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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. Eh? Eh? How's it going up there, eh? It's good. It's cold. It's cold. Very cold, but good. No. Well, that's Canada. What the fuck do you expect? Yes. Canada, December. Hmm.

Yes. It's very cold. Anyways, it's all good. It's all good. Can't complain too much. You know, it's a combination of COVID and Canada, but supply lines are still pretty bad. So we're looking at a COVID Christmas here. Things are just gone.

Like, we try to, I guess, do some last minute, you know, decorations and stuff like that. I made it out to, like, the Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever the other day and the aisles are just empty. There's nothing to be had. So we're going to have a sad little Charlie Brown Christmas tree this year.

Aw, poor baby. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, that's the one thing. We are stocked up. We don't need damn near anything. But, uh, yes. But remember, I am starting from scratch. I know. That's what I mean. You're going from ground zero. So yes, no, we have, we have an entire section of the house set up for a quick loading and unloading of the Christmas decorations and the tree.

We have this down to a science. That's for sure. But speaking of things, being out of stock, man, now I'm old and you guys got me to go to the doctor, you bastards. And sorry, they put me on cholesterol because I'm going to have a stroke any day now. And I went and filled my prescription. They gave me six pills. Like, give us a call back. We're out. This is all we got in the whole place.

I'm like, okay, that's odd. And kept calling back and calling. And now it's been two days since I've been able to take my meds. And I called them this morning and they're like, nope. Call this afternoon. Should be in. I'm like, you've been telling me that for four days. Welcome to our coronavirus vaccine future.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm like, can I just go to Rite Aid? And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just go ahead and do that. But then I got to pay, you know? Yeah. Then you got to pay. Yeah. I'd rather pay and live than, you know, what good's the money if you have a stroke? Yeah. So I will. And I tell you what, man, I thought I was going to be. This is old man talk now here on Grumpy Old Geeks.

I've been nervous about taking this stuff. The main side effect on this one isn't as bad as the last one, which had me break out in a fiery rash for three days, which was just hell on earth. This one's just constipation. Oh, that's all.

I thought that was an easy one. And for me, I mean, granted, my Clash Royale play has gone down significantly since I started taking it. But now that I'm off it, we're kicking ass in the clan is all I got to say because I'm back on the job.

Yeah, well, you know, just chase down your meds with a healthy dose of prune juice and it should even out. Yeah, I don't want it to even out. I kind of like it the other way around. It's like, you know, I get no cholesterol and free Imodium at the same time. It's awesome. All right. I think it's been at least two podcasts since we've discussed your bowel movements.

So that's a new record. Well, speaking of meds, too, I got some sad follow up on the Tony Hsieh story. Turns out he just kind of went cuckoo. Well, you know, you give people too much money, Jason. Yeah, and nothing to do. Yeah, exactly.

That's pretty much a recipe for disaster. So he was paying people to come to Park City, Utah, get doubling their highest paid salary they ever had just to come and hang out with him and be his friend. And it's like, oh, that's not going to work. I almost feel like there needs to be some sort of support group program from famous rock stars to talk to all these famous entrepreneurs that have just made it super rich.

And also insert, you know, sports figures, all these kids that come from zero money to, you know, playing basketball for $20 million a year. This is a tale as old as time. I've known many musicians that have burnt out and have done similar things, basically paid to have friends, you know.

You got your posse, your MC Hammer posse and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's sad to see it, but it's not surprising. This is really, like you said, too much money and nothing to do. Human nature is not meant for that. We're supposed to be chasing down rhinos to eat and struggling.

We're not supposed to just be sitting in a mansion with nothing to do except, you know, do a bunch of drugs. Yeah, and he was doing whippets, man. A lot of whippets. Like, that was the one crazy one. He would go on a walk and do nothing but whippets instead of oxygen. I'm like, you should be dead.

Oh, wait, he is now. In Park City? Yeah. Especially at that elevation? Exactly. That's, oh, whippets, man. They're fantastic, but oh, so bad for you. Oh, so bad for you. Here's the real shocker, though. One of those people that were, I don't know if she was on the payroll, because Penn said she was doing a project, was Penn Jillette's wife.

She was in Park City. Yeah. Yeah, as part of that whole thing. And then Penn went out there now. And I love Penn Sunday School. For some reason, it's not the greatest podcast. It sounds like ass, but it's still fun. You love Penn. I do. I mean, Penn lives an alternative lifestyle as well.

Yes, yes. He definitely does. But he is not Tony Shade out, thank God. So that's all good. In the news. Well, we have an update, perhaps, to the ongoing saga of the Twitter blue checkmark.

Ah, verification. Yes, the verification, which, as we have known since day one, has basically been a scam. If you knew somebody, you'd get a checkmark. If you didn't, you didn't. See, that's the misconception here. I knew the girl who ran the verified division at Twitter, and she was like, no, we don't do it.

Where you get to pay to get your checkmark is Instagram. That'll cost you a cool five to ten Gs, and you get your Instagram checkmark. I know people who have done that and paid that much money. I think it's silly. I think it's absolutely ridiculous. But Twitter has always been actually pretty hard to crack.

Is it more of a black box, like the AI black box? Yeah. Your account goes in, and you don't know what's going to come out. Yeah, it kind of is. We'll get to black boxes later. But yeah, it's very much like that. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. But it's basically been incredibly unknown, and it's been impossible to do.

I mean, I remember when I was working for bands, I would be writing Twitter support all the time, going, can we get a checkmark? I mean, 100 million albums sold? Come on. Yeah. And no, nothing. But there you go. So they basically paused it all as of 2017, as we've talked about.

White supremacy. Yeah. They gave a white supremacist a checkmark, and people went, hmm, that's interesting, especially since there's all these people that should have checkmarks that have not. So they put it on hold and said, all right, we're going to rethink this. That was three years ago. Nothing's happened since then.

Now they finally made an announcement. So they've said, all right. But actually, let's caveat that really quickly. In the three years since they stopped the program, they still did political candidates, some medical experts tweeting about COVID-19, and made thousands of other quiet exceptions, once again, blackboxing it, and nobody having any idea how any of that worked.

So they basically just slowed down the process. Yeah. Yeah. But now it's over. So they've launched a blog post saying, we're bringing it back, and we're going to rely on Wikipedia. Oh, fuck you. Which, as people quickly pointed out, said, you know that white supremacist that made you shut all this down in the first place?

He has a Wikipedia page. Mm-hmm. Yep. So not very helpful, really. They're trying to come up with all these different metrics. They're going to look at six different types of accounts, government companies, brands, nonprofit organizations, news, entertainment, sports, activists, organizers, and other influential individuals, basically creating Black Box 2.0, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah. And just this weird stratification. Honestly, if you can prove who you are, you should get a checkmark. That's all it should be. Yeah. It's verified. Yeah. It shouldn't be this fucked up caste system where you have to be, quote unquote, somebody to get a checkmark. I know many somebodies who are nobodies who have checkmarks, and it's BS.

I know a ton of people that have checkmarks that are actual nobodies at all. So it's kind of insane. It's sad when we are more somebody than they are, and they have checkmarks and we don't. Yes. That's saying something, because we are definitely nobodies. Oh, yes. We are definitely nobodies. And I have a little bit more of social media news.

And this is kind of funny, as we've been talking about Snapchat's imminent demise for about five years now, and this thing just doesn't die. It's like whack-a-mole. They're doing pretty good now, I heard. I know. They kind of are, except TikTok is really kind of killing them. So they were kind of on the upsweep again.

