no show your work in the patent process. For mechanical things, yeah, sure. But we're talking about software, and software patents alone should be abolished. You know how I feel about software patents.

They're all bullshit. The one thing that Mark Cuban and I—actually, there's two things that Mark Cuban and I completely agree on. Woo-woo, like supplements and shit like that, and software patents. We both get along on those. The rest of you, he's kind of a giant airbag on a lot of stuff, but we get along on that.

And software patents, especially when it comes to AI, since AI is vaporware, this is vaporware on vaporware on vaporware. Yep. Let's move on to some more fun stuff. Okay. Microsoft Teams passes 20 million daily users up more than half in four months. Makes sense to me. I've seen it.

I've seen it. I've looked at it. It's a decent product. If you would switch over from Slack, I would switch over to it. And there are a lot of all-Microsoft shops out there. There's a lot of all-Microsoft businesses out there, and Microsoft is doing a good job of having all their software kind of speak well with each other.

So if you're a Microsoft shop, it makes sense to use this. That was the chink in Slack's armor when they first came out with this, because, yeah, all Microsoft had to do, because Slack, you know, technically isn't really groundbreaking technology. They're chat rooms. It's an IRC.

It's an IRC client. Not even IRC. Not even as good as. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that, Node host, let's get us an IRC channel. Oh, no, no, no. We'll get a free Node if we need IRC. We're good for that. You want to sit on IRC all day? I sure shit don't. No, I'm over that.

You can take up the mantle on the IRC channel. I remember vaguely kind of, I remember actually mourning the death of AIM and all that sort of stuff, and I'm so glad that shit's gone. I know. Well, see, here's the thing. Now we have Slack. We don't need it anymore. Now we have Slack and text messaging and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, there's a million things that filled that vacuum.

Now, the thing here is Slack shares fell 8.4% on the news. They're down to 21.18. This was a couple of days ago, which was 45% down from the close of their first day of trading. And it made the news because my roommate comes in. She goes, Slack's dead. I'm like, what? Because of course, you know, hyperbole on the morning news.

But this was, you knew this was coming. Yeah. I think I called it when they first announced that they were going to do it. I'm like, there goes Slack. Yeah, that's pretty much it. So yeah, there's so many Microsoft shops. And if this is just an add-on to the Office product, which it is, and they get it for free, boom, you're done.

Because Slack is expensive, you know? If you actually have to pay for Slack, it's expensive. Yep, it ain't cheap. Now, when Disney Plus rolled out, one of the first things that myself and a few of my friends were mentioning is, oh my God, the big data that they're going to get. They're going to see what all the old shows that people are watching and see what's more popular.

And then you're going to get remake, remake, remake. Not so, says Kevin Mayer, chairman of direct-to-consumer and international at Disney himself. He's saying that basically, we're not going to use big data. We're going to use our creative instincts to make our shows. We might not always follow the data.

We might have great creative ideas that don't fit right into where the data would point you to make a program. So we're going to use both our judgment or the ideas we have in place, the capacities that we have in place, and the data that tells us what to make. Certainly, we will be paying some attention to that. This is basically a shot at Netflix, which basically uses nothing but data to drive their programming.

Cancel all the shows. Yeah. Yes. So, but this makes sense because, you know, Disney's been creating content for nearly 80 years now. They kind of know what they're doing. Yeah. Well, I mean, the original people are long dead, but I think this is good. I think this is fine.

And this could also be smoke up our ass because they're totally looking at the data. Oh, they're definitely looking at the data. Somebody's not looking at that data. Well, I think the data stuff is definitely going to drive remakes, any of old properties. But I am glad to hear some pushback against big data.

Somebody saying big data is not the be all and end all. And we're going to use we're going to let our creatives be creative. And I like that. I think the department that should be looking at that data is the merchandising department, because we were talking about Robin Hood the other day. Yep. Everybody I know that is of a certain age, the first thing that they watched besides the Mandalorian was Robin Hood.

That's exactly the order that almost everybody I know watched stuff to. They watched the Mandalorian, then they found Robin Hood. Exactly. And since everybody's been talking about it, I was thinking of just getting my trial just so I could watch Robin Hood. And so the marketing department and the merchandising department should be the ones that are looking at that because that's the toys and the rides that they need to revive for the theme parks.

Oh, no shit. When I went to get a Robin Hood ride in there. And by the way, when I was at the Disney store getting the Muppet Babies dolls for my kids, if there would have been a Robin Hood doll there, I would have bought it. Yep. I mean, you know, for the parks especially, it's really, really important.

I am still pissed off at them for getting rid of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, which was the single best ride at Disney ever. It was one of my favorites. Everybody's favorite, man. That and Peter Pan, two of the most underrated rides at Disney. What are you going to do? Now, this one I saw, which I thought was pretty interesting and kind of, I'm kind of on board with this one.

Whill, W-H-I-L-L, brings its autonomous wheelchairs to North American airports. Now, there's two sides to this. God, please tell me they call the models the Wheatons. The Wheatons, oh, God, the Wheatons, that would be funny. I was thinking they should have called it the WALL-E because this is right up the WALL-E train.

People walking around, they're just scooting around in their autonomous wheelchairs. The thing about it is if you could get these for everybody in the airport, how awesome would that be? Because people in airports are just dumb. Dude, it would be bumper cars. No, what it would be was if everything was programmed, right, you got your wheelchair, you sat down in it, and it was programmed to know whose flight was next up and who had to get to the gate faster, and it could use AI to actually get people where they need to be on time

without people standing on the people movers and all that crap. I think it would be great. But how are you going to tell it to pull your fat ass over to the fucking Burger King so you can bring your stinky crap onto the plane and annoy me? There's a big sesame seed-covered red button on the thing that you just slam and say, I need a Big Mac.

Yeah, I don't know if this is better or worse than the ride-on suitcases that some bullshit company was marketing a few years back that we talked about. Well, those are for lazy people. These are for people who have real problems. I used to do the wheelchair thing with my mother when she would come to town, and it was a pain in the ass.

Oh, so this isn't open to everybody. No, these are for actual people who need wheelchairs. Oh, I'll stop making fun of it then. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I thought they were trying to just slide your card through and sit down anybody who needed it. No, no. These are for people who actually need wheelchairs.

