456: Visual Valium

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. What up, Bri? We doing a thing on Saturday, aren't we? We are. We are. To celebrate what'll probably be L.A. announced back in complete lockdown, we will sit in our houses and get on Zoom and do a little Grumpy Old Geeks drink up again.

Yes, and this comes out on Saturday, so this will be 6 p.m. the night this comes out. Unless you're on Patreon and get it a little bit early. So, yes, Saturday, July 18th at 6 p.m. Pacific Time. And you can go to GOG.show slash live for the links to jump on Zoom with us.

Yes, and feel free to update that now so I can post that on social media. I will do that before this show goes live, Brian. There we go. All right, so that's going to happen. And I thought we had had a brief moment of normalcy in the world when there were reports that Kanye West had decided to drop his 2020 presidential bid.

Mostly his family basically saying they're worried that he might have had a manic episode. Might have. Might have? No, no. The first thing we knew was he was off his meds again. Yes. Well, unfortunately, apparently that's not true. He's continuing to be the idiot provocateur, according to news that you found, Jason, which then depressed me even more.

Yes, Kanye is officially on the ballot in Oklahoma, and he has filed his paperwork to run for president, which really sucks because the best thing that I saw on Twitter all week was that his presidential campaign lasted at exactly one Scaramucci, which is 11 days.

Yeah, I wish 11 days was actually just a more palatable number to the human brain so we could actually get the Scaramucci in as an actual figure. That would be fantastic. I know. I do think that we need to use that more often, but 11 days is so random. Maybe we should slow down our podcasting schedule and just release one episode per Scaramucci.

I think that might be good. It's been a Scaramucci. Here's a new episode. Here you go. Oh, man. So I had a busy week in addition to following all the news and the craziness going on with school openings and Betsy DeVos becoming a total idiot.

I'm pretty sure she came out of the womb a total idiot. No, she did. She did. And then the White House saying, ignore the science. Let's open schools. That seems wise. So, yeah, I was dealing with all that. I finally managed to find time to go drive my wife's car so I could pass the smog check.

You know, normal traffic as if nothing was going on out there. So that's amazing. That's interesting. I drove to Santa Clarita yesterday and there was nobody on the road. And that was like at 8 o'clock in the morning. So I was on the 405 and the 101 at 8 in the morning and I did not go below 70 miles an hour.

It was great. I wonder if nobody's just commuting from out there to the L.A. area right now. Who knows? Could be. Anyways, it's been pretty busy around here. But I did manage to do one other tiny little thing. And that was? We bought a house in Toronto. How did you buy a house without actually going to see it?

Well, virtual tours have come a long way. We have a really good agent that we trust. We have family members that we trust a lot that are very knowledgeable about such things that were sent to go dispatch to go look at them for us. And basically, we're told this is everything that you want.

It's a good deal. Put in an offer right now. And we did. And it was accepted. So we shall see. Now, you know, the waiting period begins. But I might be getting out of here. Awesome. So you haven't closed escrow or anything. You just put the bid in. It's in the process. Bid's in. Bid's accepted.

Now we're in the process. Okay. So, yeah, that sounds fun. Mm-hmm. Good times. Yeah. Good luck getting across the border. Well, I don't think we're not going to be moving anytime soon. But it's nice to know that we actually have a place. And, you know, quarantine for anybody coming from outside is going to be in place for a long time.

So at least we now will have a nice, comfortable place of our own to quarantine into. Yep. There you go. So, yeah, that's a good times. Good times there. Well, congrats and good luck. Well, I'm going to need some more money, too. So, GOG.show slash donate. In the news.

So, Brian, we've been covering the TikTok kerfuffle with the U.S. government possibly wanting to ban them and everybody else wanting to ban them. And every TikTok influencer on the planet worried that their revenue stream is going to dry up soon, even though I don't know how you get a revenue stream on TikTok.

But, well, I mean, obviously people do because there are people making a lot of money and people that are freaked out about this. It's crazy to me that this is so much in line with everything else that kind of is going on, at least in America right now, which is we know this is bad.

Yeah. We know TikTok is doing bad things with the data. We are very aware of this. We also know the coronavirus is bad. We know lots of people are dying. But we just stick our fingers in our ear and go, we need our money. We need things to go on as per normal.

We're having fun with this. We know Zoom is a dumpster fire of privacy holes. Yet we're still having a drink up using them. Yes, we are. We know Facebook is a horrific entity. Yet we're both still on Facebook. Yeah, so barely. But here we go.

Instagram is coming out with their competing product called Rolls. So, Reels, not Rolls, Reels. I knew that was wrong as soon as it came off my tongue. I'm like, Rolls. I'm like, hmm, butter. I like those Hawaiian sweet rolls. Those are the best.

Oh, they are delicious. Oh, yeah. It's called Reels. So they're going to do the same thing. 15-second video clip set to music, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yep. So right now it's only available in India and Brazil, but it's rolling out, I guess, pretty soon to the rest of the world.

Okay. I don't know if it's going to do it. We'll see. There are pluses to, of course, the fact that it being owned by Facebook and that you can easily cross-populate your content across your various social media places. But I don't know.

They tried to do this with Instagram, too. It failed, and then they just bought Instagram. So I can't imagine that they'll be able to buy TikTok, but I don't know. Is it better to have a horrific Chinese government running your favorite app or a horrific American company running your favorite app?

I'm going with American company because at least we're not going to have the White House trying to ban them, the Department of Justice trying to ban them, or whoever is trying to ban them this week. It just gives you a little bit more safety net, even though building your entire life on somebody else's platform, as we always say, is problematic.

That ship has sailed, Jason. Ain't nobody spinning up a Squarespace page anymore. That's true. That's true. But Instagram is also launching a new shopping page that highlights brands and collections. So in the Explore tab now on the app, there's a thing called Shop.

So you can go look at that. And I did. I looked at it this morning when I put this story in here. And apparently what they're trying to sell me are the ugliest car wraps in the history of the world, the ugliest fucking wraps or tennis shoes.

Those are pretty much all you can buy right now, at least on my shop tab. Right. I'm sure that the algorithm has picked those specifically for me because they know that I need to wrap my lowrider in that fancy reflective gear or put some tiger stripes on it or something like that.

The only thing that actually has hit with the tennis shoes is I have ads for Air Jordans out the wazoo, and I do own me some Air Jordans. That's about it. I figure I guess we should start working on a grumpy old geek's car wrap. Ooh. Just down the side on both sides.

Wear a fucking mask, you retard. That's a bit. Yeah. Well, I'm assuming this is only going to be open to the people that are able to do stores on Instagram anyways, which means you have to have at least 10,000 followers. Take a look at it because some of the stuff I saw didn't really have, I think, 10,000 followers.