They were getting some traction. I think they're aware of the fact it's a COVID bump, and they're realizing that they're bleeding out to TikTok. So they have a strange and, according to Slate, cringey attempt to woo back TikTok users. If it's Snapchat, it's always cringey, especially around culturally inappropriate filters for holidays.

Well, basically, they're paying people. Oh, yeah. That's a million-dollar fund, right? Yeah, pretty much, yes. This is the million-dollar fund. So they're using something called Spotlight, which anyone 16 or older can submit a video to without establishing an influencer-level presence, and the incentive to submit is not insignificant.

As they say, through the end of the year, the most popular submissions that will make it to Spotlight will split $1 million per day with payouts calculated according to an opaque popularity algorithm. Another black box. Another black box, yes. Yes. So, yeah.

And what is, they say, this article's great. What is Snapchat getting for its money? And here are some of the aspirationally viral things I saw over a few hours of scrolling. Also, this is my note here. This is why I don't bother with any of this shit. Here's the stuff that you get to see.

A dozen ASMR videos. Someone receiving an extra egg patty in their Chick-fil-A breakfast sandwich. Someone spying a man at an airport who looks like, but is not, Joe Biden. Someone feeding a live mouse to an African lungfish in a tank.

Someone lamenting their burnt toast. And on and on it goes. My particular favorite being someone trimming their cat's butt hair. Oh, that's a good one. And someone literally laying bricks. Yeah. And this is why I don't bother with any of this.

But yeah, this is their big attempt to kind of battle back and gain some market share from TikTok, which I don't see happening. Yeah. Yeah. Well, apparently it's still up in the air what's going to happen to TikTok. They're saying that it's OK. We're back on with you have to sell.

And then maybe not. We're busy with Iran. We don't know. Oh, we won. We won. We won. Maybe TikTok is a thing again. They're still all over the place. Nothing's going to happen because this was Trump's bugaboo. And Trump is too busy holding rallies saying he won. I know.

Rudy got the vid. That's just the best news of the week. So my prediction here is absolutely nothing is going to happen regarding TikTok. Walmart will not be doing whatever they're doing. Cisco will not be hosting TikTok stories. Absolutely nothing is going to change.

And the world will move on. Oracle was it I can't even remember because it was Larry Ellison. Oh, that's right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And his little repub butt buddies. But yeah, this is funny. What's not funny, though, is say goodbye to the night sky forever, because that little experiment that Elon did with Starlink and the myriads of what is going to be eventually thousands of satellites racing through the night sky, fucking up our nighttime photography.

Well, they just got eight hundred and eighty five million dollars from the FTC or FCC to start serving rural areas and pie on the way out screwing up our sky. Exactly. I'll get pie in the sky. Oh, man, that would have been a good show. I don't want to give that guy more more than one title a year.

So we're good. But other companies also got a bunch of money over a billion dollars for charter charter charter Minnesota and Iowa provider, LTD broadband and rural electric cooperative consortium with another over a billion dollars.

So those guys are going to build fiber. Elon's just going to fuck up the fuck up that big thing overhead. Thanks, Elon. Yeah, it's a horrible idea. It's just more junk up there. It's going to ruin our night sky. I mean, my kid is just getting into this and it's just horrible.

Don't do it. Whatever happened to Google's balloons? Can't we just do those? Oh, those things are kicking ass now. They're using AI. Yeah, it came out last week. They're using AI so they can actually do their own tracking and hover in place, which is pretty cool for a balloon, you know, if it figures out how to because it uses the air currents to move around.

It's pretty cool stuff. But yeah, what we need now is a Snapchat filter to remove all the Starlink satellites when you're taking a selfie at night. Yeah, I agree. So we got some big media news, Jason. As we know, last month, WarnerMedia announced that HBO Max subscribers would be able to watch Wonder Woman 1984 at home on Christmas Day, the same day it would debut in whatever movie theater might happen to be open anywhere.

I'm glad you I'm glad you said it the way you did it, because so many of these fucking news stories say you'll be able to watch it for free on HBO Max. Not for free. You got to pay for HBO Max. Yes, I pointed I pointed that out in our in our discord and a bunch of pedantic people came out saying, I think it's understood.

I'm like, no, well, no, when with the headline says for free, that means for free, not not to paid subscribers. Well, free, free is the free is unlimited is the unlimited nowadays when it comes to this stuff. But last week on Thursday, they announced some bigger plans.

Basically, all 17 of their big movies coming out this in 2021 will be day and day release on HBO Max, as well as whatever movie theater happens to be open for whatever people are crazy enough to go to the movie theater. So that includes Dune, the new Matrix movie, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

It's a huge change. Yeah, they're basically doing what we said they need to do and they should do. Mm hmm. Yep. So they did a big interview over on Vox. That's worth the read with Jason Kilar, the CEO. And I pulled this out specifically for you, Jason, because one of the questions was, when is HBO Max coming to Roku?

And the CEO of WarnerMedia said, feel free to call Roku. I can give you their number and you can ask them that question. So casting a little shade there and perhaps playing a little ball saying it's it's kind of their fault because they're not they're not doing whatever needs to be done to get it done.

Yeah. Yeah. And even says Amazon, it was even willing to negotiate because it's like it's about the fans and you want the fans to be happy. And yeah, screw you, Roku. So there's another article about this whole thing that happened. And this one is called Hollywood is preparing to sacrifice movie theaters.

Okay. And they're saying that basically this compromise will be disastrous for theaters. And it's kind of goes, this guy's obviously a cinephile. He likes to go see movies. The guy that wrote this article, he likes to go see movies in the cinema, which is fine. Great. Hardly any cinemas are open.

We're in the middle of a pandemic. I'm not going to see any of these movies. They have to do something with them because these movies are now just sitting on shelves. Some of them have been sitting on shelves for quite some time. So he's basically saying, though, how are we going to get this Pandora's box, everything back in when this is done?

And honestly, I don't think we will. I think this will become the new normal. Obviously, he's never heard the story of Pandora's box. Yes, no. Bad analogy there, buddy. Yeah, he's basically saying that the chains aren't going to survive. And yeah, they may not. A lot of industries aren't surviving right now.

And I can get into that. And I think I will a little bit later about the lack of federal response or any help whatsoever. So, yes, these theater chains may go out of business now. Serves them right for charging $17 for popcorn for years. They should have pocketed some of that money. Yeah.

Just saying. So what he's predicting is basically there may be some sort of two-chain thing where, you know, maybe they'll wait a week before it comes out for subscribers on services. Or it can be kind of a boutique-y thing, which I kind of get. You charge a little bit more for cinemas. There'll be less cinemas.

It becomes an experience. Blah, blah, blah. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think the days of the cinema might be over. I think there'll always be a cinema and a need for it and people going. But I do think the chains and the one in every neighborhood is definitely a done deal.

That's gone. What I really like, there's one in Downers Grove called the Tivoli that we used to go to all the time. Fantastic little, like, hometown cinema on Saturdays and Sundays. They got a kid playing the organ while you're waiting for the movie to start. Couldn't afford a monkey?

No. No, they couldn't. They get kids from the high school to come and play. They're usually really good. And the only popcorn in the country that I can handle because it doesn't actually, you know, actively smell like feet, like most of AMC's popcorn does. But, like, little boutique theaters like that I think would be fun.

