443: Farewell Utopia

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Normally 8am recording times are kind of ideal for us, but there was a bit of news that broke before I woke up. Take your pick. Take your pick. Yeah, haven't really caught up on all this. We'll see if you were up a bit before me, Jason.

So there's not enough coffee in the world right now to process everything that I need to process. I'll give you a two-second rundown here. Here's what's happened. 100,000 people are dead. We're in the middle of a pandemic. Nobody seems to care because they're protesting because they can't get a mani and a pedi and a haircut.

But in the meantime, there are race wars starting all across the country. And now the president of the United States, who is supposed to be our glorious leader and giving everybody guidance, decided to get in a fight with a website. So that brings you up to speed. Okay. Well, there we are. Let's start with a bit of frivolity first before we get into all of that.

Let's please do it. Let's please do it. In slightly happier times, i.e. 24 hours ago, I was still thinking about the Star Trek Voyager reunion that took place on the hashtag Stars in the House YouTube channel. I don't know if you've watched this yet, Jason. I have not. I have not watched this one yet.

It's not bad. The hosts... Okay, so it's a little bit too much Broadway for a sci-fi reunion show. The hosts are very into the Broadway scene. I don't know too much about Broadway or them. Apparently, a lot of the people that were on Star Trek Voyager have spent quite a lot of time performing in Broadway.

So it was more of a Broadway, hey, we all love Broadway, we're Broadway people, than a sci-fi thing. Josh Gad with the Goonies, that was awesome. He was obviously a huge fan. I'm not sure if these hosts on the show have ever even watched an episode of Star Trek.

They seemed quite confused by all the terminology. But still, it was nice to see the cast all together talking amongst themselves, at least briefly, about Star Trek before talking more about Broadway things. And it was really good to watch Jerry and Kate on screen together and not obviously hate each other.

So that was kind of nice. All right. I will probably not check it out. That doesn't sound like it. That was not very much a glowing review. It wasn't fantastic. And it's not the only time they've done it. They just got off a cruise together. I'm sure there are better cast reunions, panels that are from various Star Trek conventions that have been up there.

So I would watch that over this. The one bit of news that did come out of this is Jerry Ryan gave us a bit of an update on Picard, which is there is no update. They were scheduled to have started working on it. But obviously, sets haven't even been built because the people that get together to build sets can't.

So it's on holding pattern. Okay. All right. Now, speaking of Josh Gad, Josh Gad is back and he is doing the Lord's work. The Lord of the Rings, actually, to be precise. We got a trailer for a reunion show that dropped, which is actually quite amusing.

And this weekend, as of Sunday, the full episode will be coming out. So much like he did with the Goonies, he has gotten the Lord of the Rings cast back together. Not all of them. Well, we don't really know, but at least in the trailer, we had Sean Astin, Elijah Wood, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Orlando Bloom, and Sir Ian McKellen dropping in to talk and chat.

And it gave me a good smile, again, 24 hours ago when the world was different. I was really looking forward to this. Now it kind of seems a bit silly. No, you need silly. You need silly. That's true. I watched the trailer and I was there. I had just a grin ear to ear.

So this one, this one I will definitely watch. But yeah, Gandalf popping in at the end was made my day. Yes. And we were all very excited on our last episode because the SpaceX first crewed mission to the ISS was being was about to take off.

But at roughly T minus 16 minutes, they had to scrub the launch because of weather that would have carried astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on a 19 hour trip to the International Space Station. They are going to shoot for the 30th or 31st as potential backup days to retry.

So we will be checking that out this weekend, along with Lord of the Rings and dodging rubber bullets. I just thought it was funny because sending Bob and Doug into space, eh? I had not realized that it was Bob and Doug that were being sent. Unfortunately, they didn't take off, eh? Yeah, eh?

Yeah. I got that movie on Blu-ray. I have to watch that again. Strange Brew was quite excellent. Classic. Yeah, definitely. And yeah, because right now we're supposed to be celebrating man's, I'm sorry, not man's return to space. We've been going up with the Americans return to space from our own soil.

But nope, nope. Instead, we got what we got. So I guess hopefully tomorrow will bring better news. And what's interesting, SpaceX also got permission from the FAA to fly its Starship, that big silver thing that they're building down in Texas that doesn't look like it should ever fly.

Right. They're going to start doing hop tests with it because it's a reusable spaceship. That would be nice. Yeah, they've got one Raptor engine in it, so they're going to do a short hop test. And if that works, then they're going to slap in some more and see what they can do. But it's only going to be up to 500 feet max.

So a little farther than my drone can fly. So we'll see how that goes. But speaking of space, Space Force is out on Netflix today as we record this on Friday. So are you going to check it out? I am going to check it out. I made the mistake of at least scanning a couple review headlines and not looking too promising.

Yeah, you shouldn't have done that. Yeah, I shouldn't have done that. Well, we do have a backup plan because somebody feed Phil. Season three is out if you need to smile. Very excited about that. I'm very, very happy. My wife actually pointed out, what are they going to do? Because I can't remember. Is it his mother or father that passed away recently?

Oh, I didn't know. Yeah, one of his parents had passed away recently. But judging from the trailer, this was all shot before that. So we'll still get those wonderful, wonderful end shots of him talking to his parents. Part of my favorite part of the show. Yeah, it's pretty funny. But I think it's just going to make me sad because it's going to be a bunch of places you can't go to eat.

Well, that's true. But we have to live vicariously through the past. Yes, we do. And this is interesting. And it's a little bit of follow up on our good old friends at Magic Leap. Well, the CEO is out.

Ronnie Abovitz is out. That's going to happen when your company has produced nothing but vaporware. Yeah, yep. And I love this. This is the staff memo. It says, we have closed significant new funding and have very positive momentum towards closing key strategic enterprise partnerships.

So nothing. That's a big nothing. Yeah, they brought in some more money and said, yeah, okay, thanks. Thanks for the cash. You're out. Yeah. That's it. They're trying to pivot, obviously, with whatever tech that they do have. Yeah. Which doesn't seem to be much. Which doesn't seem to be much.

