401: What’s Her Nuts?

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, and I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I want to do a little throwback here, Jason. Back in the day when we first started this podcast, we spent a lot of time talking about running your own show, being an independent contractor, running your own company, etc.

You know, because I'd done that for 20 plus years, and you've been on and off in between corporate environments and running your own stuff as well. One of the things about running your own show, especially around this time of the year, you don't get invited to holiday parties. Isn't that glorious?

No, it kind of sucks. It's one of the negatives. I was lucky enough that I was kind of tight with a couple of the bands that I worked with, and they happened to live in the LA area for a while. So occasionally I would get invited to their kind of things. But otherwise, like I would have to, you know, throw my own party, basically.

And we never really did that too much. My business partner, as you recall, Wendy, her favorite holiday was Halloween. So we would do Halloween parties every now and then. But yeah, so no Christmas parties. And, you know, my wife works in the corporate world. And occasionally, way back in the day when we first started dating, I would get to be able to tag along to their holiday parties.

But as belts got tightened, and let's be honest, lawyers got involved, and they didn't want spouses around to potentially sue people. You know, all that stuff became, you know, no spouses, just the people that worked at the party. And my wife had her Christmas party last night for her company.

And I was not invited, so I took care of the kid. But when the wife came home, I got a little text message from the folks that still work at my local that has changed hands saying, hey, we're all down here right now having a bit of a Christmas party. Why don't you come down? So that was nice.

And I did go down, and all the old people that used to be there before the place changed names and changed owners were not working and sitting on the other side of the bar. I'm hungover. That was a long way to it.

It's been a long time since I've been hungover. And here I am. So I might be a little slow today, but good times. So thank you. Cheers, everyone. Cheers. Okay. I never liked holiday parties. So for me, it's just fine.

But the other downside of being a self-employed contractor type of guy is you have to pay for your own bennies. And Brian, it's a watershed day here at Grumpy Old Geeks. Okay. As of January 2nd, I will have insurance finally.

Will you be able to afford food? No, I will not. Bernie 2020. Yeah. Seriously. Oh, I had somebody from Bernie 2020 come to my door the other day. Did you really? Little girl saying, hey, we're looking for Jason. I'm like, I'm Jason. How are you?

Like, are you voting for Bernie? I'm like, no. She's like, what are your feelings about Bernie? I'm like, he is a solid meh in my book. And she's like, okay, that's it. Like, okay, I'm not getting a date out of this one. But if you're looking for dates from people who randomly walk up to your door, I'm really worried about you, Jason.

Hey, man, that's all my social interaction nowadays. You got to work what you got. I suppose so. Speaking of that, I just got my registration card because I tend to register as an independent, but I switched it to Democrat because I want to be able to vote in the primary.

So, interesting. Not really. Like I said, I'm hungover. So, I just thought I thought everybody would be interested who's been following the show for seven years that, yes, finally, finally, after all this time, I have my own health insurance. Excellent.

I'm very happy about this, Jason. Now, the next step after actually getting health insurance, of course, is something that you're not very good at. Going to the doctor. It involves going to the doctor. Yeah. Baby steps, Brian. Baby steps. One thing at a time. First, you pay, and then maybe you take advantage of what you're paying for.

Exactly. See, the problem is now I'm going to have to walk there because my health insurance payment is the same as my car payment, so I'll probably have to turn my car in. That's okay. You get the steps in, and it's good for your health. I get my steps in. That's right. Fitbit will be happy. So, I got a little follow-up on some deepfake stuff that I found over at Ars Technica.

A very good story by Timothy B. Lee called, I Created My Own Deepfake. It took two weeks and cost $552. That's a lot of time and investment, actually. I think I would have thought it would have been quicker. Yeah. Well, apparently, it's really hard to make a deepfake. Oh, who knew?

Yeah. So many people just sitting around doing deepfakes of celebrities and porn then. Man, we are underemployed as a nation. Well, at least for kids, yes. For sure. And, well, the funny thing is, all these kids who are making the deepfakes, they all have these rocket ship gaming machines, which is how they can do it.

That's true. Or their failed Bitcoin mining, you know, GPU farms. That's how they're doing it. So, yeah, instead of mining Bitcoin, they can just, you know, put out deepfake CPU cycles or GPU cycles. Yes, a lot of deepfakes of Natalie Portman.

That's what they're on. Oh, God. Anyway, it's a pretty good article, and it goes through a lot of how he did it. And, you know, he did the mashup of Commander Data to Mark Zuckerberg, which is appropriate. Okay. And he figured that wouldn't actually take that much computational power, since they are pretty damn similar to begin with.

That's true. Anyway, it's a good read. And there's some stuff in there near the end where he talks about the software that he used. And, you know, if I had a massive gaming machine lying around, this might be kind of fun to play with, but I have to go to work. In the news.

Well, I'm happy to announce that, finally, a tech company has managed to unionize. Unfortunately, it's a stupid e-scooter company, but small steps, right? So, in a first for the industry, employees for an e-scooter company in California have voted to unionize.

As of December 5th, workers at San Francisco-based e-scooter company Spin, of which there are some around here, voted to unionize and joined a local Teamsters chapter. They were bought by Ford in 2018 for $100 million, and it's one of four companies awarded a permit to operate shared mobility devices in San Francisco.

They're also here in Los Angeles and some other cities throughout the country, but it's unclear if employees in other cities will vote to unionize. Apparently, it's very specific to the area. So, it's about 40 spin workers responsible for maintenance and management of scooters throughout San Francisco. They are officially in a union now.

Congratulations. Good for you. We'll see how long your company stays in business. I suppose you've got Ford paying you. Yeah, Ford's floating the bill on that one. But, you know, the scooter market is very crowded right now. Might be better for Ford just to take a loss on it and shutter the whole thing now that they've got to deal with those damn unions.

