518: Eternal September of the Nerd Only Internet

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Yay. Welcome to Canada. Yeah, it's nice up here. No complaints so far. I mean, obviously, none of my stuff is here. It all arrives tomorrow. And that's going to be fun. And it's just, yeah, it's been a hell of a two weeks. But I'm happy to be here. Thanks to Eric for stepping in last week. And I'm glad you enjoyed your downtime. Jason, for your birthday, I hope you had fun.

Yeah, it was okay. All right. Yeah, it was okay. All right. That's about it. There you go. So hopefully your stuff will get here soon. So you're not podcasting from the cave in the future. But what's your ETA on all your goods getting there?

Well, they are all here already. We have a, because of Toronto bylaws, we can't have the pods dropped off on the street. So tomorrow, I get to go to Pearson Airport and go through the customs area. Yeah. And we have movers coming to the pods so they can load things into a moving van from the pods, then drive the moving van here, and then unload everything into our house. And then approximately four or five years from now, we'll have everything put away.

Canada's dumb. The whole point of the pod is so they drop it off at your front door. It works differently in different places, Jason. Okay. Okay. You know, we might as well just get right into everything here instead of just chatting about bullcrap. You know, I'm not a big Twitter guy. You're kind of the Twitter power user.

But I was on Twitter last night, and somebody had written me with a link. And instead of being able to like it, I noticed that they now have up-down vote replies. Yeah, we talked about this when they came out. They were beta testing it, and I was one of the early beta testers on that. So I got access to it. I don't know what it does, actually.

But does it remove a like if, you know, so if you got like eight likes and then you thumbs down one, does it remove it? I don't know what it actually does. Don't know, but it made me think of the Han Solo line. I'm out of it for a little while, and everybody gets deluged. It's a grandeur. That's about it. That's about it. I'm sure it's juicing the algorithm in some way, which I don't give a fuck about.

Yeah, well, if only they had a full-time CEO that actually paid attention to the product. No. Why do you need that? You don't need that in this day and age, Brian. We're in the future. And I saw this morning that the AP is reporting that U.S. experts are expected to recommend COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all Americans eight months after their second shot.

Yep. I've already got an appointment. It doesn't matter. Or, you know, those that haven't done anything. Yeah. Continue to not do anything, and that's all going to go so great. Yeah. We actually know a doctor who does infectious diseases, and he's like, yeah, just go. Just tell them you haven't got it yet, or you missed your second shot, or whatever. Just go get it now.

I'm like, okay, this is an infectious disease doctor who's saying, go get it. I'm like, I'm going to listen to that guy. Yeah. Good. Wise. And I saw a little Canadian news, and we'll have that more frequently now because I'm here now. Because it's all worked out so well in the USA, Cineplex is unveiling a subscription called Cineclub here in Canada, offering free movies, perks, and discounts.

Do they not get the internet in Canada? Have they never heard of MoviePass? Well, they're obviously doing this in an attempt to get people to start coming back to theaters. Vaccine rates are a lot higher here. Case levels are a lot lower. So, you know, please come back and go see movies is the point here. And they have learned a little bit. They're not offering the all-you-can-eat packages that destroyed MoviePass and things of that nature. So, it's a much more watered-down program for, you know, $9.99 a month or whatever.

Yeah. And you get basically one free movie a month and then cheaper tickets after that. Yeah. And 20% off the $8 for popcorn. Woo! $8 Canadian. I know. Serious cash. Ka-ching. Speaking of ka-ching, I got a check from Google+. Woo! $2.15. That's right. From Google Plus Litigation. Because, you know, class action lawsuit and it just showed up.

It's like, here, here's $2.15 right to my PayPal account. I'm like, sweet! That's the way it should be. True. I should check. I should have mine. You just got an email, I believe. But either way, yeah. That's the old Google Plus thing.

We talked about it ad nauseum before when it was going down. So, this is the final chapter of Google Plus. Until they decide to do another social network. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? Niantic CEO John Hankey says that the metaverse is a dystopian nightmare.

No, it's not. Well, it is a dream. It is a total dream because it doesn't exist. It does not exist. No, it doesn't. It doesn't exist. No. They should sell NFTs of the metaverse because they're about the same thing. Useless, dumb, lame. One of the good things about being out for the last two weeks and really not, like, looking at tech news or anything is I missed the grand brouhaha about the metaverse.