Interesting. Well, God forbid anything makes sense or there be rules. I know. Basically, what it does is on the shop page, it has just a bunch of things, and then you click on the image, and it goes to just a regular Instagram post, and there's a little button that says products or like shop for products in this image, and you click on that, and then it shows you like an interesting buy page.

But it's kludgy as hell. Of course it is. It is definitely one of the worst interface choices they've ever made. Yeah. Instagram is not exactly set up to be a shopping app. Mm-mm. But hey, let's shove it in there anyways, right? Why not? Let's shoehorn some shit in because we've got nothing else to do since we're locked down.

Yep. Can't leave any pennies on the table. Speaking of apps, the U.S. has actually beat China on App Store downloads for the first time since 2014. Now, before that sounds all exciting and we're number one, this is basically just based on timing of when the coronavirus and lockdowns hit.

Okay. So because China got hit first, they were well above us for a while. But then as we got hit later, our app downloads and installs and purchases rose above China's. So it's just a seesaw wave where you can basically track where lockdowns are occurring in the world.

Yeah. You're bored. Let's download some apps. So they go back to work. They stop downloading apps. We're stuck inside. We download some apps. Exactly. That's exactly what happened. So that's that story in a nutshell. And I saw this and it kind of, this just made me scratch my head again.

You know, the meditation app Calm. Yes, we've talked about it several times. I have the Pro version on my iPad. Yes. Well, if you, you might feel silly for buying the Pro version now because I know that you have HBO Max and they are, of course, turning it into a TV show. Well, just to clarify, I didn't pay for it.

But my insurance company, Kaiser Permanente, gave me a full free year subscription when the pandemic happened. They made a deal with them. So anybody that has insurance through Kaiser got a code for a full free year. So I'm like, I'll take it. Why not? I could use some Calm right now.

Exactly. A combination of being backed by healthcare providers and, of course, the fact that we're just in a crazy space right now and people at least download, at least pay attention to the idea of possibly having a meditation app, whether they actually launch it more than once or not. I would love to see those statistics.

But they're a big deal right now. You see commercials for them all the time, all over various channels. So HBO Max is hoping to build on that success by launching a new show based on the Calm app. It will be formatted as a season of 10 half-hour episodes loosely built around Calm Sleep Stories series with visuals from the producers of National Geographic's One Strange Rock documentary series.

So it might look cool. This serves as a backdrop to, and this is in air quotes, scientifically engineered narratives. Okay. Now, we've heard a lot about apps and their scientifically engineered crap to make you smarter, to calm you down, to all that, none of which has ever been proven.

So probably a good idea for it to be in air quotes there. But you're getting a whole bunch of pretty solid Hollywood A-listers doing this, including Mahersha Ali, Idris Elba, your favorite, Oscar Isaac, Nicole Kidman, Zoe Kravitz, Lucy Liu, Cillian Murphy, and Keanu Reeves. This annoys me because my favorite Calm Sleep Story that they have is by Stephen Fry, and that's the one I listen to all the time because he just puts me right to sleep.

It's great. Well, speaking of that, I think this is hilarious because here is the statement from Calm co-founder and co-CEO Michael Acton-Smith. Calm started life as a meditation app, but the brand has evolved far beyond that. We are delighted to bring the magic behind our audio sleep stories to the screen for the first time.

These experiences are visual valium and will help people relax and unwind during these stressful times. Visual valium. We have created a show to put you to sleep. All right. Yes. And speaking of the coronavirus pandemic's effects on media, the pandemic has been great for Netflix, unsurprisingly.

Three months ago, Netflix announced that it's seen a huge surge in new subscribers because people were stuck at home around the world waiting out the pandemic. So this quarter, they released their numbers again. Netflix says it's also doing great during April, May, and June because we're still stuck at home around the world waiting out the coronavirus pandemic.

So they've managed to sign up another 10 million more subscribers, and they now have 193 million subscribers worldwide. Now, after this announcement, which is like, oh my God, that's amazing how great, Netflix shares went down 10% in the market.

And why is that? Well, they're worried that they've now signed up absolutely everybody in the world that they can possibly sign up. So growth is going to be a problem because capitalism. That's 193 million subscribers. There's a lot more people in the world that have televisions. Well, there's a lot more people in the world that have televisions.

There's even a lot more people in the world that have the ability to perhaps subscribe to Netflix, but they may not have the finances to be able to do so because everybody's out of work. Ah, good point. Good point. Well, speaking of subscription services, NBC Peacocks is now out.

The Peacocks have left the farm. I have installed it. You have, okay. Because you can watch for free. There is a free version, but there's multiple tiers. So you can get the totally free ad-supported version, and then you've got a couple paid versions for like $4.99 and $9.99 a month.

Yes. So I have a link in the show notes on how to install it and also how to unsubscribe and cancel if you'd like and how to have your account totally removed if you'd like. It's a full soup to nuts peacock manual, as it were. Yeah, I installed it because the day it came out, at least here.

I know there were beta versions available to Xfinity or Cox subscribers earlier. It was the day that they basically took all the Premier League soccer games and refused to have them televised normally and only put them on Peacock to entice people like me to download the app, which worked. So I could watch a game.

Yeah. And, you know, they're going to be getting all the Premier League games. There will be bigger games will still be broadcast. But if you want to be able to see all the games, you're going to have to become a Peacock paid subscriber. That will not be part of the free tier. So we shall see what happens with that. It's it's a it's a decent it's better than Hulu in terms of interface.

I'll give him that. That's not hard. That's not hard. But I did look around at the other offerings. Smattering of movies. You know, I'm not really a movie guy. This might be of interest to you because they, you know, they obviously have quite a big share of stuff watching old NBC shows could care less.

Not really into it. So I didn't really see anything of interest. And I don't think that they've announced any specific programming that will that they're going to put money into. I think it's all just going to be licensing deals. Ah, no, they have an original. No, they have an original. They have Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which is getting very terrible reviews.

So, yeah, you can check that one out. But, yeah, Brave New World has launched on Peacock and I've been seeing the reviews for it. Yes, like I said, they're not stellar. Yeah. And in terms of bad optics and bad timing and maybe having to look at the calendar, I thought this was kind of an interesting story.

One day after NBC Universal rolled out Peacock streaming services, a bunch of shows disappeared from it. The next day, including 2009's Fast and Furious, Evan Almighty are already gone. And several other blockbusters are on the way out by the end of this month, including all the Jurassic Park movies, or at least the original trilogy.

The Matrix trilogy, Shrek, Children of Men, The Mummy, and The Blair Witch Project will all be leaving Peacock on July 31st. So if you are interested in seeing those, you should sign up quickly. Now, this is not unusual. Things are always disappearing from all the services. That's why there's big, big, big click-through bucks on what's disappearing from X this month, articles everywhere across the web.

