398: For Your Protection

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Mahalo, Jason. Mahalo. I'm back from five days in Hawaii. Fuck you. Well, it's not quite as exciting as it sounds. I took my, well, obviously my son and we brought my mom along because that seemed like a nice thing to do.

So it was a bit of a far cry from my previous wake up at the ass crack of noon, swim up to a pool bar and get drunk all day kind of trip that I used to do. But it was still nice because, you know, everything's nicer in Hawaii. As I noted, even watching the Food Network on TV is nicer and more relaxing in Hawaii.

Why the hell are you watching the Food Network while you're in Hawaii? Well... Aren't you supposed to be out doing things? Not when you travel with a three-year-old. Oh, okay. It's a little different. You spend a lot more time in your room, which is why we kind of, we plunked out for a very nice condo that had an ocean view and all of that sort of stuff.

So it was nice. A little tech talk about that. I didn't bring my laptop, which felt nice because, you know, having run my own show for 20 years, I never really had a vacation. I would always take laptops with me and deal with emails and work and all that sort of stuff. This time I didn't have to, which is really nice.

And I ended up having a bit of a five-day unplanned digital detox because my mom discovered that I had Netflix on my iPad and she wanted to watch The Crown. So she binged all three seasons of The Crown in five days and I did not see my iPad once except for when she handed it over because the battery was dead and it needed to charge.

So I didn't bring in... You said three seasons in five days? Three seasons in five days, man. She could have done that at home and saved you the airfare. Well, you know, again, everything's nicer in Hawaii. So all I had was my phone and I didn't plan on that because, you know, I had all my books and everything was on my iPad.

So I kind of did a bit of a digital detox. I got online a bit and boy, the algorithms. I don't think I'd ever really noticed as much because obviously I've got a bunch of plugins and on my computer and I really just mostly look at social media on my actual laptop, not on my phones.

My God, I actually ended up unfriending and unfollowing and whatevering a ton of people that I just realized like the algorithm was feeding me people from my high school that I have no contact with or random people that I met, you know, 15 years ago that I have no contact with.

And I wasn't seeing anybody that I actually relate to all the time. I was just being force fed brands and people I don't know. So I kind of did. I've talked before about how I've kept a pretty, pretty cultivated walled garden of Facebook and I discovered that I guess I didn't once the algorithm got control.

So I cultivated some more. So if you're one of my old friends that I unfollowed, don't take it personally. That's funny. Well, yes, I have my own algorithm story because I had to bit the bullet. I had to go back to Facebook. Yes, I saw you came back.

Business. Yep. Not as much mocking as I had expected. So we all knew it was eventual. You know, the resistance is futile, Jason. It unfortunately is. So I get in there. I, you know, I do it on the website.

It's fine. I, you know, I can hit most recent in the news feed and all that gets get some stuff set up and then put it on the phone to make things easier to post. And, uh, yeah, that's the first thing I noticed is the algorithm is king. You can go to like a sub menu and hit most recent, but it doesn't really work.

It's still all algorithms. It's like, I'm still seeing things from four or five days ago. It makes no sense. Most recent does not work anymore. It's a joke. Yeah, it's really silly. And so, of course, just turned it off and went to bed. But yeah, I don't know.

I just don't get it, man. Being away for so long and then coming back to it. I'm just like, this has gotten so much worse since I left. It's pretty bad. Facebook is pretty bad. It's funny because you, you made a comment along the lines of, you know, all your suggested friends were the same friends that you had before as expected.

And as you and I know there, there is no delete. There's just set visibility to zero. So, on the one hand, you know, it kind of makes sense. You come back to Facebook. Of course, they didn't delete any of your stuff. The algorithm, the friend suggestion algorithm can very easily go in and check on the not deleted information about your previous friends and just serve them back up.

However, I was thinking about this last night. And I don't generally like to end my evenings thinking about you, Jason, but I did. Ditto. And I was thinking, let's give Facebook its due. Let's assume, even though we know it's not true, let's assume that Facebook did delete all your data.

Is there a way that this algorithm would just be serving up the same friends that you had before? And I thought about it. And, of course, there is. Facebook owns Instagram. You never left Instagram. You were friends with the same people on Instagram, like all of us are. We're friends with the same people on Instagram that we are on Facebook.

So, let's assume that Facebook did delete your data. You would still be getting these friend suggestions. They would just be pulling it from Instagram, correct? Funny thing is, though, two separate accounts, two separate email addresses for each account. Same name. The same as my name. And same friend group that they can match to.

See, that's a different thing, too. I don't – my friends on Instagram were not the same people I followed on Facebook for the most part. There's some small overlap, but not a lot. And the interesting thing that I didn't – you didn't hear about because I didn't post it was when I get the, you know, you might like suggested friends pop-ups, there is a massive list of people that I don't like anymore or don't like me anymore.

It's like a nemesis list. Yeah. Well, I mean, to be fair, Facebook would have a hard time tracking that. It is very fluid for you, Jason. Yeah, but if I have blocked and unfollowed people in the past, you'd think they would keep that out or at least keep a record of that since they kept a record of everything else. So, yeah, back on the Facebook.

It's literally only for business. I'm not – don't plan on posting. The only thing I've posted so far is how the hell do I make this damn app show me things in order? And I responded, you don't. Yeah, you pretty much don't. I got a little follow-up on Intuit.

And I don't know how much this is follow-up because I don't know if I mentioned this story before. I was – I signed up for Intuit Payroll Services when I started my new company and ended up never using it. I had my bookkeeper do all the payroll stuff. And I went to cancel it back in October. I canceled it. Right.

Spent an hour on chat trying to get them to cancel it because none of the buttons they said were – should be there in my interface were there. Right. Because I'd never set up any employees. So it's like I get a different interface. I'm like, I am on the I've never used this before page. How much do I need to tell you?

They're like, well, hit the settings button. I'm like, for the 17th time, there is no settings button. So like 35 screen caps later. Okay, you've been canceled. Here is your – here's your confirmation of cancellation at the end of October. Well, end of November rolls around.

You've been charged $20. Thank you for using Intuit. Yep. I'm like, okay. And this isn't one of those things where I can use a privacy.com card for because it's like straight through Bank of America. It's like their – yeah, it's their integrated services unit. So get back on chat.

Another hour later. But the thing that they told me right away is like, oh, yeah, it shows you were canceled. Did you get an email? I'm like, yes. Here's a screenshot of the email that has the date and the time it was canceled. Oh, our records show that it was activated again the same day. I'm like, well, that would be you.