And I don't know if you've ever done this, but midnight showings where they serve alcohol with double features. Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Well, I mean, most – Best thing in the world. I mean, most theaters have upped their game, at least in L.A., with that anyways. You can get beer and wine now, which is definitely a plus.

Definitely a plus. But it'll be interesting. I think in the future, maybe everybody's just going to have, you know, like VR headsets and just sit there with headphones and a big 75-foot screen in front of their face and just – we just wally it out. In the year 2000.

We're old. Anyways. I've got a bit more streaming news, and I saw this particularly given my woes I've been talking about recently in terms of getting Food Network here in Canada. Discovery, home of Shark Week, HGTV, and the Food Network, has entered the streaming wars themselves with Discovery Plus.

Of course. A couple different names could have been. Shark Plus would have been a really good one because Shark Week. Fieri Plus. Fieri Plus. How do you miss that? I mean, I would have named it that. I'd subscribe to that. Oh, absolutely. That would have been a delicious channel.

It would have been delicious. So it'll start at $4.99 a month with ad-supported tier along with a $6.99 ad-free option, which is quite affordable, actually, compared to most other streaming options. But then again, I mean, it is just HGTV, Food Network, and Discovery Channel.

It's not exactly like you're getting premium entertainment here. Yeah, I already get those, so this is just for you. Yeah. I mean, this is for cord cutters, really. Yeah. But they are going to try to do special programming that's only for the subscribers. They've announced a couple different shows and all that sort of stuff.

But really, this is definitely for me, but we'll see. And of course, guess what? No Roku yet because they're still negotiating. Of course. I think they got some hard-ass lawyers over at Roku, I think. Or inept ones, one of the two. Yeah, or that. Yeah.

No, well, glad I kept my Apple TV. Woo-hoo. Yeah. Now, Brian, this one has been going around. This broke like right after our last show, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it because it's kind of been beaten into the ground. Timnit Gebru. I don't know how you say that.

I'm going to go with that. She is one of Google's top AI ethicists or was one of Google's top AI ethicists because she got shit canned after a new paper that she was co-author on got out and Google was not very happy.

And then they got into a very heated email exchange, which you can find just about everywhere. There will be links in the show notes to get to that. Yeah, this is not a good look for Google when you hire an ethicist to talk about why AI is bad, where it's failing, and where we can fix it.

And when they do exactly what they're supposed to do, you say, you weren't supposed to say that. Get out of here. She did her job. I mean, that's basically it. If you are an AI ethicist right now, your job is to say, everything happening right now has biases in it, and we need to be super careful and change things.

Yeah. That's your job. You can just go with this one with the title for the article alone. DeepMind's protein folding breakthrough triggers fierce debate among skeptical scientists. Quote, until they share their code, nobody in the field cares. Boom.

Yep. All right, DeepMind, show your work. Exactly. So this is for AlphaFold, the protein folding thing that we talked about last week or mentioned in passing last week. But, yeah, everybody's saying, yeah, this is kind of cool. But unless you show us how you came up with your results, we really don't trust you.

And we don't want to – we're not putting our – we're not putting our force behind this one. You know, this story in particular was a great study in journalism in the year 2020, right? Because the headlines broke, and it was like, hallelujah, breakthrough, oh, my God, oh, my God.

And then immediately it became like, hang on a second here. Hold the phone, sir. I called Boulder Dash. I mean, it happened, like, so fast, and it was so extreme, the swing.

It was amazing. And it kind of makes you go, hey, guys, maybe hold off and do a little research before you put those headlines out there. A little more peer-reviewed action, maybe. You know, that whole science part, I know you're coders, but, you know, maybe just try and talk to your peers.

And given our last two stories, this one maybe we should trade a little bit of a skeptical eye on as well. NVIDIA has found a way to train AI with very little data. Yep, they've developed a new approach for training generational adversarial networks, or GAN, that could one day make them suitable for a greater variety of tasks.

I would like to propose a new Grumpy Old Geeks rule that any time somebody says, that could one day, we replace that with maybe in 20 years. Maybe in 20 years. Yes, yes. Maybe one day the generative adversarial network will drive our cars and fly our taxis.

Yes, and I think if we had an AI ethicist on this podcast with us right now, they would probably say something along the lines of, you think it's a good idea to use even less data? Brian, I think at this point, after almost eight years, we are AI ethicists.

Oh, I would argue that we totally are. We definitely are at this point. We can do as good a job as any of the ones that have gone to learned institutions for it. Yes, and gotten paid a hell of a lot less. Well, to be fair, we have been neither hired nor fired by Google.

That's true. So I call it a push. Oh, and by the way, one of the things that the reason that this is interesting is because, you know, their new approach, which with less data, that was one of the reasons she got fired was saying this stuff takes up way too much energy and we're burning up the planet on it using AI because the data sets are so large now and the computing power is getting to the point where it doesn't work.

So maybe they all need to go buy those new Apple M1 chips and try it on that. Maybe. Or, you know, maybe we stop fucking around with this shit. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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

What's new, Dave? Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back. Hello. It's officially wintertime here, which it's cold. Christmas season is upon us. I have – there's a big tree next to my house. I put the lights on the tree. It's lovely.

So, I don't know what – I mean, I'm sure Jason out in California, it's probably the same temperature it always is. Brian, what's it like in the Great White North these days? It's white. It's white. Is it white? Actually, it's been warm enough for the snow to melt away, but snow is coming again.

But by warm enough, I mean I don't go outside. I was going to say, how are you feeling about all this, California boy? You know, I miss the fires that are ravaging California right now, you know, toasting marshmallows against the forest as it's deteriorating.

Yes. Right. Yes. You're missing 80-degree, 40-mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds today with a red flag warning, and things are already starting to burn down. So, that's what you're missing here. I'll take it. Okay. You can go outside and build a little snowman.

I can build one out of ash. Yes. Ash and the broken dreams of my neighbors. Yes. Held together with bitter regret. I like to go to the nicer neighborhoods in L.A., and I like to build my snowmen out of the Asha Ferraris and Bentleys.

Right. Right. Yes. Well, we have some big news, Dave. I know that you are as hardcore a Star Wars fan as I from your youth. Yes. And one of our favorite characters of all time came back in his uniform, strapped on as tightly as it could be.

Yes, it was. I do love the memes, Dad Bod Fett. Yep. Yep. I support this idea. I embrace it. In fact, I represent it. Yeah. It's nice to know that Basker armor has a little give to it.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was wondering what happened to his codpiece, because he doesn't seem to have his codpiece, which I imagine would be fairly important in a full suit of Mandalorian armor. Yeah, he seems to be going for the Scottish Fett look, kind of more the kilt on the bottom.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And he doesn't seem to have lost a step. He's got the old Boba Fett swagger, and he's still a good shot and all that stuff. Much like Darth Vader in Rogue One, he seems to be better than he ever used to be, now that we have better special effects and better training for the actors and all of that.

Yeah. Boba Fett never kicked quite that much ass. Also, Robert Rodriguez didn't do the old Star Wars movies, so there's a big difference there. Well, and I think someone made the point that in this episode and hopefully ongoing, we're finally getting the Boba Fett that we imagined all these years.

The Boba Fett who we played with our action figures, his capabilities that we never saw in the movies we're getting in this show now. Exactly. He's living up to his hype. Now, one thing I am very curious about, because I don't believe that they did it in this episode, and I'm guessing they're probably not going to.