I was there at the very beginning when Facebook announced that that's what Zuck wanted to build. And then there was a shit ton of articles and everybody's screaming and freaking out about it. And now it's kind of already over, which is great. It's a great... I missed it all. I know. See, I thought it was going to be in the news for six months or so because, you know, the blockchain is dead.

Nobody talks about that anymore as a value proposition for their startup. AI is kind of on the wane right now. It's, you know, it's still... It's at the top of the bell curve coming down, but I can definitely see it coming down because everybody's starting to realize that AI is bullshit.

You know, people who listen to the show knew it a long time ago. But, yeah, so they're going to start, you know, AI is waning. So they need a new hook to grab onto. And I figured the metaverse would be it. You know, we're going to be metaverse ready. No, you're not because it's not going to happen in our lifetime.

Same thing with self-driving cars. Oh, I didn't even put this in the show notes, but Tesla is under investigation because their cars keep crashing into ambulances and firetrucks and the like. Usually those... Why? Because they're red. They're big and red. And, yeah, and the firetrucks and ambulances are probably there picking up, you know, victims from the previous Tesla crash because, you know, they've got...

Elon has this bug up his ass where he's not going to put LiDAR in the cars. You know what would have stopped these cars from running into giant hunks of metal in front of them? LiDAR. You know what else would have stopped them? Brakes. Drivers. Exactly. Yes, a driver to push the brakes.

Anyway, back to Canada news. Canada's got the world's worst internet ideas. I found this one and I thought of you. There's a new law that they're trying to get pushed through. And there's a whole bunch of different wrongity McWrongenstein things in here.

But the first one is a requirement to remove lawful but awful speech that is allowed under Canadian law, but effectively also now banned under Canadian law if this goes through. Lawful but awful. I've never heard a more Canadian phrase than that, actually.

Lawful but awful. That sounds so Canadian. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I read through all of this. It's a horribly misguided and stupid bit of litigation. I don't think it's going to pass. I'm still trying to get myself up to speed on Canadian politics here.

But there's a whole new election that's now going to happen. So this is going to get buried in the there's too much other crap going on pile. And we'll review this later. Well, it's nice to know that your politicians are as dumb as ours. Well, that's pretty much a given anywhere.

I've yet to see a country in the world that has good politicians. But, you know, a little bit about the tech and Canada stuff that I've been dealing with here. I've got to say most companies are not at all prepared or set up for accounts to switch countries or even to set up a second account if you happen to use the same email address and or phone number.

Obviously, the email address is an easier one to get around. So thank God for the companies that base it on that. I finally got to dust off and use Gmail account I've had for like 20 years and never use. So all my Canadian stuff is now done through Gmail instead of my other email address.

And it's just been it's been a god awful nightmare. You know, some people do move between borders fairly often, particularly people that live on borders themselves. And some people do have homes in two countries or want to establish residences or something like that.

But it's damn near impossible with a lot of these companies. They're just not built for it. I will give big props to Apple. However, Apple TV now makes it super easy to switch Apple IDs. And I was able to create a Canadian Apple ID to access Canadian apps. I can easily switch back to my USA Apple ID and then connect to my VPN wireless to watch my US apps and programs.

I can't believe how easy they made it. Now, you know, it's still like I've got to switch two things every single time, but it's better than nothing. It's way better than most other other tech companies have set up. Wait, so you have two Apple IDs. You have a Canadian Apple ID and an American Apple ID. So are you paying twice for Apple products?

Like for your TV stuff? It's just still like under a family plan. How does that work? Well, I'm not paying for anything on my Canadian Apple ID at the moment, but you need a Canadian Apple ID to be able to download Canadian geoblocked apps. Gotcha. Yeah.

So there's an app for a basic. The Tim Hortons app? You know, things of that nature. You know, there are some like TV and streaming stuff that's Canadian only, and you can't even see the app in the app store unless you have a Canadian ID. Gotcha. Okay.

Yep. Another reason not to move to Canada, although as the way things are playing out down here, we might be neighbors sooner than you think. I saw the news today that there's nothing more dystopian than this, and I can't believe it just blew my mind.

People are now worried that the wildfires in California are actually spreading COVID. Oh, you've got to be shitting me. Nope. It's in the smoke. Oh, well, there's something in the smoke that these people are smoking. That's your shit ain't COVID. Jesus. So, you know, I'll dust off the guest bedroom for you, Jason.

