402: We Know When You’ve Been Sleeping

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. 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 a very tired Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. What's up? Oh, the house. The house is almost done. Almost done. This is the first day when I've not had a contractor in my home in like a month.

So, last night was glorious. I got to finish the last 20 minutes of the first episode of The Expanse. Ah, I've actually finished The Expanse. And verdict is? I loved it. The verdict is I'm sad I'm going to have to wait like two years for another episode.

Well, you can read the books to hold you over. That's true. And they're long enough that I will probably just catch up in time for the new episode. So, yeah, it was a really great show. You know, a little bit of repetitiveness in terms of the plot and where it's going. But overall, it's extremely well done.

Loved the characters. Just, you know, I loved it. Great. Cool. How many episodes are there? 12? 8 or 10. I don't remember which. Not 12. Boo. Yeah. Nobody does 12 episodes anymore. Well, it's 8 or 10 that you didn't have before. That is true. Well, let's see this season of Mr. Robot's 12 episodes.

And the last one's coming. And I got to say, Sam never fails to step on his own dick because episode 11 was god-awful. Well, we'll see if they stick the landing and make it all worthwhile. You can let me know. It's not possible.

It's not possible. There's no coming back, man. There's no coming back from episode 11. Oh, that bad, huh? Oh, man, it's that bad. Lovely. Well, I finally saw the Downton Abbey movie. The wife and I finally had enough time to sit down and see it all in one go, even though it pushed our bedtimes a little bit.

So, yeah, that was, it was beautiful. And I did enjoy it. Of course, I enjoyed it because, you know, it's a character piece and all of that. And the, you know, the music was, the swelled gloriously. The landscapes were beautiful. The women were gorgeous.

The men were dapper. It looked perfect. But about halfway through, I turned to my wife and I said, the lack of plot thickens. Uh-huh. There's no plot at all. Well, it's Downton Abbey, man. Do you really go there for, like, you know, Poirotian intrigue and twisted stories?

No, it's Downton Abbey. It's, it is as predictable as The Mandalorian is. You just watch it because it's fun. Yes, and it was fun. So, highly enjoyed it. If you enjoyed the show, by all means, watch the movie. But I'm sure you already have. I think I'm the last person that really enjoyed the show to see the movie. So.

Probably, probably. But the really nice thing about it, what I liked is, they took an entire season and compressed it into, like, two hours or an hour and a half. They did a very good job with it. And it was very sad to say goodbye to my favorite character. I'm not going to do any spoilers here. But given the amount of money they made, there's surely going to be another one of these, and she will not be returning.

Yeah, too bad. Too bad. But, you know, I will watch another one. If they're going to keep making them, I'll still watch them. Me too. You can just take my money. Yep. And a little more follow-up on the Ray Donovan saga, which is the only television I've pretty much watched, except for just a few little, like, bits of, you know, Mr. Bad Robot and The Mandalorian at this point.

But we've gotten to the end of Season 5, so I only have six and seven to go. Right. 60 episodes of Ray Donovan we've watched in a row. Oh, man. It's good, though. It's really good. This Season 5, though, was definitely pushing it. Right. But I'm excited for Season 6, and I've been snagging Season 7 as they come out.

But all in all, I really think Ray Donovan's a solid series. A lot of people say that. Yep. And now let's talk about it a little AI for a second. I found this over – I can't even remember where I found it anymore. The days have blurred together, not sleeping, hammering, pounding, scraping, have all just rattled my brain.

But I found this thing called Teachable Machine, which is a Google project where you can train a computer to recognize your own images, sounds, and poses. It is basically making an AI training model in the browser. Which is interesting. Does Google get to keep that data?

Only if you upload it. Okay. All right. You can upload it to their servers and make it available for everyone, or you can keep it yourself. And it's not – it doesn't keep the images and things like that. It keeps the models, the data models. Okay. So now you can make your own not hot dog app at home with no coding experience.

How fun for everybody. Yeah. I watched the banana one. They did a demo with a banana where you can actually hold up a banana and tell if it's ripe or not or if it's too far gone. And, you know, the one thing that they didn't really cover is when a banana goes bad, you don't throw it away.

You make it into banana bread. That's the best time to have a banana. That is true. Banana bread. Right. They need to add a banana bread module. They do. Get on that, Brian. No coding required. Okay. I know how I'm spending my Christmas break. Not using Teachable Machine? Yep.

In the news.

Well, one of our favorite subjects here on our show is unintended consequences. And there is a big one for Brexit that I guess a lot of people didn't quite think about. That's not true, actually. I think we even covered it on the show. There is going to be a major issue for the music industry because a no-deal Brexit will make touring simply unviable for many artists because Government Guidelines for Cultural Heritage and Sporting Professionals Touring Europe is going to be expensive.

Very expensive. The document from the Department for Digital, Cultural, Media, and Sport indicates touring parties will face extra issues with documentation, travel, and the transport and sale of goods, merch, as they make their way to work into individual EU member states. So, instead of kind of the all-in before because they were part of the EU, now when smaller artists are traveling, they've just, you know, the dip, the beak is dipping in here, the beak is dipping in there for every single state and every single country that they go to,

and it's just going to be basically unviable unless you are a major music artist, which is going to have interesting repercussions on the UK music scene because basically they're going to be able to tour North America and the UK, and we'll see how much of the UK because Scotland seems to want out and Ireland is looking interesting.

It's going to be very, you know, very crazy because it's not even like tiny, tiny baby band artists. It's Imogene Heap is what I'd call a mid-level musician. She's very cool. She's very alternative, and she's announced she's canceling her entire upcoming European tour, which was due to start in November because of extreme uncertainties of traveling and cost after Brexit has happened.

Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I can imagine, like, if you tried to do a U.S. tour and every state wanted a piece when you crossed the border. Well, interestingly, they kind of do. There's different state taxes. Tour accountant is a very solid job if somebody wants to look into getting into that.

Oh, God, it sounds even worse than being a regular accountant. It is. But it's not as extreme because we're not talking, you know, visas and everything of that nature, which is what they're going to have to have. And carnies and things like that. Yeah, man. You know, so it's unintended consequences. It's going to ruin music.

Or not. Because the interesting thing that could happen here, because I was talking about this with a couple of musicians, is it could force, like, this really, like, honed scene again. Like, you know, the early British scenes in, like, the 80s and 90s, where basically Britain, British musicians didn't look outside.

They only toured the U.K. and created these amazing sounds and scenes. So we might get that again, which would be a plus, but not great for the financial situation for the musicians. I have an idea. Here. We're going to leverage the future, Brian. Yes. We are going to have Oculus-only tours.

