502: Deliver-oh-no!

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 GOG. I'm Jason D. Oh my god, we're a rap show. That's right. TV raps. I was actually going more for the morning DJ vibe feel. Well, that's even worse. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Okay.

Well, we had a bit of a shaker here in California. I don't know if you felt it, Jason. It was much closer to me. I guess it was centered near LAX and I'm not too far from there. Yeah, the house did a big boomp. I didn't feel it, but the dogs jumped out of bed and woke me up. So that's how I knew about it.

Well, funnily enough, my big takeaway from the earthquake has to do with Facebook now. Okay. I have long been the Facebook apologizer. I suppose I've often argued my reasons for enjoying Facebook and continuing Facebook. And they've waned a bit over the last couple of years, as you've been hearing from me.

I'm less impressed with them because everything is so crap and you never see friends updates anymore. And that was the whole reason for me being there in the first place. And I think it took an earthquake for me to realize, I don't know why I'm on Facebook anymore. The algorithm has now become so useless.

One of the things I enjoyed about the occasional earthquakes and, you know, one can say enjoyed about earthquakes because we haven't had the big one yet and California hasn't fallen into the ocean. Quiet. But at least these little shakes is I've always enjoyed the post-earthquake, earthquake, exclamation point, post-scroll from all my friends in Southern California.

I know. And the algorithm has now become so useless. I got up because it woke me up. I went to my phone. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled past all these useless updates, past brand updates, past advertisements, past, even though I'm in recent view, past things that were posted a week and a half ago by other people.

And then finally, after like a couple minutes, I finally started to see some of the earthquake posts. Like, wow. It's so useless now. Yeah. I'm just wondering why you're still there. You keep complaining about it.

Well, it really took this for me to realize just how bad it is. Like, because I'd stepped back my Facebook viewing, like I wasn't loading it up that often. So I was just assuming, okay, well, I'm in recent view, but obviously some of my friends haven't posted recently because I'm not on Facebook all the time and I don't see it.

Well, now this was proof positive. People were posting in the moment. I was in recent view. I saw posts from a week and a half ago instead of the recent posts. It's a fucking load of shit. Yes, it is. Okay. Now, in its defense, I did only get one tweet from somebody I knew that said, felt that.

Well, nobody uses Twitter for earthquakes. It was a Facebook thing. No, it was a Twitter thing. It's always been a Twitter thing. Come on. It started in San Francisco. We had a lock on the earthquake tweets back then. But yeah, no, they're all just useless now. Yeah.

It's just so blatant, the recent view, that it's not recent. Like, how is it possible that posts made by friends and at least 15 friends that were done within the last 25 minutes are not showing up over posts that were made a week and a half ago in recent view? Yeah, that's messed up.

That's messed up. It's a total load of shit. So I'm stepping back even further from Facebook now. Well, it's because of their AI, Brian. Yes. Well, funny you mentioned that because I follow the Facebook developers page on Facebook because at one point in time in a different life ago, I was developing on Facebook.

And they had a post about how their AI algorithm helps people see exactly what they want to see on their news feed. And it was just filled with comments saying, no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Exactly. No, it doesn't. They are in trouble. I mean, they're not because they're raking in money hand over fist.

But there is a sea change happening with Facebook. And I think that unless they change their ways soon, this company is going to be in deep, deep shit pretty soon. Well, I mean, look at just what happened this week with Kara Swisher and Tim Apple. Yeah. Tim Apple has thrown down the gauntlet against the Zuck.

So I think they're getting hit from every angle and rightly so. We'll talk about them some more in security. But yeah, it's like, oh, man. But I was mentioning AI because we have said on the show many, many times AI doesn't exist. Period. Yes. And one of the leading researchers in AI and machine learning, Michael I. Jordan, he's a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He says people are getting confused about the meaning of AI and discussions of technology trends, that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress in which is competing with humans. We don't have that. But people are talking as if we do. Preach it, brother.

Preach it. Thank you, Michael Jordan. In addition to being one of the best basketball players of all time, you are correct, sir. And I wish you would have been around, oh, three years ago when I threw my hands up in the air like I just don't care and gave up. I know. Yes, this is exactly what we've been saying all along.

And we finally just gave up because nobody cared. I know. We're just howling at the moon and people are just going, get over it, man. It's AI. It's like, no, it's not. No, it's not. Speaking of other things that just aren't, I also howling at the moon on this one for a long time.

Well, a long time in grumpy old geeks is what? Three weeks. I said this was going to be the fastest shark fin in history. And it turns out I might have been right there. NFTs are on the way out already. I will argue with you about on the way out.

I don't think it was a shark fin so much as an insane bubble. NFTs are not going to go anywhere. They are the new baseball cards, and they have a point and a place, but they don't have a $69.3 million place for this bullshit. Well, you're buying a link, Brian.

You're buying a link and a blockchain from a company that could go out of business next week. And you used to buy a pack of cardboard pieces with a photo on it and a piece of gum. At least you had something. At least you fucking had something. But everything is digital now, Jason. We used to have photo albums.

We don't anymore. They're all digital. We used to have CDs. We don't anymore. They're on drives that get chewed up by iTunes. Thanks so much, Apple. Everything is digital now. Why shouldn't these things be? My argument is, yes, the speculation and this massive bubble was stupid.

No, they are not going to go away. There will be a place for these things. In fact, I see single releases being NFTs in the future, maybe even full albums, but nobody gives a shit about albums. I see artists releasing their artwork this way. It's going to be a way to make a small amount of cash.

It's going to be your own Patreon. We'll see. They have to get the technology better to do this. They can't do it in the current state of things. We'll talk about that. Agreed. And let me just mention one of my articles that's down at the end of this right now, because that's exactly what this is about.

This is from The Atlantic. NFTs weren't supposed to end like this. And it's from one of the original inventors that created the whole concept a couple years back. And he says, when we invented non-fungible tokens, we were trying to protect artists, but tech world opportunism has struck again. It's a good read about what they were intending to do and why the technology wasn't there yet.

And a cautionary tale about releasing things into the wild until you've got it finished. I just, when I saw this, my jaw hit the floor because it's by Aneel Dash. I've known Aneel Dash for 20 years. Well, he came up with this concept.

Yeah, it was crazy because Aneel used to work at Movable Type with Ben and Mina Trott, and we would all hang out quite often. And Aneel was always a smart guy. And, you know, he just did this. And I was just like, wow, you go, Aneel.

But yeah, I thought that was pretty fun. But yeah, it was a really good read. And of course, things end like this. I know it's not supposed to end like this. The internet was not supposed to end with Facebook. Come on. But on the fun side of it, I love this. There's an article over at Business Insider called, Crypto Art Investors Could Face a Surprise on Tax Day Since NFTs Can Lead to a Hefty Tax Bill.

Yep. And this one is interesting because it talks about when things are actualized as gains and losses when you're talking about NFTs and all of the tax issues that go along with it. Because, yeah, old Beeple there is going to be writing a pretty hefty check.

But boo-hoo. He could give away 90% of that and still walk away with $6 million. Come on. He'll still have a lot more than he ever would have made otherwise without this bubble. I know. I know. So consider it a gift. But the other thing is other people who jumped on the bandwagon, granted, I don't know if the IRS has enough people to go around policing the NFTs.