We are never going to actually hear the name of Boba Fett's ship, because it is problematic these days. Oh, do you think? Mm-hmm. Hmm. That's interesting. If we can't have master and slave circuitry in our cars anymore, we certainly can't have a slave one for a good guy.

Yeah. Hmm. That's interesting. I mean, I wonder, because the Wookiees were famously enslaved in the, you know, I believe that's canon in the world of Star Wars. So, hmm, I don't know.

That's an interesting point. I'm not sure about that. It is interesting, to your point, that how this appearance of Boba Fett kind of reminds us that in the original trilogy, the Holy Trilogy, Boba Fett is kind of a neutral character.

I mean, he's sided with the bad guys, but he's in it for himself. And so the ability for him to have this, to be a good guy, as you say, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? Well, it's no different from Han Solo in the first movie. Mm. Yeah, you're right.

Boba's in it for the Benjamins. So was Han. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be interesting also to see how much are they going to casually reveal in little asides what it was like to be in the Sarlacc Pit. And, you know, because I'm guessing there's going to be some fan service when it comes to that, because everyone's dying to know how did he get out.

He's got a little Polaroid of Han Solo and Carbonite taped up in Slave 1, you know, the good old days. Right. Yes, exactly. Exactly. He does a little kiss and rubs it, you know, right before he takes off every time. Like a completely bounce check from Darth Vader, you know.

Right. It's got a rubber stamp on it that says deal altered. But, yeah, but I mean, all those characters exist contemporaneously in this timeline. So Han Solo's around, Luke Skywalker's around, you know, they're all out there somewhere.

So that's interesting, too. Yes, it should be interesting. I'm very much enjoying the show. And, yeah, it was great to have the Boba Fett we had always once imagined appear. I do got to say that I hope that Robert Rodriguez gets more episodes, because I think this is at least second.

So it's nice to see him step up, you know. Yeah. Yeah. We had a nice laugh out loud and also cheering moment when he used the missile on the back of his backpack to take out not one, but two troop transport ships. That was just really satisfying.

And then Betsy was aiming for the other one. Yeah. Well, it's been for all of us who had the action figure and were disappointed that when it actually shipped that the thing did not shoot. Yeah. Again, just fulfilling all of our Boba Fett fantasies. Like, the guys who are making this show are – they are among us.

Yes, they are us. They are our tribe. They are us. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been great. I'm really enjoying it. I was just thinking if they gave Robert Rodriguez a show, they could just call it El Mandalorian. El Mandalorian. Yes, just do the Spanish version of the same show, just a little – with a little less budget.

Yes, and a lot more cleavage on the female characters. See, it comes back to that boob armor that Dave was so upset about. Yes. No bras in space. Always remember that. So speaking of space, I figured, why the hell not? Let's just put this in here because security seems to have gone the way of the dodo with us nowadays.

And I saw this just came through my feed. And it's former Israeli space security chief says, aliens exist, humanity not ready. This is –

Now, given the specialties and the special set of tools that the Israelis usually have, I would believe this more if they had, say, gotten a hold of an iPhone from somebody in NASA and broken into it and got this sort of information because that's what they do.

Well, let's be honest. So I don't know about this. I mean, it's coming from the 87-year-old former space security chief. But here's the other thing. I kind of tend to believe them because half the shit that Ben-Gurion University does is out of this world. So I think maybe they are communing with the aliens every day and just getting some tips.

It's like, oh, you need to hear what's going on in that room? Point this gadget at that light bulb and you'll be able to hear everything. It's like, oh. You know? So, yeah, this guy's – go ahead. I would love for this to be real. I have questions.

Like, first of all, so I think we need to be careful that we don't just – because of this guy's former position, we really don't know what's going on with him. Like, if we check in with some of his coworkers, would they say, oh, well, you know, Hayam's just not the same since he took that tumble down that set of stairs.

He really had to be pushed out of his position, to be honest. Right, right, right. So we don't know about that. He's 87 years old. You know, my father is almost 87 years old. And I can tell you that if he told me a story like this, I would say, that's really interesting, Dad.

You know, I don't think I'd publish it in a book. Oh, but that's the other thing you have to take into account is he now has a book. So he's got something to sell. Right, right. So there's that. Yes, aliens have prevented nuclear apocalypses. Yep.

Yeah. Now, one thing that I think goes against him is he says that U.S. President Trump was on the verge of disclosing their existence. Because if there's one thing we know about Donald Trump, he's good at keeping a secret, right? See, now, if he would have said that aliens have infiltrated our governments and Donald Trump is one of the aliens, I would be more apt to believe it.

I would also then think we have nothing to fear from these morons. Yeah, exactly. All of our fears have been for not. Yeah. Well, I included a link to another article here because there's a gentleman who, if you're into these sorts of things, there's a guy named Bob Lazar who sometimes makes the rounds.

I know he's been on Joe Rogan's show a few times. There's a reputable source of it. Oh, shit. I say that because that's probably the easiest place to find an extended interview with him. And he claims to have been part of the whole Area 51 stuff.

He has some interesting explanations of the possible alien technology that we have. And like I said, I would love for this stuff to be true. It's a lot of fun to think about. I think that notion that it's impossible for an organization as big as the government to keep a secret for this long is most likely true.

So it's probably not true. But I find these things to be fun. I think they're fun mental exercises and sort of the what ifs. Yeah, I do. See, the thing for me is I stopped finding them fun as soon as I really heard about the dark forest theory and the fact that most physicists and astronomers kind of buy into that, which is we don't hear about anything out there because you don't want to be found.

Hmm. Yeah, that's true, too. That also goes back to Stephen Hawking, too. He's like, we don't want to meet anybody. Yes. We really don't. Because if they have the technology to find us, we're screwed. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Could be. Could be. Absolutely. Reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode where they were taking all the humans onto the ship and the final scene is, it's a cookbook.

Right, right. Which they also spoofed on The Simpsons famously with – which is named Kang or – which are the two aliens on – the drooly aliens on The Simpsons. They're Kodos and I forget their names. Again, someone is yelling at their phone right now.

The only – to put a button on this, I will say that probably 25 years ago now when I was fresh out of college, I was working as an assistant to a friend of mine who had a video company.

And he was producing a series of videos for the Army and as part of the – and these are just run-of-the-mill kind of training videos, nothing having to do with aliens. But as part of this, we were going around and we were interviewing folks at government contractor facilities.

And while we were setting up to interview one gentleman, he offhandedly commented that in his prior life he was in the Air Force, that he was one of President Nixon's Air Force One pilots. And as such, he had been to Area 51 and had seen an alien aircraft.

Okay. One just casually mentions that? Well, no. I mean somehow it came up. We were – somehow it came up. I don't remember. Again, this is a long time ago. And I was not in a position of status on the crew where I could dig in with this guy and say, I'm sorry, tell me more about this.

I was low man on the totem pole and so I was just setting up lights and those sorts of things. But it just – it's one of those funny stories. Like this guy had no reason to – there were nothing but bad things could happen to this person for talking about this sort of thing in the environment in which he was working.

And I can just see him later that night having dinner with his wife going, ha, I dropped that nugget on some kids again. You should have seen their eyes. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's true. And it worked. Tenth level trolling. Twenty-five years later I'm retelling his story, right?

So it worked. He's been taking up space in my brain this whole time. But anyway, I like these things. I think they're a lot of fun. You know, we have all this stuff with the footage recently from all the fighter jets and – That's exactly what I was going to bring up.

