479: Good to the Last Click

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. After some very thorough research, Brian, I can definitely tell you that dogs do not care which direction they're pointed in when they pee or poo. All right. Well, you can take that up with mental floss. I can't remember which site had that one weird fact. They did say they did say prefer.

OK, well, I mean, these these are in open fields. They have they have free range of choice. I'm just saying that the fact giving person said prefer of us covering their ass, as it were. Yeah, because I'm wondering, you know, is there a questionnaire to find out what dogs prefer?

You know, maybe we need to tie this in with the genetic research you did on your dog. Exactly. Maybe there's some sort of a genetic basis. We need CRISPR to tell which way they poop. And I will get into CRISPR later. Oh, my God. Now, millennials, we have mocked millennials on the show for years.

Now, I found this one over at Bloomberg and was just scratching my head. You know, it seems like they've kind of started to age out because everybody's saying like, dude, I've got two kids, a house, a car payment, a mortgage, you know, all this stuff. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess you're, you know, you're really finally starting to get to the beginning of the end of your journey, just like the rest of us.

So you've stopped whining about adulting and actually started doing it. Right. Right. And so apparently this this article says millennials embrace baby boom icon Folgers coffee. I just don't get it. According to Mark Smucker, CEO of J.M. Smucker Co., they own Folgers.

And he said there was a period when investors were challenging, do millennials really drink Folgers? Believe it or not, they do. OK, well, the first problem with this study is we don't take stats from people that own the company, providing the good stats about them. Bingo, bingo, bingo. That is number one.

There is no proof in this article that there is any uptick in millennials buying Folgers whatsoever. And we also know that statistics are bullshit. Yeah. Even if, especially if they own the company, you know. Yes, yes. No, this is ridiculous. Yeah.

No, this is a headline writer trying to get every last click out of this thing, you know, good to the last click. Oh, look at what you worked on there. I see what you did there, yeah. I would be relatively shocked. I mean, I know my parents drank Folgers when I was growing up.

It was the thing. I only recently, like probably in my 30s, I was able to convince them there's actually decent coffee out there. Folgers is shit. So I don't know why anybody would drink that. You know, when I was in Chicago, I would drink it every now and again because I didn't have a fancy coffee pot.

It was the dead of winter and I just needed caffeine. I needed a caffeine infusion stat. So just have it on hand all the time. Right. It's tolerable, but much like this article, it still leaves a shitty taste in your mouth. Very good. Very good. As we're recording, we're in the midst of Prime Day mania.

People are losing their minds all about this stuff and for no good reason whatsoever, as far as I can tell. I mean, I guess you can get some deals, but if you actually browsed around the Internet instead of just going to Amazon, you could get deals all the time. I personally went there just because, as you know, I'm going to be setting up a new house soon.

So I wanted to get some of the lady in the tube devices. They have stopped. They've taken all the older models off their site, as far as I can tell, because I wanted to get a similar one to the version three or whatever. And it's gone.

I can't find it anywhere. You can only order their new ones. And all of them won't ship until near the end of the month, at which point I will no longer be here. So thanks for nothing. Oh, man. Yep. It's ridiculous. Absolutely useless for me. Well, it's funny, too.

It's like, you know, Prime Day has two two main functions. One is to get all of the excess shit that Amazon has lying out of their warehouse. It's like a garage. Yeah, it's it's a garage sale for Amazon. And it's a way for us, since it is pre-Christmas, to get really shitty presents for people that, you know, we supposedly say we care about.

And and that's what that's what it's for. So I'm surprised they're not trying to get rid of all of that stock. You know what? You know what they'll probably do? That'll be like after they sell all the new ones. They'll bring the other ones back because that way you have no choice but to get the old ones.

Yes. Yes, I agree. So screw them. That's name. That's lame. It's it's bullshit. Also, I just want to say this morning as I was getting ready for the show, fuck false notifications. Every site is doing them now. It's ridiculous. Patreon has them. Every time I log into Patreon, I get a notification and then I go and click on it and there's absolutely nothing new.

Not a new Patreon, not a new comment, not a new message, nothing. Just the notification that something new is there, which it isn't. Facebook has gotten ridiculous with their notifications. I don't know if you've noticed this, Jason, but if you interact with one of your friends a couple times on Facebook, they will automatically sign you up for notifications anytime that person posts anything.

Which is, what the fuck? I don't need that. I don't want that. So now I have to turn them off every time. Yeah, no, I haven't noticed that because I still don't use Facebook very much. Well, it's bullshit. Yeah, it is. I get that. You know what? I get that on my Fitbit app, too. I come in and like the little message things on.

Yep. And here's the funny part. Like, inbox, empty. Next one, notifications. Click on that. Hey, somebody posted something for the first time in a long time. Would you like to read it? Fuck you. See, notifications people are actually supposed to be useful, not a way to drive up engagement.

Oh, you know the worst one, though, is it's Citizen App. Oh, God. I actually installed it. I installed it. I couldn't take it anymore. Yeah, I'm like, I really don't care if 70 people were, you know, arrested at the Staples Center because, you know, we won. We won. Great. I'm nowhere near the Staples Center. Yeah.

I want things that happen within a five mile radius of my house. If it doesn't happen there, I don't care about it. I live in a bubble. I want to stay in my little Truman Show world. So shut up. I'm guessing we obviously must be outliers because they must do a statistical analysis on this sort of thing.

But what you are doing, people, is you are driving us away from your apps by making them useless. You're not making us engage more. You're making us disengage. But that's just us. Even my roommate, who's not very app savvy with the Citizen App, she's like, I don't give a shit.

You know, it's like, stop it with the notifications. I agree. It's getting really bad. And I just wanted to do a quick dip into COVID Corner because we haven't really talked about it much, but we're all in it. And after I finish reading my stories, we're going to be in it for quite some time. This is something you and I have been talking about off the air for a little bit.

We've been talking about, are there actual certified cases of somebody getting reinfected? Until now, there wasn't. But now there is, for sure. So we've got a guy in Nevada that has gotten COVID twice, and the second hit has been more severe.

We have a Dutch woman who has died after catching it for the second time, which is the first reported reinfection death. This is not surprising because coronavirus second wave is surging right now. There's an interesting article over on Vox that talks about why Germany is getting hit less.

And it's your usual suspects. They're German, and they actually pay attention and do all the things we're supposed to be doing, which we're not doing here. Yeah. There's that. So, yeah. And then New York Times has an article that tempers it a little bit. Coronavirus reinfections are real, but very, very rare.

So you might want to go read that. But the reality here, people, we're hitting second waves everywhere. And you can get it twice, which means you can get it three times to four times to five times. Well, there's a charm. So we are not in a good place unless we start paying attention, we start taking care of ourselves, and we start following the rules, and we wait patiently for the vaccine.

That may or may not ever arrive because it's good to remember at this point, we have never, ever, ever created a vaccine for a coronavirus. In the news. Now, Brian, Facebook has been dragged through the mud for many, many years because they have not taken down Holocaust deniers.

It's good to see them getting ahead of the curve here. Yes, they have finally, after a decade, decided to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust. Now, I like to think of this as someone from the German utility company showing up at Buchenwald and turning off the gas in 1950.

Sorry, a little late, a little late. Well, I mean, it is a bit ridiculous that it's taken this long. To me, this is kind of a, this is a bit of a Penn and Teller misdirection here. We're not doing anything about election fraud, really. So look over here.

Look what this hand's doing. Look. Yep. Look. We're doing good things over here somewhere. Yeah, we're going to take care of something that has run rampant on our platform since we basically started up. That is obviously bullshit and problematic because, you know, we're not doing, we can't, we can't really figure out.

We're just going to turn off advertising, political advertising after the election, right? So we're not going to deal, we're not going to deal with this. So, hey, look, Holocaust. Well, we're getting rid of them. Yep. And speaking of Jews, Jeffrey Katzenberger is trying to sell Quibi. Wow. You're coming strong out of the gate today.

See, man, hey, man, you get a little time under our belt to, like, you know, polish this turd of a show. We can get some interstitials and transitions here. We're good. We're good. So this is over at theinformation.com. And it's actually the informant, but theinformation.com.

Good naming there. Anyway, they're saying that six months after launching his revolutionary video streaming service, Quibi, Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is looking for a buyer. And so far, he's coming up short. And no bullet points on how it's revolutionary? That's what I was just going to say.

If it's so revolutionary, then why doesn't anybody want it? Oh, my God. They pitched Apple, Warner Media, Facebook, and some other folks, and nobody wants it. Pass, pass, pass. Well, okay. Apple, Warner Media, and Facebook all have their own streaming platforms. Well, it'd be, like, you know, easy to roll this into it, you would think.

