499: Forever Old

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. Apologies for any noise because, you know, we're recording. Therefore, the neighbors decided to trim trees today. Yes, yes. Yesterday, I had the Property Brothers outside filming. I saw the photo. Yeah. They look dapper as always.

Yeah. Slow as fuck. They've been working on this show. They're like, this guy's getting a kitchen redone. They've been working on it for four months. Look, even if they're famous contractors, they're still contractors. They're still contractors. That's true. It's true. I love it, though. Like, as soon as they were done with the scene, they would all applaud.

They're like, yay, we are so great. Cabinet. Cabinet. Yeah. Awesome. We're awesome. I just, oh, God, I hope they finish soon. I really do. The dogs don't like it very much. Yeah. So, Ronnie pointed out, listener Ronnie, that as soon as we started talking about Kim's convenience, it got canceled.

The GOG curse strikes again. Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. It is a good show. Do we have anybody on our hit list that we need to take out this week? Well, I mean, we should, well, hopefully NFTs are going to go. Oh, that's true. That's true. I mean, you know, apparently we have a whole new segment about them, but we'll get to that later.

Nifty news. So, I had my first Facebook censorship this week. I got censored for the very first time. I tried to share a post from your local epidemiologist page, Dr. Caitlin Jetlina. She's quite popular on the Facebook because she posts a lot.

She has a PhD in epidemiology and biostatistics, and she made a post about, as I'm sure you've seen by now, CDC published their guidelines for vaccinated people. Here are my thoughts. And she gets into it. There's nothing extreme. There's nothing crazy. It's basically just the science and her thoughts on the various risk levels of, say, hanging out with your when your mom is vaccinated and you aren't and all of that sort of stuff.

No big deal, right? It's been shared. It had been shared at least 4,300 times and had over 1,500 comments by the time I shared it. I shared it. It never got posted. And I didn't really think too much about it because usually when I'm engaging on social media, it might be a little bit late and I might have had a little bit of wine.

Whatever. So, maybe just a glitch or whatever. 24 hours later, I got a notification that my post went against community standards and only I could see it. Okay. I think, well, that's bullshit, obviously. This is not the fake information that Facebook is supposed to be working against.

This is the information. This is what we're supposed to be sharing. So, I go through the process of trying to appeal the decision. And at the very end of the process, Facebook tells me I can't appeal the decision because during the COVID-19 crisis, they don't have enough staff available.

Oh, God. So, you're basically just shit out of luck. So, of course, I immediately reshared the link and it went through with no problem this time. Okay. There it is. All right. I can see it on my page. 24 hours later, I get another message saying your post has gone against the community services and only you can see the post.

And at that point, I just threw my hands up in the air and said, oh, fuck it. So, you know, they've spent some time during the pandemic. They've made a new playbook. Now, this is a playbook that obviously isn't geared toward what your problem is, unfortunately.

This is in response to the accusations of polarization. Right. And I love this. During a Thursday webinar for employees, Chris Cox, who's like the head honcho over there in that department, said, here's a new document. And it will equip all of you to go home and have dinner with friends and family and explain why public perceptions of Facebook are wrong.

Now, I know that this playbook exists because I actually have two friends that work at Facebook. Oh, you didn't tell me this. I have seen their public posts on Facebook that basically point by point exactly match this. Really?

Yeah. That's funny. So, you know, I understand why you work for a company that basically the rest of the world has decided is kind of evil and we don't like anymore. So you want to counter that. You want to feel good about the place that you work. So it's nice that they give you some bullet points that will make you feel good about where you work.

Nice. Oh, you know, you might want to think about changing jobs if you have your own propaganda machine inside of the company to tell you why you should be working for the company. Mm-hmm. Just saying. Just saying. Just saying. And I got a little tech update for the show here.

This will, for those privacy advocates out there, since, you know, Overcast and a couple other sites have now started to tell people what is going on with the show downloads. It's like, okay, you're being tracked here. You're being tracked there.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We've been using a service called Chartable for a very long time. And it's just a third-party tracking service. So we can get another set of eyes on the numbers. But when you do that, you have to put a, what we call a pre-penned URL onto our RSS feed MP3 URL, which means it goes to their service first.

Then they do a redirect to the actual MP3. And nowadays, you can have multiple layers of redirects. We only have one. We only use Chartable. But there are other stats out there for podcasting that you can still add on. So I think three layers is the max you're supposed to be able to have, which is still ridiculous.

Just enough for winter. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's like spoff. You know, you only need one single point of failure. That's what the S is for. So now you have three points of failure. But this is not the issue. We've gotten a couple emails.

Well, we got one email, and I've gotten a couple side-channel texts from people saying that, uh-oh, we use this different ad URL-blocking software. What do you know about us? And they're blocking the Chartable URL. They're saying, oh, no, this is a redirect, and it is spammy McSpam-a-lot and it's tracking McTrack-a-lot.

Tracking McTrack-face. And they're not letting people get the MP3s. And I'm like, well, that sucks, since every URL we have is on Chartable. I'm sure it's a minor subset of people out there. So in the spirit of transparency, just to let everybody know, all we used them for was just so we could get stats on downloads.

And if this is actually one of those things where we've got a Schrodinger stats issue where actually viewing the stats is causing a problem with the actual stats, and the stats are now dead, we've removed it. So there is no more Chartable out there for us.

So you can sleep well at night knowing that we are not tracking you, even though we weren't tracking you to begin with. And, yeah, there you have it. Okay. So just hopefully our numbers will go back up because our numbers suck. They do. They do. In the news.

Travis Kalanick, our favorite villain, is back in the news, Brian. Oh, he didn't just go buy an island somewhere and live a life of luxury? No, he's living on the cloud. He started a company called Cloud Kitchens. I think we talked about this. Yes, we did. Yes, we did.

Well, it turns out Douchebag can't change his stripes. So now he's pissed off all of the neighbors of the cloud kitchens because there's too much traffic and people are coming by and picking up their, you know, their orders. Too much Uber, too much Lyft and DoorDash and Postmates and all of the above.

Right. So and he's like, fuck them. We'll fix it later. So there you have it. Fair enough. Travis going to Travis. Travis going to Travis. Yep. Yep. There you go. I found this really interesting article over on TechCrunch. The title is, Should There Be Some Law Against Raising Three Times in One Year?

And this article discusses a couple different companies that have done multiple rounds of funding in a year just to get money and bilk people that are stupid, including a company called AgentSync. Another one called Conscious.VC. This is kind of a long form read for TechCrunch.

They usually don't do very long articles, but this one's fairly long. Well worth reading. The TLDR on this. Should there be a law against raising funding three times in one year? Yes. Ooh, betterage. Betterage is rolling in his grave. An actual yes.

Yeah, I read this. It's, yeah, they're basically just fudging the numbers. Yep. No figure. Fudging the numbers. To get more and more and more money. Yep. Yeah. And Twitter is coming back in the news with spaces. Mm-hmm. Ooh, spaces. What is a Twitter space?