Oh, okay. That's cool then. I'm down with that. Yeah. Yeah, but if you look at the design on them, they really remind me of basically the little scooters they had in WALL-E. Well, here you go, though. I think I now have the same problem with these as I do with the idea of autonomous vehicles in general.

You have to be all in or nothing. Everybody in the airport has to be sitting in one of these AI-driven bullshit things because as soon as you've got AI-driven bullshit things mixed with stupid people in airports walking, you got trouble. Right here in River City. That's for you, Dave Bitter. You can't make lanes for them.

Come on. Yes. Yes, you could. Have we seen lanes for bird scooters or anything? This is a closed environment in a fucking airport. You can't say that. So far, the whole show, you've done pie-in-the-sky stuff that you know these companies won't do. But, I mean, that's apples and oranges.

Yes, it would work in a perfect world where these companies actually were responsible and did the correct things. Well, they've been testing this in Europe, and the Europeans say it's good, so we get it now. Okay. So, come on. Make lanes. I'm down with that. Yeah. I mean, it's been tested in Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Abu Dhabi.

So, come on. Hey, if it works in Amsterdam's airport, it'll work anywhere. That's what I mean, man. Because there's a whole bunch of stone people walking around there. Exactly. It's got stoner detection built in. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Security? We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the co-host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also 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.

How's that new Star Wars podcast coming, Dave? You know, I'm still, I'm working on it. I'm working. We're spinning it up. Spinning it up. Me and Brian have been, we've been spitballing behind the scenes. So, stay tuned for that. Feel the force. Yep, yep. And after that, we're going to do a Seedy Motel podcast.

All the big hits. Yeah. And we're going to do, what else is on the list? Well, your furry YouTube channel is coming, I'm sure. That's right. That's right. That one has to be a video one, obviously. Yeah. So, I want a furry Baby Yoda costume. Let's tie it all together.

Okay. Isn't he furry? I guess he's not furry. He's got some whiskers, I guess. But, uh. He's green skin fur, whatever. Okay. A mixture of Kermit the Frog and Baby Yoda. Some downy fur. Yeah. All right. It's not easy being green. Nope.

Nope. So, I wanted to kick things off this week with a video. Uh, Sacha Baron Cohen got awarded, uh, by the Anti-Defamation League, um, the International Leadership Award. Excellent.

I guess they have a conference called Never Is Now. Um, this video is worth your time. Uh, it's, it's fascinating to me how, how often it comes to the comedians to be the sound-minded thinkers, to be the communicators who are able to put these things together and make them both entertaining and educational and, dare I say, inspirational.

Um, basically, uh, Sacha Baron Cohen talks for about 25 minutes about the issues with social media, specifically Facebook. Yep. And, uh. He's been taking the hammer to Zuck recently. It's dead on. I mean, it's, in, in, in my opinion, I think it's, uh, very thought-provoking and worth your time.

Did you guys get a chance to check this one out? I did, and it is a lot of the things that we say on the show, but said, as most of the videos that we promote on the show are, much better than we could do. So, everybody, turn off the podcast now. Right. Don't even bother listening to the rest of it. No, no.

We just get there sooner than they do. That's our only claim to fame. Right, right. They refine it, distill it. And make it entertaining. Yeah. Yeah. We don't have time for that. Yeah. Anybody got time for that? Yeah. It was a fantastic video.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yep. And I'm not a huge Sacha Baron Cohen fan, but, uh, I did like him in his new spy show, I gotta say. But, uh, this, this made me love him. This was fantastic. Yeah. I've been a huge fan of his since day one. Yeah. Even watching the old, uh, show on BBC that he used to have.

Just genius stuff. Allie G. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Allie G was good. Yep. Very smart. Speaking of things that are good, Twitter has finally, finally letting you turn on two factor auth without having to give them a phone number. So they say it's rolling out slowly, apparently, because some people are still trying and they're like, first thing they asked me for is my phone number.

You've been able to turn it on to an app or like a YubiKey in the past, but you always have to start with a phone number and they're getting rid of that finally. Okay. Right. And I, I think part of this is, was a response to blowback that they were connecting phone number based information with, uh, accounts that people preferred to keep anonymous or keep unconnected.

Yes. And Twitter got caught doing that. So this is, I suspect partially in response to that. Well, it's interesting. I had to sign up for a new Twitter account this week and I couldn't, they, I signed up using my email, got in, set up all my, my profile pictures and followed some people and everything.

And in five minutes, it locked my account and said, uh, your account is locked. You need to verify this account before we can let you keep using it. And to do that, please enter your phone number. So I had to put in my phone number and it didn't send me an SMS. It called me and a robo voice read off the number that I had to type into Twitter.

So I don't know if it's just two factor that does it, but you know, I think the other thing that this comes down to is a lot of the SMS hacks that have been out there with, or SIM card hacks, I mean, sorry, where the, you know, people's SIM cards have been hijacked and then they use that new SIM card to break into people's accounts.

So that would bypass that because the SIM card attacks are getting ridiculous. Right. Yeah. My understanding also is that Twitter's particularly good at recognizing and shutting down inauthentic accounts. Twitter's good at something. Holy shit. That's best breaking news. Yes.

That's one thing that they are pretty decent at. They're, they're, they're pretty good at that because, uh, you know, the old egg profile pictures, uh, you don't see too many of those anymore. Not that they use the egg anymore anyways, but yeah, they go through and shut down stuff pretty fast. And it's a shame that they just can't, you know, follow, follow their own policies across the board for everyone.

Yeah. And people put in a profile picture now instead of the egg, because most people have it turned off that don't show me things from people with no default, like with the default profile image, which is janky ass work around. If I've ever heard one, that is the definition of a clue.

Just like, we're trying to do something here. What can we do guys? Quick, quick, quick. Turn them all off. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. So this next story we've got here following up, uh, on the continuing saga of the ring cameras and, um, Amazon's relationship with local police, um, a story in the Washington post about a representative from ring telling, uh, some folks in Congress that basically if you share

your footage with the police, that they have access to that footage forever and they have the right to share it with whomever they'd like to share it with forever. Um, I guess I, I'm of two minds about this.

