458: Fearsome Turtle

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. Brian, we have a little notice for the listeners. We're going to be moving our drink up because you're going on vacation. Of a sorts, yes. As much as one can do a vacation in these times, I am. So I'm not going to be available that weekend. I will be sitting around with the family and barbecue and beers.

All right. So the next drink up is going to be on Saturday, August 8th. And we're still going to get the time to you guys soon, or at least sometime in between now and the 8th, because we haven't decided on one yet. But it's going to be earlier, like we mentioned last time.

Yep. But it should be fun. Yes, it should be fun. I have a little bit of follow-up, kind of in a weird sort of way, because when all this stuff started, this COVID stuff and the stay-at-home stuff, we did a couple shows where we gave our tips and tricks about working from home.

We actually probably should be back in a lockdown here in Los Angeles and most of California. The numbers certainly seem to require it. But Garcetti, of course, has not pulled the trigger because he sees it as political doom, as opposed to, you know, mass death.

It's not doom. It's the actual doom. Yes, that's the actual doom. So he hasn't done it yet, but it is forthcoming because the numbers are just not going down. The entire state of Florida should be shut down at this point. Anyways, moving on from that, we did talk a lot about it. And I think we gave some very good and useful hints. But what I don't think either of us anticipated at that time was how long this would go on for.

We never anticipated that. And also, we never anticipated doom scrolling, which is one of my favorite terms lately, because we all do it. Yes. So there's this great article over at Vox called Shirking from Home, and it talks about the reality of what's happened now that we're four months into working and living like this.

And that is the real key. And I think we even brought it up at the time that, you know, we were giving our hints from working at home in which we worked from home in an office with nobody else home, not the situation that we all find ourselves in. Yes. And in a normal world when, you know, you can just die by going to KFC.

Yes. So a lot of the stuff, I mean, while still applied, obviously, it's much more difficult to do than expected. And this article kind of gets into the reality of that and what people are actually doing now that we're four months into this, you know, there's talk about for remote employees, meetings and deep work are now coupled with online shopping, soothing puzzles and video games, an array of other distractions, shut indoors and starved mostly of sports.

Some sports have come back. I watched some baseball last night. Video games have become huge. Congratulations. Congratulations, by the way, on your win. Yeah, it was, you know, whatever. I don't know how I feel about it, really. As I posted, I was like, better than nothing. Yep.

So, yeah, video games have gone through the roof. There's been a run on consoles and pandemic related production difficulties. The Nintendo Switch has effectively sold out. Twitch has seen traffic rise over 20% between January and March, and it keeps going up and up.

People are watching way more streaming TV and movies. Obviously, we've talked about Netflix's numbers and things like that, and people are just searching out comfort TV left and right. People are finding it impossible to stay focused. When schools closed, parents were expected to become teachers without missing team meetings, and this is certainly a life that I'm living right now, where we all, my wife and I both feel like we're just constantly busy.

It's, you know, you're teaching, you're parenting, you're running your household, you're cleaning your house, you're cooking three square a day for three people, four people, five people, however many are in your family, and you're still trying to work and sort all that out. And as we've talked about doomscrolling, where we're just kind of reading all the new news that's coming in between protests and the state of the virus and what's going on with potential vaccines and how the rest of the world has seemed to manage to get their shit together, but we can't.

And I certainly know for the last couple of weeks, I have read every single article known to man about, you know, schools and school openings and what could happen, what couldn't happen, everything. So we're doing that day trading through the roof. People are doing a ton of day trading, probably not wise, as we've talked about more than a few times.

And yeah, so this is the reality of what we're doing. And as they point out in the article, like we said, this is there's there's working from home and then there's working from home in the context in which we're doing it, which is a once in a century mass casualty event, as Larry Rosen, the professor of emergency of psychology at CSU Dominguez Hills says.

So, yeah, it's it's rough out there, people. Good luck. Good luck with it. And if you want to make it a little easier for you on that cooking three square a day thing, might I recommend checking out every plate? Go to everyplate.com and use code GOG3 for your first meals for two dollars, ninety nine cents each.

I'm going to be a pimpin show. Well, I'm telling you, I'm looking at our numbers and who boy, it's everybody's doing something but listening to podcasts. Yeah, well, understandable. Podcasts are a solitary thing. Hard to find solitary time.

Not in our cars. Not hitting the gym. Yeah, I get it. I understand why people aren't listening to podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. People aren't making them as much either. Now, as I've found out, because my business has gone from booming at the beginning of the lockdown to almost nothing now.

Yay. How's that stimulus coming? Oh, wait. They're not doing it right now. Shit. Okay. Never mind. Moving along. I found this one last night. It's over at BuzzFeed News, which I still shake my head every time I find out that's a thing. So a Facebook employee has left Facebook and he left a 24-minute video for his colleagues and posted it internally.

And, of course, it leaked. Is this the modern-day version of the Unabomber's Manifesto? It's a video? Well, here's the thing. Yes, kind of. Kind of. And, I mean, the takeaway is I think Facebook is hurting people at scale.

If you think so, too, maybe give this a watch. And I gave it a listen because they couldn't get the video at BuzzFeed News, but they got a copy of the audio. It was like 19 and a half minutes long. And he makes some very, very good points and turns out the Zuck is the one that really made, like, pushed him over the edge because they do these town hall meetings or, like, the Q&A sessions.

And the part that really struck me was he said that Zuck is trying to say over and over again that everything we do is based on making sure that we adhere the policies to everyone equally.

But what he's not getting that he can't get through his thick robot skull is that maybe the policies are wrong. So they're saying that this is their highest goal or whatever or what they're trying to adhere to. But we know they're not doing that equally anyways.

We know they're not applying their policies equally across the board. We've talked about that countless times on this show, every single case. We've talked about, you know, Zuck has had powers to go ahead and delete his messages. We can't do that. We've talked Trump gets a pass.

A bunch of other people have gotten passes. We've seen this happen time and time again. So even that's not happening. And regardless of the fact that their entire business model is flawed in so far as the way we're looking at it or the problems that it's causing, my argument, and I think the argument we've made on the show many times, is it's doing what it says on the tin.

This is exactly, it's working the way it's supposed to, but the problem is with the way that they've set it all up, right? Like the theory is, and the commercials are, Facebook is about connecting people. Sure, you can use it for that, but the business model of Facebook is connecting you to the highest bidder, and that's the way it's working.

Mm-hmm. Yep. So, well, at least this guy has the courage of his convictions, Mr. Max Wang, and he has quit. Well, that's what we've always said, you know, a rail against the company is all you want, but the real statement is to get up and leave if you don't agree with what they're doing.

In the news.

Brian, you like your Alexas. Yes. I mean, there's a lot of convenience to it. I really enjoy the Alexa show camera features in order to talk to family members that aren't nearby. Certainly been great over this COVID crisis.