I'm pretty sure they do for the big boys, though, these big sales. But the little ones, probably not. Yeah. If you made a couple hundred bucks buying an NFT and flipping it really quick, you're probably pretty safe. You should still claim it because, you know, society that we're all a part of.

And infrastructure that we have to pay for and the trillion dollars of coronavirus relief that we're all in debt for. But, Brian, if Tim Apple doesn't have to, why should we? Exactly. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And just one more last bit of follow-up.

We talked about Chrome and how it was basically jacking up your entire system a couple months ago. And then a whole bunch of people said, no, it's not. Yeah. Well, it turns out it was. Yeah. When Chrome 89 dropped in mid-March, they actually put this in the notes that said, oh, hey, by the way, we fixed a lot of that.

So Windows 10 definitely got a better bump. 22% memory savings in the browser process, 8% in the renderer, and 3% in the GPU, as well as reclaiming up to 100 megabits per tab by discarding memory from the foreground tab not currently being used. That's a lot of memory per tab.

That's a lot of memory. Yes. And Mac users will see an 8% memory savings and up to a 65% improvement on the Apple Energy Impact score. Now, the Apple Energy Impact score, I don't know how you can get an 8% memory savings and then a 65% improvement on the Energy score.

This just sounds like some Volkswagen shit there. They just kind of figured out how to maybe tweak the algo a little. But who knows? Maybe. I guess I can reinstall Chrome now and not get my fan to spin up every time I launch it. Oh, no. It still spins up. Trust me. Okay. No, I still have to have it installed.

And as soon as I put it up, my little MacBook Pro 16 just decides that it wants to go meet its little helicopter buddy on Mars. It immediately tries to take off. But Brave? Nope. Still running solid on the Brave. I'm still fine with Vivaldi. In the news.

Ryan Deliveroo is back in the news. I'm sorry. True is back in the news. They kind of shit the bed. You think? Big time. Big time. What did we say when we heard it was going public? Huh? You'd have to be a total idiot to invest in this thing.

Yeah. So it turned out that it was the worst debut in London IPO history. So I saw that one coming. People are saying it's because of their gig economy work tactics or a myriad of other things.

But here's the thing. Deliveroo is a deliver oh no this week if you tried to invest. So you probably got a decent price on it though because it started listing at £3.90 and it closed at £2.87. I don't know what the price is right now but I don't care.

I'm not investing in it. Speaking of investing news real quick, Brian, have you divested yourself of Tesla yet? Not yet. Okay. Okay. Same with Facebook. Same as Facebook. It's on the Facebook path. It's on the Facebook path at the moment. Facebook is going to go first.

I've got my fang stock pie and I'm going to divest of Facebook very, very soon. It's funny. I actually opened up my M1 finance app for the first time in like, I don't know, eight months. And that little $600 that I put in as the experiment when we first started doing the stock talk long ago, the $500, $600 has turned into $2,100.

See? Investing is good. Ah, well, divesting is even better because then you can pull out and then go on a vacation. Woo! But don't forget, you have to pay the taxes when you divest. I know. That's why it's still there. And I did buy nine shares of Tesla this morning. Are you trying to get me to sell so you can buy?

Yeah. I see what's going on here. I want you to sell so the price goes down so I can get more because I know you have a shit ton more than me. That's for sure. And back on the Deliveroo track, they – this is almost impossible to explain the thought process behind this.

The Deliveroo April Fool's joke backfires in France. Now, we know that Deliveroo is a British company and they have a long beef with the French. Well, on April 1st, thousands of customers of Deliveroo across France got confirmation emails for orders totaling over 450 euros.

Whoops. And they were very pissed off about it. I wonder why. Yeah. How could anybody see that as a joke? I'm not sure. But Volkswagen looked at them and said, hold my Hefeweizen. Yes, they did. Because, boy, what did they do?

I read this article over at Fast Company, which has quite possibly the best opening sentence of every article I've ever read. Happy April Fool's Day. We live in a branded hellscape of misinformation and lies. Good on them. That's a great one. So what they did is they posted a press release that Volkswagen Group of America was unveiling the official change of its U.S. brand name from Volkswagen of America to Volkswagen of America to lean into their aggressive electric vehicle production plans.

That press release was incomplete and appeared to be dated April 29th, leading many to speculate it was a mistake and likely some premature flacculation of silly April Fool's Day jokes. But then on Tuesday, the company dug in and issued a full, properly dated official press release on its social channels, confirming that, yes, they are going to change their name to Volkswagen.

But then they had an interview with their VP of marketing, Kimberly Gardner, who you might think would be briefed on something like this, as that's her job, and she didn't exactly say that's true. Okay. So, yeah, it's real, it's not real, it's real, it's not real.

It's Schrodinger's vaults. And finally, yes, this was some sort of elaborate April Fool's Day joke to raise awareness about the company's all-electric ID.4 model. Okay. So that went well. Yeah. Here's the funny part. And I like this one. Maybe the ID.4 should be renamed the For Fuck's Sake 4.

The funny part is, I thought it would have been a fine rebranding. I thought it was fine. Well, yeah. I mean, I think it's cute. I think it's clever. And, you know, back in the early days of the internet, we did shit like this all the time. It's just nobody paid attention or cared. It was just a cute little thing, you know, where you do a pretend rebrand or something to get some attention.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine until you're a big company that has investors and you have severe misinformation being passed around. We're very sensitive to misinformation at this point. Oh, come on. So you can't really get away with that. This is the company that made the Nazi buggies and basically lied about their global emissions.

You expect anything less from them? Well, therein is the real problem. They don't exactly have a great track record at the moment. No, they don't. Anyways. Yeah. So we got a little bit more news. The Google and Oracle fight that's been going on for years, basically Oracle claiming that Google stole their Android mobile OS from Oracle's copyright has finally, finally been settled.

And basically they said, nope, sorry, Oracle. They basically, Google took a little bit of your Java SE API, only those lines of codes that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program. And that was fair use. Yeah.

So solved. Yeah. There you go. API is fair use. Go figure. Yeah. Whatever. Whatever. I, you know, I, this is one of those things. We're a tech podcast and that's a big tech news. I know. What do you want from me? I had to put it in there.

It's not exciting. It's, it's no Volkswagen. This is why we generally don't cover tech news. Yeah. Okay. The only upside is Larry Ellison lost. That's, that makes me happy. Yeah. I'm sure he's crying from his private Island. Exactly. Which one does he own again?

Kauai? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway. So we have, we have dueling Amazon news stories and no, we're not going to talk about the pee bottle gate, uh, even though that's pretty funny. It's funny until you get a package that has suspicious wet wipes on it.

I know. I know. I mean, I used to leave bottles of water out for the, the drivers when they'd come by, maybe some energy bars. Uh, now I just want to leave an empty jug. Yeah. Leave a port-a-john. Exactly. Oh God. So Amazon says it expects some employees to return to the office this summer.

Most will return in the fall. Amazon employees go, what the fuck? We don't want to go back. Come on, man. That's it. Yeah. It's, uh, you know, I, I get why people were starting to ramp up. Uh, I get why some, some people desperately want to go back to the office.