Twitter space is basically a clubhouse ripoff. Okay. So they've, you know, they've already got stories. So why not just rip off somebody else as we go along here? So now they're going after Clubhouse. They got the email newsletter company they just bought. Yeah.

Twitter is just kind of, they're throwing poop at the wall and seeing what sticks at this point. I don't know if you use the Twitter client on your phone, but I do. I do. And it has shown up. Yeah. Have you joined a space yet? Have you seen it? No, because I don't give a shit. Yeah, that too.

There's that. Look, Twitter is an interesting company. I've always said they have the best PR in the business because everybody talks about, talks, you know, in regular media. Nobody will just say in social media, they always say on Twitter and they go and find things on Twitter.

Everybody, well, not everybody, very few people actually use Twitter, but the people that use Twitter use it a lot. They should have a business model in and of what they do themselves. I don't understand why they don't, or obviously they're not happy with the business model that they have, so they have to expand and become everything.

I don't get it. Twitter does what Twitter does, and it does it very well. It doesn't need to do with these other things. Well, you know, the thing is, they're headless over there because Jack is off running Tidal now, and before that, I mean, he runs Square. You know, all these other things, well, Square makes a lot of money, Tidal, that's funny.

That's just funny. But, you know, Twitter should tweet and tweet and twat. Yes, I agree. That's what they should do. You know how we just discussed there should be some sort of law against raising three times in one year? There should be some sort of law that if you're the CEO of a company, you're the CEO of the company, not multiple companies.

Just run the one you got. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Anyway, speaking of Clubhouse, we've talked about their glaring privacy issues that they launched with because, you know, everybody launches not even so much in beta. It's more gamma at this point, and they just drop it and let, you know, we'll figure it out later is kind of the deal.

They've made some updates finally. They're inching towards a beta. They no longer require access to your phone contacts to invite people to the platform. You only have to add their phone number directly, which is nice, I suppose. The company chief, Paul Davison, added that you can ask the company to delete any contacts you've already uploaded.

I'm sure that'll go well. Yeah. I'm sure they have tons of customer service people around to respond to that request and go ahead and get on that. Because all these companies are so good at that. The service is also expanding its basic functionality, including support for link sharing. You know, that whole HTTP thing that started all this sort of stuff.

And language filters to limit chats to those in your preferred tongue. Nominations to join a club can come from the group itself rather than individuals. And if you've dealt with abuse, there are now more tools to spot it and keep it off the platform. And they are launching a creator boost thing. They're calling it creator first accelerator program that gives producers the resources to bring their projects to fruition.

A whopping 20 people will be eligible at first for the initiative. Oh, my God. Yeah. I saw this over at The Onion and I thought it really kind of summed up Clubhouse in a nutshell. It's The Onion's Guide to Clubhouse.

And it's just a short Q&A. What's the purpose of Clubhouse? To connect eavesdroppers with blowhards. Yep. Nailed that one. What makes it different from other social media sites? You have to ask for permission to speak before harassing people, which is also somewhat true. How can I sign up?

You on Clubhouse, please. Yeah. The whole thing is pretty spot on, even though it's The Onion. But, you know, in a long enough timeline, if it's in The Onion, it will become true. That is true. That is very true. Yeah. Clubhouse just turned one, believe it or not. And I love this.

Between Spaces and Clubhouse, Chris Lockhead kind of summed it up. It's like, so we fixed a lot of what was wrong with the internet with podcasting because you can go listen to it whenever you want. And Clubhouse seems to have redefined appointment programming with webinars with no video.

And that's the big deal. It's like head scratcher. Big head scratcher. Oh, this one. This one. I have been down the bit hole, the crypto hole this week. And I saw this one come through.

It's called Bitcoin's Greatest Feature is Also Its Existential Threat. Now, as I've been going down the crypto hole, I've been trying to figure out what is the worst case scenario with Bitcoin and blockchain? What's its Achilles heel?

Right. And, you know, I think the actual fact that everything that goes on the blockchain and is in the ledger goes on the blockchain and is in the ledger. That's pretty much it. Day one, when we first started talking about the blockchain, I was always like, and I think we discussed this.

What if somebody puts a whole bunch of child porn in there? Been there, done that. Already up there. Yep. Yep. What if in my, like, what if Snowden, instead of going to Glenn Greenwald, had said, screw it, I'm going to put all these leaks on the blockchain. What would happen then?

And this article over at Wired is, it's an opinion piece, but it kind of, it's like, this has to be in the zeitgeist because there are a lot of articles about this nowadays. A lot of people thinking the same thing I'm thinking. And it's like, what happens when, and this is saying that, you know, its greatest feature, which is the, the ledger on the blockchain could be its greatest threat because what happens in China when somebody starts putting up forbidden texts?

Do they, do they fork it? Does Russia fork it? Do they, we then have, you know, this bifurcated blockchain? Possibly, possibly. And I mean, this goes on top of all the other problems with, with Bitcoin and Ethereum as it already stands, but it's like a lot of people are trying to figure out how to, I don't know, break it, which is good.

But, you know, this grand experiment in crypto, this should have happened before it became this juggernaut that it already is. So, I don't know, this is, this is an ongoing story and we'll talk a little bit more about it shortly. Actually, we'll talk about it next. Mark Andre wrote in and said, hello, I still haven't listened to the last episode, but I noticed that in 496 and 497, you talked about Bitcoin more than you usually do.

Here's an article I've read back in January that could be interesting to prove your point. And this is from crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com. And it's called the BitShort Inside Crypto's Doomsday Machine. So, yes, a lot of, it is in the air right now that, that perhaps the blockchain and Bitcoin aren't so good.

And this gets into something called tethers, which are in crypto. To simplify a bit, tethers are issued by a crypto company called Tether Limited, meaning that if Tether Limited says you own a tether, then you do. That's how it works. Tether Limited also says, that's basically Bitcoin in a nutshell, right?

I own a Bitcoin because I say I do. Well, actually, no, that is different because everybody has to, you have to have consensus that you own a Bitcoin. You have to agree. Yes. It has to be on the ledger that I own this, this bit of Bitcoin along with this piece of child pornography. Exactly. 51% of the blockchain has to agree that you own that.

Tether is just Tether. They just say you have it. Yes. Exactly. So they say that one tether is worth exactly one U.S. dollar. Can they do that? Well, they say they can because they hold one dollar's worth of assets for each tether. But are those assets actual dollars? No, they are not. So what if assets go down in value?

Don't worry. They will not. Okay. But can we at least see the assets? No, you may not. Yeah. Yeah. Did you read this whole article? Well, yeah, I did read the whole thing. There was no way I could summarize it any better than that. That's basically the TLDR right there.

But it's frightening. Yeah. Yeah. And they're being investigated by the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, which is basically the one. Which I applaud, but I would like them to focus on target number one right now, which is the Orange Menace. Let's keep on that.

We can come back to Tether later. I don't know. This one might actually have more damaging consequences to the world because Tether is, I mean, honestly, if you read this, you will never buy a Bitcoin or Ether ever again because it is a house of cards.