Now, what would you say if Amazon decided to make an Alexa robot that could walk around your house? And I don't know what it's going to do, but they are working on a robot codenamed Vesta, which is going to run about a thousand bucks.

It's supposed to be about waist high, and I have the ability to move around the house on voice commands. And people familiar with said, it's kind of like a Roomba vacuum cleaner in human form. Is there going to be a vacuum cleaner in it? Nobody knows. Because if not, then why do I need it to move around my house?

No, I mean, being dead serious. Like, why would I need a device to move around my house? I mean, I barely. I know. I know exactly why. Hey, dude in a tube, get me a beer. Yeah, there's no way it's going to be able to do that.

And we all know that. Well, unless it's Boston Dynamics and it's $150,000, it's not going to be able to open the fridge. No, it's going to be about a grand. And I love that they point out that Jeff Bezos posted a photo, like, a while ago with an Alexa taped to an iRobot Roomba.

That's about the extent of it. I can't imagine it being useful in any way, shape, or form. I'm sure this is one of those internal divisions because they have so much money that is just coming up with stuff, and this is never going to come to market.

And just given the track record of how well my Roomba actually works, spoiler alert, it's a piece of shit, and doesn't know anything, and the track record of my lady in the tube of actually playing the song that I want it to play when I ask it without asking 7,000 times, do I want something moving around my house that does this poorly?

No, thank you. Exactly. But I hope they at least bring it to market so we have some more material to use on this show. I just can't imagine this is never going to hit market. We're never going to hear about this again. So in Twitter news, Jack continues to kind of do something semi-good, I suppose.

Twitter has now banned 7,000 QAnon accounts and limits 150,000 others as part of a broad crackdown against the Insane Conspiracy Theory group. It's amazing that they are all organized, but they are. So good for them, I guess. And Twitter's managed to stop a lot of these accounts, banning them outright.

Twitter will stop recommending accounts and content related to QAnon. Thank you. A little bit late on that, including material and email and follow recommendations. And it will take steps to limit circulation of content and features like trends and search. That's the 150,000 accounts that will get affected.

So they'll basically just get pulled out of the algorithms. So we'll see. We'll see. And the interesting thing here is that Facebook's about to move on this too. And I believe Google is as well. All these guys are getting together and talking behind the scenes to do a concerted effort to basically squash QAnon.

Well, you know, so they'll all just move to other platforms and claim that this is an example that they know what's going on and the mainstream media and all that is against them. Brian, you forget. It's the lamestream media. You have to. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Lamestream media. Lamestream media. You know, where people actually get news.

Yeah. So Slack is in the news. I thought this one was really interesting. Slack has filed a complaint with the European Commission detailing Microsoft's illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of EU competition law.

A tale as old as time. Yes. Beauty and the beast. Internet Explorer and Netscape. And Windows. Yes. Well, this is Microsoft's playbook. Oh, yes. It totally is. So they want, they basically, they want Teams unbundled because they want it.

I didn't realize Teams was, oh, I guess it is part of the bundle if you buy. Yeah. Can you do that? Can you, if you offer a product and it comes bundles, what's the big deal? I don't understand how that's not be allowed. Well, I mean, that's what the whole Internet Explorer kerfuffle was about because it came bundled with Windows.

Yeah, I never really understood that either. It's, Microsoft makes Windows, so Microsoft fills it with their products. Safari comes with Mac. Yep. So, I don't know. What's the big deal? People can still install Slack on Windows and they can still pay for it if they want to. Yeah.

Hey, Slack, spend the money on making your product better instead of suing and giving it to lawyers. Exactly. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. So, we'll see how this goes. I'm kind of on Microsoft's side here because of the tight integration with Teams and the Office products used for sharing documents that are made in Office.

It seems like a no-brainer. Again, yes. You know, I was briefly before being furloughed working in an all-PC Microsoft shop and I love Teams and the fact that everything was done with other Microsoft products. The integration was, it was great. I mean, it makes sense.

It's all built by the same company to work the same way. Yep. So, you know what Slack needs to do? They need to build a word processor, a spreadsheet. They need to build a crappy PowerPoint clone. Yeah. And, oh, Outlook as well.

You know, as long as they do all of those things, then they can compete as well. Yeah. And I don't remember the, I mean, we didn't use a lot of integration in Slack. You and I basically just sent each other's messages. But I remember the integration with other product being pretty good too. So, what are they complaining about?

Yeah, I don't know. Yep. All right. I mean. Well, screw you, Slack. Yes. I'm on Microsoft's side. I mean, Slack is basically just an aim replacement for me. I hated the app integration because it was just more crap that I would get notifications on. I'm like, I don't care if somebody just uploaded a Google Doc.

Really don't care. You know? Whatever. Whatever. And since we're doing a little light news this week, because it really wasn't a whole lot going on. Yeah. And we're trying to avoid COVID fatigue. Yes. Yeah. That's the hard part. I found this one was very fun.

Snap net loss balloons from a year ago. But revenue is up 17%. Revenue is up 17%, which means they lost $326 million, which is up from $255 million. So net revenue is up 17%, but their net loss grew.

Way to go, Snap. Yeah. That makes no sense. That is, you know, I understand the financial world likes to play tricks with language, but that's not. Your revenue isn't up 17% if you've actually lost more money. I mean, I guess technically it is.

Technically it is. Yes. Okay. Technically it is. Getting me on the technicality. All right. Fair enough. Yeah. So what? Okay. So if the revenue is up, that means they're selling more ads and selling more sponsored contents. But that's in air quotes because sponsored content is fucking ads than they were before, but less people are seeing it.

Could be, but also what it might be is they're saying R&D and, but we know they hired or fired, not hired. They fired most of their engineers like two years ago. So they must've hired some of them back or they're working on the Snap Glasses 3. I think they're outsourcing.

Yeah. Well, probably Snap Glasses 3. They're probably working on that. And we know that they're outsourcing some of their R&D now. So they're still probably paying for that. I'm sure they paid all those third-party developers that develop the mini apps. I'm sure people didn't do that for free and came to Snap with them. Yeah. And, you know, knowing those kinds of deals, Snap went to Calm and said, hey, we'll give you, you know, $10 million.

Go build us an app using our platform for your product. Yep. Because we need launch partners, you know. Yep. But we desperately need to get some traction. Desperately. Any way we can. And also, they said it's daily active users were up at 238 million, which is up 4% from April.

But it is starting to go down because people have not really caught on just because of the COVID. Everybody's over at TikTok. Everybody's at TikTok. Right. Exactly. Everybody's at TikTok or Instagram. And yeah, so Snap originally got a bump.

Of course, they did. Everybody that had any kind of content whatsoever got a bump when we first all went into shelter-in-place. And now people are not sticking with it because, you know, nobody else is there. They're getting tumbleweeds. Yep. And I think it's definitely going to go down as soon as Reels come out on Instagram and everybody starts to move over to there.