Like I can understand why people can get spun up about this, but on the other hand, this is the classic thing you've agreed to. You clicked, I agree. And I'm sure it was in the agreement that you would click, you know, if you, if you agreed to share with the police, part of that agreement probably says something about forever and in perpetuity with no restrictions and, uh, and no reason I think this is the line that really upsets most people is without providing any evidence of a crime.

So if you've signed off on this, the police get all your footage, can use it for anything, keep it forever for no particular reason whatsoever. And I think, you know, that's, that's the issue here, right? Yeah. Yeah. A couple other things. When we always talk about this sort of stuff, we're like, okay, if you have a warrant or okay, if you have a reason to suspect there's, you know, crime video on that particular, on that particular camera at this particular time.

But the blanket access is, is such a, people are morons to agree to this, obviously. And, and I guess it is caveat emperor, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another interesting thing I drew from this article was a little back and forth discussion about Ring's privacy policies, stating that they don't collect personal information online from children under the age of 13, that they try to prevent having footage gathered of people

under age, under the age of 13. But when pressed about it, they admit that there's really no, no attempt nor way to actually enforce that. Yeah. I mean, when you see a child. If a kid walks in front of your camera, how are you going to, unless you start getting, you know, facial recognition and all that.

Yeah. And how do you know the age of the child? Because, you know, what if they're just kind of young teen? Or what if they're just spectacularly short? Mm-hmm. Right. So if I have a Tyrion Lannister standing in front of my house with a shaved face.

I mean, I guess it's all the best intentions, but- Is it? You know, you're right. It's not. Is it? It's all the best. Yeah. I don't see a lot of good intentions here. It's all the best. It's all the best lawyers. Yeah. That's what it is.

It's all the best lawyers. And it's all the best. Let's grab as much as we possibly can. Everybody is doing data grabs now. It's the exact opposite of what we've always talked about. Treat data as toxic. Everybody right now, including law enforcement, is treating data like it is a fucking oasis in the middle of a desert.

Get as much of it as we possibly can. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm of two minds. I still want to take these things down because I just don't care about these privacy polis. I don't care for these privacy polis. I do care about it. And I just, I don't know.

I mean, they are pointed at the outside of the house. And they do serve a purpose. So should I get that butthurt about this? That's really where, that's the struggle I'm having with it right now. Well, what about just alternate brands? Would you be okay if you were in control of it all?

I do use alternate brands. Well, yeah. Jason, you also have to remember that it may be pointing outside your house, but it's pointing directly at your neighbor's house. So this isn't a thing that does, that affects just you. It affects your neighbors. Right. But it's also pointing at public areas.

It's not, it's not like it's pointing inside their homes or pointing at their kids. It is when I open my door. Well, you. That's an interesting point. I'll have to ask Ben Yellen about that on next time I see him about what if the neighbor directly across the street from me has a ring camera.

So basically they have a surveillance camera always pointed at my house. Yep. And they've opted in. And I open my, and I open my front door or, yeah. Or I walk by my window. Or your blinds are open. Yeah. Rocking around in my boxer shorts or dare I say my furry costume.

And they gather. I don't know why I, I, I, I reinforce these people online. The whole, I don't, I guess I'm just a, Dave, the truth will set you free. All right. All right. It is a small but very vocal community.

It's keep them happy. I know. I know. All right. But yeah. What if they're shooting inside my house and, and, and my underage kid runs around. Also in his furry costume. Baby Yoda. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the real issue for it. For me is it's not, it's not just you. Like we're, we're all buying into this societal contract in this neighborhood. Contract now. And I don't want to, a camera pointed at my house. Especially if they've opted into this, these police programs where video of, of my door.

Now who comes to my house, who, when I leave, when I come back, who's coming in and out of my door is now owned by the police in perpetuity and they can do whatever they want with it. It's my house, not my camera. I didn't opt in. Yeah. But when does it happen that if someone actually breaks in your house and you would have really liked that video?

I mean, that's the whole point of these things is technically it's to keep people from stealing your shit and breaking into your house. My property, my house, my door. I get to choose. But you know, do you then? Because if you're pointing at somebody else's door. No, obviously we don't. That's why I'm having a problem with it.

No, but if you wanted to put in a camera and point it at somebody else's door and they say no, then you can't have the camera. I mean, that's the whole, the whole thing needs to be rethought from the ground up. I guess there's an argument to be made that it's up to you to put in tall hedges that you can't see into your property with.

I mean, I'm half joking about it because there's that whole thing about if you can see something from public, from public property, then what's your reasonable expectation of privacy? I don't think Brian can put hedges on his apartment balcony. Yeah. We'll see that my very thought was, well, what about, you know, apartments and condos?

Because we see these especially being used in kind of low rent apartment housing where they're being put in and they're just pointing, you know, at hallways and across the street and across the hallway doors. Yeah. Yeah. It needs to be rethought. Or we just need to, like, as Jason always likes to say, we just need to recognize that privacy is dead and get over it.

Yeah. That's the other option. Or just keep your security systems inside your house. So you don't get the pictures of the people breaking in, but only when they're inside your house. What about, like, ethical installation where they could, like, point down and, like, end at the driveway so that they're not getting the entire, you know, you're not getting your neighbor's houses and things of that nature.

And I know good luck, but we're trying to come up with solutions. That would be a solution. It could be required. It's a self-policing solution. That's the problem there. Well, or, you know, if the camera is showing that footage, then the police have to throw it out.

If it has anything other than your property on it, then the police aren't allowed to collect it and use it. I mean, there are legislative ways to get around this. Yeah. And then what if your neighbor requests the footage because their house got broken into and they were okay with it? But he said there's so many, there's so many variables here that it just drives you crazy.

I get it. And here's something else that's, here's something else that's going to drive you crazy when it comes to Ring doorbells. Mozilla report shows just how awful Ring's privacy practices are. And this comes from the privacy not included study that they do every year for their, the Christmas shopping season.

And I love this thing. It's always fun to look at. Well, there are basically five things that every product must do to get certified here. Have automatic security updates so they're protected against the newest threats. Use encryption, meaning bad actors can't just snoop on your data. Include a vulnerability management pathway, which makes reporting bugs easy and well possible.

