497: Not F’n Tangible

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Got a little reply all follow up. Okay. Is there stuff we don't know? A little bit. Well, apparently that they, yes, this is the, on shit we already know is now some shit we're never going to know because they have halted production of the show for now. They've paused.

All right. They've hit pause. Yeah. I don't know what they're going to do, but it's just, it's an update. It's follow up. Well, luckily there's no lack of tech podcasts out there. No, there is not. Sadly. Sadly. Sadly enough for us. Yes. But tell your friends if they need to, if they're going to miss their reply all fix, come, come join us. That would be nice.

Yeah. We, we promise not to do an in-depth series about horrible workplaces and have a horrible workplace ourselves. We won't do that. In the news. Well, Brian, it seems NFTs have taken over the world this week as far as at least tech news goes.

Yeah. They got a good publicist this week. Uh, this stuff's been around for a bit. Uh, you know, I, I, it's ridiculous. Yeah. So, so NFT stands for non-fungible tokens or, or as I like to say, uh, not fucking tangible because there's nothing there.

It is just a, it's just a file with some blockchain involved. You sprinkle a little blockchain on it. Now, if you remember 2017, there's crypto kitties. Come on. You remember crypto kitties? I, I remember crypto kitties. Yes. We all had a good laugh at that, but, uh, they're back. Uh, I like to call this, I, I, I do like your, your terminology as well. I call it, uh, baseball cards on the blockchain.

That's pretty much it. Yeah. Because that's all this is. But I mean, I, I don't have anything necessarily against it. Uh, I, you know, Hey, Bitcoin, not scary enough for you. Invest in these kids. Yeah. This is just the, the logical extrapolation of what people have to do when they have too much money and not enough time and are just bored out of their mind from the pandemic. It's like, okay, let's spend millions of dollars on a GIF. All right.

Yeah. But, but it's a GIF only you can own Jason, but you can see it, but I own it. Now I was thinking about what I was thinking about ways to make it more clever, you know, it's like, okay, let's do, let's like that original piece of art, you know, let's put some steganography in there and have like some art under the art, have, you know, like a painting under the painting.

And then you as the owner, the only one that gets the, the password to unlock the encrypted image underneath, that would be kind of fun, you know, in a Da Vinci code sort of way. Uh, but otherwise, I mean, I came across this because, uh, Eric Nakagawa, the guy who started off, uh, I can has cheeseburger, put up some of his original, like an original art.

Original. I'm sorry. I got to roll my eyes every time I say it is original art on, uh, OpenSea and is trying to sell it. And I'm like, okay, what's this, this makes no sense. I, I have to look deeper and I didn't take very long because I had been missing the biggest story on the internet that week.

And I just happened to come across it. It did blow up this week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, basically because, uh, Beeple, a great name for an artist, Beeple, uh, got a piece up at Christie's and is going to make a gazillion. He's already made a gazillion dollars doing this NFT scam dealio.

And I, you know, I worked with my dad in the art world for 30 years now. So I know a little bit about fine art and my dad has always told me, and, uh, we're not supposed to tell anybody, but it's all bullshit. You're not selling a piece of paper.

You're selling a story. Kind of the same thing with a dollar bill. You're selling a story with that piece of paper. Now you don't even get the fucking paper. Yeah. I mean, that is the, the weird thing is that it's just, it's, everything is getting so far removed now. Right? Like, I mean, we had this conversation, certainly, you know, college getting stoned conversations about what is money now that it's been, you know, removed from any real connection to gold or whatever.

Um, you know, it's, it's a social construct, it's a social contract that we're, we're going to believe that this is something that we're all going to believe in. And we're doing that with Bitcoin. And this is just the latest thing, you know, we've, we've done it with everything. Everything has gone digital. Now we don't actually own music per se, and we don't own, uh, movies.

And well, you do, you have stacks of Blu-rays and no Blu-ray player anywhere. But, uh, I know therein lies the rub. Can I get a, can I get a DVD player on the blockchain, please? Uh, we're just moving away from the concept of anything being really physical or anything.

So why not, Art? And, you know, the thing is, it's a game for the rich. This is a game for people that have too much money. And whoa, the people that are just scraping together what little cash that they have to buy in on this trend. Especially right now, because everything is vastly overpriced because it's in the news and it's super popular right now.

We'll see. Uh, you know, like I said, it came to my attention a little while back because of the sports world, uh, because they've gotten in on this as well. So the NBA has its own, uh, this thing called Top Shot. Uh, so, you know, you can watch clips anywhere of any game, but now you can, through Top Shot and the deal with the NBA, you can buy really cool dunks and you can own them.

And even though everybody else in the world can see them, you're the one that owns this thing. Again, it's baseball cards on the blockchain. That's all. I know. And I don't know about you, but my fingers are getting tired from doing the air quotes around own. Every time I say, I'm like, you can own it.

Yes, but do you really? Yes, I guess if you believe in the blockchain. So at least CryptoKitties did one thing for Ethereum and that's fix the technology behind it because, you know, they basically took down the entire system with CryptoKitties a couple years ago.

So they've shored it up now, so now it's a thing. Do you still have, did you, oh, you unloaded your Ether from your Coinbase account, didn't you? Yeah, I think I made a screwed up on that one. Yeah, I should have kept that around. Could have held on that a little bit longer. Oh, well. I like my fungible assets.

Exactly. Or at least whatever that means because, again, you think about it, you buy stock. You don't even get a stock certificate anymore. You get nothing. It's all just out there somewhere. But at least in theory, when I'm buying stock, I am purchasing part of a company that actually makes things for the most part.

Now I need to purchase a company that makes these NFTs. So then I'm actually really putting money into something that I get absolutely nothing physical back for a company that produces nothing physical. Yeah. I'm telling you, man, I think this might be a business. I think I'm going to set up an OpenSea account and start putting up some Photoshop docs.

If you want the original – if you want to own Grumpy Old Geeks 1.0 artwork, we'll sell it. Well, look, I think we should put – I'll have to start doing a better job of making sure I'm not ever using anything copywritten in our album or our show artwork. But we should put up every single episode. You can own one of our shows.

We'll put up every show art episode. Why not? Yeah. Somebody will buy it. Yeah. And how does this work with copyright? I don't know because it is interesting, particularly with some of the digital assets that you're seeing being put up because, you know, there was a lot of – it was a lot of stealing things in the early days of the internet.

But, hey, Pinterest still exists, so fuck it. Fuck it. Yeah. Seriously. If Pinterest can go public, we can sell our show art, damn it. That's what I'm thinking. Oh, man. I do like one aspect of it since it is Ethereum and it is based on the smart contracts.

When you resell that, the actual artist can say, hey, every time you resell it, I want a cut that comes back to me, which I think is actually really cool. That is the one thing that I think is the neat part about it. I heard that William Shatner did that, that he sold a whole bunch of different photos of himself and anytime they're resold, he basically gets ongoing royalties from it, assuming people are trading pictures of William Shatner on the internet.

But, hey, stranger things have happened. Stranger things have happened, for sure. Yeah, like Grimes, right? Grimes. Yeah, okay. So, you know, talk about, you know, a game for rich people. Rich just get richer. She just made $5.8 million in 20 minutes selling her artwork.

Did you look at her artwork? Did you look at the art? The art is horrific. Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad. It is so bad. But, you know, she made $5.8 million. NFTSMH. Oh, man. And I love this.

She was creating this mythical universe called Otherkin, of course, with a 3 instead of an E. And I would just like to point out that the 90s have called and they want their fucking Leetspeat back. Please. I remember those days. Good times. Yeah, I mean, hey, good on you, Grimes.

I mean, again, it's a game for the rich. And, you know, I guess to some degree it'll help some struggling artists out if they can figure out how to get involved in all this and get themselves up there. And it's just another marketplace, right? But buyer beware. That's all I would say about this sort of stuff.

And, you know, I'm a little surprised. Where the fuck is Amanda fucking Palmer in this? Yeah. She's usually the first to jump on these money-making schemes. No doubt. No doubt. And where's the porn? You know? OwnMyBalls.com. You want to, like, sit there and auction off your balls?

Somebody go get that. Somebody get that domain now. Yeah. Come on. Buy my balls. Buy my balls. Actually, you know, OnlyFans really needs to get into this real quick. Oh, my God. Yeah. You know somebody's over there, like, cranking on that right now.

And speaking of crypto and how crazy this is, Coinbase is getting ready to go public. And I just – this is the greatest thing ever. So they had to – they basically had to send an email to Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he, she, it may be, said, yes, we're going to do this.