Oh, dude, trust me. There are so many people working on this kind of stuff right now. It's insane. Oh, I know. The virtual tours. And I've tried them. I've logged in before to take a look at it. You know, call me old if you must. Get off my lawn, Grandpa Schillmeister. But it's not the same thing as attending a gig.

Oh, of course not. You don't get the bass, you know, whooping your shirt around. You don't get the, you know, the physicality of the music. You don't get the sweaty people spilling beer all over you. You miss all the fun stuff. All the fun stuff. I agree. I mean, you can see everything, and it sounds really good.

What's, I mean, I can't see what could go wrong there. Good point. Boy, you guys really can't play, can you? You sound nothing like your albums. Yeah, that'll probably happen. So, pivoting over to Facebook news, we've had some more information leak out this week.

The new report has revealed that Peter Thiel, whatever, our personal Emperor Palpatine in the tech world. That's what I was going to say. Thiel is pronounced Palpatine. You beat me to it, bastard. So he's a co-founder of PayPal as well as ardent supporter of Donald Trump.

He has been advising Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the controversial policy which gives prominent politicians carte blanche to spread lies on the social media platform. So he's basically said stick with it. Don't let those politicians have to be fact-checked. Who needs that? Man, it's more of a supervillain every day.

I know. He's really going for it. I expect him to come out to his next engagement wearing a mask. I think it'd be great. It would be good. And Uber's back in the news, especially in Germany, because a German court has banned Uber from Germany.

The regulations? Yes. You do not have a license to offer the passenger transport services on the rental cars. Out! Out! I love the Germans. I think this is ausgesangnet, personally. But, you know, poor Uber.

Can't catch a break. We'll see how long it lasts. But, you know, there's nothing crazy. All the countries in Europe are way ahead of this on us in terms of getting regulations on these sorts of things. And, you know, they want to make sure passengers are safe.

And it's a level playing field for all the different companies that are out there. And they're not putting up with Uber's tactics. They're saying nine. So, good. Yeah. Let's see how that plays out. As we know, Uber just likes to just keep going, no matter what. Well, yes. Let's talk about that a bit.

As we know, they've been having some problems with their passengers. But this doesn't even relate to that. This is purely internal. They have set up a $4.4 million fund for current and former employees who were sexually harassed at the company. Can you imagine your company ethos being so bad that you now need a $4.4 million fund to handle all the internal sexual harassment suits?

Oh, my God. Oh, it's so funny. I was talking to a friend last night. And I actually pulled out the line. I was doing that when Kalanick was date raping high school girls. For some reason, it just came out of my mouth. And, yeah.

Well, I'm glad that one didn't make the show. I got in trouble for a not rape joke. Oh, yes. Well, I guess it's now just made the show. Damn. Is this thing on? Shit. Merry Christmas, everybody. Yeah. So, as the New York Times article points out, Uber is still under investigation by other federal agencies as well due to various other reasons that led to the departure of former company chief Kalanick.

The Department of Justice is, of course, still looking into the ride-hailing firm's gray ball tool, which, you know, we haven't even talked about that in three years, but they're still being investigated for it. I love when people tell me Uber's a good company and it's a good thing. Yeah. You know what Uber didn't have? They didn't have blue balls because they did so much sexual harassment.

Ba-dum-ching. Hey-oh. Oh, God. How many kabocha beers did you have this morning? None. None. I'm on my third lapsang sushong tea. I tried a White Claw last night. What did you think?

It was good. Told you. There is nothing wrong with that drink. I don't care if it's been painted as the millennial lady's drink of choice. Who gives a shit? A black cherry White Claw with only 100 calories? Not bad. I tell you what, you know what I discovered yesterday? The White Claw Pure, which is just basically...

Is it spelled P-U-R with like an umlaut over the U? No, no umlaut. It's just P-U-R-E. It doesn't have any sugar from the flavoring. So it's even got less stuff in it. This is how old we are. We are literally drinking just club soda. I don't know what you're talking about. My weapon of choice for from like 20 to 35 was a vodka tonic anyways.

That's true. That kind of is the same thing. So... But these are only 100 calories, so I highly recommend them. They fly out of my house, yes. And the Truly version is pretty good, too. I like the Black Cherry Truly. That's also a good one. This is all I've moved to, you know?

I can't drink anything else anymore. I'm going to be sober by the time I'm 50 because I just can't drink anything anymore. You'll either be sober or buried in a can of White Claws. That'll be it. Just keep all the 12-pack wrappers and just make me a pyre of recycled cardboard and crappy cans.

All right. Let's get back on topic here. Back to tech stuff. I feel like I need to do these full disclosures, but everybody knows what I've invested in. Just a reminder, I am an investor at Netflix. So I checked out the numbers that they released the other day. And as I like this, they have a two-sentence breakdown of the entire report over at Vox.

Disney is chasing Netflix. So is Apple, AT&T, and Comcast. They're about to start. Have fun, says Netflix. We're busy chasing the entire world, and we're doing really well at it. Yeah, that's about it. They're kicking ass globally right now. Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Good for them. Good stuff. Yep.

I don't have any Netflix stock, but I sell all my stock to eat. Thank you, insurance. But I still keep my Netflix account. That's the one that I don't see ever going away. Yeah, they're pretty solid as long as they keep their original programming going. Who gives a crap about older shows?

Let Hulu snap all those up. You're never going to touch any Disney stuff, obviously. But the OC programming and the comedy is what keeps me going, and the food stuff. Love the food stuff. Yeah, the comedy and the food stuff is pretty much it. There's a new one that I'll talk about next time about something about fucking cats. I don't know.

I hope not, literally. Please, God. I don't know. I think it might be about Anonymous, but who knows? It's only a three-part miniseries. But yeah, that's on my queue for the break. Excellent. And another great article over at Vox this week about New York City.

Algorithms make decisions that it could impact nearly 9 million New Yorkers, but we don't actually know much about them. So, you know, we've talked about these black box algorithms. The thing is, I didn't know so many were in place at so many important levels, which is a little scary.

In 2017, the city council decided that public should have some insight into these black box calculations, which can influence anything from policing to where your kid goes to school and pass the law, creating a task force to investigate the city's so-called automated decision system systems, which they are calling ads.

Yes. And propose ideas for their regulations. Now, it's been two years, and the task... I cannot talk today. The task force... Hey, how many white calls have you had? I had like four last night, so it was good times. The task force largely failed to unearth much about how these systems actually work.