The only reason I could see why anybody would buy it is if there was a breakout show or if they had locked creators who were doing good content into exclusive deals. And as far as I know, they don't have either of those. They got an Emmy. Well, whoop-de-fucking-do.

Exactly. At this point, if I started a streaming platform and I shat out a show, I could get an Emmy. Yeah. Although Schitt's Creek took them all this year, fuckers. So, this is what I found interesting here, too. Quibi has between 400,000 and 500,000 paying subscribers, including those getting a year free through a deal Quibi struck with T-Mobile.

Now, tell me, Brian, if I'm not wrong, but if it's free, they're not paid subscribers, right? Well, that is bullshit, and that is the kind of metrics that we've come to expect from streaming media. Remember CBS All Access reporting the day after they launched that they had the highest number of downloads in their entire history.

It's a record day. It's a record day because before, it was zero. I can't believe that we were the only people that pointed out that. I have never found anybody else that pointed out the fact that I'm like, dude, it was the first day. Of course, it's record-breaking. Yeah.

No, no, no. This is, I mean, all of these guys are pulling this shit. It's Disney Plus. The Apple Plus did the same thing. All the Pluses have done it. Maybe Quibi needs to reband as Quibi Plus. Maybe they have a better shot. Quibi Plus. But speaking of Disney, and this comes back to something that you've been talking about, how movie studios were following the music industry's lead about falling off a cliff.

Yep. Disney is completely reorganizing around Disney Plus now, which seems to be the smart way to go. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Very, very smart way to go. I mean, you can still, what difference does it make how, you can still put your movie in a theater if you want to, if theaters ever come back, but you might as well streamline your entire business to be going straight out to streaming.

And you can charge upsells on new releases, as we've talked about many times on this show. Take our money. We're happy to pay a little bit extra for a brand new thing. You know, two to three month access, fine. Great. Ahead of time. And then you just roll it into your platform as regular. People that are cash strapped can wait the two to three months that they normally would wait for something to come out at home.

And if you really want to see it early, release it early and charge an uptick for it. Yeah. And keep all the profits. That's the other thing. You know, they don't have to split anything with the theater owners. Exactly. And I don't know anybody that I, have you asked your friends, is anybody clamoring to go back into a closed room and sit around a bunch of people and watch a movie?

No, not a one. I mean, everybody would like to the option to be able to do it again when it's safe and all this is gone, but nobody wants to go do it now. Not at all. Yeah. Everybody I know has been upgrading their home theater system. So it's like we got, you know, what, a hundred million homes in the greater United States.

So I think everybody's, everybody's going to be their own movie theater. Yep. Or they're just going to watch it on their iPad mini in the dark in their room. I'm just going to say this right now. Something that I think you're going to see happen. And I think this would be a smart thing to do is you're going to, especially Amazon is probably the most primed to be able to do this.

But I can see packages with physical product. Like, you know what I mean? Like, all right, we're going to release this new movie. And as part of the deal, if you buy the movie, we'll stream it to you. We're also going to send you a t-shirt. We're going to send you some branded popcorn. We're going to send you blah, blah, blah. You're going to see that soon.

Ooh, a watching kit. Exactly. You're going to see that. Ooh, that'd be cool. You heard that here first. You're going to see watching kits that come as part of purchase. Dude, that is a really good idea. We should actually do that. Well, they're licensing and I hate lawyers. Never mind. Yeah, and I don't really want to go do a pitch meeting with anybody.

I goddamn hate pitch meetings. But somebody should run with that. Yeah, free one. That's a freebie right from us here at Grumpy Old Geeks. All right. Now, this one I just loved. Yelp, the company that's famous for strong-arming small businesses into what amounts to protection money.

They're basically a mob company. They are a mob company. But now, Brian, they're taking on racial injustice. Oh, good. Yes, if a company gets too many complaints, they're going to slap a banner on their review that says, here be Nazis. But to get past it, you have to click the button that says literally, got it, thanks.

And then you're off to the racist. I mean, racist. But honestly, what could go wrong with Yelp? Like, seriously, helping to identify places where racists can go for a latte or a cold Himmler or Hefeweizen. You know, one of those things. Wow. You really put some time in this week.

I do, man. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. If we're only doing one a week, we've got to bring the thunder. And here's what I also want to know. Is Yelp going to let you search for places that are racist only? You know, it's like, okay, can I filter my search for places that have been banned for racism? Because that's going to save those little tiki torch monkeys a bit of time before they put on their Fred Perrys and head out for the night.

So I'm just wondering how Yelp is going to take this one on. I think the Fred Perry thing might be an outdated reference. I'm pretty sure all the racists I've seen on TV, they weren't snazzily dressed. Okay. Yeah. I found like 10 different sites that have dressing guides for your modern day Nazi.

It depends on what type of Nazi, what flavor of hate you want this week, which brand of haterade you got in the mail. I found another article that basically says exactly what we've been saying for quite some time. This time, the researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University have spent the last two years experimenting with something we've been talking about for about five years.

Yeah. They found phantom images that can trick semi-autonomous driving systems. They previously revealed that you could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla's driver assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images of road signs or pedestrians.

Exactly like we've been saying since day one. In new research, they found they can pull off the same trick with just a few frames of a road sign injected on a billboard's video. And they warned that if hackers hijacked an internet-connected billboard to carry out the trick, it could be used to cause traffic jams or even road accidents while leaving little evidence behind.

Again, I will state, that is a high-tech fuckery when all you need to do is take a fake stopping sign and stick it on a road. That works, too. That works, too. Oh, my God. So, again, this is self-driving cars, 20 years off still.

Yes, definitely. Well, this one, I put this one in here for you, Brian. Detection technology could help keep e-scooters off sidewalks. Okay. It goes into this, this whole article goes into how they're trying to make this technology viable for, you know, all of the birds and lines and all the different scooters.

And the companies themselves are saying, oh, it's too cost-prohibitive for us to do that, then retrofit all of our scooters. And we've tried education, but people are dumb. We've tried law enforcement, but nobody cares. And it's pretty funny.

This one guy has come up with a fairly interesting theory on how he can do it. It's like, okay, when you're on the road, it's smooth. But when you're on the sidewalk, it's bumpy. I don't know if anybody's been on a road in Santa Monica recently, but they are not fucking smooth either. No, they're not, because we live in a fucking third world country now.

Yep. And, yeah, that's going to be how they're going to do it. But here's another option. Take them off the goddamn roads altogether. There's that. How close is GPS these days? Not close enough. Not close enough for this?

That's too bad. Okay. Yeah. All right, well, let's throw these in there anyways, but honestly, because they won't be able to ride on streets either, which would be perfect. If you put these sensors in these scooters in Santa Monica, it would effectively shut them off completely. Yeah. They're also talking about maybe things like Bluetooth beacons on the sidewalk, something like that.

But, yeah, that's not hackable. I would just put one literally in the bumper of my car and just drive around with it in Santa Monica, just watch everybody stop. You know what? It's like a bird be gone. Right. That would be awesome. That would be nice. And in strange news, well, annoying news for me and you, Amazon has bought podcast.com and podcasting.com.

So what? Domain names mean nothing these days. It's funny, though. They paid over $2 million for podcast.com. So somebody got a good ka-ching payday on that one. Hey, look, you know what? If they increase the listenership of podcasts, I'm all for it. If spending $2 million on a domain name is going to get more people listening to our show somehow, okay.

Nope, not going to happen because both of those domains are pointed to Audible, which says you can get podcasts with your membership. But, no, you cannot because all Audible does is include their original content, which you can't get on any other podcast app. And we're not in there either.

So it's just a big bag of fuck you. Well, I would like to take this moment to personally make a plea to anybody that might be working for Audible or Amazon. You've heard me shit on Audible and their Audible exclusives for books for years now. If you would be so kind as to buy our show and to make us an Audible exclusive, I will never again complain about Audible exclusives.

Nope, we won't. We definitely won't. And Amazon Music is rolling podcasts into their Amazon Music app. Oh, that wonderful app that can't find anything. And finally, just because we're always, you know, bagging on Facebook because they're just turd nuggets most of the time, they actually did something nice this week, which I think comes back to what you were saying about, hey, we're going to screw everything else up.

Look over here. We're trying to do nice things for people. So they donated a million pounds to Bletchley Park. Okay. I love Bletchley Park. I would like to go someday. But here's this. I love this one. Facebook simply would not exist today if not for Bletchley Park.

Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, says. Now, I would like to say that the world as we know it wouldn't exist. But if they want to make it all about themselves, as usual, go right ahead. Well, what I particularly loved about this article is one of the reasons they decided to donate the money. Bletchley Park is now a historical site, and it has seen a dip in visitor numbers during the coronavirus pandemic.

You know what else has seen a dip in visitor numbers during the coronavirus pandemic? Everything. Yep. Well, including our podcast, but we'll get to that later.