It is a total house of cards if this person is to be trusted and that their research is accurate. Yes. Yeah. And Uber and Lyft, back in the news again, they've decided to finally call a truce and now they are sharing data on drivers that have been banned for sexual or physical assault.

Well, good. Okay. It took so long. It took so long. Come on. Do they need to share this data? Can't. Okay. I guess. Okay. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Just banned for sexual or physical assault doesn't necessarily imply that they've gone through the legal system, that they've been charged with it, et cetera.

This is just somebody internally. Shouldn't they be turning that over to the police though? Brian, we talked about this. I have so many questions, Jason. We have discussed this on the show. Each company has their own star chamber where they go through and they figure out the merits of a case, whether the police should be called, whether the client has called the police.

And in most cases, they're going to be at arm's length and say, not our problem, dude. Not our problem. If only we had some sort of societal entity that we had all signed off on that perhaps our tax dollars funded that maybe existed purely for this sort of thing.

If only. Yes. If there was only some body that would take care of the public safety. I don't know who that might be. It's a head scratcher, isn't it, Jason? It is. It really, really is. Your tax dollars at work.

And I love it. Uber said it had in 2018, 3,045 sexual assault reports in the U.S. The U.S. alone. Jesus Christ. Yeah. That's a lot. That's like eight a day. Or 80 a day. I'm sorry. 80 a day. And that was just in the last year when, theoretically, none of us were fucking taking ride shares anywhere.

No, no, no, no, no. It's 2018. 2018. Okay. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Yeah. Rape away 2018. Jesus Christ. Barrett writes in, so Amazon is building on their productivity, increasing gamification program.

And this is from The Verge. Amazon expands gamification program that encourages warehouse employees to work harder. From the article, it says, but the games themselves are not designed to reward employees with tangible real-world benefits, the report says, and are instead ways for Amazon to encourage productivity as warehouse work becomes increasingly more tedious.

And Barrett says, I wonder if this will expand to include NFTs. Yes. And I wonder if it will expand to include bathroom breaks. Because, you know, diapers. No, you get a virtual bathroom break. You get a virtual, take a virtual dump. Great.

Yeah. They're doing anything they can do. And I can see it. You know, when we talked about these games before when they first came out. And it's like, okay, anything to kill the tedium, I can understand. But that's not what they're there for. They're there to make you more productivity-oriented and get your shit in the box faster.

Yes. Exactly. I mean, all I can ever think of is the I Love Lucy skit, right? Yep. When I think of Amazon warehouses, that's what I picture in my mind. Exactly. And, Brian, we have a new segment for today. Hopefully for just today. Nifty news. I have to say, I saw you throughout the week put all these stories in there.

And I was like, I'm so fucking done with NFTs. I don't care. But it just keeps getting better. That's the whole problem. Because, you know, this is one of those things where it's like, I can see this from a distance. I can see the scam happening and unfolding in real time.

And as much as I scream, as much as I yell, I'm just watching people empty their pockets and putting it into the paper shredder. And on the other side are just all the criminals going, give us more coin. Give us more coin. And nobody sees it. It's just driving me crazy. So, yes, New York Times sums it up best with their first headline, JPEG file sells for $69 million.

Way to go, New York Times. I love you for that one. And so, that's what started. It finally sold it at Christie's. The Beeple. The Beeple art. Beeple art. Beeple. So, and it turns out this entity known as Metakovan.

Got it. Yep. Who was the bad guy in The Matrix 2? Who is you today? Yes, we are here to speak with the Merovingian. Of course. He has been expecting you. Follow me. Anyway, so here's the deal.

So, Metakovan bought it with funds from the MetaPurse NFT fund. So, it's a big fund for NFTs. And previously, this is where it gets real fun here. So, last year, Beeple put up 20 pieces of art and the B20 collection.

Well, it turns out MetaPurse bought all of them. Okay. All 20 of them. Right. Now, then they flip this to turn this into where you can buy part of the collection using a fractionalized token called, you guessed it, B20.

Oh, so I can own a part of a JPEG? You can own a part of a JPEG. Wow. Which pixel would you like, Brian? Blue, please. Remember the million-dollar homepage from back in the day? Yep. Oh, yes. Yes. It's all becoming clear.

So, here's the thing. So, you have this fractionalized purchase of this NFT pool that they've made. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Turns out, turns out, guess who owns part of that crypto fund of the B20s?

Who? Beeple. Oh! Beeple just bought his own art. Okay. Yeah. Drive up the price, right? He's a business partner with MetaKovan for some different things. And so, the scam just keeps going at that point.

And, oh, my God, it's just, it is so blatant how scammy, scammy this is. Who are the people that are buying these things? Crypto millionaires who made a bunch of money when they bought this stuff early, and they've got too much money and no sense because they didn't earn it.

They just walked into it, and they've got buckets of money. Okay. And, also, the scammers themselves. Right. So, you know, the meat in this bullshit sandwich basically comes down to the fact that this is, it's a grift. It is a total grift.

And, you know, I even laid this out when I went on Lockhead on Marketing last week. And I'm like, look, people are going to buy these. They're going to ramp them up. They're going to sell them. And it's a game of hot potato. It is a really shitty game of hot potato that is, it's going to crash.

And it's going to crash fast because people are just, you know, they're going to figure it out fast. This one is just too bullshitty for them to keep going for very long. Now, of course, Nosec sent this one in.

I was going to throw it in before, but I saw that Nosec sent it in. So, thank you, Nosec. And he said, should this be now considered as cat burglars stealing art? And over the weekend, the Nifty Gateway had a bunch of people's accounts basically hacked into.

So, what they did was the Nifty Gateway is one of those places where it's unlike OpenSea, where you have to use Ether to buy the actual NFT. You can actually put in a credit card on Nifty Gateway because they're trying to ease the process of people to get into NFT. Of course, they are.

Of course, they are. Pump up our prices, please. Yeah. So, a lot of these people had their credit card on file and they found tens and twenties of thousands of dollars were missing from their bank accounts or their credit cards. And had been basically purchasing NFT on Nifty Gateway, then exfiltrating it to other accounts and then reselling it on Discord.

So, there was like no chain of custody because everything's anonymous on the blockchain. And yeah, except everything's not anonymous. But you own this bit of red from this JPEG. I know. See, that's the whole funny thing. It's like, okay, your head's going to explode when you figure out somebody just stole a bag of bullshit.

They're risking jail to go and to break into a computer system, use stolen credit cards to buy things that just don't already exist, to sell them to somebody else who wants something that doesn't really exist.

I mean, we got to get out of the house, man. Everybody needs the vaccine because people are just going stupid crazy right now. People, get out of the house, go for a walk, look at the stars, do something because this is madness. It's absolute and utter madness. It is.

It's insane. I mean, I guess you could make an argument that it's no more insane than, oh, I don't know, the stock market, except for the fact that that shit exists. These companies exist. They create value in the real world. Unless you're Uber. We've completely untethered from any reality with this now.

It's just completely untethered, which is fine, but don't, you know, Brian, but no, we know we're tethered because there's tether coin. Come on. Okay. Look, do what you want with your money, but do it with the money that you would save to blow in Vegas to begin with.