Requiring users to change the default password if applicable, because that makes devices far harder to access. And five, privacy policies, ones that relate to the product specifically and aren't just generic. Well, all three of Ring's products have failed that test, according to Mozilla. I'd gather 98% of Internet of Things stuff probably do too.

No, go check out the study. There's a lot of things that actually are just fine. Just fine. They do have the creepy non-creepy scale too, which I really love. It's like some things can be perfectly privacy compliant, but it can just be creepy. Mm-hmm. So, really fun.

Really fun. Yeah, I'm going to check that out. Yeah, it's always a good one. And you can vote. So, you can add your own creepy score if you like. All right. Yep. And when you go there, I didn't know you could do this at first, but I remembered. When you click on it, it gives you each for each product in there. It will give you a breakdown of everything.

It's not just a picture and some, you know, the score. If you click on it, it goes deep into each individual product. Cool. Nice. And hat tip to friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, on this one. This comes from Wired. Burglars really do use Bluetooth scanners to find laptops and phones. Makes sense.

They're cheap. Walk around a parking lot. Why break into a car that doesn't have an expensive laptop in it? Yeah, seriously. What, am I going to get some spare change in Hubba Bubba? Yeah, this was a blind spot for me. For some reason, it just, it had not come to my attention that these apps were so readily available.

So, earlier today, I went and downloaded one and just fired it up here. Broke into a good car. Well, I'm here at the, here at our offices here at Datatribe, and there are probably 80 Bluetooth devices I'm looking at, just within, just holding up my phone, looking around.

Right. And they're like Apple TV and MacBook Air, Apple Watch, iPhone, you know. Conveniently labeled. Right, exactly. Does it give you any distance information on those? Oh, it does, absolutely. Oh, my God.

So, that's why, yeah, when you walk around, when you're going to your car tonight, just walk around the parking lot for a minute and see what you can find. Man, I'm going to have to do that. Yeah. Then just, you know what you should do is keep a Post-it pad with you and just write down what you found in the car and just stick it on the driver window. So, when people come back, they're supremely creeped out.

Well, thank God. If I would have broken into your car, I would have got this. Everybody will have caught it on the ring cameras that they have installed around the office. Exactly. Well, and the Teslas have the 360 cameras built in, running all the time anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. I wonder.

And you can't break into the new trucks unless you, like, hit the window with a ball, apparently. Yeah, yeah. So, the interesting thing that I want to check out, send me a link or put a link in the show notes for the app that you downloaded because what I want to do is I want to test my laptops if they're in power nap mode versus not in power nap mode.

I can tell you right now that that's actually in this article way later on. Actually, I think it's an article that's linked to it. You need to completely put your device to sleep. Yeah. You need to shut it down because if you just put it in power nap mode, it'll ping. So, if you ever, ever leave your laptop in your car, put it all the way down.

Put it down. Put it down. Yeah, because, I mean, you can turn off power nap, but I just didn't know if that turned the radio off as well. That's what I wanted to check. And that's an easy enough check. So, cool. Very cool. Now, for all you fools out there that are still using Android phones, I'm going to get mail about that one.

Of course. There's been a terrifying camera app flaw that left millions of Android phones vulnerable to spying. A team of security researchers found this flaw. They get in some weird way about using permissions, especially with app permissions on the camera. There's a specific set of Google permissions that an app needs from a user to gain access to the phone camera.

Researchers at Chexmarks found that a malicious app could bypass that safety net completely by requesting storage permissions. And then they could basically get control of the camera completely and all the photos and videos. And they can take photos and videos as well with no permissions whatsoever. And once the permission is granted, it doesn't matter if a user closes the app as the connection has already been established and your phone is owned.

Mm-hmm. Not good. Oh, all right. Lovely. Yeah. Yeah. And they point out that they can take photos while you're on a call. So they can – well, and both record audio and take photos while you're on a call.

So take pictures of them. The photos of the side of your head wouldn't be that useful. But the audio is actually probably useful. Well, no. The camera side is facing away from you. Well, I was making a joke. You got two cameras on an Android phone. Oh, I see. Come on. Right. Just wasn't a very funny one. Yes. I'm not smart or funny.

Why does anybody listen to this show? You're no Sacha Baron Cohen. I'll tell you that. No, that's for sure. Anyway, Brian, about that Star Wars. It's a good episode. Can't wait to do the podcast. The other thing, of course, is that they patched it, but patching on the Android side is way slower than it is on iOS.

People lag behind. Also because Android users tend not to update. Exactly. Ever. Yep. Yep. So if you're on planet Android, update. Yes. So the folks over at Kaspersky published recently about a coalition against stalkerware.

Of course, stalkerware is the software, I guess, typically your significant other would install on your device. Sometimes bosses. Sometimes bosses. Yeah, that's true. Bosses. I guess even, well, parents too. Yeah, parents, which is probably the only legit usage.

Right. That I can think of. And even then it kind of pushes a line. Yep. Yep. So stalkerware does exactly what it sounds like. It can track where you are, what you're doing. Oh, so you mean just a phone? Well, I guess it sends it to an individual rather than a gigantic company.

Oh, okay. I see. I see the difference. For targeting you with. It sends it to someone you actually know who doesn't trust you rather than a giant company to send you ads. Yes, as opposed to a company that just knows you. Yeah. Totally different thing. Yeah. Yeah. But so Kaspersky has joined with a bunch of other organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the European Network for the work with perpetrators of domestic violence and

some other security companies like Malwarebytes. And they come up with this coalition to try to prevent stalkerware. They have some interesting initiatives here, their own security software. They want to have pop-ups so that if they detect that something like this has been installed on your device, it'll pop up and let you know because of how a lot of these work is it gets installed and you don't even know it's there.

Yep. I wanted to point out there's an organization online called the Badass Army and it's run by Caitlin Bowden. They're on Twitter at the badass underscore army. I guess I'll have a link to that. And they're doing a lot of really good work in this space with stalkerware, also folks posting nudes of former boyfriends and girlfriends and all that sort of stuff.

Gather mostly girlfriends. Mostly girlfriends. Mostly girlfriends. That'd be my guess, yeah. That's sort of online harassment. And they're doing good work and being quite effective. So if that's something that interests you, check out the Badass Army. We are following as of now.