Uh, generally people that have children. Um, but we're looking at a potential fourth wave right now because things are not going so well. So I think it's a bit early to talk about this sort of stuff. Uh, Google jumped in as well. Uh, workers at Google will have the option to return in April, according to, uh, Google's chief people officer.

Yes, that is on a business card. Is there, is their name Soylent Green? So offices will be operating at limited capacity. Reopenings will vary state by state based on the number of coronavirus cases in the area. So if you happen to be a Google employee in Florida, better keep working on that home office.

Yep. You ain't leaving it anytime soon. Uh, there will be specific criteria that includes increases in vaccine availability and downward trends in COVID-19 cases. None of which will be happening anytime soon. Yeah. Uh, they are not going to require that you have a vaccine to come back to the office, which is interesting.

I, I expect that to pretty much be a requirement for most companies. Yeah. Uh, they will be required to wear masks, practice social distancing, and pass a health survey because God knows nobody lies on surveys. And right now they've got a firm September date when it will plan to require employees in the United States to return to the office.

Wasn't Google one of the companies that says you never have to come back? Yeah, they've backtracked on that. Uh, I, I have a couple, I have a friend of a friend of a friend that's a Google employee and they said that basically they have to make a case. They have to request to continue to work from home. And, uh, there's a whole, like a advisory committee that's going to go through in case by case basis to allow people to do it or not.

So they've definitely backtracked on that. Yeah. Guess so. Guess so. I guess that because, what was it, uh, two weeks ago we talked about that then they were putting in like an $8 billion, uh, outlay for new office space around the country. So, yep. Well, they got to fill it up now since they spent it. Yes, we do.

Great, great, great. And, uh, jogging quickly back over to Amazon, we know that there has been a vote. I've very closely watched union election at Amazon's facility in Bessemer, Alabama. Uh, that vote ended on Monday. And, uh, basically we have no fucking idea when we're going to find out what happened.

Uh, there's a link in our show notes that kind of explains the incredibly Byzantine process of counting these votes. Uh, the 7,000 opportunities for representatives from either side to basically go and look at every single vote and contest it. And then there's a mini battle for each vote.

So this could take a very long time, but I'm very hopeful that, uh, the, the pro union will win. We'll see. Because, you know, peeing in bottles basically means you kind of need a union. Okay. We'll see how that goes. Uh, not holding my breath on that one. Unless I'm next to a guy peeing in a bottle, then I'm definitely holding my breath.

His aim must be true. It must be. It better be true. That is true. Uh, they're going to have, they're going to need those, uh, warehouse cleanup robots, like in the Jetsons to start coming out, cleaning up. Uh, I saw this one again over at Business Insider. They're, they're killing it this week.

Uh, we read all 323 pages of 23andMe's SPAC filing. Here are the five biggest obstacles it faces ahead of its public debut. Now, Richard- Do you think it was originally 324 pages and they were like, we got to trim a little bit off this to get it to 323?

I think so. I think so. Um, so Richard Branson has a SPAC that's going to be, uh, used to take 23andMe public. Um, and, uh, so I, the five biggest obstacles, who cares? The last one is the one that made me chuckle. 23andMe's trove of user data is particularly susceptible to regulations.

And here I'm going to pull a Brian. Really? Is it? Because it seems like all of that data has already been, um, kind of put to the wind after the, the multiple changing of hands of 23andMe. So, yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, I have requested that my data be removed from 23andMe five separate times.

And what do I get once a week? I get news about how a new genetic survey has come out and that I might be at risk for this, that, or the other. They, they will not get rid of my data. I cannot get- Of course they're not. No, nope. So, and whoever they've shared it with already has it.

So, yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of DNA data being put to the wind. These companies might, uh, not have too much to, to float on anymore anyways, because science, scientists and investigators might not need to scoop up DNA from surfaces in the future.

No more spitting in a tube and sending it in. According to Science Focus, researchers at the Queen Mary University of London have shown that you can collect environmental DNA, which they are dubbing eDNA, from the air. Woo! So, basically, we're getting to the point where if you walk through a room, if you walk through a room, we can grab your DNA.

Yeah. Yay. We're going to need some, I know everybody's sick of hearing this from me, but we're going to need some regulations about DNA pretty soon. Nah, ain't going to happen. It's going to be on your, it's going to be on iPhone 14. It'll have DNA sequencers built in. I love this.

Lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Clare, said the work was originally meant to help conservationists and ecologists study biological environments. With enough development, though, it could be used for considerably more. Yeah, you fucking think? You think? Okay, who's the first person to have that?

ICE? Law enforcement? Yeah, there's going to be these things at Grand Central Station and every Greyhound stop in the United States if they have their druthers. So, way to go. Way to go, Queen Mary University. Yep. I still think farting in a tube is pretty funny.

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Media Candy. John Woo is back in the news, surprisingly enough. Woo-hoo. I haven't heard. Woo-hoo is right. I haven't heard from him in a long time. I like this. The director behind the high-octane hits like Mission Impossible 2 and Face Off and Hard Boiled has signed on to produce an adaptation of Monkey Master.

Monkey Master was a comic book that Stan Lee was working on before he died. So, this is basically, you know, I put this in here because I talk about the novel Monkey a lot, or I used to, and everybody kept telling me about all the different versions of it. Well, here's a new one.

So, I'm basically trying to cut everybody off from sending me emails saying, hey, did you hear about the new John Woo Monkey movie? Yes, I have. Thank you very much. Yeah, that never works, Jason. We still get the emails. No. And the clan on Clash Royale is GOG.show. God damn it. Quit emailing me. I did watch Godzilla vs. Kong this week.

I read an article on Slate that was, spoiler for people who just want to know who won. Okay. Yeah. That's all I need to do. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's a Godzilla vs. King Kong movie. I wasn't expecting it to be good. I got exactly what I expected.

It's exactly what it said on the tin. All right. Yeah, the side stories were ridiculously bad. They gave podcasters a bad name, which is really hard to do nowadays, but they seemed to really swing for the fences on that one. They insulted 90% of the population.

Yes, they did. They really went after everybody. Oh, man. Yeah. It was fine. You know, have a couple beers, some popcorn. Don't expect a whole hell of a lot. That's all I got to say. All right. I have this one in the queue. I was going to try and watch it last night, but I ended up finishing American Gods season three, which I have to say is the best season of the bunch.

That show keeps getting better. So that was good. But it's called Coded Bias. And it's on Netflix, and it is a documentary about bias in artificial intelligence and facial recognition. So I'll have that one on for next week. But I...

Why were we not talking heads on that? I know. Why did nobody call us? I mean, God, we're white and male. So the AI, the facial recognition AI should be able to pull us out of a crowd. I mean, it might say we're criminals, but there we go. And it was first contact day yesterday.

So there was a lot of Star Trek news. And first one, Discovery has a season four. Well, of course they do. And I will begrudgingly watch it. I know. And we'll see what happens. I know. Sounds like they're doing yet another reboot.

This seems to be the reboot show. Every season's a reboot. So someday you'll get it right. Maybe. Nope, they're not. No. No, they won't. All right. So yeah, the bad guy is a spatial anomaly, which will turn into something at some point.