But then they also had to release to the possible investors that if Satoshi Nakamoto ever releases their Bitcoin back into the wild, the entire market will tank. So that's – yeah. Talk about a nuclear bomb over an entire, quote, unquote, industry, to use my finger – my quote fingers again.

Yeah. That's something that will keep you up at night if you think about it too hard. Hmm? Well, if you have too much money in Bitcoin, certainly. Yeah. You know, it's not a regulated currency. What are you doing? And I love this. There are a thousand individuals that they call the whales who own 40 percent of the Bitcoin market.

So if you think that those guys aren't getting together and manipulating the, quote, unquote, market to, you know, rise and lower it as they see fit, you are more naive than I could even imagine. Well, before we get too high and mighty about crapping on Bitcoin for those kind of metrics, let's keep in mind real currency and the whales known as Bill Gates and Bezos and Zuckerberg.

Yeah. Who owned most of our real currency. That's true too. You know, I guess it doesn't really matter. You're at the whims of the whales no matter where you go. That's right. I had a dream about this the other night and I thought after I read that article, I'm like, wouldn't it be awesome if Banksy was Satoshi Nakamoto?

And as soon as Coinbase goes public, all of the all of his Bitcoin are released into the world, just like, you know, when the the painting got sold at auction and shredded itself. How awesome would that be? He should just announce that release all the Bitcoin and then put all of his artwork up as NFTs.

I'm moving over here. Fire sale, fire sale. So I read a really interesting article over on the Washington Post about we've been cooped up with our families for almost a year. In fact, we're like next episode. We're coming up on the year mark.

The last time that you and I saw each other and the last time that we basically did anything. And they've got a lot of metrics and a lot of really interesting stats. And it's super fucking depressing. I don't know if you got a chance to go look at the article and look at all the graphs, but don't need to.

I just look around the house. I don't need to do look at a graph. Yeah, we are. We are sick of our families. We have been doing some exercise, but whatever exercise that we've been doing, we've actually doubled down on TV and snacking. We are not coming out of this healthy, either physically or emotionally.

I don't know. I think the greatest thing about this, I actually have lost weight. My numbers are back down from the, you know, don't die Jason hashtag days of late September. So I don't know. For me, it kind of worked out okay. I think, you know, people like us were, well, before you, you have a family, so you're screwed.

You have a kid and a wife. Yeah, basically. You're just, yeah, you're done. It has not been fun. As much as I've tried to stay healthy and get workouts in, it's definitely catch-as-catch-can around here. But what I thought was really interesting is they asked economicists what, if they could name a previous time when our daily pattern shifted so suddenly.

Economists. Yeah, you got me thinking all money is just funny money at this point. So, economicists sounds good enough to me. They study the economicon. That's right. It's the latest Neil Stevenson book that's about 9,000 pages and tells you nothing.

Sorry. I did not like that series. Basically, they basically said that nothing like this has happened since the Black Death. Mm-hmm. In terms of how our patterns have shifted so suddenly. So, that's awesome. Mm-hmm. That's great. That's great. Speaking of shifting patterns, Twitter has finally, maybe sort of announced that they're going to try and do something to make money.

Yeah. Super follows. Super follows and super tweets. So, they're going to try and turn themselves into Patreon, basically. And, no. No. It's public and private tweets, right?

Basically. So, you could tweet publicly or you can flag your tweet as a tweet that only your super followers can see. Yes. That's basically it. All right. I don't. Yeah. You know what? For $4.99 a month, I would just like to be able to edit a tweet.

That's all. I just want to be able to edit a damn tweet. I'll give you $20 a month if I could edit tweets. I saw a lot of the same joke going around on Twitter saying I'd pay $4.99 a month not to see some people's tweets. Yeah. Oh, my God. And I just love that as soon as the news came out on this, the biggest trending topic on Twitter was RIP Twitter.

Of course. Well, you know, nothing's going to happen. Some people will be successful at this. Some people won't. Again, the landscape is so fractured. Like, if you're a content creator like us, I mean, obviously, I think we need to move to NFTs because they seem to actually make sense and make money. But what are we supposed to do?

We're already asking people to throw us a few shekels on PayPal. If they can't do PayPal, we're asking them to throw a few shekels on Patreon. If you can't do Patreon, buy our coffee mug. If you can't buy our coffee mug, buy a damn mask. Now what? We're supposed to fracture it even more and, like, do super tweets?

What? Super tweets. Somebody fix all this crap. Yeah. I'm pretty pleased. It's not going to be Jack. We just know that. You know what? Again, it comes down to what would we actually want? What is value added from Twitter? I would pay $4.99 a month for no ads and a straightforward timeline.

That would be it. But are we going to get that? No. No, we're not going to get that. I have to say, though, the straightforward timeline has been working pretty well. It used to, you know, every time you reload, it would switch from latest to algorithmic tweets. But I haven't had to change it back in, you know, a month or so now on any of the platforms.

It used to just flip willy-nilly. But now you put it on latest, it stays on latest. Well, that's a plus. Thanks, Jack.

I don't know if you watch the from-home Golden Globes latest awards ceremony. Look, my wife loves awards ceremonies, so I usually get stuck watching them. The Golden Globes one generally tend to be kind of fun because they're basically meaningless.

And usually you get a host like Ricky Gervais who just, you know, gets drunk and craps on everybody while everybody in the audience is getting drunk. So there's some humor to be had there, but these virtual award shows have made me realize I no longer ever have any interest in watching award shows ever again.

I mean, they strip away all the artifice. It is just rich people sitting in their living rooms. Yeah, that's kind of it. And it was, I mean, it was bad. It was bad. They didn't even really try, I felt like. So I think I watched the first hour and a half and just gave up and went and watched something, I don't know, anything else.

I can't even remember what I watched, but it was better than what I was watching there. Yes, but you can get clips from the Golden Globe as an NFT now. Oh, yes. No, I'm kidding. You don't. But everybody should do that. I'm surprised they didn't. Anyways, I got some Star Trek news. They must have felt that I was getting ready to hit the cancel button on that CBS All Access subscription because they just dumped a whole bunch of news on us.

This one is a maybe, but some sort of source that has been right a lot of the time is saying that Scott Bakula is going to be returning to Star Trek as Captain Archer. Okay. I never finished Enterprise, but. I liked it. I liked it. I think that it wasn't served well by the ending, but it was a good show.

But they're going to have him cameo in some Star Trek show. Hard to figure out the timelines on that. But then again, they've opened up time travel again. And they're going to leave the door open for him to headline in his own solo series. Which we once called Enterprise. Yeah. Okay. What are we going to do with that?

I mean, he was the lead. So. Okay. So we'll see. We've also seen Star Trek Prodigy's actual alien kid heroes for the first time. They've released some artwork from that. No humans, but that's kind of cool. It'll be the first entirely non-human heroes of a Star Trek show.

Okay. And that's the one that Janeway is coming back for. So. Oh. And it's made for kids. I'm hoping I'll be able to watch that with my kids. So we'll see. Is it live action or animated? Animated. Animated. Ah, bummer. Well, yeah. They're not going to spend that much money on a kid show, Jason. Plus kids don't like watching real people 99% of the time.

Neither do adults. To be honest. Yeah. Neither do adults. Yeah. And we finally have some information about Star Trek Section 31. But the information is that the show is not happening anytime soon. It's only going to happen when one of the five current Star Trek projects, Discovery, Prodigy, Lower Decks, Picard, and Strange New Worlds is over.

So that could actually be pretty close because I don't see Picard going on and on and on. I'm thinking we're going to get one, maybe two more seasons of Picard. Yeah. We don't need any more Lower Decks, so they can just scrap that one. I tend to agree with that. Yeah. And I guess I got to start transitioning.

No longer CBS All Access. Paramount Plus. Paramount Plus. And another Paramount Plus news. And in a way that they will continue to keep my monies, they are bringing back Frasier. I'm excited about that. I loved that show. But Niles better be back because if Niles isn't there, then I don't care. Well, I need everybody that's still alive.

Unfortunately, the father has passed away. Yeah. Probably the dog. The dog's a long time. Anybody that's still alive, Niles, Roz, Daphne, I want them all back because I still, I really love that show. It's so comforting. Okay. Never really got into it that much. But I got into it more than Friends.

So I have seen at least, you know, a couple dozen episodes. All right. I did watch Lady and the Dale on HBO Max over the past couple of weeks. And what a crazy, crazy story this one was.

It started out as the story of Jerry Dean Michael. And he was basically a low-rent con artist, you know, thug gangster kind of guy. But in the middle of it, it switched over to the story of Elizabeth Carmichael, who was, used to be Jerry Dean Michael.