Well, I mean, auto companies are kind of used to unions, so I'm not terribly surprised that a scooter company that is owned by an auto company, you know, they went ahead and allowed it because you've got United Auto Workers for years and years and years. So, they're used to dealing with unionized employees, so I don't think they were terribly scared of it.

Yeah, and these workers are responsible for the maintenance and management. They're not the high-tech workers, which is interesting. It's like the programmers didn't unionize. Well, I mean, what programmers? Once they get their app up and running, we can fire those people. Just like Snap.

Yes. We'll keep a few around for refurbing the artwork in the app when we put out our new overpriced glasses. Renewing the AWS bucket when it comes up. We need somebody who knows where that is. Yeah, don't forget your certs. You've got to update those certs.

Yep. This one is fun. I found this over at MIT Technology Review. Emotion recognition technology should be banned, says an AI research institute. Mm-hmm. And said research institute is called AI Now. And they're saying, AI not now, as a matter of fact.

AI, hold on a second. Yeah, they're basically saying that emotion recognition is not ready for prime time and should be completely and utterly banned. At least for now. So everybody should stop deploying it.

Pretty pleased with sugar on top. I think it's pretty accurate. You just scan people's text messages and see if they put a sad face or a happy face emoji on their text to their friends. I'm pretty sure that's not what they're talking about. Oh, okay. Yeah, this is facial emotion detection. Right.

Well, you know, that's actually probably one of the easier aspects of recognition technology is telling if somebody's happy or sad. It's pretty obvious. We can do it as humans. Yeah. No, I don't think so. Okay.

It's difficult? Yeah. It turns out that it's extraordinarily difficult and wrong most of the time because it's extremely hard to tell what somebody's feeling by their facial expressions because I could be happy as a clam, but I might have to go poo. So, therefore, my facial expression doesn't match my mood.

So, you know, I could have just gotten a puppy and the puppy just pooped on the floor. Inside, I'm happy as can be. But on the outside, I smell poo, you know, things like that are hard. You should probably be happy that you're going to go poo. Oh, wait, you have health insurance now. Normally, I would just say it's good that you're regular, Jason.

You should be happy about that. Yes. So, if you want to actually check out the report, it is about 60 pages long. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. No, thank you. Yes. Thank you for MIT for summing that up for us. And this one I found over at Wired, which is a really good story.

ISIS is now harder to track online, but that's good news. How so? It is good news because that means that ISIS is having a really hard time getting online. So, Telegram actually went on a huge campaign and killed a ton of their accounts and their message boards.

Well, thankfully for them, Facebook is about to roll out their messenger encryption. So, there you go. Everybody will be moving around. And we know that Facebook won't be deleting any accounts because, you know, it's not their job. That's true. That's true. And all ISIS has to do is run for office.

That's right. Then they can do whatever they want. So, these guys, once Telegram shut down, they basically started to, you know, scamper like cockroaches when the lights come on. Then they went to Riot. That didn't work out well for them.

Okay. And then they went to TamTam, back to TamTam. Not working out well for them. There is a concerted effort between these companies to actually squash ISIS. You know what they need to do? They need to set up a gopher. Go for server work. Hey, yeah. What's going on with that, Node host? You teased us with it.

We don't know. I haven't heard anything back. I don't think you can find any of the software anywhere. Yes. No, there was a link in one of their posts about it. So, it's kind of cool. So, these accounts are being shut down in conjunction with Europol, which is pretty good. But a lot of journalists, academics, and terrorism researchers were also booted from the platforms and unable to make new accounts.

Oops. Well, how do they know? If you're hanging out in an ISIS chat room, you can't just say, hey, I'm an ISIS researcher. Let me in. Because the ISIS people could just say, hi, I'm an ISIS researcher. Ah, la, la, la, la. And let me in. Well, all they needed to use was the facial recognition software to see what mood the person was in.

Were they concerned? Or were they very excited about blowing things up? Are you feeling very jihadi today? Jihadi or not? There you go. Oh, that's the new Facebook. It'll start with jihadi or not. Yeah. Oh, man. And, well, we know they're definitely not going to Instagram because it's Instagram.

And they might, actually, because, honestly, here's the thing. Facebook lets you do whatever the hell you want. Instagram, you can barely do anything. That's the difference. Yeah. Yeah. Instagram, the land of no nipples. Well, they're going to start warning people before they post potentially offensive captions.

Which means that I'll never be able to post again. Damn it. That's true. Some more AI-powered tools will be snarfing up your captions and checking to see if you're worthy or not for posting. And, you know, I think they're just going to say, hey, hold the phone, man.

Hold the phone. You might want to think about that because we might have to ban you if you post that. And then, I guess, if you post it, they ban you. I don't know what the deal is here. Well, there's a simple way to get around it, of course. Just register to run for office. That's true.

Yes. Because Instagram is starting to hide false content behind warnings, except for politicians. Nice. Nice. Yes. So, Instagram is definitely trying to go all in on doing some actual, you know, content moderation. But they're doing the same thing as Facebook did.

Not surprising because it is their parent company. So, politicians have free reign to do whatever the hell they want. So, if you are a regular user and you post some false information, you know, your uncle who was fired up after Thanksgiving and is starting to post more and more as the election is coming along and is posting bullshit, fake crap that's being spread left, right, and center.

Instagram will give you a warning and Instagram will pop up a warning on these posts now. But if you happen to be a politician, whatever, you can post whatever the hell you want, of course. So, there you go. Do you have to register as a politician? Do they tell you what the mechanisms are for that?

Of course, they don't tell you what mechanisms are. Does anybody know 15 years on how to get a blue fucking checkmark on Twitter? Nobody knows. Well, actually, you can't because they turned it off because it was such a fuster cluck. Yes. But you still can't get them on Instagram and other places.