Like, because I don't want to have to fucking bail your ass out at the end. And that's where it's going to end up. We all know this. It's going to end up with these people are going to fucking lose all the people at the bottom that are coming in to pump up the prices are going to lose all their money. And who gets to support them then?

We do. Well, also phenomenal. What happens when Bitcoin crashes? How much money does Apple have in Bitcoin? How much money does Tesla have in Bitcoin? I mean, granted, I wouldn't shed a tear if the Winklevii twins went down, but that's just, you know, that's just entertainment.

Well, the people at the top would never go down, though. They sell when they see the wind is blowing and they may lose a little bit of their value, but they don't lose it all. It's the people hanging. It's the GameStoppers on Reddit that end up holding the fucking bag.

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Media Candy. So, the Grammys were this last weekend. I thought you said you weren't going to watch award shows anymore. Well, I don't want to watch them. My wife, it's work for her.

Like, you know, it's part of her gigs. Like, she has to watch this sort of stuff. And because I was sitting on the couch with her, I ended up watching it as well. They weren't bad, honestly. They pivoted through this coronavirus thing quite well, I thought.

No speeches. No presenters. Just performances. Now, granted, I could give a shit about anybody that was performing at the Grammys, because I'm old and it's not my music. But, you know, it was actually a great format. Did you ever see the Jules Holland show from over in England, where he basically just has, like, three or four bands and a rotating stage, and that's the show.

They perform live. That's it. That's what the Grammys were like. And what a great format. I hope they never return to the previous bullshit that they did before. Wouldn't that be great? It would be. I did watch the Megan Thee Stallion dance number. I got to say, the showmanship was off the hook.

I mean, it was pretty good. I can make some serious arguments about most of the stuff that were on the Grammys isn't actually music, it's performance, but it's good performance. Yeah, I mean, it was entertaining, that's for sure. Yeah, so I found myself actually watching the Grammys for the first time in years.

Perfect. Okay, well, we found somebody that's at least COVID resistant. And I actually found a new podcast this week. It's been around for a while, but I actually started listening to it. Pivot, hosted by Vox Media. Now, I stayed away from this probably because it's Kara Swisher, and I'm not a huge Kara Swisher fan.

However, I was not aware of Professor Scott Galloway, and he was a guest host, or not guest host, he was a guest on Bill Maher. And he is an angry, angry man. I love him. I do love him. So now I've started listening to the podcast because of him.

It's pretty good. They talk a lot about tech stuff, but it's mostly from a company and investment. Well, they're not saying to invest, and they're not trying to do that, but that's definitely like they go into the fundamentals of companies. And, you know, if you are thinking of investing in tech and don't know too much, this is a podcast you should listen to.

It's very good. And I do like it just because he's so angry. Yeah. Is he on all the time now, or just that? Yeah, yeah. They are the two hosts of this podcast now, so that's what makes it pretty good. Okay. Yeah, I'll sign up for that because her, I can, you know, take or leave.

Sometimes she does really good interviews, sometimes. But, yeah, no, I love him. Get his newsletter, too. It's pretty good. Okay. I'll definitely sign up for that. So, yeah, I've become a new fan of him. All right. Anything he does, I will do. I've been watching National Geographic kids shows on Disney+.

I've got to say, Disney+, if you have a kid, is a gold mine. It's amazing. So, beyond just the animated stuff, their deal with National Geographic, all the shows that they have on there, my kid is so into, like, snakes right now, and Disney+, delivers. But I've been struggling with this idea of honesty with my kid.

Like, my wife and I talk about this all the time. Like, how honest are we going to be? Are we going to try to always be honest? We kind of fell down on, yes, let's, you know, the world is the world. Let's be honest. Keeping in mind, my kid is four. But during this King Cobra documentary, they showed a male and female mating, and I was asked by my son if they were fighting, and I just said yes.

And then the female killed the male, so we switched back to Paw Patrol. So, sometimes nature is a little too brutal. Oh, yes. All the secrets of life. Yes. Netflix is going to be cracking down on password sharing, it seems. This is all over the news.

Yeah, and I guess it's a big deal. I have always paid for everybody that's on my account, so I guess I shouldn't have been doing that. Now it's too late. Damn it. So far, I haven't experienced a problem. I do share Netflix with family.

You know, I don't pay for Netflix. My sister-in-law does. But she uses my Disney Plus account. This is what everybody does. We share our stuff around because it's too expensive otherwise. But this, of course, makes sense. At some point, Netflix is going to run out of people to sell to because we're all sharing our logins, and I'm sure they've hit that point.

I'm sure the only reason that they're doing this is the numbers people have said, we have no more growth. We're slowing down. This is the same for all streaming media companies. This is our new version of Untethering. I buy this one. You buy that one. We share our logins. That's what we do. The price of buying into all these services is unsustainable.

See, you know, four years of shows before this all happened where we talked about cutting the cord and how it's just going to end up screwing us and being more expensive. That's where we're at. So, of course, they took the right course of action as long as they could. They ignored it because get people hooked, right? Drug dealer.

You're hooked on Netflix now. So now we're going to say you can't share it anymore. So now you're going to have to buy it, too. And this is the only way that they can grow. This is the only viable option for them to satisfy shareholder demand. Yay, late stage capitalism. That's what's going to happen. That's what's going to happen.

How many services are you up to that you pay for? Let's see. I've got Paramount Plus. I've got I don't pay. Well, technically, I have Apple Plus, but it's just this rolling thing of buying new devices. Every time you buy a thing, you get to get it. Yeah. And the only thing I really watch on that is Ted Lasso.

Anyways, Netflix, HBO. And I think that's about it. I get Hulu free with Spotify. Yeah, got that one, too. So, yeah. I think, yeah, I don't pay for Disney Plus. I did a horse swap for HBO Max for that one.

I do get Showtime. I don't do Showtime. I got Showtime through. This is a nice one. If you have an Apple TV or use the Apple TV app on the Roku, you can pop in and out of those services fairly easily, which is really nice.

You can just buy it for a month or if you forget and sign up, you can cancel it really easy. I think the cancellation process is so much better on the Apple TV because you can just go into your Apple account and say, yeah, I'm done with that. And it'll just stop when it's over. Right. And I got to say, Discovery Plus, that has been the big surprise for me.

You know, it's like seven bucks and there's tons of stuff on there, except and I did get Epix on accident because I had it for a month and I was like, oh, great. Condor's on there. I can go watch season two. Guess what? No, no. See, that's the thing. That's the thing with these apps.

If they've got deals with cable companies to have the networks and all that sort of stuff, they hold the new content. It doesn't show up on the apps right away, even if you're paying for the app. And that is bullshit. Yeah. Condor, I can get season one, episode one only at this point, even though season two is over, over.

See, that's complete bullshit. And that's what ruins Discovery Plus for me because I want the latest Food Network stuff and they don't put the latest stuff up. Cops and doodads. Speaking of Apple Plus, the reason I have it again is I got a new phone finally.