And it's just licensing arrangements and all that. But I do think it's kind of funny that they just didn't – I suppose it's such a – I would love to see that Excel spreadsheet. So I'm sure it was very hard to find a day to pick where nothing was disappearing the very next day. But a very funny article because of that. Yeah.

I mean, it's all stuff I've already seen. That's the whole thing. These things are just rerun factories. Well, all of these streaming services, except for Netflix, which – and I guess Amazon. Apple TV. You know, they've got their originals on there. That's pretty much – that's about it. Hulu's got some originals. And I think that's just – that's going to be the way that they're going to have to go.

I can't imagine there being a streaming service that isn't producing original content that is going to be able to get people's monies. Yeah. I mean, everybody's going to be a studio now, which is, you know, great for Hollywood. That's actually a good thing. Yeah. Good competition. That's what we want. We just don't want to be nickeled and dimed everywhere for it so that we end up with, like, $300 per month bill instead of the $200 per month bill I had originally to get all this stuff.

Yeah. Well, that's coming. Just get used to that. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm going to check out Peacock. There's really – You might as well check it out for free. Yeah, I'm going to try it for free. I'm going to check out Brave New World because I always liked that book, you know.

That was always the big argument back in the early days of the cyberpunk revolution is, like, are we going to turn into 1984 or are we going to turn into Brave New World? Well, it turns out we turned into Brave New World and 1984 at the same time. We have a hybrid now. Yes. And I remember a couple of weeks back we had somebody ask us a question about sci-fi for kids.

Brave New World I remember being one of the very first sci-fi books I read as well. Great book. Okay. I didn't know it was that kid-friendly. Well, I mean, there's no sex or drugs or murder in it, really. It's just kind of weird. Okay. All right.

And hat tip to Dana for this one. Fan marketing app GigRev celebrates successful first year. Now, I wanted to ask you about this. I put this in here specifically to ask you about this because you're the music industry guy. This seems like it's because it says it's, like, white-labeled fan clubs.

And you used to make fan clubs for a living. I did. And have you checked these guys out at all? I haven't looked at any of the ones that they've built. I read through some of their stuff on their site. They're doing exactly the sort of thing that we did back in the day. It'll make some money.

It'll always make some money. We're obviously in a weird bubble right now where there are no concerts. So there is more interest in this for a brief period of time. Once we move past this and concerts start again, I expect their revenue will decrease a lot. They're in a weird bubble where right now there's nothing else to do.

And if you want to see what's going on with your favorite bands and you're young and into that sort of thing and you can consume all the contents in the world and you're a super fan, they're probably getting a lot of signups right now, especially if they can actually... The hardest part of all of that for me, all those years with all those artists, was getting them to produce content.

So if they have figured out the secret sauce or found the right artists who are interested, willing to produce content, to sit in front of a camera, to talk, to answer fan questions, all that sort of stuff on a regular basis all the time, if they've got that going on, then they'll probably make a decent amount of money, at least until the coronavirus thing ends.

After that, good luck with it. Yeah, it seems like in the long haul, this is going to be for smaller artists. It's basically like a Patreon type of model for just about any artist. But the big artists, I'm sure, are just going to be like, you know what? I can just go fill a stadium and make my nut for the next year. Exactly, exactly.

And then really, the only thing that was really doing well for the fan club things back in the day for me was basically doing meet and greet contests. And people would sign up just for that chance. So you'd have to strong arm the artists to say, okay, we need you to meet at least 10 to 20 people pre-show.

And if you're willing to do that, I can guarantee you that we're going to make income on your fan club. So if they can get that going, maybe they'll still stand a chance. It's never going to be a huge moneymaker for either the artist or this company unless they get enough people. And it's just kind of – I'm sure they've built a system. There's a whole back end, and every single site is exactly the same.

So that makes sense. Yeah, they said they spent three years building the back end before they even went live. I did it in three months. Shut up. How slow can you be? I know. I'm like, three years? Seriously? That's a little ridiculous. I mean, good on them. Good luck. I looked at it.

Again, it makes sense for these super fans. But, you know, you've got to have a band with enough super fans for it to make sense. Yep. Yep. So good luck to them, man. Anything that anybody can do to help other people make money in these troubling times. I support anything that's actually getting some money to the artists.

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Security? Security? Ha! This week, we are joined again by our good friend, 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.

And you can check out Dave's new show, Stormtrooper Times, where he gives you all the Stormtrooper news that's fit to print. Yeah, it never starts on time, though. I don't know. We tried to have a start time, but we keep missing it.

Thank you very much. I got it. Thank you very much. How are we doing, guys? How's this week going? So far, so good. Back on lockdown, sort of. Not officially, but we expect the announcement later today.

Give it about 55 minutes. Yep. Yes. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Our transmission rate has gone to 1.1. Wow. So that is a bad thing to have happen. How do you guys feel about that? Honestly, I think I can speak for Jason.

Jason and I and our, well, my respective family and his respective household have been living as if we're under lockdown anyways, regardless of whatever they've said about opening up. That does not change the intense anger and depression that comes with the fact that obviously people are incapable of getting their shit together enough for us to ever get out of this.

Yes. I'm not depressed about it. I am fucking furious. Fucking furious is about the only way that I can describe it because people still won't wear masks and they think it's a hoax and they are just too stupid to live. I actually, it's funny because the battle on Facebook has become fast and furious between people who believe this and people who don't.

And I know two people that have posted, I've had to get rid of friends from high school. I actually unfriended a friend from high school this week after posting something about the schools and it's not safe. And the guy, you know, the White House basically saying we should ignore the science to open up the schools anyways.

And of course, somebody had to post, but the kids aren't dying. And that I wasn't even paying attention. I had gone to like take a shower or something like that. And I came back and like 50 of my other friends have posted, you fucking moron. And here's all the links about how people are dying. And then of course, he defended it with something along the lines of, well, what about the people that died from H1N1 under Obama?

And I was just like, unfriend, you're out of here. Yeah. Yeah. Time to move on. Who has time for that noise? Exactly. That was kind of my point. Obviously, you are not going to listen to anything and you're always going to have a what about ism and nobody has time for this shit anymore.

Yeah, I think that I share that that is a real source of despair for me that those of us who in good faith are trying to do the right thing and protecting ourselves and our family and our friends and our communities. And then to see people all around us out of willful ignorance doing all the wrong things and so making it that much harder for us to get our feet back under us.

Yep. And we're the sheeple. It's just aggravating. Right, right. Yeah, we're the sheeple because they've got YouTube documentaries that will tell us that you do not get enough oxygen through your mask. Oh, fucking idiots. I'm just over it. I'm fucking over it. Yeah.