So it's basically about a trans woman who then was still kind of a low-rent con artist person and tried to sell this three-wheeled car, the Dale, and got in probably a little too over her head with the con on this one. Ended up going on the run many, many times for many, many years.

Finally gets caught. And it's a fairly interesting story. And the really, real evil person in this is Dick Carlson. Do you remember him from LA News when you were growing up? Vaguely, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's a real piece of work.

He basically just ruined her life, just kept, you know, hammering on her, hammering on her, hammering on her about the transsexual thing. He was just, he was a real dick. I mean, not to have a pun there, because his name is Dick. What really sets the stage, though, Dick Carlson is the father of Tucker Carlson.

So there's a direct line of assholery in that family. The dick doesn't fall far from the balls. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. So it was really good. I highly recommend it. And there's some really interesting trans history in there as well. It's a, you'll learn a lot.

And it's a strange one, because you think it's one story, then it's another story, then it turns out to be a completely other story. So there's layers on layers in there. It's four episodes, so you can punch through it in an afternoon. And everybody's saying that Renegades, born in the USA, the new quote-unquote podcast from Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama is the tits.

But it's not a fucking podcast, so everybody quit calling it a podcast. It's on Spotify. Damn it. I'm going to keep banging on that until somebody listens. It is what it is. That is a hill you will die on alone, unfortunately. That has passed a spy. Now, is this thing, is it a regular thing, or was it a one-off?

Like, are these two getting together and, like, you know, like us, every Tuesday morning, they roll out of bed, go into their garages, fire up their microphones. I do believe it's a show. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah, they've got three episodes out so far. Can't wait until they get reply all.

Yeah. Wouldn't that be awesome? Yeah, Bruce is like, oh, Barry tried to touch me. It was a bad scene. It was a bad scene. Oh, my God. So, and we have multiple, multiple mainstream news organizations talking about podcasting this week.

We've got the Wall Street Journal, how hosts are tapping pros to polish their podcasts. And then we've got the New York Times, an article, When Podcast Hosts Speak, What Do We Hear? A story about somebody who tried to talk like a podcaster. Here's a pro tip.

It ain't hard. And I've got a couple other ones here. I got one from Forbes that I have to still put in the show notes. But the thing is, it's like all of these mainstream news organizations are talking about podcasting. And we got tagged on a quote from Michael Crichton talking about the Gelman amnesia effect this week.

And this totally hits home for me, reading all of these podcasting articles on mainstream media. And I forgot about this. I'm going to read it to you real quick, Brian. Okay. Briefly stated, the Gelman amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.

You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often the article is so wrong, it actually presents the story backwards, reversing cause and effect. I call these the wet streets cause rain stories, which is pretty funny.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story and then turn the page to national or international affairs and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page and forget what you know.

Yeah, I totally found myself doing that this week, reading these really stupid podcasting articles where they get so much wrong. And then I'm like, well, let's see what's going on in vaccine news. But surely they're right about cryptocurrency. Yes, tell me more about NFTs, please.

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The remaining Fry's electronic stores are all shutting down. They've been mostly West Coast-based shopping destinations for gadgets. I built computers from parts that I would buy there. It used to be a wonderful place to go to and spend an awful lot of money. Oh, yes. But they're all going out of business because, you know, Amazon.

Yeah. Which one did you go to the most? Well, when I was younger and I was down in Orange County or even when I was in college because I would just go to my parents, I'd go to the one that was in kind of like the Buena Park area. What was the theme on that one, though? I don't remember, actually, sadly.

It's been so long. I think it was the UFO one. No, that's Burbank. Burbank was the UFO with the UFO smash in the front. You walk in, there's a giant gort. Oh, yeah. That was the best. Yeah. I have one here and we had one. It closed down about a year ago here in Woodland Hills. We had the Alice in Wonderland one.

Oh, never went to that one. Oh, my God. We had probably a 50-foot-long Jabberwocky hanging from the ceiling. It was fantastic. It was totally fantastic. I loved that one. And I spent tens of thousands of dollars on the old school DVDs back then on my plastic collection.

I would go there every Friday after I got paid and pick up a bunch of DVDs. And computer parts and crap that I didn't need. I will miss fries. Yep. It was the best. So many impulse buys. Yeah, they were really good at that. That checkout lane that was just two and a half miles long had everything on the planet you could just pick up and throw in your basket.

It was bad. It was bad. Exactly. iPod is now 20 years old, believe it or not. All right. I can sadly believe that. Yeah. Unfortunately. I know. I know. I had mine for, I think, up until about five years ago. But it got to be too scary because the battery was all swollen.

And I'm like, I know this thing is going to blow up and catch fire and burn my house down. And I can't handle that. I wish that Apple would actually cater somewhat to nostalgia. I would love them to release a new version that is just the same as the old school. I want the spin wheel.

I want the 60 gig hard drive in there. I want the whole deal. That would be amazing. Of course, they'd actually have to release a functioning version of Apple Music or iTunes to facilitate that. That'll never happen. They'd have to make iTunes work again. Oh, there's your hat.

Make iTunes work again. Send that to them. And since iPod turned 20, somebody posted a list of how old some of these other gadgets are. And I was a little surprised at this. iPad, 11 years old. Fitbit is 13 years old.

It seems like not. It doesn't seem like 13 years since a Fitbit came out at all. iPhone, 14 years old. Kindle, 14 years old. And surprisingly enough, my Kindle first gen still works with the cell connection that you bought once and you can still use the cell connection to get books on.

Crazy. That's amazing. BlackBerry, 22 years. I thought it was around a lot more than that. That seems – yeah, the fact that a BlackBerry was only around for two years longer than an iPod doesn't feel right to me. But, you know, I'm sure that this list – I'm sure all the articles on this page all make sense and they're all written perfectly and correct.

Yeah. And because there's the other one. TiVo is as old as the BlackBerry, which does not – that timeline does not jive in my head. Palm Pilot, 24. And then Palm Pilot. I feel like a Palm Pilot was around for a decade before an iPod.

I know. At least. It was only four years. But here's the other one. Here's the one that's the head scratcher. DVD is only 25 years old. Yeah. Nuts. Macs are 37. Nintendo NES are 38. Sony Walkman, 42 years old. I actually thought that was – I guess that does kind of – yeah, it was about – yeah, it was seven years old when I got my first Walkman.

So that timeline works, I guess. I got one when they came out. VCR, 46 years old. Wow. And – Well, I'm as old as a VCR. Yeah, I was three when we got our – when I could have gotten our first VCR. The Polaroid camera is 74 years old.

So, yeah, walk down memory lane. There you go. New gadgets. The Amazon Echo Show 10, which was announced an awful long time ago and I got kind of excited about it because I thought I would get one. And then I bookmarked it. And then it never came out and never came out and never came out and never came out.

And apparently now it's out. But I've read the reviews on it. And it's basically – you can spend like 150 extra dollars to get a rotating screen that kind of follows you around. But the software isn't really quite there yet and it's a bit glitchy and it does sort of do 360.

But at some point it will just decide to turn itself all the way around to follow you the other way in the middle of a call. And you're better off just having an eight. Or buy a $2 lazy Susan. Exactly. Spin it yourself. And there's a site that's been doing the rounds, radio.garden.

So one of the things that I do love about the Echo is the ability with sites like TuneIn and things like that to basically listen to any radio station anywhere in the world at any time. The problem with all these ladies in the tube devices, of course, is discovery. Now, radio.garden is a great website where you can basically just click around a map of the world and find any radio station anywhere.

It's pretty awesome. It is so cool. And you can actually just listen to it there. But, you know, I basically just use it to find a cool radio station and then tell Echo to play it. Yeah, it is really neat. I've spent quite some time messing around with that one. That was really fun. Yeah, it's really cool.

So I recommend people check it out because the only way that I discovered KKCR, which is Kauai Community Radio, which plays some awesome – it's a community radio station, so you get news and you get regular music and all that too. But they obviously do a lot of – spend a lot of time playing Hawaiian music, which is nice and relaxing.

See, there's no discovery with ladies in the tube. The only reason I found that out is it misheard me say, play KCRW, and it played KKCR instead one time. So then I was like, this is the best, and I've been listening to it all the time. But this lets you find anything anywhere, so check it out. Ah, serendipitous discovery.

I remember those days. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I found this site called Chiptone, which is kind of a cool little mixer to make sound effects. And everything's royalty-free that you make on it. If you need to make some beeps and boops and bops, this is a cool little site that does it.

It used to be made in Flash, but this person, which apparently is smarter than a Chinese railroad conglomerate, has figured out how to make it an HTML5 instead. Very cool. There's some downloadable versions, too, but check it out. You can do some really—I mean, I can't believe it's written in HTML5.

