396: Baby Yoda Face Off

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Well, I've had a couple crazy days, Brian. As have I. You go first. We were cooking some gumbo in the kitchen on Sunday, and we walked into the dining room and noticed, whoa, the floor is a little squishy.

And we looked down, and lo and behold, water is coming through the hardwood floor. That's never a good sign. Yeah. And turns out our house is on a slab, and an old pipe broke in the concrete or under the concrete. It's been an interesting few days.

We had the remediation guys out here looking for mold yesterday, tore up our entire dining room and living room floor. I've got industrial fans going 24-7 for 72 hours. Awesome. It's like an industrial club. It really is. I didn't have to use my dome last night, that's for sure.

And the biggest dehumidifiers I've ever seen in my life. They're like that square robot from Star Wars that has the legs on it. Right. Yeah, that's been fun. But here's the kicker. They were going to come tear up the kitchen this morning, but turns out, guess what I'm getting for Thanksgiving?

Uh, what? Asbestos. Oh, nice. Yeah, fun times. All right. Well, that's horrible. I'm sorry. I hope they fix everything soon. Well, I also had a fun weekend. Uh, I was out for a day with the family on Saturday. We were out having lunch and then we were going to go over to the Amazon bookstore, which should not be called the Amazon bookstore.

It should be called the Amazon half a bookstore because half of it is just electronics and the other half is books. Um, but I was having lunch and all of a sudden I felt very cold, yet I was sweating and all my bones ached. So I was like, huh, well.

Never a good sign. Never a good sign. And, uh, thank God I got that flu shot because apparently I still have the flu. Great. And, uh, it got really, really bad Saturday night. Um, so bad that I basically had like fever hallucinations. Uh, my wife swears I went to sleep and I slept most of the night through, but I, my recollection of that evening was me just laying in bed with my eyes open, completely unable to sleep.

Um, I probably sweat out 98% of my body water. Um, I was severely dehydrated. Sunday was not much better. Um, when I woke up on Monday morning, I kind of felt somewhat okay. I got out of bed after like sleeping for 12 hours and walked out to, uh, go get some water because I was feeling particularly dehydrated.

And as I got to the kitchen and my wife was sitting there, I got so dizzy. I fell down and bonked my head. Oh, dear. Uh, she called 911. Oh, Jesus Christ. Uh, they came and took all the readings and I was okay. And they just said, you know, we have an ambulance here if you want it, but all your readings are fine and you're communicating with me and it's, it's good.

And I'm like, yeah, I'll just go to urgent care. Uh, so I went to do that, uh, expecting to, you know, get a dose of Tamiflu and all that sort of stuff. But my readings then were, when I got there were okay as well. So I guess kind of the fever and everything broke with, uh, my head banging. So it's Gilligan's Island's rule, right?

You get hit by a coconut and you're okay again. There's your problem. Yeah. There's your problem solved apparently. Yeah. And so they did a couple of tests and all that and, uh, not the flu, some other random virus. So there you go. Oh man. Let's do some follow-up. Uh, we talked about rev transcribers, uh, about getting their pay cut and how everybody's pissed off last week.

Well, it turns out they're pissed off about something else too. They get some really nasty stuff to transcribe from law enforcement officers and the courts and things like that. And there are no warnings on what they're about to actually listen to. And a lot of people, like here's one that says, I finished more than one file in tears because listening to someone talk about being abused or assaulted is emotionally taxing.

And frankly, I have no training or expertise that really helps me cope with it. Well, I mean, sad, but true, but, uh, you know, they're basically just mechanical Turks, right? They're very low paid employees that have to deal with not even employees, sorry, low paid contractors that have to deal with the, the worst crap on the internet, much like, you know, most of the Philippines and everybody that does this job.

So there it is. It sucks. It's horrible. It really does suck. And I think what should happen is the people who are putting up the actual audio to be transcribed, I think they should have to put warning labels on them and say, you know, this, this may contain possibly sensitive material that, you know, may be disturbing to some people because they know what's on those tapes.

Yeah. They talk about that a little bit in the article, you know, they, they, they basically need to do, define their categories a bit better. You can't just have a legal category that could be a corporate law meeting or a police recording with someone screaming in distress. As they mentioned in the article, they've got to fine tune these things a little bit. They need to NSWF tags.

Seriously. They do NSFW. NSWF. I, I, I was going to let it slide, but after all the fucking problems we've had this morning, I figured that's the least of my worries. I'm virus laden and the internet hasn't been working.

So give me a rig here. So I've been talking a bit in the past about my frustrations with a smart home and particularly, you know, like things like smart light bulbs and how you can't control them from your switches because they don't know the state that they're in. So the wife and I are in ongoing battles that, you know, wives win.

So no more smart lights for me. There may be a solution coming soon. Amazon has revealed that it will start to run on devices with as little as one megabyte of memory and a cheap Cortex-M processor. Right now they require at least a hundred megabytes of RAM and an ARM Cortex-A processor.

So that limited it to smart devices that serve as a central hub for things that are controlled by Alexa, but that will now change and they're going to run most of it on the cloud. And you can expect to see Alexa on all kinds of relatively cheap and dumb devices from light bulbs to toys to potentially light switches and thermostats.

That would be kind of nice. That would mean that they will understand state and you'll be able to buy an Amazon Alexa-supported light switch, which will work with my Amazon Alexa-supported light bulbs. In theory, we shall see. Yes, in theory is the point there.

But it won't need to do much. A light switch will just need to check the state and act accordingly, right? That's true. That's true. I guess it's not, you don't have the light switches actually listening for Alexa commands. No, it doesn't need to do that at all. It just, you know, check state, if on, don't, you know, don't do anything, if off, go ahead.