And it'll be a big reveal that they expect will blow everybody's socks off. And most of us will just go, meh, meh. That's my guess for the season. I know. And it's funny. Before I saw this teaser trailer, I was watching just a little montage of all of the Star Treks that they had put together for first contact day.

And man, Star Trek used to be a lot better, is all I got to say. It used to be so much better. Yeah. Lower Decks is coming. Great. Yeah. And Star Trek Prodigy has debuted their animated Captain Janeway.

And I have to say, my latest experience with Kate Mulgrew is red from Orange is the New Black. Boy, she thinned up. I know, man. They really took some liberties on that one. But yeah, I mean, I think they captured her face fairly well and definitely her personality.

And this is just from a still image. So I'm actually kind of looking forward, even though this show is for kids, I'm looking forward to checking this one out. Yeah, I'll watch it too. I mean, we watch Lower Decks. This can't get any worse. True. They did have a great trailer for a documentary called Woman in Motion, which is a Nichelle Nichols documentary about- I saw Run, Lola, Run.

That was a great movie, by the way. Great soundtrack. Better soundtrack. Great movie, better soundtrack. I do have a copy of it, if you'd like. It's very hard to find, but I had the DVD and had it ripped for me. Anyway, so this is, yeah, it's about her involvement in NASA in the space program, and it looks really good.

This one I will definitely watch. This one I'm looking forward to. But what I'm really looking forward to, obviously, is Picard Season 2. Now, what really irks me about Picard Season 2 is that it's not coming till 2022. Yes. And we have Discovery in 2021. Why?

Yes. Why? Why, why, why, why? Why do the good air young, or I was trying to make a good die young thing, but it didn't work. Never mind. Why do we have to wait till 2022? But it looks, I mean, it's got Q. Come on.

I'm in. Yep. That's it. I'm in. You know, Q is the best part of all Star Trek, as far as I'm concerned. I love John DeLancey. His characterization of Q was spot on, always hilarious. And for a character that could easily be the, you know, the deuce ex machina of everything, they never really did that with him.

He was all powerful, but he never, like, just solved things for everybody. It was great. They really held back on writing that. So I'm really looking forward to this, and I'm really looking forward to how he's going to play into it. And obviously, you throw him into the mix, and who knows who else is going to show up on this season.

Now, here's what I'm worried about. The massive spatial anomaly in season four of Discovery is Q. Is still connected to the Picard anomaly, yes. I just don't want to. You know that's going to happen. I don't want it to be. I don't want it to be seen. And then it's going to be a crossover event with Picard.

Now, see, if Q really wanted to save the universe, he would just recast Discovery. Or at least the captain. You really only need to recast one person. One person. One person's got to go. That's it. Or at least give her acting lessons, please. Oh, man. And it's been driving me crazy.

I haven't been able to really watch anything on TV or any of the movies lately, because I haven't found any good stories that really... Like, I'll start watching something, and five minutes into it, I'm like, this again? This again? I think it's getting old, Jason. I think so. We've seen everything.

Yeah. You know? It's like, even watching American Gods, it's like, okay, I read this book 20 years ago. I know what's going to happen. I mean, it's very pretty, what they're doing, but yeah. And just everything is going crazy. And it dawned on me, the only thing in recent history that I've really, really enjoyed, that I thought was really clever and new, was the Umbrella Academy.

All right. They're working on season three. It's not going to be out for a long time, but it got me thinking, I'm going to go back and watch those on Netflix. And then I'm like, no, you know what? This is based on a comic. So I skedaddled my little butt over to Comixology and bought them all.

So my thing at night now is I sit down with my iPad 1700 inch and lay in bed and read comics on it. And I just need something different because at least it goes into what's going to be in season three. So I'm going to skip ahead and cheat.

But yeah, I don't know, man. I haven't found anything really good that's tickled my fancy lately. And I got to say, the Umbrella Academy is the only thing lately. All right. I watched the last blockbuster after you had mentioned it on last week's show because I was curious about it.

And there was some nostalgia feels, interesting group of celebrities that they decided to have on, and also interesting production values. I don't know what happened with Iona Sky. I don't know why. It looks like they shot her interviews back in 1980 with a Betamax handheld camera in the dark compared to everybody else.

But okay. And, you know, it was cute. It was clever. And because, you know, algorithm on Facebook, they knew that I had watched it somehow. And after I was finished having a little bit of feels about my youth and all that stuff, the Everything is Terrible page that I do not follow on Facebook popped up before any earthquake reminders with this update.

Just a reminder that Blockbuster was never good to anyone except Blockbuster. There was no community at those soulless chain locations. They were responsible for closing most of the local ma and pa video stores that we loved and that actually fostered community. Blockbuster hardly carried anything besides hundreds of copies of Titanic or Independence Day.

Their conservative views caused movie studios to produce movies that fit their limited opinion of what we should see. Please stop feeling nostalgic for a corporation that cared nothing for you. Love, Dad. Yeah, fuck you. Sorry. He's not wrong. No, he's not. But you see, the video stores in my little neighborhood outside of Chicago were run by assholes.

You know, the mom and pop shops were basically just snobs. But the Blockbuster... Yeah, it was like there were very few vidiots around, which is the one, the famous one here in Los Angeles. So the mom and pops down in Orange County were basically porn shops. Yeah, these were...

Let's be honest. But yeah, you know, I met some people I still know to this day there and met a couple girlfriends there just hanging out in the parking lot. There's all sorts of fun things that happened at Blockbuster, at least for me, because that's what we had.

And, you know, I don't care what that... I mean, granted, I lost my job at Paramount because of Blockbuster, because that really soured me on them, but not so much as Viacom and Sumner Redstone, who, thank God, is dead now. He deserved it a lot long ago. But anyway, I still had the feels from it.

So I still think it's a good movie to watch, personally. All right. That's just me. And a little bit of follow-up that we talked about. We've been talking about closed captioning for a while and basically how I leave it on all the time because it helps my kid learn how to read a little bit, just exposing him to all that sort of stuff. You talked about the Stephen Fry thing that he had recently done, extolling the virtues of closed captioning.

And there's just a good article over on Salon, Why Your Brain Loves Closed Captioning. So if you do not have closed captioning on your TV, start to. It's a good thing, actually, when they get it right, as opposed to 99% of the time when closed captioning is gibberish, but they're working on it.

Yeah. In the old days, it used to be terrible. I don't have that many issues with it nowadays at all. Yeah, it's pretty good these days. It's much better than the AI translations of our show. Ups and doodads! Ryan, I got a new Mac! Of course you did. Of course you did.

Sure, why not? It's not really a new one. Someone gave me this one. It is an iMac from 2001. Ooh. Yes. The kind they use a blockbuster. It has a CD or DVD drive on it.

Oh, coffee holder. It's in mint condition. It will run High Sierra. That's as far as it will go. Okay. And it's got 8 gig of RAM, which I can't upgrade. I have to say a 500 gig hard drive. But it was really weird having someone hand me an iMac saying, look, here, you can have this one for free.

And I'm like, okay, that's just more work. I got to reinstall the operating system, create all my stuff, move the apps. And then I'm like, no, I don't. I'm never going to use this thing. I'm like, yeah, why do you have to do any of that? Just put it there so it looks cute. Yeah. So, but it's strange.