Nope. In the news. So the first news article in here, which seems quaint and from a previous time already, was the very first mention that Twitter had labeled Trump's tweets with a fact check for the first time.

Now, you and I had immediately started texting each other about this and trying to figure out if it was a nothing burger or not. And my thought at the time was this can go either way. Mm-hmm. They label him once. Don't do it again. And actually, that makes the situation worse because it's much like trying to impeach him.

And now he feels he can do whatever he wants. And that would be the way that it could go on Twitter. Or alternatively, if you do it, you have to keep doing it. And that seems to be what Jack has picked. Yeah. I was, you know, I'm like, has Jack grown a set?

It appears so. That's what I was really trying to figure out. Yeah. Because, you know, he put the first shot across the bow. And since the, you know, the first Trump fact check label went up, they have put up a couple hundred other fact check labels on other tweets from other people, which is good because that's what you have to do.

Now, on the plus side, if you happen to be on Twitter and you are not Donald Trump, game on. Because the sheer amount of fact checkers that they possibly have employed all have to be going through all of Trump's tweets now. Yeah. I'm wondering if they're going to retroactively go fix those. I doubt it. I tend to doubt it.

Yeah. But, you know, okay. So that was the first shot across the bow. Yes. Then we get the executive order. Yes. Which is based on an old draft that they had going around. And this comes back to, oh, God, our good old friend, Safe Harbor.

And, you know, we've talked about that on the show. A million times by now. And to be honest, I somewhat agree with the, at least looking at Safe Harbor and modifying it because it has allowed platforms to get away with, I would say murder.

But we actually need to discuss murder in a real sense in a couple of minutes here. So it's enabled, you know, platforms to use the, we're just a platform excuse for far too long. However, just abolishing it or getting rid of it or whatever the hell this executive order is supposed to do, which by all rights, every single lawyer in the world has said this executive order is ultimately meaningless.

And it's just going to start off a bunch of lawsuits and it will eventually get shot down because that's not what you do to private companies to try to regulate them. So somewhat meaningless, but obviously somebody got his panties in a bunch and had to do something because he lost, he got a little egg on his face. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's what's so ridiculous about this. I'm like, we have bigger problems than a website, dude. And I love that he's bitching about it on the platform that he's like, come on. Yes. The platform that is censoring him is allowing him to bitch about it. Now let's discuss what the meaning of censoring is. Censoring is not putting a label on something and allowing it to continue to be there.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So that leads us to this morning. Let's talk about this morning. Let's talk about what made my eyes pop out of my head when I looked at my phone first thing before having any coffee. Yeah.

Good old, good old root and toot and Trump there. I keep getting him confused with Putin nowadays. Well, you know, you say tomato, I say tomato. Okay. So, yes, the now I'm sure famous by the time this show comes out in about 14 hours, Twitter has finally put on labels saying that this tweet violates our terms of service.

So, yes, it violated Twitter's rules about glorifying violence. Yes. However, Twitter has determined. Yeah. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the tweet to remain accessible. So you have to click through it. Right.

Yeah. Well, this is what we've wanted Jack to do for a long time. And he has stepped up and done it. Now, just in case you have no idea what we're talking about. Donald Trump had tweeted basically that looting will lead to shooting. So straight out threatening American life.

It's an interesting – I don't want to get too off on the Trump tangent. We should stick with the technology aspect of this. Let's hang with the Twitter angle. For one second, I have seen a lot of crazy campaign ideas before. The campaign idea that Trump seems to be following with, which is earlier in the week, cheering on the loss of American jobs just because he doesn't like the Atlantic and now threatening to kill potential voters.

I've never seen a campaign promise quite like this before. It's an interesting tactic to take. It is. It is. So with this new tactic from Twitter, it's going to be interesting how Jack handles it going forward. And if he does go back and fix some of the old tweets because there you need a lot of people to go fix some of those old tweets.

I'm guessing it's just going to be going forward. But the fact is now that the gauntlet has been thrown down and we're going to see what's going to happen here. Yeah. This is flat out going to be an interesting – it's a war.

I mean Twitter cannot back away from this now. They have doubled down and they are going to apply the rules. Well, not really apply the rules because as we've always said, if any of us did any of this, we would actually be banned and kicked off Twitter. But they are going with the this is public interest sort of stuff.

But they will have to apply labels and warnings to all of his tweets moving forward. There's no avoiding it now. And yes, I even checked – they put that same label on the tweets at White House because I guess – Not much of a difference.

The White House retweeted it on the White House account, the official White House government-run account. Well, I don't know if you caught the other thing that the official White House government account had tweeted out today. But it was a whiny – again, an interesting tactic. It was a whiny thing about one of the Khomeini's.

Like they had retweeted one of the Khomeini's tweets that also incited violence that didn't get a label. And basically, I guess that approach is this dictator is doing it. Why won't you let me? Which is, again, another interesting approach for an American president to be taking.

It's an interesting approach for a five-year-old to take. Yes. Actually, that's quite funny. But Joey got a lollipop. I have been – pre-COVID-19, I've been spending an awful lot of time trying to instill in my child that just because someone else does something doesn't mean you can. Exactly.

So now what I'm really fascinated by here is how Zuck's going to handle this because he went on Fox News. I watched a 20-minute interview with him on Fox News talking about how he thinks that Facebook should be – shouldn't be the arbiter of truth. They shouldn't fact-check or anything like that and let the public deal with it themselves.

It says the guy who has an algorithm that determines exactly what you can see, when, and where. It's going to be interesting because there is a lot of pressure on Zuckerberg now because Twitter has stepped up his social media to do this. And Zuckerberg is kind of looking like a bit of an ass because he's going to apparently refuse to do it.

Now, the two arguments also being made are, one, Facebook is irrelevant compared to Twitter, which I don't necessarily agree with. When it comes to Donald, it is because Donald doesn't really use the Facebook. Yes, but there are plenty of forces behind working there. And I have to mention that the funniest thing I saw all day yesterday, and I reposted this, this was thanks to Dr. David Teeter, who brought it to my attention.