Cool. Well, that's a good thing. Let's talk about the Brave browser for a minute, because I believe you finally did switch over. Is that correct? I did. And it's been working wonderfully for us today. It's not the browser, dude. We tried, we tried multiple things. We even tried Skype and that didn't work too. So it's not the browser. I will say, though, that the sync sucks a lot.

Yeah, I haven't tried it on mobile yet. So now that I know that, that kind of, there appears to be a unicorn browser that I'm waiting for. Well, the problem that you have right now is that Apple requires everybody's underlying engine to be Safari. So it doesn't really matter.

Right. But I'm talking about from two machines in my house. I got my laptop. Right. There are two laptops and a desktop. And the sync, every time it like starts to talk to each other, I'll have multiple copies of everything for like five minutes. And then it'll shrink back down to one of each.

Then it'll bounce back up to multiples. And then it'll go back down to one of each. It's annoying as shit. So the sync is the only thing that I found so far that has sucked. And of course, the close tab being on the right. Yeah, I got used to the close tab on the right again pretty quickly. Yeah, and I'm finally getting used to the browser icon too.

I hate it. It's really ugly. Yeah, it's really ugly. In the news.

Uber has suffered a major blow on Monday. London transportation authorities basically said, nope, no more. We're not going to extend your taxi operating license because of persistent safety problems. So that is awesome as far as I'm concerned. Sucks for people that really like Uber and getting around London.

Well, hey, there's the tube. Shut up, people. The decision will not immediately affect Uber's presence on London streets because, of course, they can appeal the decision as they are. Setting off what could be a long legal process and they can continue to operate throughout that time. Transport for London, which regulates taxi and private hire services in the city, said Uber did not meet the fit and proper standard.

So English. Needed to hold a taxi license. They said one main issue was a flaw in Uber's system that let unauthorized drivers sneak onto it. The driver's sidestep rules by colluding with authorized drivers to pick up riders under their account. At least 14,000 trips were conducted by at least 43 drivers using this workaround.

This means that all journeys were uninsured and some passenger journeys took place with unlicensed drivers. This practice known as account spoofing is a challenge for gig economy platforms to police. This also occurs with food delivery companies as well. London officials cited other safety deficiencies at Uber, including instances when dismissed or suspended drivers were able to create another account, which is obviously not good.

They also found several examples in which drivers did not have the correct insurance. The regulators said that because of the volume of problems, they had lost faith in Uber's ability to improve. Welcome to our world. Seriously. Uber sent a statement that would operate as normal, which I would define as bad, while it appealed the decision, which they called extraordinary and wrong.

Unfit operators cannot get away with deliberately shirking their responsibilities, the mayor of London said. Uber have had 17 months to comply with the conditions of their temporary license, and yet they have continually put Londoners at risk by letting drivers on the road who aren't properly licensed or insured.

Hear, hear. Hear, hear, sir. And I wonder how Deliveroo handles this. Like if you loan your bike to somebody, do they – is there like some kind of RFID chip in there somewhere that says this is the person on the bike that needs to be Deliverooing? Who knows? But this whole account spoofing thing is a problem.

Yes, it is. I never even thought about that before. That's even worse. So whoever – you know, I could just loan you my phone, and you could take your car out, and there you go. Or even borrow my car, and so I could be driving for Uber 24-7. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. So that is a loophole that needs to be closed somehow, and Uber's pushback on this stuff should not be surprising.

It's what they do. It's their – it's the company's way of doing business, so. We should be used to this by now, but it's still annoying. It's still annoying. Yes. And we've talked in the past about how we're rapidly becoming a third-world country, and that definitely came to the forefront during our recent widespread fires that we've had here in California.

In addition to the devastation caused by the fires, of course, it was compounded by the fact that there was widespread cell phone outages during the fires. We saw significant interruptions in cell phone service due to the planned power shutoffs at precisely the time the customers needed to be alerted about evacuation warnings or reach out to families and other things to let them know that they're okay or to get help or to get service or anything like that.

At one point, Marin County saw 57% of its 280 cell phone towers sites out of service. Other counties also saw major disruptions. This wasn't limited to just cell phones. Some customers who get their landline phone service – what's that, granddad? What's a landline? Oh, my God.

Through their broadband internet service providers saw their phone lines go out despite having their phones charged and equipped with battery backups. Even traditional copper-based landline phones had problems in at least some areas. There are – here we go, everybody. Regulation warning. Regulation trigger warning, everybody.

There are no federal or state regulations that mandate cell carriers have any backup power for cell service, says Anna Marie Johnson, program manager with the Public Advocates Office, an independent organization of the California Public Utilities Commission that advocates on behalf of consumers.

What this tells us is that the communication network is vulnerable. It's not resilient. The companies were not prepared, and requirements must be put in place to require backup power, Johnson said. Consumers rely on the wireless networks to call 911, and they expect those networks to work. Interestingly enough, guess what most other countries have?

What do they have, Brian? Regulations that require that cell phone towers have at least 48 to 72 hours of backup power on hand at all times. So if the main power goes down, they're running off batteries, and your phones work. This is ridiculous. It's getting worse. I mean, I live in a third-world house right now because I don't have water, and I haven't had water for a day.

But this is kind of stupid. The fact that the broadband providers went down with – I mean, that's going over cable lines. That shouldn't go down. I understand the cell service when they cut the power, but I guess the cell companies at their different knocks probably don't have backup power for, like, you know, some of the transmission lines.

That's really weird. But I do have a problem with them calling, you know, cable-based phone service landlines. That's not a landline. Yeah, that's not a landline. But the copper-based landline still had problems, so this is more widespread than you'd think. You know what we all have to do? Everybody go out and buy a ham radio.