So I'm like, let's cancel it again. I want my $20 back. And if you please, please feel the need to do this again, don't. Please. Yeah. I mean, they're horrible. They've always been horrible. I used QuickBooks for 20 plus years.

And I've got to say the software version wasn't bad. Once I figured out how it worked, it's a very powerful program. It was wonderful. And then they canceled it and went to a subscription model and all went online and everything online was shit. It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. I don't know what's going on at that company.

They had a great product and they fucked it up. Well, I mean, I pay people to use it instead of me using it myself. I was going to and then I'm like, you know what? Just pay the account and pay the bookkeeper because it's like it's so much easier. And I don't feel like learning accounting software at 48 years old, you know?

Yeah. It's not really something for you to do. No, and I'm just not. I'm not. My brain doesn't work that way. I want to make music, Brian. That's what I want to do with my brain. I want to be a musician. But I can't because my Lumi keyboard has not shipped yet and it will not ship till probably after the holidays.

Was that a Kickstarter project? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, interesting. Well, it was supposed to ship at the beginning of October. And I'm thinking, OK, there'll be enough buffer in there to get them for the holidays, even though this is a present for me. Nobody else. But they're prioritizing other people who have marked it as, you know, I want to make this a present and blah, blah, blah.

Right. So, yeah, I am on a farther down list. So I'm probably not going to get it till February now. They should rename Kickstarter to Post Tour. Yeah, seriously. Maybe, maybe, maybe Starter. That's about it. Perhaps. Because maybe you'll get it. Perhaps.

Oh, man. Now I want to go watch Coupling. That was a great show. Oh, God. Yeah, that was a good show. Now we're Brave. Brave the browser. You got so mad at me two weeks ago when our recording was shit and it was not my fault. Yeah.

It was not my fault. It was Brave the browser. Yeah, it's funny. Brave is using an older version of Chromium as their base layer. And which means they get, it's the thing. It's like if you're going to use Chrome as your back-end engine, you're going to get all the bugs of Chrome and you're going to be behind the update cycle.

So what we ran into basically was, and I noticed this when I was using Brave, it would just stop. Yeah. And my CPU would just crank up to 100%. It would peg. Yep. And then it would come back down. And that's where we were having all these hiccups on our recording and just it was impossible.

So I'm like, oh, well, try and get rid of Brave. Guess what today's been so far, Brian? Perfect. Hiccup free. Thank you, Opera. I'm glad everybody in China is listening to this, but at least your browser works. Seriously. But you are using a hybrid of Opera and Chrome, correct?

Yes. Yes. I do use Chrome for the recording bit right now. And I'm using Opera for everything else. Yep. I am done with Brave. I have removed the Lion from my desktop. I have removed it from all my computers. I uninstalled. Yes.

So using the fine uninstaller on clean my Mac 10. As did I. As did I. Another damn subscription I had to pay. Thanks. Twice I got to pay that because I got it on two machines. Right. Fisted twice.

Yes. One day. Great. Well, speaking about getting fisted for the holidays. Oh, yes. We all pay $119 a year for our Amazon Prime membership, which over the course of a year, at least for me, certainly pays for itself in terms of shipping costs and things of that nature.

However, one of the pluses of doing this is, of course, the fact that you're supposed to get same day or one day shipping, which they flout all over the website on products that they can get to you in one day. In theory, of course, it's the holidays and there's been bad winter storms and shit ain't going so well for Amazon.

People are not getting their stuff. One day delivery is turning into six to seven to eight day delivery. Some people for some people and people are, of course, pissed off about this. Now, one can put this down to first world problems, except for the fact that you're paying 120 bucks a year for this. Yeah.

So, I mean, here's the thing. Force majeure can't really help everything. Nope, you can't. So, some sympathy to Amazon on this one. The winter storms were particularly bad and the shipping process is insane, to say the least. If you ever track some of your stuff, you can't believe where it's coming from.

I thought they were building gigantic shipping locations nearby everywhere, but apparently they are not. A lot of stuff is still coming from all over the place and, you know, there's not much you can do about the weather. No, there's not. So, suck it up and deal with it. But as someone who is dealing with home improvement woes, you just learn to brush it off.

You got to get a little island time in you, man. Mahalo. Aloha. Chill out. I'm sorry. I have to be here because, let's see, yesterday morning, my kitchen was turned into the quarantine zone from ET for asbestos removal, so I've not had a kitchen for 24 hours.

Now, this comes on the heels of the no water for 36 hours, no floors, and, yeah, this isn't going to be done until after the new year. And, so, you know, I'm not going to bitch about my packages being a little late. Right. I will bitch about Uber, though.

Ready? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I've got some stuff to say about this. This is funny. We're 14 minutes in and we're still in follow-up. Okay. So, CNET's reporting that some Uber drivers use bogus identities in shared accounts. Duh. Duh. This is a report, though, about how it's happening in the U.S.

Because London got shut down on our previous episode, we were talking about it, for, like, 14,000 occurrences of people using someone else's account or fake identities. Yes. So, here's the long and the short of it. You just have no idea who you're getting in the car with. No, you do not.

Nope, you do not. And, as the kicker here, on Thursday, Uber has released their transparency report. Yes. My wife sent it to me and said, I am never, ever, ever, ever, ever taking an Uber ever again. She is...

3,045 sexual assaults. Yes. And this is all 2018. Nine people were murdered and 58 killed in car crashes. Yes. So, and they're saying, yes, it's just 0.0002% of all the rides.

The 1.3 billion rides in the United States. Yep. It's really hard to figure out what that really ties in with, you know, taxi services and other forms of transportation because there is no place for that to be, you know... This is true, however... ... collected and distributed.

I was involved in a rather spirited discussion about this from... Because there are Uber apologists everywhere, of course, because they just want their cheap rides, which, of course, are passed down to the drivers. You are screwing the drivers to get your cheap rides. But, okay, whatever. You keep telling yourself that Uber is a good company.

So, I got involved in a bit of a discussion about this. And I did not point this out. Somebody else did. Taxi drivers must have extensive medical and police checks annually. Otherwise, their license is not renewed. There are checks and balances in regulated industries. Mic drop. Boom. Fuck you, Uber. Well, I'd like to also point out that this is just Uber.

It doesn't have Lyft's numbers in it, either. No, it does not, because Lyft is a separate company, of course. But I assume that they will be releasing their... If their news is better than Uber, they're rushing to release it right now. If it's not, they're probably going to wait a little while. They're going to bury it. Exactly. Either here's our data, or we don't release that to the public.