Now I have, I can't say who's got a DVD player anymore in their computer. I do. You do. I do. Craziness. So this has been making the rounds. HoloLens has inked a deal with the government, which is, HoloLens is Microsoft basically, but they've inked a deal with the government for $21.9 billion.

Yep. Yeah. For 120,000 HoloLens headsets. That seems pricey to me. Pricey. Does that seem a little pricey to you? Because it seems really fucking pricey to me. I'm assuming they're going to be a little better quality than the ones we can buy. Unless it's attached to a fucking robot soldier, I don't see how they can justify that cost.

Yeah, it's a little crazy. 10-year agreement to provide 120,000 headsets based on the HoloLens line. Again, we always talked about this. We know that the government is at least 10 years ahead in technology, so I'm wondering what exactly these things are doing.

Yeah, but here's the upside, I think, is that we'll get some trickle down to the consumer market for this. So they'll figure out how to make this a lot cheaper, and then we'll finally be able to afford a HoloLens because they're still like $3,600 right now. Yep. Yeah. But looking forward to that.

And Apple has expanded their Apple Arcade with classic App Store games, which is awesome, I gotta say. They bought some of the old games and kind of rejiggered them and remastered some of them. And it's cool.

It's really cool. I've been playing Threes Plus, which is nice because I loved Threes. They did Monument Valley again, which I already beat that, so I didn't get that one. But that was a fun game, if you have it, for free. Fruit Ninja. I have been playing far too much Fruit Ninja.

I played Fruit Ninja once for about five minutes. It was clever. Okay, I get a dig into it. Yeah. And they remastered Cut the Rope, which was also a fun game. I never finished that one because it got to be really annoying. But what I want, what I really, really, really want, so if anybody at Apple is listening to this and you have a list of games that you're going to buy and remaster, please, Flight Control.

Flight Control was an awesome game. I loved that game. And you can't get it anymore. So they, because it's, you know, the technology bowed out and the company that made it got bought by EA, so it doesn't exist anymore. But I guess you can get it on Steam if you've got a PC.

But I don't want to play it on Steam. I want to play it on my iPad. So please, somebody at Apple, bring back Flight Control. It's got to be cheap. It's got to be cheap. You can do it. I believe in you. You can do it. Flight Control Plus, coming soon. Please, please.

I did end up getting one piece of hardware this week. I got the Apple Magic Keypad or Keyboard for the iPad. This is much nicer looking than the crappy Logitech version that I bought two or three years ago and never once used. I've got a stack of Logitech, you know, iPad keyboards and cases and all this stuff.

And I've even got the Apple keyboard or keypad that just the really cheesy rubbery one that folds out. This one's really expensive and there's a reason for it. It is hands down the single best keyboard for an iPad ever made.

The engineering on it is so solid. It does double the weight, more than double the weight of my iPad. But it's worth it. It's just because of the way the thing works, the feel on it. The keyboard does not flex, which is great. The weight on it's weird because, like, the iPad is up top, so it's really top heavy.

So it's kind of weird to have in your lap, but I don't use it in my lap. I use it on a table. And it's amazing. It is. And it's got the trackpad is great. It'd be nice if it had some function keys to change things like the brightness and stuff like that. So you still have to touch the screen every now and again.

But for the most part, you can do almost everything from the keyboard and the trackpad. It is so cool. I really, really enjoyed this thing. It is, like I said, for the 12-inch iPad or the 13-inch iPad, it is expensive. It was like 300 bucks. But it's worth it.

I mean, it totally transforms the iPad into a really usable, you know, hybrid laptop kind of deal. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy good. I was amazed. I'm like, oh, God, I got to return this thing. I know I'm going to have to return this thing.

I got it. I plugged it in. I'm just like, holy shit, this is nice. I'm keeping it. But does it work with your iMac? No, it doesn't. Oh, that's too bad. So as you know, during this whole coronavirus thing, I've been going down to my mom's house on weekends down in Orange County so the kid can play with her and we all get a break and all that sort of stuff.

And it's involved a lot of traveling of equipment because, you know, I take my laptop. My wife takes her laptop. We take iPads. We take our phones. I've got my Apple Watch and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, a long time ago, I have the bed stand, the three-in-one charger for my watch and all that.

And I got sick of pulling my iWatch charger, my Apple Watch charger out of that thing and putting it back in every weekend. So I bought a second cable so I could take that with me. Why can't they just have some other solution that fits with everything else? But no, of course, the watch has to have something different. And so I bought a second cable because I got sick of doing that.

And then one weekend, I forgot my second cable. Oh! And the watch does not last more than one day. No, it does not. So that was bad. So I finally just went over to the Amazon bot and I got the iWatch charger three-in-one cable card charging compatible USB type-C iPhone iPad portable travel wireless fast charging cord compatible for Apple Watch Series 654321 blast off 3.9 feet.

And yeah, one of the better purchases I've made. One cable to rule them all. I basically just plug that thing in. I can charge my watch, my iPad, my phone, my wife's iPad, everything all in one go. One cable, one spot. Thank God. I don't know why I waited so long. Well, you know why I'm going to wait so long?

Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock. Damn it! I guess I bought the last one. You must have got the last one. Did you get the new Apple Watch though? No, not yet. I am still waiting for my gift cards to come in the mail from their painstaking search of my old phones to tell me how much money I'm going to get.

As soon as I get both my cards in, I'm good to go.

So we've had a lot of music book talk and roadie talk recently. I had reviewed the book about the side guy that played for Sting, Jeffrey Lee Campbell. And we talked about the, are roadies going to come back to the music industry when it comes back up? Because a lot of them have gotten other jobs.

And so for whatever reason, this book I'd been hearing about was written by a previous roadie, Joel Miller. It's Memoir of a Roadie. Axel said, I made a great cup of tea. Scott Weiland liked to the Carpenters and Ozzy drinks rosé. It was amusing. He's a horrible writer.

That's too bad. Absolutely horrible. And he thinks he's much cleverer than he is. He spends half the book talking about how he gave poetry and his movie scripts to rock stars and nothing ever happened. And I wonder why. And he does little roadie asides at the beginning of each chapter, which is deep thoughts of roadies, which are excruciatingly awful.

But the stories itself of being on the road, pretty rock solid. I would say from my experience, if you've ever wondered what it's like to be on the road and not be the rock star, this is a great book to read about it. Because it's all just getting drunk and trying to work with a hangover.

Okay. Fun stuff. All right. I could just ask you, like, what was it like? Yeah, pretty. Well, my stories are actually better, so. But I'm not going to write a book about it because I don't want to get sued. There you go. And someday you may want to be able to go back out on the road again. Probably not.

Probably not. I'm old. And Alejandro wrote this in. He says, with all due respect to Jason, I consider The Alchemist to be pure drivel. I remember reading it many years ago and was wondering, what the fuck does this garbage book have so many fans for? Brian, please don't waste your time, although I can imagine that it being read by Jeremy Irons would make it possibly tolerable.

I agree with both of these reviewers, and the two reviews were pretty scathing. Now, Jeremy Irons did make it quite tolerable. But here's the thing about this book. If you go into it thinking that it is some kind of self-help parable that is going to change your life and, you know, give you all of the answers of the world, well, you're an idiot anyway if you're going to do that.