Because I know TikTok people are desperate for another platform that is not, you know, in jeopardy of being shut down by the government. So, I think Reels is going to get a big bump out of the gate when it launches, which is like, you know, that's just – it's poison for Snap. Yep. And more money to suck.

So, it's a lose-lose. It's a lose-lose for everybody. Nobody wins. Nope.

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We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans, with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat, with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

Dave is also the co-host of the Great Turtles of Maryland podcast, where he identifies some of the endangered species in his backyard. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And as a graduate of the University of Maryland, whose mascot is a Maryland Terrapin, a fearsome turtle, which is, yes, I understand, an oxymoron.

Strangely enough, my nickname in college. Yeah, so I do have a certain affection for turtles. So, there you go. There you go. How are we doing, guys? Hanging in there.

It's been a decent week. Some sports are back, which is helping keep me somewhat sane, even though sports are weird. Oh, yeah, yeah. How did you, how, did you watch the baseball stuff that, uh... I did. I watched Dodgers' opening game yesterday. Uh-huh. It's, it's, I mean, I've dipped my toes in the water already, having gotten into, uh, being a fan of international soccer.

So, I've already kind of gotten used to, uh, the heart, like, big stakes games done in a complete and utter vacuum. So, uh... It's weird, but better than nothing. So, it's, uh, it's been fine. It's, I enjoyed sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and watching a baseball game and feeling, not normal, but something in the vicinity of.

Uh-huh, I guess. A glimmer of hope, yeah. Uh-huh, yeah, I, I suppose, uh, you know, it's, it's some normalcy in a world that's not normal. Right, right. Yeah. So, that was fine. Um, yeah. Yeah. I thought it was interesting. I, I watched some of it, uh, myself, and, uh, I, like you, I felt like I was watching, uh, uh, like a preseason game, I guess, is how it felt.

Well, aren't watching all Orioles games kind of like watching a preseason game? Hey, hey, hey, I was watching a Nationals game, buddy. I'll have you know. But yes, you are correct. Watching all Orioles games is like, yeah.

Yeah. Kind of like turtle watching. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Probably a reason they don't scrimmage against their, uh, their minor league teams. Because they'd lose. Who knows how it would, yeah. Who knows how it would come out. So, yeah. Anywho. So, yeah. We're somewhat back to normal there.

Um, we did have some news this week. Uh, as we kind of expected. Uh, Twitter has now confirmed that, yes. Uh, some DMs were accessed in the hack. Uh, not, uh, no two high profile politicians have been, uh, named here in the US. Apparently they're all safe. But one elected official in the Netherlands did have his DM inbox, uh, accessed.

Again, I guess my thought being that surely anybody that is an elected official would know better than to do too much hanky-panky in DMs. Um, so I'm not too worried that too much is going to come out of this. Uh, most high profile people shouldn't be running their own Twitter account anyways.

So if anything is going on in the DMs, one would assume it would be the interns in the office futzing about. But, uh, we haven't heard anything salacious yet, uh, even though we know that some were accessed. So we shall see if news is coming. Yeah. It was interesting to us how it was, it was almost, uh, the announcement from Twitter was almost a roundabout way of,

of saying who wasn't affected by, by saying it was, it was this official in the Netherlands and that was the only politician who was affected. It was in effect saying it wasn't Obama, it wasn't Biden, you know, so, so stop asking. Yeah.

And of course the big one would be, uh, you know, Trump because obviously Trump has access to his own Twitter, um, as opposed to perhaps many politicians who do not, or, you know, at least have a team of people that are involved. Uh, it is apparent to the Trump is, uh, in charge of his own.

He's large and in charge. So. They cannot pry that device out of his, his little hands. Little tiny hands. Right. Right. So I do think it's funny. I saw this over at Reuters, more than 1,000 people at Twitter had the access to the tool that they used to get into these accounts, including contractors like Cognizant.

Hmm. Seems, uh, seems like a bad idea. I mean, we've only said it on the show about a thousand times, but. Obviously a bad idea, but I, one that I would say is probably more the norm than we would probably like to know.

Um, certainly. I mean, I'm sure there's quite a lot of documents that these companies have to sign to become contractors at that level. Uh, very, very, very large pages of legal things. Um, but I, you know, I'm, I'm not shocked or surprised that, uh, contractors would have access to these sorts of tools.

Yeah, I guess my thoughts are, if this hadn't happened, had there been proper security tools in place with the, these internal tools, would we care that a thousand people had access to them? If it was the right tool, if it was a properly secured tool, would that matter?

I mean, yes, having that many people, it certainly increases the attack surface. It increases the potential for bad things to happen. But I don't know, relative to the size of Twitter, is a thousand a big number? I don't know the answer to that. It might be, might not be. My shock and surprise would be the fact that we hadn't, uh, we haven't had this happen before.

Of course, that assumes it hasn't, and we just haven't heard about it, but. Well, we did have the one, uh, disgruntled Twitter employee delete Trump's account on his way out the door for, and it stayed deleted for about, you know, five minutes. But, you know, it has happened. And what a blissful five minutes it was.

No, we've talked about this before. We've actually come up with some ideas on this show that, you know, when you're modifying someone's information, you know, you should probably maybe have a manager on hand to get manager approval.

Yeah. And one would assume these things are all logged as well. You know, this person accessed this at this time and did this to this account, and it's all in a nice log somewhere. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, you'd think. Well, you can, if you can bet there's a list of potential modifications that are on somebody's whiteboard right now as we speak.

You're not allowed to say whiteboard anymore. Oh, yes. Oh. Racially diverse board. Yes. Rainbow board. All right, we just go with that. That'll work. Drawing board. How about drawing board? Yeah, okay. We had some more not surprising news this week.

A GED match, which we may remember is the DNA analysis site that police used to catch the so-called Golden State Killer, was pulled briefly offline on Sunday as its parent company investigated, wait for it, how its user's DNA profile data apparently became available to law enforcement searches.

It was a permissions change that was caused, they say, by a breach. So, yes, you can upload all your DNA profile data, trace your family trees and ancestors, et cetera, et cetera. And they have issued privacy warnings to its users and put in new controls to allow users to opt in for their DNA to be included in police searches.

But, yeah, those permissions. Police searches are a different thing that's going on elsewhere in the country. Those settings changed without permission or modification, which is something that I've maintained has happened to me about a gazillion times on Facebook. Every time they've updated their permissions and access and privacy features, things get switched off that I swore were on or vice versa.

So, this has happened. Don't forget the old Bluetooth Apple update bug that plagued us for the first three years of the show. Every update would switch Bluetooth back on all the time, even though I'd always kept it off. So, this has happened to them. All user permissions were reset. And, of course, they were all opt in to, yes, please do let the police search my data, as opposed to opt out by default.