It works really well for what it is. I can't believe we're still only on HTML5. Why aren't we on HTML6 or 7 by now? Do you know how long it took to get from 4 to 5? Yes, I do. I remember. We're going to be dead before HTML6. We're going to be long dead because there's nobody caring about HTML anymore.

Like, 5's good enough. Fuck it. Yep. And the Citizen app will now tell you when helicopters are flying overhead or what they are going to do. I mean, I can only see this being useful in Los Angeles because we have helicopters overhead 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And you're always like—I mean, I can tell from being inside the house what agency it's from, what brand it is. And some of the time I can actually tell you which helicopter is flying overhead because I know the sound so well. Especially the—there's one really nice Sikorsky sky crane that they use for putting out fires that's always flying over.

I'm like, oh, Joe's up there because I did the research on the helicopter and found the company that owns it and the guys that fly it at one point when the fires were really crazy here. But now you can launch your Citizen app and it will tell you. Do you still use the Citizen app, Brian? I was about to say, I will never know about this because I've been meaning to delete the Citizen app for a long time because it's gotten increasingly useless.

At first, it was just like, okay, I would get a notification if something happened within two or three miles of me. All the notifications I'm getting are national or they're like all of Los Angeles. They were way over-notifying. You can't dial back down anything.

So the final straw for me was the other day when Citizen decided to give me breaking alerts on my watch about Lady Gaga's dogs. Oh, fucking Christ. This is not what I got the fucking Citizen app for. I got the Citizen app for local stuff that was going on. I do not need an alert on my watch that Lady Gaga's dogs were fucking stolen.

So I deleted it with extreme prejudice. Yeah, I got rid of it a long time ago for that very same reason. It's like, you know what I want your app to do if there's nothing going on in my neighborhood? Be silent. Nothing. Be absolutely silent. Yeah.

It's like, I don't care if something is going on in Compton or El Segundo because I'm never going back to Compton or El Segundo. So why are you telling me? You know, with no engagement, there is no money, Jason. I know. I got to get those clicks. I don't understand. They don't make money anyway.

So what's the matter? I know. They should want me not checking it all the time and paying for their data. It's like, leave me alone. Yes. Oh, my God. The world is working correctly if I do not get notifications. Yeah, seriously. And when I do get a notification, it better be juicy because, you know, pandemic time, there was one that was like an El Torito up the street and there was a 25 person fist fight one night in lockdown.

And I'm like, okay, there's a story here that I want to hear. A, why are people inside of El Torito? B, why are there 25 of them? C, why are they having a fist fight? I want to know all of these things. It told me none of those. So the follow-up sucks.

And I'm going to save this one for next week because some people can get a chance to download it and maybe get an invite, which I don't have. This is the Dispo app that's now worth $200 million, which is basically Instagram where you have to wait until the next day to see your photos because they're trying to make it like the old school disposable cameras.

I signed up. I'm on the list, but I have not gotten in yet. But once I get in, we will talk about this app. Or if anybody has gotten in and wants to send me an invite, you know where to find me. Pretty please, pretty please. And I found this through one of the shows I was working on.

It is called wherefore.com. Okay. This is quite possibly the coolest travel site I have ever seen. And I wish this was around when I actually was young, had disposable cash, no dogs, and could leave the country whenever I wanted.

Because what you do is you put in how much money you have, how long you want to go for, and it will give you choices everywhere in the world that you can go for that amount of money for that amount of time. So I put in, I've got $2,000, I want to leave for six days, what can you get me?

And I can apparently go stay in a very nice hotel in Moscow with round-trip flights for under $2,000 right now for six days. Now, the downside is for them, they give you the list of the hotel, the airline, which then you can go to your travel site of choice and just book it yourself.

You don't have to book it through them. The other downside was for me to get to Moscow, I have to fly Turkish Airlines. And no, sorry, I'm not flying Turkish Airlines. Uh-uh. Well, there goes our listeners in Turkey. Oh, yeah, sorry, guys, I'm not, you're great people, great food, but I'm not flying your airline, especially to Moscow.

And this has just been released in drone news, the DJI FPV is out. This is a $1,300 drone with a controller, a headset, and that's about it. You don't have to plug your phone into it because everything is done through the goggles.

It's FPV stands for first-person video. So you fly this by looking through it. It is so damn cool. This is the drone I always wanted. I got one of these headsets to go with my Mavic 2 Zoom, and it's just, it didn't really give that feeling for me because the Mavic 2 Zoom is like driving a semi-truck.

It's big, fat, and heavy, and isn't like a sports drone as much as this one. This one will go from zero to 100 kilometers an hour in two seconds. If you're not puking by the time you fly that for a few minutes, you're doing it wrong. And they've even got hand controls now, so you don't need to use the joysticks.

You can actually wave your hand around with a stick and like fly it that way. It looks so cool. I want one, but it's $1,300, so I'm not getting one this week. So my birthday's coming up soon. Yeah, gog.show.com slash donate.

Please, please, please. And speaking of things that you look through, I do have to do a quick follow-up here. My Oculus Quest quest is at an end. Okay. I finally found someone in the great country of India to finally help me out. And my quest has been restored.

My purchases have been restored. So this weekend, I will finally be playing the Star Wars Darth Vader game. So finally. I've heard it's very good. I bought all three parts. This is why I was so pissed off that I couldn't get to them. I'm like, I'm not going to pay another 60 bucks so I can play a game I already bought. I'm not giving Zuckerberg any more of my money than I have to, damn it.

And it only took two and a half months for them to get back to me. That's customer service. That's it? Wow. Hmm. Awesome. At the library. So I read something kind of out of my normal wheelhouse, which is really nice.

I read a book called Saigon, a misfits memoir of great books, punk rock, and the fight to fit in by Fouk Tran. Memoir, kid about my age, exactly. Grew up in a small town, smart kid, first generation immigrant, all those issues, small town Vietnamese, lots of issues.

Smart kid, did well in school, torn between kind of being a punk rock kid and being a smart kid. It was great. I really enjoyed it. He ended up pursuing both of his interests, both art and literature, and he ended up being a teacher and tattoo artist. How cool is that? That is very cool.

Would I enjoy this book? I think you would. I think you really would. All right. I will pick it up then. I read the description before we went to air, and I'm like, oh, this sounds like it might be pretty good for somebody like me. I'll check it out. Yeah. I think it more closely mirrors your childhood than mine because I was not in the small town.

No, I was in every town. You'll dig it. Yeah. And I found this. Stephen Fry posted a video on Twitter the other day talking about subtitles in children, and I thought of you with this, and I don't know if you do this already, but it's for turnonthesubtitles.org.

It's a great little video that says that kids have a much higher chance of becoming good at reading if you just turn on the subtitles because it's there in front of them, and it's kind of like they learn reading by osmosis because it's just there in front of them. And I thought that was a great little hack.

Do you guys have subtitles on? I think we've even talked about this on the show, like, probably about two years ago or so that I was doing this. So, yeah, yeah, definitely. As soon as we started doing letter recognition with the kid, subtitles went on, and it does seem to help. I mean, he definitely does pay attention.

So, yeah, had him on forever, and it's gotten to the point where basically we just never even turn them off even when it's not kids programming anymore because, you know, we're all ADD now, and even when I'm watching a show, I'm wandering around the room. So it helps to be able to just look over and read. No, it's great.

We keep them on all the time, too. The only time we ever turn them off is if we're watching stand-up comedy because you can't have them on for stand-up comedy. Right. And this one came through this morning, and I thought it was really – I got to call my dad on this one because this is six Dr. Seuss books won't be published anymore because they portray people in hurtful and wrong ways.

So the books that are going to be pulled are And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McGilliot's Pool, On Beyond a Zebra, Scrambled Egg Super, and The Cat's Quizzer. So all of these books are being discontinued by the Dr. Seuss estate.

But you can bid on the NTFs of them now. Exactly. There will be one copy. Oh, my God. Yeah. I got to find out what the deal is on these and if I can get, like, cases of them out of the back of the warehouse before they go – Yeah.

No shit or anything like original artwork. Yeah. I think this might be my retirement plan. Okay. The show's over. I got to go call my dad.

Security? Ha! We are joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast and 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.

How are those long locks doing, Dave? You're looking more and more dancing every day. I know. It's actually been right about a year. It's actually been over a year since I had my last haircut. I got my haircut before RSA last year and I started seeing – RSA is the big security conference in San Francisco.

And I started seeing pictures popping up a year ago today was RSA. And I think that was the last time I got a haircut was for that event. So, let me tell you, I've never had hair this long before. I'm kind of digging it.