So, two years looking into it, no clue how these things work. They've provided some... The city provided some examples of the ADSs being used by agencies, five of them. They did not provide a full list of the automated decision systems known to be used, which is great. While some systems have been identified, it's very likely that there are a lot more in the city that the city is using the public isn't aware of, which I find almost criminal.

Don't you? Yeah. I don't know if it's criminal, but it's certainly troubling. Certainly troubling. So far, it's publicly known that such systems have been used to predict which landlords are likely to harass their tenants in their evaluation of teacher performance and in DNA analysis used by the criminal justice system.

So, that's what we know so far. That's about it. So, we talked a little bit while ago that the mayor, Bill de Blasio, established a novel algorithms management and policy officer role in an effort to kind of figure out what's going on with this sort of stuff, or at least, you know, obfuscate it for the public.

I can never, ever say that word. Obfuscation. I know. That's funny. But apparently, that position is not nearly enough and does not have a mandate or the power to reveal what systems are actually currently in use. So, again, it's a nothing position, really. This is really kind of like an off-the-rack minority report that they're running over there.

It kind of is. And you know that New York City isn't the only city. The fact that these things aren't public knowledge and it isn't a law that what systems are being used are public knowledge. And this isn't even getting into the fact that they are black box systems, which means the people putting it in place don't even know how they work.

The people making them don't even know how they work. How the fuck are the people using them going to know how they work? So, you know, the future is here and it's a little frightening. Find out how many are in use in your city. Let's play a game. Let's play a game. I'm betting there's not a lot in San Francisco, the place you'd think it would be, but I bet there's a few in Los Angeles.

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. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.

Security? Ha!

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 the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy. And here on Star Wars, ha!

It's a banner day! It is. I'm excited. Nothing gets me going like that music, I have to say. I was just chatting with my family the other night. We've been watching all the movies leading up to going to see The Rise of Skywalker, and so last night was The Last Jedi, which still sucks.

Yep. But, however, however, I will say this. Watching it did not make me as angry as it used to. It didn't annoy me. It didn't... Is this because you know there is a retcon coming in a few hours?

Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe. It could be that. I think it just could be time that, you know, that over time my grief has faded some. Perhaps 40-year-old men shouldn't be so upset about such things. Maybe.

Maybe. Thank you. Thank you. So what's the plan, guys? Who's seeing it when? I'm seeing it Sunday afternoon. Oh, so I'm the only person actually seeing it today. This is the... No, you're not. You're seeing it? I've already seen it. You got it off Sweden, didn't you?

Both of you can suck it. This is the first time in history where I, Jason DeFillippo, have seen the Star Wars movie before the nerds have. Oh, no. Two thoughts here. First, I'm assuming you didn't actually leave your house, so you must have gotten a Swedish copy of this.

And secondly, we know that any critique that you have is invalid because you were not a fan. Well, you should probably revise that statement because I actually loved it. That's not a good sign. Well, that's good to know. Oh, kiss my ass. Actually, the first half I screamed at the screen, but the second half, I will actually say I had to reach for the Kleenex box more than once.

Okay, okay. Let's... I want zero. Zero spoilers. I don't even want to know characters that were in it yet. Not going to tell you anything. Not going to tell you anything. You realize now that Brian is just going to have to hate this movie out of spite. Well, Star Wars crosses all the bounds. Misa wins.

Yeah, I'm actually relatively lucky by happenstance. Today is the last day for my kids' school before they go on break, and the school does a Christmas gift to parents called Parents' Night Out, where they keep the kids, let them watch a movie, feed them dinner, give them treats, and all of that.

So the wife and I were able to book a showing a little bit later this afternoon, so we're going to get to see it today. Very excited about that. Very nice. What kept me from seeing it sooner is that I am very particular about where I sit in a theater for a show as important to me as this one.

And also, when we go to these premieres, we usually buy around 10 tickets because we... Ah, yes. The Klan. Yeah, we go with a whole group of people. So that was the soonest that I could get that combination of good seats, lots of seats in a good theater.

So that's when we're going, Sunday afternoon. Excellent. So... Don't look at the internet between now and then. Oh my gosh, it's so much pressure right now. There's so many spoilers out there. I know. I know. So far, so good. So let's talk... Enough of that. Enough Star Wars. Actually, we have to talk about The Mandalorian.

Oh, okay. We can talk about that. Sure. Yes. Brian, you wanted to bring it up. So what did you think of the last episode? Well, just because I knew this was our last episode that we're doing of the year, I just thought I would mention that I had caught up with it. Speaking of the spoilers, of course, you could not stay away from articles saying that there's a massive lead-in and spoiler leading to the rise of Skywalker in the penultimate episode of The Mandalorian, which was, as far as I can tell, not having seen the movie yet, clickbait.

I thought it was still a great episode. I really do enjoy the show. I understand people's criticism saying this is predictable, but Star Wars is predictable. It is what it is. I'm really enjoying it. I thought this episode was great. It's definitely setting up a high-stakes season finale.

And the new Force power doesn't disturb you any? We know nothing about Yoda's creatures and what they can do. Okay. Yeah. I enjoy it. I'm having a good time. Looking forward to all of them. There hasn't been any of them that have disappointed me yet. Some have been better than others, but I think it's been remarkably strong throughout.

Yes, I think so, too. And true to Star Wars. Yes. It feels like Star Wars. More so than, as you probably have just really felt and realized, more so than the first three episodes that Lucas did. That did not feel like Star Wars at all. Right. Right. Yep.

So, am I the only one that actually really likes the Mandalorian theme? Yes. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought. From everything I've heard and read, I'm the only one that really likes it because I like Westerns and, you know. But, yeah, it does not feel Star Wars. That is the only thing that does not to me. Right.

I do not like the music. I'll say that. Yeah. That's the only thing. My criticism of it. Not a fan of the music. Doesn't take me out of it, but. I get a little good, bad, and the ugly bump from it. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Sure. A lot of times when I'm working, I'll listen to the 310 to Yuma soundtrack, which was pretty damn good, and it reminds me a lot of that.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I could see why they went that way stylistically. It just wouldn't have been my choice. Yeah. I'm on the same page. All right. Somebody shoot Favreau. Moving on. Let's get into some tech here. I've particularly enjoyed the journalism taking place this week because everybody is tying in the holidays to your complete lack of security and privacy, as we will see a number of these articles talking about.

This first one was over at the New York Times, and it's talking about the California Consumer Privacy Act. So they start with, as the holiday approaches, some families may be counting down to the days of Christmas with advent calendars. Many tech companies, on the other hand, are counting down the days they still have left to figure out how to comply with the sweeping new law, the California Consumer Privacy Act.