And it was posted originally by chaser.com.au. So, well done, Australians. Yes. Social media should not fact-check posts, says child molester Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. I highly recommend everybody repost that on Facebook because, yeah, there you go. I retweeted that on Twitter.

Well, see, you do that on Twitter, and you're breaking the terms of service, and they are going to maybe label your post. I think I actually have been shadow banned for a while because all my tweets for a while, I'm getting, you know, 10, 20 replies, 30 replies. And then I posted a couple things, and it went down to almost nothing because I was complaining about DirecTV, and I had to spend two and a half hours on the phone to get to their quote-unquote automated system, which wasn't automated.

It was spending 90 minutes on hold and then getting told that, oh, the system that does this is down. Thank you so much, DirecTV. Anyway, moving on. Well, now, what's brought about a lot of the ire here are certainly what some of the defenses are for Trump and not being labeled and things like that is that for years now, basically since Trump has been in office,

conservatives have been crying foul and saying that they are being – there is an anti-conservative bias in social media. Now, this is their marching orders. This is part of their talking points. This is something that they say all the time. And basically, the very day that this all started, a U.S. appeals court in Washington, D.C. has dismissed a lawsuit accusing top tech companies of silencing conservative voices.

This was filed in 2018 by the nonprofit Freedom Watch with a side of Freedom Fries. And right-wing gadfly Laura Loomer, the suit accused Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google of stifling First Amendment rights. As you can imagine, it is somewhat unclear about how Apple would be involved in that as they have no social media of any note.

But, you know, throw them into the lawsuit as well because they're big tech. And, yeah, the government, the district judge, Trevor McFadden, basically said – threw this out and said, nope, not happening. They failed to back up any claim that the companies were state actors involved with the regulation of free speech, basically just saying they're platforms.

So they can do what they want. And, frankly, we don't see it either. And it is worth pointing out that this legal ruling comes after a number of well-documented studies of social media that have already proven that there is no anti-conservative bias whatsoever. So I've included a link in our notes.

The myth of social media anti-conservative bias refuses to die. This is by the – sorry, I can't remember quite the name of the organization here. The Columbia Journalism Review – so that sounds pretty legit to me – despite an almost total lack of evidence to support the theory, alt-right groups and mainstream conservatives alike, including the ones that currently occupy the White House, continue to promote the idea that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are somehow biased against them.

We have found this to be not true. It just reminds me of the other thing that finally – you know, with all this stuff going on, it's dawned on me that we haven't heard in a long time that Facebook's listening to me and sending me ads. Because that refused to die for a long time. Why won't this one just go along with that one?

Oh, wait. Yeah. Never mind. Yeah. I know why. Now to kind of transition back to our normal bread and butter, i.e. morons in the tech world. We'll move away from the Twitter fight for now. Wasn't that exactly what we were just talking about? That's a good point. Okay. Non-politically charged morons.

Non-political morons in the tech world. The ones that keep our numbers up instead of going down, Jason. Got it. Yeah. So this is a great story that I found. And I really – it belongs in Moron of the Week here. The business models that come out of Silicon Valley are just beyond me.

Emmanuel Bamfo is the co-founder and CEO of Globe, a year-old six-person startup that connects customers with rooms in people's mostly urban homes. Think Airbnb, except that Globe isn't for users looking for days or months-long stays, but instead for a day break.

Yes, it's a platform and a company that will put you in somebody else's room, spare room in their house for a couple hours. Oh, so they should have just called this app Notel Motel. Right. Because you know that that's what it's going to be used for. Hookups. So, get this, again, because this is just the way things work.

Globe evolved from an earlier company called Recharge that tried convincing hotels to let its customers rent their rooms by the hours and even minute. Your Notel Motel. And had raised $10 million in funding for that concept. Okay, you know what?

Whoever gave them $10 million deserves to lose it because they're just stupid. Now, obviously, hotels pushed back on this idea even pre-COVID-19 because the idea of cleaning their rooms so frequently would basically not make any financial sense for them. So, they went into the popular accelerator program Y Combinator and came up with the brilliant pivot of instead of using hotels, let's just use people's houses.

Oh, God. Now, against all odds, they have been growing slow but steady with more than 10,000 hosts around the world signing up to rent out rooms in their homes, mostly serial killers, one would imagine. Yes. And then came COVID-19. So, obviously, this idea kind of went away, sort of, because people continued to actually do it a very small amount.

Instead of giving up, they began to position Globe as a platform for people needing escape from home quarantines. Escaping from quarantine. Quarantines. Is their business model now. This shit just writes itself. You cannot make this shit up. So, they say Globe can help individuals find that quiet place to make calls away from roommates and children and infecting other people.

It offers a reprieve from loved ones for a much-needed hour or two. It can even help those in desperate straits to find better bandwidth. Really? During a pandemic? So, they're mostly, of course, San Fran-based, and San Francisco sent them a letter last week, noting that the company's hourly rental business appears to violate the shelter-in-place order.

You think? Yep. Yeah. So, it said, basically, you've got to stop doing this, and they are prepared to take action. And it has warned Globe that if it doesn't immediately halt its business, the startup and its founders risk fine imprisonment or both pursuant to San Francisco Administrative Code Section 7.17B and California Penal Code Section 148.

So, basically, it's saying, you are a menace to public health. Your business model breaks the rules that we have set down, and we will fine you and maybe even put you in jail. So, this is somewhat unsurprising, because, you know, laws. And there you go.

And Banfo, who says he was shocked by the city's letter, is engaging in a game of chicken. He says that while Globe works on an official response, one that it will send by Tuesday of this coming week, the company is continuing to make its service available. He says that Globe doesn't want to focus on regulations, fines, and threats of jail time.

We want, instead, to elevate this discourse around solutions. You don't want to focus on the laws that have shut you down, and you want to elevate the discourse while continuing to run your illegal company. Somebody has been drinking too much Uber Kool-Aid, because...