I went to a park for a socially distanced walk with my lady and her dog the other day. And this is, I mean, it's a massive park. The sidewalks are about 12 feet wide, so you have plenty of space to stay away from people. But as we walked around the park, we got to the basketball court, which had anywhere between 50 and 100 kids, all playing basketball, obviously, with no masks, sweating on each other, breathing on each other.

And the parents were sitting there in lounge chairs just watching. Yeah, it's insane. When I take my bike rides up the coast with my mask and all of that, so I'm as safe as can be in the outdoors, there are volleyball courts all up the length of Santa Monica through Malibu. The city has taken down the nets, but people buy their own nets.

And there are groups, huge groups of people playing volleyball every single day. I'm sure they're not living in the same households. There's not a mask to be seen. It's just insane. There were two people playing volleyball in the park, but it was one person on either side.

And I'm like, that's how you do it. Oh, well, yeah. But this is not one person on each side. These are huge, organized teams. And it is what it is. It seems like one-on-one tennis would be okay. Yes. You know, like if you want to pick your outdoor sports activity, that's a good one.

That seems safe to me. Yeah. There are ways to do this in a safe way right now that, you know, obviously you will be sacrificing your normal life. It will not be normal life. But you can get enough activity and connection and everything else.

You can do all of that safely right now. And again, they've come out and basically said, if everybody here would just wear a mask for four to eight weeks, we can beat this. It's not going to happen. I think we need to bring back jarts.

That's what we need to do. And we throw them at the idiots? No, I think that's just a fine socially distanced outside activity, but they've been banned by the government. And now you have to play cornhole like a wuss.

I miss jarts. It had the right amount of danger when you were a kid. Personally, I am happy you no longer have jarts in your arsenal, Jason. Speaking for myself. Somehow booby-trapping his house with jarts, with spring-loaded jarts.

Well, first I see that, but then I also see the same reasoning that led Jason to no longer have a gun. Sometimes you just have a bad day. And jarts can be self-inflicted. I'm not going to fall on my own jarts. Fall on your jarts.

No, you throw them up in the air and then try to catch them with his mouth or something. Coming down, coming down. Now that Jason's all over TikTok, you know, it could just be a stunt he'd try to get the views. You know, that reminds me when I was a kid, there was a neighbor kid who had a bow and arrow set and he would just spend hours in his yard shooting straight up in the air.

And then watching for it to come back down. And as far as I know, he never got hit. But well, man, he's probably one of the people you'd be unfriending at this point. That's right. Exactly. Right. Well, nothing bad ever happened to me. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, just a quick note on that. We all did see that the study came out that basically said that the lower your IQ, the less chance that you will follow directions that save your life, such as wear a mask. Yeah, that was all over the place. So just that.

Right. Yeah. Okay. Doesn't seem to affect fertility, though. Unfortunately, any of it can breed. Yeah. Well, security. Twitter had a big week, didn't they? Yes, they did. Now, I'm going to state for the record here that I have actually read zero on this subject because I kind of wanted to get the fresh take from you guys.

Okay. Well, where were you? I saw it start. Yeah. When it began, where were you? So let's start with you, Jason. Where were you when there started to be an inkling that something was up with Twitter? What was going on with you and how were you tracking it? The first thing is I'm just, I have Twitter open in another window.

I'm sitting here editing, working on a show, and then I see Elon Musk's tweet. And I immediately screen capped it. And I literally said to myself, here we go. Here we go. And fortunately, the replies to Elon's tweet about the Bitcoin and send me X amount of dollars and I'll double it for the next 30 minutes.

I'm like, oh my God, somebody's going to fall for this. But then I went and looked at the replies and almost unanimously, everybody's like, this is stupid. This is a scam. This is a scam. Then I saw the next one happen. I think it was, I can't remember who it was.

It might've been Bill Gates or Obama. I follow them both. And then I'm just like, oh shit, this is big. This is big. Right, right. I'm like, you get one A-lister, you know, okay, there's a trophy for you right there. You start to get all the A-listers.

Okay, this is an inside job. Something massive is happening here. Because you know, every single one of those accounts has two factor on. So this is not something that was going to be just a little flash in the pan. I'm like, these guys got access, big access. So I just, I just like pop some popcorn and just watch Twitter.

Yeah, that's exactly what I did. I actually, I guess I was having dinner with the family and so I wasn't looking at my phone. And then after dinner, I sat on the couch and pulled my phone out and started, you know, doom scrolling as I do. And then I started seeing things lighting up from some of the InfoSec folks saying, and, you know, the speculation running rampant.

And like you, there just came a point when you sort of sit back and you say, all right, well, this is not in my control. Seems like I still have access. So let's sit back and, and watch this unfold. And so I did just that over the next couple hours. I literally did pop popcorn, by the way, and watch.

Oh, did you? Because we had the popcorn maker out from the night before. I'm like, oh, this is going to be good. So I just threw in some more popcorn and made a bowl and just sat here and just watched them go by. It was so much fun. Well, I mean, to sort of break it down for you, Brian, you know, there are a number of popular theories as to what exactly could have been going on here.

It seems like one that's bubbling up to the top is that in the days leading up to this, there were some folks on some dark web forums who were selling access to Twitter accounts for a few thousand dollars. Right.

And Krebs on security has a story about how he seems to be, have, have a certain amount of confidence that this could be the work of a notorious SIM swapper who goes by the name Plug Walk Joe.

And he's been receiving intel from folks that he follows and contacts he has that this is a 20 something Brit who is stuck in, I believe, Spain right now because of the coronavirus. And maybe got a little bored or he needed plane ticket money to get home.

So he's like, oh, let me do something here. Yeah. Idle hands. Well, but the things that I think have set people on edge is that if you had this kind of access, why would you use it for something as dopey as a Bitcoin scam? Right.

Well, I mean, there's a longstanding theory that criminals are lazy and stupid. Yes. So there's that. Yeah. And I did the one thing that I did really see from this, that considering the high profile nature of what has occurred and the fact that obviously they will get caught eventually because it was so high profile, there's going to be a lot of eyes on this.

The takeaway from it was very, very small. It's not like they made a lot of money. Yeah. They barely got anything out of it comparatively to what they could have. Well, and that led some folks to wonder if this could have been a misdirection. Could they have been, you know, getting us to take our eye off the ball for that?

Could they have some deeper access? Could it be been a demonstration of capabilities? Could it be used to shake our confidence in Twitter when so many? Sorry, we had confidence in Twitter? Well, you think so many. Yeah, that's a good point. There's so many people who get their news from Twitter.

Imagine if they, when they got the Biden campaign, they said, I'm dropping out of the race or I hate to tell you I have terminal cancer or, you know, something like that. Lots of things they could have done with the accounts that they had.