We're sorry. So, I found this one, which I thought was pretty funny, over at Vanity Fair. Baby Yoda has conquered the world. Baby Yoda kind of has. Yeah. What I like, though, is that they had a quote from Werner Herzog calling the team cowards if they replaced the puppet Yoda with a CGI Yoda, because apparently they had to film things, like, twice.

Right. In case they wanted to, you know, they'd have it with the puppet, and then they would shoot it again in anticipation of green screen in case the puppet didn't work out. He's like, you're cowards! Leave it! And only a way Werner Herzog can say it. Yes. Well, I mean, I agree with him. You know, Yoda has been a puppet.

Keep him a puppet. I don't want to see a CGI Yoda ever. He hasn't always been a puppet, episodes one, two, and three. Oh, well. Yeah, but those were shit. Exactly. In the news.

Larry and Sergey have left the building. I am a little surprised they lasted as long as they did. I would have left a long time ago if I would have been one of those guys. Yeah, yeah. Apparently, now that Google is 21 years old. Jesus Christ, we're old. Can you believe that?

Unbelievable. It is really unbelievable. I remember a pre-Google internet. I do, too. I remember a pre-internet world. Yes. When Google was just a very, very big number. Yeah, seriously. So, they finally decided to, you know, call it quits and retire to their own private islands.

Are they really? I have no idea. I'm just assuming. Because that does seem to be the case, right? That's what people do. They go get their own private island. I think they probably already have one. And they're being delivered there by drone as we speak. Getting their internet by Project Loon.

And, yes, they're self-driving Waymo cars, shuttling them around the island. Yeah, well, thanks. Too bad they sold Boston Dynamics because they could have, you know, robot guard dogs all over the place. I think they can still afford to purchase one or two if they wanted to. Yeah. Well, thanks, guys.

You invented a really great product that got way, way, way, way, way, way too big and too powerful. Yeah, well, it still works, so. It does. It's funny because people keep hitting us up for that search engine that plants trees. And I keep writing back, but it doesn't work well.

It doesn't work well. I will use Google and go plant my own tree, my grump tree from Trader Joe's that you saw on socials. Yeah, those grump trees. We took one of those like three or four years ago. And when the holidays were done, we planted it in my roommate's mother's backyard.

And it's still there. It's still growing. Excellent. But if we could only get Zuckerberg to take a page out of Larry and Sergey's book and just go away, then we'd be so much better. The problem with the Zuckerberg and removing the Zuckerberg is we've discovered that the rot does not stop there.

Sheryl Sandberg isn't any better. People at the second level aren't any better. Nothing's going to change, even if Zuck leaves. Yeah. So just don't use Facebook. And I'm like, damn it. Cut. Fuck. Yes. I got one new friend yesterday. Bite me.

Oh, so funny. Well, the FTC is reportedly opening a probe into Amazon's cloud business as well now. Not terribly shocking. They're expanding the scope of their Amazon probe to include the cloud business. In addition to looking into the company's e-commerce business, they are reportedly starting to ask software companies that Amazon works with about web services practices.

Such as, I don't know, perhaps leaving the bucket open by default. I was going to say, leaving every S3 bucket and elastic database open. Yes. Well, that's not really what they're looking into, although they probably should be saying, hey, how about you switch that on by default?

But they're trying to figure out if it's harming competition, duh, or violating any antitrust laws, duh. So there you go. So Amazon is getting squeezed by the FTC. We shall see what happens. The web services is still providing most of the company's operating income over the past four years.

It's down a little bit, but it's still a $9 billion a year industry. Yeah, because it's fantastic. I'm sorry, but AWS is fantastic. It changed the world. Yes, they made it very simple to put all your data out there for everybody, whether you wanted them to or not. And, you know, I'm starting to think that there's a lot of pebcat going on with these databases.

Of course. I do remember a lot of times when I was setting things up, you did have to set a default password, and you did have to turn it off manually, because what a lot of programmers don't want to do is write that authentication layer into their app. And it's like, oh, nobody's ever going to find this. It's private.

I'm the only one that knows about it. Well, there are bots. They were wrong. Yeah, they were totally wrong. And thank you, Shodan, for that. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think this – I do think AWS should be spun off of Amazon. I agree.

And then just be WS. But I think that would be fine. But, you know, there is competition out there. Google's cloud, which is up, you know, 75% of the time. Microsoft is killing it with theirs. Microsoft's got great cloud services, actually. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you can even do PHP, which was always my – when they first started, they're like, they didn't have any PHP containers. I'm like, well, I guess I'm not using you. But now they do basically do everything that AWS does. I haven't checked the pricing to see how comparable they are. Have you? No, I haven't because I don't really have need for those services these days.

I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to do that stuff anymore. Can you put up a website for me? No. No, I cannot. No. I don't do that anymore. I'm retired. But you still remember how to do that? Nope. Forgot all about it. Totally forgot. Don't remember. Nope. Nope. Nope. Don't have any of that software on my computer anymore.

Nope. All gone. All gone. Except it's not. Anyways, I found this great article over at Engadget that basically says what, we've been saying all along, as do most tech articles these days. This is by Roberto Baldwin and says, regulators are the only ones who can save us from distracted drivers.

Clearly, we cannot be trusted with technology while behind the wheel. Yeah, pretty much. That's about right. So, his argument is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has to do something about this. We're not even talking about going to full-fledged autonomous vehicles.

People cannot get away from their phones with their regular cars now. It's ridiculous. Just like the annoying seatbelt warning system or the lane keep assist feature that reminds you to put your hands on the wheel, cars need to start alerting drivers when they're no longer paying attention to actual driving.

So, we want more alerts and more of everything. We want our cars to monitor us now because we cannot be trusted to monitor ourselves anymore. This is how sad we have become as a species. Yeah, they need that system like Cadillac has that does eye tracking from the steering wheel and the dashboard.

That's exactly what he's arguing for. Our cars need to start monitoring us to make sure that we're paying attention. The European Union has already acted on this in March of this year. It mandated that starting in 2022, all new cars must include tech to monitor drivers for signs of distraction or drowsiness.

It recognizes that not paying attention on the road can have deadly consequences and it is time for the U.S. to do the same thing. This is why we can't have nice things because people are stupid. Do we, I mean, you're driving. You know what we're going to see now? I think I'm going to invent this. We're going to invent a little hat that basically goes on your forehead that has a picture of your eyeballs on it.