It looks good on you. I got to say, it does look good on you. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I have new appreciation for all of my lady friends who have complained over the years how long it takes to dry. Yes, it does. Yes. Most of my life I get both dry and comb my hair with a towel, you know.

And I've become accustomed to just having hair in my face and in my eyes like I never thought I would before. Dave Emo Bittner. I have started experimenting with volumizing products and a blow dryer.

I was about to say, you must enter the world of product. Yeah, and I was going to say, check out Moroccan oil. That's the shampoo and conditioner I used when my hair was longer. And it smells beautiful and it will do your hair right. Moroccan oil.

All right, I'm writing that down. And the podcast has taken a new direction. Moroccan roll oil. Yeah. Well, see, the thing, my challenge here is that both my hair and my skin are naturally oily. So I have gone to using a foofy kind of shampoo specifically for oily hair.

Again, trying so that I don't end up by the end of the day having stringy, greasy-looking hair. And it helps. Well, here's how you mitigate that. You buy a leather jacket and then you can be a greaser. Right, so people, yeah, that's like the old joke about how no one notices my glass eye because they're too busy looking at my toupee.

So, yeah. But, Brian, yes, I would love – you have wonderful verticality to your hair and it's something that I envy in your look. And I wonder how I, too, might get my hair to defy gravity the way that you do.

It's something that I'm jealous of that you're able to do there. Is there a product secret there? No, well, I suppose Aquanet, years and years and years of Aquanet when I was a teenager doing the Robert Smith and the backcombing has trained my hair to get as far away from my scalp as possible.

So it's just years of doing it that is – my hair just kind of sticks up until it's so long that it falls in my face. And that is my secret, ladies. No, I suspect there may be a volumizing moose in my future.

But if anybody – if any of our listeners have tips, I'd love to hear them because – I don't know. I keep saying I'm going to get my hair cut when I get vaccinated. That's when I'm going to go and get a haircut. And when I go to have to go back to my barber and give her a $100 tip or something because I have not seen her in a year.

So – but we'll see. I don't know. I'm kind of digging the long hair. It's a great excuse to do something I'd never done before. And it does – it feels nice on my back too to kind of toss it around. It sort of tickles my shoulders. I like it. It's nice. When I had it, it was nice.

But everybody is just like, yeah, it's got to go. It did not work well with me. But I grew mine out for like two years. And yeah, it was – when it's much longer on the sides than it is on the top, you kind of got that riffraff look going and it's not good.

That's the thing. You know, that is my deepest fear is that I'm going to look in the mirror one day and I'm going to see Ron Jeremy staring back at me. You know, like that old guy, you know, receding hairline, growing my hair long, ridiculous look.

That's not what I'm going for. Ponytail in the back and shining dome in the front. It's always a very good look. Yeah. Yeah. So I need to be – I need to be self-aware on that. But I am the best person in the world at fooling myself. And no man bun. No man bun.

No, no, no, no. No man buns, please. Not even ironically as a joke because you might like it and then – Not even once. Yeah. Not even once. No. It's like – think of a man bun as heroin. You just don't even want to do it once. No. No. No.

It's not – everybody who sets out to – who tried a man bun thought to themselves, I'll just try this once. And now they live in Seattle and serve coffee. Right. Right. No. You don't want that for you. You and your children and your wife, that would be irresponsible of you. No.

No. Right. Well, in addition to your perplexing problems with having to choose a product, Dave, there's another crossroads that we find ourselves at right now. Okay. There will be no more live action Star Wars for quite some time.

So we have a decision to make here. We have to decide if we're going to delve into the animated worlds or not because Star Wars The Bad Batch will be debuting on Disney Plus on May 4th. This is an animated series following a group of elite clones called The Bad Batch who first appeared in Star Wars The Clone Wars.

Each of these clones has a singular exceptional skill that makes them extraordinarily effective soldiers and a formidable crew, according to Disney. So we have to decide, are we going to delve into animated Star Wars? Obviously, it would probably be helpful to have watched The Clone Wars before watching this.

So there's quite a lot in front of us should we choose to go that direction. Yeah. Yeah. I did watch – what was the one with – what's the recent animated one with the little angry R2-D2 droid? Fox Force 5? No, no, no, no.

The one with the teenage boy who's like a Jedi – who has Jedi skills and – oh, gosh. What's the name of it? People are yelling at their podcast players right now. Yeah, I'm not sure either. It's one of the most recent animated ones.

And I watched a couple seasons of that and it was quite good. It was quite good. I didn't stick with it because my son didn't stick with it. But I'll give this a try. Why not? Yeah. Okay. Not like I got anything else to do with my free time. No. Except sit in the – Except combing your hair.

Do those hundred strokes a night in front of the TV. That's right. WandaVision is about to wrap up. So I think it's time for me to watch something else. How is that? I could not get into that. Yeah. It takes – the getting into it takes way too long.

They overplayed their hand, I think, with the first few episodes. But once you get past – I think once you get to episode four, it really kicks into gear and it's been a lot of fun since then. So if you can – if you can make it that far – I know a way to sell it, right, Dave?

Yeah. If you can make it that far, it will pay off and I am enjoying it. I think there's only one episode left now. But it does get a lot better. But I think they screwed up. I don't understand that. I mean I always use my example of the Stephen King series, The Dark Tower, which you have to read The Gunslinger first, which is the shortest in the first book.

But it is god-awful. It is awful. And interminable. If that's the shortest book, Jesus. And yeah. But once you get past that, it's awesome. Yeah, I think also like WandaVision points to how – and I think Mandalorian was this way too that – and even shows like Breaking Bad where we have these TV shows that are doing highly cinematic things in ways that TV shows weren't able to do before.

And they're really pulling it off. They have the access to the types of special effects they wouldn't have been able to have before. Because everything is in HD, they can do the types of cinematography that they wouldn't have been able to do before. So I like it. It's really interesting storytelling.

So I've been enjoying WandaVision. I'd recommend it. But yeah, it is a bit of a slog getting through the first three episodes I think. All righty. All righty. Well, we do have a little bit of follow-up on the Facebook privacy lawsuit. This is the one about the biometrics and people living in Illinois.

And I'm happy about this because I lived in Illinois when this was going on, and I did have a Facebook account. So this is a $650 million settlement. And this is one where the judge came back and said, yeah, now the $550 million, not enough.

We want a little more. So they are aiming to put at least $345 into the hands of every class member interested in being compensated. Well, that would be me. I would like to be compensated. So I will be signing up for this one.

So if I get it or not, that'll be interesting because I don't live in Illinois anymore. So I can't prove anything. And when I moved to California, they absconded with my Illinois driver's license. So I don't know how I'm going to prove that I was there. I don't think I have bills anymore, but we'll see.

We'll see how this goes. I'm going to do my damnedest. I'm going to do my damnedest for that $345. No, it's like playing Monopoly and pulling the right community chest card. You know, $345 in your favor. Mm-hmm. And like I say, I always say it is our duty to sign up for any class action lawsuit that we can possibly be involved in because it is the only punishment these companies get.

Yep, and if you don't use it, you lose it for sure. $345 isn't – That's a much stretch. That's much better than the $2 checks I usually get. Or a free month of Netflix or something. Yeah, that's great. No, this is like almost a car payment.

Buy a nice something. Right. Buy yourself a new microphone because that's what you need. Oh, yeah. Great. That's what I need. One mouth, 400 microphones. Perfect. Basically, my show is going to look like one of those press conferences at the White House at some point because I'm just going to have this, you know, this giant microphone – what do they used to do?

Like a microphone bouquet. A microphone bouquet. This was making the rounds and I thought it would be fun for us to just throw in here. The Tom Cruise deep fakes on TikTok. Have you guys gotten to see any of these? I have. The question I guess I have for it is Tom Cruise feels somewhat unhuman anyways.

And somewhat uncanny valley to me. So, is it – have the deep fakes gotten better or did they just pick a shitty target? They looked really good. Yeah, they did. And this guy, I think, is really kind of Tom Cruise-esque. He's definitely too tall, but it worked.

I thought they were really, really good. And here's the weird thing about deep fakes now. We watch so many of them. I was watching this series on epics the other day called By Any Means Necessary. It's kind of like the Malcolm X story from back in the day. It's like the same one that they – the Godfather of Harlem.

They took that and they did the backstory in a documentary. And they were showing all of this footage of just like Kennedy and all of the civil rights leaders and things like that back then. And I'm watching this going, this looks like Forrest Gump.

I don't know if it's real or not. I can't tell anymore the difference between historical footage and faked historical footage. And I feel like I'm going to be watching videos nowadays and I'm not going to be able to tell if they're real because deep fakes are getting that good. And it's just kind of a – it screws with your head.