All right. I was using your iPhone 8 that you sold me a while back, almost two years ago now, I think, right? Yeah. Something like that. Back, you know, when we could leave the house and see each other. And the battery finally started to shit out on that. So I was like, all right, let's get a new one. So I got an iPhone 12, not the Pro, don't need it.

Just the regular one. It's fine. At first, I was very annoyed by Face ID. I missed my home button. But, you know, like everything, you adapt very, very quickly. Yep. And I did. I like back tap settings. I don't ever remember them. That's pretty cool.

But otherwise, man, you know, I had an iPhone 7 for years. Then I went to an iPhone 8. I waited so long between update cycles that we went to double digits. We're on iPhone 12. And if you go that long without upgrade cycles, you kind of expect a bit more.

Honestly, if the battery hadn't crapped out on your old phone, I'd still be quite happy using that. I don't. There's no real benefit to the iPhone 12 that I can see. It's faster, but you didn't even get the LiDAR version. So you could, you know, scan your apartment. Don't need to scan my apartment.

Yep. And I got to say, on those back tap settings, when you were texting me about it, and I'm like, oh, I set up double tap for screen capture. And I'm like, this is going to be bad. I'm going to have a bunch of garbage screen caps on here. Turns out I was right. Well, you were right, too. So, but I switched mine to triple tap for the screenshot, and I don't get anywhere near as many.

Yeah. See, my triple tap is for black and white mode, which I set right before I go to bed in case I need to look at it at night. I like it in black and white mode. All right. So, having said all that with my phone upgrade, I'm sending in my old iPhone 7 and 8 because I have them both still sitting around through Apple's trade-in program.

I mean, you can trust them. Yep. So, I'm going to get a good chunk of change coming back. So, I'm going to ask you, Jason, what should I upgrade next? I have an iWatch 3. Should I go up to the iWatch 6? Or should I take my AirPods to AirPods Pro? I would go with the Apple Watch 6, personally.

Okay. It's lighter, it's thinner, it's bigger. And you can do the EKG stuff on it, which is good because in these days of going to see a doctor, you know, over Zoom, sometimes they ask you for that. So, I've had to send in my EKGs to my doc a couple times, which is nice.

Okay. It's comfier because it's thinner as well and bigger. Cool. The AirPods Pro, I love, but I think I get more use out of the Apple Watch 6 versus that. So, whenever my gift cards show up, I will upgrade my watch.

There you have it. There you have it. And Dustin wrote in, I heard you mention recently you wished Apple would re-release the original 60 gigabyte iPod for the nostalgia. I'd pass. But I came across this video of a guy rebuilding an iPod Classic to stream Spotify and thought you might enjoy. And this is a YouTube video, Spotify streaming on my 17-year-old iPod Classic via Raspberry Pi.

Or you could just download the app onto your phone. Exactly. I mean, I get it. I get what he's trying to do there. No, it's cool. It's cool. But, yeah. You know what you could actually do is you could just crack the thing open and put an Apple Watch inside of it. Just use the Apple Watch part and just touch it. Here, I'm going to lay my record player on top of my iPod Classic and stream my music that way.

There you go. Apple has basically discontinued the HomePod, the HomePod Grande. They're going to keep the mini. But the big HomePod is finally going bye-bye. It's been around for four years. And I know not one single person that owns one.

Yeah, I don't either. If I were in that ecosystem, I would be pretty pissed off about it. But apparently there's nobody in that ecosystem because nobody's pissed off about it. The sound on those things was supposed to be phenomenal. Yeah, that's what I heard, too. Phenomenal. But I guess the minis are pretty good, too.

Right. The biggest problem is Siri. Yeah. That's the biggest issue. Siri's garbage. All I use, Siri is a fucking egg timer for me. That's all Siri is. That's what it is for everybody. I'm sorry, but that's what the other ladies in the tube are.

It's, you know, they're timers. That's it. The only thing that I, and even Siri sucks. I can't set multiple timers. You know, it's like, okay, well, my eggs are going here. I want those for seven minutes. But I've got, you know, my chickens in the oven. I need that for 45. You can't do them both at the same time.

I'm like, come on. That's why I have all the flavors of the ladies in the tube in my kitchen. So I can have three timers going. I've got my Google Home. I've got my HomePod and I've got my Amazon Echo so I can do three things at once. Oh, God.

It's the world we live in. It's the world we live in. We got some news this week that Adobe has finally put out Photoshop for the Apple M1 Max. And sort of, turns out. Some of it works. Some of it works. But if you actually want to get work done, you have to go back to the Intel emulation still.

So thanks, guys. There is a new way to scale images, though, that they have put in that I haven't tried yet. I'm dying to try it, but I just haven't had time, which would be great if it works because I've got that Topaz Gigapixel AI program that works really well.

And then, you know, if I turn on the face recognition, I can get what's his name and all the windows in the buildings. Remember that? It wasn't the guy from the notebook, was it? I can't remember any of these guys. They all look the same to me. Sorry. Can't help you. Okay.

I'm brain farting, too. Yeah. Whatever. Anyway, so hopefully if that works, then I can get rid of one app that I have to maintain. But everybody that I've seen tweets about it says it's fucking incredible. But, yeah, there you go. So this is basically just a PR push for Photoshop.

So nothing really has changed yet. All right. And the FAA's final drone rules will start taking effect on April 21st. For all of you droner people out there, which is sooner than expected, but it is what it is. The regulator has revealed that remote ID and operations over people rules will start taking effect as of April 21st, 2021.

From then on, you'll have to list the serial number of any remote ID drone or add-on module in your registration. You can fly small drones over people if they have protected blades, but you can't conduct sustained flight over open air assemblies unless you comply with remote ID. Other heavier drones have stricter operational and performance requirements, such as limits on the amount of force they deliver in a crash, which is nice to know.

You know, I don't have a problem with any of these rules. This is great. There's some breathing room built into this. Drone makers have to comply with remote ID requirements starting September 16th, 2022, while all pilots will have to meet remote ID requirements or fly within limitations a year later in September 16th, 2023.

This article talks about how these rules won't please everyone. Alphabet's drone delivery company, Wing, has worried about privacy, noting that broadcast from remote IDs could let people infer sensitive data like home addresses. Yeah, I would like to know who flew the drone into my child.

I think for them they're worried about, like, it's like, you see the alphabet drone and you see it flying and it lands at somebody's house. Well, if you can see it landing at the house, who cares? Yes, your argument is invalid. Your argument is absolutely invalid. Yeah, this doesn't affect any of my drones at this point, which I can't fly anyway, because thanks to global warming, we have consistent Santa Ana winds every day that I have off to go fly my drones.

So, they are. It has been windy as fuck here. Oh, my God. It's ridiculous. At the library. So, we haven't had an at the library segment for a couple of weeks.

I know Jason's been busy. I have been reading one book in particular that has taken me a long time to read because, frankly, it scares the fucking shit out of me and depresses me. So, I put it down every couple, basically every chapter I have to walk away from it. I finished, this is how they tell me the world ends, the cyber weapons arms race by Nicole Perlroth.