This is the fuck it, we're going to do what we want response. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that this... Even Uber wouldn't have tried to fight this one. No. So, good luck with that, Globe. I hope the city shuts you down. Yes, and Instagram is in the news, because they're finally going to start sharing revenue with creators for the first time.

Sort of. Sort of. Sort of. Not kind of weird, in a sort of weird way. Yes. Yes. Yeah, next week, they're going to start showing ads on IGTV for only about 200 approved English-speaking creator partners. And the ads are just going to be from a handful of partners.

And all the videos are going to be checked by Human Reviews. So, everything has to go through that. And they hope in the future that they will be able to have a combination of human and software reviewing so that they can, you know, release the product in a wider way.

And they're only going to be sharing 55% with creators. Okay. Which they said is industry standard. And that's what you get if you're on Facebook Watch, which nobody watched. And I don't think that many people watch IGTV either. I don't think that many people watch IGTV. I mean, you know, we're old.

Who knows? But I don't think IGTV's reach is all that great. The thing I found interesting about this, and I do like this, but the human reviewing thing probably won't stick around for too long. It's a good thing. I like it. And this is an interesting and smart way to get around the whole political ads thing because they're basically not going to do any political ads, and they're going to review everything, and they have select ad partners.

It's great, but it's obviously not sustainable. They want to open this up to everything to make all the monies. Right. I mean, you have to have a broad platform if it's really going to work, and you have to open it up to everybody to make money on it. But, you know, it's a test case. Yeah. It's a test case to see if they can do it and if people are going to be willing to actually – or, I mean, if the ads even work on Instagram.

Yeah. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, because you can advertise on Instagram now. All that is, you know, you can go – I've seen so many dicks in ads on Instagram. It's ridiculous, as it would say. Really? What are you looking at to get that in your algorithm? Hell if I know, man.

Instagram's supposed to be a clean platform, but you get – every now and again, you get a bunch of boner pills or penis extensions in there. Hold on a second. What? Let me just talk for a second about the concept that Instagram is supposed to be a clean platform when 99% of the influencers are girls in tiny, tiny bikinis showing their boobs.

Right. No nipples, though. No nipples. No genitals. That's true. That's – you know, they've got their nipple algorithm locked. That's true. Yeah. So, whatevs. Come on, guys. All right. Apple's in the news for buying yet another AI startup. It's time to improve Siri's performance.

The company has confirmed to Bloomberg that it recently acquired Inductive, a Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based company that uses AI to correct data, which in turn improves machine learning. So, basically, it's an AI data cleaning machine. All right. So, this is a move to attempt to compete with, obviously, Amazon and Google, whose voice recognition is considerably better than Siri.

So, I welcome this because – well, let's be honest. I only – I use Siri on my watch when I'm barbecuing to set time. That's about it. That's really about it. My roommate uses it all the time and just – there's never anything good that comes back from it. This is what I found on the web.

That's not what I asked. Thanks. That's not useful. We consider that a horrific result if we get that from our other ladies in the tube. Exactly. I'm like, okay, what time does Target open? And you ask Amazon or Google that, and it's like, oh, hey, the one closest to you, because we know where you're at, opens in about 12 minutes.

So, get your butt on over there. Siri's like, are you looking for Target practice? Yes, exactly. Siri is horrific. So, hopefully, they'll fix that. Yep, and speaking of things that are horrific, Palantir, our favorite private search company and spooky company.

Spooky company. The world's biggest spooky company. Well, over at Axios, they had an interview with the CEO, Alex Karp. And so, apparently, they're thinking of leaving Silicon Valley because of the monoculture, and they may leave California altogether. And I thought this quote was pretty funny for a company that's supposed to know everything about everyone and everywhere in the world.

Mm-hmm. We haven't picked a place yet, but it's going to be closer to the East Coast than the West Coast. If I had to guess, I would guess something like Colorado. Get that man a map. Wow. And maybe they need that data cleaning AI over there because their maps are all messed up.

They must be using Siri. Well, here's the thing. He works from a barn in New Hampshire. He says, I've been distanced from Silicon Valley for the last 15 years, and so I'm used to being social distanced in the valley, and now social distancing has become a way of life. The world would be a better place if this company socially distanced from the world.

Yeah, yeah. Can we put them on an island somewhere that maybe gets sunk from global warming? Look, this assumes an awful lot. This assumes that there are employees that one assumes they somewhat value would want to move, which they probably don't. And go ahead. Leave. I'm tired of these companies.

You want to bitch? Leave. Go. Yeah. Well, I mean, they say that they want to leave because a lot of their employees are pissed off at them because of signing contracts with ICE and shady government organizations, and they think that it's because of the culture in Silicon Valley that people are mad at them.

And it's like, no, because human beings are mad at you because you're sleazy. Yep. So it's like, you can go to Colorado, and I don't know if you've been to Colorado, dude, but there's a lot of hippies out there that don't like this shit either. Yeah. Oh, man.

And to finally put a note on the rich get richer, Elon Musk has reached his first Tesla compensation award worth nearly $800 million. Okay. It's crazy. They eclipsed $20 billion in total revenue over the last four quarters and a market cap of more than $100 billion.

And this is a first in a series of milestones which could net him a couple more billion dollars down the line. So it's funny. It's like he can buy, was it 1.69 million shares of the stock, but he can get them at a strike price of $350 a share, but the stock right now is trading at about $800.

Or $800. Right. In the range of $800. So right there, if he just exercises those options, that is a juicy profit. Elon Musk is basically the industrialist version of Donald Trump right now. Now, let me explain that. Not in all ways. Elon Musk is actually smart, and Elon Musk actually makes money as opposed to Donald Trump.

But the way he is like Donald Trump is basically Twitter-based in that he can say whatever he wants, do whatever he wants, lie about whatever he wants, not produce what he said he was going to produce, and everybody still loves him and believes him. It's amazing. Yeah. Whatever happened with him not being allowed to use Twitter for a while because of the crap he said about, I can't even remember.