And this happened for approximately three hours. So, all law enforcement went nuts and searched everything they possibly could, one would assume, and then downloaded the entire database. And they had pizza delivered, and there was confetti and hats, and there might have even been cake.

Yeah. And then there was a second breach, which caused user settings to reset as well, something like that, along those lines. And so, yeah, and there's no word here as to, I mean, I'm assuming some sort of restore from backup was enabled to get everybody's settings back, as opposed to just sending out an email saying, whoops, you'll need to switch that off if you want to, since they claim to have fixed this in about three hours.

So, oopsies. Yeah. Could have been worse, I suppose. Could have been three months. Yeah. I wonder if folks can go after law enforcement and say, I did not give you my permission to have my DNA data.

If you have it, please delete it. Yeah, I'm sure that will happen. Oh, set the visibility to zero, please. They do have a case, though, if that data is used in court. They definitely would probably have a case against them for that. Just having it, probably not, but if they do use it in some way, shape, or form to, you know, arrest your touchy-feely uncle, then you may have some kind of recourse there, unless the touchy-feely uncle deserves it.

And you might say, okay, who knows? Yeah, who knows? So that happened. The other story I had, which is something that I'm sure has thrilled Israeli researchers across the globe, because they are always the ones that seem to be able to hack Apple without too many problems.

Now they're going to have a leg up, a little bit of extra help. Apple is going to provide hacker-friendly phones to security researchers. They have not done this for a long time. They will be loaning out what they're calling special security research devices to security researchers so they can futz around with it.

There's going to be a lot of controls on this, apparently. They're going to, you know, you cannot, these phones cannot leave the premises of the researchers ever. They are never to be meant in the outside world. And if researchers find vulnerabilities using these phones, they have to report them to Apple or an appropriate third-party if it's in third-party code.

Apple will then attempt to resolve the issue and provide a publication date when it will take place. Until then, researchers cannot share any of these findings with others. But it's an interesting move by Apple, which is a, I think it's a good one. If you're going to be the privacy phone, if you're going to do all that, why not let a bunch of other people who are smart and capable of doing it regardless, poke around with your phone and find it for you.

Yeah, they're not going to have any of these in Israel because they've already, they're like, we're good. We're fine. We don't need them. We don't need your dumbed-down phone. It ruins the challenge. Exactly. Yeah, this is interesting.

I had a couple of thoughts about this. One was who will – when you speak about folks like the Israeli researchers who, as we say, are quite good at things that they do, I can imagine those kinds of folks reaching out to the people who have one of these phones.

In other words, not wanting it for themselves but wanting to pay a visit to the folks who have it to spend a few hours in the room together. Right, because that way they can skirt around the Apple issues about not publishing the breaches. Beforehand.

Yeah, like saying, oh, I didn't – I found something but since I'm not actually an SRD licensed phone carrier, I don't have to tell Apple about it. You know? Yeah. Now, surely that's in violation of the deal that Apple would have with the people that they gave the phone to.

But it also makes me wonder what sort of information is – would these special phones be sending to Apple all the time? Are they giving a blow-by-blow description of every single thing that's going on on the phone? That's possible. One would assume everything is being logged.

Yeah. Yeah. So, certainly. I think Apple wouldn't even get into this kind of program without at least that kind of cover-their-own-ass thing going on. Yeah. It's an interesting move. I agree with you, Brian. I think it's a good thing. And Apple seems to have been embracing more of this as time goes on.

You know, they were kind of late to the bug bounty program, and now they're doing that as well. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah. I'm all for it. I think it's a great idea. Yeah. All right. Hat tip to Joe for this next one. This just came in through the emails.

Chinese-made drone app in Google Play spooks security researchers. Now, this is from DJI, my personal drone producer. I've got a DJI drone. I have one, too. Oh, yes. Well, do you run their software on your Android phone?

No, I do not. I didn't think so. I was fairly certain you did not. Well, DJI Go 4, which has been installed more than one million times, can apparently execute arbitrary code. It also phones home with a ton of data, including the IMEI, IMSI, carrier name, SIM serial number, SD card information, OS language, kernel version, screen size and brightness, wireless network name and address and MAC address, and Bluetooth addresses as well.

And they were sent to, of course, mainland China. And people wonder why we're dubious of TikTok. Exactly. So they were using an API from a company called MobTech. You figure this would be going back to Russia then with a name like that. Yeah.

They have removed this as of now. So this was in previous versions. But, yeah, not good, DJI. Not good optics right now. No, not at all. I mean, this goes back to it's been in the past couple of years that government agencies were saying we can't use DJI drones for the stuff we want to do.

And obviously, DJI is a leader in this space. Their drones are cool and fun and seem ahead of the pack. But, yeah, mine's basically uncrashable. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Mine, not so much. I paid extra for mine.

Yeah. In fact, well, I've never crashed it, but I do have a teenage son. So that's all I'm going to say about that. Clever little bastards. They just have a way of, yeah, they, anyway, I may have had to have purchased some new rotor blades.

A couple times. Once or twice. Once or twice. Yeah. Yes, my son's only four and the replacement rate and burn rate on every object he gets his hands on is incredibly high. So I understand this. This does remind me of a conversation that Jason and I were having when our government was first looking at banning TikTok.

And, you know, we kind of said, okay, well, don't take TikTok away from the kids. We're in quarantine. We're in lockdown. It's something to do. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's amusing and fun and really what's the harm. But we always forget, you know, we think about just these apps are being used all the time by people in sensitive locations, not just, you know, the kids at home playing.

Well, I just remember the whole thing with Strava, the bike, the bike ride app and the jogging logging and people were doing it on bases and that wasn't good. That's, you know, it's, it's one thing to have a drone and, you know, use it at your home or at the beach or as one news report that I saw this week, which I didn't put in the show notes, but I probably should have.

Police somewhere on the East Coast used it to, to basically surveil a, a known topless beach that wasn't supposed to be topless where people were also drinking and then just sent a drone over and then came over and used the drone footage to recognize the perpetrators and give them tickets, which obviously annoyed quite a few people.

But there's, you know, it's one thing to use a drone at home and there's another thing to realize, oh, well, people are probably using them on bases and things of that nature. And these things are phoning home and the home they're phoning to is not our home. And it's from a home that people that kind of want to possibly harm us.

And there was another drone story this morning. Apparently a photographer put a drone over, uh, Megan and Harry's house to get pictures of the baby at Tyler Perry's compound and, uh, he's selling those photos. So that was an interesting, uh, legal story this morning. Cause they're saying the, the photographer saying, no, I took this photo in Malibu and they're like, the kid's never been to Malibu.