The other thing that's happening is folks are taking a closer look at, because it's kind of revealed some of the admin tools that some high-level Twitter users have. And so people are wondering about that, if a Twitter admin can effectively bypass two-factor authentication.

And I should also point out that one of the other concerns, as I was saying about misdirection, is that it's presumed that these folks had access to all of the DMs for those accounts. That's the one that I was going to get to, yes. It's like, this could just be a massive attack to slurp everybody's DMs, especially if they got access to, you know, the carrot-in-chief.

And I do have to say that the jokes were flying fast and furious about why Trump's account wasn't hacked. And they said, because it wouldn't be believable, because he's never doubled anybody's money. Ah, that's a good one. Just a thought on the DMs thing.

I do think that, say, for celebrities and things of that nature, getting access to their DMs would be a big deal. I don't personally believe that getting access to, say, a Joe Biden account DM is going to see much of anything, because it's not really his account now, is it?

Right, right. But Trump's is. Yes, Trump's is. I think Obama's is as well. So I'm pretty sure he's doing his own. I'm sure Obama is not sending Dickies through his DMs. No, it's not that. It's just if you need some political capital, you never know.

And I'm sure, well, again, reasonably smart people are probably not doing, you know, secure conversations through their DMs on Twitter. This is true. This is true. But you never know. No, but it has pushed for. Sometimes you get drunk. Right. Sometimes you get jarded.

It has pushed for folks saying that Twitter should have end-to-end encryption with their DMs, that the DMs should have better security. It's been a reminder of that old yarn about, you know, don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't put on a postcard. And DMs are perhaps should be considered in the same category.

They are not secure, so they're not encrypted. Twitter does have them. And this demonstrates that somebody could get them. Indeed. Yeah. And it also demonstrates that they need to have better controls over who has access to these tools. I suspect Twitter is going to be taking a close look at that now.

Yeah, I think so. There might be a review of some of the security policies. One thing we haven't mentioned is that there's speculation that it was an insider who was bribed. Right. I mean, that was my original theory.

It's like even my first tweet about it, I'm like, hashtag inside job. Because, you know, they say that, you know, Twitter is saying that there was a social engineering attack that let somebody get in and get to the tools. But I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it. My gut says that somebody got paid off.

Yeah. There's been – it's funny. There's been some chatter among security pros as to sort of, I don't know, pedantic terminology of is what is considered a hack, is a bribe considered social engineering. I don't think a bribe is social engineering.

No, that's sheer criminality right there. Yeah. Yeah. So the bottom line is everything is still speculative. We don't know what happened. It will probably be a little while before we will know what happened. I would expect that Twitter will have to release some sort of report outlining what exactly happens.

And that will be met with, you know, varying degrees of skepticism. And derision. But eventually I think we will know. Yeah, yeah. I think we will know. And it wouldn't surprise me if whoever did this gets brought to justice because, as you said, Jason, talk about a bright spotlight on you.

Oh, yeah, man. Because, I mean, the FBI has taken over the investigation into this one now. And I do have to point out, and my roommate made this point. I thought it was very good. You kept seeing the lists of all the people that got hacked. And one of the people that got hacked was Kim Kardashian, who never showed up on any of those lists.

And, you know, her ego was just seething. Well, I got hacked, too. Why am I not on any of the lists? To be fair, Kim Kardashian's entire Instagram account or Twitter account is basically just selling things anyway. So it would have just flown by the radar. Oh, she's just selling something else.

Good point. Are either of you guys verified? No. Fuck no. We can't get an account verified to save our life. I knew the girl that actually ran the verification department at Twitter, and she couldn't even do it for me. She's like, I can't tell you how we do it. I can't tell you why we do it.

And I can't do it for you. I'm like, well, shit, I should just go to Instagram and pay somebody because that's how they do it over there. They take bribes at Instagram. Yeah, mine's not either. The CyberWires is, but my personal one is not. Are they still doing it, though? Because remember they shut it down after the white supremacist got verified, the guy who started the Charlotte protests?

I don't know. That's a good question. I think we got ours a couple years ago. Yeah. I did apply for it once probably, I don't know, six or seven years ago and never heard anything back from them. So I didn't pursue it any farther than that. Yeah. I've applied like 10 times, and I was one of the first 140 users of Twitter, and I still can't get verified.

I'm like, come on, guys. Oh, wow. Yeah, but that account's long gone. You're using a different one. Yeah, it was a problem. I tried to get Grumpy Old Geeks verified on Instagram, and it was a no-go because I didn't give them the bribe. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I'm working on claiming my panel.

I don't know if you guys know this. If you Google your name on Google, you don't want to Google your name on Bing. But if you search for your name on Google, there's a little information panel on the right that has all of your bona fides on it, and you can claim that. So I'm going through that process right now.

And the last step that I have to do is send them a selfie with a state or federal-issued ID, and then they'll do it. So that's their last step. With Twitter, you just had to like send a scan in of your ID. But yeah, they want you to take – for Google, they're like, take a selfie with this.

It's like show proof of life so you're not somebody taking over with it. But you guys can try that if you want to get your little panel and get control over that because there's some things in mind that I want to fix. I think I did that quite a long time ago, and it was pre-requiring the selfie.

I don't remember having to do that. Yeah, I had to show them admin screens for two social media networks. So I had to show them the admin screen that I had to edit permissions on Twitter and Instagram and then do the selfie thing and a couple other things. But they actually make you do screenshots of you having admin access to social media accounts that are linked to your account.

Right. Cool. Which is interesting. But do you know? Yeah. Got to do something. Yep. Well, speaking of hacking, we've got some other news about that. The NSA is saying Russian hackers are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine research. This isn't just the NSA. intelligence services in the U.S., U.K., and Canada say Cozy Bear is back.

That's who they're blaming right now, also known as APT29 or the Dukes. They're using malware and spear phishing attacks, according to a joint advisory from all these different agencies. And they also published some guidance to help health care organizations beef up their systems defenses. So it's not just Russia that's attempting to do this.

In April, the U.S. accused Chinese hackers of trying to steal vaccine research. It emerged last month that similar attacks had also taken place against the U.K.'s National Health Service. Interesting stuff. I mean, there's going to be a lot of money involved in the COVID-19 vaccine when it hits, when we actually get one.

And so not surprising that this is happening, you know, the very tiny part of me that still has any hope or belief in the world working the way I once envisioned it should kind of feels like shouldn't COVID-19 vaccine research be a massive world open source project?

But, you know, that part of me is dwindling every day. Well, that's the way polio vaccine was, right? I think Jonas Salk put the polio vaccine in the public domain because he felt it was too important to retain the patent on. Yes. And a lot of AIDS researchers said that if they had all gotten together, we'd have a vaccine for that by now, too.