Have you seen the thing from MyHeritage.com, the thing where they're animating the still pictures? Yeah. That seemed kind of low rent compared to a lot of the stuff that we've seen that we've even talked about on this show. It's like, OK, you know, that's just like, OK, they find the eyes, they find the pieces and then they just kind of shuffle a little, you know.

But I think to me that's like the – I think I said on Twitter. It's like the portraits in the Harry Potter series. Yeah. And I imagine we're heading towards a time when we will have – or we will have the option of having portraits in our home where we can have – you know, every time you walk past the picture of your grandmother, she smiles a little bit and nods her head and watches you walk by.

Fifteen years ago, I proposed this for graveyards. I wanted this in graveyards. So when you walk through a graveyard at night, all the people that – on the tombstones would watch you walk through the graveyard. That's what I wanted. I wanted to build that as a product. I wanted to have cameras and LCDs on every tombstone so you can see everybody.

And at night, everything turned green. And then you can walk through the graveyard and have everybody that was buried there watch you. I thought that would be the coolest thing. And we're getting close. You know, a dear friend of mine made the point that – with this sort of thing, like, there are some people that we'd like to have stay dead.

You know, like – I mean, you can imagine people who've lived through trauma with family members and things like that where they don't want to see that person reanimated, you know, realistically. Like, that could really be – That's true. And issue. Trigger warning. So, yeah. I mean, I think that's a – with all these things, right?

With great power comes great responsibility and all that. And there's a downside to any of this. But that was a side of this I hadn't really thought about. And I think it's something good to consider that before you just go around and reanimate your entire family tree from Ancestry, and you might want to check with some folks.

Check with your family members to see how they all feel about that. Nobody wants a cutesy, cute baby Hitler reemerging, and everybody goes, oh, look at that little baby. Oh, that's Hitler. Oh, man, you got me. Damn it. It's like the worst Rickroll ever. Oh, man, you're saying people don't want that? Because I already bought the NFT for that.

Nice. Only cost $17 million. God, I just throw my money away. Bitcoin, NFT, Hitlers. If we didn't already have a show title, NFT, Hitlers would be – we might get canceled, though. So we can't do that.

Can't do that. You think Hitler's in any filters for flagging words? I don't know what that would be. I put a story in here that I thought was interesting. This is from Wired, and it's about Microsoft at their Ignite conference.

They announced – they're doing a public preview of their Azure Active Directory verifiable credentials. And I'm just – I'm curious what you guys think about this sort of thing. I have my own thoughts, but I want to hear yours first. This is – basically, you could have an electronic version, something similar to Apple Pay or Google Pay, but for IDing yourself.

So imagine you walk up to the bouncer at the bar, and instead of showing them your ID, you would hold your phone up to something that would go bloop and say, yep, this is this person. And in you go. I guess it would have a photo on it so that they could check it was actually you or whatever.

Who knows what the details are? Right. And you could use this for all sorts of things. You need to verify that you actually had a degree in the thing that you had a degree in. One of the other interesting things about what Microsoft is doing here is that they're trying to lead the way so that we don't end up with a whole bunch of different standards for this.

This story talks about how MasterCard has a standard they're trying to put forward. Well, I've been wondering for years, ever since the advent of the smartphone, why do I have to have a driver's license on me anymore, particularly after Apple Pay has been introduced?

Why do I need anything other than this device that I'm carrying with me to handle all of this stuff? And isn't this not the idea? I don't know if it's going to happen because nothing with our coronavirus response has really happened very well, but it wasn't the idea that we would be getting a digital vaccination card that we would be able to show and things of that nature.

I'm all for this, and I do think that we need some sort of secure system for it, and that becomes the rub. The thing that gave me pause was, as you put this in the show notes, just yesterday, I'm working with a company that's an all-Microsoft shop, and they'd requested that everybody switch over to using 2FA for logins and things of that nature.

And a process that should have taken me 35 to 40 seconds with Microsoft's Authenticator app took me about 45 minutes and multiple phone calls verifying my identity. They need some work on this system first because it was not easy, and there were a lot of mistakes, and it was very confusing.

And it was confusing to me, who is relatively expert at these sorts of things. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Jason, what do you think? I'm glad you put this in here because I'd read the article, and I was going to put it in here, but I saw you'd already gotten to it. So I am very interested in this topic, and I like how they're doing it as kind of like an arbiter of information.

It's like, okay, I need to show this guy just that I am 21 years old, so I am going to get a token that they can verify that I am 21 years old. And it's a third, you know, like an arm's length transaction. They don't need to see my actual birth date.

They just need to know that I'm 21 years old. And so they get my token, and it verifies that I'm 21 years old. There you go. I go drink. You know, it seems like a great idea. And I like it with what the U.K. is doing with the National Health Service because that has apparently been a problem where people can't get their credentials fast enough so they can actually get to work being, you know, first responders, which just seems like a pretty simple thing that you would be able to do nowadays.

Yes, I know CPR. Staying alive. Do, do, do. Yep, I got it. I'm in. Let me go. Nope, takes a couple months. So they've actually helped do that at this point. So that's shown proof of concept. Yeah. So I like that part. What I don't like about it is it almost, and I know this is a silly thing not to like because I've just never liked, I've never liked gamification, but it feels like I'm just going to be collecting badges.

I don't see that at all. I got my 21 and older badge. I got my vaccinated badge. Woo-hoo. Yeah, I don't see that at all. Here's my bachelor's degree. I don't see it that way at all. I just see it – yeah, I see it as just a way to make the process – like take the friction out of the process of saying, I need this information, boom.

And it's like, okay, did you live at this place? Yes or no? Things like that. It's just – you know, you can put the history to it, but you don't have to give them all of the information that they possibly need. But one thing that I think really needs to be an important part of this whole process is what happens when everything goes wrong?

What are the backup procedures? I mean, we've all heard stories from friends or ourselves of nightmares that happen if you gave away your phone without backing up your authentication app or something like that, and you've lost all that information or somebody steals your phone or whatever.

The backup procedures and the verification procedures need to be clearly outlined. Oh, yeah. I'm terrified to get rid of my phone because I know, Dave, you switched phones, and how long did it take you to get all your 2FA stuff back in check? I'm still not back on Discord.

Yeah. So there you go. I was wondering. You've been tagged quite often. No, I mean, I can't get it. I have not – because I know I'm in for the thing that you just went through, Brian, that's why I just haven't chosen to fight that fight yet.

You know, I – the thing about 2FA is it's great when it works, and when it doesn't, it is miserable. It is miserable. Yeah. So hopefully – the other thing that this reminds me of are those stories that we covered not too long ago about the bars who were sharing information.

They would scan your driver's license. They either use the barcode or actually scan the driver's license, and then they were sharing information among them. This would help cut down on that, which I think is a good thing. Yeah. Right, because you don't have like a unique ID that is transmissible between establishments type of thing.

Right, right. Yeah. All it says is, as you said, Jason, this person is eligible to come in this establishment and enjoy a lovely beverage. Yep. That's all they need to know. That's all they need to know. What is this thing in which you go into an establishment and have a beverage? It's been so long.

What is an establishment? Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. I like it. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Good. All right. Well, we'll see how it plays out. I think hopefully it will get some traction, and we'll see, right? Time will tell. I put a couple other things in here.

One was just a quick reference to a link. The folks at Buzzsprout got hit by DDoS, which is a distributed denial of service, and they just – they wrote up a really nice post-mortem. It just lays out exactly what happened, how they went about mitigating it.

And I share it here in case we have any listeners who are interested in learning a little more about the technical parts of this, the mitigation parts of this. This is a really nice example of how you lay out one of these things to explain – a disclosure of, hey, we got hit by this.

This is what we did. This is what we know. This is what we don't know. A nice little opportunity to learn about how these things work. Very cool. Very cool. And then the last thing in here is a link to a listing, a home listing in Omaha, Nebraska, that I think we should start the Kickstarter funding for now for the new Grumpy Old Geeks headquarters.

I don't know if you guys check this out. Oh, yes. If there's ever a rock and roll home, this is a rock and roll home. Am I right? I finally found something that would make me move to Omaha. I'm on the fence with the whole moving to Omaha, but if I lived here, I would never have to leave.

So it doesn't matter if I'm in Omaha because this place is ridiculous. This would have been the ultimate pandemic home. Yeah. If I could have gotten this on Airbnb a couple months ago. I saw – and folks, if you haven't seen it, this home is – it's like you're living in a hard rock cafe.

Yes. Not like you are. Someone on Twitter commented that I've never seen a home that screams divorce as much as this home screams divorce. Let's just say all of the decorating impulses are on the masculine side with probably – Yeah.