Right. I'll get right on that. And we're back to that Christian Slater movie, Pump Up the Volume. That does not have legs. Right. Now, I saw this article, and I thought it was really interesting, how Iran turned off the internet. So 10 years ago, and I do remember when this happened, a Senate bill proposed by Senators John Rockefeller and Olympia Snow spurred considerable controversy.

This bill, which never even came up for a vote, would have made it possible for the U.S. government to build an internet kill switch that would allow it to shut off the internet in the event of an emergency. What particular reason they would want to do that for is beyond me and everybody else, too, as well, because it got a lot of criticism and they quickly backed off the idea.

However, it's definitely in the playbook for a lot of other countries in the world right now, and Iran's government has just demonstrated that. On November 16th, amid widespread political protests, most of the country was cut off from the global internet. After five days of isolation, the government announced Thursday that access would be gradually restored.

They're not the first country to do it. You're going to get a list of countries that should not be too surprising. Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Russia has plans to test their own in the next year or so. So there you go. It's in the playbook now.

Netblox, which is an organization that monitors internet shutdowns around the world, estimated that the recent Iranian shutdown took about 24 hours to implement. It's not as easy as just flipping a switch. Cutting off internet access to the outside world isn't that simple.

It involves isolating connections to the outside internet at a small number of designated transit points within a country, and then either blocking traffic at those points or announcing to outside routers that pass traffic from international servers into the country in question, that that traffic can no longer be delivered to the intended recipients.

And our devices are dumb enough that they just go, oh, okay, I guess we can't go there, so we won't. See, this is a problem because, I mean, the internet was built to route around a nuclear war. So apparently as things have gone, they have become very – like the anti-fragility of the internet has been subsumed with everybody trying to put in all of these kill switches.

And like you've got China with the Great Firewall, and I'm sure that they can just turn it off at a whim if they want to. But I'm sure Huawei would probably have a problem with that – or not even Huawei – no, I'm sorry, Alibaba would have a problem with that because, you know, I think half of China's GDP comes from Singles Day now, and that would be bad.

But yeah, this is not good. This is definitely not good. And this is an interesting one that came over from Ars Technica. Suspect can't be compelled to reveal 64-character password court rules. This is a story that I am of two minds about, but I believe the judges have acted properly here, even though the consequences of it actually are kind of scary for this case.

But as far as free speech goes, I think this is actually a win. So I'm going to read a bit of this ruling here that was handed down on Wednesday by Justice Deborah Todd. Based upon these cases rendered by the United States Supreme Court regarding the scope of the Fifth Amendment, we conclude that compelling the disclosure of a password to a computer, that is, the act of production, is testimonial.

Distilled to its essence, the revealing of a computer password is a verbal communication, not merely a physical act that would be non-testimonial in nature. There is no physical manifestation of a password, unlike a handwriting sample, blood draw, or a voice exemplar.

As a passcode is necessarily memorized, one cannot reveal a passcode without revealing the contents of one's mind. Indeed, a password to a computer is, by its nature, intentionally personalized and so unique as to accomplish its intended purpose, keeping information contained therein confidential and insulated from discovery.

Here, under United States Supreme Court precedent, we find that the Commonwealth is seeking the electronic equivalent to a combination to a wall safe, the passcode to unlock a pellet's computer. The Commonwealth is seeking the password, not as an end, but as a pathway to the files being withheld.

As such, the compelled production of the computer's password demands the recall of the contents of the appellant's mind, and the act of production carries with it the implied factual assertions that will be used to incriminate him. Thus, we hold that compelling appellant to reveal a password to a computer is testimonial in nature.

We acknowledge that, at times, constitutional privileges are an impediment to the Commonwealth, requiring the Commonwealth to do the heavy lifting. Indeed, to shoulder the entire load in building and bringing a criminal case without a defendant's assistance may be inconvenient and even difficult.

Yet, to apply the foregone conclusion rationale in these circumstances would allow the exception to swallow the constitutional privilege. Nevertheless, this constitutional right is firmly grounded in the realization that the privilege, while sometimes a shelter to the guilty, is often a protection of the innocent.

Moreover, there are serious questions about applying the foregone conclusion exception to information that manifests through the usage of one's mind. Boom! Love this. I do. Yeah, it really is like, okay, look, this is going to make it harder for law enforcement, especially when this is a child-born case.

But, you know, sometimes you have to do it. Yeah, that really is unfortunate, but you have to do the legwork. I have a couple of thoughts about this. First off, I totally agree with this thing. I think, you know, you can't let a few bad apples take away everything from the good apples, and that's what we would be doing otherwise.

They said it just there. A shelter to the guilty is often a protection to the innocent. Boom. I love that. My second thought is, screw you, Border Patrol. I'm taking my phone home. And my third thought, my third thought is, this only applies to passwords.

I'm sure this does not apply to biometrics. So now we're all screwed using our thumbs or our faces. That's right. You have to use a pass. That's why I use a six-digit passcode on my phone. So this is a good ruling, I think.

And yes, it does make it harder for law enforcement to do their jobs, and it is sad that this is in a child porn case. But, you know, there are other avenues to get what you need. But yes, biometrics are exempt from this. This is, you know, he has to give him something from his mind, and that's where the sticky wicket comes in.

We've got to bring in the mind hunter. Yeah, that was a good show. I like that show. I watched the first episode. I really enjoyed it. I've got to get back to that. Yep. And the last article I have here in news is, New York City is creating a high-level position to oversee ethics in AI. Mayor Bill de Blasio has issued an executive order creating a position for an algorithms management and policy officer, or AMPO.