Yep. Follow. Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow. All right, gentlemen. Well, that is what we've got this week. I will see you guys next time. Catch you on the ring camera. I want to tell you about a little program for podcasters called Descript.

What you do is you toss your audio up there and it lets you kind of edit your audio in line with a transcription of your of your audio. Now, the the great part about this, it works pretty cool. You know, you can edit audio on the fly and it'll even export like a logic project for you, which is cool.

But the transcription stuff is really cool is what I got it got on board for. I dropped one hundred and twenty dollars for a year of the service and found out, well, the transcription ain't exactly free, which is what they say when you're doing it through the app.

It's like, oh, if you go to the producer level, you get transcriptions for free. No, I'm like cooking through my back catalog here trying to get all this stuff up. And it's like, oh, you've run into the the 10 hour limit for 30 days. You only get 10 free hours for 30 days and then you have to buy it.

So I wrote them a very terse email saying, what the fuck? And I got the the owner wrote back and said, oh, yes. And blah, blah, blah. It's it's because, you know, power users will use too much and we're waiting for everybody to sign on. So like the free people that don't use that much transcription will, you know, offset the cost for the others.

But right now we have to pay for all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. And I'm like, well, you didn't say that. They're like, oh, it's in our fact. Go right here. I'm looking at all the little check marks under their choose your plan thing. And it does seem to imply transcription is is included. Scroll down on the page on the website and you'll see that there is a fact that does say that here's the rub.

I didn't sign up on the website. I signed up in the app. The app has no such fact. So I wrote him back and I'm like, that would be fine if you actually had that in the app itself, which you don't, which I then call bait and fucking switch.

So I'm very pissed off at this company. And I wrote the I wrote the owner back. Nothing back yet. Right. So I'm I am very much on the line of I'm on the fence now because I like the product. And if they would have said out of the gate, plug in your credit card and then you can, you know, get transcription for X amount of dollars afterwards or plug in your own transcripts and go from there.

I'd have been fine with it. I just feel ripped off because they didn't say it out of the gate. So that's my it's my non app of the week. So if you're a podcaster and you're looking at Descript, there are other options out there. I'll put some in the show notes and for just cheap transcriptions. I'm sure by now the fact has been added to the app.

No, I checked this morning. It's not. OK, well, they're probably yelling at somebody about that. I talked to the owner, man. Come on. And he didn't write me back. So he can kiss my ass if he wanted to have good PR. You know what? My roommate pointed this out the other day. If you go to Ralph's, our local grocery store, they actually have a button on the cash register called the make it right button.

So if they screw up and the posted price is wrong and they have to do it differently, they press the make it right button and put in the price of what it should be. These people need to make it right button. Oh, man. Angry Birds is 10 years old.

Can you believe it? I'm old. Yeah. Well, it feels like it's actually been longer. I know that's the flip side. I'm like, I can't believe it's been 10 years, but it feels like 20. See, when you get older and older, like the chasm between Donkey Kong and the Angry Birds is not so big anymore.

That's true. It certainly seems that way. Yeah. The funny thing about this article that I put in here, it's called Celebrate 10 Years of Angry Birds by Beating the Crap Out of This Vending Machine. Well, the irony of this is that it was yesterday that, and you'll hear this tomorrow if you listen when the show comes out, they put one of these in Times Square and they had the big show from WWE come out and help people access the vending machine.

And the vending machine is basically you scream at it and beat the crap out of it until it gives you a prize. Right. Which I love it. I love it. It's part of their Bring the Anger campaign for the anniversary. And I'm like, you know what? I can get behind hashtag Bring the Anger for this show.

So they are going to be doing other rage-inducing promos. So keep an eye out for them. And yeah, the venting machine is what this was called. Nice. That's clever. I would have loved to play with this thing just to beat the crap out of it. And if they had the big show there smacking on it, it must have been pretty durable.

Yep. There you go. So I've got my Samsung HW MS 550 Sound Plus 2-channel premium soundbar, parentheses, Dark Titan, end parentheses. Dark Titan! Yes. So I wanted to get a soundbar because, you know, as the kid is sleeping and all that sort of stuff and we're trying to watch TV at night, my wife has been kind of noticing, I'm having trouble actually hearing voices.

So let's get a giant speaker so we can place them on the kids to sleep. Wait for it. Part of the problem is sound editing because, you know, you'll crank it up for dialogue and then all of a sudden there's a car crash and it's 18 times louder than the dialogue, right? Right. And I got sick of my wife turning on captions because I don't like watching captions.

Oh, I love captions. Yeah, well. So to compromise, I did my due diligence and my research and they, you know, a lot of soundbars have it, but the reviews on the Samsung soundbar in particular, they have a clear voice technology, which, you know, they use, thank God they didn't say AI.

They just use technology to pump up, you know, and isolate vocals for things. And, you know, it has different modes for music, et cetera, et cetera. You can switch through all of them. So got it out of the box, went to install it. And this is exhibit A on why smart homes still suck and aren't getting any better because this is, of course, the soundbar that was supposed to do everything.

That's why I got it. It's supposed to interface with Alexa. It's supposed to interface. I went with a Samsung because I have a Samsung TV. I thought that would help. They're the same manufacturers. Surely their items will talk to each other without problems. Eight hours later, I finally got it all up and running and working as it was supposed to.

I have to say in their defense, Bluetooth mode worked perfectly, very easily right out of the gate. I was able to stream music from my phone, from my laptop, et cetera. All of that, no problem at all. Now, getting it to talk to my TV and getting it on Wi-Fi, that was a bit of a pain in the ass.

The instructions tell you to get an app called Multiroom and you'll be able to register the soundbar and put it on your local Wi-Fi network and all that sort of stuff. Piece of cake, no problem. Doesn't work. Google it and people say, well, no, what you need to do first is go get another app that Samsung makes called SmartThings.

So the problem now is I've tried to do it with the first app. So then I got the second app and tried to do it and it still wouldn't work. So then I have to read further and further. Oh, because you use the first app first, now you have to, you know, you have to unpower it and let it sit for 10 minutes. So it does a full flush and then you have to power it back in.