Wow. We are screwed. Everybody is in everything. We have reached our new, you know, our new nuclear detente, except it's cyber war. We're in Russia's shit. Russia is in our shit.

The Chinese are in everybody's shit. We're in the Chinese's shit. We're all basically just poised over a finger for zero days to press a button, and we can shut down anything everywhere in the world. All of us. Everybody. All the time. Holy shit. We're screwed.

See, it's best not to know these things, Brian. Yeah, I kind of wish I could unread this book, to be honest. I definitely want to ask Dave about this. I'm sure he's read it as well. We'll talk about that in the security section a little bit. It's phenomenal. It's stunning.

It's shocking. It's everything that we kind of knew what was going on, but laid out as clear as day. And, yeah, really, really scary. But well written, well researched, a very good book. Very good. I'll pass. Thanks. I appreciate your review, and I appreciate you taking the time to review it for us.

Which is great, because now I don't have to read it. I've got enough scary shit in my life. I'm down the crypto hole. Dude, this stuff is so bad, it feels like you're reading science fiction. Really? Yeah. That's how bad. Moron of the Week.

I'm still a, I can't say proud anymore. I'm still a shareholder of Tesla. This guy, Elon, Elon, Elon, Elon needs to move away. But apparently, he's got a whole bunch of enablers there, so who's going to come along next, I don't know.

Elon Musk has changed his job title to the Techno King of Tesla. So, you think about, well, if Elon goes away, the company will still do really well by itself. They'll have adults in charge. Meanwhile, the company's CFO, Zach Kirkhorn, has a new position that's right out of Game of Thrones.

He's the master of coin. Yeah. Yeah. Look, when we were like 20 and we were making up our own companies and stuff like that, we would print out business cards for ourselves that had funny titles. Well, come on. I mean, our actual title. That's fine when you're 20.

Our title for a long time, Brian, come on, was Webmaster. That was a thing. Yes. Think about that for a minute. That was a legitimate title. We were the webmaster. I'm not going to argue with that, but, you know, I'm just saying you're a massive company.

Your company's worth is more than all of the automakers combined. Please take it seriously every now and then. Well, maybe this is how you get to become the Techno King is that you just don't take it seriously. Who wants to dance?

Who wants to sing? Who wants to be the Techno King? I saw this. I saw this one over at the L.A. Times. It came through yesterday because it was an invite to a webinar. And they have a new series called We Can Teach You That over at the L.A. Times.

They have experts come in. And some of the previous courses were capturing this moment in photos, how to write and sell your mystery novel, how to navigate health care and vital services, which sounds like, you know, something that you really should should know how to do. That would be helpful. How to connect with friends and family.

Could have used that a year ago, maybe. And how to travel safely if you must. Okay. And the first one was how to make a family cookbook, which, you know, that's not bad. Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. I would like how to how to access more than five articles from the Los Angeles Times without paying for it.

Well, I just pay for it. So there you go. That's how you do it. You just got to bite the bullet. But I'm going to reconsider my subscription to the L.A. Times after this one, because now in the new We Can Teach You That segment, they have how to binge watch like an expert.

Yes. That's right. That's right. Okay. They are going to make me go sit in a webinar so they can teach me how to binge watch. I don't know what they've been thinking we're doing for the past year, but a little late to the party on this one, L.A. Times.

Slow news day? I don't know. Okay. Step one, sit on couch. That's it. There's only one step. Just put down newspaper. Do not read L.A. Times. Do not read our paper and put on TV. Done. Security?

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

And any more shows this week, Dave? Well, you know, I'm also the host of the Recorded Future podcast. Covers threat intelligence and cybersecurity stuff. So, if that's your game, in fact, we just celebrated our 200th episode over there. So, congratulations. Thank you very much.

We're going to have to rework our intro now, but thanks. Well, you know, it's getting to the point where it's easier to list the podcast that I don't host. He does not host the Joe Rogan show. Right. Right. Absolutely. So, but thank you.

I appreciate the cross-promotion there. Every little bit helps, right? Yes. Yes, it does. Trust me. Yes, it does. So, since we started this show a little bit ago, we have some breaking news. Elon Musk is now selling one of his tweets as an NFT. And the NFT is a song about NFT.

Which we unfortunately have passed Moron of the Week, where Elon Musk is the techno's super ding-dong king of the world. But now he's the nifty king. Yeah. You know, we've spent a lot of time this episode talking about NFTs again.

I don't understand them. I certainly don't understand buying a tweet. It is the dumbest thing in the world. I'm not sure who's dumber, Elon, for doing this or the people bidding $1.1 million for it. Well, whatever. Obviously, people have far too much time and money, even during a pandemic.

Yes, I was actually putting this in here to kind of cement the fact that you were right, Brian. You know, when you're going to be CEO, be CEO of one company. One company. One company and be an adult. Right. Yeah.

I don't get it either. I've seen people saying that it's full of folks who are using it for money laundering, particularly with things like artwork, which evidently, you know, art is worth as much as you say it's worth. So that makes that – I'm sure you guys – have you guys covered all this?

Am I repeating stuff? Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I won't bore the audience then. But I'm with you, Brian, left scratching my head. How is this a thing? It reminds me of Tulip Madness. It is. It is. It's all crazy. The thing about this particular story that you've put in, Jason, now, and I've been struggling with this for quite some time as a Tesla shareholder.

I've gotten to the point where I'm embarrassed saying I'm a Tesla shareholder. I think it might be time, as well as this stock has generally done for me over the years, it might be time for us to part ways. There you go. I think – but we do have a new show that we're going to have to start now called How Is This a Thing?

The internet. Much better than nifty news. Well, I had a bit of news. We talked the other week about the Tom Cruise deepfakes, and deepfakes are now becoming weaponized. This occurred in Chalfont, Pennsylvania. I just like to make it sound classy.

I'm sure they call it Chalfont. Right. Raffaella Spohn allegedly used deepfakes in a bid to kick rivals off her daughter's cheerleading squad, the Victory Vipers. She sent coaches AI-altered photos and videos of teens portraying them as drinking, smoking, and naked.

Now, does that not count as child pornography? I would imagine it would. I would imagine so, and the police thought so as well. So, yes, she is in some degree of trouble at the moment. And wow, to think that this was a smooth move.

More like Vindictive Vipers, if you know what I'm saying there. How much money do you want to bet that Mama Spohn was once a cheerleader herself? Yeah, I'm not taking that bet. I'm not taking that bet. And I'm sure as a cheerleader, she often drank, smoked, and was naked.

Well, it could be. You do what you know, right, Dave? I guess. Always go back to the well. Yeah. It's just sad, and it's just a reminder that some people are terrible, and it just strikes me. As if we need more reminders.

Yeah, yeah. If these allegations are true, then this woman is terrible. But also that these tools are so readily available, even your mom can use them. Yes. Yes. Oh, God. Even your mom in Chafon is capable of knocking these out and sending them off into the world.