There have been so many Elon Musk Twitter scandals that they all kind of blend together. Again, that was all before Jack grew balls. Yeah, that's true. Well, let's see. I mean, he's starting to get a little peach fuzz down there. Let's see if he actually grows in a full set. I'm sure you'll see it in your ads on Instagram.

I will. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love, from beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.

So, something else fun happened with our ladies in the tube this week. My son has discovered he can make our Amazon Echoes fart. Oh, great. And, yes, that was hours of wondrous fun for him. On the plus side, I was able to leave the room, and he just sat there and kept it going.

Unfortunately, when I left the room, I realized that I had forgotten to turn off invoice purchasing. And thanks, Amazon, for offering up the Extreme Fart add-on pack as part of the process of going through and asking for farts. Thanks. Oh, nice. So, it actually has a fart upsell built into the fart app?

It does. For $1.99, you can get Big Fart, which my son did. So, I am now the proud owner of that. Link in the show notes. You know, all this shit that we're talking about, and when this whole thing started with just, you know, the ladies in the tubes, and then, oh, God.

Everything is still trending towards idiocracy. We're in that in-between state. When COVID-19 hit, we're like, okay, this could be a fantastic societal reboot. The atmosphere is clearing up. People are driving less, less fossil fuels, blah, blah, blah.

People are working from home more, and it's going to change the way the world works, and then everything falls apart again, and humans' true nature comes out. And I just, you know, I was really hoping for that utopia to come out of it, but, you know, it's pretty easy. Just farewell utopia.

It's not coming. No, it's not. No, this is not going to end up in Star Trek land. And I do want to say, as a note, I'm quite annoyed at Amazon's whole process and procedure for the upsells with Ladies in the Tube, because, you know, if I'm trying to play some music and, say, I can't find it on Spotify or whatever, then I basically get an almost two-minute red ad about upselling to Amazon Music.

I don't want that, and you can't get out of it. It's really annoying. Like, you've got to cut down these sales pitches, people. I need an elevator pitch at best for these upsells. Oh, man. So HBO Max came out this week. Much to the confusion of everybody.

Yeah, there's now three different HBO streaming services. Right. There's HBO Go, and that's if you have HBO as part of your cable package and you want to watch it somewhere else. There's HBO Now, if you don't have cable and want to watch HBO, which is what I had.

And now there's HBO Max, which is the entire HBO catalog and Warner Media content. And I went with HBO Max. Give it a shot. It's a couple bucks more. Actually, no, it was the same price. It was maybe a dollar more a month. That would not be the same price.

Yeah. I couldn't remember if it was the same or not. Okay. Because it flashed by so fast, and I was trying to remember what I paid. For HBO Now, I was thinking I was paying $14.99, and I think Max is the same. But so I went and checked it out, and there's definitely a lot more stuff on there. And there's a really cool section.

Well, you've got the Studio Ghibli stuff on there, all of those movies, which is great because I've never seen most of them. I've only seen a couple of them, and I want to go back and watch them because they're fantastic movies. But I just never had the wherewithal to go out and find them.

So I think I'm going to try and watch more of those and get through those because they're fantastic. There's a lot of classic movies on there that I've always wanted to see, so I'm going to check those out, too. So I'm still digging into it, but trying to figure this stuff out is like, okay, what am I getting here that I wasn't getting before?

And fortunately, over at TechCrunch, they did a really nice write-up. It's called Netflix, Disney Plus, or HBO Max, the best streaming service for your watching habits. And it's a nice breakdown of which service is best for what you want to watch. I recommend everybody check it out. And, of course, for kids, Disney Plus.

No brainer on that one. And HBO Max actually won a lot of the categories. It's a pretty deep media catalog when you get Warner involved. Yeah, it really is. It really is. So I really don't need to go back and watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from the beginning, though.

I think I can skip that one. But, yeah, so far so good. And the interesting thing is trying to get it updated on Roku is impossible. There's no HBO Max app on the Roku yet. They said there's one, but I can't find it anywhere.

But it works on my iPad and my computer. You can watch it over the web and stuff like that. So waiting on that. Now, finally, in absent doodad news, I saw this come across my desk this morning. Tidal announces Dolby Atmos support for soundbars and set-top boxes, Apple TV included.

And, of course, the first thing I said was, Tidal's still a thing? Well, there was a lot of money pumped into Tidal a long time ago. Well, there was in Magic Leap, too. Yep, that's true. Yeah, I'm a little surprised the Tidal is still actually somewhat involved in the streaming wars. But I guess they're not really.

They're just there. I mean, I don't know anybody that has a Tidal account that doesn't have it for free because they work on, basically, deals for Tidal. Security? Ha! Welcome to COVID Corner with Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the 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. I thought we should just pull the veil away and say, yeah, security's kind of on hold for a little bit.

And I like COVID Corner with Dave Bittner. It sounds Saturday Night Live-esque. Actually, I was more thinking, you know, CBS early Sunday morning programs. It could be that, too. The old school ones. Who was it? Was it Charles Kuralt? Yes, Charles Kuralt.

In his RV, and it turns out that he was not only touring the country, but he had basically a lover in every town or something to do. Do you remember that story? I do. It was excellent. Yes.

Good old Charles Kuralt. Something you need to tell us, Dave? No, not yet. No, actually, Joe Kerrigan's the one with the RV. So I don't know. I don't know what's up. But I don't think he drives around in it. So, you know, just him and his wife, Lisa, and his family.

But, no, not my thing. Excellent. Guys are not doing well today. Nobody is. Get in the line, dude. Well, this is actually one of those rare occasions where neither right nor left, neither conservative nor liberal, I don't think, is doing too well today.

Yeah. The whole country, not doing so well today. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I was speaking to someone else I was interviewing today. Just that if I'm feeling this way, this level of, I don't know, what do you call it?

Anxiety, angst, distress, all that sort of stuff. And with all the advantages that I have, you know, being a middle-aged, white, upper middle class man, I can only imagine what it's like for folks who don't have that long list of, you know, basically every privilege checkbox there is.