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Security? Security? Ha! All right. Here we go again with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the CyberWire podcast. Dave is also co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy, as well as surveillance and privacy.

I've been practicing my breath control to make it through your CV there, Dave. I think we would be remiss to mention that Dave's segments are also apparently clock-checked by some of our listeners, and they get it wrong, because we had a complaint that apparently your segment was only 10 minutes last time, and we're like, it was more than 10 minutes.

It was 17 at least. Do people feel like we're short-changing them or something? If I'm, or is it too much? We want five, damn it. We'll leave that to your imagination, Dave. Okay.

Wow. No, they definitely wanted more, so feel good. Feel good about yourself. All right. I'll do my best. It's tough sometimes, but do you guys, are you guys excited? Are you getting new iPhones? New iPhones are announced? No. Eventually.

I'm not waiting in a socially distanced line, that's for sure. Well, I mean, I got six years to pay off my 11 Pro, so I'm good for now. It's like buying a new car. It really is. Well, Jason and I are definitely on different cycles.

I still have an iPhone 8, so this new phone is- That I sold you. That you sold to me, so yes, this phone is singing to me a little bit. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. I'm generally on an every other year cycle, which is, I think, just a habit that I formed back when the phones were all subsidized, and it was pretty much every other year was when you were done with your contract.

And there were actual, like, real moves forward in technology, as opposed to the incremental bullshit now, like one more pixel. Well, yes. And they weren't over $1,000. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so I will be getting one of the new iPhones.

I will be likely getting an iPhone Pro Max, so the big baddie of them all. So you're going to get parachute pants to fit it in? What do you mean get? Oh, zing! Just, I guess, at the worst, unpack.

Stuff. Dinner time. Right. All it takes is a trip up to the attic, my friend. Are they still folded lovingly with the cardboard for the breakdancing? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. But I was thinking about, I long for the, this is, to your point exactly, I long for the days when I used to get sort of consumed and wound up by some good old-fashioned techno lust.

Right. You know, it's like, oh, man, this new thing's coming out. I cannot wait for this new iPhone, or I can't wait for this new Mac, or I can't wait, you know, because it seems like the jumps were so much larger than they are today. Yeah. But also, it struck me today that I'm really tired of all of these big companies acting in what I would say is not good faith.

And what I'm talking about here is 5G. Because. You mean the many flavors thereof, some of which are no more than 4G repackaged? Yes. Well, and of course, AT&T kicked it off with their 5GE, which is 5G Evolution, which is not actually 5G.

Which is 4G. It's 4G. It's just, we, yeah. With a 5 and a D. It's 5, it's 4G with extra marketing. Yes. And, but here in the U.S., we're really not getting the benefits of 5G. Not to start, not anytime soon.

No. You know, most of the stuff is the, I would call it the sub 600 millimeter or 600 megahertz stuff, which is going to be about as fast as 4G. Then you got the millimeter wave, which is the really fast stuff, but that's going to be few and far between.

And you'll be very lucky to get that. And then that mid band stuff, our, our providers aren't really building that out yet and aren't going to be building that out for a couple of years. Look at it this way, Dave. You'll have a phone capable of using a technology that we won't have until you're ready to buy another phone.

I know. I'll have the, the, the, the, the advantage of anticipation, multiple years worth of anticipation. Just no, no, it's, it's like having a Ferrari, but having only dirt roads around, I guess. Oh, but, but, but, but with the added frustration of looking at your phone all the time, having your carrier telling you it's 5G and you screaming at your phone, no, it's not.

Right. Right. Or faster, faster. Yes. Now. So it's, it's very funny that you mentioned the 5G because on my local radio station this morning, they were talking about Hans Vestberg's talk at the Apple keynote. And basically how excited he looked.

Hang on, your local radio station was talking about this? That would be, that would be K-R-O-Q. Yes. Oh, okay. Yeah. And how, how excited Hans Vestberg was because apparently Hans has a, he, he, he's the heir to the throne of Ham's hog.

Because all they could talk about was his giant package and how his pants seemed to get tighter and tighter the more he talked about the 5G rollout. Oh, see that I did not notice, but someone pointed out to me that it seemed very, his, his part of the presentation struck them as being very much like Dr. Nick Riviera from the Simpsons.

You know, the 5G is only going to be $29.99. So I think that was, I got a chuckle out of that anyway. So yes, I will be getting the new phone.

I'm looking forward to the new camera. I would say that is the part of the phone that probably I enjoy the most is because I do a lot of photography. And so the, the better camera, the, the better lenses, all that sort of stuff, I will get good use out of that. And the new LiDAR sensor?

The new LiDAR sensor. Yeah. We'll see what that, again, that I don't know what I'm going to get out of that, but Hey, I'll be glad to have it. Wait, the phones have LiDAR? Are they self-driving? They're self-driving phones now that they have LiDAR. Yes. Yeah, exactly. You wake up in the morning and your phone is no longer sitting on your nightstand.

It's downstairs making itself a bagel. So I don't know. I, like I say, I wish I could be more excited in a visceral way. I feel like, I guess more that I'm on the, the, the, uh, the technological treadmill, uh, and I'm okay being there.

I don't have, I don't have a problem with what these phones cost, um, because it is my primary computing device. And so I, I, I think I don't mind paying a premium for what I still consider to be a premium product. And I consider Apple's high-end phones to be premium products.

So that doesn't really bother me. Um, but, uh, yeah. You just want your flying cars. That's it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's what I want. Yeah. I want the version of the future that we saw in Back to the Future 2. Like that's, that, you know, well, without, without Biff, actually.

You're on the right podcast to be disappointed. So if you were upbeat and happy about technology, we'd have to kick you off. Let's be honest. It's nice that I get to save these things up and it gives me a nice outlet for it. So thank you, gents. Yeah, we actually just, we actually discussed this a couple episodes ago.

And the show intro, because I'm like, there's nothing that excites me anymore. You know? And I got, I have my new, I don't know, now it's not even new anymore. I have my Oculus Rift. And that has to be the coolest piece of tech that I've gotten in a long time. Except I posted this to our Discord channel.

I was sitting, sitting on my bed, just updating a new game that I bought. And in the interim, I was playing some space shoot them up. And I'm sitting there going pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. And then all of a sudden, I just feel a wet ham smack me in the lips. And I'm like, whoa, what the hell?

Apparently, the sound effects, you can hear the sound effects in the room. And I'm gesticulating wildly. And apparently, Bam Bam got very, very concerned for my safety. And started licking me in the face and jumping all over me. That's got to be disconcerting.

It was really weird. I'm just going to tell you. Thank God he wasn't doing one of those VR porns. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. When Meet Space comes into contact with virtual space, it is very scary. I got to say.

I don't know why that just reminded me. Well, I know why. Because you're talking about your dog. It reminds me of back when I was in college. And we were all thinking about, a bunch of us were thinking about going to the local quarry. To go swimming. You know, there's a big swimming hole kind of thing.

In a breaking away moment? Yeah, it was going to be kind of fun. And one of the gals we were going to go with, she said, you know, I'm not a very strong swimmer. But I'm really good at doggy style. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll give you a ride there. Yeah.

And we all sort of paused a second. And we said, doggy paddle? Do you mean doggy paddle? She said, yeah. What did I say? Nothing. Nothing. Anyway, we'll meet you there. Do you have any friends that are also proficient? Yeah. Exactly right. Do you have any sisters? Anybody good at missionary swimming?

That's right. That's right. Reverse cow stroke. Oh, boy. It's going to go all day. Oh, my. Oh, my God. Well, should we talk about some actual fun tech news? Actually, that was fun. Why bother? That's way better. It's all downhill from here, folks.

All right. Now it gets boring. Or uphill, depending on. Yeah. So it's funny. In the past couple months, all I've seen in, like, scrolling through my RSS reader is ransomware, ransomware, ransomware, over and over and over again. Botnet, ransomware.

Yeah. And then there was some good news this week that Microsoft has disrupted one of the biggest botnet groups out there. Yeah. And I'm sure that you guys have covered this. But, yeah, they basically took down, what was it, the TrickBot group.

They were distributing the Ryuk ransomware. And if you're a Death Note fan, you know, Ryuk. Yes. I love Ryuk. But this was actually a really, really good thing that they did. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The other interesting thing about this is that, evidently, Cyber Command, U.S. Cyber Command, were simultaneously going after TrickBot, also taking down some of their infrastructure, some of their command and control infrastructure.

And they both kind of, both Cyber Command and Microsoft got to the, let's say, finish line at the same time. But, evidently, there was no coordination between them. They were working independently. It was kind of like, I don't know, two people show up in a bank vault at the same time, you know, having broken in or something.

