481: 18.09 Scaramuccis

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 Eric Hundley. Yes, because Brian is on a plane on his way to Candanatiana. He's not joining us this week and possibly next week, but we'll see. But yeah, Brian is going to the Great White North.

On his way to quarantine. On his way to quarantine, exactly. Not like he hasn't been quarantined for seven months anyway, but like we all have. But Eric, it's nice to have you back on the show. Dude, great to be here. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Now, tell the people just a little bit about yourself.

Just another wayward podcaster and now sort of YouTuber, oddly enough. Yes, that's right. But you also wrote some books. You were in the Army. Oh, my goodness. Actually, you've had a storied career. But more importantly, I worked at Gateway and I heard Gateway is being revived.

Yes. Yeah, we covered that a couple episodes ago. And I'm OK. Just stick around a box. I don't care. It's a PC. It's the same parts on it and all of them. Hey, the Apple store can thank the Gateway for coming up with that. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, my PCs get a little long in the tooth. So maybe when they start rolling out, I'll take a look. I saw somebody did a review of one. I think it was Mark Frauenfelder. I think he got one of the new ones. And it actually made him switch to PC. So that was strange.

That was very strange. That's very strange. I would never do that. No. Well, speaking of things that aren't strange, Quibi is finally dead. Now, we said it, you know, when we first heard about it, that it wasn't going to last because it was such a stupid idea.

But, yeah, $1.7 billion in funding later, it just shows you. You can't, you know, throw money at everything and make it work if it's just a really stupid idea. Where do they find people who do that? Can I have some? I mean, seriously. If you ask anybody on the street and you say, hmm, do you want a short video format?

And they'll be like, huh? Oh, YouTube. I got it. Yeah, we already have YouTube. Why would we need another service that we have to pay for when we can go to YouTube for free? Yeah. Well, the good news, though. Meg Whitman, she's CEO. She's being floated for a cabinet position. He's leading the polls. So, you know, she'll land on her feet.

Oh, yeah. And I'm sure Jeffrey Katzenberger, which is funny. His name's Katzenberg. But even on all the mainstream media that we're covering it, the first time that they say it, and I'm guilty of this, too. You say Jeffrey Katzenberger. I just thought that was funny. Even my roommate picked up on it. She's like, why is everybody calling him Katzenberger?

Because it's fun. That's why. So, Quibi lasted 199 days about there. Which we have a running joke over on the Discord channel for Grumpy Old Geeks. If you want to join that, just go to GOG.show slash Discord. We have a rolling invite there, so you can always get in if you want to join.

And we talk about the Scaramucci scale. So, we talk about things in units of Scaramucci, which is 11 days. So, by the Scaramucci scale of Grumpy Old Geeks, Quibi lasted 18.09 Scaramuchis. You know what's wonderful about Scaramucci scale?

He himself came up with it. I forgot what it was, but he tweeted, oh, that was one Scaramucci. Yeah. And I was like, oh, my God. Well, you've got to get – he's a freak, but give him credit for having a sense of humor. Oh, I think he's pretty funny. I saw him on Big Brother.

He came on, and he was like a ringer because he could only stay on for one week, but he was like a spy in the house. It was like two seasons ago, and he was pretty funny, I've got to say. You know, I don't like him for a position in government, but, you know, he's kind of – he's like a little sidekick type of guy.

Well, he's full New York, or he gives me that vibe, and that can be really funny. Mm-hmm. No, I got no problem with the mooch. He's, you know, he lasted as long as he was supposed to. So we have some more follow-up here on the Foxconn factory in Wisconsin.

We were going on about this when it was first happening. Well, turns out it's a big nothing burger, not a nothing Katzenberger, but just a nothing burger. They were supposed to have this, like, you know, next-gen LCD factory there, and so somebody went in and looked around and they're like, uh-uh, it ain't happening here.

This is like a demo – this is a demo factory. It's not going to actually do anything viable. So something's going wrong here. So, yeah. Wisconsin got duped, which we kind of all said was going to happen at the beginning anyway, but it's nice to have some confirmation that we were right again.

Oh, good news. Well, I mean, you can't – we really suck at factories, man. We have lost our whole manufacturing ability, and that's why they do the Mac Pro as the only computer that's really manufactured at Apple. Well, don't we just actually put them together here? Yeah, essentially.

I thought it was just assembly in Texas. Essentially, yeah. And I mean, that's the problem is we just don't have the engineering chain that they have in China, and that's a giant, giant problem. They're starting to build up more in Brazil and maybe some in India, but we need to spread the wealth.

Yeah, yeah. India was the last one I heard. They're thinking about moving iPhone production to India as much as they can. But, you know, after working with Indian programmers for a good chunk of my career, I don't know if I want an Indian iPhone. I'm sorry. It's not being racist.

It's just being factual. Most of the Indian programmers that we worked with were god-awful. Even Brian had the same experience, and I think anybody that has gone the outsourcing route to India for code just had the worst experience. I've never had anything come back that was even usable. So, yeah, wait for that iPhone 13 from India.

See how that works out for you. Yeah, I'm sure that they're not going to rush too far. Besides, I think they have to do it in India for the Indian market, so we probably won't see it. Got it. Fine with me. You keep them over there. And we got some more news on the Uber and Lyft debacle that's been going on from AB5 here in California, because this is something to watch for everybody because this is kind of the canary in the coal mine for how Uber, Lyft, DoorDash,

all the gig-working economies, how states are going to treat them in the future. Well, we've got a new court ruling that said, nah, guys, you really need to follow AB5. But the thing about this is we're right in the middle of the vote for Prop 22, which is what Lyft and DoorDash and Uber all put in almost $200 million to try and get defeated.

That shows how much they don't want this thing to pass. Sadly, it's probably going to pass because, yeah, people just don't read the fine print, I guess. But, yeah, so the court, at this point, this is kind of also a nothing burger because everything is hinging on Prop 22 happening to see if these people can get classified as employees.

You know, I have such mixed feelings about that. I know it's one of those that looks great on the surface, but I think of all the editors who have been kicked out of the publications in California and many other jobs. My dad was a general contractor. And something like this could devastate him because a lot of his jobs were he goes, gets a job, ramps up employees for the job as independent contractors, and he has to let them go.

It's the only way to survive. Yeah. Now, AB5 is not the greatest thing ever invented. It's actually quite terrible. So I don't know how this is going to go because it's like, you know, Prop 22 is very narrow focused on the gig driving community, not the regular community.

I mean, I wouldn't mind seeing somebody go after AB5 and rewrite it so it's a little bit less draconian because it does cause a lot of problems for people. Yeah, baby bathwater stuff. And that's the thing. I mean, I have no love for Uber or DoorDash. I mean, they do some shady shit, period.

But you're really destroying a lot of people who have to do independent work just to get by. Mm-hmm. No, that's the biggest issue with it. I just don't – I just want them to lose at this point because they keep getting in their way.

It's honestly – it's all it comes down to. I want Uber and Lyft and DoorDash to lose because they keep coming in, breaking the law, making their own rules, and I'm just tired of it. I want them to get – I want to get their dick knocked in the dirt a couple times so they start to play nice with people.

And that will happen? No, it's not going to happen. That's the problem. Prop 22 is going to pass. You have no idea how much like the commercials are on here. They are on every five minutes, and they finally started to put out commercials with, believe it or not, Gloria Allred for the anti-Prop 22 people because they're saying that if Prop 22 passes, it doesn't have the sexual assault parts to it.

So like Uber and Lyft aren't even required to report sexual assaults in their cars and things like that, which we've covered on the show a million times because it is a really just shady, shady area of their business. And so they exhume the corpse of Gloria Allred to actually come after that side of it.

You see, that sounds like a legal situation, and I kind of – I'm going to call bullshit a little bit because if a sexual assault happens, if you don't report it, you can be liable for it. So whatever their policy is, I have a feeling that – get the cops and the DA involved.

Yeah, it's a sticky wicket. It really is a sticky wicket. So I recommend reading up on some of the policies and the red teams that they have inside of Uber. We covered that on the show like maybe six months ago, and there's some really good articles from whistleblowers inside of Uber that came forward and said, yeah, it's really sketchy.

And you have another article on, shall we say, sketchy behavior coming up too. I'm sure I do. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. In the news. Well, I got a problem with this next one.

Tesla's full self-driving software is starting to roll out to select customers. Now, Eric, when you hear full self-driving, what does that say to you? You could take a nap. You could take a nap. The car will drive itself because it says full self-driving right there on the tin.