How it must be even worse for them. And I don't even know that I have the right to, I guess it's something I deal with is who am I to complain, right? From many of the Twitter threads that I've read and the, you know, opinion pieces that have come out in the last 24 hours, I believe everybody is telling us that this is how they feel all the time.

So welcome. Welcome to the party, guys. Yeah. Yeah. I tell you what, you know, we haven't given many, many tips lately on how to get through the lockdown and everything that we've been going through and all this stuff. I have found that cleaning my inbox has become kind of my Zen thing at night.

I've gotten, I've gotten down from 650 emails down to only 70 now. And it leaves me with a wonderful sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, even though I know it is the dumbest thing in the world to do, but nothing has actually gotten accomplished except I've made a number go away.

But it has definitely been something that I can find, I can hang my hat on at the end of the day before I go to bed and say, I did something today. It's good to have goals. It is. I'm reminded of, I think there was, I can't remember specifically who it was.

It was a woman who's a famous writer and she said, I hate writing. I love having written. And that's how I feel about going through my email. I really hate email and I hate going through email and so much of my email is just pitches from PR folks who want to get their folks on our show, which is great.

And that's necessary. And, you know, the ones who do a good job, I appreciate. They make my life easier. But, you know, the ones who do a good job are few and far between. Yeah, we kind of have a stock email response saying, you have obviously not even listened to our show.

Right, exactly. Do you even know what we do here? And so, yeah, I used to get 200 of those a week when I when I was doing booking for Jordan Harbinger's show. So I know I know what you're going through at least 200 a week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I often procrastinate and wait till the end of the day to to clear out my email inbox and to crush the spirits of those people who are just looking to get a little airtime.

Yeah. Yeah. But I always feel good when it's done. You're right. It is a feeling of accomplishment. And there's a little bit of cleansing that goes on with that. But when I look at it and I see that long list, I'm just like, oh, God, God. I'm way too OCD to have basically an inbox.

Like I have folders that I move things to that I know not to deal with. I am I'm way too heavy handed with the delete, particularly since quarantine has started. I probably deleted emails that I should have responded to, but I just couldn't be bothered. And I saw somebody on Twitter had posted a screenshot of half a million unanswered emails or unopened emails.

And it literally gave me such anxiety. I had to, like, take a nap. I can't. I couldn't. It must have been Tim Ferriss's inbox. But I think that brings me to another interesting point. So here's a question for the two of you. When you go on vacation, are you someone who unplugs and deals with the avalanche of email when you get back?

Or are you someone who checks as you go to prevent that avalanche from building up? What's a vacation? Yeah, you are speaking to two people that have run their own shows, run their own companies and been contractors for 20 plus years.

So, yeah, there is no such thing. I would take my laptop with me on vacation so I can do work as needed. I have my phone. I check my emails. Now, since having a child, that has changed slightly. I still bring everything with me to do work. But, you know, if we're going down to the pool and having family time, then the phone stays home or in the hotel.

So, yeah, as a podcaster for seven and a half years that runs shows that happen to come out every single week, you know, it was five years before I took my last vacation. And it was just one of those things where it's like, okay, autoresponder.

And it said, anything that you send me in between these dates will not be viewed. And I just deleted them. And it said, just write me back after I'm back. Because generally the problem that you're emailing me about right now, you will have solved by the time I get back.

And there will be no need for me to talk to you. Yeah. I mean, it became a running joke with my wife that particularly when I was still working heavily within the music industry that as soon as I announced to all my clients that I would be taking a vacation, emergencies would immediately occur.

Oh, yes. That was always the truth of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I try – even today I try to guard my weekends as much as possible to not check email and Slack and so forth. I feel like we run at such a high level of intensity throughout the week that I just need to be able to slow down on the weekends a little bit.

Well, one of the hopes at least of this quarantine and this pandemic, the silver linings that I've seen repeatedly in articles, especially about the tech industry, is that hopefully we will be able to claw back some sense of time off. But from what I see from the people that I know, it kind of goes two ways.

Either you've been furloughed or fired and you have no work or your workload is insane right now. And especially, you know, the problems of trying to work from home if you have family or other distractions are not helping because you're working at, you know, quarter speed, half speed, whatever, just because of the realities of the situation.

And your work is piling up, like I know my wife has been working on weekends, which she never used to really have to do unless there was an important deal coming through. It's just the workload is – for those who are still employed, the workload is incredible. Well, and I remember too when I moved the business out of the house and into a proper office, I noticed a real change in a lot of my clients' attitude towards their ability to interrupt me at any time of the day.

Just by having an office outside of the house somehow in their mind, I think that established the fact that I wasn't just at home. I couldn't just walk downstairs, you know, to the edit room that was in my basement or, you know, like you have, Jason. Just – well, I mean it's right there out in the garage, right?

I mean what's keeping you from it? Can't you just make that quick change for me? Well, I think we discussed that – we discussed situations like that a bit when we did our big work from home kind of wrap-ups and things of that nature, which is – I mean one of the things that I had always attempted to do was make sure whenever possible that no client knows that I actually worked from home, that I actually pretended to have an office.

And the biggest thing that I think Jason and I both tried to do back in the early days was to create a fake office persona so you have a staff email account that things go through that isn't your name. So, you know, kind of keep that mirage going that you are not working from home and available 24-7 and there are layers of people to get to before they get to you.

Yeah. That's one of the things I wonder about with everybody shifting to work from home is how that shift is going to fuzz the lines even more between work time and home time. Yeah. And, you know, be careful what you ask for. Yeah. That's one of the real downsides of working from home.

And I know a lot of people are – maybe it's just bots out there that are applauding this and saying this is the best thing ever. But I know it's not, especially when whole families are working from home. That's a completely different story. So the idea that you have a separation, it's very hard psychologically to do that, the separation of work and home when you're in the same space all day long.

It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of training for your clients. Like now everybody knows that at 2 o'clock, office is closed. White claws are popping. Yep. I didn't – those two generally don't have to be the same time.

But they do tend to dovetail, don't they? You know, there might be a little creep going on. There might be a little overlap. But I have found that also I don't do back and forth with people anymore when it comes to scheduling. I use a service to do – to use my scheduling.