The way I like to think of it is they all show up at their Waffle House to pick up the bad guys, the meth guys. Right, right. They all pull in the Waffle House parking lot at the same time. So, I did actually have a question about this, and Dave, you would probably be the best person to answer this.

Is this part of Microsoft's core business in any way, shape, or form, or is this just something that they're doing because it's a good thing to do? Well, like any large company, Microsoft has a section that is dedicated to security.

So, they'll have a research team. You wouldn't know it from using Windows. That's exactly why this exists. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it goes back. Remember the old days when Microsoft started buying up antivirus companies?

And it was like, sell the solution and the problem. And the problem at the same time. Yeah. But, yeah, so it doesn't surprise me that they have a team that's working on this. And they went to a bunch of different organizations and got websites taken down, got servers snatched up to take down, like we say, command and control infrastructure, that sort of thing.

So, I guess it doesn't really surprise me that they would have a team doing this. And any of the big companies, all the big companies have teams that focus on this kind of stuff. And it's for exactly this sort of thing that they can, you know, they can be associated with these sort of do-gooder efforts like this one.

And this is genuinely good. This is good stuff. Yes. Yeah, I was talking to somebody just earlier today, actually, who was saying that we were talking about ransomware. And he was saying that they've been tracking ransomware and it's gone from the old, you know, $100,000, $200 asks or demands from the ransomers that the average now is around $175,000.

Oh, there's some inflation for you. Yep. Yep. But what it reflects is the shift towards professionalism, that this is organized crime. Yeah. Right? These folks are going after, they're choosing their targets. They know who they're going after.

They calibrate the ransom demand based on what they know that organization is willing to give or able to give. It's not the teenager in the bedroom anymore. Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. Well, I'm hoping that this takedown is going to, they don't know who it is yet, but I'm hoping that it leads to picking up the group, because it was TrickBot that was responsible for the woman in Germany who died.

So, I'm hoping that they're going to, like, you know, finally, this will be some inroads into taking these little bastards down. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So, we've been talking quite a bit recently, and in the months coming up to this, about our concerns about voter security, voter security and all that sort of thing, ranging from the kind of, you know, somewhat credible.

You know, we've had people hacking into election machines fairly easily. It's been proven that that can happen all the time. So, you know, hopefully we're doing a better job with that. To the somewhat inconceivable, the bags of mail being sold in the dark web, kind of shit that we're being sold right now.

But what we've discovered is we don't really need any bad actors at all. A broken internet cable took down Virginia's voter registration website hours before the deadline because of a Verizon contractor that just happened to cut the wrong fiber optic cable. If they only had 5G.

Yes. That's right. Yeah. Well, and of course, the conspiracy theorists are all abuzz because the same thing happened in Florida about a week before that. So, now we're in pattern matching mode, right? Yes, exactly.

Because if a third one happens, then it's for sure. It's confirmed. It's Alex Jones all the way down. Exactly. What is interesting about it, though, is that it was never – this sort of aspect of it was never really mentioned, which is if you had bad actors, you don't necessarily need to get them in to hack you.

They can just find some lines and cut them. You'd think it would be a bit better than that. But we do rely on our public infrastructure, which can be easily taken down. Yeah. I have to say I'm a bit surprised that the Department of Elections would have this sort of infrastructure running on a system that could be brought down through the cutting of a single cable.

I would think – Redundancy. Yeah. Well, but I mean, you know, stick your stuff in the cloud. And the cloud providers take care of that for you. You know, it automatically gets dispersed and spread out, and you kind of protect yourself against this sort of thing.

Yes. Of course, then we have the other aspect of then, hmm, did you put a password on that cloud? Yeah. No. It's a fair thing. Yeah. I don't know if it's just because you think, you know, public infrastructure tends to lag behind. Of course, you know, they don't have the money. They could be on the tail end of some 10-year contract or something that this is how they do things.

And, yeah, cable gets cut at just exactly the worst time. Yeah. One of my colleagues went to vote today in Virginia and came back with his ballot still in hand because he said there's probably about a six-hour wait.

The line went around the block a couple times. Right. So he's trying to figure out, you know, how he's going to try to game the system and figure out the best time to get there so he doesn't have to wait in line for so long. God, we have to modernize this process and come up with something before the next election because it's crazy.

I mean, we've done things like here in California, they put up voter drop boxes, official ones. But, of course, now some bad actors have put up fake ones and people are dropping their ballots into the fake ones. So it's insane. I mean, I do like – the one thing that I have enjoyed, and I know it's here in California.

I don't know if other states have it, but the ballot tracking websites that you can sign up for so they keep track of your stuff. They tell you when it's been mailed to you. They tell you when it's been received so you know your vote is there and safe and counted. I signed up for that. I use the regular mail to return my ballot, and I have gotten confirmation it's been received.

All seem to work fairly swimmingly well. Yeah, but none of it matters because we still have the fucking electoral college. So who cares? Also, we're in California, and we vote blue. End of story. Yeah. Yeah, we're pretty much in the same boat here in Maryland that our vote at the presidential level doesn't really count right.

They don't even campaign here because they have us in the bag on the presidential election. But similarly, yes, we can trace our ballots, and I've done that. I'm planning on turning mine into one of the local drop boxes, and we have probably, I don't know, half a dozen of them near my house.

I think the closest one is actually at the board of elections for the county, so that's where I will go. I've been told that they have county security folks. I believe they're off-duty police who are there just keeping an eye on the boxes basically 24-7, so that's good. That's good, yeah.

Yeah, excellent. Start in the right direction there. Yeah, absolutely. All right, this next one I found, and I loved it. We hacked Apple for three months, and here's what we found. This is a team that was going after Apple from July 6th to October 6th. Did you guys cover this one, Dave?

I didn't hear it. Yeah, we did. We did. Not in a lot of depth, but go ahead and describe it, and I'll tell you what our take on it was. Okay, it seemed like these guys, because they were going after the bug bounties, but they were going after the Apple network and not so much devices. And they kind of got through a lot of the network level stuff and were able to impersonate Apple employees and get into very secure areas that were just like, I was like reading some of this stuff,

and I'm just like, oh, Jiminy, that was easy. Because there were some things in there that, Brian, even you and I wouldn't do. Like, okay, let's pre-populate a password in a hidden password field in HTML that then gets resubmitted back to Apple.

Nice. Oh, my God. But, you know, so far, these guys have gotten 32 payments totaling $288,500, which I'm like, that's a pretty good haul. Yeah, split four ways.

I mean, it's not bad for a few months' work. Well, five ways. There's five of them. Is it five guys? Yeah, there's five of them. Well, they should use that money and get into making burgers. So what's interesting is that, you know, Apple is relatively late to the party when it comes to really embracing bug bounty programs.

Apple famously is very insular and resisted all this kind of stuff. And I remember years ago or within the past couple of years, people would say, you know, if you sent Apple some sort of serious vulnerability, you'd be lucky if they sent you a T-shirt. And so it seems like they've sort of turned around on that.

But one of the things that caught my eye in the write-up from these folks is that they were saying that they weren't – because it's so early in Apple's bug bounty program, they weren't really sure what kind of payoff they were going to get. So they were kind of working on spec, you know, not sure what the payoff was going to be or if it was going to be worth it.

Yeah, spec and faith. That was a lot of it. Yeah, and it seems as though they feel as though it's been a good deal. Yeah, and what I really liked was they said that Apple typically remediated the bugs within one to two business days with some of them being fixed in as little as four to six hours.

So that's another huge turnaround from Apple. That's pretty impressive. They didn't put it under the rug. They were just like, oh, shit, let's fix it. Yeah. No, I like it. I think this is a good – this is a win-win all around. It's good to see Apple being open to this sort of thing, joining the modern world, I guess, when it comes to bug bounties.

So I think this is good. Yeah, no, it definitely was good. And if you really – I mean, the write-up is fascinating. It's a really long write-up. And if you want to see how these guys did it, I definitely recommend pouring yourself a hot toddy and kicking back with your feet up next to the fire and reading through it because, man, it's pretty detailed and it's pretty fascinating.

Like I said, some of the stuff was just like, they were doing what? Yeah, I think it's also a good reminder, especially for those of us who sit here smugly on Planet Macintosh, feeling as though we are immune to so many of the security vulnerabilities, and particularly on iOS, which I think you could argue that iOS is the most secure, certainly public-facing operating system ever.

And I'm sure we'll get people writing in to say that I'm totally wrong about that, but save your effort. But some of us also remember the fappening, and that's kind of the same system that these guys went after. It's like going after the network system.

Yeah, I was going to say, going after the iClouds and all that rather than the actual devices. Right, right, right. But I think this is a good reminder that nothing is completely secure and that you can't just rest on your laurels. You need to be vigilant with this stuff.