Right there on the tin. But there is no such thing as full self-driving cars. So somebody needs to get on this. I'm thinking, you know, just somebody. Somebody needs to get on this and tell Elon that this is not – this is false advertising.

It's flat-out false advertising. And, frankly, it's fucking dangerous because, as we've seen, people have died in Teslas when they turn on their autopilot and, you know, start watching movies, start drinking in the car and doing all sorts of other stupid crap.

And this just makes it even worse. But they're saying that they're putting it out to their drivers who are, quote-unquote, the safest. I'm like, okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? Okay. For one thing, self-driving to me seems like advanced cruise control at this point.

And I don't even like cruise control because I feel like you aren't controlling what's going on. And if the car is taking over too many functions, you're going to be more dangerous because you can't help but just – ignore, look away, or drift off. Oh, yeah, totally.

The actual engagement of driving is forcing you to be involved. And as a weird analogy, okay, I listen to audiobooks all the time, and I know you do, too. If you sit in a chair listening to an audiobook, what happens? Probably fall asleep eventually. Yeah, every time.

Well, if I'm driving, I'm actively driving, but I'm listening and driving so I can keep my mind going. If I'm doing an audiobook and sitting in a chair, I'll play solitaire, and that keeps my mind going. But the point is having an activity that keeps you engaged will keep your mind from wandering off and you won't fall asleep.

Right. Now, as somebody – I've driven across the country and back at least 15 times, and I love long-haul driving. It's one of my favorite things. So I do love cruise control for that. And now that they have adaptive cruise control, so it slows down when it knows somebody is in front of you, it's the coolest thing ever.

Lane keeping, even better. I like it, but when it comes down to the quote-unquote autopilot full self-driving, I can see myself pressing the button and forgetting about the fact that, oh, I'm just cruising along and not actually doing anything until I'm dead, you know? I'm thinking if we do get to it – because I think there will be a point of autopilot cars.

What if they take HOV lanes and that's sequestered at some point as autonomous driving lanes versus the other? So your car part-time, it's like, okay, it's fully driving when you're here. Then you take over when you get off.

That's sort of what I'm wondering if something like that could happen. It could happen, but the amount of infrastructure that would need to be updated is the biggest problem. It's expensive, and HOV lanes, as we know here in California, are a joke and actually make traffic worse. So it's like – True.

I think you'd have to make normal drivers illegal on it, though. I mean, it would have to be a dedicated lane. I think that would be the only way to possibly make it a safe viability. Yeah, and if Elon's not going to push out the billions for it to get that done, then, yeah, I'll pass on it.

I mean, he's trying to dig holes in the ground so you can have those lanes, so let him do that for now. But at least the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had said that they are going to monitor the new technology closely and will not hesitate to take action to protect the public against unreasonable risks to safety.

Well, you can start now. Yeah. Yeah. They said, as we have stated consistently, no vehicle available for purchase today is capable of driving itself. Boom. There you have it. We're done. Yeah. It doesn't exist. So if the Highway Traffic Safety Administration can't get them for saying it's fully autonomous, you know, maybe the Federal Trade Commission could do it for false advertising.

That's all I'm saying. Somebody needs to just tell people that this is not fully self-driving. True. But, you know, I don't know if they can slide under as a marketing term, sort of like unlimited internet on your cell phone. Yeah, that's true. Unlimited doesn't mean what you think it means anymore, you know.

But we got another interesting story here. Airbnb and Johnny Ive are hooking up. Johnny Ive. What? What? What? I'm sorry. The guy who makes, you know, phones and software very ugly has decided to go work for Airbnb.

I don't get this one at all. What's he going to design for them? You know, I hate to say it, but it's been such a fall for Johnny Ive because he was almost godlike. And remember, Steve Jobs, when he passed, he was like, nobody can touch Johnny.

I made sure of it. But in recent years, it's like he's getting a complete revision, if you will. I mean, people are looking at him saying, oh, God, yeah, the damn Johnny Ive designs. And you never have a bigger battery.

And these keyboards, I hate them. And where's my fucking ports? Yeah. I want my fucking ports back. So now I'm like, okay, so he's going to do Airbnb. And knowing him, though, he's always got to do something weird. So maybe we'll have golden toilets.

Yeah, that could be it. That could be it. He could. Well, because they're going to eventually have to turn Mar-a-Lago into an Airbnb after Trump goes to jail, after he gets booted out. Oh, I'm sorry. He's just going to leave the country. But either way, Mar-a-Lago is going to have to have some kind of revamp.

So golden toilets at Mar-a-Lago with Johnny Ive. There we go. Perfect. And we got this one from Facebook, which really kind of irks me. Facebook seeks to shut down New York University's research project into political ad targeting. So these guys at NYU have a program called the Ad Observatory Project.

And they're just having people who go to Facebook. They install a little plug-in and get sent. The project gets sent what political ads they're being shown. And Facebook's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's against our terms of service. You're not allowed to scrape us that way, period.

No, no, no. And they're like, guys, well, if you would give us the right information, we wouldn't have to do this. But you haven't. So we're going to do it anyway. By the way, I don't consider it scraping. That's a bullshit term. Because I'll tell you what, an ad is a broadcast that goes out.

So saying I'm scraping is like I'm going into your town and putting on a radio and intercepting your radio signal and then recording it onto a cassette. You broadcast it to me. And the other thing is scraping is not illegal in most places.

It could be against their terms of service. But it depends on what you do with the data as well. And, yeah, this is just recording a user session. It's not going in and scraping the whole site, which is what we usually think of when we're thinking about web scraping. It's like, let me go in, I'm going to send a bot in, and it is going to hit every page in the site, and it's going to save all the HTML, and then I can work on that, you know, remotely at a later time.

This is just, you know, recording political ads that are shown to people who have volunteered to be part of the project. And if they volunteer to be part of the project, they're Facebook users, you know, what's the difference from this between putting a video camera on your screen and recording it that way and then jotting them down later?

There's no difference. So just the fact that they use a plug-in, you know, Facebook's like, oh, you can't do that. And I think it's bullshit, and I think, you know, these guys should be able to do this because we need transparency in the political ads that Facebook's running because, as we found out in the past, they're destroying the damn world.

Totally agree. I mean, they're shoving it down our throats. Somebody's just turned it into some nutrition. Yeah, or at least they're giving us the nutrition labels on the package. There you go. Yep. Now, Twitter is also in the news this week.

This is going to be interesting because we do have Twitter and Facebook on two different stories, not even the ones we're talking about. But tomorrow, we're recording this on Tuesday. And tomorrow on Wednesday, Jack Dorsey and Zuckerberg have to go sit before Senate to explain the Biden's laptop problem, which I think is going to be funny.

It's going to be boring as hell, but it'll be funny at least. And so this new thing with Twitter, though, is they're trying to make retweets more difficult to make it so, you know, the noise amplification problem that they have, it just puts a little speed bump for people to retweet.

You're supposed to be able to, you're supposed to read the article and write something about it instead of just hitting the old, ye olde retweet button. What do you think of this? Goofy. Yeah. And confusing. I mean, I've done it and it's, it's not clear exactly what they're doing.

Everything becomes a quote tweet. It's like, I didn't quote tweet. I said retweet. Yep. What? And I mean, so what, it's like, why don't you just say, are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? It's just a total kludge. It's like, you know, they came over there.

What can we do to slow people down? It's like, okay, here's what you can do. Give everybody three, three retweets a day. That's it. You have reached your allotted retweet limit. Boom, done. That's a good idea. Yeah. Or they could do what everybody else does and copy the link and paste it into a new tweet.

You know, it's not like this is stopping anything. It's like, whatever. This is just one of the dumbest ideas I think they've come up with in a while. And, you know, they are a fountain of dumb ideas. But this one, this one takes the cake. Well, it's such bullshit too, because the retweeting gives them traffic.

The traffic they live or die by. I mean, the more angry you are, the more it spreads. That's scientifically proven. So their whole concern about your anger inside closed doors has to be concerned. You're not angry enough. Maybe that's it. This is irritating.

It is irritating. It's very irritating. But the funny thing about it is I've got my Twitter experience so curated that if anybody does make me angry, they're immediately blocked. So I actually use Twitter for good and fun and just to get new stories for the show.