So it's a little frightening. Yeah. I'm reminded of, there was a story a couple years back, a few years back now, where there was a coach or a dad of a young peewee football team, and he was making all of the little metal pieces on the straps of his son's helmet razor sharp so that any other kids that this kid came in contact with would end up sliced to bits.

And so he also was on the list of horrible people who, why, how does one think to do this, you know, for their kids? Like, it's just, I don't get it. I don't get it. Yeah.

Like, they're thinking, okay, how can I give my kid a leg up? How can I give my kid an advantage? By taking out the other kid's legs. Right. Exactly. Aim for the artery, son. Oh, just, yeah. Sad. It is sad.

It is sad. Well, I wonder if the police used this new tool that was developed at the University of Buffalo. They have now figured out a way to spot deep fakes that are 94% effective, surprisingly. What they're doing is they're checking the reflections in the cornea to see if they have the ring of truth, as it were.

That's interesting. Does it work if you're actually just dead inside? What if you have a glass eye? Sammy Davis Jr. That's going to be a problem. Yeah. Right. Oh, that's cool. I mean, it's whack-a-mole, though, right? Because now they know and they can do things to fight against it.

So, yeah. It all comes back to the eyes, though. The last time that they figured out how to spot deep fakes was that nobody was blinking. So, they fixed the, they added the blink technology. And now, now we'll have a cornea technology. Yeah. I think I might have mentioned on the show once, so I made a TV commercial and I was doing motion graphics for it.

It was just, it was a woman standing in front of a green screen and we put her in front of a, you know, pretty graphic background and so on and so forth. And the client came back and said, I love the commercial, but I think she blinks too much. Can you make her not blink so much? And I was like, well, okay.

So, I cut out a little, little, I cut, basically cut out a little layer of just her eyes, made a little loop of her blinking at a much slower interval and then used motion tracking to place that back on her face.

So, that basically slowed her blinking down to half the rate that it was before. But it was still her eyes and they were tracked perfectly well on her face. So, there was no way to know it wasn't her. But thinking of that makes me think of this, that if that were so easy for me to do a decade ago in After Effects, that these folks aren't going to have a whole lot of trouble tracking real eyes onto deep fakes.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. It's just going to be a plugin. Yep. Yep. So, we've spent some time talking about hacking as a service in this particular arena. And I read this article over at Vice that it's troublesome, to say the least, especially as we are all kind of pushing the world into two-factor authentication and all that sort of stuff.

And everybody's just using their cell phones now. You know, you get the text from your bank, you put in the code and you're into your site and all that. A hacker got all my texts for $16. And this is a gaping flaw in SMS that lets hackers take over phone numbers in minutes by simply paying a company to reroute text messages.

Mm-hmm. Not good. Nope. That's another reason why you shouldn't use a text-based two-factor auth and you should always use an app. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. The root of the issue here is there's a company called Sakari, I believe is how you pronounce it. And they are a marketing firm.

They have tools for folks to use SMS for marketing purposes. So, reminders, alerts, marketing campaigns, all that kind of stuff. And as part of that, they allow people to reroute SMS messages from one number to another number, basically function as kind of a reflector.

Mm-hmm. But it seems like the weak point in the process here was that when they ask you if you are the legitimate owner of this particular number, all you have to do is say, yes, and they believe you. Yes. That's it. There's no verification.

They send nothing out to that number to say, is this really, we just got an alert and we're trying to reroute everything coming to this number. Please respond if you're okay with that. Right? But none of that, not any kind of security. So, the folks at Sakari say that they've put new things in place to prevent this.

But as this article points out, there are many, many companies who do this. And it seems like the root problem is that there really isn't a whole lot of regulation when it comes to SMS. And the companies themselves are loosey-goosey about it, about who can have access to it.

Are you telling me that companies aren't self-regulating? We got to let the market decide, Brian. Yeah, I guess we do. People will push back on this and it'll just, it'll change. They won't be willing to pay for it and it'll change. No problem. No problem.

Yeah. I have an interesting, if nothing else, the title of this article would resonate particularly with Brian. I don't know why I thought that. But it's an article from Gizmodo. It's written by Shoshana Wodinski and the title is, Anonymized Data is Meaningless Bullshit.

I don't even know that I have to go farther than that. Not really. Not really. Yeah, that's great. I love personally, you know, I do like to think of myself as somewhat high class sometimes and I like to read The Atlantic and The New Yorker and things of such nature.

But I do like the generalized trend towards cuss words in headlines these days when merited. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I think bullshit is a uniquely, it's a word with unique meaning.

Like, you know, I think back when Penn and Teller were doing their bullshit show, they made a point of that, that, you know, it has specific meaning. So I too like it. But to your point of being classy, this article is based off of research done by a couple of students at Harvard.

Fight fiercely, Harvard. Right, right. And they went through a bunch of data sets and, you know, no news here for us who've been following this stuff that they can go through the data sets and cross-reference them and anonymized data is not really anonymized and so on and so forth.

So this, yet another bit of data to add on that pile to show that anonymized data is meaningless bullshit. Maybe this is how we should rebrand our show, Jason. We should be called, we should call ourselves internet bullshit and do a deep dive every episode of the fact of the internet that is bullshit today.

Statistics are meaningless bullshit. Anonymized data is meaningless bullshit. Right, right. Social influencers are meaningless bullshit. We can just go all day. Still not going to be available in India. Yes, NFTs are meaningless bullshit. Absolutely.

I do got to say, if you guys haven't read it yet, Calling Bullshit, The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World is a fantastic book. Yes, I finished that just a few weeks back. It was wonderful. Well, the last thing I have here, I threw in here for fun before we get to, I know we have some feedback, but this came over the verge and it's titled Zoom Escaper Lets You Sabotage Your Own Meetings With Audio Problems, Crying Babies.

It had to come to the, I'm actually surprised it took so long. And of course, those of us who have tools like Audio Hijack and have soundboards and stuff have been way ahead on this. And of course, scammers have been ahead on this too. You always hear about folks who have crying baby sounds in the background.

Basically, someone has built a tool called Zoom Escaper, which is a free web widget. It's basically a soundboard that lets you choose different sound effects to start playing in the background to give you an excuse to basically get out of your meeting. Things like dogs barking, a man weeping, urination.

I'm not sure why. I guess that's... Well, if somebody's in the room urinating, I guess you kind of have a problem. I guess. I mean, you could say, oh, gosh, I accidentally, I got to go, you know, nature calls or something. I don't know. But a fun tool. Yes. Very reminiscent of the old days of driving around with the cell phone going, oh, I'm going through the valley.

Or, you know, basically just being on AT&T. That too. That too. Yeah. Yeah. This made me think, it's like, okay, we've been locked down in the pandemic for a year now. And after a year, you usually have an awards show. And in awards shows, you typically tend to have an in-memoriam section.

And I think, I do believe that we need to have an in-memoriam section for people who have lost their jobs by masturbating on Zoom or not wearing pants. Because there seems to be a lot of those this year. Right, right. My favorite one is the one with the woman who had her camera on and she went and took a bathroom break and she put the laptop on the floor in her bathroom while she pulled down her pants and sat on the toilet.