Well, this always reminds me of way, way back in the day. We're talking like, you know, 90s, 80s, late 80s, 90s, when Apple was just kind of a high-level consumer product that's really smug bastards in graphic design used.

And they would always say, well, Apple is just so much better because you people on Microsoft and your PCs, you're always getting viruses. And us PC people would just go, yeah, that's because there's so few of you, it's not worth the time to try to figure out how to hack your shit. Yeah, right. And now, you know, now everybody's on iOS.

Both of those things are true. Yeah. Yep, exactly. So there you go. Oh, man. So this last one's just a quickie because, pardon the pun on that one. Sometimes that's all you need, Jason.

Sometimes that's all you need. Exactly. So I labeled this segment, welcome to Singapore. Our friend Graham Cluley posted this one over at bitdefender.com. Home security cams hacked in Singapore and stolen footage sold on adult websites.

By the way, I'd like to say, I just want to add that Singaporean is going to be the name of my new all-nude karaoke bar. All right. All right. That almost makes the trip over there worthwhile, I've got to say. Yes.

I love the fact that stolen images were circulating on Discord. I'd like to state for the record, not on ours. So we'll probably lose some people there. We'll lose some people on that one. We'll make a channel. We'll be expecting it. There'll be a side channel for that one. I just love the bullets at the top.

It's unsecured home security cameras hijacked, stolen images circulated on Discord. And the last one is the no-shit Sherlock. Everyone needs to take IoT security more seriously. Thanks, Graham. IoT security starts with the manufacturers. Yes.

They are not taking it seriously at all. And nobody's following up with firmware updates on them. You know, even if there is a firmware release, nobody is doing it. You know, because it's a pain in the ass. Most of the time, you have to take the device down. You have to plug it in.

You have to reset it. You have to, like, you know, go through the worst interface in the world to flash it. And then you have to put it back up and start all over again. You might as well just get a new one. Almost. Because I had to do that with these Amcrest cameras that I have because they were, you know, hijacked.

And then I found the big firmware patch came out. I did it. And it took me half a day to take all the cameras down from the ceilings and then take the power cords out because the power cords are all, like, stapled into the rafters and all that. And I'm like, I took down the camera. I'm like, well, shit, I don't have a power cord because it's all stapled to the roof.

And it's just a pain in the butt. But, yeah, this is just another reminder that, A, you don't need that many cameras in your bedroom or your bathroom. Yeah, that's what I was wondering about. Why do these people have these cameras in these places? They're influencers and they're saving the footage for Instagram.

Well, I mean, we can make a joke about that. There is something a little bit disturbing about this story. And I'm a little surprised that the hand of justice has not reached out and gotten to these people yet. Because, you know, it's one thing, OK, we get some stupid couples left their camera on in a bedroom, which they had for God knows why anyways.

So we can watch this couple in Singapore bang it out. That's fine. But whatever. And, you know, fine. Send those around. Charge for them. Whatever. Teenagers and children are included in these dumps. And, you know, I thought we were taking child porn fairly seriously and had some pretty good police work going on.

And even, you know, international, the international, you know, Internet police were actually on this shit pretty well. Well, if you go read the actual local report from the local Singapore paper, they say that they are going after them. And there is there is, you know, extra judicial remedies that they can have, because even if the the perpetrator who has the photos and is distributing the photos is not in Singapore.

The crime was committed on Singapore soil. So Singapore police and their international divisions can go after people and actually get them wherever they may be, whatever rock they may be hiding under. So they are taking it seriously and they are going to start going after people for sure.

Good. Good. Good. You know, also, I mean, there are the stories about the sort of Robin Hood vigilantes who go after they look for devices like these and they brick them intentionally. Yeah. Just, you know, to prevent, say, look, if you're not going to patch this, better have it broken than used for something like this.

Right. No more bathroom camera for you since you can't patch it. Right. And also slap, slap, why do you have a bathroom camera? Right. Change the default password. And you're a terrible wiper. All right. On that note.

That's a great place to end things. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, we'll do this again next week. Yeah. I'll be there at your nude karaoke bar to set up the cameras in the bathrooms next week, Dave. Perfect. Perfect.

All right. Very good. See you again. See you next week, guys.

Media Candy. Initially, I was extremely excited to hear that Kate Mulgrew has signed back on to reprise her role as Catherine Janeway. But what? Exactly. I was like, wow, this is awesome. Then I found out it's a show called Star Trek Prodigy, and it's going to be on Nickelodeon.

And it's for kids. Smack my captain up. Yes. Created by Kevin and Dan Hageman of Lego Movie and Troll Hunters fame, Star Trek Prodigy. It was previously revealed would feature orphan teens stealing a discarded starship. We have no idea what exactly Kate Mulgrew's involvement in the show will be.

We'll find out. She's happy to be doing it. I think it's a great idea they're doing a Star Trek show for kids. I just, you know, I want to Janeway back. Yeah. For reals. For adults. You can go back and watch Orange is the New Black reruns. She was awesome in that. This will be coming next year at some point, so hopefully my kid will be old enough to enjoy it at that point, and I'll get to watch it.

So I love the idea of them doing a show for kids. I think it's great. Cool. Yep. So there you go. And one of our other favorite shows happens to be coming back right now, sort of. Sort of. The Band of Brothers sequel is set to begin filming in March. None of the same cast, I'm assuming, because this will be about the Bomber Boys in World War II, so about flyers.

I wouldn't say this is a sequel. This is kind of a parallel storyline. Yes, exactly. In the same universe, as it were. Yeah. Our universe. Just not Zuckerberg's universe for the past 10 years. No, this never happened. Anyway, yeah, I'm looking forward to this, for sure. Yeah, me too.

It was the first one was so well done, and I can't wait to see how they do with, you know, special effects these days. Now they've changed just in the 10 years. So, 19 years. Sorry. 19 years. Exactly. And if you go back to that thing holds up, it has legs. It's so good. I watched Human Nature on Netflix, which was a really great explanation of what CRISPR really is, how it actually works, and how limitless the possibilities are in both good and exceedingly terrifying ways.

I mean, we really do have the technology in our hands now to play God. So, all that screaming I do about regulation, and you think, oh, God, who cares? It's just fucking Facebook. Why do we need to regulate them? This is shit we need to regulate. Oh, yeah. Go watch Rob Reed's TED Talk on this.

It'll scare the pants off of you, for sure. This documentary is well worth it, Jason. I think you'd really enjoy it. It's extremely well done. Co-produced by Dan, rather. So, you know, it's got the facts. It's actually got a real journalist behind it somewhere. Yes, exactly. Cool. I'll check it out. I finished The Boys Season 2.

I heard it has quite the ending. It does have quite the ending. Yeah. It's got an ending that they could actually not come back from, which is interesting. They could do a sequel. They could do Season 3, or they could leave it as is. All right. Interesting.

Well, you know they're doing a Season 3 because it's everywhere. Yeah. But, I mean, I hope they are. But, you know, if it got canceled today, I would be okay with it. But I'm happy to have it back. That's all I'm saying. They'll be given the chance to end on a note that nobody will be happy with, as most shows do.

Yeah. Definitely. But I got to say, I've been keeping up with Long Way Up. And I know I bitched about the first couple episodes because it was basically, where can we plug in our bikes and our truck for the first, you know, couple episodes? But they're up to like seven now. And it really does pick up.

And it's kind of reminiscent of the old show. And it's kind of fun. It's a fun light watch, for sure, since we don't have any Ted Lasso left for a while. Yeah. And I saw this site. And I think it's basically just a pirate site that links to videos.

It's called Documentary Mania. And they've got a gazillion documentaries on there. You can go pick up tons of documentaries and just watch them right there on the site. It's like the old days of Amazon Prime when that's all that they had streaming documentaries. Yeah. They were the place to go for, you know, late night documentaries that low budget conspiracy theories and things about Bigfoot and Sasquatch.

Right. So, but if you like documentaries, check it out. There's some good stuff in there. And you can maybe get some ideas on what to watch next. And finally, I come to Fat Man. This trailer is out. It's a Mel Gibson movie, which is apparently… Off my list then. I'm not watching it.

Speaking of, like, has he been uncancelled now? Who knows? Well, yeah. They did uncancelled him. They tried to put him in that Buddy movie, you know, where he was like the parent or the grandparent or something in some feel-good family movie. And initially, you know, the entire media and most people came out saying, fuck this guy and fuck that.

But the movie did well enough. Yeah. He's been in a couple of movies I've seen that were actually decent. I mean, as an actor, he's still fine. It's just as a human being, he's a dumpster fire. Yeah. But it's also got Walter Goggins in it, who I adore. I think he's amazing. But the trailer was funny.

I got to give it that. It was a pretty funny trailer. Well, since we've been talking so much recently about separating the art from the artist, I guess some of us will do that. And some of us won't. Yeah. Okay. I won't. Do as I say, not as I do today. I might change my mind tomorrow.