But everybody wanted to hoard their research. Yay, world. America. Yeah, but also think about what a competitive advantage, just a global economic competitive advantage you could have. If China or Russia could get their countries up and running first. Right, right.

So if we're not playing or if we are playing by the rules and they're not and they benefit from being able to take advantage of the results of our research, that could give them an advantage. I just think about just what a huge freaking unforced error this is for the U.S. and the world.

The U.S. and the world, but, you know, from an economic point of view, how our economy is going to be in the dumpster much longer than other nations. And like I said, it's an unforced error.

Yeah, I like how we just all kind of dwindle off into our own private sadness. Yeah, just stare off into the distance. It's one of those stock footage shots where somebody's leaning up against a cold glass, rainy day window.

I was thinking that Kermit the Frog meme where he has his cup of tea and he's just staring out in the rain. Yeah, well, I did see one thing that I thought that was interesting and somewhat positive. Our friend Andrew Yang has kept himself busy after his presidential campaign and he's launched a new project called the Data Dividend Project.

Data rights are human rights. So this is a movement dedicated to taking back control of our personal data, saying our data is our property and if we allow companies to use it, we should get paid for it. So he's involved in this. It's the brainchild of Andrew Yang. And the primary objective is to establish and enforce data property rights under laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect as of January 1st this year.

It's a sign-up form designed to capture just the information necessary to legally allow them to be authorized agents in your fight for data rights. And what they'll do is once you've signed up, obviously, they're pursuing all these things with tech company boardrooms and if needed in the court of law.

And they'll hopefully send you money every time that there's class action lawsuits or anything like that. Pretty interesting concept. My immediate thought was, do I feel comfortable giving them all my data? But at some point – And what will they pay you for it?

Yes. At some point, you kind of have to throw caution to the wind and trust someone. And these guys seem to be pretty interesting characters and seem to be trying to do the right thing. I mean, as far as presidential candidates go, I was very big on board with Andrew Yang's technology perspective on things.

Ultimately, he would like to see what I think all of us would like to see, which is small costs for social media rather than them selling our data as an alternative. It's, well, they should owe us some money for all of this considering all the money that they're making. And that's kind of the pursuit and end goal here.

Kind of reverse micropayments. Yep, exactly. Yeah. You know, it makes me think about how data has gone through this perception evolution where originally for a while it was considered to have value.

And so you wanted to gather up as much of it as you could and you wanted to hoard it and you wanted to keep it and you never wanted to get rid of it. And as the ability to store data became cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to the point of practically being free, that's what organizations were doing.

And then there was a little bit of this shift towards considering data to be radioactive and that if you had too much of it in one place, bad things could happen. Data breaches where now you have all this liability. If you have all this data gathered together, it gets out in the world.

Everybody sues you and you lose you or your insurance company loses a lot of money. Now, I would say that some smart companies have adopted that approach, but we just look at our segment almost every week, huge data breach from huge company.

I don't see that huge companies are taking this radioactive approach to data. They're still hoovering up as much as they possibly can. I do a podcast with basically chief data officers. I'm a producer on that show and I get to listen to that show quite a bit. It's called The Data Chief.

You can actually go download it on iTunes and where, no, sorry, Apple Podcasts. iTunes doesn't exist anymore. You can listen to these people and very few of them are for storing less data. It's all about more data, more data, more data.

There's one person, I think Jacques Van Nykerk, was very much on the lines of, like, look, we need to be very careful with this. This is their data. We need to, you know, we have to have trust with our customers and we need to know, you know, what we're doing with it and we don't want to cross the line with it.

Most of the other guests on the show are like, give us more. We want more. It seems to be a very tech woke kind of thing for a very small amount of very progressive companies that are treating it that way. It's more all the security professionals out there saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this and the company boardroom saying, screw you, we are.

Yeah. I think it's the security people that are driving the radioactive charge. Yes. And I think it's a really important nuance that you point out, Jason. And from my point of view, it is, in fact, even more specific than that, it is the privacy folks.

It's not the security folks. It's the chief privacy officers who are the ones who are saying, hey, everybody, this stuff's going to go critical mass if we keep gathering it up. Who gets fired if something happens? That guy. Yep. That guy's the fall guy.

Yes. And also, I think you have to be careful because I've heard of more than one company where the chief privacy officer is more or less window dressing. They're not really listened to.

They're just there because it's important to have somebody like that on our company tree. Right. Because your privacy is important to us. Yes. Because we have this guy. We even have a chief privacy officer. So he's in about the same role as the chief diversity officer. Yeah. His name tag has a target painted on it.

Yeah. He's issued a red shirt when he walks in the door. Mm-hmm. We have company uniforms here. Here's your shirt, sir. I wouldn't get too comfortable in that cubicle there, friend.

Don't put up the family pictures. Yeah. And if anybody asked you to go for an away mission to lunch, bring your own. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, you're not coming back from Chipotle, man. You're not coming back. Yeah. All right.

Well, that's it, guys. All right. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, gents. Well, do take care. We'll see you guys next week. All righty. Cops and doodads. Brian, a couple weeks ago, you told me you picked up the Logitech MX Master 3 mouse.

Yes, I did. I'm using it right now. And in fact, I even programmed the second channel for my wife's computer this week because she was getting sick of using her trackpad. Yeah. No, it's cool. You can add up to three devices on it. Now, I used it for about a day.

Mm-hmm. I cannot stand the MX Master 3. Really? They made a design change from the one and the two that I don't know. You won't notice it because you never used it, too. No. But they put the back and forward buttons under the thumb wheel.

Yes. I find it amazingly convenient. Yes. I find it amazingly inconvenient because on the old ones, your thumb was right on the wheel at all times. Now, you have to bump up against that and go over it. So, all of my muscle memory is screwed. So, because the back and forward buttons were behind the thumb wheel on the other one, which is much easier because you didn't bump it accidentally.

You knew exactly where they were. So, anybody want an MX Master 3? Because I'm just going to go buy me a couple extra twos to have around. There you go. Yeah. Well, or you can change your muscle memory. Yeah, but I've got three computers. Two of them have MX2s and one has an MX3. But you can program all three computers on the one MX3 and just carry it around in your pocket.

Yeah, I'm not going to do that. Not going to do that. And let's follow up with the saga of the Nest Home Mini. So, I got it. I programmed it. It took a while to get installed because they didn't tell you on the tin that you have to have not just the Google Home app installed on your phone and logged in.

You also have to have the Google Assistant app and logged in on your phone. That was a fun hour and a half of Googling, trying to figure that one out. But I got it set up. I programmed my routine. So, in the morning, it wakes me up and says, good morning, Jason.