Whoever holds this position will work within the mayor's office and serve as both an architect for algorithm guidelines and go-to resource for algorithm policy. The person will make sure that city algorithms live up to the principle of equity, fairness, and accountability. The officer will have the help of advisory and steering committees and will respectively draw on appointed public members and city officials to drive the conversation around algorithms.

I've been in enough corporate environments to understand that any job that drives the conversation means to get a hefty paycheck for doing nothing. That's true. That's true. I do hate that the title of this is, NYC creates a high-level position to oversee ethics in AI. No, it's in algorithms, algorithm management and policy officer.

Nowhere does it say AI in there. It says algorithms. So in gadget writer, stuff it. I've gotten so immune to AI being thrown into everything. I just don't care anymore. I know. The AI has won. They've broken me. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media Candy. Brian, I saw a new documentary this week called Hail Satan? Over on Hulu. And I have to say, it was really good. Saw a lot on the social media. So a lot of people have liked it. Yeah. I first heard about it on Penn Sunday School, which surprisingly did not have an episode on Sunday.

So I don't know what's going on there. But yeah, I went and watched it because I had nothing to do one night. And it turns out to be really good. And this is not the Church of Satan, the Anton LaVey organization. This is the temple of, or the Satanic temple. And it's a completely different organization.

And it is a religion without a god, which is really the interesting part about it. They're all about something completely different. And, you know, just people's rights. I love it. I really love the show. I recommend it. Can't they just be atheists and not throw in the Satan bit?

No. Actually, it's much better that they're Satanists because the atheism part does not actually have a lot of the protesting that they're doing. And they're going up against different groups because they have to, you have to have a religion to go up against Christianity and some of these things where they're going after, like, you know, when they put the Ten Commandments up, they, to solidify their point, they want to put up their own statue.

Right. Which would make sense because it's a competing religion. Without that religion, you can't do it. Okay. That's the, that's the interesting take on it. And it's just, it's really fun. These guys, they're trolls. They're trolling. Yes, they are. It is great.

It is a ton of fun. I love it. So it's well worth the watch. It's well worth the watch. And the crazy Christians in here that are just going bug nutty about it, don't get the joke. They're not in on the joke. Well, they are being trolled, to be fair. Right.

But they, but the thing is, they're still not in on the joke. They don't get it. If they understood it, then they would come at it with a completely different tack, but they're not. And season seven of Ray Donovan dropped last week. That's been running for seven seasons? Seven fucking seasons.

Jesus. The funny thing is, I've never seen it. Oh, I've. I haven't. Well, now I have. I'm on a, I'm on a mission. My roommate and I are binging the entire first six seasons. We're up to like, we're almost done with season two. It's a damn good show. Highly recommend it.

I mean, it's got it. Well, it's also got Tasha Yar and data from Star Trek Next Generation. So you've got that. Oh, really? Yeah. How's it been running for seven seasons? I didn't even know that they were on the show. I have no idea, Brian. I have no idea. All right. And I tried watching Living With Yourself, the sitcom that they put out on Netflix.

And. Yes. I got two and a half episodes in and I tried to watch episode three, like three times and I just can't do it. Can't do it. You know what? You know what the theory behind this was? Everybody likes Paul Rudd, right? What could be better than Paul Rudd? Two Paul Rudds. Hey, two Paul Rudds. Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

And that was about it. So I don't think there's much of a show there. No, it's. I didn't. I didn't care for it. The premise is funny, but it could have been like, you know, an hour and a half movie and been done with it. It doesn't need to be a miniseries. So. Right. And this one I put in here for you, Brian.

CBS All Access launches kids programming, soon to include Nickelodeon shows. Because you're talking about Nickelodeon and so you can get your discovery and Nickelodeon. Yeah, I was looking through this. I was looking through this. Unfortunately, right now, the shows that my kid watches are tacked into the noggin service, which is tied to Amazon, and they are not scheduled to be part of the new agreements yet.

The end of the article says it would make sense for CBS All Access to eventually absorb all of the kids streaming services, which is where you find all the shows my kid currently watches. But by the time they sort all that shit out, my kid will probably not be watching the shows anymore because it'll take too damn long. He'll be on to Star Trek Discovery.

Yeah, at that point. So, you know, CBS All Access has got me because of Picard, obviously. But again, it's funny because it's really hit the zeitgeist right now. I'm seeing a lot of people posting on Facebook and social media going, I've been running the math on doing cable versus subscribing to all these services.

There's no winning here. It's more expensive. It's just getting more expensive all the way around. It doesn't matter what direction I go. It's going to be crazy expensive. Did we not predict this seven years ago? I've been screaming about it since the show started. We totally predicted it.

And we're there. Thanks a lot, everybody. And good news coming, Sex Education Series 2 will be released on January 17th, 2020. Quite looking forward to this. I haven't seen it yet. I started watching it. Gillian Anderson, man.

You'll love it. I know. That's what you keep saying, but I haven't dug in yet. I don't know why. And boobies. Yeah, I know. I mean, it's got everything that I... It's got everything you want, Jason. It's like Brondo. You know, it's like it's got what Jason craves. So I'll check it out over the break for sure.

And Sandman is coming to Netflix. Yes, we know about this. But hey, no, fuck you. Go back and read them. They're amazing. And it's been revealed by Neil Gaiman himself that the first season will be 11 episodes. And it's going to be Preludes and Nocturnes and a little bit more.

Now, the real interesting thing here is they're going to be updating it for 2019. So, except it's going to probably come out in 2021. Except it'll be out in 2020. So they're going to make Morpheus sleep a little longer. So instead of the 80 years, he'll probably be in there for 110 and some things will change.

But they're going to update the endless too. So I'm a little scared about that because, you know, don't fuck with death. Death is what made that damn comic. I still have my... No, I don't. Shit, I don't even have it anymore. I gave all my comics away. Damn. I used to have all of them.