And then if you use SoundThings first, you can get it set up and then you can go back to using Multiroom and then you can connect it to your TV over Wi-Fi. Perfect. I didn't want to have an extra cable. Why bother with all the cables? Wi-Fi streaming works all the time. It works great in my house. Awesome.

Go through all the settings on the TV. Finally find the right setting. Finally connected to the Multiroom app. That took a few minutes too because it couldn't find my TV. And for some reason it decided my TV had already been registered. And the unregistering process involves 7,000 fucking searches to finally figure out how to unregister my TV so then I could re-register it.

At which point, of course, now I have to fuck around with my other things that are connected to the TV because now that's all getting screwed up and I have to reset up the TV to recognize all the different things I have connected to it. Okay. Finally get it all there. Finally have it connected to Wi-Fi. Finally have the soundbar connected to the TV.

Turn on sound. Three second fucking delay using Wi-Fi. Mouths are moving. Voices come out later. Unset up all the fucking Wi-Fi connections. Get the fucking optical cable. Plug the optical cable in. Fine.

Now it's all working. And it sounds very good. But this is why smart homes suck. They're fucking impossible to set up. They're just, they make it so hard. Oh, the Samsung HWMS 5500 or 550.

Costs $193.33. And it's smart. I got the Vizio SB2920-C6 29-inch two-channel soundbar. Costs $78.99. And it just works. And it comes with DTS true volume. Which the reason I got it was the exact same reason you got it.

And it just works. Well, mine is smart, though. And I can do everything through it. I kind of like it now that I have it set up. I can walk out in the morning. I can tell my Alexa to start streaming NPR on my soundbar. And it does. And it's great. And I can turn TVs on.

Because I got the Amazon Fire Cube TV thing now, too. I can basically control my entire TV using my voice and the soundbar. I like it. So I didn't like the eight hours getting it fucking working, though. Yeah. You know, it's really not worth it for me. For my hourly rate, I could have bought a full surround sound stereo and had it professionally installed for the time you spent trying to get your soundbar to work.

Yeah, but, you know, we got a segment for the show out of it. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Not worth it. Yeah, and mine has Bluetooth as well. So I just set it as another speaker. So if I want to play Spotify through it, I just basically hit use that speaker, and it just plays through the soundbar. But I never use that because I've got a Sonos One system throughout the house.

So I don't need that part. So, you know, the only problem with mine is to get the TV to actually use the volume on it, you have to use, you know, mini plugs and RCA to pipe it in. So the TV is actually controlling the volume.

If I wanted to use optical, I have to use a secondary remote, which kind of sucks. But the sound quality on the optical is really good. The sound quality on the optical is great. And I have to say, for the Samsung one, you can still use your TV remote volume. It'll control the soundbar volume. Yeah, I'm trying to figure that out.

There's a way to do it. But I've got an old Roku TV, and it's not, you know, it's a 55-inch TV that I got for like $399. So you give and get. Well, I lucked out because my TV, I've had it since, when did we buy this place? 2014.

And that's the last year that the soundbar would actually work with the TV. Like if you had a 2013, you were just screwed. You'd have to get a new TV too. Got it. Got it. Well, Amazon's come out with something new today. Oh, the Amazon Dash Smart Shelf, which is.

You've got to be effing kidding me. I'm not. I'm not. You know what it is? It's a scale. It's a scale. It's a Wi-Fi scale. You tell it what's on top of it, and when it registers that there's nothing left or getting low on the wait, then yeah, then you, it'll, it can automatically order more.

Or if you don't want the automatic reorders, it will send you a low inventory notification. People are so lazy and stupid. And you can save up to 15% on items from select partners. I love the example. It's got rolls of toilet paper sitting on it.

It's crazy. No, it's just like, oh man, are you, are you shitting me? Really? This is, this is Wally style shit. We are so fucking rocketing there. You know, I, and this honestly is like a reverse dash button because the dash buttons you would press when you're out. This depresses when you're out, but it's the same concept.

It's the same idea. Did they not learn anything from the dash buttons? Seriously? They've got big data. I guess enough people bought those things for them to roll this out. Look, I can actually even see the, see this making sense for like gigantic companies with, you know, just huge inventory lockers and things of that nature, but whatever.

These are, I mean, these are out in the, in the public, like for coffee, paper coffee cups. I mean, how sensitive is this scale? Yeah. And what if you sit your coffee down? Does it reset the amount of cups you have? It'd be, I don't know. It's, it's silly. There's no price on it yet. It's, you can get a, an email alert when it comes out.

So what haves. I thought this one was fun. Facebook and Microsoft are partnering on remote development. Okay. And this comes back to Microsoft is switching over to using Microsoft visual code. Right. And I learned about Microsoft visual code because a listener of the show told us about it a long time ago when I was still developing.

And it is a fucking great IDE. Believe it or not, it is a really nice IDE and it's free. It's open source. And I really, really liked it. So I thought it was interesting that Facebook is switching over to it for the most part. And, uh, good for them. I just, I, I don't know why I got in developer mode.

Oh, wait, because I was dealing with building a website this week and I kind of missed, I kind of missed. You missed coding a bit. Oh, I did. I really did. I don't want to do it again. Don't, don't get me wrong there. I'm not, not stupid, but, uh, oh wait, no. Oh God, I am.

Sorry. Yes. I see the beginning. We're both stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the one thing I also found out is Git, um, is not what they use at Facebook. They use Mercurial, which I never used. I thought Git was pretty much the de facto standard for source control nowadays. So it's strange that Facebook is using Mercurial.

Just little geek notes that I was just, I was sucked down the rabbit hole. I know. I know. Well, here, this one will wake you up. Have you seen iSongs on YouTube? No. This is a guy who is basically recreating famous songs using GarageBand on his phone in real time.

Okay. It's fascinating. I had no idea that GarageBand was this cool. Season assist order is coming up. Uh, I, he's been in business for over a year now, I guess. Four years. Yeah. A long time. And, uh, I, I think I found sweet child of mine this morning and that was the, somebody put a link in one of my feeds and I went and watched it and I was like, damn, that's cool.