Please do. Please do. We're on our way. Me and Bammers and Dino crashing out in the garage. In the news. Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.

Well, they made a blog post this week called Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Building for the Future, something that I'm sure if Mark Zuckerberg was dead, he'd be rolling over in his grave for, because privacy enhancing technology is something that is just so foreign to him.

So, they are going to be rebuilding its ad infrastructure to know a lot less about us because people aren't giving up the data like they used to. You know, kind of like DuckDuckGo has been doing for, I don't know, its entire existence and is profitable. Now, see, I actually, I have, in my mind, I know they think they're being altruistic about this, but in my mind, they're not.

In my mind, what they've seen is, if we dial in so deeply, oh, shit, nobody's actually looking at ads. We can't report this back to anybody. We got to make sure that more people see more ads so it's less specific. And that's it.

It's money. Oh, it's always money. Yes. And I love this from Graham Mudd. Is it Harvey Mudd's great, great, great, great grandson or grandfather, actually, because it goes the other way around. He says, we definitely see that ads personalization will evolve very meaningfully over the course of the next five years and that investing well ahead of that will benefit all of our customers.

We're not customers. We're not. Oh, I'm sorry. The ad agencies. Oh, he's not talking to us. He's talking to the ad agencies. That's right. And enable us to help shape that future state of the ads ecosystem. Yeah, well, I'm sorry. Never forget, everybody, that we are not Facebook's customers.

Was it Harcourt Fenton Mudd? That was it? Yeah, something like that. Anyway, yeah, I got a lot more to say about Facebook in the coming sections. But, yeah, this is just flag waving and stupidity trying to keep a stock up because everybody knows that their fire hose of data is starting to get turned off.

Yep. And scientists trial AI systems which could diagnose dementia in one scan. This comes from our buddy Vincent. And this is great. I am cool for this. We talked about machine learning and radiologists in the past and how the machine learning algorithms, not AI, can actually pick out cancerous tumors better than a radiologist.

The radiologist is like the second tier now to take a look at it, which is fantastic. I'm fine with that as long as they're still the second tier. Yeah, there's still listening insurance companies. As long as there's eyeballs on it, some human eyeballs. But they're going to start doing this with dementia, which is great because I lost my grandmother to dementia.

It's a horrible thing that anybody who has gone through it will agree with me that get this done sooner than later because if they can do any kind of treatment before this – honestly, right now, to diagnose dementia, do you know what they have to do, Brian? No.

An autopsy. That's the only way that they can actually diagnose dementia, which kind of – cows have left the barn at that point. Yeah, grandma's got her heart already, so thanks for that, modern science.

So this is great. I think this is fantastic. Yeah, I'm all aboard of that. I'd just call it machine learning or stick with algorithm. Don't call it AI and have a second set of eyes after the first. Yeah. That's all I ask for. Yep. That's all. That's all. And Will sent in this article, which is – I don't know if you read it, Jason.

I tried. I tried. It's one of my favorite written articles in recent history for tech news. Motorola wants to be the new Apple. Its first attempt is, oh, take a look. And basically, it's just like – we could have written this straight out. It's hilarious. You might think Motorola simply produces cheaper phones.

You may not realize that its market share in the U.S. has risen to 11%. That leaves it 21 points behind Samsung, but 10 points ahead of its former owner, Google. And they want to be recognized now as diverse and inclusive. We want to be seen as disruptive, as agents of change. Yes, I should have admitted a buzzword alert.

My apologies. And then they have an ad out that is attempting to show the newer, cooler, disruptive agents of change, Motorola. And, yeah. It's a fucking phone. It's a stupid ad. I don't know if you watched it. No, I couldn't. I couldn't. As they say in the article, if you want to be seen as different, it's wise not to look like a thousand ads you've seen before and would rather not see again.

No mold is broken here. Instead, mold merely slithers over the ad. Yeah. It's good writing. Oh, it is. It is. Yeah. Motorola. Once so high and lofty. I mean, it's still a solid company, but you're not going to be Apple. Sorry.

Yeah. I mean, what was the last great thing that Motorola ever made? The Razor. Exactly. You know how long ago that was? Well, you were just using it two years ago, if I remember correctly. No, I tried to. You can't use them anymore because the network's dead. I've got one.