So, when your head goes down to look at your phone, it still sees a pair of eyeballs. Right. And that's how you get around it. We're going to hack the distracted driving. That's how we're going to do it. Because anybody that buys those is going to be dead within a year. Yeah. So, we're culling the herd. We're doing good for humanity and all of mankind.

Except the only problem with that is the innocent people that they hit when they go out. There's that. You know, obviously, we've noticed this happening in our day-to-day lives on a regular basis over the past few years. But I haven't gone on a vacation where, you know, I rented a car and all that sort of stuff in quite some time.

And I've got to tell you, oh, my God. Driving in Hawaii was terrifying because it's all tourists that are using their phones for Google Maps or everything like that. And it's so easy. The car I rented was just some piece of crap and it had CarPlay.

CarPlay is phenomenal. All you've got to do is plug your phone in and you get your map right there. You don't need to stare at your phone. Why are you all looking at your phone, you fucking morons? Yeah, because they're not actually looking at the map. They're Instagramming their trip. That's what they're doing.

Well, there's the problem. Don't Instagram and drive people. Yeah, I think instead of, like, mandating this, you know, distracted driver technology, we just have to have everybody have CarPlay. That's it. CarPlay is pretty phenomenal, Jason. I've got to say, I cannot wait. We're looking to get a new car pretty soon and making sure that the now free CarPlay and BMW is on my car is a priority.

Yeah, I told you, man. It's pretty nice. The only downside is you've got to plug your phone into it, but that's actually an upside because then you're not going to look at your phone. Yep. So I saw this one over at Business Insider and I loved it. The DNA testing fad is ending. That's because everybody that's going to do it has already done it. Yeah, and everybody else is the smart ones that haven't done it.

Well, not so much the smart ones because it doesn't matter because you got our data anyways by the sheer number of people that have already done it. Yeah. So the interesting thing is, you know, it's like 23andMe and Ancestry are just, they're seeing their numbers decline because, yeah, it's not really, it's a nice to have.

This is a, you know, a first world problem problem to get your DNA tested. And I still think that a lot of people shouldn't do it. I'm just down with that now that I've done it and I know the, I know the stress that it's caused me and then I finally got over it.

But a lot of this stuff that they're talking about are third party labs as well to take your Ancestry and 23andMe data and then repackage it and try and sell it back to you in different ways that is absolute BS. And, you know, it's like, oh, we found that you are allergic to chocolate covered M&Ms from 1972 to 1976.

It's like they can't get that specific, but they make stuff up like that. Yes, they do to try to keep upselling you and keep your interest. I actually listened to Dave Bittner, of course, who we'll be talking to. Well, I'll be talking to shortly. Jason will not be able to be there. He was on Christopher Lockhead's podcast and I listened to that while I was in Hawaii and they got into the DNA testing stuff a bit.

And, you know, he comes down on there are certain use cases, much like his own, because he was adopted, where it makes sense to go and do these tests. But the overwhelming thought is if you don't need to do this, don't do it. Right. Definitely.

And, you know, I think the other issue here is that Ancestry and 23andMe and the big box DNA testing labs, once you get your DNA tested, you're kind of, that's it. They don't have another revenue stream for you. Yeah, that's it. They can't figure out how to monetize that beyond selling your data. Yeah, I'm not going to get a subscription.

I'm like, my DNA is already there. I don't need more data from you. I actually want less data from you. I'll give you a subscription to throw it away or set visibility to zero forever. Yes, set visibility to zero. That's about it. And my wife sent me this one earlier this morning. I didn't really get a chance to read too much of it.

This is one of our former advertisers, the Away Luggage people. And a quick scan of the article basically tells me that millennials do not know how to fucking run a company. Again, it's all snake oil and it's all brand and it's all made up to look good, even though behind the scenes, they don't know what they're doing.

It's a nightmare scenario for most of the employees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I have only just started to read it. It's a very long form article. But man, these people don't know how to run companies. What do you expect? It's probably their first time out of the gate. Yep. And then they got a lot of money.

Yeah. And is there a fire festival away edition? That would be kind of fun. Yep. So apparently it's not a great company and they're having a lot of problems right now. Oh, poor guys. Speaking of companies that are having a lot of problems, the technology company that we've talked about that's not really a technology company, Peloton.

It's a bike. It's a bike. It's a bike with an iPad strapped to the top. Well, they're in the news this week because they lost $1.5 billion in value from its market cap because of an ad that they made. Well, I would argue that it's the market just correcting itself to what they actually should be worth.

But, you know, I'm going to come down on the other side of the internet on this thing. I watched this ad. Didn't bother me. I had no problem with this ad whatsoever. I actually think it's a million times better than their previous ads, which involved perfectly in shape people in multi-billion dollar architecturally designed homes coming down to ride their bikes first thing in the morning, overlooking the landscape from somewhere heavenly.

You know, this was a slightly more realistic, and I think the problem to me seems to be the actress that they used because she's got these thick kind of eyebrows that just make her look sad no matter what, and she wasn't sad, which, trust me, I'm into.

Like, that chick is my dream girl. That's the kind of girl I've been chasing my entire life. I like that look a lot, so maybe I'm a little bit more tuned into her. She's not sad. She's not miserable, and people are reading that into her just because her face kind of looks that way. I didn't think this was a bad ad at all.

I think it perfectly fit with the kind of branding that they're trying to do and was far less offensive than their previous ads was. Yeah. I mean, I didn't see a problem with it. I just thought it was funny. And the guy who played the husband, he's milking it for everything it's worth. It's like, everybody's mad at me for my five seconds of screen time.

And then he goes and gets, like, the Instagram account Peloton husband. I'm like, you're milking it. You're totally milking it. And first off, why are you mad at an actor, people? Yeah. He's an actor. She's an actress. It's not real. What is wrong with people freaking out at the actual actors?

I don't. People are so stupid. Speaking of stupid, TikTok, a social network video app with more than 1 billion downloads globally admitted on Tuesday to a set of policies that they had suppressed the reach of content created by users assumed to be vulnerable to cyber bullying.

They suppressed videos by disabled, queer, and fat creators to save them from bullying. Now, they've admitted that this is not a good policy, and perhaps they shouldn't have done it. And they claim to have, of course, stopped it.

Basically, but these policies were still in place as of, like, November. So, they haven't exactly pulled it quickly. They basically just looked for hashtags, including hashtag fat woman, hashtag disabled, hashtag rainbow flags, and other LGBTQ identifiers.