We're going to try and have a story about Instagram on for our Friday show. A friend of the show, Michael Burns, had his Twitter account, I mean, his Instagram account stolen last week. Yeah, I saw that on the Facebook. Yeah, exactly. And they did it with SIM card jacking, which is really strange because, you know, he generally just posts pictures of his dogs.

Yeah, his dog, his dog, Bonnie. So, I was like, why do they want that? So, who knows? Probably his username. He's a dog influencer. He is a dog influencer. Well, Bonnie's a dog influencer. He's just the poop carrier of the dog influencer. Bonnie is not taking the photos, Jason.

Let's give credit where credit is due. That's true. So, we're going to try and get him on the phone for Friday's show. It will be a prerecorded interview, but we can hear his story. And literally on the phone because none of our other technologies seem to be working. Nothing fucking works anymore. Well, speaking of the whole politicians online thing, I saw this great article on the New York Times about how 2020 campaigns are throwing their hands up on disinformation, much like Facebook has decided to do and Twitter as well.

This is an in-depth article, and it was really interesting about academia and all that sort of stuff and people who have been following the spread of misinformation and are able to track it and have all these interesting statistics and things of that nature who are saying, wow, nobody seems to care.

None of these politicians and their campaigns do not seem to give a shit about what's going on, and they probably should. Few politicians or their staffs are prepared to quickly notice and combat incorrect stories about them, according to dozens of campaign staff members and researchers who study online disinformation.

Several of the researchers said they were surprised by how little outreach they had received from politicians. Campaigns and political parties say their hands are tied because big online companies like Facebook and YouTube have few restrictions on what users can say or share as long as they do not lie about who they are. And Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard University's, let's see, Schoerenstein Center, says that basically politicians must play some defense by understanding what information is out there, and that may be manipulated.

So staff up, people. You need to have some people out there looking to see what memes are running around about you and if they're true or not, and if they're not true, combat them. Yeah, that's what you got to do. I mean, it's part of the price of admission now. You have to have, like, a defensive team.

Exactly. Hey, don't spend all your money on offense is pretty much it. If you're making nasty memes about your, you know, your opponents, then you're doing it wrong. The best offense is a good defense. Always has been. So Google Maps has now photographed 10 million miles in Street View.

And I will walk 10 million miles. And they have mapped out 98% of the world where people actually live through satellite photos on Google Earth. Okay. I don't know what's up with that other 2%, but, eh. Can't get a car some places.

Well, that's why they did it in satellites. I guess they couldn't make the satellite fly where they wanted it to go. They should throw up some loons with cameras and get those going. So it's pretty cool, you know, after 12 years of Street View. I suppose it's pretty cool.

I think it's cool. The fact that you have... Lack of consent. Well, I don't... Just... That aside from... I know. Privacy is dead. Get over it. I know. I know. From this standpoint, this is pretty damn cool. You have to... The entire point of this show, Jason, is from a technological standpoint, we shouldn't always do things.

That's what we... That's like the main thing we talk about now. Yeah, but sometimes it's cool. It is cool, especially when I get it thrown up on my BMW and I can see exactly where I'm going. Yes, yes. Or when you just want to dick around on Google Earth after a couple of cocktails and, you know, check out where you used to live.

See who's got their knob out while they're walking down the street. Well, I'm not looking for that. I think they have knob detection. So... Oh. Well... They blur that out. I know they blur out the faces. Knob detection easier than emotional detection. Absolutely. Well, I guess you can kind of tell what emotion they're in.

They've got of their knobs out. But anyway, I just thought that was kind of a cool stat to pass along. It is a cool stat. 98%. That is impressive. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

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Media candy. Brian, Apple podcasts are now available on Echo devices. Okay, hold on a second. I've been able to play our podcast and other podcasts on my Alexa for quite some time now.

It didn't do it directly. So, I suppose that's the change it reached out to. Ooh, I can't remember who. TuneIn? Or something like that? I can't remember if it was TuneIn or iHeart. I think it was iHeart. It doesn't even matter because you didn't have to say it.

You just said the name of the podcast and nine times out of ten it recognized it and played it. So, this is not new. Well, here's what they're doing. You can now set like your podcast provider. Ah, okay. And the thing about Apple podcasts is if you use the Apple podcast app on your phone, you can now pick up where you left off, which is the key.

That's nice. Yeah, that's the one thing that's always bugged the crap out of me. I'm like, okay, can I, if I want to listen to a show, I want to be able to stop it on my phone and then start it in the house. You know, that has been the one thing that with all the technology they got, they couldn't figure out until now.

Well, again, laptop, podcast player on my Mac, syncs with my phone and Bluetooth connection to my Alexa. So, I've been doing that since day one, too. Okay. Now it's built in.

Okay. The interesting thing here is they're not the only ones that are doing it because this is going to be rolling out basically over, I'm guessing, all of the apps for a while. Luminary has now joined in.

There's still a thing? There's still a thing. Yes. Luminary is going to be available on Alexa devices. And for the time being, I wouldn't get too used to them. But, yeah. A quick poll. Everybody that's listening to our show, hop on the Twittersphere or whatever. Let us know if any of you have actually subscribed to Luminary.

I'm curious. And stayed after the trial period. Well, here's the thing. I actually paid a few ducats. Stayed after the trial period of your own free will because they got eight bucks out of me after I canceled. Then they did it again. I canceled twice.

Privacy.com slash GOG. Couldn't use it. It was the in-app payment. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. Trust me. If it is possible for me to use privacy.com slash GOG to buy something online, I do. Oh, man. So, yeah.