I had a signed number one. It's all gone. It's all gone. But anyway, I'm looking forward to this and I'm thinking about going back and rereading all the comics. Since I have the entire anthology on comiXology, it might be fun to go reread them all. But... And one thing I've never done is actually I've never finished it.

After all these years. 30 fucking years. I've never finished it. I never wanted to. I'm just like, I don't want it to end. So I've never finished the last five episodes or issues. You're going to watch all of this, but not watch the last episode? Yeah, that'll probably be it.

Go to the grave, not knowing what happened. Well, I kind of know what happened, but I just, I've never really finished it. You've never been drunk and went to the Wikipedia page and read the ending? Nope. I sure haven't. 30 years on, I still haven't done it. I do that shit all the time. Hey, man. Look, there's some things in life that I stand by.

And I have never finished this and I have never seen a full episode of Friends. And I will definitely never see a full episode of Friends before I die because fuck that noise. But yeah. You're not missing anything. No, I know. I know. I just, I got to finish it before the show comes out, I guess. Damn it.

Right. There you go. I found a new podcast this week called Dig Me Out. It's the 90s rock podcast. And I found it because I'm a big fan of Lush, as you know, and the Lush official account posted that they had done a podcast. What they do is they basically take a classic album from the 90s, alternative rock of any form, and they break it down.

They're kind of, these guys are good, you know, they're musicophiles and they used to work radio and production and things of that nature. So they've set up a Patreon, I believe, or something like that. And they let people vote on what album they're going to do for every episode, which is kind of cool.

And they kind of break it down. They talk about what they like and what they didn't. They give a little bit of the history and place it in context of the time and what else was being out at the time. And so far, I mean, you know, you enjoy the ones about the bands that you like. And that's kind of, it's a pick and choose sort of situation. But they've done Nirvana's In Utero.

They've done Curve, which is another one of my favorite bands that I think was always underrated. So if you were big into 90s alt rock, I suggest checking it out, finding an album or a band that you really liked and listen to that episode and see what you think. Cool. I'll definitely check it out. Sounds good. Elon Musk is back in the top spot for more on of the week.

He didn't listen to his people who pretty much said to skip the steel ball demo, but he went and did it anyway. So always listen to your people, Elon. How many times have you and I been in that position? So many. So many. When we've told people when they were doing demos, please, for the love of God, don't try this.

Don't click on that. Don't click on that because it doesn't work. And they click on it anyway. And then the demo goes to shit. Yes. So here we go. The two theories are that the sledgehammer gag broke the base of the window. And the other one is that they tested it the night before with the ball and they could have introduced micro fractures in the glass.

But my takeaway is if you need to break into a Tesla Cybertruck through the window, they just hit it a few extra times and Bob's your uncle. And we have a runner up for Moron of the Week. One of the main actors for Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker left their script under their bed and the cleaning lady found it, passed it off to a friend who then tried to sell it on eBay.

And fortunately for Disney at large there, the person at eBay who saw the listing said, hey, that actually looks real. Let me make a phone call. Sure enough, it was and it was it was returned to Disney before it actually went on sale.

And I'm assuming the cleaning lady got fired. I seriously hope so. And here's a little statement from J.J. Abrams. One of our actors, I won't say which one I want to, but I won't, left it under their bed and it was found by someone who was cleaning their place.

And it was given to someone else who then went to sell it on eBay, blah, blah, blah. You know, there's a script that looks legit and they got it back before it sold. Yes. But I love the fact that he says, one of our actors, I won't say which one, but I want to tells you how pissed off he is. Yeah.

Yeah. So, well, you know, I mean, it's hard to blame the actor for that. What's he supposed to do? He's in his own or he or she or she is in their own home. Yeah. And it's got to be a major actor because a lot of the cast only got their lines. They didn't even get the other person's lines. They had to go to a, like a secure room to read the whole script.

I'd be less forgiving if they were staying in a hotel and just left it under the hotel bed. That's, that's ridiculous. You don't do that, but it's their own house. Come on. Give them a break. Yeah, I know. I know. I, when I worked at Paramount, the head of my department was flying and he took the Mission Impossible 2 script with him on a plane and he left it in the seat back.

Left it? Yeah. Yeah. That was an interesting day. Awesome. And third place for more on of the week goes to Giphy. Baby Yoda memes return as Giphy stops pulling content over copyright concerns.

Now, the interesting part of this article is they, they, we don't have an answer here. Is it Baby Yoda or Yoda Baby? Brian, I am on the side of Baby Yoda. Which side are you on? I'm more Yoda Baby. You're wrong. Why? Because it's Baby Yoda, damn it. I don't like Yoda Baby.

Well, no, because if it's Baby Yoda, then that means it's actually Yoda back, like, maybe cloned. But even if it was a clone, I wouldn't refer to it as Yoda. It's a similar species, so we don't—I'm going Yoda Baby. Yoda Baby, do-do-do-do-do.

Yoda Baby, do-do-do-do-do. Baby Yoda Baby, do-do-do-do. Baby Yoda Baby. We got a new tune. All right. So, turns out that Giphy pulled a bunch of gifts of Baby Yoda slash Yoda Baby, and Disney was like, we didn't ask for that.

Why would they? Are you kidding? The amount of promotion they were getting for people to go sign up for the service? Yeah, I know. They're like, that's not us. So, Giphy came out and says, we apologize to both Disney and Vulture, because Vulture is where this whole thing started. They had a bunch of them. They were pulled. For any inconvenience.