Exactly. Apps and doodads. Hey, Brian, guess what? What? Apple released some shit this week. Oh, okay. Did they do a big developer conference and throw somebody up in a turtleneck? Or did they just?

I don't know. I didn't watch it this time. I watched the last one and it felt like an hour and a half ad. And then, you know, this one. Well, it is. Yeah, it actually is. I was actually at the doctor's office while this was going on. So I did. I actually missed it because I was doing something for the first time in a long time.

All right. So they basically came out with four phones. I like them because they look like iPhone 4s. They do. I like that form factor a lot more. This might actually make me upgrade. Yeah, that's my favorite form factor out of all of them. Because you can stand it there and it won't fall over if you want.

And, yeah, they look cool. The camera in the, you know, the 12 Pro looks pretty cool. The 12 Pro, like the shit that they've done with the camera, of course, every year it's going to get better. They're like, this is the best camera they've ever had. Well, I'm like, I fucking hope so. Seriously. I shouldn't be taking a step back.

Yeah. This camera is not as good as the last one. Yeah. Captain Obvious. Jeez. They're all 5G compatible, for whatever that means, depending on your particular carrier's flavor of 5G.

As we've discussed, 5G means many different things. It's a catch-all for fuck-all. Well, there is actually a 5G spec. Yes, but nobody is advertising with that spec in mind. Everybody is just using 5G. Yeah, well, I've got 5G-E right now in my garage on a phone that does not have a 5G chip.

So, whatever. So, they also released a $99 cantaloupe that makes noise from services that you don't use. I do like the fact that at some point, a memo must have circulated saying that all of our ladies in the tubes and speakers need to be round this year.

Mm-hmm. I would like a rhombus next year, and the year after that, I would like a dodecahedron. Yes. Maybe a three-dimensional parallelogram. I don't know. I mean, this looks nice, but I mean, the fact is, Siri sucks. I'm sticking with the Amazon.

I know a lot of people swear by Google, and that's great, too. But I don't know anybody that just goes, I want to be all in on Siri with all my smart devices. Yeah. Almost nobody. Almost nobody. They got some $50 headphones that nobody knows if they're waterproof or not yet, so that's interesting.

Mm-hmm. And a magnet. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. That's the big announcement. Saved you two hours. Well, you know, they're not coming with headphones or chargers anymore, which is smart because initially, you know, everybody threw up the, oh, they're just trying to screw us for money. But as they point out, everybody has fucking headphones and everybody has fucking chargers already.

So, you know, the whole connection thing, the magnetized connection thing, whatever. It is what it is. I still have my doubts about wireless charging. I don't think the technology is there yet. It's bad for the environment as far as I'm concerned, but that's where we're going.

Yeah. I mean, they'll fix it in post. Speaking of fixing in post, Apple has released Watch OS 7.0.2 with a fix for Apple Watch battery drain issues. I installed this last night, so it's a little bit hard to tell yet, but it does seem to not be as low as it would already be at this point, having been up like three hours.

So that's good. My phone battery still sucks. So where's that fix? It's in the post. Okay. Yeah. So I've been up for, I've had my watch on for three hours now, and I've been all around town, and I'm at 93% now, which is actually, yeah, that's usually at around 80%.

So I will say that. The actual thing I wanted to ask you, though, was did this fix the problem with it turning on in the middle of the night? I was too gun-shy last night, so I still left my watch out in the other room. I will give, look, you have no understanding of the wrath of my wife when this thing fucking turns on and floods our room with light at three in the morning.

So I'm going to try to do some tests throughout the day where I'm just going to put it next to me on the charger while I'm working and see if it flashes on or off today. So I will get back to you on that. Well, I mean, if you don't need it in your room at night, then why just not, just never charge it in your room at night, you know?

Yeah, I know. But I have that fancy little stand right by my, on my nightstand that charges everything, and it's nice. Oh, yeah. That's right. I mean, why bother having that then? I did try the sleep feature this week, and I turned it, I went through all the rigmarole of turning it on and all this stuff, and it does all of this crap.

Like, right before you go to bed, it gives you, like, you know, notices, does, like, slow down, prepare for sleep, all this stuff. And then it turns off all the notifications, makes everything dark and all that shit. And I'm like, well, that sucks because I need the notifications because if somebody's trying to break into my house, I need it to tell me. It should just match your sleep settings on your, on your phone.

End of story. I don't understand why it's different. Okay. And here's the thing. I already get sleep data into my phone and my watch through the HealthKit app from my pod bed, from my eight sleep pod. Right. So my bed is already telling it how much I'm sleeping, what my heart rate is during the, during the night.

So I'm like, do I even need it? Yeah, you don't need it. Yeah. You've got, you've got a big bed that has a warranty in terms of service. So you don't need it on the watch. Yeah, exactly. And I don't know about you. I can't sleep with a watch on. Oh, I never do. I never do. That's, that's when it charges. I can't sleep. I even take my wedding ring off.

I just don't like anything on my, on my fingers or my hands. You don't want to feel guilty while you're dreaming. You have to step out for a bit. I don't feel guilty. There you go. And I found, I found these for when your Macs break or when you get a $4,000 laptop and the fan won't shut off.

And also, I don't know if you've had this problem. I think you have. And I know some other people that have this. Bluetooth on any new Mac that I've had randomly stops working for 30 seconds all the time. Oh, yeah. All the time. Because my, my, I noticed this because my keyboard is Bluetooth connected.

And all of a sudden I'll have like typed an entire sentence and it's just not there. Yep, my, my keyboards and my mice are all Bluetooth and it just stops for 30 seconds and then it comes back and nobody can figure out why. But I did find this over at Apple support.

It's how to use Apple's diagnostic tool on your Mac. So, and, and the follow-up article I have is Apple diagnostics reference codes. That is helpful. Yes. Exactly. So you can use the diagnostic tool and it gives you a bunch of gobbledygook and you're like, what the hell does that mean?

You could spend hours Googling that, but there's a handy reference chart for that too. Very good. So, so they finally caught up with Microsoft. Yeah, seriously. So links for that are in the show notes. They finally, they finally realized that, oh, our stuff breaks sometimes. I guess we should give some people tools.

Yes, that would be nice. And a while ago, I got these Sony wireless headphones that, because I wanted to be able to watch my, my TV without, you know, waking the house up. Because if I'm playing Xbox and killing lots of Nazis and things like that, I don't want to, you know, wake the dogs up.

Don't, don't let Zuckerberg know. Yeah, seriously. That's why I'm using Microsoft, not Facebook's gaming platform. These things are garbage. They're absolute utter garbage. There's like a short in the volume wheel. So every time I change the volume, like one ear will flits out and come back and you got to whack it.

I don't know if it's just a defective pair or if it's a feature, not a bug. I don't know. I don't know. But I know when I was growing up, I was all about the Sony. Sony always had the best gear whatsoever. But I haven't used a Sony product for audio in years. Yeah, these are, they're cheaply made.

They're, they're, they're crap. They're utter crap. So speaking of Amazon and prime and sales and stuff like yesterday, I found a car, not a copy, a, a set of the Bose quiet comfort 35 to wireless Bluetooth headphones, noise canceling with Alexa voice control black.

Okay. Now these things are usually 300, 350 bucks, but they were on sale for 200 with same day delivery. So I'm like done. And they look, they look nice. Dude, they sound amazing. They're ridiculously comfortable.

You can pair multiple devices to it. So I can like have it paired to my computer and my phone at the same time. You can use it either with Alexa or you can use it with Google Assistant. Now, the issue is you have to have the app open on your phone, which I'm not going to have my Google Assistant app open on my phone.

If I have my Google Assistant app open on my phone, I don't need the goddamn headphones to talk to it. It's already open. That's true. So I just turned that crap off, but they're great. The problem I'm having though, and this is when I got the JBL speaker, you know, like a week or so ago, I'm trying to figure out how to have sound coming out of my laptop when I'm using logic so I can edit, but not have to have tethered headphones.

They say, I like, give me a good speaker or give me some headphones that I don't have a wire with. Problem is you just can't do it with Bluetooth. There's lag. Yeah. There's always going to be lag. Yeah, there's lag. So I think I'm just like, you know, SOL on that. Yep. So yeah, that's it.

I've given up. I'm just going to, you know, go back to the old Sony MDR 7509s or whatever they are. I'm actually on the fence on this one. I can't decide if it's genius or moron of the week level. So I will present the story and let you be the judge, Jason.

Okay. You can buy half Christmas trees if you don't want to decorate a full one. They may look like a regular Christmas tree, but it's been designed so that one side is completely different. So no matter how limited your space might be, you and your family can still enjoy the magic of having a tree in your home. The product description online says it stands six feet tall, features 511 tips for a lush look, and you can stand it flat against the wall to save on valuable floor space.