I thought that was pretty good news. You know, it's working to get somewhere. You see, what I want is I want it all tied together. I want to be able to say, lady in a tube, GOG time. And then the lights turn blue. The show comes on.

And then, you know, the house turns into a mood for that show. If I want to play, play Joe Rogan. Everything turns red and flashes at me all angry. Like, if we want to do that for our show, we just have to write a skill. Do you want to write a skill, Brian? No, I do not.

There you go. I just want it out of the can so I can just say, do it. Damn it. I don't want to go back to the early days of the web where we had to do it all ourselves. I don't want to have to go to if-ta-ta-ta to make a, you know, if this, then that action. I just want it to work.

This once again said by Jason, who always wants to go back to the early days of the web, pre-AOL. I was thinking about that this morning, and now I don't. I'm like, I don't know what brought it up in my head. I was thinking about something, and yeah, I'm like, you know what? Website builders are okay.

Having to write HTML really did suck. Yeah, but it, you know, it paid the bills for a long time for both of us. Yes, it did. Yes, it did. Now, Spotify is giving you a big, good push on podcasting nowadays. They're trying to do podcasting. But not to us.

No, yeah. I think we're like number 180 in technology for a while, which is crazy because like we get four downloads on Spotify, which probably tells you how well Spotify is doing in the podcast realm. Yes, because we got our Spotify, what do they call that thing that they rolled out for all the musicians and everybody was sharing it and they rolled it out for podcasters too, the year in review thing or whatever.

Year in review thing, yeah. And we looked at ours and it's like, oh, we got four listens. Well, I mean, it was, it was like a thousand, but that was for the entire year. Yes. Nobody's listening to podcasts on Spotify. The weird thing about Spotify is there's- Nobody's listening to our podcast on Spotify. Nobody's listening to podcasts on Spotify.

They've already pulled ahead of Apple in Canada. Yeah, that's Canada. Like I said, nobody's listening to that. Oh, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing about Spotify with their podcast pushes is they're touting left, right, and center about how they're buying up exclusive rights for all these podcasts.

If you go to Spotify and look at podcasts, they don't even push the exclusive ones. I can't tell which podcasts are exclusive on Spotify and which ones are just like us everywhere. It's weird, right? Like, if you're going to spend all this money, we have exclusive rights to these podcasts.

They're not promoted anywhere. There's no way to tell which ones are exclusive. Nothing. It's so fucking weird. Yeah. I mean, at least on Luminary, they shove it down your throat. You have no choice. It's like, okay, here are all the shows that we pay for, that you're paying for now.

If you want something else, well, go dig for it. We're not going to tell you how to do that. Yeah, it's very strange. So, yeah, this new suggestion thing is going to be interesting. It's already started to roll out. I haven't checked it yet, but it's only going to be for people in the U.S., Denmark, Great Britain, Brazil, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Mexico, Ireland, and New Zealand who have never listened to a podcast on Spotify before.

And the topic choices will differ by user and country. Okay. Okay. Now. So that's a good study. Yeah. They're trying to get people who have not listened to podcasts to do something about it. But, you know, you would think that they would really want to cater to the people that actually do listen to podcasts.

Yes. And get them to get more hours on the app. On their platform. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of doing the heavy lifting of getting new people to listen. But, you know, I guess they have to do both. It's got to be a, you know, multi-tiered approach because they are spending a lot of money. And the more money they spend on podcasting and the more people they get listening to podcasting, the less they have to pay for music.

That's true. Because they don't pay podcasters very much at all, especially if they're not exclusive. Yep. And Google Podcasts has come out with a new recommendation engine as well. But they're going to suggest different episodes for you, not shows in general, but just an episode.

So if you say follow a celebrity through Google News updates, they will recommend the podcasts that have that stupid celebrity on them. Yeah. Because I think they're really kind of going deep on the like they're doing transcriptions of the big shows and then doing search on the on that and then building up those recommendations based on that tech.

Okay. We'll see. I mean, I've used Google Podcasts a total number of twice when I checked to make sure that our show was in here and one of the other shows I work on are in there. And that's pretty much it. But I got to say, the Google Podcasts app that they ship now with Android is much better than having to use Google Play.

Yeah, I was about to say, I figure most Android users are probably using that as their default. So quite a few people, I'd imagine, are using Google Podcasts. Not really. Most people are using Pocket Casts on Android. Okay. Yeah. I mean, because Google's behind on it. They don't advertise it very well.

You know, it's podcasting is still a massive afterthought for Google. They're kind of like it is for Apple, too. Apple just got first mover advantage. But yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so that's this week in podcasting. All right. Trailer news.

I saw the new trailer for Top Gun Maverick 2020. All right. Boy, I'm excited. I didn't care much for the first one. I was going to say, you don't strike me as a Top Gun kind of guy. Not really. No, not my thing. Yeah. Well, Top Gun.

I mean, I lived next to Oceania Naval Air Station when Top Gun came out. So I was used to seeing planes all the time. I was like, you know, two miles from the end of the runway, we'd see the Blue Angels would practice over my junior high. I loved planes. So Top Gun for me as a kid was just awesome.

So I'm excited that it's coming back. I'm really excited. It looked fun. It looked fun. And Tom Cruise has not changed. I was about to say, does Tom Cruise look any different? None whatsoever. It's insane. He's the new, he's the new, uh, what's the guy that used to host, uh, Rockin' New York?

He's the new Dick Clark. Yep. Yep. Does not age. Well, in addition to being called down to my local at like fucking midnight, um, I, my sleep is suffering because I can't stop watching The Expanse. Really? I am loving the shit out of this season.

It is fantastic. I am up and like episode ends and it does the stupid five seconds, four seconds. I'm like, damn it, damn it, damn it. All right, I will just watch 10 minutes of the new one and then go to bed. Never works. Never works. Yes, I've been staying up quite late.