This law will take place on, or take effect on January 1st. And just a quick note here. Who comes up with these ideas of January 1st? Why would you choose that? All the poor sap programmers that are not going to be able to see the Star Wars movie or have a holiday because they're going to be scrambling to make, why not make it January 30th?

Give these people their fucking holidays. New rules, new year. It's the policy makers. Yeah, it's really stupid decisions. But that's when it comes into place, and the law is going to give Californians the right to see, delete, and stop the sale of their personal information that companies have compiled about them.

So they have, all these companies have to prepare for this if they're planning on even bothering to follow it. Look at you, Facebook. Yeah, so they have to restructure the way that they handle users' information. So lots of people are working right now. There's some specifics about this. Well, one can argue how specific it is because a lot of people seem to be throwing their hands up in the air saying we don't really understand what most of this stuff means.

But it will give individuals a new right to see the specific pieces of information companies have compiled about them. And I love these categories that tech companies come up with. This includes inferences and categorizations such as status-seeking singles, blue-collar comfort, and tight money, which is how these tech companies are classifying us.

Some questions are asked in this article. Does this mean Uber and Lyft will now be obliged to provide riders in California who request their personal data with a list of all the passenger ratings drivers give them after each ride? Will Amazon be required to give Prime customers detailed activity logs of their streaming video use? Will smart mattresses companies have to show sleepers moment-by-moment records of their tossing and turning?

We know when you've been sleeping. We know when you're awake. And the answer to all of that depends on what side you're on. Tech companies are saying no. And privacy advocates are saying yes. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

The other really interesting thing about this law is the definition of selling personal information because they are including, and smartly, I would say, sharing it for non-monetary compensation, meaning trading it for, say, other people's data. So we will have the right to opt in and out of that, whether they actually make money on transferring our data and sharing our data or not, which will have quite the impact on the digital advertising industry and various apps that share user data in exchange for targeted ads

because they now will have to offer Californians a way to opt out. All pretty interesting. Most of this means I'm expecting a shit ton of articles in January showing how you can get your data and the outrage at exactly how much and how refined and granulated all the data that these people are collecting on us really is.

I want my shadow profile from Google. Can I get that? That would be nice. Yeah. And, well, the interesting thing, too, is when we're talking, it is California-based. Are they talking California geolocated? Or if you just happen to be residing in California, do you have to show proof that you're a resident of California?

I don't know how all this is going to work. Is your data resident in California? Who knows? Who knows? Yeah. I just love the whole definition of selling thing. That reminds me of the old joke. How does a Microsoft programmer screw in a light bulb? He redefines the value of dark to one.

So you guys both being Californians, how do you suppose this is going to affect you, if at all? I am guessing that regardless of the January 1st deadline, we're not going to see anything until March at the earliest.

I think it's going to be incredibly convoluted, the processing by which we get our data, as we've already seen from companies that have tried to give us access to our data. It's hidden. It's buried. You need articles telling you the step-by-step process to get through it. I'm expecting once you make a request for your data, you're looking at another one to two months before you get anything.

Due to a high volume of requests, we cannot facilitate your request right now. I think it'll be the typical... Because we haven't written it yet. Yeah. I think it'll be the typical shit show that it always is with these tech companies. I think it's going to be a very drawn-out, convoluted process that'll get you probably only half the amount of data that they actually have on you.

And I'm assuming that deletion process or requests for exclusions are going to be even more difficult because it moves the companies to make them so. I think we should look at GDPR as an example here because nothing really happened with GDPR for months and months and months until the lawsuit started rolling out.

And then people really started to pay attention when real money was involved. So I think everybody is going to try and skirt the rules as best they can until somebody gets sued and loses. And then everybody's going to be making a mad scramble for your data. Yeah, I believe Jason's 100% right.

I think most of the tech companies are going to code this to their definition and understanding of the law, which will not be quite the same as the rest of ours. And they'll have to be sued to make any further changes. Yeah, I think you're right. I think right after GDPR, we saw this.

There was a lot of wait-and-see attitude of how much is this enforcement regime going to actually kick into gear? And I think we're going to see the same thing here. The people I've talked to, like Brian described, there's been two sides of it.

They're the folks on the business side who say that, you know, at the extreme, no business is going to be able to afford to stay in California because of the crushing weight of even more regulations. And then there are the other folks who say California is setting the standard for the rest of the nation and is a shining beacon of consumer privacy.

And not a tracking beacon. Right. Yeah, exactly. So we'll see. I think it's a good sign that you have somebody as big as Microsoft and as influential saying that they will 100% comply and are working on it.

That's always nice to see. They can afford to, of course. So the question is, particularly these companies with, you know, billion-dollar valuations but no actual cash flow and no income are going to be able to handle these sorts of things. Right.

Of course, they're just building what they should have built in the first place, so screw that. Exporters are our friend. Yeah. Yep. So speaking of the quality of journalism going on nowadays, the New York Times again posted a great article called 12 Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy.

Good name. Good name. Did you guys get a chance to peruse this one? Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, this was this week's bombshell article. Yeah. And like you said, again, the New York Times just crushing it when it comes to interactive design. Yeah, they really are.

They really have been good, yeah. Yeah, I like the scrolly bits, especially because, you know, they do it at the beginning, but they also pepper it through the middle, which I think is a really nicely done touch. They've actually paid money for web designers over there. Yeah, they don't shoot their wad up front.

You're right about that. No. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, and it's fun without being garish. Mm-hmm, yeah. So you hear that, Wired? You hear that tech crunch? Jesus, can't even select the title of an article without it jumping back to the homepage.

Thank you for your need for clicks, you bastards. So this is the Times going through basically a huge data set of 50 billion location pings from 12 million Americans between Washington, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

I'm sure that we're in there somewhere. Probably all three of us are in that data set somewhere. I'm sure. It's likely. But surely, Jason, the data was anonymized. Describing location data as anonymous is a completely false claim that has been debunked in multiple studies. Paul Ohm, a law professor and privacy researcher at Georgetown University Law Center, told us, really precise longitudinal geolocation information is absolutely impossible to anonymize.

Who would have thunk? DNA, he added, is probably the only thing that's harder to anonymize than precise geolocation information. Yet companies continue to claim that the data are anonymous. Yeah. So, as we've known for years, you cannot anonymize anybody.

Now, question here, for those of us in California, as the CCPA Act rolls out, will we be able to go to our cell phone providers and say, I would like all the data you have on me, please? We'll see. Perhaps.

Yeah. To me, the take-home of this article was that if someone knows where you live and they know where you work, they can track your every move. Yep. That's all it takes to be able to, because chances are you are the only person who lives where you live and works where you work.