But I never run into the, you know, the anger escalation problem anymore. Because I, if you look for it and you know when people are posting this crap that just, you know, gives you that sense of, you know, impending dread 24-7. And then you just cut them out of your life. Yeah. I still, in Facebook, they'll want the eye-rolling reaction so much.

Are you fucking kidding me? Exactly. Just, and that's it. Just, boop, next. Yeah. Boop, next. I'm sure there's an emoji for it. You can just use the emoji. Yeah, but then I have to do something.

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

How's it going, Dave? It's going pretty good. Have we heard anything from Brian? Has he crossed the border successfully? How's he doing? I have no idea. He's flying today. I've sent him a couple texts, and I have not heard back.

So, he may be in customs. I don't know. He may be in Canada jail. I don't know. We hope it all goes well for him, and we look forward to having him back. Maple cookie jail, which would be ironic, because he doesn't send them to me.

He had a run-in with a moose. Yes, yes. Hopefully not a moose knuckle. Just a moose. So, we got some follow-up from a listener named Chris. He said, Hey, Grumps. Hope is all well with you guys in this shit show of a year, and that you're keeping safe. I'm writing in with something which could be discussed with the Bittnermeister.

Bittnermeister. All right. He says, Today I received an email from my IT department at work, Herr Bittnermeister. You know, Bittner is German, so that does work. Bittner is originally Buehtner, which is barrel maker. So, there you go. Oh, well, there you go. Just like a barrel of monkeys.

Exactly. So, he says, Today I received an email from my IT department at work with a below text. And here's the quote. Dear all, I hope you are well. Please, can you run the following script on the laptop and or desktop PC you have and on the device you may have at home if you have one?

This will allow me to do an audit and update my records correctly, as during the lockdown period, the audit file was not updated fully. Please send the results back to me. Kind regards. Now, does that not sound a little suspect to you? It does. Yeah.

Do you want to read the rest of what Chris sent in here, and then we can comment on it? He said, attached to the email was a Windows batch file. To me, this was all red flags, and I raised the alarm immediately. Turns out, I was the doofus that did not want to properly comply. What are your thoughts?

I think that if people get used to complying with this kind of email, it opens the door to a massive vulnerability through social engineering. And to think that an IT department is promoting this behavior is ludicrous, if not downright irresponsible, in my opinion. Am I overthinking this? Nope.

Curious to know what you think. Best regards, Chris from Malta. Yeah. I am on Team Chris with this one, absolutely. I think that's the only team to be on, on this one. Yes, I think so. This is ridiculous, but I hate to say it, not that unusual.

Yeah, exactly. What I think this points to is the disconnect between some folks, perhaps in this IT department, and certainly in many, who just need to get something done, but they, it is not their first impulse to understand the human aspect of this.

And, um, I mean, this, this reads like a phishing email to me, right? Oh, completely. And, and, you know, Chris, Chris is in Malta, so it is across the pond. So, you know, the IT department might not be that well versed in English, which makes it harder. So they need to have some kind of verification system to do this.

Like maybe some kind of internal messaging system with the file that they're supposed to run, not some just email out of the blue, something. Yes. I, I was, and I was thinking about how could you do something like this safely? What would be the right way to handle this?

And the first thing that came to mind for me was, please give me a call and I will walk you through this process. Right. And, and don't even include the phone number, you know, give me the call at the, you know, our, our tech support, our company's internal tech support hotline or whatever, you know, how, whatever that is.

Let's call the helpline. I'm at, I'm at extension, whatever, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Because that way you don't have someone sending you a fake phone number. Who's then pretending to be your tech support people. Right. At least that way you have somebody on the other end of the line.

You can verify that they actually meant to do this, but there's, yeah, this is just, this is bad from point A to point B. I would, I would also say that the burden should be on the IT department to make a house call. Or do a remote login.

Yeah. Yeah. Because if he's home with COVID, like everybody else, you know, if it's the IT, if it's the company's computer, the, you know, the IT department should have remote login. I haven't worked for a corporation that never had remote login for anywhere, you know, it's their hardware.

They've got the back doors to come in, do patches, do upgrades and things like that. So you'd think that they would have their own way to, you know, just do, you know, do a VNC or some kind of remote desktop in to get to it. Yeah. And in today's day and age, I mean, there's no reason not to do a zoom.

So you see the person on the other end, you know, it's them, you know, we're not, we're not to the point where somebody is going to deep fake that yet. Yeah. Give it a week. But yeah. Yeah. So it wouldn't be that hard to make this 10 times safer than what it is, or I should say not the dumpster fire that I believe it is in its current form.

Yeah. Is that fair to say? So we're with you on this one, Chris. Thanks for the email. Thanks for sending it in. That's a good, good lesson. Now, I know you've seen this this week, the Dutch hacker that claimed that he logged into Trump's Twitter account with the password MAGA2020BANG.

Now, gut feeling for me, never happened. This is, that's my gut feeling after reading through all of the articles and everything about it, that this never happened. Because after the latest breach, when the hackers from Florida and everywhere else got in and got access to the backend tools, you know, they locked down everybody with two factor auth if they weren't locked down with it before.

So I, I, for honestly, I call bullshit on this one. I tend to agree with you. I think there is, if you, if you think about the degree to which President Trump's Twitter account is a matter of national and global security. Have you read it lately?

Well, I, well, I mean, and that joke's on us, right? Yeah. But, but I think you have to look at, I mean, the people who are concerned about these sort of things, the Secret Service, oh, I don't know, the Department of Defense, the military, just think of all the bad things that could happen because someone gets their hands on his Twitter account.

Because what he, he's conditioned us to accept that, well, that's too crazy to be true. I mean, no, there's nothing he could post on there where we wouldn't say, well, that's, that's plausible. Yeah. Or it's plausible that he would, yeah, it's plausible that he would say that.

So I'm with you. I think there's no possible way that his account isn't locked down in all sorts of ways. I mean, it's probably locked down geographically that no one from outside of the areas where he is supposed to be on that day can, can log into it.

If I had to guess, and I'm just guessing here, but yeah, it's in everybody's interest. It's in everybody's interest. It's in Twitter's interest. It's in Trump's interest. It's in the nation's interest. It's in the world's interest to have that account be locked up tight. So I think I'm with you.

I think there's, and the thing about is when I was looking at the security folks who were looking at this story and they were all scratching their heads and wondering why would this Dutch researcher make these false claims? Because all they're going to do is, is shoot their own career in the foot.

It doesn't make sense. I had that problem with it too. I'm like, what's he, what's, what's the end game here? What are you trying to accomplish? Yeah, I don't know, um, five minutes of fame, whatever, uh, which, which, yeah. I mean, he achieved. Yeah.

Like, you know, Twitter said it never happened. The government said it never happened. You know, it's like one of those things where if he'd gone in and like changed a little something and then it had proof, you know, like the old, uh, counting coup, but I didn't see any evidence of that. So no, yeah, maybe he got into a decoy account.

Oh, he, he found himself in deep Twitter. Right, right, right. Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Yeah. I'm with you. I think there's a lot less to this than, than, uh, they'd like there, the, the hacker would like us to think the researcher would like us to think, I should say.

Yeah. Researcher, uh, might lose that title after this former researcher, former researcher. Yeah. And of course I, I know you guys have covered this, the big article that had been going around the, the report about how, how many times the police have broken into your phone, um, recently at least 2000 law enforcement agencies have the tools to get into encrypted smartphones, blah, blah, blah, 50,000, uh, instances of it.

Um, did we think this was something that wasn't happening? Uh, no, we knew it was happening because we know about the different tools that they were using. Grayshift, Celebrite, uh, you know, all of these different places are selling these tools to law enforcement and they're using them willy nilly.

So I didn't, I don't think that, I mean, everybody was a little bit up in arms about it, but I think everybody I talked to was just like, yeah. And yeah, Ben and I covered this over on caveat. And, uh, uh, I think part of our conversation, what we were surprised about was how many little law enforcement organizations are using this.

It's, it's not just the big boys. It's not the NYPD, although, I mean, it is the NYPD, but it's not just the NYPD. Yeah. And Barney Fife. It's NYPD and Barney Fife. Little sheriff's departments are using it and the little police departments are, are having the big ones help them with it.

They're using grant money. Um, so the other part of this is that the police departments find this extraordinarily valuable. Of course it is, but, uh, from a civil liberties point of view, uh, quite problematic, quite a bit problematic.