So, uh, yeah, it doesn't work out that way. So, yeah, well, and, and TikTok is, is making noises like they want to, uh, break away from their Chinese owners so they can be, not be under the thumb of the Chinese.

Chinese government, uh, unknown if that's, hey, it's our new office in Hong Kong. We're separate. Yeah. Right. Right. And exactly. I say a distinction without a difference. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there were a bunch of us investors that actually tried to, uh, buy a majority share in TikTok this week, but it didn't work.

Cause they were like, let's just get this damn, let's just buy the damn thing and get it out of there because it's a cash cow. I mean, even on another TikTok news, TikTok has just created a $200 million fund to start paying the influencers. Cause they're like, oh, we don't know how to do ad shares yet.

So we're just going to throw money at you. Right. Yeah. Here, here's some, here's some money. Interesting. But, well, but back to drones. Yeah. Um, uh, if you do have, uh, the, the, uh, DJI go for app on an Android phone, you might want to update it.

Yep. Yep. Probably a good idea. Mine is much older. I have one of the, uh, I want to say it's the Phantom 2, which, which I like because it's, uh, it, it's not, um, uh, what do you call it when they restrict your GPS? Oh yeah.

You don't have the, you're not, uh, geofenced. It's not geofenced. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah. It's not geofenced. So you can basically fly it anywhere, but it doesn't have all the fancy things that yours has where it, it won't crash into things. Yeah. Yeah. Mine is, mine is extremely geofenced.

Well, Dave, it's perfect for your location. Then if you just go get an Android phone, you can, uh, fly your drone all over and all around the bases near you and send all that data right back. I've often wondered about that. What, what, what, what would happen? What would happen? We'd be looking for a new, uh, security guest.

Yeah. Hey, Joe Kerrigan, what are you doing on Fridays? Yeah. I mean, there are a couple of hotels that are within view of, uh, Fort Meade. What would happen? And, and that's where the NSA is. So what would happen if you just set your drone and just headed it, you know, I don't know, 250 feet and just buzzed it right over the, over NSA.

What would happen? I think it would fall right out of the sky. I was going to say it would fall from the sky immediately. And you would have, you would have some very large black vehicles pulling up to your location within two minutes. Yeah. I suspect you're right. I suspect you're right.

Probably not worth. I think it's worth the experiment, Dave. Yeah. Here's what we do. We do an arm's length transaction. You put it on eBay and we find a, we find a stooge to buy it on eBay, but it's got the, the coordinates for Langley already plugged in.

And then you can, as soon as he turns it on, it just takes off and flies and you could be like, no, I sold it. It's not mine anymore. Go get this other guy. Hey, Joe Kerrigan. I have a gift for you. Merry Christmas. That's really weird.

Wow. I didn't know those waypoints were in there. Yeah. You know, you know, there, there are stories about them going rogue every now and again and just flying off. So it must've been that bug. You know, it's, it is an older unit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've got one more story.

And, and as I always like to point out when we kind of make these transitions, uh, uh, you know, the only difference between China and the U S is China, uh, is government run in the U S. We let the private companies do it. Uh, this is the customs and border protection, which can now track cars nationwide via a commercial database that they purchased.

So, yeah, we, they can now keep an eye on your car without even bothering to get a warrant. Uh, this month we've learned that the, uh, custom and border protection bought access to a commercial license plate database, meaning they can look up the historical location of cars across the U S with no legal red tape necessary.

No, the other interesting thing about that is, uh, as this story points out, this, uh, this, this all came to light because, uh, they published what there's called their privacy impact assessment.

We're impacting your privacy a lot. Yes. And that's pretty much what it is. So, you know, in past stories about, uh, customs and border patrol, we've talked about how, uh, in fact, this comes up on caveat all the time.

Like they have that 200 mile rule from the border where they're able to basically their jurisdiction applies up to 200 miles from the border, which pretty much covers almost everybody because cities are generally built near, um, ports and borders and things like that.

So that's where most of the, um, but what's interesting about this privacy impact assessment is that in it, customs and border protection basically admit that there is no practical way for folks in the U S to opt out of this license plate gathering, uh, effort.

So if you are driving a car in the U S you will be, uh, uh, vacuumed up in their data collection effort and that's, uh, you, you can't avoid it. It's, it's, it's, it's a fact of life. Yep. Yep.

Good times. Good times. Yeah. So there's that have fun with driving around. You know, I was thinking about this related to that.

This has nothing to do with security, but I was thinking about how we aren't buying, we, by we, I mean, Americans, we aren't buying cars so much anymore, right? We're buying little SUVs. Right. Mostly. And I don't know about you guys, but I have been, I want to say since I was in my late, well, really since I've been driving, I have had a subscription to car and driver magazine.

Right. I'm not a car guy, but I do like nice cars. I, and I enjoy reading about the technology and the cars and that sort of thing. But, you know, I'm not a guy who, I'm not a car guy, but I, I do enjoy fancy cars. I, I watch Top Gear religiously, not a car guy.

There you go. Right. Yeah. So, but a point that, that someone made in car and driver in the past couple of years was that it is hard to go out and drive a car these days in the U.S. and have a pleasure drive because the roads are so crowded.

Yeah. The roads are crowded or they're crappy because they haven't been maintained because we have crumbling infrastructure everywhere. Right. One of the few drives that I have actually really enjoyed in quite a long time was the drive from Los Angeles out to Palm Springs, but it doesn't start until an hour outside of Los Angeles.

And it has to be done during the week. Basically, you can't do it on a weekend because there's just too many people everywhere. So, yeah, that joy of driving, I've never really, growing up in Los Angeles, you never really experience it because L.A. is just a vast cesspool.

I have to say, the last time I drove back from Chicago, actually, the last two times I drove back from Chicago, I did a thing where I tried to avoid freeways as much as possible and take back roads. And I'm like, okay, I know I'm headed towards the Rockies.

I look, you know, I had Google Maps there, but I wasn't using it for wayfinding. I was just literally like, I'm going west. I know where the Rockies are and I know where the Rockies stop. So I'm going for that point where the, because I hate going through the Rockies. It is one of the worst things ever. So I'm just driving and just going southwest.

I'm like, okay, I'll just find something, you know, it took me an extra day, but it was one of the most pleasurable drives I've ever had. And just out of random happenstance, I ended up in the second largest windmill farm in the country.

And it took me an hour to drive through it on these back roads. And you're still going like, you know, 60 miles an hour on these back roads. It's not, they're just not freeways. They're just two lane, two lane roads. Right. They were beautiful roads. Everything was smooth and there was like almost no traffic because everybody goes to the freeways.

And I got to say those types of drives now, it's like, that's the only way I'm going to travel cross country anymore because it's just more fun. You get to see all sorts of stuff. You find little towns that you never knew existed. And then if you take the Atlas Obscura app with you and turn on notifications, you just find crazy random stuff along the way.