I think my favorite – From anyone else. No. My favorite has to be the martini glass sink. That is quite, quite the baller sink there. I would remove the ping pong table because it does not match, for starters.

The color palette they picked, they picked a blue ping pong table in this obviously brown, black, and white home, which looks beautiful, and I hate ping pong. But the rest of it, hell yeah. I do love the screams divorce comment, and actually it was making me think that this doesn't so much remind me as a home as this does kind of remind me of like the first internet boom.

These were the offices. So perhaps this was Reply All's headquarters before it just went sideways. My favorite thing was the guitar case table. I knew you – I like that too. I like that one too.

Yep. That was a nice original touch. Yeah. It's terrible. There is so much in this place that is there here to love. We could deconstruct this for hours actually and start making some very good jokes about various aspects.

But how did it end up in Omaha, Nebraska? Because that's the only place you can build this and still afford it. I mean this would be a $20 million apartment in Los Angeles. Yeah. I would love to know the story behind it. Who built this?

Whose folly was this to build this place? I would love to know who it would belong to. How many divorces did he have? Yeah. So it's $8,400 a month to buy this place. Patreon.com slash GOG.

GOG. Exactly. You know, I'm not a fan of Omaha, but I could be. But I could be. As long as they have high-speed internet, that's all you need, right? Yeah. Yep. Yeah. All right. Well, that's all I have for you gents this week.

Take care and I'll see you guys next time. All right. In Omaha. Omaha. Brick-a-brick. So I thought this was pretty cool. We've talked about animal cruelty and all that and how zoos are kind of outmoded and something we should move beyond.

There's a circus in Germany, the Circus Ronchali. Ronchali. I don't know how it's pronounced. They have gone all hologram. No real animals. How do they do that? Because holograms don't really exist. How does it work? You know, Tupac is touring.

I don't know how it works. Lots of cameras and smoke and things of that nature. The pictures look pretty cool. Like, you can't tell. The thing with a hologram is you can never really tell. Like, you have to actually be there to know if it's any good or not. Yeah. So it seems cool. I don't know.

We'll have to find out at some point. Maybe you can use your little travel site to get yourself over to Germany to see where the circus is at and go take a look as soon as we can travel again. I was going to say, I don't think they're letting this in. But I'm looking at the picture of the elephant on the front. And it's like, you can see like a bunch of different versions of the elephant around the circle of the ring.

So, yeah, not really sure how that's going to fly. But, hey, they're trying. Something new. They're trying. Is it on the blockchain? Not yet. So, and because we always do this and we've gone to this well many times on this show, the German words.

And I loved this article. Hamsterkopf, Corona Zeit. There's a German word for your pandemic experience. And there's some really funny stuff in here. So, yeah, Hamsterkopf, which first emerged during World War II and began circulating in German media last March, means hamster buy, which is basically when everybody ran out and bought all the fucking toilet paper.

So, they had a word for that. Yeah. So, and they've got quite a few in here. They're all very, very funny. So, highly recommend checking this out. I am not going to attempt to read half of these things, but they've got great words for just about everything. And, again, way better than English in terms of describing this last year of hell that we've all lived through.

Yeah. Halt! Corona Zeit! You can't fax this. Fax? Oh, good times. Feedback Loop.

Over on Patreon, we've got James. Just James. Thanks, James. Yeah, thanks, James. And everybody, if you sign up on Patreon versus PayPal, we get the same cut. So, don't feel like you're, you know, saving us anything. We're grandfathered in on Patreon. So, we get the old school pricing as far as the pound of flesh that they take.

And you get, basically, you get the episodes as soon as I'm done editing them. Sometimes it's ahead of the curve. Sometimes it's not. But you do get them in high res, 128, and ad free. That's all we got for you over at Patreon right now. But over at PayPal, we've got Simon, John, Nikolai, Matthew, Michael, Jonathan, Matt, Judge, Shaleen, Doug, Charlie, Adam, Nicola, Thomas, Michael.

And Michael says, Good morning, Grumps. I've been listening to the show for a few weeks, and I had to throw a few bucks your way, so I sent 20 bucks through PayPal. As for my recent five-star review, I didn't mean to imply you are as old as my grandpa, but rather I was implying you remind me of my grandfather's great disdain for all the shit that is wrong in the world, and like him, you don't hold back or sugarcoat your opinions about it.

In looking at my review, I definitely did imply you are as old as my grandpa, so sorry about that, but not sorry enough to go edit the review. Stay grumpy. Thank you, Michael, and everybody else who donated. Well, I actually, I did the math on that, and if you had made questionable life decisions or, say, grew up in a small town, I am old enough to be a grandpa.

Yeah, wasn't Michaela on Discord that posted the math on that one? I thought Michaela posted that. She's like, actually, Brian, let me explain. Let me do some math here. Yeah. Over at Twitter, Stephen writes in with thoughts and sends us a link.

Mozilla launches Total Cookie Protection with Firefox 86 for Mac. It's their latest privacy feature, and it will be basically the new privacy option will create separate cookie jars for every website you visit to prevent cross-site tracking, to which I say, how the fuck do they miss branding this as cookie jars?

Yes, because they branded it as Total Cookie Protection. Yeah, that's just lame. Yeah, they talk about cookie jars in every bit of documentation, but why didn't they call it cookie jars? Cookie jars. Why not? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Who fucking uses Firefox anymore anyway? Jeff writes in.

Been on more than one Zoom funeral service. It's a shame that funeral homes don't know how to be prepared for families to stream online. The audio and video and internet connections are just horrible. You would think that funeral parlors who have some of the most insane margins in the world would at least know how to, like, you know, wire up in this day and age.

But guess not. Maybe that's our new consulting gig. Maybe. I think they've been dealing more with storage at the moment. Yeah, that's true. And having to expand that. So, you know. No room for the routers and the cameras. That's true. Yes. Right Film Sleep Repeat writes in. Wondering what you guys think of Fairphone.

I love the idea of being able to swap out parts rather than all that waste. That would be great. Does it run any of my iOS software? Because if it doesn't, I don't care. Yep. Probably not. Libertarianitis writes in. Cali has rolling brownouts when it, quote, checks notes. Gets hot in the summertime.

How are you going to compare to Texas? And a couple of eye emojis, eye rolling emojis. Here's the deal. We have been talking about how shitty California is for eight years. Okay? We're not saying that California is better than Texas. We never have and we probably never will.

We are getting better here. I didn't get hit by any brownouts this summer. But we have been saying forever. I responded on Twitter, like, where, okay. Apparently, all the snowflakes are in Texas with the snowflakes because Texans got really fucking touchy that we dared to say anything about their state fucking up.

We've been saying California has been fucking up for years. So get over it. Move on. Yeah. At least we're recalling our governor soon. So, yeah. Look, when we're not on fire, we can't turn on the air conditioner. You're the first person, Brian, that said we were a third world country probably by episode three.

So, yeah. We've been on the train. Yep. Yeah. Oh, I lost Vincent Roulette. Here we are. You lost Vincent Roulette. Actually, you won Vincent Roulette this week because he only sent us one link.

Yeah. I know. He must have been sobered out of whiskey over there. Yeah. Vincent writes in, hey, Grumps, the fiend from Little Ireland is back with some news on facial recognition in schools. Greeting from the Emerald Isle. And this is and says fair play to the data commissioner for saying nope.

And this is an article about the Data Protection Commission intervened over school's rather extreme facial recognition plan. Yeah. So there was a 2020 report showing it handled over 10,000 cases last year, an increase of 9% compared to 2019. This is Kilkenny's secondary school using facial recognition to monitor attendance.

Now, pardon my – it's been a long time since I've been in school, but whatever happened to fucking taking roll? Why do we need facial recognition? Bueller. Bueller. Yep. Bueller. It's funny. So they scrapped the plan because you don't need it.

Well, it's funny. It sounded like somebody came along with a solution for a problem that they didn't have, and they were just like, ooh, a solution. Let's look at the solution. And then somebody goes, well, that's a solution for a problem we don't have. So moving on. Yeah. And Martin writes in, did you come across Morning Brew yet?

It's a little tailored daily email news summary. I subscribed a couple days ago and kind of like it. One funny little thing it contained today, a Clubhouse bio generator. Speaking of Clubhouse, I listened to a couple of things on it, and it can be interesting. But I think in the end, it's a huge waste of time. That's probably my biggest issue with it.

No curation, some yelling, no editing, non-experts taking the stage. Much better to listen to a podcast like yours. Well, Martin, you nailed that one on the head. Yes, you can listen to non-experts right here. Yes, and I do subscribe to the Morning Brew, and they have a couple other ones.