Is this some, like, The Wish bullshit? Think it and it will come true, except wrapped in fiction? You're thinking of The Secret. Oh, The Secret. Yes. Yeah. No, fuck The Secret. Kind of. But it's still just a good story. If you go for it as a short story, it's a fun short story.

I'm going to alchemy myself 10,000 more listeners next week. Yeah. Yeah. You could give it a go. Yeah, it's not going to work. But it's not like that. It's not like that at all. Yes, you know how I feel about self-helpy bullshit. Except for the fact that they always drizzle in.

But the thing is, I didn't read this for that. I read it because I thought it was supposed to be a story. I didn't know it was supposed to be self-helpy bullshit. Okay. And Jeremy Irons does make it tolerable. It's like watching a movie. So, yeah. Okay. Whatever. I mean, your mileage may vary.

But I just went into it thinking it was going to be a story. Turns out it was a story. You don't have to read everything into it. But whatever. Whatevs. You enjoyed it. That's fine. Yeah. There you go. Didn't change my life. In one iota. He pees gold now.

Security? Ha! Dave Bittner is back. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. Co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy.

And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. And I'm afraid that's our time for this week. Thank you guys for stopping by. We're off. Thanks for listening. Be sure to like and subscribe. Yes. Oh, man.

How are you guys doing? Doing good. Doing good. I thought I'd start off Star Wars Corner here today with a little good news. It has been confirmed that Jar Jar Binks will not be appearing in the Obi-Wan series. So there's... Thank God for small miracles. Poor Ahmed Best being associated with the most reviled character in all of Star Wars.

Yeah, well, he got paid. Not much. He did, but it seems like he's a genuinely nice person, though. You know, like everyone who I've heard interact with him seems like he's a genuinely nice guy, which means it's kind of sad that he didn't get dealt a better hand with that whole thing.

Yeah, he's certainly dealing with it as well as best as he can, given what he has gotten. And, you know, he goes to... I hear he goes to the fan, you know, meetups and things like that, and he's quite hubris about it. And, yeah, but I don't think he made all that much money. You know, obviously, they don't get a cut of action figure sales to begin with anyways.

And Jar Jar Binks have not exactly been flying off the shelves. He actually had to pay to have his action figure created. Yeah, yeah. But good to hear he's not going to be an Obi-Wan, which with its casting and seems to be of a more serious bent of a show.

So, you know, you throw Jar Jar in the mix and it's just not serious anymore. Misa Tsai. I wonder if he'll ever appear in anything else, if they'll... I mean, you'd think a TV show would be where he could make a passing appearance, but I wonder if it'll ever happen.

He can host the Muppets if they bring it back. He features fairly heavily in the very tongue-in-cheek Lego Star Wars series that are available. That's true. But that's about it. I don't track the comic books, so I don't know if he turns up there at all, but that could be an interesting place.

Wow, it's interesting. I know that there's been fan fiction in which he becomes a Sith Lord, which is quite... And there's a theory that he was actually working for the Sith the entire time. But that's, you know, that's virgin territory when you spend that much time reading up on Star Wars Online.

I would love to see him be a foil for young Lando, you know? Like, that would be fun. Right? You just see him annoying the hell out of young Lando. Me so blocked you again. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, for some reason, Lando finds him in a situation where he has to take Jar Jar on a very long journey on the Millennium Falcon, and so they're trapped together. And you end up with this odd couple situation. Yeah. Worst buddy comedy ever. Pitch that to Kathleen Kennedy now, because I know she's looking for things.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there you go. Just send me free action figures for life, and we'll be good. A little bit of more news. A little bit of more news. ILM has released some video of their stagecraft setup that they used in season two of The Mandalorian.

Because we saw the first season one for... That was a while back. But now they showed season two and how they've enhanced it, and I was just drooling watching this video. Yeah, these things are amazing. I mean, I know, you know, coming from the music world, I know set designers and lighting designers that do tours that are just crapping their pants looking at this thing, wishing they could get a budget big enough to get one.

Seriously. Yeah, I mean, I remember I went to see Rock of Ages on Broadway a few years back. An old high school buddy of mine was in that show, and they had a video wall as one of the backdrops, you know, a big backdrop on stage.

And it was sort of, it was stunning at the time because you didn't really think about that sort of thing where you could have, instead of using drops, you know, which theaters have used forever, you could put whatever you wanted back there and have it be animated, which, you know, fit that show really well.

But this whole thing of not, just not having to use green screens, but then, and so having the actual light being cast on your actors, just, just, it's amazing. And it's funny because it's not something I really thought of, like if I was thinking about what's the future of special effects going to be, this never really crossed my mind.

And I'm someone, probably like you guys, I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the special effects. I love all of these behind the scenes things and this combination of these high res walls, but then having the graphics cards to be able to render them out in real time. It's just amazing.

Really cool. If I had Zuckerberg fuck you money, I would have like three of these in my house. Like every room would be one of these. I'm trying to imagine the things you would set up for the dogs, you know, dog, dog, dog fantasies.

They could always be, they're always driving in the car, hanging their head out the window, you know, set up some fans and flying squirrels galore. Squirrels with jetpacks. Chasing, right. Chasing cats around, whatever. But, yeah. And is it the, you know, is it the future?

I could imagine someone building some kind of really cool bar or nightclub with this sort of thing. Oh, yeah. Well, aren't we already living in this to some degree as everybody has used their custom Zoom backgrounds for the last year and whatnot? So we already know we're kind of wired to like this sort of thing.

And once you get it for our houses, how cool would that be? Yeah. An entire wall. And imagine you finally get the technology to have like, you know, a movable treadmill underneath that can move in any direction. And then you've got your holodeck. Right. Yeah. The whole Ready Player One kind of thing without having to have a headset.

Or a crappy sequel. And, of course, the initial application will be, as all new technology is, porn. Porn. Yeah. So that'll be fun. You're definitely going to have to want to knock on your teenage son's room door before entering the room.

I'm just saying. Give him time to turn his wall off or switch it back to the most isolated cantina or whatever his default setting is. Yeah. No eyes wide shut until you finish your P's. You know what I thought was really interesting about this? Actually, this is a bit of a tangent, but it's because I just finished watching the last Blockbuster documentary.

It is the distribution method for all these behind-the-scenes things now. They kind of just go straight to the internet while we used to have to wait for the deluxe DVD sets to purchase where you would actually get to see all this sort of stuff. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And what's the – oh, gosh, I'm going to hate myself for not being able to remember this.

What's the magazine that would come out, the special effects magazine? Oh, gosh. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I remember the horror one was Fangoria, but what was the – I cannot recall. I know a bunch of our listeners are screaming at us right now. I know, I know, I know.

And I subscribed to it for years. I have a big collection of them, but I can't remember it right now. But they recently folded. Yeah. I think the majority of our listeners are of our age, and they're going, God damn it, what was that called? Mm-hmm. Because we haven't been taking our ginkgo bilbao.

Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got some not-breaking news. Yeah. The biggest not-breaking news of the news cycle. Yeah. So this is just all over the place right now. The personal data for 533 million Facebook users has leaked onto the web.