Because it's like, oh, you're within five miles of this random thing. Would you like to go check it out? Here are directions, you know? Road trips with the Atlas Obscura app are awesome. I got to say. It's the only way to farfuck, Nugent. Well, I'll also point out that, for example, the Waze app has the option of avoiding highways because a lot of people don't like highways.

So this happened to us accidentally one time. Somehow that setting had been thrown. We were like, why is it taking us so long to go to our favorite restaurant? Because it was taking us all on back roads. But then that struck me like that would be a great way to do a road trip. Just set it to avoid highways and let it map you through that way.

If you have the time, you're right. It's a great way to do it. Maybe they just updated the app and reset all your settings. That's what happened. Right. Right. As they are wont to do. Yeah. And I was getting ready to say, we're giving advice to people who are never going to use it because they can't leave the house anymore.

But my friend Shane rented an RV here in Los Angeles and put his family in it and drove all the way to Maine a couple of weeks ago. And he's hiding out in Maine, like basically living on a lake, going hunting, doing all sorts of Maine shit. And he had one of the best road trips of his life.

And I think he did kind of the same thing. He just like kind of went that away. Yeah. Because RV life is pretty damn cool. I think he was going to buy one after this trip. I'm like, good for you, man. So, you know, we did a road trip, what, last summer.

We did a southern loop, you know, out of Maryland down towards the south through the Carolinas and that sort of thing. And it was sort of a, you know, plan as you go kind of thing. Hit a bunch of theme parks, water parks, that sort of thing. And it was delightful. And I have to say, I'd never really been through that part of the south before.

And it was when you could get on those big open roads and sometimes it would take us through farmland. And it was a great way to experience the country. And I'm glad we got to do it. Did you guys stop at south of the border? Of course we did. Of course. Yes.

Awesome. Of course we did. You always got to stop at south of the border. Yeah. The kids had no idea what they were in for. And, of course, my oldest son basically got a lifetime supply of fireworks because that's what they do.

And the younger one was just more kind of amused by all of the – it's – one of the things about south of the border is it seems as though – like if you're a miniature golf course that's going out of business, south of the border will buy up all of your little cement animals.

Yes. And they'll paint them some sort of pastel color and stick them on the property there. So that was the part that the younger boy enjoyed very much. Why is there an alligator standing there next to King Kong? South of the border is awesome.

It is just one of those things that if you're going that way, you have to go. You just have to go. Everybody needs to do it once. Yep. Agree. You cannot – and the scale of it is – it's beyond what you expect it to be.

So it's worth it just for that. I went there 30 years ago with my dad because we were driving from Chicago through Washington, D.C. and then down to Kennedy because he wanted to see the rockets. He always wanted to go to NASA and see the rockets. And I had been to south of the border before. I'm like, just wait.

Just you wait. And when we got there, he was just like, whoa. And we both bought – and we did both buy sombreros for the rest of the trip. Yeah. And we wore them – we wore them at Disney. We wore them at Epcot. We wore them at Universal. We looked like idiots. But I tell you what, they keep you cool.

They keep you cool. Yeah, they do. No, it's – Next week on Road Trips with Dave and Jason. Americana. Yeah, that's right. Well, actually, one of the things we stopped at on our road trip was we did stop at the world's largest bottle of sweet tea. I didn't know that was a thing.

Nope. Nope. We – it was a thing. All right. It was a thing. We went out of our way and stopped at the world's largest bottle of sweet tea. Does everybody get to take a sip and it no longer exists? No, no, no.

It's – well. Yeah. It's actually like imagine a big giant industrial tank that's been painted to look like a bottle of sweet tea. That's what it was. All right. Adding it to my list.

Yeah. Places not to go. But it worked. I knew you were going to say that. It worked to get us off the road. We went and had lunch there. We – in other words, it did exactly what it was intended to do. Yep. All right. It was to get us to come to this small town and spend some of our tourist dollars, and we did so gladly.

Yep. Well, you know, I always stop at the Burger Boy by the world's largest thermometer on the way out to Vegas. Yep. I've been there. There you go. There you go. I'm going to go look up the world's largest bottle of sweet tea in the Atlas Obscura app so I can see exactly where it's at now.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right, guys. I think that's enough random tangents for one show. I think so. I think so. All right, guys. Have a great weekend. See you guys next time. You too. Take care. Now, Brian, I've been kind of moving over to USB-C land lately because I got a Mac Mini, the new one.

I got a MacBook Air, and my iMac has USB-C or Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C on it as well. So kind of making the switch, and half of my gadgets all use USB-C now. So I'm like, man, it would be really nice to have a decent hub, USB-C hub like I have for, you know, all of my other USB A, B, and C devices, or A and B devices, sorry.

So I went on a hunt, and I found over at Amazon, Anchor Docking Station Power Expand Elite 13-in-1 Thunderbolt 3 dock for USB-C laptops, 85W charging for laptop, 18W charging for phone, 4K, HDMI, 1 gigabit per second, Ethernet, audio, USB-C.

USB-C, Gen 1, USB-C, Gen 2, SD 4.0. That's a beast. That's a beast, and it is a beast because it costs $300. Yeah, I was about to say, I'm looking at the price, and I'm looking at the thing itself, and I'm like, boy, I miss ports coming in computers.

There's an extra $300 you just had to spend. Yeah, I mean, this thing is incredible, and the real obnoxious part of it is, there's not that many ports. There's not that many ports on it. Like, the little Frankenstein Bolt I had, the first one, had almost as many ports as this.

And this is an ugly tower that you have to sit on your desk. Yeah, it's definitely an ugly tower. It's got a bunch of crap in it. But, you know, the whole point of it is, it's like, I need more ports. And you get, like, literally one extra port here. The really annoying thing with the Frankenstein Bolt is that you can either run a monitor off of it, or you can charge it.

You can't do both. And that's why I was looking for something decent here, because you have to, they're a mess. This whole USB-C thing is a mess, at least with, yeah, it's shocking, really. And I'm just, I'm not a fan of it. So, I skipped the $300 USB-C.

I'm just like, okay, I'll figure it out some other way. But, and so, remember that price, $300. So, I've got this 55-inch plasma TV in my bedroom that I got at a fire sale from the set of Entourage Season 5.

It's plasma. So, it's hot. Really, really hot. So, I can't really use it that much without turning the air conditioner on in my room. It's just like, the power suck on, it's ridiculous. So, I'm like, look, let's get a modern TV. So, I went in search of last night, and I found the TCL 50S425 50-inch 4K Smart LED Roku TV 2019.

This is a 50-inch TV, right? It's an LED TV. I've got the 55-inch in my living room. They're beautiful. They work great. Having Roku built into it is awesome, except when you want to use HBO Max. So, I look at the price on it, and I'm like, $269.99.