It was going to those two places every day, Monday through Friday, and only one place, Saturday and Sunday. Right. So, regardless of how that data is anonymized, if you can align those two points of data with a device, and from there, you can track all that person's other movements.

There's Bob, my uncle. Yep. Exactly. That's a little terrifying. So, I think also, hopefully this will be a call to action. This will get the attention of some folks who have the ability to change some of these things.

I suspect we will probably see further reporting where people are releasing minute-by-minute maps of lawmakers, celebrities, you know, that sort of thing. And when we start seeing lawmakers who are visiting their mistresses and their drug dealers and their therapists and any other embarrassing places, their pharmacists, places that they don't want people knowing that they're going to, well, we might get some action, and but quick.

Yeah. And with the celebrities, there'll be lawsuits. So, it always seems to take the lawsuits, right? Yep. Yep. First time Senator Joe goes to the dick doctor, we're going to get new legislation. Right. Yep. Right. And continuing with the Christmas-themed journalism, over at Vox, there's a similar article where the headline alone is worth the price of admission.

Santa isn't the only one tracking you this holiday season. Stores are watching you, too. So, yeah, brick-and-mortar stores know as much about you and your shopping habits as the virtual ones do. Thanks to your mobile device, they're as good at tracking you, as NORAD is at tracking Santa. So, yeah, this goes through all...

Except they don't make it up like NORAD does. Yes, they don't. They actually have the data. They actually are tracking you. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what? Oh, I'm sorry, was that a Christmas spoiler? What are you talking about? Anyway. It's all real. I'm sorry. Just like the Jedi. I don't have very much right now, Jason.

Dave makes a good point. There's not a lot left for us, Jason. Don't ruin it all. I'm sorry. Yeah, so this goes through just the long laundry list of things we've talked about a thousand times on this show. Tracking beacons and all the various ways that people have to track us. Go ahead and install that app to get your 5% off, and they will now know everything about you.

And it leaves us with the conclusion that we always end up with on the show, which is terribly sad. That leaves us with the only guaranteed way to truly opt out of being tracked through your mobile device. Turn it off. But the problem is, when you turn it back on to make a call, you still ping. You're done.

Well, that's why you need a whole landline again. You don't turn it off, you smash it with a hammer. That's the only way to really get rid of it. I do want to make a pitch here for an app on iOS. It's called Guardian Firewall. And it is the real deal made by well-respected security researchers.

These folks worked really hard over a long period of time with Apple to even be allowed to have any sort of VPN on iOS. And it is a firewall. It encrypts your data. But it also takes away the bad guy's ability to track your location.

It automatically blocks location tracking within all these apps that are trying to send out your location information. Does it do Bluetooth beacon tracking or blocking? I don't believe so. I believe this is only through your internet connection.

Okay. It's limited in the things that it can do, but it's a start. A wonderful tagline that they put up on their site from Wired, an iPhone app that protects your privacy. For real this time. Right. Right. Right.

Yeah. I did a little bit of the testing of this when they were still getting it running. And everything I could see seems to indicate that it's the real deal. So if it's something you're concerned about, it's worth a look. Yeah. I'm definitely going to grab this. And if you really want to be safe when you're out and about shopping, have this on and turn off Bluetooth.

Yep. Yep. Well, speaking of Bluetooth, Amazon. They just had their, was it the re-invent conference in Las Vegas where I think 60,000 people went. That's a big conference for Amazon. That's surprising. Mostly delivery drivers bringing things to each other.

Yeah. So what they did was they put a Bluetooth tracker inside of the lanyards for the, you know, the badges. And if you did lose it, you'd have to pay another $150 to replace it, which is crazy that they're giving out $150 lanyards for your badges.

Which means that the data that they are collecting of you walking through that conference is actually fairly valuable to them. And they didn't really tell anybody when they were doing it. But they did say AWS has said that the data was anonymized, of course, and to help, it was just to help understand attendance at certain events.

Okay. Okay. Yep. So they just peppered their whole conference with beacons and just tracked everybody. Yeah. That's the need for these companies to know where we are at all times is getting increasingly insane.

I got, I got very upset a couple of weeks ago when I, I had to install the live nation app because for, you know, they're not going to give you, they're not going to give you printable tickets anymore. You need to use the app and you have to show the ticket at the door. And of course, you know, it's tracking is built in to it.

They want to know where you're at. So live nation is collecting a map of places I go to. Maybe they're looking at venues that I go to that aren't live nation owned venues. And they're collecting, gee, he went to like eight shows that were at this venue. We need to take over this venue next and all that sort of stuff.

What the fuck is going on? Yeah. What's even worse about the damn live nation app. I think we use that when we went to go see Hamilton in Chicago and we had six people in our party. One person was late. We were at the front of the line. All five of us.

We had to wait for that sixth person and we had to just basically watch the entire theater fill up. And this person came like right before curtain time, which means we couldn't get our snacks. We couldn't get our cocktails. We couldn't get our coats off. It was miserable. Yeah. It's like you all got to go in at the same time. Yeah.

In the old days, I bought six tickets. I had six paper tickets. You five can go in. And the last person, one person has to wait outside for them. Right. You know, that's how that's how we did it back in the days when we were savages. All these companies are taking away our ability to stay anonymous.

They really are. They're just getting rid of the old tech that really worked and replacing it with the new in the guise of security. And I mean, is it just that they're all they've been seduced by this notion? The dark side. Yes, they've been seduced by this notion that having all of this data is somehow going to give them a huge competitive advantage.

Yeah, I think so. It's collect as much as possible. We don't know what data is going to be worth to what what types of data will be worth it to us in the future. So we better have it all. Certainly, it makes sense for Live Nation to be tracking to see what venues you're going to because they could be looking at their next purchases.

You know, we don't have this venue yet. A lot of people that like to go to our Live Nation shows are going to this venue. We should look into doing something there. You know, there are there are, of course, valid business reasons for some of it. But it's just so sketchy that they don't tell. Well, they do tell us it's buried in the T's and C's that we're never going to find.

Right. You know, right. And speaking of location tracking, I also saw this article in 2016. The Donald Trump campaign released an app called America First, which had about one hundred and twenty thousand registered users. This was created by a company called You Campaign and the app function.

I'm thinking maybe F You Campaign should be the rebrand. Well, believe it or not, this this story isn't I'm not I'm not really anti Trump on this one. I'm anti these companies and what they're trying to get. That app function is a social network for Trump supporters and a tool, of course, for collecting data stored in a phone's address books, such as names, emails and home addresses of users and their contacts.