It also means you don't have to worry about any of your favorite decorations being out of sight at the back. If you've got a bit more money, Hammacher Schlemmer has a $249.95 version of a semi-round Christmas tree that rests against a wall. I think this is great.

Okay. I'm sorry. I think after somebody who's lived in apartments for, you know, half of his life, this is a great idea. The only thing, I mean, when you put this in here, I thought, okay, somebody outside with a, you know, with a chainsaw cutting these things in half, but they're, they're fake trees.

They're fake trees. So, yeah, I guess the $249.95 investment for, if you're still living in an apartment and you can afford to spend 250 bucks on a Christmas tree, but it is reusable. So, you know, I just, it feels a little bit hollow.

It feels a bit of a, like the part of the, part of the fun of the whole tree thing is you had to get around to the back and stick stuff there too, because you had to have, even, even if people aren't going to see it, you need to decorate the back. And it just feels like Christmas. I don't know. I, you know, I, if you have the space, I understand that.

That's what we do here. But if you don't have the space, I would like to actually see a quarter version of this for the corner. So you can just stick it in the corner, you get a quarter tree, and then, you know, just, you go with that. Like those desks that we always used to get. So you can stick your printer in that unused corner and from your L desks that you create with Ikea desks.

Yeah. So I think, you know, I think there, I think somebody's missing the boat here on the quarter tree. All right. Well, there we go. Not moron of the week. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers, Frankie, Disloyals Broom, and Gabriel.

Thanks, guys. Thank you. And gals, or whatever, whatever your pronoun is, I guess. He, she, slash, they, slash, whatever. Slash wombat, whatever. And over at PayPal, we've got Linda, Natalie, Andrew, Noah Kalina Photography, Breed, Raj, Andrew, Ralph, Mark, Adam, and Michael, and Martin.

With the stock bets again. Thank you very much. Thank you, Martin. All right. Over at Twitter, Dan says, really bummed you guys are backing off bi-weekly. You're a bastion of fun in the world of terrible news. Wish you'd reconsider. No. Nope. It doesn't make sense financially.

It doesn't make sense psychologically for us anymore because we're the ones that have to go through that world of terrible news twice a week. Yeah. This is purely like, okay, we were doing two shows a week pre-COVID, and it didn't make financial sense then.

Since then, advertisers have gone away. Listenership has gone down. It just does. It does not make any sense. And we lasted seven months into this doing it. And now we need our mental breaks. So maybe we'll come back when it makes sense to do so. Yeah.

Yeah. It's going to make sense. I don't even know what that is because I looked at the schedule. It's going to take a lot of money. Yeah. That's the only way to do it because I have to get rid of every other client to do that. Yeah. Two shows a week is a full-time job. End of story. And we weren't making full-time job money. We weren't making part-time.

Yeah. We weren't even making Uber contractor money. Seriously. All right. So Richard writes in, Grumps and Grumpettes. Here's your new favorite sci-fi in podcast form. Dust S3 Chrysalis. Each season is separate.

Think Bobiverse. Think Darker. Disclaimer, before you get hooked, only nine of 14 episodes are out. But boy, it's good. You're welcome. All right. Okay. Maybe check that out. Maybe you should check that out because I like reading books. You like Audible. I do. And I'm actually almost done with the new Bobiverse book, which you won't get for a long time.

No, I won't. Chipipotamus writes in, you don't have anything posted for 478, so I'll put this comment here. It sucks that you guys are going down to one show per week, but that is your prerogative. And if the sponsors are not there, we get it. My only complaint is that your actual show was under 50 minutes. He must have missed all the years of two hours shows that we used to do.

The segment with Seth was more than 35 minutes versus the segment with Dave was under 10 minutes. There's no way the segment with Dave was under 10 minutes. The segment with Dave was almost 20 minutes. There you go. Maybe you get tons of feedback and everyone loves Seth and maybe I'm in the minority, but I am never interested in the topics Jason and Seth cover and is taking up more than 40% of the show.

I took a quick look and it appears to me the episode was an hour and 24 minutes long, significantly longer than our normal episodes are or will be even once a week moving forward. Like it or not, when other people join our show for a segment, that is part of the show. It is not a separate entity.

No, it is not. Some people don't like Dave and they skip through that because they don't like security. Some people don't like me and they edit me out. Some people don't like me. Oh God. Anyway, Thomas writes in, wow, the impact free returns has on the environment.

Very sad. And this is an article from Canada. Hidden cameras and secret trackers reveal where Amazon returns end up. Yeah, this is really interesting to read, especially in light of the fact that we are in the midst of Prime Day where everybody is ordering shit they don't really need and will probably return quite a lot of it.

They found perfectly good items are being liquidated by the truckload and even destroyed or sent to landfills. They were quite clever about this. They visited a tour of a Toronto e-waste recycling facility with hidden cameras. And during that, they revealed that they get tons and tons of Amazon returns and that their facility breaks apart and shreds at least one tractor trailer load of Amazon returns, sometimes even up to three to five truckloads.

So they're not the only ones. They can't handle all of Amazon. There's no way. And they have to do this off the record because they don't want to lose the contract. They also stuck some trackers in these things. And this is insane. Many returns took a crazy route, often covering several hundred, sometimes even thousands of kilometers to reach final destinations.

Marketplace returned toy blocks that traveled over 950 kilometers before reaching a new customer. A printer clocked over 1,000 kilometers while traveling around. Of the 12 items returned, it appears only four were resold by Amazon to new customers. And yeah, they're just all the stuff that you return.

You think it's being sent back and resold. A lot of it's just getting trashed. Okay, here, I have a little issue with this. They're putting GPS trackers inside the returns and tracking them to people's homes. What the hell's up with these people? That is a bit of a problem.

I do hope they reached out immediately to them and gave them some compensation. Yeah, something. I mean, that's just like, hey, yeah, that's creepy. I'm just going to say that's creepy. Yeah, it's annoying that all this stuff's being destroyed. It's like, okay, give it to charity. Ship it somewhere.

People need stuff. I know it's probably not good for your bottom line, but give it away. I remember when I used to work at a bookstore, if we couldn't sell books and if they'd been on the shelves too long, we would rip off the covers and throw them in the trash. We should have just been giving them to libraries. But there's too much stuff. Yeah, when I worked at a comic, I worked at Diamond Comic Warehouses and we would do that.

We'd get, you know, airplane loads of comics with no cover on them. Sucked. It sucked. Travis writes in, I hate to be an Apple apologist, but it's their playground. This is why Apple stuff, for the most part, just works instead of buggy software. This is US Judge Rules.

Apple could bar Epic Games Fortnite from App Store. Now, I agree with the first part of your statement, Travis, but this has absolutely nothing to do with why Apple stuff just works. This is purely financial. It's not like Epic Games Fortnite is fucking around with their rules in terms of anything functional.

It's just they want the money. Mm-hmm. This is all about money. Yeah, so a federal judge in California on Friday ruled in an injunction request that Apple Inc. could bar Epic Games Fortnite from its App Store, but must not harm Epic developers' tools business, which includes the Unreal Engine.

So that's exactly what you and I said was probably going to happen. Yep, yep. Don't fuck with Unreal. Fuck with Fortnite all you want because they're just being dicks, but everybody needs Unreal. And over at GOG.show, Peter writes in, Hey Grumps, someone could recapture the heat generated by Qi chargers and do something useful with it.

This product comes so close, but it seems to just barely miss the mark as it seems to generate its own hot and cool, not use that of the phone. And this is a wireless certified fast charger with mug warmer slash drink cooler, so you can charge your phone and keep your mug warm. Okay.

Okay. That said, I suppose I can use my existing flat charger, place the iPhone on it, and place my coffee on top of that. Problem solved. I don't even need to have it brought by. Wait for it. Go ahead, Jason. Deliveroo! And Raph writes in, Plus one for Seth Miranda segment.

I'm a Nikon DF user and really love it. In many ways, the photos are nicer than my fancy camera, which is a Sony A7R2. The Seth segment is always informative. Great to hear you talk shop. Ha! So we're even Steven on the Seth love right now.

Yep. Yep. Justin writes in. Hey, Brian, if you haven't already bought a new Apple Watch to cure the bugs in your current one, have a look at the Garmin VivoSmart 4. When you were talking about what you use your Apple Watch for a couple episodes back, it sounds like you and I have similar needs. It's fitness activity tracking, sleep tracking, smartphone notifications, not much else.

The VivoSmart is very small and light, which I really appreciate since I don't like having things on my wrist. And it's actually useful as a sleep tracker since the charge is good for a few days continuous use. I don't need sleep tracking. In fact, I've actively said tons of times on the show that it is not a use case for me. Now, if the Garmin watch could stop my son from kicking me when he climbs into bed at four in the morning, that could be useful for sleep.