It's been around kicking about since January on the dark web and for sale and all that sort of stuff. But according to Business Insider, security researcher Alon Gall has discovered that a user on a hacking forum has made it all public, exposing details for about 533 million Facebook members.

Facebook's response, of course, was not particularly – well, I mean, it was very on-brand. Yeah. You all already had this. It's not the new. No apologies whatsoever. Yeah. Fuck you. We fixed it. We fixed that back in 2019.

No big whoop. Yeah. Yeah. Fixed because 533 million members' information is out there, including generally non-changing details like birthdates. Email us. Right. Speaking of – We closed that barn door. Yeah. The horses are all gone, but we totally closed that barn door.

Yes. No problem. We're good here. Speaking of, have you guys kicked up any on your spam this week? My information – there's a couple of sites. There's the have-I-been-Facebook-pwned version of a site out there right now where you can punch in your details and see if you were part of the leak.

And I was not, so. Okay. Have-I-been-pwned actually has it too. But I haven't checked to see if it was in there, but I don't have to because I know it is because as soon as this thing dropped, I started getting SMS spam like you would not believe. And now I'm getting probably 10x the robocalls saying that the IRS is coming to arrest me.

Press 1. Yeah, I'm not in it either. I did note that they're saying that Zuckerberg himself was in this data leak as well as the Pope. So there you go. Talk about your different ends of the spectrum.

If the Pope posts on Facebook, does anybody see it? If anybody posts on Facebook, does anybody see it? So what I thought about this though is it did – it kind of warmed my heart to realize that hackers are now taking the premium subscription model a la Disney into heart.

So, you know, you can either pay the $30 to Disney Plus to see Mulan or Raya and the Last Dragon right away or you wait a little while and you get it for free. That was so true. I wonder why did they release it? That's what I want to know. Did it just run out like nobody could – nobody was buying it anymore, so they're just like, eh, screw it.

Let's just throw it out there for shits and giggles. Seems to be. Yeah, seems to be. I know, for example, we reported today that the folks in Ireland who handle the data breach enforcement for GDPR, they're looking into whether or not this is actually an old breach or not.

Is the data new or not? Because that makes a difference for them. If it was dropped when Facebook says it was, then it happened before some GDPR enforcement had gone into place. So it could make a difference for them as to when it actually happened and what they actually did.

So whether they lose their coffee budget for the next two months or not. Right, yeah, whether or not Zuck has to go digging in his couch cushions to pay the fine or not. So, yep, yep. I saw an interesting story. This is via the folks from CyberScoop, mostly about some research from the Cisco Talos folks about some malware that's being hidden in game cheats.

And what I thought was particularly interesting about this, I mean, you know, those of us who've been playing games for a long time, of course, there's always been cheat codes. And then along the way, there were cheat mods where, you know, you could alter your software to give you superpowers and so on.

See, this is where I'm definitely going to show my non-gaming basic life in that, like, boy, this stuff's come a long way because I just remember getting codes or being told turn left and then right. Right, yeah. I did not realize that the cheat codes have come so far.

Yeah, you know, subscribe to Nintendo Magazine where it would give you the left, left, right, right, up, down. Exactly, up, down, up, down, A, B, A, B, C, D, done. Right, and you get unlimited lives in Pac-Man. But so there are mods.

And, of course, in the world of online gaming where evidently there are real things at stake, at least to the folks who play these games, these cheat codes can mean a lot to them. But what was interesting to me was that part of the – part of how they're getting in here is that it's a pretty normal thing that when you're installing video game software and when you're outfitting your PC to play video games, you give the video game high-level access.

Oh, yeah. And a lot of the installations say turn off your antivirus, turn off – you know, you want to strip that thing down so it's not running anything but what's needed to run the game. And the hackers are – the folks spreading this malware are taking advantage of that by telling you if you want these cheats, well, you've got to turn off all your security software.

Well, as someone who has been down this road long, long ago with – I used to play Quake 3 Arena semi-pro. Cinefax. Cinefax, yes. Sorry. Yes, yes. It just hit me. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. There we go.

I knew it was there somewhere. Sorry, Jason. Yes, okay. Yes, yes. Brian found the cheat code for the memory unlock. Just hold on a second, Jason. Just wait a second. I'm just basking in the glow of Cinefax.

My old addled brain is enjoying the recall of Cinefax and playing back all of the covers from going back to, you know, Star Wars. So, all right, Jason, you were saying. I was saying, as a semi-pro Quake 3 player back in the day, we had aimbots.

And half of the time, you would install an aimbot because you needed the aimbot software installed so you can run the anti-cheating aimbot code. And these were pretty low level. I mean, what it did was you gave it kind of access to your system, and it would follow your cursor, and it would read the game and find out where somebody was going to be, and it would do prediction on where the person was going to be.

And it would shoot the railgun, you know, a couple milliseconds before any human could possibly do it. But to do that, they also had, you know, software because you wanted to catch the cheaters. And so you had, like, multiple systems going at the same time to do all this crazy stuff.

So this stuff has been around for a long time, but you definitely have to give it a lot of access to run it or find the cheaters, too. Now, when you say you were playing semi-pro, what does that mean? I was in a bunch of clans, Quake 3 Arena clans, back in the day.

So we would do tournaments and things like that on the weekends. I would basically go home for my 48-hour weekend. 36 hours of that was spent playing competitive Quake. Okay. So it wasn't just in our office. No, it wasn't just in our office. T-shirts and things like that for what we were doing.

I mean, I got, like, you know, official ID swag and things like that, but no money. Right. That's always semi-pro. Okay. Semi-pro. I think we'd consider that amateur since there was no money involved. Yeah, true, amateur. But it wasn't... Come on, Brian. Let him have it. Come on, man.

I will let him have it, definitely. You got the Senefex. Let him have the semi-pro Quake player. He destroyed me on a regular basis when we played in the office, so he got his wins all the time. I was always having a flamethrower right up my ass as soon as I joined the game. Railgun. Railgun, yes.

But yes, it was... See, we were playing... We played Network Marathon back in the day on our Mac networks. We did that at Paramount. And my friend, our mutual friend, Brian, Dave Riegler, he and I worked at Paramount, and we wired up the entire Paramount network for the advertising department, and we would all play marathon on that.

Yeah. Because we had some of the best Macs money could buy, so it was pretty nice. Right. You needed those graphics capabilities, so there you go. No, we had all the good toys. So yeah, the fact that the Titanic website was late can be directly attributed to our love of Marathon.

To the fine folks at Bungie. Yep. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this next story I have here comes from the Bitdefender website, but it was written by our pal, Graham Cluey.

It's kind of a funny whoopsie kind of story where the UK Cybersecurity Council, which is a government organization who is out there to help track people to the cybersecurity sector. They made an announcement, a press release, asking people to send information or find information on their website, ukcybersecurity.org.uk.

But it turns out no one had actually bothered to register that domain, and they didn't own it. Or build a website or get email. Yeah. Yeah. So lucky for them, a security researcher noticed this and actually went and got the domain and then offered it up to them to transfer it to them for free.

But, you know, it reminds me, we've talked about the guy who owned the do not reply dot com domain. Before, and he would get everything, including classified materials. How do you get to the point? How do you get to this point where nobody thinks to check, do we have the domain before we launch?