That stuff was pretty compelling and pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it seems like there's some – so there's that old thing about how, yes, there are UFOs. There are absolutely unidentified flying objects. That does not mean they're alien. Correct. Right. That does not mean they're alien.

So it is – it's most likely that somebody has some technology, either our military or one of our – someone else around the world has something that works in a way that normal airplanes and things that fly don't work in the same way. And so that's what people are seeing.

It's much more likely that that's what we're – that's what we're seeing here is some sort of advanced technology that just is classified. But, you know, it's still fun to – it's fun to read these stories. I enjoy it and it's fun to think what if and kind of ponder the possibilities.

You know, could these things be true or not? I think that's a fun mental exercise. All right, Mulder. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure out who Jetpack Man is here in L.A. That's the latest mystery here in Los Angeles. We've got a guy in a jetpack at like 5,000 feet dicking around with planes heading into LAX.

And he's been seen multiple times at like 3,000 feet and 5,000 feet. And nobody can figure out who he is. If he's not a great pilot, he ain't going to be around too much longer. He's going to be splattered up front of a Southwest flight. Captain Smear is what we'll call him.

No, I'm just asking for trouble. I mean, yeah, looking for attention in all the wrong ways. Seriously, seriously. So I do have one little bit of security here. And I just love this one because there was one line in this article that just caught my attention.

I thought it was beautiful. It's an Ars Technica article about the iPhone zero-click Wi-Fi exploit that is one of the most breathtaking hacks ever. And they call it the Wi-Fi packet of death exploit. This is a bad one, but it was patched before it was seen in the wild.

But basically, this guy figured everything out. He was on Google's Project Zero, Ian Beer. Did you guys cover this at all this week? Yeah, we did. And I have shared along with everybody else, have extended an invitation for Mr. Beer to come on the show to talk about his research.

So we're hoping to get him on Research Saturday. We'll see where we are in that queue or how shy or not he is. Maybe send him some beer. I'm sure he gets that a lot. I'm sure he does. I've never heard that one. Yeah. Yes, but I bet if you actually send it, it will actually have some gravitas behind it.

Be different. Send wine. He won't see that coming. Oh, how clever. But a heck of a bit of research. Also, very well-documented research. So, I mean, it's a book. It's 30,000 words.

But also quite an exploit. I mean, if you watch the videos of him demoing this, it is – breathtaking is the right word for it. It's a biggie and it's a good thing that this got discovered and patched so far as we know before anybody used it.

But who knows? Update your systems, folks. Update your systems. Except maybe not to Big Sur. Oh, God. Oh, okay. No, no, yeah, no. Big Sur, Big Bad, Big Bad. Yeah.

My air took a giant crap after that. It takes Twitter about seven seconds to load on any browser. It doesn't matter which one it is. That in and of itself, not such a bad thing. Well, you want to get in and out fast. So, it's that seven seconds of anticipation that is just like, what am I going to see?

What am I going to see? Oh, damn it. Yeah. I put one little item in here, which is an interesting little thing over on GitHub. Somebody posted – it was about a guy who came up with a way to basically deobfuscate pixelated text, an automated tool for doing that.

So, you'll often see that folks will sort of – they'll use a standard pixelization tool to hide things like passwords and so on and so forth. This guy has come up with an algorithm that, I don't know, probably gets you more than 50% of the way back to the original text.

Yeah, I'd say. I'd say. I'd tell you, man. As soon as somebody figures out how to do this with photos, there's going to be a lot of embarrassed people out there. Let's get on those Epstein photos right away. Right, right. But, yeah, I mean this is just another sign that you should not be dumb enough to post something like your password, even pixelated, anywhere.

Yeah. A big black box works for a reason. Unless you're doing it in a PDF and like the idiots who put it on a PDF and it turns out it's another layer that you can just turn off. Remember that? I was just going to say that. That's what I was – that's what this reminds me of, right, as long as you don't have it be a layer on there where you can just turn it off.

Yeah. I covered my wife's face, but I guess I shouldn't have uploaded the PSD file with all the layers on it. Yeah. What was that – what was the one that did it? It was like a government document where they redacted a bunch of stuff and they just basically did a layered PDF that you could just turn off.

Right. It was a big deal, yeah. There was another one I want to say back in the 90s where there was a well-known – I want to say it was like one of the women who worked at Tech TV or something and she had a photo of herself that she had cropped.

Oh, yes, yes. That was Kat. That was Kat. Okay. Cropped to her shoulders, but the original was not cropped to her shoulders and she was topless and the preview image from Photoshop had the whole image. Yep. That was Kat. I remember that. Okay. That was a great day.

Just saying. Just saying. That was a great day. Oh, the enjoyment of others' misfortune. Yes. Yes. All right. Well, there it is. She was – I mean I don't think it really messed her up that much. I knew a lot of people at Tech TV at the same time.

She's just like, yeah, whatever. It's just dits. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But a cautionary tale. Cautionary tale indeed. All right, gentlemen. Well, good talking to you. We will check in next time. All right.

I take it that was your attempt at the X-Files. Yeah, I couldn't. My lips are so dry from the heat in here I couldn't whistle. I want to be hydrated. I need to be hydrated. Right. Next week on Security, huh? The Loch Ness Monster.

Oh, man. I'm so going to be searching for stories now. Brian is now officially in search of – I found a depixelated image of the Loch Ness Monster. Mm-hmm. There we go. You can see its tits. This is how it begins. This is how new podcasts are spawned, right?

You'd know, Dave. You'd know. Yeah, that's true. I would. I would. I'd bite my tongue. Bite my tongue. All right, guys. I'll see you. All right.

Media Candy. Brian, I watched Tenet this week. In the theater? Because they held on to that one forever to put it in the theater. Yeah, that didn't really work out well for them, did it? Nope. Well, I watched it and – oh, my God. I can't catch a break, man.

I can't catch a break. I can't find anything good. This was terrible. Yeah. This is Christopher Nolan also getting too much money and too little oversight. Misa think he has George Lucas. He's George Lucas the Jar Jar because this was bad.

I mean, it was bad. I've had people flat out tell me it was bad, and then I've had people tell me it was amazing, but it took like 25 minutes of justification and made-up stuff that you had to kind of explain or basically make up in your own head, create a whole different story based on his story to make it decent.

And that's not a good movie. Oh, no. And even when they're explaining the premise of the whole thing, the girl scientist who is trying to explain it to the protagonist says, don't try and think about it too much. Just go with it. Okay. And I'm just like, okay. If that's how you're going to like, you know, fill your plot with this really ridiculously stupid idea.

And I know what he did. He wrote this movie around the cool effect in his head that he wanted to get on film, and it did not land. He did not stick the landing at all. Yeah. Trying to base your entire movie on a visual sequence or a title because a lot of people do that too.

There's a bunch of movies where you can tell they came up with the title and they just tried to make a movie based on it. Yep. Never a good idea. Uh-huh. No, I used to, don't waste your time. It's two and a half hours long too. It was, and yeah, it was not, it was so transparent. They should have just called it transparent.

But anyway, I want to put out a few reminders to our fans and fellow nerds. The Expanse season five is December 16th, which really upset me because I thought it was December 6th and I'm scouring Amazon going, where is it? And yeah, I forgot the one.

I forgot to carry the one. So December 16th for The Expanse season five and the Grand Tour presents a massive hunt is December 18th. Clever, clever. Well, I know you're looking for something to watch and if you like your holiday eggnog shaken and not stirred, you're in luck right now.