I still have three more episodes to go, but, uh, it is a great season and, um, um, I'm a little sad about the fact that I know once this ends, I'm going to have to wait like two years. Yep. Yeah. Uh, also continuing on with Mrs. Maisel, that is a great series as well.

And I'm enjoying this season very much. And the, the latest Mandalorian episode with Bill Burr was awesome. Did you watch it? I watched it. It was okay. I really enjoyed it. I like the fact that every episode is completely different from the previous one.

It's like Favreau is just going through his, now I want to do a shoot him up. Now I want to do a heist. Now I want to do this or that or whatever. It's great. I love this show. Yeah. I mean, you don't watch the Mandalorian if you want anything that is going to be somewhat unpredictable.

You know, you can kind of tell from the get go. Oh, you know what you're going to get. Everything that's going to happen. But that's fine. Yeah. That's totally fine. Yeah. I'm okay with that. And I watched a 20 minute documentary last night, which is bite-sized and perfect at the New York Times produced it.

It was really interesting. They call it killing in the age of algorithms. It's a New York Times documentary examining the future of artificial intelligence and warfare. We've talked a lot on the show about how like, you know, Hey, we've got a drone. Don't put a gun on it. They're putting guns on lots and lots of drones.

This was terrifying. I highly recommend you just spend 20 minutes watching this. It was really good. I did well done. I spent 20 minutes and watched it. Okay. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot. It's very interesting that, you know, they had to go to a Russian gun show to find a lot of these things.

Yep. But yeah, no, it kind of tells you what the state of affairs is on, you know, autonomous killing machines. And I have to say there was a protest in there about stopping the killing machines where people that were dressed as sperm fell over, which I thought was pretty pathetic.

But yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't the best protest. No. And I, even, even when it was done, they got back up and they high fived like we did it. We fell over. Yay. So bad. Yeah. Like nobody's done a flash mob before. Seriously.

Seriously. They didn't even dance. What's the point? Oh yeah. But it was a good documentary. Now I found this one just head scratching, head scratching. Yes. A small Wisconsin company stored thousands of people's CDs and suddenly vanished.

Now it's a company called Murphy, M-U-R-F-I-E. Have you ever heard of these guys? I do remember the name back in the day when I was looking, when I was like considering, am I going to have to rip all these myself? And I ended up just doing it myself anyways. But yeah, I looked into the service and I, you know, I just had too many CDs.

I, it would have cost me so much money to ship them all to them. Yeah. Yeah. I ripped all mine too, hundreds and hundreds of them. Yeah. So, but yeah, this was a service where you could send them your CDs, they would rip them and then let you play them online. Right. Yeah. Which, you know, who cares anymore?

Which is exactly. Apparently why they shut down. Yes. This company has changed hands many times, but the problem now is they're gone and they're saying that you can't really get your CDs back. Yes, of course. And if the Pope shits in the wood, who cares? Okay.

Like who? The Pope shits in the woods. Okay. I get the fact that they're probably, you know, you paid, you paid for the service and that it is bullshit and you should be pissed off. But do you really want your CDs back? Who wants their CDs back? Well, apparently there was some other way that they could make money inside of this whole, you know, shenanigans scam.

And people basically didn't get their money back either. They just shut down and took all the money and just disappeared. And they did send out a couple of emails, very, you know, short, cryptic emails that said, oh, you can get them back for, you know, an exorbitant amount of money.

They're holding your CDs hostage. Right. Let it go. Get a Spotify account. And if you want your CDs back, just go to any resale shop and you can get it for pennies on the penny. Good luck finding one these days, though. Even those are almost all gone because you know what?

No one cares. Yeah. There's a used CD shop out here in the valley on Ventura that I go by all the time. And there are people in there still, believe it or not. Amazing. I don't know if anybody's buying. I'm sure they're probably selling. But there are people in there. They're just selling. Moron of the week.

My moron of the week is a company called Futurus. What they want to do is take your windshield in your car and turn it into an AR display. I have a heads up display in my BMW and I love that damn thing. Your entire windshield is a heads up display?

No, no. Just a little bit right in front of me. Can your passenger watch movies on it? No, and that's probably a bad idea. Yeah, Ken. You have to go look at this thing and see some of the screenshots that they're showing.

It's not out yet, but they say they're working with some major automobile industries. And it's going to be kind of released at CES next month. Okay. Nothing good can come of this. Nothing good can come of this. You don't need a full windscreen AR display, especially.

And they point this out in the article. What if you just get a blue screen to death and you can't see out the window anymore? Right. So is it going to wait? I didn't actually look at it. Is it do they basically get rid of the windscreen altogether? Is it like blacked out or is it this is thrown up on top and you can still see out?

Right. It's a projector that projects over the entire windshield. That's fine. It's fine. It's not a good idea, but it's fine. I want this when we have our self-driving cars, but I don't want it until then. Yeah. Well, self-driving cars, you just you don't need a window. Yeah, that's true. You know, you basically built a giant roll cage because you're going to be playing bumper cars all the time.

But yeah, I just can't see anything good coming to this. I mean, look, people can't drive with their own little fucking phone. And we talked about this last on one of last week's episodes about how everybody is distracted and nobody can drive right now. And it's insane.

Put your put your shit down and drive. You're in a giant hunk of steel going 60 miles an hour down the road in a 35 usually. Yes, of course. And I've got I saw this, you know, it's that time of year when everybody does their their year end list and things like that.

And this is a decade long list. The decade tech lost its way. Now, Jason, we've been doing this show for, well, closer to a decade than not. Six years now. Coming up on seven. Coming up on seven. So this is basically our show in one interactive little article.