So they were contact mining, which is a no, no, as far as I'm concerned. But for 2020, they want to go one better and they want to do what all these other companies we were just talking about right now. The peers, the focus on this new app that they'll be releasing will be tracking users locations. Great.

So the article asses all of this typical or creepy, probably both using located days, location data to reach possible voters has quickly become the new normal for organizations on both sides of the political spectrum. Again, like we're saying, why are they collecting this?

I'm not sure if they even know, but they feel the need to have it. And it gives them some sort of some sort of advantage one way or another. But obviously, you know, once you're able to be tracked, they know if you're going to places like churches or state party meetings or even Planned Parenthood clinics. Right. I was going to say, yeah, abortion clinics.

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, they're just grabbing the grabbing hands. Grab all they can to quote the wise sage Depeche Mode. Wow. Well, we have a little bit of listener feedback here from Krusty Dog. Guys, I have one you probably want to discuss with Bittner.

My youngest son was driving home from high school and the sun glinting off his windshield as he was coming around the curve. He bounced off of a parked car. Obviously, the police came and started writing up the accident. My son waited with me in my car and eventually the police officer came out of his vehicle and gave us the accident report.

While doing so, the officer mentioned that he checked the ring doorbells in the neighborhood and was able to tell that my son was not speeding. Thought you guys would like to hear of this. While it is a good outcome, I still don't like the idea of being watched by those little snitch rings.

Snitches get stitches on the good side. No one was hurt and the cars can be repaired. The real downside is they got a photo of him wearing his furry suit showing up on the snitch ring. So thank you, Krusty Dog. Yeah, this is exactly the kind of stuff that I find really problematic about, you know, basically private surveillance networks that the police now have access to.

I mean, a good outcome here, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not good. Yeah. What if he was speeding? Right. What if he was speeding? Yeah. And how? Yeah. It's just makes my skin grow all thinking of this thing.

And I'm getting rid of mine. So don't worry, Brian. It's good. They're gone. That's OK. I'm not going over there until I have proof. Well, I should mention that you should you and Dave are both getting one for Christmas. Oh, terrific. I love how you send me all your technology.

You're too scared to put up anymore. That's pretty much it. You're my dumping ground for invasive technology. Hand me down for insecure devices. That's terrific. That's love. Well, speaking of getting rid of things, I'm doing it.

I'm shutting down my Facebook. And I figured I'd do it right now. Let's do it. I'm saddened by this. Drum roll. I've enjoyed seeing your updates, but I understand. And I appreciate. I look at it as an experiment. We'll see how long until you come back. Exactly.

Exactly. A year and a half. All right. I think Dave's just shooting to make it through the election. That is my goal is to make it through the election. But I have to tell you, guys, I'm not feeling I'm not feeling like I have a whole lot of strength coming at this. There's always Twitter.

And there's always LO. Yeah. You're still on Twitter. I'm looking at my account here. Jason, can you help me guide me through this? This could take about an hour and a half while Dave tries to figure out where to quit. Here's the only way to truly do it, Dave. It's so buried.

Here's the only way to truly do it. Grab a hammer. Take it to all devices plugged into electrical units. And then burn your house down. Oh, then salt the earth.

Oh, here we go. Delete your account and information. Permanently delete. I don't want to do that. Well, when you start doing that, it will give you the option of basically pausing your account. Ah, okay. And don't forget, they will send you multiple emails asking you if you'd like to come back to Facebook.

And if you click on any of them, your account will be restored. You won't be able to reactivate. But I don't want to, okay, this is, see, they're scaring me already, guys. I don't want to delete everything. I just want to put it on ice. I just want to ice it. Yeah. Oh, man.

All right. Let me, all right. Isn't there a suspend account option, Jason? I think there is. Did you not do that? No, I didn't do that. I went basically straightforward. So here we go. Hold on. Let's go to the Google bot. All right. If three nerds can't screw it. While you're looking this up, I'm going to delete it from my phone. So. All right.

You do that. There you go. This is some good pod here. Okay. So it's just deactivate, not delete. So to do that, let me know when you're ready, Dave. All right. I am ready. It's off of my phone. Okay. Yeah. Basically, you click on your settings. Click on the little down arrow at the top right of any Facebook page.

And you want to go to your Facebook and information. Got it. Yep. Deactivation and deletion. And then you can do deactivate account right there. Wait, wait, wait. So I go to settings. Yep. And then your Facebook information. Your Facebook information. Deactivation and deletion. Deactivation and deletion. It doesn't say deactivation and deletion.

Oh, this is where Facebook gets you. Even their tech support is always wrong because they keep changing things. I just walked through it right now. And I go to, it says deactivate or delete your Facebook account. And the first one is deactivating account. Deactivating your account can be temporary. Your profile will be disabled and your name and photos will be removed from most things you've shared.

You'll be able to continue to use Messenger. I do not have that option. Oh, I have both, Dave. I have deactivate or permanently delete account. See, Facebook is listening to your phone calls on your phone and they know that you are trying to deactivate your account.

Interesting that you do not have that. You're on your browser now, right? I am in Chrome on my browser. Yep. And the options. So I'm in your Facebook information. The options I have are access your information, download your information. Activity log, managing your information and delete your account and information.

Whoa. You have completely different options than I'm seeing. Same here. Huh. Huh. How fascinating. Well, this is how they get you. And I have noticed this actually a lot recently because like you, Dave, and like you, Jason, I tend to be for friends and family, the tech guy.

And I'm not usually not face to face. So I'll like be doing it on my screen and running through options. And they'll say, I don't have that option. Oh, that's so maddening. And that happens on many, many different sites and platforms. Huh. It is so maddening when that happens.

They heard that you wanted to leave, Dave. You shouldn't have posted it on Facebook. Oh, here we go. Here we go. I found it. I found it. So under general account settings, under manage account, I have modify your legacy contact settings or deactivate your account.

Ha ha. Interesting. Yeah. All right. So here we go. Deactivate your account. Deactivating your account will disable your profile and remove your name and photo from most things that you've shared on Facebook. Yep. That's the one. Here we go. All right. Pressing the button. Password. Oh, God. Here we go.

Go ahead and read it out loud. Here's your password. And then do you have this? Do you have two factor auth on? Because you're going to have to get your generator out. Shit. All right. Well, it says I've got the wrong password. All right. Here we go. You know what?

The crazy thing is I just. By the way, we are three seasoned technological and internet professionals. And this is. This should have been a 30 second process. Here we are. I figured it was going to be harder to find it, but it kind of was because it didn't exist.

Oh, my God. Forgotten your password. All right. Here we go. Send. Send password. Reset. Oh, my God. I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave. Are you trying to disable me, Dave? Tune in next week.