And we are happy to report that the gifts are once again live on Giphy. And I love how this article ends. It says, it's the latest example of the overwhelming sensitivity and general joylessness that surrounds intellectual property and copyrights in the age of corporate branding Uber Alice. Well, that actually, that line stands true for a lot of things, but actually not here, because the corporation didn't actually ask them to remove them.

Yeah, that's exactly the problem here. And, yeah, I mean, you search Giphy, and they didn't pull the aforementioned friends. There's a gazillion friends memes on there and animations. There's a gazillion of everything on there. Why focus on one, especially when the corporation didn't even want you to do it?

Yeah, somebody pulled the trigger too early. Somebody doesn't like Baby Yoda. Yoda, baby. You came around to my way of thinking. You came around to mine. We switched again. Woo-hoo! Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers, Jason and William.

And over at PayPal, we've got Tom, Steve, Joseph, Mark, Gabriel, Anoop. And Anoop says, fuck the whiny guy complaining about the ads. And Matt V says, fuck that one-star reviewer. You guys rule. Love the show. Don't let idiots like that guy get to you. Keep on grumping. We shall. And Noah says, I love the show.

Thank you. No, Noah, thank you. And thank you all who donated through PayPal or Patreon, because Papa needs a brand new kitchen right now, and that really, really helps. Excellent. Thank you all so much. Over on Twitter, Sam writes in, been trying out Brave Browser at your recommendation, and so far, mostly like it.

You're right about the lion icon throwing me off, however. Yep, I'm with you, bro. Yeah, Sam, you get used to it. Well, can't we change the, we can change the icon, right? I don't know. We don't have ResEdit anymore. I don't know how to do that. But if we make, I don't know, if we make, if you make a clone or a shortcut to it, you can change the shortcut icon.

Oh, good call. Right? Yeah, because I think if we change the actual icon on the app itself, it'll just change back anytime it updates. It'll change back. So what you do is you put a shortcut link on your bar, and you change that icon. Ah, good call.

Look at you, Brian. Hacking it up. Always thinking. Mr. Dom writes in, hey, Grumps, how do you make the Brave browser or any Chromium-based browser scroll as smoothly as Firefox on Mac OS? Mine scrolls fairly smoothly. I have no problems with smooth scrolling, as it were. I mean, I just said smooth scrolling on my mouse, and it works fine.

Yeah, same here. I don't really notice. Well, I actually haven't launched Firefox in ages, but from memory, it doesn't seem any different. Chad writes, you guys realize that middle mouse button to close tabs works for all browsers, right? Bonus tip, if you close a tab by accident, just Control-Shift-T, and it'll reopen.

Finally, if you middle mouse button and click on a link, it will open in a new tab. It's life-changing if you aren't aware of the features. Keep up the great work, guys. That Control-Shift-T does not work in Brave, and I think it's browser-specific. And also, yeah, that might be Opera-specific, but mouse buttons, middle mouse button?

No, it's a scroll wheel. I turn off the click on that because of other things. So, yeah, I think this is a very specific use case. Fabian writes in, your VPN provider of choice, private internet access, go to gog.show slash VPN if you want to check that out, was recently bought by cape.com, previously called CrossRider and known for distributing malware slash adware.

Does this change your view on them? And will you stop advertising for them as PIA cannot be trusted anymore? Well, until they're caught and convicted of doing something wrong with PIA's service, I plan on promoting and using them. If they're ever caught doing something nefarious to the users, then we'll revisit. But as of now, they're the best option in my opinion.

And, you know, these things happened in the past, and I'm sure that they have been rectified and remedied from the CrossRider slash Cape side because, you know, it has come out in the public that they did some dumb things in the past. There have been some dumb things done at PIA in the past.

But from everything that I know about all the different VPNs, I'm still sticking with private internet access. It works for me and everybody else that's tried it. So far, so good. Not worried about the corporate overlord screwing up the service at this point. But we'll keep an eye on it. David writes in, worth noting that Google Home seems more common than Alexa in Australia, mostly due to being first mover here.

However, lots of Google Homes for sale secondhand as people buy them and don't use them. Yeah. I got a bag full of Alexis from Jason. Write film, sleep, repeat, and Shane writes in, you were humming Herbie Hancock's Rocket. I was. Thank you for that. As soon as you guys sent that to me, I went, oh, yeah, that's what I was doing.

Third in Command sends in a link from Sky News. Hyper-realistic masks fool a fifth of people, say researchers. In the study, 240 people in Japan and the UK looked at a pair of photos to try to spot which showed a face and which showed a mask. They were fooled in a fifth of cases. Dr. Rob Jenkins from the psychology department at University of York said, The real-world error rate is likely to be much higher because many people may not even be aware hyper-realistic masks exist and are unlikely to be looking out for them.

These are pretty crazy. You know, I can't wait for somebody to use their iPhone and post a complete remake of Face Off on YouTube. Ah, Face Off. I worked on that movie. Did you? I didn't know that. I worked on that movie and I got to go meet John Woo and hung out with him in his trailer with my ex-girlfriend, Missy, and our mutual ex-friend, Jeff Koga.

And we did an interview with John Woo and he signed, what was that horrible movie he did with John Travolta and Christian Slater? About the- Oh, the train with the missile? Broken Arrow. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah. He signed a Broken Arrow laser disc for me and gave it to me.

Yeah. No, Face Off was a great movie. I love that thing. Jeff writes in, Here's what it looks like when you buy something on the Wish app and it tries to ship from China. Maybe I'll get it sometime in the next 30 days. And this is a link to Twitter with his shipping status. So that'll be in the show notes. Well worth checking out. Very funny. Soto writes in, Nailed it with the smart home stuff.