And, you know, suppress those videos. Because if those videos got out, they might get bullied. And we don't want that. I want to be in that meeting where they decided to do this. I just, I really want to be. Does it just feel this week, Jason, like, I mean, I know every week we have these kind of stories.

But doesn't it just feel like everybody has just gotten that little bit stupider this week? You know what this is? This is the internet giving us Christmas presents. I guess it is. Oh, man. But the meeting thing on this, you know it was not about cyberbullying.

No, of course not. But the PR department's spin as we just want to, you know, keep you from being cyberbullied is genius. It is genius. Whoever came up with it is give that person a raise, then promptly fire them. But still. No, of course it's genius to try to turn it around that way.

That wasn't the reason. The reason is let's put the fucking hot people front and center. It's the same reason you don't have a fat person in a Peloton ad. I never log into Snapchat and see fat people. I see boobs. That's what you see on Snapchat. Boobs. I should probably get on Snapchat.

Yeah. Well, you're the one that told me about it back in the day. I deleted that way long time ago. Yeah. My roommate still has it. So when she logs in in the morning, I just peek over her shoulder. I'm like, boobs. Thanks. Get my morning boob fix. Well, the Vatican, in a stroke of genius, decided to spin up a Minecraft server.

Why not? I guess they didn't want to get on board with doing a gopher site like us. Yeah. Yeah. More on that soon. Father Robert Balliser, a priest, made a Minecraft server for the Vatican last week. And he reported that he was hoping to create a less toxic online community for players who wanted to join.

Dear father. Less toxic and online are two things that don't go together. Let me tell you how you create a less toxic online community, father. You get a whole lot of employees to monitor and police it. You don't just spin up something and say, look, we're the church.

Yeah. Yeah. So they were like immediately DDoSed. And honestly, if you want a less toxic place on the internet, don't put anything there. Because it's always going to happen. I read TMZ comments this week for the first time in a long time just to see how bad they were and see how they are giving YouTube a run for their money.

Woo doggy. Speaking of the comments section, I did notice when I went to go look at that Peloton ad, just to swing back to that really quickly, they had, of course, disabled comments. And I thought, that's nice. Maybe comments should be disabled by default. I am fine with no comments everywhere.

Me too. Seriously. Do you remember JPEG Magazine, that company I worked for? Mainly because you talk about it all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're back in the news. They're retiring, apparently. Well, they're retiring jpegmag.com for a little bit. They're spinning it back up as a new website.

So all the stuff that I wrote 13 years ago is now officially gone since I was user ID number one. I was hoping to be able to pop back in and see it one last time, but it's gone. You can go back for a limited time and buy all of the old episodes in PDF format.

I recommend you don't do this because I did that this morning because I wanted to have a copy of them all. Right. Since I put a lot of time and years of work into that damn thing. Half the PDFs are super low res and crappy, like for the first bunch of episodes or issues. So I was kind of sad by that.

But the one thing I wanted to do was buy all of the print editions again, but you can't do that either. Right. So if you are into jpeg back in the day, it'll be coming back soon. You can get the iOS and Android apps now to sign up and participate in the creation of the premiere issue again.

Okay. I think this is the fifth iteration of jpegmag. It's just fun to see this thing come back from the dead after so many years. You got a clapper there?

We're joined again this... What? You got a clapper there? No, I was just... I was dropping a marker so I knew it would have... Start the recording. It was so I could edit it, but now I got to fucking do it again. Clap on. Fucking Christ.

This is what happens when your roommate won't let you get an Alexa. We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans, with Joe Kerrigan, as well as co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

And they like to make fun of me when I do my little breaks now, trying to make the process of the show easier, and then everybody just gets on my ass. You know what would help, Jason, is if you informed us that you were going to do it, instead of there just being a random clapping noise, as if you just bought the clapper from 1990.

Sorry. You expect to... When you just throw things out there, you expect us not to chime in? Have you not done this segment with us for a while? Yeah. It's been a while. That's how he's triggering the reel-to-reel in the background for roll tape.

That's right. Gotta go out and get some razor blades to cut this up for later. I get the monkeys running the crank on the Dictaphone back there. George! More speed! Excellent. Well, one of the only things that I kept up with while I was on my vacation in Hawaii was The Mandalorian.

And Dave... Yes. Are you as surprised as I am that this show is basically about being a parent? Uh... Yeah. That's interesting. It is, isn't it? It kind of is, especially as I have a three-year-old. I'm watching Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian saying, Don't touch that.

Don't touch that. Put that back. Don't move. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, the most recent episode very much felt like a Star Trek The Next Generation episode. Yes. Yes, it did. Yeah.

Are you talking episode four or episode five? Oh, okay. Episode four. I'm sorry. Episode four, yes. As we record this, I have not yet seen episode five. So, most recent for me, yeah, you know, starting off on the little idyllic planet where everyone is doing their part and living off the land and they all wear matching outfits and, you know, it's coming down on a crane shot and here comes the stranger to town and they're facing

off against some, you know, nasty bad guy who comes out of the woods and takes their stuff. I mean, right out of TNG, right? Totally. Yeah. And every Western ever made and The Seven Samurai. Yes. Yes. Still good. Still very, very good. No, I'm still on board and yeah, I love that little Yoda.

He's just adorable. Yeah. And as we're leading up to the final movie in the nine part series of which three we should never speak of again, I ran across the Star Wars rewatch over at Entertainment Weekly. So, they sent some poor sap down to rewatch all eight of the previous movies and give them an honest modern review.

I read all of these. Let's just say these movies did not fare well. But... They never have. But they are in our DNA and we all love them and that comes through in the reviews as well. The reviews are very much like what happened. These movies are terrible. But gosh, I love them.

Yeah. We've been watching the prequels. Well, we've been making... Let me rephrase that. We've been making our way through the movies which sort of obligates us to watch the prequels. Yes. That's how I think we all feel.

Yeah. And boy, it had been a long time since I'd watched Attack of the Clones. And what a terrible, terrible movie that is. It is just awful on all kinds of levels. Yeah. So, next up is Revenge of the Sith, I suppose.

Yeah. At least you get a good lightsaber duel at the end there. Yeah. Yeah. But looking forward to the next one. We already have our tickets. Yeah. As do I. Stuff's starting to leak out and it seems like people are having a positive response to it. The other big Star Wars news this week is that the Rise of the Resistance ride opened at Disney World.