So, I can buy a 50-inch television for less than I can get for a few ports. What is wrong with this? It'd be great if the TV actually had a whole bunch of ports on it, and you could just use that. I just use that.

Exactly. Oh, man. And the whole thing started, like, two weeks ago when I got the Acer CB241 HYK BMJ DPRX 23.8-inch IPS Ultra HD 4K, 100% sRGB monitor with tilt, swivel, pivot, height adjustments, and built-in speakers black.

Because I needed another 4K monitor for the house. And this one actually costs – this is a 23.8-inch monitor. And it costs $338.19. These prices are – Pricing is all over the map. I know. I should have just got the damn 50-inch TV and plugged my laptop into it.

Like, you know, or just, you know, threw to it with an Apple TV. Yep. So, none of this makes any sense. No, it doesn't make any sense. And it's really frustrating to me because I'm starting to do, like, my due diligence and my research for new TVs and things like that for the new house.

And the pricing is so all over the place. And it's so frustrating. Yep. Thanks, Amazon. Yeah. I got to say, though, man, these TCL Roku TVs are awesome for the price. They look great. Put a sound bar on it. They sound great. The speakers – the internal speakers suck.

But anything else? Yeah, of course. I'm going to bring back another thing that we talked about in the past. And this is bullshit statistics. Yes. HBO Max has reached 4.1 million subscribers in first month despite lack of distribution on Roku and Fire TV.

Now, Brian, you talked last time we talked about how your HBO Go account was turned to an HBO Max account. Yes. As soon as I saw this, I figure I am one of those subscribers, even though technically I am subscribing to HBO. Through my cable provider.

And I just used to get the app HBO Go as part of that process. And they automatically shuffled me onto HBO Max. So I am not a new subscriber or anything like that. I have not activated a new account, technically. I've just been given an app rebrand.

But I am sure I am one of these subscribers. And I pay for – I do the $14.99 a month package because I don't want to get it through my cable provider because I do like having it on the apps. So I am one of these as well. So I am one of these as well, I am sure. But it is like – Jason, I just want to point out something to you financially.

Since you do not travel and you are always on your own home Wi-Fi, it would probably make more sense for you just to get the cable package. Because the only upside to using these apps that you pay for directly is you're not tied to your Spectrum or your cable accounts.

It's $19 to add HBO to our DirecTV account. So this is actually cheaper. Yeah, and it's a pain in the ass to do and you have to like spend an hour and a half on the phone and all this crap. This just works. And I get the added upside of just being able to have it whenever.

And also, multiple accounts means I can kind of slide one to a friend here or there if you know what I'm saying. I can do the backstreet barter, the backstreet password barter because I did trade one of the HBO Max. Accounts for a Disney Plus account, yes. So technically, I'm paying $14.99 for HBO Max and Disney Plus.

And that's what a deal, as they say. Yes. All right. So we've been talking about our Herman Miller chairs a lot recently and I saw this come across my feed. Logitech and Herman Miller have made a $1,495 gaming chair.

Yep. Yep. It's a fully customizable seat for gamers that looks like something a mad scientist would own. Behold, the Embody gaming chair. This is the first product geared towards the Twitch generation. And since it's not exactly known for staying on the pulse of gamers, Herman Miller worked with Logitech to learn more about how eSports players actually sit.

Now, I have to ask you a question as somebody who's not terribly into gaming, Jason. Do you sit differently when you're playing a game? Kind of, yeah. Yeah, because, eh, no. That's what I thought.

Or let me phrase that even better. As somebody who owns a standard Herman Miller chair, which is extremely comfortable and extremely adjustable, are there any adjustments you cannot make with your $700 or $800 Herman Miller chair that this $1,500 chair would do better? Yeah.

Yeah, there's actually a lot of stuff that you can do with this chair. It's got different spine calibration. So we only have just the lumbar support on the Mira 2. This has seven points of spine posture adjustments, which actually would be pretty nice.

But it is not twice the price of a Mira 2, like, upside. Yeah. Yeah. No, it looks kind of ugly, too. I don't like how it looks either. Yeah, it looks bad. Yeah. So when you put this in here, I did a little more research because they also released the Motia gaming desk, also with Logitech.

Now, this is a $1,295 standing desk, or, you know, it's basically the same as my Uplift desk. It has, you know, basically switch, raise, and lower, and it's overpriced for what it is. It's literally a desk. But it's Herman Miller.

But it's a flat black piece of plastic. And what I love is they talk about the anti-glare surface on the desk, and they show the gamer playing, like, in the photos, and he's got one of these giant mouse pads on it. Just like I do.

So I'm like, okay, why do I need a non-reflective coating when I'm going to put a three-foot fucking mouse pad on it? Now, to be fair, we're making fun of them, but I actually applaud them. They found a market that exists, which is the, you know, upscale, well-financed, slightly older gamer who will buy these things.

Yeah, this is really going to be people who are, like, my age but don't know how to do research. They're going to be just like, ooh. Or people with just, you know. Or brand consciousness. Yeah. You know, people who will buy, you know, Herman Miller no matter what. Exactly. Yeah, people who just buy it for the status.

Now, since I was researching this, because I went to my Uplift desk website to look up, you know, the specs on my desk versus the ones that they had. And my desk was, like, around $700 compared to their $1,300 desk.

You can almost buy two of mine for one of theirs. And I love mine. Then I saw in the accessories department, have you clicked on this link yet, Brian? I hope you have. I did. So, they have created the underdesk hammock accessory.

So, you can take, basically, you can make a hammock under your desk and hang from it when you need a nap. I wish to God that this didn't specifically state that this is only for Uplift desks. If there was an attachment to get this onto any other desk, I would buy this for my wife in two seconds.

Even if just as a gag, $55, I might just do it anyways as a gag gift. Yeah, somebody else said that they use the hammock as a footrest. So, they just basically put their feet on it and let their feet swing back and forth in the comments. This is amazing. Yeah, the downside is that there's a 200-pound weight limit on it.

Now, see the problem. Got to do some more yoga, Jason. Well, I got to do some more yoga. But the problem is I've got 75 pounds worth of crap on top of the desk already, which goes into that 200-pound weight limit, I believe. So, it's. Right. Maybe if you get two hammocks. Yeah, I need to go back in time and spend a couple months at Auschwitz, I think, to probably lose the amount of weight that I need to to get into this hammock.

Also, also, it's. Rough one there. I'm trying. So, the other issue is that the wingspan of the desk is only 72 inches. It's for smaller folks. It is for we, we people, not big guys like us.

That's for sure. But it's cool. It's funny. You know, I think it's funny. It is. It's great. Oh, man. And this kind of, it was interesting. StarCraft 2 turns 10 years old this year. I actually thought it was going to be longer than that.