And what's most fun about it is you get to see the horrified faces of all of her work colleagues. Some of them are trying to be good Samaritans and flagging her down. Others are laughing their heads off. It's just comedy gold. Comedy gold.

Yeah. We can call it the whoopsies. Yeah. The whoopsies. I like it. That is great. Yeah. The whoopsies. That's great. So we did get a little feedback on your awesome pose question last week, Dave. And then we had a couple people write in. David wrote in and said, what song sums up 80s the best?

Talking Heads' Wild Wild Life, especially the video. That's a solid choice. Rook reminded us of a song that we had just discussed recently on the podcast. And this is very 80s. 80s music to me is Axl F. No reason given, it just is.

Emphasis added by me because, you know, I can't tell. I'd say that's another solid choice. Yeah, it's solid. I would put in that category Herbie Hancock's Rocket, which I heard the other day. Yes, definitely. Definitely. See, when I think of Herbie Hancock, then I go back to Electric Avenue.

I feel that was great. That's not Herbie Hancock. No, it's not. But it was on the radio at the same time when Herbie Hancock was big. So they would always bounce back and forth. The two black artists that would get played on K-Rock. Exactly. Right.

Sad, but true. Not to put too fine a point on it, but yeah. Until the Living Color came around. We know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rocket. Well, I think of Herbie Hancock, the Chameleon album also, but certainly for the 80s, that was.

And Herbie Hancock got robbed of a Grammy nomination because they wouldn't give him best instrumental because there's a few words in there. And that, to me, was bullshit. There you go. Yes, there you go. And finally, Amanda wrote in Long Time No See regarding the musical question about the ultimate 80s song from episode 498.

For me, that would be Alphaville's Forever Young. It's hard to explain the 80s optimistic, but expecting things to turn to poop at any moment vibe to people who weren't there. But that particular song evokes this for me, along with some vividly bittersweet memories. There would probably be more memories left if I had been more sober when I was off duty back then.

Grump on. Yeah. Great track. A little bit, I think, niche in the alternative realm, but good choice. Great song. Yeah. I have to say, before we started recording this segment, I went and brought that up on YouTube and spent five minutes staring at my monitor with, you know, weepy eyes kind of, I think Amanda's right.

This, I mean, that song is a time machine and boy, do I, it just puts me back in that time of my life. And, uh, some, then some songs do that. That's one of them. So it's a good, good choice. I just came up with a new one since we were discussing the Herbie Hancock and all, and all of that sort of stuff.

The, the, uh, the kind of instrumentals with a word or two in them. I can think of no more 80 song than yellows. Oh yeah. Oh, yes. Chaka chaka. Chaka chaka. Yeah. Um, yeah. You know, I met him once.

Uh, that's random. Yeah. I met, so it's even more random. I was in, I was in the lunch buffet line at NAB, which is the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in, in, uh, in Vegas, huge convention, 120,000 people.

I think at the time it was second only to CES for big shows. So I'm in there, you know, waiting in line to get my chicken nuggets and my fries or whatever. And, uh, a buddy of mine was in a lot, was with me and he's Swedish. And I think the guy, I want to, I don't know if I have this right.

So please, I'm just using this as placeholders. But, um, and he said, you see that guy next to you? I was like, yeah. He goes, that's yellow. I said, yellow? He goes, yeah. Chicka, chicka. And I went, oh. I bet that guy his entire life, when he is recognized, always just hears chicka, chicka, behind him.

Yeah. People going, oh, yeah. Yeah. Now, if he had a sense of humor, every time he would, they would say that, he would just go, hmm, bom, bom, and just keep walking. Yeah. It always reminds me of the end credits to Ferris Bueller. Oh, yes. I also had a roommate in college who, uh, was like, worked for the campus.

And he realized that if you speed up, like, if you play the 33 RPM version at 45, all you hear yellow saying, oh, yeah, beautiful. The moon. You know, like, it's not slowed down.

Awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, that's, that, that's a good, that's a really good choice. That's a really good choice. And the fact that it made it into so many movies, too, I think makes it extra iconic. Oh, definitely. I have to go listen to Alpha Ville's Forever Young because I can't, for the life of me, picture that song.

Oh, dude. I get weepy even just thinking about it. I don't know. I hear the chorus right now and my voice starts to quiver. Yeah. Jason, I did the same thing because when I saw the first thing I thought of was Rod Stewart's Forever Young. Yeah. And I was like, well, that's not it. And then, so I went to YouTube and I looked this up and I was like, oh, right.

That was it. I got it. Oh, getting old is awesome, isn't it? Yeah. You know what? You got to let yourself do that. Sometimes you got to let yourself just, you know, melt into a puddle of weepy nostalgia. I think it's healthy.

Someday in the near future, well, not near future. Someday in the far future, some kid will sit around and listen to WAP and get all misty-eyed. They'll remember where they were the first time they heard it. Yeah. It's true. All right.

Well, good feedback. Thanks, everybody, for writing in. I don't think there's a stinker in this list. I think they're all strong choices. Yep. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Adam. Welcome, Adam.

We lost quite a few Patreons. I know. Everybody's said times are tough again. We've been talking about this for a year. We appreciate any donations that you have made, obviously, if you're having financial problems. We get it. No problem. No worries. Yep.

Yep. Dogs, just go hungry. That's all. They're sad little puppy dog eyes. No kibble. My kids' shoes have holes in them. I know. It's fine. It's fine. Yep. They only get to watch two hours of Disney Plus because we can't afford electricity anymore. Yep. We have to go to the Bitcoin fields and shovel snow.

It's fine. It's fine. I own part of a JPEG now, so I'm hoping it's all going to work out. Those two pixels are your retirement fund. That's college. College. Oh, college. I got you. Yeah. Okay. Over at PayPal, we've got Linda, Andrew, Natalie, Nigel, Raj, Logan, and Nathaniel.

Thank you guys very much. Thank you so much. And some sad news this week. The inventor of the cassette tape has died, Lou Ottens, the former Philips engineer who gave the world its first compact cassette tape, has passed away, according to Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsbad. He was 94 years old when he passed away on March 6th.

He worked on the cassette tape in the early 1960s. He wanted to develop a way for people to listen to music that was affordable and accessible in the way that large reel-to-reel tapes at the time were not. So he created a wooden prototype that could fit into his pocket to help guide the project.

He was a fucking whittler. Sitting out on the porch, having his Bartles and James, making the first cassette tape. Whistling the classics of the day, going, if only I had a way to listen to this through wood.

Little Joe down the street was whittling up his first walkman. Woodman. That's great. But it didn't stop there. He also went on to help Philips and Sony develop the compact disc. So pretty cool. Pretty cool stuff. Yep. Great career.

Great career. We've got a couple links in there. And one's from the Washington Post with a bunch of tributes to him, which I think we all have if we're of a certain age. Now, my little brother has no clue what a cassette tape is. I hope they buried him with a little pencil. You old folk will remember that.

Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, please consider 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.show slash 499. From there, you can find all the links we talked about in this episode.

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