Yes. That's getting rave reviews. I heard it opened as well and it's getting good reviews except for the fact that it apparently shut down and everybody had to be evacuated, at least at the one here in California on the first day. Yeah. Yeah. Glitches. I'm sure Lucas is still in there tinkering around changing things.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm looking forward to that. It's funny because I remember the first time I rode Star Tours and how my head basically exploded. Right. Because it was just the realization of so many of my childhood fantasies of going along on a Star Wars ride.

And by all reports, this thing just makes Star Tours look like a merry-go-round. Right. Yeah. Well, Star Tours, as one who went on it relatively recently, has not aged well either. It's definitely time for some new stuff. All right.

Well, beyond Star Wars, in terms of things we're looking forward to in the coming new year, gentlemen, I'm putting it out there. And part of the reason I'm putting it out there for you all and for our audience is that I am seriously considering more than I ever have before.

I was about to say, this is something we've been seriously considering for a few years now. No, I know. I know how definite and positive that sounds, right? But I'm thinking about putting my Facebook account on ice. Deleting or just not logging in, shutting it, shuttering it for the time being?

There's that in-between thing you can do where you can shutter the account. You can put it in sort of hold mode without actually deleting everything. Yeah. And I think that would be the first step for me. That would be like the people who get the nicotine patch before they actually quit smoking.

I think it would be like that. And my thought is to try to aim for the 2020 elections because I really think I'd be better off not being on Facebook as much as I enjoy the things that are on Facebook.

I have to say I've been feeling lately like the value proposition is getting lower and lower. It's getting noisier. I'm seeing the same crap over and over again. The quality of stuff that's being posted there, it just seems like it's going down. Yeah, I spoke to this a little bit briefly earlier in the show when I was discussing my five-day vacation in Hawaii and how I was basically, for numerous reasons, I was left with just my phone.

I didn't have a laptop. I didn't have an iPad or anything like that. And I went through basically a loathing of social media for the five days. And I discovered the algorithms are serving me information I don't care about or don't want or from people that I honestly don't know why I'm still friends with.

People I haven't talked to in 20 years are people being featured by the algorithms, not the people I want. I feel they're tinkering. They're very Lucas-style tinkering with the algorithms and how Facebook works has turned a corner. That's made it, just like you said, the value proposition just isn't there anymore.

I found myself unfriending tons of people because they were being pushed at me and I don't care. I don't really know who they are anymore. Yeah, I found it less and less useful recently. And now that Jason's back on it. I was going to say, now, Dave, this really doesn't have anything to do with me sending you a friend request now, does it?

Total coincidence. Total coincidence. Heard that one before. So you're back on Facebook, Jason. Yeah, yeah. And here's the thing that will be very easy for you to, you can do whatever you want to with your account. Whenever you come back, your stuff's still there.

Doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, the only thing that wasn't there was my preferences for, you know, any music or movies. But all of my friends were there pretty much as I left them. All I had to do was click resubscribe. Hmm, interesting.

And did you do that thing where you just put it on hold? No, this was a total account deletion. Really? And when I came back, yeah. There is no delete. There is no delete. As Jason has now proven. I think they basically delete your actual account data, but all of those friend graph connections, there's an empty hole there where your account is.

It's just waiting for you to come back and fill it back in, you know. What about things like your photos and stuff? No, that stuff's gone. That stuff's gone. But all of the social connections are still. Well, yeah. Let's define gone. It's not visible to you. Yeah.

Yes, I'm sure still all of the training data is there. If I post a photo, I should try this. Post a photo and see how well it just, you know, if it picks me out of the crowd right away. Yeah, and I have to say that part of this is a mental health component, too.

I just feel like I'm probably going to be happier and, you know, it'll help with my base level of whatever anxiety that I'm experiencing between now and the elections to disconnect with that particular social media platform. Is it just a sense of too many friends with disagreeing opinions, inability to kind of stay out of arguments?

Do you – is that it? General existential dread? It's partially that it's seeing stuff come by that is ridiculous and absurd and, you know, it's the – Well, Dave, I hate to break it to you, but you might have to – you might have to quit the internet.

You might have to not go outside. You might want to close up your house for a little bit. Turn that TV off. Yep, yep. Put a sleep mask over my eyes. Yes. No, I mean – so that is definitely part of it. Part of it is the crazy uncle problem. Right. You know, who I'm – because I want to see the crazy uncle stuff in case something happens in the family with – someone has a health issue or something like that.

So I don't want to block them completely, but then with that comes the crazy conspiracy theories and that's not good for me. The misspelled images and – Right, right. Exactly. So all that kind of stuff. But also a big component of it for me is I just don't want to support Facebook.

Yeah. I'm really – I've just had it with them. Well, I'll bring up the same thing that I brought up to Jason when he wanted to quit Facebook. Does this also mean you will be not on Instagram? Does this mean you will not use WhatsApp? I don't have either of those and I never have – Oh, well, there you go.

Just Twitter, the sanest of these social media platforms. But you know what Twitter has that Facebook doesn't, which would actually solve a bunch of Dave's problems, are mute filters. I mute just about anything that bugs me or offends me and then I don't see it anymore. It's great. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing. On Facebook, you can mute people but not particular topics or anything. Yeah, you can mute hashtags and you can mute keywords. So if a tweet comes by with something that you don't want to hear or if there's just an event going on that you don't want to follow, you can mute it and you can set a timeout for it.

It's like, okay, mute this for a week and it comes back when the event's over or mute forever. So let's see what our listeners think about this decision and I'm thinking maybe for our last show of the year. If I still am feeling this way, I'll actually do it on the air while we're recording.

That's good, I was going to say, that's some engaging radio right there. I know. Just you'll be able to, if I do it right, you'll be able to hear me click the button and you'll hear... If not, we'll fix it in post. You'll hear hundreds of friends on Facebook screaming out and then sudden silence.

The Alderaan of Facebook, yes. Well, I for one would miss you on there but I certainly understand your reasons. I'm not quitting anytime soon as much as I don't want to support Facebook either but I really have found my usage of it is way down.

I will only check in two or three times a day now and generally only if I get a notification that somebody has said something to me, then I'll go look. Like you said, I find the value proposition no longer in my favor with Facebook or any social media really, it's unfortunate because it's been such a good way to stay in touch with and keep up with so many people and I'm scared to lose that which is probably part of the reason

why I'm not quitting any of the social medias but I do find myself not as interested and engaged which should scare these companies that people are starting to feel that way. They've done a Lucas, they've tinkered with it too much and now we're getting upset. Facebook off.