It is this day, this date. Here's a little COVID news. And it reads me a partial article. And then you just go back to bed and cry. No. But here's the cool part about it. It only gives you a synopsis of the article, but then it texts you a link to your phone. Or it didn't text you. It uses the Assistant app to pop up a notification with a link to the full article if you want to read it, which I thought was a really cool feature.

Then I have it read the day again because I may have forgotten during the COVID because I got the COVID brain. And then it says, okay, time to get up and get out of bed and move your ass. And I have it set for five o'clock in the morning. And I love it. I love it. I think it's great.

I do want to up my ante a bit and get some lights to bring up the lights in the room and do the whole shebang. I'm going to tell you right now. You'll install those. You'll play with it and use it for a month. And then you'll completely and utterly forget about that and never do it again. Well, that's why it's all automatic.

I don't do anything. It just does it at five in the morning. It just wakes me up. So it'd be nice if it could start to raise the lights in the room. I wish I could tie it into my eight sleep bed to have it like, you know, trigger that. But I guess I can do that already with scheduling on the bed. But I have to say, though, this is the one thing that it really excites me about the Nest Home Mini.

It is so much more superior than Alexa in answering questions. You cannot believe how easy it is. And it just tells you everything right away. It is so much smarter than Alexa and don't even get me started on Siri. Siri is just like, you know, Siri is the dumb one.

It's the three year old sucking his thumb in the corner with the dunce cap on. I'm like, because, you know, you put in you have your zip code entered into it. So it knows exactly where you're at. I'm like, you know, hey, lady in the disc. What time does the UPS store open? And she's like, oh, the one closest to you opens at 9 a.m.

You know, it just knows immediately. And it's smart enough to do that. And I can ask it just about anything. And it works. It just works. So if I had to do it again and I was going to put these around my house, I would totally go with the Google Home Series or the Nest Mini or the Nest Home Series now.

Okay. Because it is so much better than Alexa. Oh, my God. Is it so much better? That's cool. I'm just not willing to change my entire infrastructure in my house right now. Although my new house, perhaps I'll go Google. Yeah. I'm telling you, man, this thing is so much smarter. It's so much better.

I was blown away. It's like I tried to play Stump the Nest and it kept coming back with like great answers for just about everything. Stump the Nest. That sounds like something completely different, but okay. And I finally got my Blackmagic ATEM Mini.

This thing, it's a video switcher. It's a four HDMI video switcher. So I can have up to four HDMI ports coming into the little box. And you can either run it with the buttons on the box to switch your feeds or you can use the software control, which is really cool. Hat tip to Kent Nichols for helping me figure out one of my sound issues this week.

Thank you, brother. You saved my bacon. But this thing is really cool. The problem was I ordered this thing in February and it just came two weeks ago. I think they're back in stock now, but they have the ATEM Mini and the ATEM Mini Pro. The ATEM Mini Pro is really cool because if you're a live streamer, it's like one button streaming to your major platforms.

So you basically sit down, turn your cameras on, get everything booted up, and then you can just press the YouTube button and boom, you're live on YouTube, which is kind of nice for, you know, instead of having to sit there and you got your OBS running, you got your switchers running, all the software going, you got the Elgato doohickey running.

It's like, and I tell you what, man, doing this video thing is tough. It's just so many moving parts, but I see the appeal to it. I, you know, I watched Seth Miranda do his stuff and I'm like, damn, you got this thing nailed, man. He's like, yeah, it's a pain in the ass though. And I'm like, now I get it. It is a total pain in the ass, but this little switcher box is really cool because it also has the one thing that I needed, uh, which is audio offset because when the signal comes

from the camera and if you, if anybody who's running a DSLR trying to use it as a webcam, there's lag, there's lag because it goes through the encoder. And then if you have sound pumped in from another source, they're going to be offset. There's going to be a delay, but the, the mini lets you set like how many frames of video that the video is, or the audio is offset by.

So you can sync everything up. So you don't look like an old Chinese martial arts movie. It's great. Okay. Yeah. And it was under 300 bucks. It's, you know, for what this thing does, it's amazing for the price. All right. Excellent. Well, you were speaking about the three-year-old sitting in the corner with the dunce cap.

Sometimes I wish I had that situation going on in my house. I have the opposite. I have a three and a half year old wandering around behind me all the time going, and he's beyond into solar system stuff, space stuff right now. So I've just got this guy following me all day long going, daddy, what are the four, five dwarf planets in the solar system?

What are the planets in the solar system? Tell them to me in order. How many moons does Saturn have? It is nonstop, nonstop. So if you had a Nest Home Mini, you could just sit there and ask it all day. Semi-related to that. In perfect timing, this appeared in my feed at some point.

The best apps for identifying bugs, trees, and more in woods and gardens over at Fatherly. So this is, the URL says seven apps. The actual article itself says six apps. So at some point, one app got cut from this article, and they forgot to tell the people who did the headlining. So it's nature apps and things like, it's basically hot dog or not for a lot of these apps, but apparently they actually work very well now.

They've got one called like Picture Insect, so you can take a picture of a bug or an insect, and it will identify what it is for you and then give you information about that. Pretty cool. The one that I was interested in is a Starwalk 2, which I've downloaded. It's a $2.99 purchase, so I bit the bullet and went for it.

I haven't been able to play around with it too much. It is incredibly involved. So as my kid learns more and more and gets interested in more stuff, this is obviously going to grow with him. I have to find the kind of more gentle early kid settings, but I see them in the screenshots. I just haven't played around with it enough to actually find them yet.

So I'm so far on board with this one. There's also one called Sky View, which is more involved with finding constellations and things like that. I might try that one as well. And I also downloaded the tree identifying apps because this is by Virginia Tech. And same sort of thing.

You can take pictures. But the cool thing about this one is it uses your location and basically will tell you the plants that are right around you, plants and trees, and show you pictures of them so you can go recognize them yourself and look like you actually know something to your kid ahead of time, which is nice. And they've also got one about birds and wildlife and all that sort of stuff.

So pretty interesting. A lot of cool apps are coming out that will tell you a lot about the world around you without having to go, hey, Siri, and get the wrong answer. Or, hey, Google, and maybe get the right one. Yeah, I like that. I think I want to put the plant one on there because does it tell you if it's poisonous or not?

Because it'll tell you everything. Yes. Yeah, in the coming apocalypse, we might all be stuck in the woods foraging for food. So a little app to tell you if you can eat it or not. Well, a lucky interesting thing for you about that app in particular is it gives you three options when you install it.

You can download the entire database. You can download only the local database. Or you can put nothing on your phone and just have it go to the cloud every time you want to. So you might want to download that full database because in the apocalypse, you will not be connecting to their cloud servers. Exactly. Exactly. That was going to be my next question is does it give you the option to download everything locally?