YouTube is streaming 19 James Bond films for free. The site is allowing users in the US, but gog.show slash VPN and Bond's your uncle. Yep. Welcome to the United States, my friend. Yes. Easier than customs. And you can go back and watch the Sean Connery, George Lassenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Bronson James Bond films.

So they don't have any of the new ones because those are through Sony and this deal has been done with MGM, which has all the older ones. So you can just go to youtube.com slash watch Bond. Pretty cool way to spend the holidays, actually. Yeah, if you like watching reruns, there you go. There you go. And speaking of Christmas movies, The Grinch.

There is a 2018 animated remake that I was kind of unaware of. And I wanted to, I didn't, my kid wanted to watch The Grinch. I didn't want to watch the old one because it just feels old, right? And I don't know. But it's perfect. No, it's a perfect classic for me and you.

But for him, you know, he's not used to that kind of animation and that weirdness yet. So the 2018 version, animated. I also didn't want him to watch the Jim Carrey one because that would probably freak him out and basically freak me out, too. Yeah. I've heard it was really bad. Yeah. So there is a 2018 animated version.

We watched it. It was awesome. And I was Googling it for the show notes when I discovered that apparently you cannot watch it in the U.S. on Netflix. They pulled it December 4th. Well, that's a Grinch fucking move right there. So that's crazy because, like, it's a really, it's actually a very good version.

I will say that the theme song, the remake of the theme song by, I can't even remember who did, who did the, wore the big hat, Feral, Pharrell. The remake of the Grinch song is horrific. It is an abomination that should have never been allowed to exist.

You had me scared there for a second. I'm like, A, the original theme was perfect. And when you said Pharrell, I'm like, there is no way that that guy could do it justice. So I'm glad that that's true. No, I mean, the stuff that he did for the Minions was fantastic. He got that deep voice.

He does not have that deep voice. He just destroyed it. No. Oh, God, the music. The music. It makes me want to pull my ears out. I want to rip my eardrums out and stomp on them when I hear his version of the Grinch. Other than that, really good movie.

Very well done. Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Yes. Exactly. So if you are in the U.S. and you want to watch it with your kids, as you should, once again, gog.show slash VPN. And the Grinch is your uncle. So check that out. And keeping on the kids thing because, and I just love the way this article was written.

The best 2020 Christmas episodes from toddler shows. And I will just read this verbatim because this encapsulates a pandemic Christmas with kids. What are the best Christmas episodes of mega popular toddler shows? What about kids shows that are just okay but also have Christmas specials your kid can't get enough of?

What's that you say? Your kid only watches one show repeatedly to the point where you can recite the episodes you used to enjoy in your sleep? Good news. There's a holiday episode of your kid's favorite show. Call it a holiday treat because in 2020, TV specials count as an activity. You are being a fun parent. Use it as an incentive for good behavior or throw it on to defuse a meltdown.

But it's time to add a little bourbon to your coffee and curl up for some guilt-free TV seasonal merriment. There you go. Very true. So link in the show notes. It's got all the big kids shows and the special Christmas episodes that they have. It will be an invaluable resource to those of you trying not to kill your kid before Christmas.

Cups and doodads. I stumbled across this article over on Gizmodo and I didn't think two seconds about it just because I thought it was a little bit funny. But then I realized that there are insane audio files on our Discord and I wanted to upset them all.

So this is it. Nice of you. Also, I mean, I think it's just really funny because I was never a big believer in spending a ton of money on cables. And this is an audiophile deathmatch between monster cables, the most expensive cables known to man, versus a coat hanger.

Whether or not monster cables are worth it is a war that has raged since home theaters immemorial. And a poster at Audioholics was put in a room with five fellow audiophiles and a Martin Logan SL3 speaker set at 75 decibels at 1,000 kilohertz playing a mix of smooth, trio, easy listening jazz.

Which just sounds horrible. That sounds like Gitmo. That's what they do to people at Gitmo. That no one had heard before. In one corner, the monster 1,000 speaker cables. In another corner, four coat hangers twisted and soldered onto a speaker cable. Seven songs were played while the group was blindfolded and the cables swapped back and forth.

No one could tell the difference. That's so awesome. Now, one would argue getting five coat hangers, soldering them together yourself and putting them into a speaker cable, probably in terms of time, you might as well just go buy the monster cable. My argument would be just the standard cables will work just fine.

Probably, probably, probably. Now, I understand that monsters are just ridiculously overpriced. And I do have, I mentioned this last week too, I think. When you're dealing with podcasting and XLR cables, spend the extra money because cheap cables will ruin your day.

So, anyway, moving on. I got this one from a friend of the show, MXV. It's called Marvis Pro. It's a $5.99 app for your iPhone and your iPad. And what it is, it's a new front end to Apple Music. All right.

So, if you use Apple Music, you basically just download this, link it to your account, and you can scrabble on Last.fm as well through it. Why anybody would want to do that in this day and age, I don't know, but apparently some people do.

I got it because I'm an Apple Music guy now. And it dawned on me I haven't actually synced my library yet. So, I started doing that last night, and it's taking quite some time because I have a very large music library. And it turns out that, you know, remember iTunes Match and all that crap that you could never use with the 25,000 songs?

The thing that destroyed me from Apple Music forever? Yeah. Yeah. Seems to be built in now, and mine's just chugging away, loading stuff up. The one thing that you have to do, and I'm going to give this to you as a pro tip, make sure that you turn off Save Local Files before you do this, before you import your entire library into Apple Music and start syncing it.

Because I woke up this morning to a plethora of notifications saying, your disk is full, your disk is full, your disk is full, this app won't work, this app won't work, this app won't work, because you got no disk space. So, because I only have a 64-gigabyte phone, unfortunately, and my music library is 175 gigabytes.

So, that didn't work out too well for me this morning. But you can, it's a few easy fixes, unlike a computer. Fortunately, the iPhone is smart enough to not brick itself when you run out of disk space. It's got a little bit more intelligence than your average PC. But, yeah, but for $599, it's actually a pretty decent interface so far.

I'm still playing around with it, but it's, dude, because Apple Music, the app, is just, you know, a dumpster fire. I mean, that ship has totally sailed for me. I mean, at some point, at the rate I'm going right now, maybe when I'm 80, I'll sit down and reconstruct my actual music library.

But at this point, I just use Spotify. I've given up. Mine's constructed, and now I can make playlists with all the stuff that I want to listen to, because I swear to God, I pay so much money for all these damn services. And if I can't turn on my phone, pull up the cure, and hear killing an Arab, then technology has failed me.

So, this is my breakthrough. Technically, society has failed you. That's true. That's true. Assholes. So, it seems to work so far. Oh, and I had this later in the notes, but I'll bring it in now.

Since we're talking about Apple, Apple Plus Fitness is launching December 14th. All right. I'm very curious. Yeah. No, I am, too. I've got it. I'm paying for that whole super package, which is why I've got Apple Music and Apple Music Plus and Apple News Plus.

And I got more fucking pluses than a goddamn calculator. But I'm looking forward to this one to see how it works, because I got my space set up. I've actually been doing yoga. Look at you. Believe it or not. Fucking hate yoga. Dumb. Yep.

But I do it, because I'm old, and I don't want to die. There you go. That's the only reason to do yoga. And I thought this one, I thought you'd get a kick out of this one, Brian, because this is service at its best. This is Amazon. Most of the time, you do an Amazon return. You hand it over to the UPS guy.