Yes. You know, it's like some of the stories about, okay, some kids got in a fight over $70 in a McDonald's parking lot and you have to like, you know, crack their phones. I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think so. I mean, there has to be, there has to be some kind of bar that has to be crossed, you know, some kind of either violent crime or some kind of, at least a felony.

Come on. Can we at least get a felony here? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. There has to be some cost to the police, uh, so that it's only used in certain instances. I'm with you on that.

We've talked about facial recognition so many times in this show. It seems like we're beating a, a, a pulverized horse, but this one got me excited. Uh, just from the title alone, activists turn facial recognition tools against the police.

I'm like, yes, go get them, go get them. And, uh, in reading the article, it turns out it did not really yet. It's kind of a side project for one guy up in Seattle. So it hasn't been really released into the wild, but, uh, you know, turnabout's fair play, I think, yeah, um, do you, I, you know, this is, I guess it's something I have to, I'll ask Ben about when I talk to him.

Uh, is it against the law to out a police officer who's undercover? Undercover is a little different from what they're trying to do though. That's a different thing. These guys are just putting their, putting black tape over their name badges and are in public doing police work.

This is not like you don't know their police. Right. Undercover is like, you know, yeah, you don't want, uh, with a huggy bear getting wise to, you know, Joe law over there. But I think, I think in this case, and they said, you know, the guy talked to the, the attorney in Portland and he said, yeah, it's, it's, it's not illegal.

It's just creepy. Yeah. I mean, I don't think police should be allowed to cover their names when they're out on the job, when they're in uniform and they're out doing their job, their names or their badges should be in plain view. Um, and I know the, the counter to that is, well, we don't want to get doxed.

Well, you know what? You're, you're, you're, this comes with the job. You're a police officer. Yeah. And stop doing heinous shit and you won't have, give them a reason to dox you. Yeah. Don't give them a reason. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, uh, I, I think that's very interesting, but, uh, I guess my point about the, um, the folks who are undercover, could you inadvertently out someone who's undercover and could there be ramifications for that?

Could you get in trouble for that? I don't know the answer to that. I'm going to try talking to Ben tomorrow. I'll ask him. Okay. Ask him that. And also what, what do you think the, the odds are that, you know, if people start putting these databases together of police officers and people who could possibly be undercover, how long till the criminals do it?

Well, exactly. Right. Right. And that's, and that's kind of what I'm, what I'm getting at here with the undercover folks. Are you putting undercover people at risk if it's easy for me to run someone's face against a Facebook collection of photos and odds are somebody is going to pop up somehow.

Yep. Um, what does that take? Can, can you no longer do undercover work the way you used to? I don't know. It's an interesting question. Yeah. I think undercover work is probably going to be becoming exponentially more dangerous. GG. Quiet. Sorry, everybody.

We have a whiny dog in the office today, but I think, uh, it's going to be, it's, oh, I think it's going to get much more dangerous to do undercover work in the future just because of things like Facebook alone. Yeah. Sorry.

I had to rub her butt. This is going to take some editing today. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Yeah. Oh my God. What a day. What a day. So it's the big time, right? It's the glamorous part of the job.

One, one hand on the, on the level controls the other hand, rubbing a dog's butt. Exactly. I got my roles mute switch in one hand. I got my dopey butt in the other. Yeah. Life is good. Yeah. This is what happens when you get into podcasting people. This is what happens.

Right. This is the big time folks. This is the big time. So yeah, I'm curious. I will definitely tune into the next caveat when you talk to Ben about that. Yeah. I'll ask him. It's a good question. Next up, we have something that you knew was bound to happen, but you didn't quite see it coming this way.

There's a company called a Verkata, which is a quote unquote unicorn startup. Yeah. Great. Billion dollar valuation. Yep. They sell security camera systems with facial recognition and things like that. Right. Well, it turns out some of the creepy dudes who work there were using their own cameras in their own office to just get really gross with some of the female employees, but then they posted it all on Slack.

And this is why we can't have nice things. Ain't that the truth? What kind of stuff were they doing? Like when you say really gross, were they just being obnoxious? Yeah. I shouldn't say just. Were they being obnoxious men? They were. They were taking suggestive photos and making, you know, lewd, nasty remarks.

Like guys do. I see. You know, it's locker room talk, Dave. Right. It's just locker room talk. Caption contest, you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Betty bending over the coffee machine to pick up something she spilled. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Exactly. So, but as we know, nobody ever gets fired and none of these people were fired, which I find just like, what?

They gave them an option to either lose some of their stock options or leave the company. And they all took the, there's four people and they all took the option to reduce their options. Now, this is ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Listen, people have left the company over this because apparently that is, you know, the, that's how they run things over there. It's, that's the culture. The culture is a sexist, nasty, misogynistic culture. They should have taken the stock options and given them to the people they were making fun of. Oh, man.

Talk about justice. That would have been great. Oh, look at you. Dave Bittner, man of the outlaw West. Oh, that's a great idea.

I may be just a backcountry lawman, but, but this to me sounds like justice. Yeah. You ain't no Barney Fife. No, that's right. Andy. Yeah. So, um, hmm. Yeah. I, I get, I, it's just creepy.

And I guess part of this too is that, you know, this goes on all over the place and I, it's good that these stories, it's, it's simultaneously heartbreaking. But also good that these stories come out because I think the more we're able to shine a light on these things and show that there are consequences, um, although, as you say, nobody got fired, but people did, they got fined.

That's something, right? They didn't get a slap on the wrist. Um, but the more attention, yeah, the more attention we get on this, then maybe the, we'll get rid of these sorts of the, the, the notion that this could possibly be acceptable will, uh, fade away and it can't happen fast enough.

As far as I'm concerned. No, definitely. So I just got a text from Brian Schulmeister. He has landed successfully and, uh, in, in Canada. And he says he has infiltrated the country. So. Boy, do they not know what they're in for. He just sadly can't infiltrate a pub for the next 14 days.

But, uh, yes, he's made it into Canada. Oh, well, good for him. I'm glad he got there safely. And I can't wait to hear all the adventures of his travels. He fucking better be back next week. Doing this alone is a pain in the ass. Well. Not your segment, just getting everything together.

The other hour that we have to put together. Absolutely. But thanks again to Eric Hundley for stepping in. Well, you know, this last thing that I have for us, uh, this week, my son, uh, sent me a video earlier this week.

And, um, evidently my son has, has started, uh, entertaining himself by watching old vintage training videos from the nineties. Okay. Well, I will say that in the course of my career back in the nineties, I was making training videos.

There you go. Full circle. I can understand how these things happened. Uh, and he brought this to my attention. This is a, and folks, you'll just have to trust me. You want to check this is the link to this YouTube video. Um, this is a video that was produced by the elevator and escalator safety council.

And it involves two young children who are about to use an escalator at their local mall, their mall that is, uh, surprisingly empty. And the, the, um, the mall cop tells them to stop that they, they have to, he has to, uh, teach them how to safely use the escalator before they go up it.

And one thing leads to another, some magic happens and some sort of cat creature, Ronald McDonald kind of character pops out of a poster. It was very, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was very much Ronald McDonald meets the rum tum tugger.

Yes. Oh, that's perfect. Yes. Yes. That's it. Yes. I love it. And, uh, and, and he, he proceeds to, uh, hip hop his way through because another thing in the nineties, if you weren't around this time, uh, if you wanted to give something a little bit of edge, well, there's nothing better than making, making your characters rap.

Right. And so this cat character hip hops his way through teaching these kids all about not just escalator safety, but elevator safety and also moving walkway safety. Yeah. It is scintillating content. Let me tell you scintillating content.

So, uh, it's pretty epic. I got to say pretty epic. Uh, so I don't know that we can go as far as categorizing this cat character as a furry. No, definitely not. Maybe a proto furry. Okay. See, sort of his head is, is a creature, but it's sort of a plasticky, right?

I mean, yeah, it's a plastic mask. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I think, uh, I think, uh, I think this is definitely not into furry territory. It is definitely into damn, that's good entertainment territory. Right. Well, but you also wondered like, what did it look like in the boardroom at the elevator and escalator safety council when this project was being pitched?

They had to have had meetings. Right. Right. Somebody said, you know, the best way to get into the classroom, the kids to these days. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the boardroom of the elevator and escalator safety council in the nineties, it was probably wasn't a whole lot of diversity in that room.

I'm just going to know, it was very white all the way down to the cocaine. That's what I'm guessing. Right. And they, somebody, they probably got some grant money or it's just their job to spend this money on trying to spread the word about safety, safe use of these devices, which let's say is a good thing.