I use Calendly. And I'm like – I even have it in the footer of my email. I'm like, if you'd like to book some time with me, just click on this link. And there are multiple options for time and my availability. And that way I'm not playing the dumb game of, you know, trying to do tag with that.

And that helps a lot. It is so worth the money to do something like that. Yes, that is it. I agree. I use the same thing for scheduling folks for interviews and so forth. And boy, is that a lifestyle upgrade. If you're not using something like that, and we use Calendly as well, there are a lot of them out there.

But you will get time back in your life, and it's a really, really good tool. I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. It's like it is – I've got – you know, I got the paid service so I can link, like, you know, all of my calendars from all my different accounts.

So they all, like, overlap. You don't have to worry about, oh, man, I forgot I was booked on this other calendar this time. It's just you stop having to think about it. And when you realize how much you did think about it before and how much time you spent on it before, that reclaimed time, it's just – I mean, just the, you know, the psychic load that it takes off, it is so nice.

I've never had to book quite as much as you guys had, but I stumbled across my own super low-tech version of that over the, you know, 20 years of trying to deal with and schedule calls with clients and things of that nature, which was always – I would always respond with just two options. That's it. I would look at my calendar.

I'm going to say you could have Thursday at 3 or you can have Wednesday at 2. Pick. And that's it. Right, right. Yeah. Well, you know, I know you guys spoke earlier in the show about the executive order from the president.

And so I don't want to rehash that, but I do want to just mention that we did send up the bat signal to Ben Yellen on the Cyber Wire today. So if you look at Friday's episode of the Cyber Wire, Ben and I have a conversation where he unpacks the whole executive order from the position of someone who actually knows about things like the law.

Yeah, see, that is what was lacking from our discussion. Yeah, yeah. Any sense of credibility whatsoever was totally lacking from ours. Yeah, yeah. So Ben, of course, is actually a lawyer and a law professor and all that sort of good stuff. So the summary version from him is that this is really just a political statement.

It has no – it is ridiculous to the point of being nonsensical when it comes to the way it's put together and the legal things it tries to do and the various agencies and organizations it calls upon to do things that are things that those agencies cannot do or do not do.

So not a whole lot to see here according to Ben. But check out his version of it if you're interested over on Friday's Cyber Wire. So even with no real knowledge, we actually nailed it pretty much. Yeah, yeah.

I guess it probably wasn't that hard to come down on the right side of this one and just guessing based on past history. Yeah, exactly. Boy, just, yeah, pile it on. Hell of a week, right? Hell of a week. Hell of a week.

Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot in our little COVID corner now about kind of the ups and downs and how the emotions go. And I had had a pretty good week the previous week, and I kind of knew it was coming. And I was sliding into ennui and all the related feelings that we get even before all of this happened.

And boy, hey, I'm going to need – maybe I need some white claws today. Wait for the wheel, Brian. Wait for the wheel. There was a fantastic episode of Farscape, and they had that term in it, and I've looked it up since then, and it's an old term. And it's just like, you know, sometimes you're at the top of the wheel and sometimes you're in the mud, but the wheel always goes round.

So just wait for the wheel, and it'll come back around. And if you're at the top, here comes the mud. Oh, and I did forget, since we do this out of order, I was meant to put this in the closing shout-outs. My friend Gigi Edgley, she did a short film called Hashtag back in the day, and it is now available on the sci-fi platform Dust.

So I will throw a link to that in the show notes, too, because we love Gigi, and it was – it was actually – it was a crowdfunded short film that I actually was a patron for. Oh, nice. So I recommend that, yeah. Nice. I see you put a couple of stories in the show notes here.

What do we want to cover today? Meh. As I was saying to Jason earlier in the show, it's like – it felt like everything that we put in our show notes from yesterday felt so bizarrely from a different world from this morning. That's why I didn't put summaries in, because I knew everything was going to change.

I'm like, okay, this is just a starting point for people who want to follow the link trail in the show notes. Yeah, and I can't help but feel that when this comes out tomorrow, everything will have, of course, changed again because everything is going so quickly. But let's at least do the listener feedback question. We can skip the other ones and just talk about our feelings as we do in COVID Corner.

Highlander writes in, love your show. Got all your episodes downloaded to my computer. Can you comment on the latest telephone scam? Scammers from a fake service Canada call you, threaten arrest and prosecution, then demand payment in Bitcoin. Are you receiving something similar? I can say I have not gotten any of these calls, and my wife actually still has a Canadian cell phone, and she has not gotten any of these calls either.

So I don't know if this is maybe Canadian-specific or if it's everywhere. I don't know why anybody in the U.S. would take a call from Service Canada. So I'm assuming Highlander might be Canadian here. Yeah. I mean, the scam – the style of scam itself is pretty widespread.

So I suspect, first of all, this is probably coming from somewhere overseas, and they're just dialing it in for whoever they know that they're calling. So if they're calling Canadians, they're pretending to be from a Canadian agency. If they're calling people in the U.S., we'll hear a lot – they pretend to be from the FBI actually.

That's the – I think the most popular one. I've gotten those a few times. Yeah, I've gotten the FBI. I've gotten the IRS. And since I have a 415 phone number, which is San Francisco-based, most of my spam now is in Chinese because they go after Chinese immigrants and threaten them with deportation.

No, that's not limited to just San Francisco. That's – all of L.A. gets that as well. I get those two to three times a day. Interesting. Interesting. A lot of Chinese here too, Jason. Well, I'm just – I put the – I've been getting them for years, so I thought it was just a thing in San Francisco, all 415-based.

Because the numbers come from 415s. That's their trick to make you try and pick it up. Yeah. So the ones you get in Chinese from L.A., are they using L.A. area codes? Yeah, 213 or 310 mostly. Yeah. Yeah, I've noticed also that they will use your prefix, not just the area code.

They'll use your prefix to try to trick you into answering. Yes, to make you think that it's one of your neighbors with the very small understanding that in major cities, none of us want to or know our neighbors. And also, I've never had somebody with the same prefix as me, ever.