All right. So I got the code. All right. Here we go. Copy that. Fascinating pod. I know. I know. I know. All right. Here we go. Continue. New password. New password. Fuck you. Facebook. All right.

No, that's not going to be. I'm sorry. Did I use a naughty word? You did. But it's the holidays. We'll blame it on the eggnog. Yeah. All right. So we're going to generate a secure password here. Use password. At some point, I have to go see Star Wars. Just saying.

I can send it to you if you want. I figured. No, thanks. I want the theater. I could use some popcorn. I tell you what. It did sound good with my studio monitors cranked up here. I'm sure it did. You know, it did strike me that this is the last time we will hear that iconic Star Wars theme before a brand new movie.

Because this is the end of that trilogy of trilogies. All right. I'm in. I'm so angry right now. Imagine if you'd have just stayed. You could have been happy. I know. But imagine what this is like for.

You know what? Maybe other people wouldn't. Ah, here we go. Are you sure you want to deactivate your account? Yes. All right. Here we go. Fuck yes. Come on. All right. Now we're. Okay. Reason for leaving. Ha ha. Let them have it, Dave. Let her rip.

This could take a couple hours. All right. I don't find. Oh, I don't find Facebook useful. No. I don't feel safe on Facebook. I don't feel safe. Oh, they only allow you to choose. Oh, what? From their options of why you could be leaving. Damn it.

What the hell just happened? He just clicked on the permanently leave my account. Active and never let me disable it again button. Oh, my God. I have another. No, I don't have an. Oh, all right. Other. All right. Here we go. You must pay five libras to deactivate your account.

Oh, my God. Please explain further. All right. Now. While you've decided to deactivate your Facebook account, we've, for your courtesy, opened up an Instagram account for you. Oh, my God. Guys. Funny thing is, when I just logged in, it asked me to link my Instagram account.

All right. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to just say I don't feel safe on. Facebook. All right. There we go. We're sorry about that. We want you to feel supported here. If you'd like to stay on Facebook, we have some options that may help. No. All right. Here we go. Opt out of receiving future emails from Facebook.

Yes. Keep using Messenger. Nope. And all right. Here's the beautiful blue button. Deactivate and click. System failure, Dave. Are you sure you want to deactivate your account? Deactivating your account will disable your problem.

Yes. Deactivate now. Click. Have you thought about this enough, Dave? Your account has been deactivated. To reactivate your account, log in using your old login email and password. You will then be able to use the site as before.

We hope you come back soon. All right. Done and done. Merry Christmas. God. I am feeling. Yeah. Guys, I'm feeling. I have to say I'm feeling a little anxiety over this. That's okay. Don't worry. They're still tracking you from using beacons all over the web.

They're still getting your data. Yeah. Yeah. Well done. Congratulations. Thank you. I shall tweet you on Sunday about Star Wars. Well, I'm still on Twitter, so you can see me there. Yeah.

At Vittner. No. Since I'm not going to be talking to anybody on Facebook for a while. All right. But listen, I'm counting on you guys to keep up the peer pressure, right? Yep. To keep me at this through the election at least. Or, you know, the new year. Or next week.

Yeah. Whatever. Well, yeah. November 8th is the target, so we'll see. Stay on target. Stay on target. Stay on target. All right, guys. Wish you luck. Have a happy holiday, a Facebook-less holiday.

I hope you enjoy it. All right. We'll talk Star Wars when we're back after the new year. All right. Thank you. See you soon. See you soon.

Ups and doodads. Well, Betamax and VHS are getting... No, hold on a second. That was news from 30 years ago. Apple, Amazon, and Google are uniting to help create a universal smart home standard. Jesus fucking Christ. It's about time.

I know. It is about time. You know, we've already got the products, so we'll see if it's retroactive. I doubt it. But they've created something called the Connected Home Over IP, which they're not calling CHOP for some reason. CHOIP! CHOIP!

CHOIP! A new working group managed by the Zigbee Alliance, which aims to develop a new open smart home connectivity standard based on internet protocols. So that's good. In theory, this will mean that stuff will just work together, and it'll be a boon for developers as well, because there'll be a universal standard streamlined product development procedure, and it'll reduce costs by giving them a blueprint for their products.

So that's good. Other companies involved include IKEA, Samsung, SmartThings, and Signify, which is the new name for Philips Lighting. They're all on board to help develop the royalty-free connected standards. Okay, we can expect version one of this standard in 2032.

Shockingly, the group has not revealed any roadmaps or timelines. I just did for you. 2032, we'll get V1. Yeah, I don't think we're going to be getting this anytime soon, but it is a step in the right direction. It is good that they are self-policing and self-regulating this to come up with a standard, so we're not stuck with a thousand kludges.

You know why? Because now you can hack all of the devices at once. That's true. Brick-a-brick. This one's done the rounds, but it does deserve mention because it's very funny. The U.S. Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free trade partner, despite it being a fictional country.

This is pretty good, though. You've got to admit. It is. A USDA spokesperson said the kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by accident during a staff test. So somebody had a sense of humor over there. The department's online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows.

Sticking in the Ds there. So, Wakanda forever. Yeah, you know that this is probably some employee that got canned. I don't think anybody got canned over this. No, no, no. I don't think he got canned. I think he was on his way out the door, and he's like, release Operation Wakanda.

He got his Christmas pink slip, as we always talk about. Exactly. Instead of the Black Panther, he got the Pink Panther. Over at Patreon, Dan is a new supporter, and he says, Hey, guys, love the show. I finally have a big boy job after college, so I decided to become a patron to show my support since I've been listening to you guys for over a year now.

I was thinking about something recently, and I wanted to see what you guys thought about it. You both talk a lot about these Silicon Valley tech companies and startups getting severely overvalued by investors in the public. During the 2000s and the dot-com bubble, I was too young to know what was going on, but from what I heard, it seems to be a very similar situation.

Given this and the world's growing dependence on tech companies and services like Uber and Lyft, do you think that we are going to see history repeat itself? Oh, yes. Yes. You've only been listening to us for over a year now, but our tagline for the first three years of the show was, This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

This is exactly the same. It really is. It's overvaluations with nothing really behind the curtain. You know, what was one of the big ones from back then? Pets.com. Pets.com. There you go. That was nothing. Pets.com was nothing, and for some reason, it was like billions of dollars of evaluations.

Uber is an app, and apparently a sexual harassment farm, and billions of dollars of valuations. Yeah, Uber is the new Pets.com. Yes. And there was Home Grocer back then that subsumed. Actually, you know, Home Grocer was my favorite, but Webvan bought them, which pissed me off because I thought Webvan was a terrible name.