They have an emerging tech newsletter that is hit or miss. You can get like one story a week out of it that's decent. But Morning Brew is good. Cool. Steve writes in, okay, I got a pushback on you guys saying the NVIDIA releasing mining cards is a good thing. In reality, most in the gaming community have several issues with it.

One, since both the mining cards and the gaming cards use the same GPU, a GPU that is used for a mining card is GPU that is not used for a gaming card. Given the global silicon shortage and the premium, they will be charging for the mining cards. There are questions if this will exacerbate the already massive GPU shortage.

Two, the mining card will have absolutely no resale value, as they will not have any display out, so they are useless to gamers once their life as a mining card is over. Three, the hash rate lock they are putting in the gaming cards is in software drivers. It only applies to the Ethereum hashing algorithm.

And since it is software, how long before someone is able to hack it and remove the lock? Bottom line is, NVIDIA is trying to sell this as a win for the gamers, when in reality, it's more of a cash grab and an attempt to kill the secondhand GPU market. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Well thought out points. Yep. And Jose writes in, for those who like Kim's Convenience and want to see season five, and it's a link over to YouTube.

Very cool. Jack Light writes in. Have that in the show notes. Jason, I believe you recently recommended to Brian a certain Daft Punk live concert to watch, and now Daft Punk has broken up. The curse continues. Yeah, I guess that's kind of on us. Yep. And just a little backstory here, Brian shat on me.

He's like, oh, somebody else is giving credit for something that I did. And I'm like, no, actually, go back and listen to it. That one was mine. I knew you were going to point this out. I had to. I had to. Well, look. Look, what are the chances that you would actually recommend a Daft Punk live concert to me?

99.9% of the time, that would be the other way around. Right. But it was 100% of the time on this one, so. But I was on Vincent whiskey levels at that point. So, you know, it happens. Eddie says, please stop. You guys were very hard on Texas for not being regulated on their horrible management on the cold weather event.

Just to be fair, California, on the other hand, didn't fare too well on the fires started by the power companies that are highly regulated. No. And why take the time to write in and ask us, do you work for the utilities in Texas? Are you a politician?

Because if you're not either of those, you should be pissed off at what happened in Texas. Oh, just as we are here in California, read previous comment that we just said that we've been shitting on our own state forever. If you don't say something and do something, they're going to keep doing the same thing and you're going to get the same result.

And we're in the process of kicking out our governor because he's let the state burn down. And, you know, my I don't know about yours, Brian, you haven't been here for very long. You've been up in Canada. But my electric bill is through the roof because we have to pay for all the fires that they started. So anyway, Eddie, sorry.

There's a technological solution that could have saved lives in Texas. They chose not to use it. And ask yourself, why aren't you being as hard on them as a couple of fat old white podcasters a couple thousand miles away are being? That's all I'm saying. You know, be as hard on your own people as we are because we're hard on our people, too.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. So get over it, Texans. Raf writes in, there's a British version of Grumpy Geeks. You guys should listen to them discuss S-P-A-C-S. SPACs. SPACs. What is a SPAC? And this is the Trash Future podcast. And they talk about it in an episode that he is linking to in our show notes.

Also, each week they pick a useless product or service and have the other host guess what it does by providing a name and a couple of hints. Pretty hilarious. And I took a quick look into them and their Patreon and they make 10 times as much as we do. We're doing something wrong, Jason. Yes, we are. I think shitting on Texans is probably a bad thing for us because it's a very big state.

Maybe we shouldn't do that. All right. He also sent a link to Raising the Steaks. The first 3D printed ribeye is unveiled. Hey, look. The Texans took the first shot. This is an Israeli company that has basically 3D printing ribeye steaks using a culture of live animal tissue and what could be a leap forward for lab-grown meat once it receives regulatory approval.

But there's a lack of regulatory framework for this because it's new, so that could basically slow this all down. I would totally eat this. Okay. Why not? Yeah. Why not? I'm looking forward to it. There you have it. Jim, like your show, but don't celebrate an actress getting booted from Hollywood for expressing her thoughts.

She has a point about the sliding slope of tyranny. Don't like on. Don't like on. It's disturbing and hurts your show. I don't think we were celebrating the cancellation of her. It was more of a group befuddlement about how she could be so unbelievably stupid to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory in such a spectacular and unnecessary way.

She was going to be set for life and she just had to tweet. That's the head scratcher here. There are learned ways to make points about the sliding slope of tyranny that don't involve comparing fucking Nazis to. That's just so stupid. And yes, we weren't celebrating it. Give me a fucking break.

God, you people are just pissed off about everything right now. Everybody's pissed off at everything. I get it. I get it. We're all sick of this. I get it. Highlander writes in, FM radio hacking. Just thought I'd pop in and tell you about the one time I stopped by my local pub. The local news was about to start. So I went to the bathroom.

While in the bathroom, I turned on my FM radio transmitter, which one carries into the bathroom apparently at the pub and played the final 20 seconds of Grumpy Old Geeks podcast episode 490. As luck would have it, moments before our prime minister was about to speak, the podcast popped on.

Let's just say that brought the house down. Thanks, geeks. Great show. I would have loved to have seen that. That would have been great to have been a fly on the wall for that. And over at iTunes, Millennial Surf writes in with a four star, truly grumpy, sometimes concerning. They truly are grumpy, and that's a good thing.

The topics they cover on the show are always entertaining and thoughtful. Please also keep the Star Wars segment going with Dave. Four stars until Brian explains why he hates Hot Chip. I've listened to the show for years, and I still don't know why. It's concerning. I really appreciate the content.

Thank you. What the hell is he talking about, Brian? Hot Chip is a band that I probably maybe discussed once on the show six years ago. Maybe. I haven't even thought about the band Hot Chip for five or six years. When this came in, I actually told my lady in the tube to play Hot Chip.

I've never hated Hot Chip. I think there's one album that I particularly like, and the rest of their stuff I just don't care that much for. It's fine. It's not top of mind. I demand a recount on this star rating. This is some bullshit here. Millennial Surf, give us back our star.

Damn it. I don't recall hating Hot Chip, and if I did, it was a very long time ago. Here's another one. This is great. And so if we add this one star to the Millennial Surf's four star, we'd get a five star. This is M. Nice.

If they stuck to tech, I'd still be listening. I was a loyal fan for five years, obviously through the Hot Chip hating days. Then 2020 hit, and seems every other subject revolved around their disdain for the former president. For the record, I agreed with their stances on most, but that's not why I listen to a tech podcast.

If I wanted that, there's plenty of other political talking heads. So I took a break until after the election, thinking they would finally leave the political mess behind. I was wrong. I look for tech podcasts that actually talk about tech stuff. I may check in down the road, and hopefully they'll go back to their roots and talk tech and make it seem like they actually want to be a podcast again.

Instead of Brian's nonstop whiny drivel, followed up with a loud sniff. See ya. Okay. Hey. All right. Whatever. Yep. Rock and roll. Again, I don't understand. I don't understand how you can say that there's a separation between tech and politics these days.

We don't talk about tech in the ways that like, oh gosh, Adobe's having their fan forum, and let's talk about the stupid new updates that they're doing to Photoshop. That's never been the way that we talked about tech. We talk about tech in terms of how it fits into our culture and our lives, which involves politics.

Yep. Don't like it. Sometimes. That's fine. Go listen to Reply All. Oh, wait. You can't. You can't. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash review and toss us a four-star review telling me that I don't like a band that you really like from seven fucking years ago.

Shout out to Ken W. for starring the entire back catalog on Overcast and sending us proof. Now, if we could just get another 200 or 2,000 people to do the same, we might be back in the running. But yeah, I don't know. I think the ship has sailed on the Overcast ratings, Jason.

I think you might want to just move on. I know. I need a new white whale. That's my problem. And the thing is, nobody listens on Overcast anymore. Remember, everybody's on Spotify. Closing shout outs. Eh, fuck it. No shout outs.

Nobody deserves anything this week and nobody died. So screw it. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. I'll give a shout out to Hot Chip. Yeah, shout out to Hot Chip. I'll give a shout out to Hot Chip. Yeah. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, please consider visiting... You know Hot Chip's going to break up next week now, right?

Visiting gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on and we'll love you forever. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show497. To be honest, I don't even know if Hot Chip is still together. From there, you can find all the links we talked about in this episode. You can get links to old episodes, donate to the show, leave feedback or ask questions.

Watch videos from Hot Chip, buy our swag, join our Discord channel and don't forget to donate to the show. And if you know somebody who has too much hope in their hearts and spring in their step, then definitely tell them about the show. Misery Loves Company. And don't forget to get your NTF Hot Chip memorabilia. Stay grumpy.

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