It's everything that's gone wrong with the big tech companies. It's a fantastic presentation. Again, this is like the kind of stuff that I still every now and then I'm like, oh, there is web design still. They did a good job with this. And it is our entire show. When the decade began, tech meant promise cars that could drive themselves, social networks that could take down dictators.

It connected us in ways we could barely imagine. But somewhere along the way, the flaws of technology became abundantly clear what happened. And, you know, if you don't want to listen to all 401 episodes of our show, just watch this or go back and listen to it's fine. But don't download them all.

What really struck me is, you know, we have been doing this for almost seven years. And a lot of these stories that are in here, a lot of them still seem to me like they happened just yesterday when we started talking about them. Because they'd never change and it just goes on and on and on. But, I mean, it's like, think of Snowden.

Remember when we first started talking about Snowden at your place and David Teeter was there and we were huddled around a Blue Yeti like savages? That was 2013. Yep. That's crazy. Yep. Yeah, man. We old.

Even stuff that happened, like I'm looking at the timestamps, it's like two years ago and I'm like, I thought that was two months ago. It's like time has warped because we reached so much damn tech news. I know. Thank God this is the second to last show of the year for us.

I need a break. Yeah, it was a good article, though. Highly recommend checking it out. Yeah, it's amazing. They did a really good job. Feedback loop. Well, because I monitor the Patreon stuff and all of that and you don't, Jason, I just wanted to give a shout out.

Of course, we've been losing some Patreon people who've been moving over to PayPal, so thank you to all of those that have donated and moved on. We appreciate that. But we have a new trend that's happening on Patreon. The people that are sticking around are upping their donations, so thank you so much for that.

We really appreciate it. Appreciate it so much, especially in this time of need. Jason's got to pay for healthcare. No. Actually, no. I can afford the healthcare. I can't afford food. Right. So, that's the difference. Get Jason a pizza.

Over at PayPal, we have some new subscribers. Nicholas, Andrew, Art, Linda, Joseph. And Joseph says, not losing my mind. It's on the website as well. And this is in response to episode 397 with Seth Moran. He says, wait until you hear it's cheap as hell. And you'll hear a significant pitch change when it's cheap as hell is mentioned.

Either it's a third-party individual or something would have been wonky. I also played it back via the app, and you can hear the pitch change as well. Hopefully, this donation will cover the download fee. Cheers. Wow. Okay, Sherlock Joseph. Well, I went back and I listened to it, and all it is is it's Seth getting excited about his Nikon Z6.

He just went like crazy. That's it. He just pitched up. That's all. All right. There are no shenanigans there or anything. He just, that's why I was like, there's nothing there. I was like, when I listened to it the first time, I'm like, there's nothing going on there. That's just what Seth sounds like when he gets excited about something.

Well, there you go. Yeah. And Robert also donated and said, you've tried the rest of the browsers. Now try the best of the browsers. Vivaldi, have a beer on me and stay grumpy. We have tried Vivaldi. I tried it even again last night after I read this. Yes. You know what's nice about it?

Hmm. Close tab is on the left. Oh, remember it's made by the same guys that made Opera. Well, here's the thing. And I've been doing some more research on it. All of these things have the same damn backend. Right. It's all, they're all just overlays.

It's all Chromium and the same rendering engine in the same JavaScript engine. Some add new things like Brave, which break it completely and make it useless for us. And Vivaldi is kind of nice, except that their Vivaldi net thing is a little weird.

It does come with a little note-taking app built in, which is kind of cool. Oh, we could use that for our show titles. Yeah. Yeah, we really could. It's snappy as hell. I got to give it that. You can install Chrome extensions. So, I don't know. I've got it on my laptop.

I'm going to try it. But, yeah. I mean, so far, it seems to do exactly the same thing that Opera does. So, I don't know why we'd switch. Oh, that's right. Because Opera is owned by the Chinese. That's why. But, you know, Vivaldi is owned by Fern or two.

So, if you want to get down with that. But I'm not going to go there. Seems decent so far. I'm not going to switch yet because every time I switch, I get bit in the ass. Yeah. My new policy with this is I wait until you tell me to switch. And then I wait another two weeks because you'll eventually find something that's wrong with it and tell me to switch back.

Yeah. Yeah. You jumped the gun on Brave. You went too fast. I know. I went too fast. That was on me. And Jeff as well. A PayPal donation. From one old grumpy geek to two others. Happy holidays and thanks for the great content. Keep on grumping. Well, we shall. Thank you, Jeff.

Over at Twitter, Brett writes us, I thought you gents would appreciate this bit of Kodak history. He's obviously writing to you and Seth, not me. This is a podcast called The Memory Place and it's episode 154, Dotting Eyes. Okay. It's about, yeah, Kodak history. I used to listen to that show.

I don't know why I stopped. Oh, because I have too many podcasts to listen to. Cool. I'll check it out. I like that show. Yep. And Stuart says, so you play a Sesame Street clip in your show and this has happened. The grumpy old geek's curse strikes again. No, not true, right?

You play the Sesame Street clip in the episode that we talked about Carol Spinney who did Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch passing away. So it was an homage, not a precursor. I think Stuart wrote this before he got to the end of the episode.

Nah, there you go. Quite possible. And Mustafa writes in, sent a link, Chinese criminal gangs spreading African swine fever to force farmers to sell pigs cheaply so they could profit. You go, hold on a second. That's not tech news until you realize. Report by state media says some offenders are leaving infected feed in sites and are even using drones to spread contamination.

Lovely. Hmm. Fun. Weaponized drones. And Loke writes in, so to recap, Brian, you like cab drivers enough to converse to the point of finding out what they did back in the day in Bombay, but you don't talk to Uber drivers. Were you inappropriately touched in an Uber at some point?