Yes. Um, and so somebody got hired and somebody got sold on the idea of doing a hip hop rapping Ronald McDonald cat creature. Uh, who knows? Like you say, maybe somebody just came back from a weekend trip to see cats and was inspired.

Yeah. As I'm watching this guy go around, I'm like, that is totally room, tum, tugger. And, you know, yeah. Yeah. Actually, the guy who plays the security guard is, uh, one of those sort of that guy actors, you know, you see him and you're like, oh, I've seen that guy before. Uh, he's been in a lot of things as, as that guy, but he's no Paul Blart.

He has no Paul Blart. No, no. But he's, he's a good that guy. So, so check it out. Uh, you'll learn a little something about escalator safety and, uh, get to see this proto furry cat dude in, in the process. Cause you know, back in the nineties, it was a problem with kids getting chomped by escalators.

So, well, I was going to ask you about that too. Did you, have you ever, do you ever know anybody who got injured by an escalator? Uh, no, but I saw a really disturbing scene when I was in, uh, Hong Kong and, uh, a baby almost got eaten by an escalator.

So yeah, it was, uh, I was, I was there, uh, we were up at the top, you know, where you're overlooking Hong Kong and we're coming down. And this woman tried to put her stroller on the escalator and it flipped over and the baby tumbled out.

And every, it was just like, fortunately there's like a military, like a Chinese military there at the station there at the top of the, the hill. Yeah. And, uh, these two female military officers literally dove over the, um, over the fallen stroller and scooped up the baby.

And like, cause we were at the top of the escalator and they were at the bottom and watching this whole thing happen. And it was just horrific, but like the baby blanket was getting caught in the escalator. So we almost saw something terrible, but thanks to the Chinese military, I'd never thought I'd say those words. Uh, they saved a baby.

Well, and you know, I think back when we were kids, escalators were not as safe as they are today. They didn't have the, the yellow lines on them that they have, and they didn't have the little, the little brushy things on the side that help keep your feet away from the edges. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. Those were added after multiple, uh, amputations were required.

Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, check out the video. It is a hoot. It is a hoot. All right, Dave, thanks for stopping by. I got to go take care of this damn dog. All right. See you next time.

Media candy. So I have a little follow up here. Uh, I don't know if you heard this episode, Eric, but a couple months ago in the middle of lockdown, like maybe three and a half, four months into it. We were looking for feel good TV, but we were looking for feel good TV and we came across old reruns of supermarket sweep on Netflix.

Okay. I don't know if you've ever seen the show. I haven't. I did watch the new one. It's not really in my taste bucket. Okay. I love it. I think it's great. I love Leslie Jones. She's one of my favorite comedians and it's just silly fun. That's the great part.

That's why I like it. It's, it's just fun. And the people who do the contest, like the writers on the show, they have tons. I thought they were going to have the same three contests every week for the teams to do, but they're like, they're all new every time. And I kind of find myself enjoying playing along at home.

So. Do you know what is fun? I mean, I'm not going to say I'm against whimsical and fun. I love the show. Nailed it. Nailed it. I haven't heard of that. Really? That one's on Netflix as well. I mean, this one's ABC that he showed, but nailed it is a hilarious show.

It's a cooking competition show. Okay. And they pick people who suck. Okay. And what they'll put forth is some like really awesome, beautifully designed superhero cake or whatever it is. And these people put together these items that are just like falling over and melting.

Okay. Nailed it. There's a lot of charm, but everybody is horrible at what they do. And it's quite hilarious. Okay. Well, I'll have to check that one out for sure. Since we're not getting any new MasterChef Juniors. So that's my favorite. That's my favorite cooking show on TV.

I love MasterChef Junior. Well, Somebody Feeds Phil is starting on Friday. Yep. I know. I was watching. I was getting caught up on a couple old episodes that I missed last night, actually. A friend of mine was in that. Which one? David Freiheit was in the Montreal episode.

That's the one I just started. I finished South Korea last night. Oh, you're going to choke up a little on the Montreal. Okay. Okay. Oh, great. That's not what I want from Somebody Feeds Phil. Please. That's not what I'm looking for. So we do have the new Borat movie out.

Have you watched it? I have not watched the movie. I have watched the scene. Oh, yes. The famous scene. Now, I actually enjoyed the movie. I thought it was really good. It was funny. Whimsical. And, you know, it's a Borat movie. What the hell do you want from it?

It's a Borat movie. And, yeah, the whole Giuliani scene and everybody going, you know, cuckoo, bug nutty over it. So I want your read on it. What do you think happened? And just give me your read on it. I think, okay, Giuliani hasn't won any Friends for himself, and he's auditioning to Roger Stone.

So I'll put that out there. Okay. So we can qualify him. However, the dude was tucking in his freaking shirt. See, that's exactly where I'm at, too. I'm like, okay, she pulled out his microphone. He laid back, and he tucked in his shirt. I mean, yeah, he did try and pat her on the ass, but that's...

I don't even think that. I really don't, because if you look at it, it was her lower back, and it was like an old man pat. Like, yes, dear. Yeah, asking for the phone number type of thing, too. It's like... But they tried to make it out like he was getting a blowjob. You know, that's what they were going for, and it failed.

I thought that part failed, and I think it's a tempest in a teapot. It really is nothing. Yeah, it's pretty slimy, honestly. I'm just like, ugh, really? And, okay, there's many things you can go after Giuliani on, okay? Ukrainian connections, Russians, all kinds of stuff.

But that? Yeah, yeah. Really kind of just grasping at straws on that one. I did not think that there was... It was definitely not what they portrayed it to be, so... But, I mean, for the rest of it, the movie was pretty good, I got to say. Especially when he spent a couple days living with, in quarantine with these, you know, like, super hardcore right-wingers.

It was pretty funny. One question for you, though, I got to push just a little bit. What if he was, let's say, from Nigeria? Would people like it as much? I don't know. Making fun of a country? I'm just saying. I don't know. I haven't seen it.

You show me that movie and I'll tell you. But since that movie doesn't exist, you know... I just think about it, in some ways, sometimes I think it might be a little mean-spirited. Oh, it's definitely mean-spirited. Sacha Baron Cohen, man. It's generally mean-spirited. Have you ever watched anything else he's done?

Not much. Okay. Yeah, go back and watch the Ali G show. Go back and watch his... This is America, I think it was. Yeah, no, he's a certain flavor. And this is right up his normal alley. But you should watch a movie.

Definitely check it out. All right. And back in the day, did you ever watch Animaniacs? You know, I had heard about it and everything, but it was kind of sort of slipped in my age, if you will. Okay. I was like a little too old for it, I think, when it happened in the 90s. I was in the army.

Oh, that's right. You were in the army. I was sitting home alone, writing code all day and just had the TV running. So I was a huge Animaniacs fan. And they're coming back. Hulu's going to bring it back with a reboot, which is fine, because I watched the trailer. It's all the same voices. Everything's pretty much the same, but a little more snarky.

I like the trailer. Yeah, the trailer's great. I'm looking forward to it. It comes out on November 20th. So if you're an Animaniacs fan, definitely get your Hulu account fired up. Like, I see, I think everybody has Hulu at this point. That's why I can make fun of it, because you get Hulu free with, you know, basically a donut at Dunkin' Donuts nowadays.

I'm curious about it, though, because it's like, does the real mystery be how you got Hulu? I got mine through Spotify. Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. They give it away in so many different places. I bet half the people have Hulu and don't even know how they had it. Yeah, they get it from their cell phone. Like, you know, it comes with your cell phone plan, comes with your cable plan.

It's just everywhere. You just get Hulu for free. It's just one of those things. It's like, you know, would you like a measles vaccine? Well, yeah, you can have Hulu with that, too. There you go. Yeah, and sadly, in other reboot news, this one I do not want. I do not want this to ever get made.

David Gordon Green and Seth MacFarlane are going to reboot Smokey and the Bandit as a TV show. No. Okay, when you put this up here, I'm sorry. When you put this up here, I was kind of like, why? Exactly. I don't even know that the movies really hold up, dude.

The movie has legs. I'm sorry. We covered Smokey and the Bandit on does it have legs, and it absolutely has legs. Does it? Okay. I'm just looking back going, oh, God. Well, then let the legs keep on walking. Jesus.

You know, we'll see how it comes out. I like Seth MacFarlane, so we'll see what he does with it. But I honestly don't think this one needs to be made, period. It sounds like they're trying to do a Dukes of Hazzard but be safe about it or something. Probably. Just, I don't know.