So that's kind of cool. That app definitely does. The Star One, I didn't see anything like that. So you can definitely download all the data for that app, which is kind of cool. Nice. Nice. Because it's not like the data is going to change. It's going to be the same fucking plant. Exactly. It's like, yeah, we don't have, you know, we have an update for your redendorm.

Oh, man. So with this new update that Apple just released for iOS and the Apple Watch, Apple car key is now a thing. Now, it's, of course, you can only use it on a BMW right now. And I thought of you, but then I read the article and saw that, nope, only these BMW series, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Manufactured after July 1st, 2020 will be compatible. So 17 days ago, they started making cars that you could use this way. So there are 12 people on the planet right now that can actually use it. Probably not even 12 because if they were manufactured July 1st, 2020, they probably have not even made it to a dealer yet.

Exactly. So, yeah. Problem that doesn't really need to be solved. I mean, I guess it's kind of nice. Maybe, you know, if carrying a fob is too much for you. Just, you know, I've got a tiny fob in my pocket and I can unlock my car.

I don't have to take it out. It just stays in my pocket when I need to go driving and it stays in my pocket the whole time. And I'm able to open the car, close the car, whatever. It's one less thing in the pocket, but it's such a small thing anyways. I don't care. Yeah. I mean, my fob is my key.

Yeah. Exactly. It's like the control panel for the car. The other thing that my Explorer has, which I don't think your BMW has, is there's a keypad on the outside of my door. So, yeah, if I don't have my fob or anything, I can actually type in a code and get into my car and use it.

Right. So, it's a five-digit code and you just basically punch in the code and you can just get in and go. So, you don't even need it sometimes. But, yeah, check it out if you're going to buy a new BMW. I don't know why you do that right now. But, yeah, if you're going to check them out, make sure it was – ask them if it was baked after July 1st if you want to use the Apple car key.

Look, I love my BMW. It's my second BMW. I may potentially always be a BMW customer, but it's going to depend on what they're going to do with their bullshit subscription stuff they're talking about. If they roll that out, I'm out. Well, technically, you kind of have another BMW because minis are made by BMW.

Yes, they are. Brick-a-brick. And I saw this going around on Twitter when they actually did it and Bored Panda has made a collection of 30 of some of the best of these. These are just hilarious. A filmmaker has asked people to describe their favorite movie as boring as possible, and boy, did they deliver.

I mean, these are just phenomenal. I don't know if you had a chance to look over these anyways, but here – Guy finds a ring and his nephew returns it to the factory. Old lady tells a story about a boat on a different boat. I knew you would pick that one. Yep.

And I built a website about it. Professor skips office hours to find a misplaced box. So good. So good. I really wish – I wish that – you remember the old TV guide blurbs about movies. They should replace them all with these.

These are phenomenal. Man turns off alarm clock 3,176 times. Very good. And then speaking of TikTok, as we talked about earlier, there is a challenge going around with Gen Z right now, and I just found this hilarious.

We're all supposed to be wearing face masks at the moment to help reduce the spread of coronavirus, including if you're still on the fence about this, scientists have come out and said that we could beat back this in the U.S. in four to eight weeks if we all just wore our goddamn masks. Well, yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, some people are treating this as an opportunity to try getting away with things they wouldn't ordinarily manage. One thing that's happening is underage kids are buying booze. They are basically using their masks and making themselves look like elderly women to convince shopkeepers that they're old enough.

And I've seen some of these. They look pretty convincing. Yeah. You know, a young girl covers her entire face with a rubber mask of an old woman's face, throws on a headscarf, the mask, and basically you could probably get away with it if you had a disinterested clerk.

And they are. So it's like a challenge on TikTok right now, and people are pulling it off. Cool. Good for them. Yeah. Much more clever than I ever was. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Good for you, kids. Good for you. It's always good to start drinking young. Yes. And I saw this one, and it made me sad.

British Airways is scrapping their entire 747 fleet early. Okay. They were going to do it anyway, but since C-19 hit, nobody's flying. They're like, eh, let's mothball these bitches, which really sucks because the 747 is just, you know, it's so iconic.

I grew up with it, and it's one of my favorite planes to fly on. Although the new 767s and 787s are pretty damn nice, too. But I was about to say, I'll go ahead and take a newer plane. It's cool. Yeah, I took the 787 from LA to Hong Kong, and it was one of the best flights of my life.

And it has cameras on the outside, so when you come in for a landing, if the asshole on the side won't open the window shade, you can actually go between three or four different cameras on the plane and watch yourself come in and land. And you can watch yourself land, like, with the camera on the underside of the plane.

It's so cool. It's so cool. Now, this next one I put in here, and the story kind of doesn't really matter. It's a Japanese robot to clock in at convenience stores in test of retail automation. Yeah, they're making robots for convenience stores. Fine.

Okay. I want everybody to go look at this article. It's a Reuters article, because this is the coolest fucking robot I've ever seen. I love this thing. This is so Japanese, it fucking shits sushi. I love it. Did you get a chance to look at it?

Yeah, I did. It is none more Japanese than this. It's pretty cool looking. I love this thing. No, I mean, this is... But I guarantee you, you throw on a mask and kids, kids in Japan, you're going to be able to buy booze easy from this thing. Oh, totally.

Totally. No, but I mean, I just love this thing. I saw it this morning. I was just like, okay, that's going to the show for damn sure. And hey, if you're looking for a job in Culver City, California, Apple Podcasts is hiring an editor, so you can be the one to pick all the new shows that go on the page on Apple Podcasts that nobody ever looks at anymore.

Hey, man, I should get myself in there as a mole. Yeah. Come on, man. I'm perfectly suited for this job. Yeah. All you got to do is listen to podcasts and pick them for the U.S. and Canada. So you are a dual citizen. Yeah. That would be... They all suck. Except for grumpy old geeks.

Exactly. So get on that, Brian, please. Culver City's not even that far away. Yep. I wonder what they pay. Does it matter? That's true. It's a job right now. It's a job. It doesn't matter. It's greater than zero. Just a quick shout out to the Herman Miller folks.

My Mira 2, as I mentioned a couple weeks back, had locked up, and I contacted customer service, and they found an authorized dealer near me. It took a while, COVID times. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But a guy showed up, mask, gloves, perfectly happy to take my chair outside to work on it there.

Was able to at least get it basically working, but is ordering completely new parts. And whenever those arrive, he'll come back, install them, and I'll basically have a brand new Mira 2, free of charge. That warranty pays off. Sometimes you get what you pay for. Yeah, seriously, I didn't have a 12-year warranty on a chair.

That's pretty awesome. So, thank you very much, Herman Miller. 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 to buy our merch, you can get some masks and mugs right now, go to GOG.show slash shop.

No car wrap yet. No car wraps. No car wraps. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support really keeps us going, and we really do appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 456. 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 hope to see you on the Zoom.

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