My apartment is outfitted with HomeKit, but it's set up in a practice way. Scheduled scenes such as lights, blinds, heaters, etc. Come on with my alarm. Smart lock for control away from home. Smoke detector that notifies, etc., etc. But when it's used as a lazy remote control while on the couch is where it usually fails.

It's faster to pick up the remote and do what I want physically. Scheduling and remote access away from home is where these brands should be focusing. Practical scenarios. Eh, okay. I'd like them to fix the lazy couch scenario, though. Yeah, that's the main scenario that you want. Mm-hmm. Look writes in, So glad you guys realized that search is dead.

I thought I was the only one. It's been this way quite some time. It's all these SEO companies and advertisements. So annoying. I was doing searches on Amazon the other day. Because I needed to get some new tripods and cables and stuff. And I looked at the search results.

There are 20 results in a page. Five of them were sponsored results. But you know what Amazon's doing now? Sprinkling in sponsored results in various locations throughout the regular results. You have to look for it to realize that they're sponsored results.

Bullshit. Yes. I call bullshit on that. It is bullshit. That's what I was saying. Yes, I agree with you. Moss 6502? Moss 6502 also agrees. He says, I agree with Brian. I would pay for unfucked with search results. It's super annoying even inside Amazon. It takes a long time to find what I want.

Search is dead. Yes, it is. And over at GOG.show, Anonymous Jackass writes in, Sorry for the outburst, guys. Heard my comment called out in episode 395. I hold you to very, very, very high standards. You're the best podcast out there.

When you screw up, it ticks me the wrong way and I take personal offense and hence the not smart comment. Rock on. Well, apology accepted. I guess we're like really good baseball players that like don't get a hit and then get beers thrown at them when they're in the outfield now.

I guess so. I guess so. Well, thanks, Anonymous Jackass, for clearing that up. Thank you. And Peter writes in, Yes, please do a hypocrite of the week section. Well, if we keep finding them, we will. Yeah, we need source material for that. CQDX writes in, Have you guys ever used IPTV?

The FBI just took down a major player and I've listened to you complain about the price of cable and the price creep over time. I've had the same experience with Xfinity. We were paying almost $200 a month for internet and TV for three sets in our house, so we tried an experiment. We canceled our TV subscription and unhooked the three cable boxes, took them back to the Xfinity store a half hour away and tried IPTV.

Gears TV was by far the best provider at $35 a month for two devices. I got to try it for a full month before the FBI raid and paid my bill for the next month the day before. Goodbye money. There are about a dozen IPTV options and I've tried them all.

And let me tell you, after a week of trying every service out there, they all suck. We drove back to the Xfinity store and are now back on cable on our main TV in the living room. But I continue to experiment with IPTV and I am currently trying out Beast TV. And so far, it's not too bad at $15 a month.

Stay grumpy. Well, Beast TV will be next on the FBI's most wanted list because IPTV is just illegal. It's illegal. Absolutely 100% illegal. Yes, they're all illegal. That's the problem. That's why they're so cheap. And, you know, you're just going to get screwed.

We're stuck in a bad situation here, everyone. But it is what it is. Bob writes in, good day again, Grumps. I have a question that you might be able to shed some light on for me. I was listening to Papa Bittner on his Hacking Humans podcast. Good stuff, by the way, Dave. And they were talking about juice jacking and how your data can be stolen by using charging points or cables that have been tampered with.

I remember a while back, you guys did stories on U.S. border force and the issues they had getting people to unlock their phones so they could go through them. Could you guys enlighten to me as to why they couldn't have just used these bad cables, et cetera, to access the phones without permission of the owners? Would it be a privacy issue or something?

I can't see the difference if they are going to make you open the phone anyway. Thanks, guys, and keep crumping. Forcing you to open the phone or forcing you to plug it into an unknown cable, probably about the same degree of an offense. Like, they can't force you to charge your phone.

No, but they can borrow your phone and take it and plug it in. But, I mean, they've already got devices from that. You know, that's kind of what they do. But, yeah, no, I don't know. I don't know about that. That's really – I don't think the cables really matter because they've got, you know, $100,000 devices that they plug your phone into if they want to slurp it.

Yep. But Jason also writes in, hey, Grump, here's a great holiday gift for family and friends to keep them safe when using phone charging stations or random USB charging plugs out in the wild. And this is the Port-A-Pow third-generation USB data blocker, black pack of five, over at Amazon.

And he says, does what it says on the tin, keep up the great work and stay grumpy. Cheers. So this is one of those things where it'll allow the juice through but no data. Right. So it's kind of like a phone condom. Yes. So if you're going to go out and have, you know, dirty, nasty phone charging sex, then you want to wrap it.

Wrap that cable. Wrap that phone. With a Port-A-Pow. Peter writes in, yes, Nest is effing dumb. However, you can just set a schedule and not have it try to learn your routines, which is indeed effing dumb. Also equally dumb is the home away assist on Nest, which, despite two sessions with support, still does not recognize when I'm away and happily adheres to the set schedule, running the heat even when I'm gone for days.

Along the same lines, Tesla just introduced a new feature to let you schedule charging and warming the car. It has two options, every day of the week or weekdays. So if yours is any different, too bad. It has a smart preconditioning feature for years and by most accounts never, ever came close to working, even with drivers who worked a regular 9 to 5 Monday through Friday schedule.

It's kind of nice to know that everybody is having the same problems that we have, Jason. Yeah, I don't know why these engineers can't figure this stuff out, that people have different schedules. I don't know. It's kind of stupid, especially if you're at Tesla. Or with all this machine learning that's out there.

This is relatively simple stuff. Yeah, seriously. Where's the AI? I could probably write a script in Perl to do this. Yeah, no shit, man. I could even write it in JavaScript, the language of the devil. That's right. Brett writes in, Dear G-Squared, I'm currently a 1099 worker and I work consistently and hard every single day.