What's he going to run instead of Coors, like N95 masks across the country? I don't know. It's weird. Yeah. So, in other movie news, Ghostbusters Afterlife, they're pushing it again to June 11th, 2021.

I swear to God, I saw a trailer for this over a year ago. They just need to put it out. Come on, guys. Quit. The box office isn't coming back. Even by June, the box office isn't coming back. Get over it. I don't know. I wonder the theaters are going to come back.

I mean, I'm waiting for the drive-ins to come back. I'm like, we finally have the reason to bring back the drive-in. Yeah, and I mean, a lot of comedians are using drive-ins for their shows, so we know they're out there. There's a pop-up drive-in right down the street from me in this huge parking lot, so I can't wait to go. They're opening it up this fall for movies, so I'm looking forward to it.

I mean, you've got FM transmitters. You just drop it, boom, in the car, and digital projectors aren't that expensive. I mean, it's an amazing time for Renaissance. You have a – bring back roller skates and window service. There we go. Get back to the old Sonic days and things like that.

No, I just want this thing to just come out already. You know, I'll give you $50. I'll give you $50. It's a new Ghostbusters movie. The trailer looked awesome. I'll give you $50. How's that? Is that going to change your mind? Probably not. But in another one that is still having issues is the new James Bond movie.

Now, I saw this one. It was just like – I choked on this one. MGM considered moving James Bond to streaming, but Apple and Netflix balked at the $600 million price tag. $600 million. Yeah, well, what did the last Bond make worldwide?

Oh, I'm sure it was, you know, probably close to a billion, but that was from box office. You have to look at – this is streaming, so it's like, is this going to push the needle on new subscriptions to make up for $600 million outlay? So what's MGM's actual budget right now?

I mean, can the company even afford to be under $600 million without going under? No, probably. Like you brought this up, and I'm kind of like, Apple, don't buy the movie. Buy the whole damn company. Yeah, just buy MGM itself and be done with it. Yeah, they weren't talks, apparently.

I believe earlier this year, they weren't talks to actually buy MGM and bolster up the Apple TV. Oh, that would have been a good one, because that way they could have got the whole Bond catalog. Although I thought Sony owned the whole Bond catalog, like the back catalog. I'm not sure, and that's always that weird one, because what is it?

The Broccoli family, and they had different rights with whomever, but maybe they own it for a period of time. Yeah, because I remember in the 90s, I worked on a Bond project where they were re-releasing all of them on DVD, and it was a Sony project.

So I'm not sure who owns the rights. You also have to remember that there are different rights for different distribution channels. It's like, okay, here's theatrical rights, here's streaming rights, here's DVD rights, here's VHS rights, all the other crap. You know, so it's like, those things are so complicated.

The $600 million might have just been for the streaming rights only, and not for follow-on. You know, I mean, it's interesting that Apple is paying, like, all this money for some of these shows, though, because I was really surprised that they bought Greyhound for $70 million.

It's sometimes worth it just to get that tentpole feature or, you know, I mean, for a while, HBO made no money on The Sopranos. They lost money. But it was worth it to have the cachet of being, you know, the brilliant network with the best things out there.

Somebody has said that they think Apple TV is trying to be HBO, and I don't know that they're that far off. No, they're not. They're not at all. And, you know, the only reason I opened up Apple TV Plus was because of Greyhound, and then I found some other stuff to watch in there. I found a bunch of really good movies.

And Ted Lasso, which is- And Ted Lasso. Yeah, you can't go wrong with Ted Lasso. Man, they nailed it on that one. So thank you, Jason Sudeikis, for a little bright light in the pandemic. Cobra Kai, though. I know I watched it back with you, too, but it's hot now on Netflix.

Everybody really should give it a shot. Yep. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's pretty damn good. Something that's not really good, though, and I want to talk about this one for two seconds. We're going to make this short. Billy McFarland, the douchebag from the Fyre Festival.

This uber douchebag from the Fyre Festival, who actually ran another scam when he was out on bail waiting trial for his big douchebaggery. He's got a podcast now. Doesn't everybody? This is proof. Yeah, this is proof.

But this is also instant karma, because he got three months in the hole for getting caught with a USB drive while he was inside. So, you know- Was that him or his lawyer? You see, the article's very confusing, because it was saying the lawyer himself has served time and had a USB drive, I thought.

So it's very weird. I'm like- Okay. Yeah, I don't know. This kettle's defending the pot here. It's douchebags all the way down. That's all it really is. And I listened to the first episode, and there's no slight against my buddy Jordan Harbinger, who's doing the hosting on it. But whoever is editing that show is one of the worst editors I've ever heard in my life, because there is no artistic through line.

Like, Jordan sounds like he's in a studio half the time, and he sounds like he's in an airport bathroom the other half of the time. Really? And there's no rhyme or reason as to why it changes. I'm like, Jordan's got a studio in his house. I know. I helped him set it up. He can record studio-quality audio.

Why does he sound like he's in a bathroom? Makes no sense. RX-7. RX-7's a good tool. Yeah, it's – no, they did this on purpose. And the other funny part is it's like – Billy's like, all of my proceeds – I own 50% of this podcast, and all of my proceeds go to, you know, reparations for all the people that I have fucked over, which is, you know, a total of $26 million.

There was not a single ad in that show, so. I think he has to, though. Oh, he has to say that, yeah. But I don't think you're allowed to profit because he is profiting off of a scam, technically, with a podcast, so he has to give it all to them, kind of like OJ can't collect any money on pretty much anything.

Yeah, this isn't him being a nice guy. This is because he's legally mandated by the court, you know. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I want to talk about a podcast that I actually do love, and that is 13 Days of Halloween. And this is hosted by Keegan-Michael Key, and it's put out by Aaron Manke and Blumhouse TV and iHeartRadio.

Now, this is an extremely well-produced show. Oh, yeah. Extremely well-produced show. Keegan-Michael Key is a fantastic voice actor, and all the other voice actors they get in there are amazing. It is really well-written. I love the stories.

They're spooky as hell. They pull no punches on some of them, and you're just like, oh, shit, when you're done listening to it, which is what I want from a good Halloween show. But this one surprised me as well because, also, not a single ad. Mm. Wow. Not a single ad.

Well, again, though, it's iHeartRadio. Maybe they're just trying to promote the class of the network, if you will. Could be. Could be. But you'd think they'd have something in there, at least a post-roll or a pre-roll. But, yeah, nothing at all, which is fine by me. I'm cool with it.

But I listened to part of the first episode off of this, and the sound work is amazing. There's even a little ASMR in there. Yeah, unfortunately. Because I was like, whoa, that was. Yeah. Yeah, but it's ASMR in a very creepy way.

Exactly. It was like, ugh. It's the perfect use for it because it freaks me the hell out. So it's really good in this type of situation. But it is really well done, and I highly recommend it. So definitely wear headphones, though. Wear headphones. Noise canceling if you got them.

Caps and doodads. Orbi Prime glasses. Now, Jason. Yes. I've been talking with you offline because you complain about how long things take to get there from Kickstarter. I forgot. What is it you order? You order something from Kickstarter.

It took, what, a year? My Lumi keyboards. Yes. It was well over a year late. Okay. Cry me a river. Cry me a river, buddy. Okay. What you got? What you got? I got Orbi Prime glasses. These are 360 glasses. The first ever. And I ordered them back in the early days, the days just past the last election, 12, 2016.

Oh, my God. Okay. They were delivered July 28th of this year. That's definitely, you win the long lead time on the crowdfunding game right there. So how are they? Well, sadly, they seem to have not updated the cameras.

And so it has 2016 quality cameras in it, too. That's what I was worried about. 640x480? No, but they're just, the light control is very poor.

I don't know if some of this can be fixed later on, but I haven't done a lot with it. They're very slow. And they seem to be either too dark or too blown out. Okay. So, you know, they're one of those that took so long that I kind of forgot about them.

And then every once in a while, I'd remember and go check it again. Yeah, that's what happens with those things. I did the same with my Lumi. And I ended up turning off the notifications from them because I'm just like, it's going to get here when it's going to get here. Quit reminding me that it's not here yet, guys. It's like they're taunting you.

Yeah. It's like, or they'll say, look, we're getting tested here. I'm like, oh, so they get to play with that that you owed me eight months ago, a year ago? Yeah. The Lumi one pissed me off the most because I bought two of them. I wanted, because they click together and you have a bigger keyboard. Well, it turns out if you give them more money, they send it to you later.