Ever. Ever, yeah. Oh, really? Not since I was a child. Yeah. Okay. Huh. All right. Especially since cell phones came along, because cell phones, at least in L.A., the cell phone mapping was all over the place. So, you know, my prefix, like, I don't know anybody that has it, even people that live within Santa Monica.

Yeah, my prefix usually is picked because I could spell a good word with the whole number. Right, you're that guy. Of course he is. Come on, Dave. Well, I was back in the day. Yeah. Everybody was. As soon as you got the option to do that, you'd sit there and look. Call 415.

Fuck you. I had, like, 323 Punk for a long time, so of course I'm going to keep that, you know? Yeah. All right. I mean, that was in the early 90s when AT&T let you go to their website and scroll through the numbers and pick your numbers. And it was just like we'd sit there with the – in one page, you'd have that, and then in the other page, you'd have the generator.

The number generators. Yeah, the Pearl script that would make words for you if you tried to figure it out. Yeah. Simpler times in tech. It was fun. I mean, that was back when it was neat. Yes, it was. I liked it. I do want to ask you a question, Dave, and I'm assuming that no news is bad news and there was nothing in the show notes.

How's the Stormtrooper outfit front looking? No movement there. Nothing new. I'm a little disappointed in our listeners. Well, I shouldn't say that. I did get a note from someone. Let me look up who it is here.

A kind note from someone who is going to be looking into the possibility. Actually, this is someone named Richard who is with the Rebel Legion in San Francisco, which is the good guy version of the 501st.

And he has offered to reach out to some folks in the Maryland 501st. So perhaps, if nothing else, I'll get a warm intro to the 501st here in Maryland. He also suggested I check out the Black Series of Helmets, which I have seen.

It's a sort of a high-quality replica version that you can buy. It's widely available. I would imagine the hardcore people probably poo-pooed as being not precise enough, but it's certainly a step up from what you could get from a toy store, for example.

Right. We even tagged the 501st Legion on Twitter in our update, so I was hoping that might get some traction. But maybe it got flagged as inciting violence. Oh, wait, that wasn't us. Well, and it's also, I mean, admittedly, it's a strange time to make the request, because what are we going to do?

You know, it's not like they'll say, oh, we have a parade. Yeah, we have a parade this weekend. Come on and join us. And so there's not a whole lot they probably could do, even if they wanted to. So that's part of the reality of it. But I don't know.

I hold out hope. It'll happen sooner or later. Someday it will happen. Yes. Even if I just have to start buying it one piece at a time and just assembling my own, you know, this slippery slope. This is how it starts, right? This is how it starts. Well, Dave, you know, for Christmas this year, we will send you the cod piece.

Just start wearing it around in public. That would be hilarious. You can't mix and match with the furry head we sent you for Christmas, though. Oh, why not? Don't ruin the fun. You're not the boss of me. I just I was thinking they might clash.

That's all. Yeah. They're both white. Oh, true. True. Okay. Point taken. Yeah. Just don't wear them after Labor Day. Right. Well, I'm not an animal. I mean, come on. Everybody has their backup TIE fighter costume for that.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, guys, hang in there. Yep. This too shall pass. And may the wheel rise for you next week. There you go. There you go. All right. I'll talk to you guys soon. Closing shout outs.

I really miss sports ball, Jason. I know you do. I've got a bit of sports ball related news. Dodger Stadium has now become the largest coronavirus testing site in California. Yay, sports ball. Yes. Dodger Stadium, which has hosted nearly 20 million fans over the past five seasons, has opened as the largest coronavirus testing facility in the state of California with the capacity to test 6,000 people daily, according to our mayor, Eric Garcetti.

On Tuesday, tests will be conducted from the stadium parking lot with large video monitors explaining the process in hopes of maximizing efficiency. And I have to say, if there are large video monitors explaining the process in the parking lot, this would be the first time the parking lot might actually be efficient. And it's one of the worst parking lots in the fucking world.

It really is. Yeah. And continuing with some sports ball news, it is the Women's Soccer League, but it is still a major soccer league. And it is only the second soccer league or even major sports league in the world to announce an actual return date. The Bundesliga is already playing, but the Women's Soccer League will return in June, June 27th to be exact.

So the National Women's Soccer League, which includes 23 members of the 2019 World Cup winning U.S. Women's Soccer Team, will play a one-month tournament to be held entirely in Utah. We don't know how many people are going to actually participate because some, you know, I mean, it's the Women's Soccer League, a lot of kids, a lot of concerns.

And yeah, so, and we also don't know if there will be fans. I'm assuming not. And they're doing it smart by having it in one location. So there's not a lot of travel. So I will be watching. That will be fun. And yay, sports ball. Please come back sooner rather than later.

And I saw this one yesterday and I got to put the link in the show notes, but Japan is working with Yamaha and they've got a new app that they have. It's for remote cheering for your team. So they put speakers all around the stadium and everybody watching has an app and they can cheer from the app to at least get the, you know, the atmosphere.

I love that idea because what Fox has started doing with the Bundesliga is they're putting in canned audience noise and it's horrific. It's stupid. Yeah. Yeah. So Yamaha just basically, they put these speakers around there. You have an app with different options on it. And as your team plays, you're watching it live.

You can send in, you know, live feedback to the actual players, which is a fantastic idea. I wonder if they have filters. So you can't go, you stupid idiot. What are you blind ref? Yeah, exactly. That's very funny. That is very cool. I wish, I wish if we're going to do this for a long time, I'd much rather have that than the canned bullshit that they're putting in right now.

Definitely. But, you know, I still think it's cool that you can hear everybody. I like that part. Oh, I know. But that's really, yeah. Well, you know, they're gearing up for the US sports because like I talked about, you know, athletes tend to use ribald language as it were. So if we can drown that out with fake audience, that's what we're going to do.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right. Well, there you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to GOG.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. And if you still want to get those masks, because it looks like we're going to be wearing them for a long time, go to GOG.show slash shop.

Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 443. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and try not to set anything on fire today. 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.