Home Grocer was a way better name. Yes. My favorite was Cosmo, though. Oh, Cosmo. Ice cream and porn at three in the morning was the best thing ever. Yep. Yep. Cosmo was basically the forerunner of, uh, what's, uh, what's those service where you just can get anything you want? Deliveroo! Or any of those, yeah, basically.

Yeah, exactly. So Cosmo beat them to it and went away. I actually named a cat after Cosmo because I loved it so much. I always thought it was just, like, for the Cosmos. Oh, Cosmopolitan. I don't know. I just, I... No, I mean, I thought you did it because of that, not because of this.

Oh, no. It was, it was even spelled K-O-Z-M-O. Oh, Christ. Yeah. All right. Well, thank God we didn't have Instagram then. I would have known how you spelled it and been annoyed. Okay. Well, I did. That's when I was inventing Moblogging with everybody else. And if you'd have, you know what the problem was, I think, that I was using my sidekick, my dangerous sidekick.

Oh, God, I miss that phone. I know. I do, too. And you couldn't really put in any text because I would just post the photo to an email address that would then be picked up by a Perl script and then reformatted and posted to my website. That's how we used to do it. We all wrote those programs. Yep.

Over at PayPal, we have got donations from Ryan, Andrew, Tom, and Matthew, who says, Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. Back at you, Matthew. And we also got a donation from Bernard, who writes in, Love the show and your senses of humor. Do have one question, though. I have been using Brave for over six months now.

I'd love it. I realize there might be some missing functionality that doesn't make it useful for you guys to do your own show. But how do you feel about as a browser for non-podcasters? It seems like whenever you mention it there is the thought that, on the whole, the browser stinks because it doesn't work for podcasting. I would agree that the syncing isn't ideal, but honestly, the reduction in tracking and targeted advertising more than makes up for this downfall.

Not to mention that whenever I use a more traditional browser, such as Chrome, on someone else's computer, I am shocked at how much crap Brave has been suppressing without me realizing it. Rant over. Keep doing what you're doing. We don't use Brave because it's basically Chrome and because they've added stuff on top of it that basically pings our CPUs anytime we run it.

Yeah, that's the only problem with Brave is the fact that it slams your CPU to 100% about once every minute or two, and it takes a while for your computer to recover. Otherwise, we'd probably still be using it. Yep. But, you know, they're all the same now. They're all based on Chromium, and even Opera is based on, Vivaldi's based on it.

So I'm probably going to end up moving over to Vivaldi for the break and trying it out because it does seem faster than Opera, and there's that whole Chinese ownership issue. The pesky Chinese, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we have to do that. But everything uses, you know, Chrome extensions nowadays.

So they're all kind of the same, and you can get the same functionality out of all of them. The one that I will just never use unless I have to is Chrome because Chrome is so damn bloated, and it's just a memory hog. Yep. Over at GOG.show, Ralph writes in, love your podcast. Thanks.

Thought this article might be of interest to you and your audience. I learned a lot from it. Stay grumpy. And it's, what does your car know about you? We hacked a Chevy to find out. This is over at the Washington Post, and the link will be in the show notes. Brian, did you get a chance to read this one? I did not. Me neither.

So link is in the show notes at GOG.show slash 402. Yeah. You know, this is like the last week of school for us kids. This is our last show of the year, and we're over it. It's been a long, long month.

So sorry about that. I guess there's another way to review our show, something called Podchaser. Are you familiar with that, Jason? Oh, there's Podchaser. There's a bunch of places you can review the shows nowadays. Yes. Well, we got a review over there from Xavier. Authentic raw tech, social impact and security, sci-fi and pop culture driven, and most of all, grumpy.

I love this show, and it was a five-star rating. So thank you for rating us on Podchaser. Yes. Thank you, Xavier Fernandez. We appreciate it. I think we got a couple other reviews over there this week because it was some like pod review thing like Movember or NaNoWriMo.

It was like podo review-o, whatever somebody called it. But nobody figured out that it was actually happening until like the 15th of the month. So everybody's like, eh, well, it's already started. I'm not going to bother. But some people have. Nice. Over at iTunes from Paul Strick in the UK. He says, hell yeah.

What can I say? I'm over 40, an engineer, and grumpy as hell. Listening to these guys is like listening to like-minded geniuses. Health warning. These grumps may contain nuts. Well, thank you very much for that five-star, Paul. Paul Strick actually sends us a ton of posts and messages on Facebook.

Paul, we really do appreciate it. But the Facebook UI for pages is so clusterfucky. I never can see anything, and I can't comment on anything. They don't let you make an easy star on something when somebody's posted. Facebook sucks. But thank you.

Thank you for all the interactions there. Twitter.com slash GOG podcast or podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Or use the form at GOG.show. Turns out that works now. So we're all good there. Yeah, that does work. It's very nice. Yep. Closing shout outs.

I have a closing shout out to Chris Voss, one of the coolest guys I've ever met doing podcasting. He's an ex-FBI negotiator for hostages. He's a major dude. And he finally released his first master class on negotiations, and it's quite good. I highly recommend everybody go check it out.

Or check out his book, Never Split the Difference. Also, a fantastic read if you want to learn how to manipulate people. It's awesome. All right, everybody. That's a wrap for us for 2019. I can't believe it's going to be 2020. We are not doing any more shows this year because it is holiday time.

It is break time. It is travel time. It is eggnog time. Everybody have a great and safe break. Enjoy yourselves. And we will be back early January 2020. And I'm sure nothing will have changed or gotten better. Yeah. The other reason, too, is there's just really nothing happening in the news between now and then.

And we're going to be petitioning White Claw to make an eggnog version of their goodies. But yeah, it's been a great year. So thank you, everybody, for listening. And over this holiday season, you're going to be hanging around with family and friends. So tell them about the show. Let's get some more people joining us on this quest to be grumpy.

We'd really appreciate it. And a final shout out to the clan over at Clash Royale. We've been having a good year. We're coming up on three years almost of that thing. Jesus. Time is flying. Still going strong. Yeah, man. I told you. Things like that we thought were long ago were yesterday and things we thought were yesterday were long ago.

Time is weird. Time is weird. 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 gog.show slash donate. And there you can find links to Patreon and PayPal.

You made the page. No, I didn't. But by the time this airs, it will. Because now I've got a goal. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. And your support really does keep us going, folks. We really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 402.

From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and stay happy this holiday season, I've got to actually say. Skip the grump. Your family's going to make you grumpy already. Let your heart grow three sizes this season.

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