What gives? Great show, by the way. Well, first off, Jason is the one that has had a horrible ride sharing experience. Yeah, and that was Lyft, not Uber. That was Lyft, yes. And you assume that I only get into these things by myself. Now, Jason knows my ex-business partner very well, Wendy, right?

Yes. Would you say that Wendy is happier talking to complete strangers than she is to people she actually knows? Absolutely. Who do you think I got in the cab with? Yeah. I have learned the life story of every fucking cab driver I've ever gotten into with Wendy, so it isn't me.

I like to sit in the back of my cabs, much like I like, say, my dentist or my hair cutter completely silently. But I'm not always alone, and I have to listen to stories an awful lot of the time. Wendy was a chatty Cathy. She wants to hear everybody's life story. Yes, and this is how I learned about people's lives.

Yes, yes. And over at GOG.show, Dan writes in, I've become quite the bit of an anti-online convert this past year and believe that shopping online is only about convenience at this point. I've bought hobby-level remote control cars, guitar equipment, computer parts, electronics at brick-and-mortar stores at or below online prices this past year.

Yes, there is a time cost, but I think there is other value in talking to people. I don't, as previously mentioned. Yes. Personally, the people are the problem. If I could just go to the stores and just browse without anybody there, anybody getting in my way, anybody talking to me.

Hi, can I help you? Would you like to sign up for our Target credit card? No. I wouldn't. It's great that you want to talk to people. I totally get it. And, you know, he's talking about some very specific stuff that you, communities are built around that sort of thing. So I totally get that.

I need toilet paper. I need it to show up once every month or so. Amazon subscribe and save works perfectly for me for that. Just saying. Yeah, but everything else you buy on Amazon, too. Yes, that's true. Destiny writes in, hi, guys. You've grown on me, though I'm still reluctant to call you old.

I'm a 72-year-old retired industrial automation engineer. Wow, that's awesome. The Mandalorian is shit. My sci-fi loving wife and I watched the latest episode last night. The acting, writing, et cetera is really, really bad. I can predict the next line with ease. No surprises in either the dialogue or plot.

It's every bit as terrible as episode one, if not worse. I loved Star Wars. The series should be allowed to die a natural death. Of course, I'll go see the final movie as soon as it comes out. By the way, I'm having some difficulty disengaging from Disney+. I've got to find a way to do this. There's nothing, absolutely nothing on this channel I want to watch.

Cheers. Star Wars, in general, has no surprises, neither dialogue or plot. It's kind of comforting, and that's why we like it. I get that you don't like The Mandalorian. That's fine. I love it. I think it's fantastic. And I have a three-year-old, so Disney Plus has a lot of stuff that I want to watch.

Well, not me specifically, but it does allow me to plop my kid down in front of the TV and get 10 minutes to myself. So, there you go. Yeah, I'm with him on The Mandalorian. Yes, it's predictable, like I mentioned. It's extremely predictable. Oh, by the way, I do have to say in the Bill Burr episode, they got in a Gungan diss, which I thought was pretty damn good.

Yes, it was awesome. That was pretty funny. I laughed out loud. I LOL'd. I did, too, I think. I was like, nice one. But, yeah, I mean, it's not everybody's cup of tea. You are definitely allowed to hate it, and a lot of people, I'm sure, do.

Like, I hate seven, eight, and nine. And one, two, and three. Wait, you can't say you hate nine already. It hasn't even come out. Let's say if I were a betting man, I'd put all my money on crap.

All right. And Garzella writes in, I can totally see Jason making a thousand penis jokes about this penis fish invasion. Ha ha, stay grumpy. And this is the story about the penis fish watching up on a beach in Northern California. Well, you know, not like we don't have enough dicks in California already.

Right by San Fran, where it belongs. Yep. And Tyndall writes in, following up on the item on Yahoo Groups shutting down, please find the following article from October where it is revealed that swaths of the UK mobile network is managed on Yahoo Groups. Cheers for the podcast. And this is from The Verge, some of the UK's phone number infrastructure relies on Yahoo Groups, which is shutting down.

It's not as extreme as it sounds. What they basically were doing was they were using Yahoo Groups to notify cell phone providers which numbers were in use and which numbers weren't so they could basically, you know, activate numbers for use on their own networks.

Now, it's not horrible, but what the hell were they thinking? So, and I do like this comment in the article. A review might consider whether it is befitting for the world's sixth largest economy to manage critical national infrastructure via Yahoo Group, but we would hope that is obvious.

Oh, man. Oh, good times. John writes in, ranacrossgog.com, plus a special offer, gog.com, PC game Wasteland 2 for free. Well, gog.com is not us, obviously. It's a gaming site. And it's funny because I was actually going to mention something about gog.com today.

They released the Blade Runner game from like 97 on there today. And it's all over my RSS feeds. But Wasteland 2, I don't even know that one, I think. Well, you can get it for free. Yeah, but then I'd have to actually dust off my PC and plug it in. Yeah, well, there's that.

And Chris sends us a link from Fox News. San Francisco's poor street conditions, a factor in city loss of $64 million Oracle Tech Conference. So they are moving their annual Open World Conference to Las Vegas next year due to San Francisco's expensive hotel rates and the man poop, according to reports.

Of course, man poop. Yes. You know, they're never going to do anything about the man poop until it costs the money. And now it's actually costing the money. Now it's costing them money. Yep. Yep. And Martin writes in, unfucking believable. This appears to be what the anti-vaxxers want. Brian said it.

So we'll get your own fucking island and just die already. And this is an article over at theconversation.com about measles in Samoa. How a small island nation found itself in the grips of an outbreak disaster. Disaster. Disaster. Disaster. And Jason writes in, speaking of your latest episode in the coin scam, it is common to scam the elderly and near retirement even before Fox News.