I got to play with that some more. And then I'm like, no, I don't. I've got a lot. I've got Logic Pro 10. I think I've got something a little better than GarageBand, but, uh, it's just neat. It's fun to watch. If you want to play around with GarageBand on your phone, this guy shows you how to do a lot of really cool stuff. It's, it's cool. Brian, were you having to model trains?

No. I was, I loved model trains growing up because that's what we had in Pittsburgh. We had tried to get my kid into it. Oh man, they're fun. They didn't, it didn't take, he wasn't interested either. He wants flying trains. Where's my flying trains? Well, Rod Stewart has an amazing train set that he's, I guess, been keeping under wraps forever.

This is, this is making the rounds, but I still wanted to put it in here because it's fun. 124 feet long by 23 foot wide model depicting an American city and its industrial hinterland in the 1940s. It looks cool. This is what happens when you have too much money. No.

This is what happens when you have just the right amount of money. It took him 26 years to make this thing. This is definitely a passion project for this guy. Yeah. It's, I just think it's neat. I just go check it out. The link will be in the show notes, but if you're into model, even if you're not into model trains, go check out the detail on this thing.

It's fascinatingly good. 26 years. You know, you can do a lot in 26 years. Like have a career and children and raise a family, or you can make a great model train set. Well, I hope it brings him joy. I think it does spark joy for him. Does it spark joy?

Good. We all remember Marie Kondo. We talked to her about, about her quite a bit on the show when she was a super popular and had her TV show and all that sort of stuff. Well, yes, she of throwing things out fame now has, you guessed it, a store online. Now that you have all this room, let me sell you some shit.

Exactly. Now that you've thrown out things that did not bring you joy, she hopes to sell you a bunch of shit that will, right on schedule for the holiday season. Naturally, people are wondering why a woman whose whole thing is that you should eliminate the excess from your home is switched course to funnel crap into your life. Has she just developed a sudden personal interest in the modern art of e-commerce?

Is this a well-meaning attempt to use her considerable platform for artisans spreading their handmade goods? Was making you get rid of all your belongings so she can sell you new belongings to Khan all along? She defends the shop at KonMari with this quote on the landing page. I can think of no greater happiness in life than being surrounded only by the things I love.

Yeah. The thing she loves, not that you love. You know, this is straight out of Amazon's playbook. Let's completely clear out your house, get rid of all your shit, and then help you fill it back up. That's it. I mean, we definitely need a new hypocrite of the week section. I think so too. Oh God.

Yeah. Shop KonMari. That'll be linked in the show notes too. I love this one. I found this over at Laughing Squid. Prankster hilariously sticks realistic iPod stickers on the ground in random places around San Francisco. This is an artist and art director, Pablo Roshat. And he just made these stickers and would stick them on the ground.

And he open sourced the stickers. So you can actually go download them from his website if you want to play along at home. Oh, sweet. I'm going to put these all over the bike path. Oh, you know where you need to stick them on the bottom of all the bird scooters. Yeah, this is great. Actually, this is one of my predictions that on the show that did not come true when they first announced the AirPods.

I was like, we're going to find these things everywhere. People are going to fall out of people's ears and pockets all the time. Not really. No. They actually did a good job with those things. They stick in your ears pretty well. Yeah. My, my, even my AirPods one, my AirPods two, they, I don't know what they, what kind of sorcery they have, but they do not fall out.

Yeah. That's pretty great. It's good. Yeah. Uh, I could not wait for more on of the week and in next, uh, in the next show segment for this one, because this is hot on the heels of Apple's, um, anti, what was it? It was anti-insider trading lawyer that got busted for insider trading. Insider trading, yeah.

Uh, this is the, the U.S. has arrested money, money laundering expert for laundering money. Yep. Oh, Bruce Bagley. Yes. Bruce Bagley has been regarded as a leading expert on organized crime in Latin America, particularly on money laundering. Now the University of Miami professor is in trouble for the way he may have, supplied that knowledge.

He wrote the book on money laundering and not expecting anybody else to read the book on money laundering. He used it and was surprised when the, the law enforcement agencies read the book as well and said, Hey, you're doing some of that stuff you wrote about buddy. Yes. He was arrested on Monday for charges of laundering $3 million on behalf of corrupt foreign nationals who collected the illicit funds through bribes and by embezzling from a public works project in Venezuela.

Yeah. And he pocketed about 10% of that. So made about $300,000. Yeah. He's 73 too, man. It's like, I get where he's trying to cash out on his knowledge, but, uh, he should have done it a little better job. He could have done a masterclass. Yeah. Stealing money. Yeah, exactly.

And now how are those books worth anything now since, since the guy who wrote it got caught at it? I guess not. Well, he didn't share all of his skills apparently. Uh, well, the ones that he didn't share obviously shouldn't have been used. Right. These are the, these are the outtakes.

He used the outtakes from the book. Yeah. Uh, and this one I just found fun cause I was a John Denver fan as a kid. They, they forced me to listen to the eight tracks all the time when I was growing up. And, uh, it's over at Geekology, John Denver's classic, take me home country roads, remixed in a minor key for bonus mournfulness.

And, uh, I listened to it. It was cute. I liked it. It was, you know, it is what it is. But if you're a John Denver fan and want to listen to this, go, go have a listen. I enjoyed it. Actually. I quite liked that version. It was good. Wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And another weird one, uh, another day, another world record four tire change pit stop.

This is the Red Bull team. And they got this tire change down to 1.82 seconds. If you, I mean, literally you blink, you miss the thing. It is insane how good these guys are. Well, you know, Red Bull got sued for saying it gives you wings cause it doesn't, but they can now use, uh, it changes your tires real quick.

Real quick, real quick. I'm guessing these guys probably weren't on Red Bull because they'd have the jitters, but yeah. And they're saying that there's just almost no way that the people are going to get faster than this because it's just, it is insane how fast it is. And I, I fear for when one guy just misses the mark a little bit and the guy drives off with three tires.

Oh, and this one was interesting. Humans are, have been placed in suspended animation for the first time. Yeah. I saw this. I read the article. Um, pretty cool. It's pretty cool. There's a couple of chilling things in here. No pun intended because they, they basically take all your blood out and fill it with, uh, ice cold saline to give them extra time to work on you.