Oh, Jason and I worked for many companies. I can tell you one story that was pretty good. UPN, United Paramount Network, back in the day, they were launching an animated show called Syndra, S-Y-N-D-R-A. And they had a URL on the commercial that they were running on television.

So I'm like, oh, let me go look. Not registered. Boom. Mine. Done. I was not so nice. As the gentleman in the UK, I got a cool couple grand out of that one. So they're like, would you please transfer it to us? I'm like, I'm sorry.

I've already started to build a website here. So I'm going to have to change all my branding and I'm going to have to find a new name and do all the work. Well, that was a big thing back in the early days of the internet. People would scour press releases and basically buy up domains that they thought that might be, that that product might be at some point, right?

Because nobody would think to do it ahead of time. There would just be a press release and, okay, we're going to launch this thing. And then you would just grab the domain for it and, you know, hopefully get a couple grand. Check for scripts that are being sold, you know, if a new script is sold and you can check the titles on those, buy the titles for it.

But these people were so, so dumb that they actually made a TV commercial for it and were airing it. And that's how I found it. So it's like, come on. It actually just shows you how many people actually went to the website from their TV commercial too. Yeah.

And I just randomly saw it on a Saturday morning and I was like, oh, let me grab that. Yeah. It's hard. I remember back in the early days when domain name speculating was a real active thing. If I had kept all the money that I got from domain speculating and actually invested it, we would not be doing this show right now because I would be on my own private island.

Jason did have an empire of domain names at one point. I had well over a thousand domain names and I was pulling in close to a hundred grand a year on those things. And I would just buy gadgets like a dumb ass. I did not understand investing or taxes. Well, hopefully you had fun.

Yeah. Yeah. So we had a bit of feedback from our favorite 80s album. Now, before I get into this, I would like to point out that our first query, which was what song kind of most defined the 80s, actually required some explanations and had some objective information regarding it.

While the second query was very subjective. So, you know, people can yell at us all they want, but it's incredibly subjective what 80s album was most important to us. Mervyn wrote in saying, Upstairs at Eric's by Yazoo, no mention. It was a fine album. It did not define my 80s.

Never heard of it. I guess it did for you, Mervyn. And that's great. Levi from Denmark. Loved hearing you guys talk about your influential albums from the 80s and security. Even though I'm one of the grumpy young geeks, I could relate to having an 11-year-old brother resulted in me browsing through his tapes to discover 80s gems like, and here we go into Jason territory, Master of Puppets.

I grew up in a smaller town, was one of those sticking out like being the pastor's son for starters, but blasting out battery made me not care at all and left me feeling proud that I wasn't just like everyone else. See, he should have gotten Pastor of Muppets because he was a pastor's son. Come on. Pastor of Muppets. There was an album called Pastor of Muppets.

Now there's a show to pitch to someone. Pastor of Muppets, yeah. Yep. And Rick writes in, greetings from sunny, COVID-free Adelaide, South Australia. Screw you. Great show this week, as always, chaps. Props to Brian for naming the best album of the 80s.

As Jason and Dave were going through their choices, I was yelling disintegration until my wife told me to shut up. I feel you. I feel you, Rick. Then Brian brings it home. I was about to do a victory dance, but remembered my goth shoegaze roots, so shuffled around a bit while looking down instead. Good times.

Keep on grumping. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody, for playing along. That's good. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It struck me in the past week or so, because I continue to think about this. I was thinking about important 80s albums, and I was thinking about the album Faith by George Michael, which I think often gets overlooked.

And I think because it was very poppy, and George Michael was very, you know, very pretty, and also he sort of faded off of the scene for a while when he was mad at his record label for so long. But that was a hugely successful album that spawned a lot of really, you know, good poppy hits, and it just doesn't seem like it gets put on a lot of those lists, and I wonder why that is.

And I know it's easy to say it's because George Michael sucks, but I don't—I can understand why people don't like him, but I think objectively— I think objectively, you know, that was a—for a pop album, it was a very well-crafted album.

And I also think George Michael was objectively a very good musician. Yes. Yes. I see what you're saying. He doesn't get the props that, say, a prince does. Like, prince's 80s output is always lionized and everything, and George Michael, you know. I would throw in with George Michael, Journey, who throughout the 80s just killed it.

They did. They really did. You can dislike him as much as you want, but man, Don't Stop Believing, all that stuff in the early 80s. Massive. Yeah. Well, then what about Frankie Goes to Hollywood? And lasting. Sopranos. It went to the top 10 again after it hit the Sopranos.

Oh, God. I was just thinking of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, because everybody had the t-shirts for years. Years. Yeah. I lumped them in the band. George Michael wore a relaxed t-shirt. Yes, he did. That's what made me start thinking of it. But Frankie is a band like the Ramones, where they sold a lot more shirts than they ever sold albums.

Ah, yes. Yes. The Misfits has the record for most. And Misfits, yes, by far. Misfits definitely win that one. Like, you're a Misfits fan, kid? What? I just thought it was a cool shirt. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks, everybody, for writing in. It's good. This has been a sticky one. I just keep thinking about it, and it's fun to revisit. So, yeah, it's nice to hear what folks out there think, too. Yep. Very cool. All right, guys.

Well, stay tuned for next weekend. Don't stop believing. Yeah, got to have faith. Relax. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Adina, Philip, Noah, James, and Ian.

Thank you all so much. We're getting close to actually hitting a round even number in Patreon donations. So, help us out. Over at PayPal, Nikolai, Shaleen, Doug, Nicola, David, Stephen, and Marios, who sent us 500 bucks. Happy 500.

Can't wait for episode 1,000. Me, too, because then you'll send us $1,000. You know, you can do that every week, because this is episode 502. We'll take $502. Keep it up, Mario. Come on, Marios. Pretty please. And I got a little plugs for me personally here, I got to say.

I was featured in Podcast Magazine in the April 2021 edition. So, links will be for that in the show notes if you want to go check it out. And you can also grab a free lifetime subscription to Podcast Magazine while you're there. Link for that will be in the show notes as well. So, thanks to Steve over there for slapping me in the magazine.

That was nice. And this show comes out for the unwashed masses who don't give us money on Patreon. on Wednesday morning. And also on Wednesday morning, I will be on the Wild Business Growth Podcast. And you can check that one out.

Link will be in the show notes for that as well. I had a fun conversation with Max over there. And yeah, lifted the veil on some podcasting stuff. Ah, the Wednesday release explains why when I tried to go look at it, I was getting page not found. Yes, it comes out Wednesday morning. Mystery of last night solved.

Yes. There you go. You could have just texted me and said, dude, your link's broken. But I wouldn't explain. It was well past your bedtime, dude. It was 10 after 7? I was still watching baseball and I know you were asleep. Oh. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister.

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 502. And there you can find all the links we talked about in this episode. You can also 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 Karen us with a five-star and snarky review. If you don't already follow us in your podcast player of choice, go to gog.show slash follow where you can find convenient links to every podcast player so you can get the show as soon as it drops. And if you know someone who has too much hope in their hearts and is springing their step, tell them to shut up and tell them about our show.

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