They scan it. You get your refund automatically. Right? Easy, breezy, beautiful cover girl. So, I had to return a Magewell USB capture, SDI USB 3.0, HD video capture, dongle, model, blah, blah, blah, SDI, because I wanted USB, and they gave me SDI.

Or I wanted HDMI to USB. Okay. But I don't know what SDI is, like, you know, a coax thing. Whatever. It was $327.41. I returned it on February 20. Actually, no, I returned it on March 1.

All right. Just before lockdown. Yes. I ordered it on February 27. Got it on the 28. Returned it on the 1st because it was the wrong thing. This week, I got an email saying, you have been issued your refund on December 3rd.

I'd forgotten about it because I just assumed they had done it. And here's the real shit part. So, I paid $327.41 for this thing. And they gave me a refund of $261.93. That's kind of bullshit. That's kind of a bullshit restocking fee is what that is.

Because it was exactly as they sent it to me. Ten months later. Exactly. I mean, like, okay, so they dinged me on that. They probably, like, earned interest on the money while they had it. Yeah. Yeah. I should have name-shamed the outfit that sold that to me through Amazon.

But that would have been effort. Yeah. I don't have effort. Who has time for that? Yeah. I do have time for a new app, though. Have you heard of Clubhouse, Brian? No. I hadn't either. It's apparently the new Hotness with the kids. Oh, great.

Here's the thing. It's invite-only. Can I watch somebody trimming their cat's butt hair on it? You cannot. You know why? Can I listen to it? Yes, you can. It is all audio. So what it is is, like I said, it's invite-only. Oprah's on there, too.

So maybe you can someday find Oprah. But these influencers are on there. They create rooms. And then it's basically a conversation. And it's live, real-time talking to each other. I got an invite to this, like, a month ago. Check it out. It's actually really fun.

I was on it last night in some of the podcasting rooms and just a bunch of different rooms. And I actually learned a bunch of stuff. I was like, oh, shit. This was unexpected. Like, actual knowledgeable people are in there sharing tips and tricks and secrets.

And I was like, huh. I don't know. So hat tip to Jessica Tork from Teachable for hooking me up with an invite and turning me on to it. She's like, hey, are you on Clubhouse? I'm like, what the hell is that? And she's like, listen here, old man. Let me school you. And she was nice enough to give me an invite.

So it's kind of neat, I got to say. If you've got an invite, hop on in, man. There's some fun stuff. There's a lot of music business people in there, too. All right. I'll check it out. I'll just do this really quick.

I finished Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline over the last week. I know we talked about it a bit last week. And I guess we'll call this the crap down effect. Since I heard how awful this book was before getting more than a bit of a way in, I will agree. It was awful, but not nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be.

So you guys all shitting on the book actually made it better for me. Isn't that a great effect? Isn't that awesome? It's a great effect. I didn't mind the ending. I thought it was okay. You know, feelings of Bobaverse. It's not great, but it was not, as you like to say, it was not go die in a fire bad for me.

Having said that, though, I do not believe I will ever read an Ernest Cline book ever again. Pretty much done, right? Yeah, I'm done with him as an author because our motto was horrid. And this just wasn't good. And he's just not a good writer. That's the biggest problem. It's poorly written.

Yep. He had a genius idea that was executed well enough at the right time with Ready Player One to capture the zeitgeist. And that's it. Yep. I do have to say, though, Earth by David Brin. That's it, right? Yep. Yeah. Fucking great book.

Isn't it? That's so good. And here's the difference. Well written. Yes. We're on of the week. This is just the best story. When you think of victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, your mind probably doesn't immediately leap to Yankee Candle.

No, it doesn't. Unless you're somehow in the pocket of Big Yankee, of course. However, a group of internet investigators has taken a hard look at the data and it would appear that Yankee Candle has been hit hard because they're getting a bunch of one-star ratings of their reviews of scented candles because people can't smell them because they have COVID.

Now, you might think this is just a causation thing. This is a perfect storm. This is a perfect storm. It's unbelievable. People are going crazy giving one-star reviews saying the candles are crap. They have no fragrance, whatever. And I love some of the responses. You've got the Rona, Karen.

That's the best one. I think that should be our show title. That is a good title. And actually, there is hard data about this. And credit where credit is due. Internet sleuth Kate Petrova. And she has graphs. She's gone deeply into this.

And I highly recommend everybody go to our show notes, gog.show slash whatever episode this is. 487. Because the graphs are amazing. She has detailed time graphs, timelines of when the reviews started. She's done unscented candles versus scented candles as a comparison.

So you can see that there is some real connection here between when coronavirus hit and the reviews. It's unbelievable. It's fucking hilarious. And it's just one of those wonderful things that have come out of a horrible situation. She's doing Yankee tracing.

It's great. But big Yankee. I mean, that says it all right there. I'm ordering a big Yankee candle. I'm in denial about the COVID. Yay, Trump. And why can't I smell anything? Because I'm in a brand new house.

And we're, like I said, doing kind of everything from scratch. I'm trying to figure out lighting and all that sort of stuff. And I just stumbled across this resource. And it's actually fantastic. Now, normally, we like to crap on Lifehacker here. But this is a pretty good compilation of information about how to pick the best light bulb for every room.

And it's not even just light bulb. They get into fixtures, what works, what kind of mood you're trying to set, what kind of room is it, what's the point of the room, the right lighting for it. And, you know, when I go to Home Depot now or Lowe's or whatever, and I'm standing in front of 7,000 different kinds of light bulbs, it's not like the old days where, hmm, 60 or 100.

No, there are about 7,000 choices in light bulbs now. So this is actually very helpful because I was overwhelmed the other day looking at light bulbs. So it's a good little resource. I highly recommend checking it out. You know, even if your house is already done, if you're thinking about just changing the lighting or not a fan of what you've got going on right now, this is a great resource.

It really is. No, this looks fantastic. And I love that they actually give a breakdown of how many lumens you should have in each room. Yep. That's actually pretty cool. Although I think they're a little low on the bathroom. I think you need a little more lumens in the bathroom.

Well, that's just because you like to report on your bowel movements and need to see everything. The rest of us are okay in substandard lighting. That's gross. That's gross. That's you, man. I just like to see my face when I moisturize and make sure I'm getting all my pores. Of course. And this last story I just loved as well.

My kid is super into volcanoes. So like space and volcanoes and natural disasters. Every morning he's like, what's the space news, dad? Let's see volcano news, dad. And there's never any fucking volcano news unless an actual fucking volcano has exploded. But I was surprised the other day when this came up in my feed and I showed it to him and he loved it.

This GoPro camera recorded itself being swallowed by lava and survived to tell the tale. So yeah, this guy, Eric Storm, talk about nominative determinism. The lead guide of Kilauea EcoGuides placed his GoPro down in a small crevasse to try to get some footage of volcano and lava flow.

And lava suddenly flowed out of the crack unexpectedly in the position that he was in and totally engulfed his camera, which was in a protective casing at the time. You can see all of the footage. Now, the camera didn't so much survive great, but the SD card certainly did. So you can see the footage.

It's online. Link in the show notes. It's pretty cool. Oh, I'll check that out. I wonder what kind of case he got. It's probably not an OtterBox. I don't know, man. My wife puts that OtterBox on her phone through everything. Yeah, that's true. Those things are pretty damn good. But they are plastic. I haven't gotten a titanium OtterBox yet.

And the footage is pretty awesome. It's worth checking out. Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got the red shirt that dies in the cold open. Poor red shirt. Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we've got Shaleen, Doug, Nicola, Andrew, David, Breed, Timothy, and of course, Martin.