Yes. One of the first signs of cognitive decline is the inability to recognize sarcasm or subterfuge. It takes higher level thought processes to see the meaning behind what is being said or see past the scam, which to someone else may be obvious. That can also be a reason why people don't come forward. They don't want to be thought of as addled.

So stay sarcastic. Stay grumpy. It will exercise those neurons to keep your bank account safe into old age. Love the show. Listen every week. Oh, yeah. Also, embarrassment is a big, big issue why people don't come forward because they're like, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. So Peter sent this in broke billionaires and other ridiculous signs of the top.

This is from over at Zero Hedge. Did you get a chance to read this one, Brian? I did scan through it. It's about the Elon Musk was on trial because of, you know, the thing about calling that guy a pedophile who isn't a pedophile. And then trying to say that, yeah, that's just what we said as kids.

Okay. But the point of this whole article was Musk had to disclose something about his personal finances. He told the jury under oath that despite being worth more than $25 billion, he actually has very little money. And this is true. It's because most of Elon's Musk wealth is both not liquid and not profitable.

He owns around 20% of Tesla, for example, which is worth about $13 billion. But he can't really sell his shares without giving up control of the company. And they're also controlled by a trust. He has regulatory limitations, et cetera. So, yeah, super rich people have a lot of money on paper. They don't necessarily have a lot of money that they can just throw around, although they seem to manage.

Yeah, they seem to manage okay. Yes. Well, you have your company pay for stuff. That's the way it works. It's all scams left, right, and center and tax evasions and dodgings and blah, blah, blah. Yep. And Nathan actually sent me an email on this one. Manscaped lands at Target.

You just mentioned this trend in episode 400. Great show. And it has been one of the few distractions I've had after losing my family home and job over the course of four days at Thanksgiving. Timing couldn't have been more imperfect. Thank you guys for just being you. Well, sorry to hear about that, Nathan. Sorry to hear about that, Nathan.

But as we've always said on the show, it is the most wonderful time for pink slips. Everybody fires people on the holidays. Isn't that lovely? Yep. Yep. Still got. I think I still have mine from Paramount when they fired us all at Christmas. Yep. Merry Christmas, everybody. And over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Sammer51 in Great Britain.

How's that breakfast thing going for you? Perfect balance of entertainment and grumpy. Greatly enjoying the show. It's funny how it's entertaining to hear guys complain about stuff. But it is. Thanks for the awesome work, guys. And we got a five-star here in the United States from Granny Dar.

It's entitled Something to Look Forward To. Housework is not the most invigorating task, especially when you've done it for decades. However, it's a perfect time to put on a podcast and scrub away. This podcast covers a lot of topics while still giving one a good peek under the sheets. There are issues covered that I would never have come across in my everyday life.

Information is not doled out in a dry manner, but with humor and sarcasm. I walk away with pointers that make me wiser about my tech purchases, help me improve many aspects of security, keep me in the know of books, cinema, TV, and much, much more. They do tend, though, to giggle a lot between each other.

One does have to wonder if they are simply that joyful or if there are substances involved. Anyway, kudos to the format, the quality, and the overall tone they bring to the podcast. I simply can't manage to do my household chores without them. No substances, unfortunately.

Yeah, we haven't done a drinking show in a long time. Yeah, yeah. There's a reason for that. Yes, there is. I'm in bed by eight, so. And I don't want to drink at 9 a.m. Exactly so, you know. We're in this lady hawk phase.

Jesus. There's a dated reference. Hey, man, this is one of Rutger Hauer's best movies. And Matthew Broderick. And what's her name? Not saying much. Yeah, what's her name? I can't remember her name. What's her nuts? I don't remember either.

Let's get this over with. If you want your questions or comments 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. And go ahead and tell your lady in the tube to play us because you can do that now.

Oh, wait. You can do that all the time. We haven't done a dead people roundup in quite some time. So I found two bits of news this week for some closing shout outs that are near and dear to our heart, even though we didn't know their names.

Tony Booker, pioneer of computer programming, has passed away at 94. He worked with Alan Turing. He went to work at the University of Manchester and wrote the programming language for the very first commercial computer called AutoCode. How cool is that? Very cool. See, he had a good run.

94. He did have a good run. And also George Lauer, who developed the barcode, is dead at 94 as well. Every purchase evokes his design of the rectangular universal product code, the UPC. Although it became ubiquitous, he received no royalties. Oh, man.

This thing is on everything. No cash. Oh, man. That sucks. So I thought this is just interesting for a bit of trivia. The UPC made its official debut in 1974 when a scanner registered 67 cents for a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

And also interesting, some fundamentalist Christians, got to ruin everything, have also noted that the so-called three guard bars at the beginning and in middle of the code resemble the numeral 6, suggesting the number 666, which the Book of Revelation links to an apocalypse. And as he stated, it is simply a coincidence, like the fact that my first, middle, and last name all have six letters.

What? Mind blown! Satan, Satan, Satan. The Omen 2. Still a good movie, too. I liked all the omens, except for the last one. Yeah, the last one was not good. Number 3. No. 1 and 2.

Yes. Number 1 is why I got a Rottweiler. Fun trivia fact. And the other thing that I have to say that the UPC code is great for is back in the day when really cute cyberpunk chicks would get UPCs tattooed on the back of their neck, I was a fan. Are any of them coming to your door trying to get you to register to vote?

Otherwise, you're never going to meet them, apparently. Nope. That's it. Days are long gone. It's over. It's over for me. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schillmeister. 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 the PayPal button. And at some point, Jason will make a GOG.show slash donate page and you'll be able to go there. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 401. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. Sorry, I haven't finished your widow page yet. There are people in my house destroying it for the next three days.

I'll get to it. You know, you can't go into your kitchen. You're just sitting at your laptop. I can't go into the house, dick. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

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