But other than that, I'm trapped in the Apple ecosystem. And if I'm going to wear a smartwatch at all or even a watch, it might as well play along with my other devices. Yep. Why not? Yep. I know a couple of people that have the Garmin watches and really, really like them. It sounds fine, but that's, yeah, it is what it is.

Yep. And Ralph writes in, hi, Grumps. Should masturbating and intercourse be added as tracked activities on Apple watches? Seeing as you both track each other on your Apple watches, I figured you might have an opinion. And this is from the Daily Dot. The Apple watch tracks calories burned during sex.

What does that mean for data privacy? Same thing as it means for all the other data that you give it. But I really don't want to know when my friends are rubbing one out. But, you know, that's fine. That's all good. But because everybody's married, I know if they're saying they're having sex, they're just, you know, watching some Pornhub.

Okay, but this is an incredibly misleading headline. The Apple watch tracks calories burned during sex. What does that mean for data privacy? The Apple watch tracks calories burned during taking a shit. The Apple watch tracks calories burned during watching TV. It doesn't do anything specific during sex.

It does not know you are having sex. I guess if you masturbate with that particular hand that you're wearing the watch on, it could probably figure that out. But it isn't tracking that. There aren't categories for that. That's a bullshit headline. Fuck you, Daily Dot. I got to say, though, I still want a dog walking option because I get dinged for having the leash in my watch hand.

So my arm's not swinging. I don't get as many calories. I want a dog walking option, damn it. Okay. All right. Just saying. You can work on that. Barbara writes in, love the CBD, but big problem for some folks. Possession will potentially be life changing in a bad way. Sad but true. Let's not make anyone grumpier.

And she says, from Humana Military in November 2019, as a reminder, hemp-derived products such as CBD oil is forbidden for use by any service members in any military branch. Please do not recommend using these products as they may result in both a positive result in a drug test and in legal action against the military member if it is found in his or her possession.

So, not good for military. No. Yeah. I mean, they probably know this. Do their own homework. Yes. We're not doctors. No, we are not doctors. We are podcasters. Even better. Yes. Chris writes in, although not strictly about that social dilemma movie, this article, and it's The Prodigal Tech Bro from The Conversationalist.

It ends up expressing my feelings about many of these prodigal tech bros who turned a blind eye to many unethical practices in big tech while they made their fortune. And now that their options have vested, have seen the light. On a separate note, generally, I have similar tastes to both of you, but I really love Star Trek Lower Decks.

I thought it started pretty strong, struggled mid-season, and ended with two great episodes. On the scale of Star Trek First Seasons, that's pretty good. I love your show. Keep grumping. He makes a strong point there. On the scale of Star Trek First Seasons, it actually was pretty good. That's true. That's true.

So, we shall see what happens. And, yeah, I completely agree with that whole Prodigal Tech Bro article. It's what we've been saying about it. They make all their money, they get out, and then they go, man, these people are doing such harm. Well, you helped. As they say from their mansion.

Yeah. You took the blood money, didn't you? So, Ed writes in, listened to your most recent episode and didn't hear mention of the shit show that is my home state of Florida. So, here you go. And this is a link. Judge denies another voter registration extension in Florida. Says, state failed its citizens. And says, P.S.

I've written it once before, but just thought I'd let you know you guys are great. Started listening to you around episode 335, and I'm running through all your past episodes currently on 214. You hear this all the time. Actually, we don't. If we heard it more, we might still be doing two shows. But thanks to you all, I have a PIA VPN, have a family account for 1Password.

I'm using an Eero for my Wi-Fi needs, using a Manscaim product for my other needs, and I'm currently listening to the laundry files on Audible. Yes, Brian, I've been using the links in the show notes. Hope to have both you guys around for a long, long time. Thank you. We'll be around a lot longer with doing one show a week. I'll guarantee you that.

Barrett writes in, hey, Jason, as someone who can no longer drink, I found that Seedlip is really great for making non-alcoholic gin and tonic. Their Spice 94 blend is really enjoyable, as are their others. You may want to give it a try. Stay grumpy. That is such a horribly named product.

Seedlip sounds like a fucking disease. It does. It really does. What did you do? I hooked up with the chick at the bar last night. I've got the Seedlip. That's what Doctors Without Borders go around the world trying to heal. Barrett writes in, yet another shitty business model, the Uber of photography.

And this is a link to PhotographyTalk.com or the Seth segment. The Uber of Photography app just launched this week, and I have no thoughts on this, but I guess you do. Yes, it's called Snapper. Not like Grindr. Not like Grindr, but you might get screwed.

Anyway, so they say that their photographers on the platform have earned, on average, $80 to $100 per hour of shoot time. I call bullshit on that. Here's the deal. No, it might be fine. But here's what you have to realize, shoot time.

Now, they don't talk about getting to and from where the shoot is. They don't talk about post-production and all the time that you have to do with that. They don't talk about revisions and all the time you have to do with that. It's not just that one or two hours that you're actually shooting, but it could take you another 15 hours to get the actual job done.

So I'm not really down with this, and I talked to Seth about it, too. And he's like, it's like Fiverr. It'll hold people over for small businesses or whatever, but if they need legit work, they go to a legit professional. There you go. You know, that's pretty much it. If you have a camera and you have some time, then this might feel like a little bit of a need, but don't expect to get rich off of it.

There you go. And Vincent writes in, Google design language sucks. Now you have all the colors. They could have taken a leaf from Adobe or Microsoft's books and kept the solid colors for the icons or logos, and this is linked to TechCrunch. Google's new logos are bad. I did like this one particular bit of the article.

First, I should say that I understand Google's intent here to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite. This can be important, especially with a company like Google, which abandons apps, services, design languages, and other things like ballast out of a sinking hot air balloon. We've seen so many Google icon languages over the years that it's hard to bring myself to care about new ones.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float by. Better to not get attached. Yeah. Yeah, these are ugly. They're all rainbows and bullshit and whatever. I like one color icons, personally. Yeah. You know what this reminds me of?

Like a picnic on acid. It looks like really bad plaid. And over at iTunes, we have a four star from Real Epicenter in Australia. And it says, the only actual podcast I listen to. You guys are awesome. Making complete fun of everything that is happening provides some form of sanity to my life.

Signed, Will. At first, I was upset about that. Because if we're the only podcast, why aren't we getting a five star, just a four star? Then I realized maybe he's going to expand his podcast and he wanted to leave room at the top to grow if he found a better one. Okay.

There we go. That's the only thing I can come up with. Okay. And we have a five star rating from Helen Luen in Canada. Life altering. I'm no techie person, but you guys make me try harder. I'm now using 1Password. Got my first iPhone and I'm completely paranoid. LOL.

You have the best show out there. Amusing and informative. Highly recommended. Hey, 1Password. Why don't you fucking advertise again? I was just getting ready to say this. God damn it. Everybody stop using 1Password. Yeah. Last pass all around. Whatever.

If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a five star and snarky review. And if you're still listening to us on the Overcast, Blair, please click that little star next to the episode.

Closing shout outs. Happy birthday to friend of the show, MXV, who is recovering from COVID-19 right now. Seems to be doing better. Good. Stay safe. Stay careful because you can get it twice. Yay. And I have a strange shout out.

I have a shout out to the LA Dodgers. They are currently in the NCLS. If they win this series, they go on to the World Series, as it were. They've lost the first two games badly. Well, they kind of came back last night and almost tied it up, but they didn't.

They've lost two. My shout out to them is in this crazy year, this topsy-turvy 2020, it's nice to have some consistency. We're in the postseason and the Dodgers are fucking it up. So thank you for that. It almost feels normal. You know what?

This actually ties into what I was about to say is, you know what the LA Dodgers do? They love Los Angeles more than the LA Lakers because the Lakers won the championship, which led to what is going to definitely be a super spreader event with all the people out partying.

The LA Dodgers love Los Angeles enough to take one for the team, let people stay home and lose so we don't have any more COVID-19 spreading at such an industrial scale. So you know what? Hats off to the Dodgers. Hats off, Dodgers. Thanks so much for losing. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. This show is a labor of love, but your support keeps the show going. If you like the show, please visit GOG.show slash donate to help us out. We'll love you forever. Or visit GOG.show slash shop and pick up some good old-fashioned GOG swag. If you can't do that, please pass the show along to a friend.

It is the only chance of us ever going back to two shows a week. Word of mouth is the only way the show grows, so spread the grump far and wide. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 479. There you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, buy our swag, and get links to stuff we like.

Stay grumpy. Whenever you're ready. Oh, wait. You're confusing me, Jason. I know. Dude, I've been up since five. They took a lot of blood. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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