Thank you, Martin. Another good stock trade. Thanks, Martin. Over at Twitter, Gwydian sends us a link from the BBC. Machine gun with AI used to kill Iran scientists and grabbed a little selection for us. Iran's description appeared to be little more than a collection of cool buzzwords designed to suggest that only a supremely mighty force could possibly have succeeded.

Very cool. And Jacko writes, and remember, Johnny Mnemonic starts in 2021. Hating that movie. Moss6502 says, haven't read the high-rise book, but did see the movie. It's really something. And apparently on YouTube, he provides a link.

And looks like Amazon Music is following in Spotify's footsteps. Don't remember seeing a podcast tab there before. Yep, we covered that on the show. You can put your podcast in Amazon Music now. And we're not there because they've had or have.

I don't know if they got rid of it or not because I really don't care enough to check because nobody's ever going to listen there. They had a no disparagement agreement in their POS TOS. We disparage Amazon every episode. Exactly. And Travis writes in, you might have seen this in the past, but accurate.

And this is a screen cap of a tweet or an Instagram. I don't know which one anymore because they all look the same. It says, I saw a girl post her Spotify top artists on her Instagram story with the caption. So accurate. Like, yeah, it's accurate. It's literally data. So good.

Barrett writes in over on GOG.show. Really looking forward to having this option. And this is from Deadline. Amazon Fire TV adds local news in 12 U.S. cities with 90 more coming in 2021. He says, we cut the cable in 2014, but our leaf antenna that we have in our kitchen just doesn't get the reception as our main TV.

Of course, all about location. And by the way, for other cable cutters, I use this page, watchnewslive.tv. Going to check all those out because I have no cable here right now. I'm doing my grand experiment in cable cutting and have no access to local news. So that's cool.

Oh, grab one of those antennas if you don't have one. They're pretty good. Yeah. That's how I watched. But I want local news from L.A. too. Like, I want to do. Oh, that's not technically local news for you. Well, local-ish. Okay.

And Matt Buck writes in, Chinese quantum supremacy, 2.5 billion years in 200 seconds. And this has been making the rounds. China claims to have achieved quantum supremacy in one of their major breakthroughs. And this is using a different type of photonic-based quantum computing.

And, yeah, there's a little bit of back and forth with this one. But the problem is it can do one task and then you can't really just, like, drop in new code. It's, like, physically based. So it's kind of a big pain in the butt. But it's, you know, people are making headway with this until they, you know, create a black hole and swallow the earth, which would be at this point.

Just like earth and David Brin. Yes. This would be fantastic right about now. You know, the way to roll in 2021 is just to suck the earth into a giant black hole. Perfect. Yeah. So Google was first. But the Chinese researchers are claiming their prototype was 10 billion times faster than Google's machine, according to their state-run news agency.

Keep in mind, our state-run news agency says Trump won the election. So there's that. This is going to be a game of leapfrog for a long time. Highlander writes in, as if you don't have enough to worry about, beware of the COVID cock. Addressing male sexual and reproductive health in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak.

And this is a recent study that has basically found out that if you have had COVID-19, you and you're a male, I mean, obviously, you're probably at risk of getting erectile dysfunction. Now, if there has ever been a reason for us to tackle the problem, it is this. This seems to be the only thing that gets people to do anything.

Like I said, a better headline would have been, don't get the Rona if you want to have a Bona. Look at you. I know. It would have been perfect. It would have been perfect. Tim writes in a couple episodes ago. Brian mentioned long German words. He might like what Samuel Clemens had to say about the subject if he hasn't seen it before.

And this is a post at Georgetown EDU called The Awful German Language. It was great. So I particularly liked a little bit. Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. That's so good. Observe these examples. And then there's some very, very long words.

I'm not even going to attempt right now because people will crap on me for it. And he says, Freundschaft beseitgegungen. Close. Close. Close. And he says, These things are not words. They are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare. One could open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page.

And if he has any imagination, he can see the banners and hear the music too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Yeah, I love the German language for that. The compound words are phenomenal. Yeah, it's better. I like him better than Welsh. And Barrett writes in here, thought you too might enjoy this drone footage of the collapse of the...

Arecibo. I just went from trying to do the German to go into that and it did not work at all. Arecibo! Exactly. So the NSF released footage. There's some footage from a Steadicam and then as well as a very quick drone operator who managed to turn around and catch it in time.

The footage is pretty awesome, but very sad. It's awesome, but that drone pilot needs to be fired, man. He, like, turned the camera the wrong way when it was going down. But, yeah, no, the footage was really fun. It was really fun. Sad, but fun. Let me recast fun. Over at iTunes, we have a review from Brazil from Give Dark Mode, please.

And it's titled Good Podcast. It's a good podcast. Seriously, though. It's a great weekly podcast featuring two charismatic hosts. They keep you up to date with the latest news in geek culture and the tech world, as well as a little bit of politics sometimes. Well, thank you, Give Dark Mode, please.

I'm trying to figure out, is the Give Dark Mode, please, the name an actual request to Apple or to us? Because I figure we're always in dark mode. I was going to say, yeah. Dark is the mode we are on the inside, so that's the mode we are on the outside. Dark is the mode we wear on the outside.

That's right. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to gog.show.com. 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.com and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And if you think about it and you're using Overclass, click the little star next to the episode.

This is Jason's copy. We're totally off the recommended list now, which blows monkey balls. I don't know if you're going to read it or not. I thought I'd try and slide it in. I figured why not. Closing shout-outs! Closing shout-out to Chuck Yeager, the U.S. Air Force officer who first broke the speed of sound, who passed away the other day at 97.

That guy was a baller. He was such a baller. Yeah. And the crazy thing is, like, very few people actually knew anything about him until the right stuff was made. The movie. Also a fantastic movie for Christmas if you want to go watch something good. That's true. That's true. Yeah, great movie.

And a big shout-out to Tim IT down in Australia who sent me a copy of Junior Masterchef, the final episode that I didn't get to see because you bastards in Sweden didn't actually upload the finale. So he hooked me up and we watched it on Saturday.

And my roommate and I were very happy to have closure. So thank you so much. And I tried to get his address and send him some swag. And he said, no, man, it's cool. I just like the show. So that's a true fan. Thank you. And an anti-shout-out to Steve Wilson. Most people who listen to podcasts have no idea who Steve Wilson is.

He used to work at Apple. And now he works for a company called Q-Code. And Steve held podcasters by the balls for almost 15 years. And you could not get a promotion, just anything, without going through him.

And if he didn't like you. Not even a jiggle. Nothing. Nothing. Couldn't get a squeeze. Nothing. And, you know, there are people that have been yelling at me about, oh, don't get it. So down on Steve. He was just doing his job. Well, I would like to point out one very specific time where Steve, who is a fan of the show The Dollop.

Well, Steve got tickets to go see The Dollop live in San Francisco magically that day from, well, they were placed around 175 on the iTunes top charts for a podcast back then. We called them iTunes back then, back in our day.

And they magically got to number one just in time for their live performance in San Francisco. I wonder how that happened, Steve. Yeah, yeah. So, Steve, welcome to Hollywood. And if I see you on the street, cross it. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Steve. 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, then please pass the show along to a friend, just not Steve. Word of mouth is the only way the show grows to spread the grump far and wide. Show notes for this episode or gog.show slash 487. 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 away from Steve.

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