All right, so moving on, we have some fun news from Google. We heard last week that they had pulled vast amounts of unredacted and unanonymized data from healthcare provider Ascension. This includes test results, diagnoses, hospitalization records from tens of millions of patients.

They were made available for their Project Nightingale team as part of plans to build software software that might help improve software in healthcare environments which begs the question why was this data not anonymized because they could have used anonymized data as easily as data that is directly connected to people.

This is not good but apparently it's entirely legal under HIPAA as well which makes me go, well, why is that legal? Should it be legal? I don't think so. Do you? Well, this is just the kind of thing that we talk about over on the Caveat Podcast.

In fact, we did. Oh, good. Yeah. I have not listened to that one yet. Well, it's because it has not come out yet. So by the time this show comes out, let's see, this conversation is scheduled to be on the Caveat that drops on December 11th.

Okay, excellent. Look for that. But what's the highlight of that is we interview someone named Donna Grindle and she is actually the host of the Help Me With HIPAA podcast. Okay. And she is a hoot. Help me, HIPAA, you're our only hope.

Yeah. Jesus. She is a hoot. And she doesn't agree with this whole notion that it's legal. Right. This whole thing of who's connected, organizationally, who's connected to who, who's bound to HIPAA and who is not, she says lots of companies, yeah, companies claim to not be, but they actually are.

Right. So we'll see how this plays out. But Donna has a lot to say about it. And so she thinks this is not the case, though, the way that this company is saying that they're allowed to do this. She does not agree. I would hope not because it doesn't seem right to me.

It's kind of ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have an interesting article that I've sort of been stewing on here for a couple of weeks. So this is from Quartz and this is back to Facebook again.

This is a precious metal scheme used fear and Facebook to trick older conservatives out of their savings. Now, there's a couple things I want to go at in our conversation here. First of all, precious metal scams are nothing new.

Yes. Tale as old as time. Yeah. People have been cheating other people out of their money by using gold and silver and precious metals and so on and so forth. And a big part of this story is about that. It's about companies that the writers of this article allege, companies metals.com and Chase metals who have been selling elderly people, silver and gold, mostly silver, collectible

coins, telling them that this is the way to protect their savings. Yes. The stock market is going to go down, but gold is gold. That's right. And also, one of the interesting components of this is that when Obama was president, it was that Obama was coming for your money.

And now that President Trump is president, it's that Trump is coming for your money. So it doesn't matter who is in power. Basically, they're using this story that there's going to be legislation passed that will allow the government to come confiscate your savings.

Right. And that's right. And so the other part of this story is that they're using Facebook's ability to target specific people. Right. To target them with these ads. They place fake ads that have Fox News logos on them, that have Fox News on-air personalities

on them, and have text that says, you know, protect your savings. This is the only way for retirees to ensure that their money isn't taken away. Right. So not terribly dissimilar from what you talked about, Jason, on Instagram with, like, the Keanu Reeves being used to advertise absolutely everything without his knowledge or approval.

Yeah. Yeah. They basically just Photoshop in their product into pictures of the celebrities. That's why you never hold up a white sheet of paper in a photograph. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. And that's pretty much what's going on here. I guess what troubles me about this is Facebook's ability to target these people.

They're going after people over 59, people who are extremely conservative, people who are Republicans. They can drill down on their socioeconomic status. But here's the other part I want to talk about here, because this has come – I've seen several stories along these lines, and I've – this one I almost didn't bring up because

of the conservative angle of it, and that it seems like there's this particular subgroup of elderly conservatives who are being scared by all the things they're hearing in conservative media.

Yes. Fox News and AM radio and all that sort of thing. Mm-hmm. And that – and these people are preying on them. Yes. And – but part of what troubles me is that I feel like we're hesitant to talk about these stories because the minute you say conservatives are being targeted, you get people coming at you and saying, are you – are you saying conservatives are stupid?

Are you saying that we're gullible? Well, and the other thing is then, to properly talk about this story, we have to properly discuss the fact that Fox News is in the business of scaring people rather than providing accurate news, and that disturbs conservatives because we're attacking their primary news source.

Right. But that is the reality. If you watch the ads or most of the shows on Fox News, there is a deep-seated distrust of government, and they do use fear tactics. So we have to state that, and conservatives don't want to hear that, understandably.

And this is the result of that. Mm-hmm. Because of that, these scams – Exist. Work. Yeah. Exist, right. They work in the same way that they – in a way that they do not work with older liberals because older liberals like government and trust it, so they have to take different tactics.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting details here. Facebook took at least $3 million from these coin companies. Of course, Facebook claims that they take the ads down as soon as it's brought to their attention that there's anything going on.

Yes, but Facebook also comes out and says, caveat emperor. It's not their problem. It's up to the people to figure out stuff. I almost feel we need classes in high school. We need to start educating the whole next generation about scams, but we also need outreach to the elderly.

This technology stuff has just moved on too fast. The fact that our parents' generation has gone from dial-up rotary phones to a cell phone of which 99% of the phone calls they receive are targeted scams, they're not prepared for this sort of stuff.

They don't look at everything with the skeptical, jaundiced eye that we do with the internet and everything. They tend to take things at face value. They're not the Kenyan stuff. I mean, all of that sort of stuff. I just – even talking with my mom or my in-laws, they just don't have the toolkit to recognize that so much of this stuff is bullshit

and that they need help with that somehow. Interesting point at the end of this article, they say that some of these folks are terrified that their adult children are going to clamp down on their liberties when they get – when they fall victim to a scam.

So they're embarrassed. They don't want to talk about it. And so, again, the scammers get away with it. So I think one of the lessons here is regardless of your political feelings or where you fall on those lines, as we're coming towards the holidays and you're getting together with family, just remind everyone that these coin things are very often a big old red flag.

Just spread the word. Educate your family. Educate your loved ones that these sort of investments – don't go off and do it on your own because the chances are you're going to lose a bunch of money. Yeah. Agreed. Security half off.

Media candy. Brian, we're getting a Christmas present. Okay. The Grand Tour is back for a special called Seaman. Of course. Of course it is. Yes. This is a boating episode.

All right. So it should be interesting. Yeah. You know, their boating episodes usually are pretty funny. It's always fun when they do stuff they don't know how to do. Yeah. And they're apparently traversing like the Mekong Delta in different styles of boats. And it looks fairly entertaining and terrifying in some bits.

Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. That'll be fun. Yeah. I watched the No Time to Die trailer, the new James Bond. I've been kind of split on these movies, the reboots, because, you know, you and I came of age in the gadget and humor James Bond generation.