And I forget who sent it to me. One of our friends of the show sent it to me. I think it might have been Jason Bryant. I can't even remember. But it's actually one of the Thai versions. So above the numbers, instead of A, B, and C, it's got like Thai letters on it. Nice. But I still, I mean, you just hold that thing in your hand and you flip it open and you feel like you're in fucking Star Trek.

It was awesome. Media Candy. All right, Brian. I got a lot of stuff to cut through because I had a little time off, like I said, for my birthday. And so we watched a lot of TV.

If you're a fan of Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum, Making the Cut Season 2 is out on Amazon. We loved it. Watch the whole thing. Now you can binge watch the whole thing. We watched it in order over the couple of weeks. Great show.

Great show. Is it just Project Runway Part 2? No, it's not. It's actually much more in-depth because they get established designers. And the prize is a million dollars, which is much higher than Project Runway. And Apple gets behind it with their fashions.

So every week when somebody wins, when they announce the winner, you can actually go buy those clothes on Amazon. Smart. It's very cool. And I mean, I disagree with the winner of this season. You can watch it. Tell me if I'm wrong. But we were both screaming at the TV. We thought it was bullshit.

But still, it's Tim Gunn. I love Tim Gunn. Tim Gunn is that crazy gay uncle that you just always want to hug. I love him. And Heidi's okay, too. I like the both of them. On my birthday, we watched The Suicide Squad, me and friend of the show, Bob Fogarty.

Loved it. Absolutely loved it. It's a superhero movie, but it's a dumb superhero movie, you know, from the Guardians of the Galaxy guy. And so we just kind of got drunk and watched that. It's super violent, just fun. Idris Elba's in it.

And then, of course, anything with Margot Robbie is worth a watch. I'm just saying. Let me actually bump it really quick here because I totally forgot about this. It wasn't a drunk on an airplane thing because my flight was super early and I was COVID scared and all that sort of stuff. But I watched Shazam, speaking of dumb superhero movies.

Okay, how was it? I've never seen it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like Tom Hanks Big meets Superman. And it was very funny. Okay. I liked it. I wanted to catch it, but it was one of those things where I never really got a solid review. So if you say it's fun, then I'll check it out because I only want fun stuff.

I thought it was fun. Yeah, it was totally fun. All right. And it's all over the news this week. The Ms. Pat Show is out on BET Plus. No idea what that is. Ms. Pat, she's a stand-up comedian. She's amazingly funny. I first saw her on Burt Kreischer's The Cabin, where she was in an episode with the chick from The Big Bang Theory.

Kyuco. What's her first name? Kelly. Kelly. Kelly Kyuco. Yeah, Kaylee. Whatever her name is. Whatever. And there was a whole big drama about that because she was scared of Ms. Pat. And I thought it was part of the show, but it turns out, no, she was actually really scared of her. Anyway, but the Ms. Pat Show, it's a 10-part sitcom.

On BET Plus, you can binge it right now for some strange reason, which we're still trying to figure out why they released all 10 episodes in one go on a streaming platform, which you pay by the month. Not sure about that one. So we binged the whole thing, and I swear to God, we did it basically in real time.

It was so damn funny. Highly recommended. There's just nothing not to love about that show. Really good. And you can watch the whole thing. If you've got your Apple TV account, you can just pop into BET, sign up for the account or the trial right there, watch the show, and when you're done, cancel it all in the Apple interface, which makes it so easy.

Unless you're a big BET fan, and you can just keep it. But I'm not really about the whole Medea collection, personally. Anyway, I watched Pig with Nicolas Cage this week. Okay. Loved it. I absolutely loved it. It's really strange, because it's, you know, it's about a pain.

Well, yeah. But it's not. The thing is, it's like you're expecting this thing to turn into a John Wick-style movie the whole way through, and it is not. It's completely different than you think it's going to be, and I really, really enjoyed it. Okay. It's not really on my to-do list, but maybe I'll watch a few minutes.

No, it's a slow burn. It's one of those slow burns that you just have to, like, turn the lights off and get into. And it's surprisingly good. Surprisingly good. All right. So, you're in Canada now, and you said that you weren't going to watch Ted Lasso until you got to Canada. Are you back up to speed on Ted Lasso?