Yeah. Um, so to be clear for people that aren't going to go read the article, these are people that have less than 5% chance of survival coming into, uh, the hospital there. So they're pretty much dead already. Yeah. Yeah. This is the university of Maryland medical center in Baltimore. Uh, so Dave, be careful out there.

You might, you might get a, get a, get an oil change that you didn't want sometime. Um, now the thing about it is they're not telling the people who obviously they're not getting, you know, permission from the people who are coming in because they're just about dead and, uh, they're not actually giving the results of the trial till the end of 2020 because they don't know.

They're not telling anybody how many of these people lived or died. Right. Yeah. So that's kind of the, the key bit of data that we need here. That's the one I'm looking for. Yes. Like, uh, yeah, we'll tell you later. Well, yeah, we're not going to really tell you right now. Uh, give us a few chances.

We're, we're, we're ironing it out. You know? Cool. Pretty cool. Yeah. It's pretty cool. My last one is, uh, NASA will test a beautiful spaceship that looks like space shuttle. Uh, this was over at Futurism and it's about the dream chaser and it's a new reusable spacecraft that they're going to use to take cargo up to the international space station.

And it's even got like a garbage dumpster that it's going to bring back with it to burn up in the atmosphere to get rid of the garbage. Nice. Uh, now the first thing I said, when I, when I looked at this, I'm like, Jesus, that looks like the Farscape one module. Cause I loved Farscape. So the first thing I did was type dream chaser Farscape one.

And I found this over at Reddit. Does anyone else notice the dream chaser looks a hell of a lot like the Farscape one module? Like, well, yes. So there's an interesting discussion over on Reddit about the type of craft it is, where it's basically the craft is a wing.

That's why there's no real big wings on it and how the aerodynamics works. It actually, it's not the article that I thought I was going to get, but it was actually much more, uh, educational than I thought. So it's, it's pretty cool. Yeah. It's a good looking ship and it looks a hell of a lot better than Tesla's new cyber truck that they launched the other day, which is one ugly piece of junk.

I like it. Oh, I'm sorry. I like it. That's why I like it. It's ridiculous. It is ridiculous, but, uh, it's got some pretty incredible specs. They had a bit of a problem on the launch though, because, uh, the glass is impact resistant as they'd like to say, but, uh, they took a hammer to it and broke it.

I don't know. They threw a ball at it. They're like a ball at it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, they busted it on stage, so that didn't go so well. Yeah. Musk said the glass was impact resistant, but it didn't really work. And he says, we'll fix it in post. Nice. Nice shucking job. And he didn't seem to be pretty upset at all.

You know, he's used to the demo gods. I mean, this guy demos rockets that explode. So I'm guessing a cracked window or two ain't so bad for him. He's also on the serious weed. Uh, that's true too. Yeah. So it really reminded me of the Landmaster truck from Damnation Alley.

You remember that thing? Kind of. Yeah. Vaguely. It was, it had 12 wheels, but it was in, uh, four clusters of three that rotated. It's a movie from 1977 with like Jan, Michael, Vincent, and George Pappard. Love that movie. And it used to live on Highland Avenue.

As soon as you came over the hill into the Valley, there was a little shop on the left where that thing lived for years. When I first moved to Hollywood and I would see it every time I would drive over the hill to go to Paquito Moss on my hangover Saturdays. I love that thing. I always, I always wanted to buy. I got one of them two blocks away.

Next time you come over, Paquito Moss on me. And, uh, so I've got two links in the show notes. I've got the official trailer from the movie, which is really fun to watch. And, uh, Dean Jeffries, the guy that made it discusses how he made it. So I recommend going and renting the movie, watching it over the weekend, and then going and watching how it was made.

Cause they're both fascinating. I love, I love that thing. And this truck reminds me of it. I want one. It's actually cheaper than my Explorer. Can't wait. Can't wait to see you pull up in that thing. Closing shout outs.

And a rest in peace to John Mann, Spirit of the West, lead singer who died at 57. Uh, they were a Canadian folk rock legends. Um, they've got a couple of songs you'd probably recognize if you could just fire up the Spotify, particularly the song Home for Arrest, which is a great drinking song, Jason. You'll really like it.

Uh, he passed away at home in Vancouver from early onset Alzheimer's. Oh, I'm sad to hear. Yeah. Very sad to hear. Also sad to hear this week, the Jim Jeffries show. RIP. Well, as my wife always tells me when a restaurant near us closes, we don't go to eat.

They shut down. I wasn't watching the show. I watched every single episode. I love the Jim Jeffries show. I love Jim Jeffries, but, uh, the word on the street is he's, he actually left to go do a sitcom. So it's, it's not so much that comedy central canceled him, but I think the stars aligned where after three years, he kind of did what he set out to do.

And that's the, the, the show closed for the final episode was actually pretty funny. He's like, we fixed everything. It's all good. Um, we, we set out to do what we meant to do. And it was, it was really a stellar show. If you've never seen it, go back and watch some of the old episodes. He did really good field pieces. Yeah. I got to say it was, it's good.

I'm going to miss him until next time. I'm Brian Shulmeister and I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks, even though we get things wrong every now and again, and we're not so smart to support the show and keep us on the air. Go to patreon.com slash GOG tosses a few bucks a month and we'll love you forever. And if you don't like Patreon, like a lot of people seem to do nowadays, but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and click that PayPal button.

Emphasis on recurring. We love you. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 395. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. Multiple warhead strike confirmed.

Retallatory strike on advisement. Hostile missiles heading to major U.S. population targets. Launch retaliatory missiles. All enemy targets. You have seen great adventures. Now you're about to live one.

Damnation Alley. Everything man remembers is gone. Everything he has achieved is forgotten. Every place he has lived has become a wasteland. Desolate. Barren. And these five survivors may be the only humans left alive.

Together, they will attempt a journey into the unknown.

Only their courage and the instinct to live could carry them safely through the hell that lies ahead. The devastation of man. And the mutations of nature gone wild.

And somehow, they must endure this journey through the nightmare of what we once knew as Earth. Somehow, they must survive this journey through Damnation Alley. Starring Jan Michael Vincent, George Pavard, Dominique Sandler, Paul Winfield, Jackie Earl Haley.

Produced in the magic of Sound 360.

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