They're like, we're only doing the single keyboards together first. And I'm like, you assholes. You assholes. Yeah. You won that one. Now I have a drone I'm waiting for. Oh God. You know, you can just go buy one of those nowadays. You don't have to Kickstarter one. You can just go buy one.

I know. I know. I got them cheap. Well, you got good, fast, or quick, you know? I mean, good, no, good, fast, or yeah, good, fast, or cheap. That's what it is. Yeah. Project manager triangle. Yeah. The project triangle.

Yeah. Pick two. Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. I know which two I get. You got some Descript news, I see. I do, and another thing we looked into, super exciting. I don't know if you've used Descript at all. I use it all the time, and I hate it.

So tell me why I should like it, or if I should keep on hating it. And tell me what it is first. Descript allows you to edit audio as if it is a Word document. Right. And again, you know, it depends on your practice.

It can be a little bit dangerous because you may get unnatural breathing cuts and things like that when you're doing it. But if you get a lot of content, like somebody who's an ummmachine, you can very quickly select that superlative or whatever and just delete them all.

Boom. One shot. Or you can move sentences around. They're doing interesting things with AI. I know you love AI. But it is pretty cool. It's like a voice matching technology where you can get your voice recorded in, and you may be able to slip in a little fill here or there to finish out a sentence or statement and other adjustments.

They're now doing it, though, where you can edit video. Right. So you can have crappy video editing as well as crappy audio editing. Perfect. Potentially. But, you know, there are advantages to some of it, especially you are getting a half-assed transcript while you are going, and you can find good edit points.

I think it might even be more effective with video in the sense of just finding cut points. Yeah, I think that's going to be the best thing about it. Because then you can slide in other footage and stuff like that. So I could see, like, using that for a pass-through and checking out, okay, boom, we'll cut this section out, especially when it's like take one, two, whatever, cutting out entire areas and sliding it into Final Cut Pro or Premiere or something like that.

Yeah, it's just really expensive. That's the other problem with it. It's really expensive. And the transcription stuff, when I first got it, they totally bait and switched me on it. So I've had a really bad taste in my mouth. And I talked to the guy who created it, and he was just a dick to me for customer support.

And he's like, ah, we got your money. You can wait until next year, and we'll fix it then. And I'm like, there's so many problems with that company that just irk me. You know he's the one who did Groupon, right? Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I was going to say, what do you expect? What is Groupon? Yeah. It's a come on, and then you're going to pay up the ass later.

Yeah, yeah, no. I'm not a fan. I'm just running out. I've got another month left, so I'm just getting all my transcriptions done that I paid for. But yeah, I'm not going to keep up with this program at all. Because yeah, you can do mass editing of ums and ahs and things like that.

Then you have to go back and fix them all in post when they all sound completely unnatural, and there's like big nasty cuts and shit like that. It does not sound good. And I mean, I'm a professional editor, so I have a high standard, but even this doesn't even meet my like most basic standard.

So I'm not a fan. I am a fan of Photoshop, though. I've been using Photoshop since version two. And of course, this new version has lots of AI in it. But it is really cool AI, I've got to say.

The stuff that rolled out with Photoshop 2021, they've got neural filters, sky replacement, the new Discover panel, and two new Refine Edge selection improvements, all based on AI. Well, I played around with some of the neural filters.

And there, you can get some really, really creepy results. I took some old black and white photos of me that one of my friends did in college, and tried to colorize them using their colorized filters. Now, sometimes it works really, really good, and it's amazing how it looks, and sometimes it's not really that good.

They have a problem with ears. They haven't figured out the ear problem yet. So you have this perfectly colorized face, and then you have black and white ears like Bat Boy. It's just not right. But some of the other stuff is really cool. The sky replacement's really cool. And this is just, if you pay for Creative Cloud, it was just an update that came with it.

So I am a fan. I am definitely a fan of these updates. But then there's the one where you can actually change the portrait mode and make yourself angrier or happier type of thing. The Twitter function? Sort of. So in this picture that I'm using, my mouth is closed.

I got no teeth, no nothing. So I set the slider to angry, and it auto-generated teeth for me that basically look like Shane McGowan's teeth, all over the place and made me really grumpy.

And it was just spooky. It was very spooky. And you can keep playing with it and keep adding layers on top of it. It's fun to play with, just to play with it. So if you've got Photoshop 2021, check out the portrait mode where you can change the emotions.

It's pretty fun. It's not great. I mean, it looks really bad. It really does look like a weekly world news photo for people who remember what that is. I mentioned Batboy, so it's top of mind. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. No, I saw it. It looked amazing. Looks like it provides everything except talent.

Well, fortunately, you can take about a million Photoshop tutorials nowadays. It'll turn you into a Photoshop master in no time. I was overwhelmed looking at it, though. I was like, holy shit. I think they're doing a really good job with this new stuff.

I like it. I like it a lot. I like the lighting filters. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I mean, the stuff that we used to do back in the day, I mean, with channels, if you're old enough to remember channels and channel ops before they had layers. It's like we used to do stuff like that, and now you can just click a button and have it done, which is much nicer.

I like the future in Photoshop much more. Well, I like this version of AI, if you like. You know, you're talking about it. It makes me think about the iPhone, what's coming out there with a narrow engine. Have you seen the breakdown where they show the chip? No, I haven't. If you look at the new iPhone chips, it's like a third of the chip is the narrow engine.

So you've got the CPU part, which is smaller than that, and you have the GPU, and you've got the neural engine. So, I mean, everything is heading this way. Oh, I'm sure it is. Now, if they can just make Siri not suck, then we'd be fine. It would involve networking skill. Could be.

So another thing that I found, which we talked about this on the show when it was first in Alpha and nobody could get a hold of it. It's called ClipDrop, and it is the coolest bit of tech. That I have seen in a long time.

Spooky. It's like kind of AR-ish. It is AR. Kind of. Literally. Kind of. You're basically using your phone, and you're just capturing a screen grab of an object, and then it takes that object and will mask it for you if you wanted to.

Or it can just use the whole photo, or it can pull the text out of the photo, and then what it will do is connect directly to your computer and drop it in like I was testing it with Photoshop last night and dropping it into a Photoshop doc. And I have to say, it is really, really good.

I mean, it is really good. I was taking pictures of, I had a bottle of Guinness sitting on my counter, and I took a picture of it. It masked it perfectly and dropped it right into the dock. I was amazed at, like, how much it knew on just how to mask one particular item in the shot.

It was crazy because it was in really low light. I can't even wait to play with it today in actual sunlight and see what it does, see if I can – see if it's smart enough to clip out a dog because I got my dogs. That's all I get to take pictures of. You know what I thought of as soon as I saw it is this would be so amazing for – I mean, Brian had to buy a house without seeing it.

Would it not be cool that you could have a virtual tour and the capability to get to the rooms, right, take a picture of your couch and then drop it in that room? I think you can – I mean, you can kind of do that now with the technology that's out there because this is just going to be a flat image.

This is going to be a flat image. I think the new LiDAR sensors are going to make that a lot easier. And you can even do that in the Amazon app for some things. You know, you can drop it in – like, when I was buying a new blender for my kitchen in Chicago, this was like two and a half years ago, they would pull up the AR engine and put it in my kitchen at the right scale and I could move it around.

You see, that's the stuff I think is super cool. That's really cool. That's why we've always said that AR is something that we're looking forward to, VR not so much. But now that I've got an Oculus Quest, I'm in love with VR. Well, it's fun. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I still – I'm dying to get the AR glasses. I mean, doing repairs on engines when you don't know what the hell you're doing and it lights up this area and you go, oh.

Yeah, no, that's what I mean. That's where the Microsoft goggles are probably going to own the business for a while. But I definitely recommend checking this out. If you've got – and I think it's iPhone and Mac only right now. But the app that you get for your Mac actually has a clipper on it as well.

So you can just do a quick drag on an image anywhere on your screen and it'll take that and it will still do the clipping and drag it and pop it into Photoshop or what other app that you're using right away. It's just like the time it saves you on just the clipping alone is so cool.

It is really cool, yes. Yeah, they do have pricing for it, but right now it's free, so go check it out. One last app that I have is Nova from Panic. I used Coda 1 and Coda 2 for years back when I was a software dev, and it's nice to see that they're actually keeping up with their tools.