I'm not a rideshare driver, but do other things via an app called Wanalo. I do this because it provides consistent and flexible work to be able to be with my son and follow my passions as a podcaster and, of course, pay the bills. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the new bill, AB5, that's going to reclassify folks like myself, 1099 workers.

And, of course, the GOG spin on the law itself, good, bad, or indifferent. Cheers to the best out there. Well, thank you very much, Brett. And the AB5 bill is the one that we've talked about in the past. It's a new California law coming into play that Uber and Lyft hate, that classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees, blah, blah, blah.

What do you think, Brian? Well, I'm for these laws, actually. I understand that there are limited case scenarios where it may not work out so well, and that could be in Brett's case. But overall, we've just seen the gig economy as destroying workers' rights. You don't get minimum wage laws.

You don't get sick leave. You don't get unemployment. You don't get workers' compensation. You don't get anything as an independent contractor. And some of these people are working 40, 50 hours. They are full-time people. Right. So I could see there being like, you know, if you do 20 hours a week, then you don't get classified that way.

But if you're doing anything over than that, you're an employee, damn it. Yeah, seriously. And pro tip, Brett, go get an S-Corp or a C-Corp and run your business out of your corporation. It'll help you with expenses and let you keep a little bit more of your money. And over at iTunes, we have a five-star review from Ian Bacow from Poland.

Best tech show. I found this podcast through Jordan Harbinger's show. When there's something going on in the tech industry, I can't wait to hear what GOG have to say, and they always deliver. I appreciate the beautiful sound quality, especially because English is not my first language, and it's a great opportunity to learn and have fun. Stay grumpy. Thank you, Ian Bacow.

And we apologize for this episode. We're having all kinds of problems, so it probably sounds like shit. Well, it'll sound good, but it's just going to be an editing nightmare. But thank you very much. And Kentamon over in the U.S. says five stars. The dude's not that old, but smart grumpy.

I'm pushing 50. I'm old enough. My legs don't work anymore. Shit's falling off. Fuck it. I'm old. I'm old in the meat. That's it. And another five-star rating from Squirt, S-R-Q-T. I love their ads. I actually had to reinstall Apple Podcasts just to leave this review, but seriously, screw that guy who left the one-star review because the ads were an insult.

Not only am I happy to listen to some ads to support the great content that is provided for free twice a week, but some of the ads have turned me on to some amazing services. My wife and I both use privacy for all our online shopping. I discovered the show a couple of months ago, and now I never miss an episode. And once we are past the money pit that is the holidays, I plan to start donating to the Patreon or PayPal, as well as continuing to listen to the top quality ads.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Squirt. I think it's Squirt. Something like that. I don't know. And welcome to Open Mic Podcast, writes in five stars. Where do I begin? Love these guys to the depths. They say what I'm thinking and are funny to boot. This is a guaranteed soundtrack on my daily commute to the Napa Valley.

Keep it coming, gents. We will. And you stay safe up there with the fires and everything. You guys got it worse than we do down here. That's right. Another five-star rating from CoTeddyBear. Great grumpiness. Love these guys. Love the banter between them. I always put them at the top of the list when the show arrives. Security Ha is one of my faves, as is at the library.

I've gotten some great suggestions, and I've even tried some they stated weren't good, and they were right. Well, we're right. Don't do that again. Dave Bittner is a great addition to Security Ha. Just got back from vacation and had five episodes to listen to. Score. P.S. I had written a five-star Apple Podcast review a couple of years ago, but it's allowing me to write one now.

Do the reviews only last a certain amount of time? If so, let us know. I'll be glad to periodically re-review you guys. They don't expire. You can actually see all your reviews from your Apple account. If you use Catalina, you can get to your account using the Music app to see all your ratings and reviews.

And older OSs can still use iTunes. It's under account-viewmyaccount on both. So when you write a new review, it just overwrites the old review. Ah, there you go. And thank you for that tip. I was like, where the hell is all the review stuff in the podcast app?

Now I know I have to go through the stupid music app to get to it. Makes total sense. Yeah, I had to figure that out before I replied to this, so I figured it out this morning. And Cheezik23 writes in five stars. Great stuff. I wish I'd found this podcast sooner. The guys are great. The episodes are very educational and informative.

Keep up the great work. Snarky comment. And we're still rolling out the back episodes in the feed since he didn't find this sooner and maybe want to go back and listen to some of the oldies. It should be back up to the full archive soon. You can't get to them all in Apple Podcasts anyway because Apple has this stupid limit of 300 episodes.

But other apps like Overcast do not have that limit. Once we get the first bill for the new podcast host, I'll have a better idea on how that's going to play out or if I just have to go get a new credit card to pay for this shit. Great. Hopefully we'll be back up to the full list soon and that'll all sort itself out.

All right. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review or apparently use the music app now. Closing shout outs.

To all of our American friends and listeners, happy Thanksgiving. To all of our other friends and listeners, happy Thursday. Right. And we do not have a show for the end of the week, so there's no Saturday show. And on Tuesday or on Wednesday, I forget the days of the week, we're going to have a special show, hopefully, that we interview a new contributor to the show.

So that is pending corporate approval at this point. So we'll let you know how that goes because Brian is going to be traveling for the holidays and will not be back in time to do a show. So we had a friend step in. So until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. If you don't like Patreon but still want to support the show, you can give a one-time or recurring donation by just going to GOG.show and clicking that PayPal button.

We're loving everybody that's giving us eight bucks a month, a buck a show. It's fantastic. Oh, I love you so much. Yes, it's amazing. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for the episodes are at GOG.show slash 396. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

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