Right. And there's none of that in these new movies. But this one actually hooked me. This looks really good. Did you watch the trailer? I did. I did. And up until the end, I was really excited until the reveal at the end that the villain is Rami Malek. Yeah. I'm like, again? God damn it.

He's everywhere right now. It's like Will fucking Wheaton showing up on every audio book that I download. Here's Rami again. He's a good actor. I think he might pull it off. We'll see. Probably. Probably. And we've got the return of Drunk on a Plane movie reviews, because I took my mom with us to Hawaii. She looked after Lucas on the plane.

And I was able to have a couple Mai Tais and watch a few movies, which was very nice. First up, I watched Late Night with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling. Kaling? Kaling? This is an Amazon original. But, you know, she plays... Emma Thompson plays a late night talk show host who is out of touch with reality and going to lose her show.

And Mindy Kaling is the cute little girl who comes in and saves everything. It was well done, but you're not going to be surprised by anything here. It's pretty much what you expect it would be. Okay. I watched Booksmart, which is the first movie directorial debut from Olivia Wilde.

Which is... I liked this movie a lot. It was really good. It was very old school, coming of age. This could have come out when we were kids. It's that kind of movie. They get drunk. They try to go have sex. It's all of that sort of stuff. I heard a lot of Oscar buzz for this.

Like, people were pissed off that it wasn't getting nominations. It's not that good, but it's good. Let's be clear here. This is not Oscar quality movie, but it's very enjoyable, and I do recommend it. I just think that it's cool that they have .movie extensions now.

Yes. Yes. I did notice that as well. Not too many people using it, but... Probably 500 bucks a pop. That's why. Yeah, probably. The next movie I watched was Ad Astra. This is the... Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt in space movie. If you like looking at Brad Pitt staring off into space for long periods of time...

Hunks in space! ...and not saying or doing anything, then this is the movie for you. If you like movies that have plots and interesting things going on, look somewhere else. Oh, man. I was going to watch that this weekend. Damn. It sucked so bad.

It was so boring, and it kept going and going, and... Oh, look! Another shot of Brad Pitt staring off into space. Okay. Oh, that's a bummer. Could have saved the download. And then, finally, another sci-fi movie I watched, and this is one of Netflix offerings, I Am Mother.

I am curious to hear your review of this, because I have a comparison. Yeah. Following humanity's mass extinction, a teen raised alone by a maternal droid finds her entire world shaken when she encounters another human, and it is exactly what you thought would happen. The robots weren't good.

Shocking. Okay. Was the movie any good? It was okay. Okay? Okay. It was okay. I think I was so turned off by the fact that they just went for the obvious story, but at the end of it, that I was just kind of like, ugh, why did I waste an hour and a half on this?

Okay. Well, that's what I needed to know. Hour and a halves are precious around here, so... Yeah. If you got an hour and a half to spend, this is not the movie to do it with. If you're stuck on a plane and you've run out of other options, not bad. So that's it. That's my Drunk on the Plane movie reviews, and just because tis the season, I thought I would throw this back in here up.

We have a YouTube link in our show notes. The Darth Vader Yule Log five-hour special. So you can watch Vader crackling away in the background, throw it up on your TV, and have a Merry Christmas. I love this so much. Oh, and we have the return of Drunk on My Couch movie reviews.

Did that ever go away? Nope. Probably not. Probably not. I watched Gemini Man with Will Smith. Why? Because I wanted to. I wanted to see it. All right. I got to tell you, the CG's getting there. The Uncanny Valley still exists, but it is getting smaller and smaller every day.

The big problem is it's an Ang Lee movie, which means there's no plot worth a Tinker's Cuss in it. Oh, well, make it a double feature and watch Ad Astra. Okay, there we go. There we go. Apparently, I mean, it did tank here in the U.S., but it apparently did very well overseas where they have a less discerning palate, I guess.

Yes. And this is for both of us. I'm sure you watched it on your trip. The Downton Abbey movie. I have not watched it. No! Let me tell you why. I got an Oscar screener DVD. I do not have a DVD player in my house anymore. I took it to Hawaii going, surely the condo, you know, the condos always have old technology.

There will be a DVD player in this condo. Nope. You said that before you left, and I'm like, I'm not so sure on this one. He may be incorrect. Yes, I was, sadly. So I have not seen it yet. I have a DVD sitting on the corner. Okay. Well, I got my digital screener, so I'll ship it over to you since you have the actual DVD.

We're not breaking any laws there. That's right. And I love this. The budget was $13 to $20 million for this, and the box office was $186.7 million. Guess what that means. We're getting another Downton Abbey movie. We're getting another Downton Abbey movie. I'm not going to ruin it too much, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I started it with a cocktail. I ended it with a cocktail and a smile on my face. I can't wait. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Send me that thing, because I'm never putting this DVD in anything. Dropbox. And I do have a little bit of follow-up, because we talked about Ray Donovan the other day.

Yes. I'm halfway through season four now of the Ray Donovan binge. My DVR is so packed up with every other thing that we have. My roommate and I, every day, it's just like we power through two episodes a day. And I did the math last night.

If we kept to that schedule two a day, every day, three more weeks, and we'll be done. It's fantastic. I love it. We're addicted to it. It is so good. Yeah, I keep meaning to get back to it and watch it, but there's so many things.

My wife wants to watch Succession now, so I don't know. Oh, that's really good, too. All right. Yeah, Ray Donovan Succession. Those are two great tastes that taste great together. Same type of thing, sort of. Unlike Gemini, man, and Ad Astra. Yeah, but our puppy gets here in a couple days, so I'm guessing our TV consumption is going to go down drastically for the next couple months, so.

Right. Tune in next year at Christmas when I finish my review of Ray Donovan. Closing shout outs. Shout out to DC Fontana, who passed away at 80. She was the pioneering TV writer who significantly shaped the Star Trek universe, in particular, the character of Spock and his home planet, Vulcan.

She passed away just this last week. Her real name was Dorothy Catherine Fontana. She used her initials DC, so producers during the 1960s wouldn't know she was a woman, and she was perhaps second only to Gene Roddenberry in molding the sprawling Star Trek storytelling empire. You will be missed.

Yes, very much so. And thanks to Seth Miranda for joining us on the last episode. Got a lot of good feedback. That was a fun episode. I'm really glad we got to do it. And since you skipped town, you bastard. So thanks to Seth for stepping in for that one.

Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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 a month 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 click that PayPal button.

I even made it bigger so you can find it now. Your support really keeps us going and we really, really do appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 398. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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