So this new one is Nova. It's written from the ground up. It's $99 if you're new to it or $79 if you own any of the old Codas. For life? Probably for a couple years. It took them long enough to do Nova. I mean, Coda 2 I've had on my machine for probably five years.

And I've only paid for it once. I paid for Coda 1, then I paid for Coda 2. Panic is really good about only paying for full revision upgrades. So you don't pay for point upgrades or things like that. Like all my tools, half of them are Panic, like transmit and things like that.

Okay. But, I mean, they're just a great company. And Nova finally has Git baked into it, so you can get rid of your Git app, which I think I was using Watchtower for my Git repos back in the day. So you can get rid of that. So that's another $30 that you don't have to pay for and worry about.

They don't have diffs yet, though, which they said they're working on, and they better hurry up because diffs are important when you're working in Git. But anyway, I think it's a pretty cool app. If I was still developing, I would definitely get it. And I was almost tempted to buy it just because I'm like, you know, I get a copy of that, then I throw on MAMP, you know, and get some PHP and my SQL running.

I get a little LAMP stack on my desktop. And I'm just like, no, stop. Go away. No, no. Bad, bad, bad. Don't do it. Don't do it. Willpower, man. I know. I had to express some serious willpower today for that. Yeah. But on that one, you know what you can do?

Well, when you're playing a video game with Jordan, you now have a Garmin watch dedicated to eSports. Oh, God. And I love this. This is from a DC Rainmaker. And by the way, if you are into any kind of sports equipment or anything out there, he's the best.

He likes literally writes the book on every review. It's amazing. But I love his statement. File this one under the things you didn't have on your 2020 bingo card. Okay. Anyway, Garmin has launched an eSports watch that will track your heart rate, your stress, your body battery, and send it via Bluetooth smart so people can see your heart rate is racing during what, quake?

I have no idea. I'm old. Yeah. What's the point of this thing? Dude, I mean, I literally am speechless. That's why I had to share it because I have Garmin watches. I've run marathons. There's a place for them. But eSports, are you kidding?

Or is it because while I'm doing eSports, I'm getting so far out of shape, I'm having a high heart rate just eating chips? It doesn't have a countdown timer to when you're going to die because that seems to be probably the most useful thing. That's a good metric. Yeah. That is a good metric to share.

You know, get out of the house and actually take a walk or you're going to be dead in 12 days and 67 minutes or something like that. Yeah. You're going to be dead in 12 Scaramoochies. Oh, ouch. Yeah. I think I'll pass on this one. Please.

So I don't have anything new to recommend this week, but I am going to tease three books that just all hit this week that I have either on a Kindle, on an audio book, or in physical form.

I've got all three this week. First one up just came out and I am so excited. It's Dead Lies Dreaming, The Laundry Files, book 10 by Charles Strauss. If you know us, we love The Laundry Files, so hopefully he's getting to the end of the series because this is book 10 and it's kind of getting long in the tooth, but we'll see.

There's still always a good read. And we've got The Joke at the End of the World, a novel by Scott Dickers. Scott founded The Onion or one of the founders of The Onion, and most of the books that I recommend by him are how to write funny books, literally. How to write funny, how to write funnier, and how to write funniest.

Three books on how to write funny. But he finally wrote his first novel. He's actually ghostwritten too. I've had, okay, I've interviewed Scott. Unfortunately, I had mangled audio that is unusable. But yeah, he's written a few books.

Yeah, he's a smart guy, he's a funny guy. I'm a fan of Scott, so I got it. It's a young adult sci-fi novel. So, and I'm, you know, about 30 pages into it. It's pretty cool. I'm digging it so far, so I'll have a full review next week.

And also Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow, which was a crowdfunded one that I talked about. I would have read it by now, but he kept screwing up the downloads for the audio book. So, to finally, he kept forgetting one of the last chapters of the book in the downloads. Oh, God. Which, it's really annoying.

And the whole process was late, and it was just a mess. But he was doing something where he was testing out Kickstarter to make sure that, you know, he got enough people and made enough money on the audio book so that they could take it to the publishers. And it was like an experiment in publishing.

So, I supported him. I still like Cory. I don't know if the book's going to be any good, but it did come with a short story book. It's a short story book. A short story with it, which is a little brother short story that I got with it. And it was – I wasn't engaged.

Let's just say that. So, it was very funny. I can't see – the problem is I can't really talk about it because it's going to – there's big spoilers in there for some of the – the idea that he came up with in the short story is, you know, it's basically about the law of unintended consequences and GDPR.

And it's really clever. And the problem is that I can't talk about it yet because it would ruin the book. But that's what I got on deck for next week. All right. Good times. I just finished last week, Stalling for Time, My Life as an FBI Negotiator by Gary Nessner, famous as the lead negotiator at Waco.

But he also did – he did a lot of them. Major FBI negotiator. He hired Chris Voss. Oh, no way. Yeah, that puts some perspective on it. Really, really legendary guy. I did the interview. It actually comes out today, which is yesterday, when you're hearing this, most likely.

All right. We'll put a link in the show notes to that. Very, very proud of it. He's an amazing mind. And I love talking to negotiators, obviously, because there's a lurid thing of, you know, how do you deal with the stressful situations? But just in general, how to become a better person.

No, I love Chris Voss. He was actually one of – no, he was the first video interview I did ever here in my studio. Really? Yeah. We had cameras set up and lights set up, and Jordan and Chris and Jen came over, and that was the first time I did a video interview here in my studio.

That was last year. I got to get Chris Voss on the YouTube. I've had him on the podcast, but not the YouTube. Yeah, he's such a cool guy. I mean, such a cool guy in person. And if you want to know who we're talking about, Chris Voss is another FBI negotiator, and his book is called Never Split the Difference. Check that one out.

Link will be in the show notes. Or watch his – he's got a class on Masterclass as well. Also linked in the show notes. Feedback loop. Over on Patreon, we have JSM1955 and Melanie.

Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we've got Thomas, Scott, Shiloh's Shop, Stavros, Joseph, Jeffrey, Mark, David, Adam, and, of course, Martin's Stock Hall for the week. And we appreciate that very much. Martin is keeping the lights on around here. Now, for this episode, we are going to move feedback loop to the next episode.

So we're going to have a stacked feedback loop just because Brian is traveling and we're running long. So if you send in feedback, thank you very much. We got it. It's in here, and we'll get to it next week. So thank you very much. But if you want your question or comment read on the show when we actually do them again, head over to goj.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 goj.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Closing shout outs. Well, a big thank you this week to Eric Hundley for joining us. Go check out his podcast, Unstructured.

A link to that will be in the show notes. Thank you so much, Eric. Hey, thank you. And for my closing shout out, the behavior panel is a group of four body language experts I've had on my YouTube channel. And that's YouTube.com slash Eric Hundley.

And these guys are on Dr. Phil this week. What? I thought you had better taste in friends. Dude, I know you. God, Dr. Phil. What are they going on Dr. Oz next? If they can, I'm sure they will.

I'll go on Dr. Oz tomorrow. Yeah. Hello. Sell some books. Sell some books. Sell some podcasts. Roger that, buddy. Definitely. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. And sad news, the amazing Randy died this week at age 92. Now, we saw this coming.

You know, Randy hasn't been doing good for quite some time, but he really is just, he was a gem. He was a gem. Great magician, but also the James Randy Foundation called bullshit on psychics and psychic phenomenon. And I do believe they still have the million dollar standing award if you can actually prove that you have psychic ability.

So bring it on, people. And we talked about the sad news that Grant Imahara died during the pandemic from basically a brain aneurysm, I believe. And it was just, it was a, you know, he wasn't my favorite myth buster, but man, it was sad still.

So his friends and family are giving him for his 50th birthday, they're starting Grant Imahara's STEAM Foundation. So, you know what STEAM is, if you listen to this show. So if you want to go donate to it and check out what they're doing, we'll have a link to that in the show notes.

And sadly, happy birthday, Grant. Wish you were here. No doubt. And until next time, I'm Eric Hundley. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. The show is a labor of love, but your support keeps the show going. So if you like the show, pretty please head over to GOG.showslashdonate to help us out and we'll love you forever.

Or you can go to GOG.showslashshop and pick up some good old-fashioned swag. And if you can't do that, then just pass it along to a friend. You know, everybody needs some more grump in their life nowadays. Well, actually, that's not true. But after next week, maybe we can have a place for grump again. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.showslash481.

And from 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.

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