I have, I mean, I've got it. I've played it. I've got all the expansions. I love StarCraft 2. Not as much as I love StarCraft 1. But apparently the reason this game has the longevity because people still play it. There's still tournaments about it, especially in South Korea. They've made it so customizable because they took Warcraft 3's game editor and kind of baked it into StarCraft 2's game editor because Warcraft's game editor was awesome.

So I can see, you know, making your own custom maps and challenges and stuff like that. We used to do it all the time on StarCraft 1 and it made the game so much more fun. But, yeah, no, happy birthday, StarCraft. I've always loved that game. I always wanted World of StarCraft instead of World of Warcraft, but they never went back and did it.

Bastards. Well, maybe you can build it yourself. With what? My mad programming skills? Yes, of course. From your hammock under your desk. Exactly. I bought a couple, well, I got a couple apps and I've got a new device here.

I got the JBL Flip 4 waterproof portable Bluetooth speaker Red. They need to work on their Amazon titles, obviously, because that's kind of generic and boring. Way too short. It is. So I wanted one of these because, as mentioned, I'm going to be going on a little vacation, as it were, which will be by a pool.

And I wanted to have an easy way to play music out there in a space I don't really control. So I picked this up. Pretty nice price. I was concerned about the sound quality because it is very small. Sounds great. Like, I've been testing it out in my house. Super easy to connect to.

Pretty phenomenal for the price. So I highly recommend this. JBL generally doesn't do anything terribly wrong. So I was very surprised and happy with this. That's good. And I forgot to mention the other, last week when we were talking about the Nest Home Mini, I forgot to mention the sound quality on it.

And it is atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. Even with the EQ, you take the bass all the way down, turn the treble all the way up. It's still got so much bass in it that you can't understand a damn thing. Like, if you're trying to play music or a podcast, it's really hard. The built-in voice sounds great when it talks to you, but it is not tuned for anything remotely else that you'd want to do.

And it does work as a Bluetooth speaker. I figured out how to hook it up so I can't throw from my phone to it. But the problem is, it sounds like shit. So the speakers on my iPhone 11 Pro sound 10 times better than that, which I guess makes sense since that phone cost $1,000 and the Nest Home Mini cost $45.

Or it's just basically given away a lot of the time. Yeah. So I tried out some of the apps that I had talked about when I had found that link about the various nature apps for kids and things of that nature. The first I tried was Vito Technologies Starwalk 2. This looks pretty amazing.

It is not for kids. Like, this is one of the ones where you can, it basically just boots up, it takes your location, and you can just scroll around and see all the stars and all that stuff right above you. It's pretty intense. It's pretty awesome. But it is not for kids at all. Even playing it with my son, it was a bit hard to explain.

He likes some of the pretty pictures. But, look, he really just wants to focus in on planets and be able to spin those around and all that sort of thing. So luckily, they put out another version called Starwalk Kids. Now, this is great for kids. The videos, instead of having to read, Kid doesn't read yet, so bringing up page after page of text, not very useful if I want to get 20 minutes to myself.

But Starwalk Kids, perfect. He's able to, like, basically pick every planet, dwarf planet, all that sort of stuff. He got the user interface within a couple minutes, and he's just happily learning things and then wandering around the house and asking me questions and seeing if I know them and calling me an idiot when I don't.

So it's perfect. So highly recommend that one for kids. And for adults, you can check out Starwalk, too. It's pretty intense and seems to be pretty good. And I'm looking forward to my place that I will be going to in the next two weeks is kind of outside of the Los Angeles lights.

So I'll actually be able to give it a go and maybe look at some stars and point some stuff out to my son and go, did you know that? Hmm, you didn't. Huh, smarty pants. I did. Nice. I found this one over at the Next Web, and I thought it was pretty cool. How to turn your home Wi-Fi password into a QR code for easy sharing.

Now, I originally put this in here because I was going to make fun of it because they say, here are a couple of websites that you can go to to put your credentials in and have it generate a QR code for you that you can then print. And I'm like, that would not be so smart. That would not be very smart.

But then they go on to tell you at the end of the article, for people who don't want to put their credentials in another website, here's how you do it without actually giving your credentials to somebody else. So I think it's a cool. I would recommend just losing the whole first part of that article.

Exactly. Exactly. That is not teaching people a good habit. Yeah. Yep. And I actually should have put this at the beginning of when we were talking about all the streaming services. I saw this over at Rolling Stone. It says, who loses big in the great streaming wars? The user. And it is basically an article that backs up everything we've said since episode two of the show.

So way to join the party there, Rolling Stone. Well, it's finally happened now, right? So now it's news instead of us giving our opinions. That's true. That's true. And I do like this. As Peacock joins Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Disney Plus, CBS All Access, Apple TV Plus, YouTube, Acorn, Quibi, Tooby, Hoopla, Shudder and Crunchyroll.

And so many more. And I love this in parentheses. They said, none of those names are made up. When you get to the end, it's pretty like Tooby, Hoopla, Shudder and Crunchyroll. Come on. I had never even heard of Crunchyroll. I've never heard of Tooby either. So. Yep. And I did. I actually canceled my Starz subscription because Hightown is over.

So I was paying $8.99 a month. Now, here's a pro tip for anybody who is actually using the Starz app and probably on any other app. I should probably try this with HBO Max. So when I canceled it, they're like, we don't want to see you go. We don't want to see you go. Then at the very end, they're like, okay, okay.

Just between us girls. I'm going to give you two offers here. I'm going to give you $0.99 a month for three months or you can do $2.99 a month for six months. And I was paying $9 a month. So those fuckers. Isn't that the old, that's the old porn model, right?

The porn subscription model. If you, anytime you try to cancel, well, we hate to see you go. How about we give it to you for next to nothing? Well, that's the everything subscription model. Try and do that with your cable or your direct TV and you can pretty much do the same. You should do that every 12 months anyway. Everybody should do that and just say.

Try to cancel everything. Say if you're on cable, say I'm moving to satellite. If you're on satellite, say I'm moving to cable. They will put you to customer retention and then the world is your oyster. It's the only reason I still have Sirius XM at all. Because every time I try to cancel, it gets cheaper and cheaper.

There you go. There you go. Closing shout outs. Lost one of my favorite music magazines this week. Not that that's surprising because music is dead. Magazines dead. Put them together. You got a dead sandwich.

But it is sad to lose. It is sad to lose Q magazine. It was one of my favorites. Very hard to find in the U.S. Always found it at airports. British music magazine. Definitely a good way for me to keep in touch with what's going on in the music industry.

And particularly British bands because I've always been a bit of an Anglophile. And there's an interesting article from some of the original editors and people that started up the magazine saying why we should mourn the loss of Q magazine. And I agree with it 100%. We are losing something by losing these editors and gatekeepers of popular culture.

And it's sad. I used to always look forward to getting the magazine and reading it. So sad loss. Aw, poor baby. There you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Schilmeister. 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.

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