No. Fuck you. I've just gotten here. Do you know- You've been there for 10 days. Do you know how difficult moving is? 10 days you've been there. Whatever. I haven't watched it yet. No. Okay. Well, the entire world has, and the episode four is the single best Christmas special for some reason in the middle of August that they could have ever made.

And it's fantastic. I mean, you just cannot- The show gets better and better and better. I, you know, I love season one. I've heard nothing but good things about season two. So, I definitely am very much looking forward to it. You know, a couch would help and some other things that we still have to sort out.

So, we'll get there. Okay. I did watch, well, my wife really got into and watched White Lotus, and I occasionally looked up and enjoyed parts of it immensely. I would say I probably watched 80% of it. I missed some bits here or there. Don't think I really missed out on that much.

If you like shows about awful people being awful and there being no redeeming features whatsoever, kind of like, what's that show, Ascension? No, not Ascension. Succession. What's it called? Secession, kind of like Secession, except this is like set in Hawaii on a resort. It's really good and dark funny.

Okay. Okay. So, you could watch that, but you couldn't watch Ted Lasso, eh? Just let it go, Jason. Let it go. I will watch things on my own time when I'm ready to watch them. You watch things with horrible people, but you don't want to watch the pick-me-ups. I get you. I get you. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. I also watched another of the Disney series on Disney Plus about the background of the parks and things like that.

This one's called The Imagineering Story. It's like a six-part thing. Each one's an hour long. Absolutely fascinating. I love this stuff. I was trying to figure out why I've been so attracted to it recently, and I realized I'm leaving my youth behind. And that's why I'm watching all these Disney things right now.

Okay. Because it's comforting to me, because I grew up going to Disneyland. My first job was at Disneyland. So, I just love watching all this stuff, and it's just something about leaving and made me all nostalgic for it, I suppose. And speaking of being nostalgic and my youth being destroyed, everybody in the world sent me this link.

The Cure bassist, Simon Gallup, announces he's leaving the band after four decades. He's just fed up of betrayal, he posted on his Facebook on Saturday. That post has now been removed. Okay. And who the hell knows what's happening. It's probably back in the band. Yeah, probably.

It's somewhat comforting to know that 60-year-old musicians are still cranky assholes. Of course. Dude, they get crankier as they get older. Come on. I have to say, though, I mean, to some degree, The Cure has been my all-time favorite band. I think Simon Gallup is an integral part of it.

His sound, his bass playing, all of that sort of stuff is a big part of The Cure. I can't remember the last time they released an album. Sure, they tour every now and then, and that's always great to go see them. But you know what? They're in their 60s, for fuck's sake. Do they really need to tour anymore?

Do they need to make new albums? I mean- No, they don't. I'm like, yeah. There comes a point where it's like, go by the island and just fuck off from reality. I think Robert Smith has said they've got one more album that's supposed to come out, but that's supposed to have come out for like three years now, and I'm sure they'll do a goodbye tour, and hopefully Simon will be a part of it.

Well, maybe that's why Simon quit. Quite happy. That's maybe why Simon quit, because he was just like, I don't want to go on tour again, man. 61, screw it. Yep. I want to go to my island and sit on the beach. And listen to Killing an Arab. Oh, wait, you can't. Yes, I was getting ready to say he wants to go stare at the sea.

Oh, jeez.

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Ups and doodads. So I got a notification a couple days ago from the Hello app, because you had posted a very wonderful birthday photo.

And I opened it up and I went, why the fuck do I have this app? And I deleted it. I mean, no one's moving there. No one will. I don't think the internet is even interested in another Facebook-style app, even if it's got privacy. The people have spoken. They want TikTok.

And I will give Hello app a thumbs up for the delete account option, although I still suspect it's just set visibility to zero. Okay. Yeah, I'm getting really close to it, because I really like the story behind it. I really like the guys behind it. Doesn't matter if nobody's there, Jason. Well, the whole point is that, you see, this is where they miss the mark.

And I was writing up a post about this, actually. So I'll just save my fingers, the keystrokes, and tell you right here. So they want it with no filters, raw, just talk to the people you want to talk to, your family, your friends, things like that.

And I think they completely miss the mark, because we like all the features of the modern social network. We like everything that it does, but we do want a timeline-based view of our stuff. We do not want an algorithmically-based view, period.

We all know that. We don't want ads. Fine. We won't pay for that. But we still want all the fixings. You know? Filters are fun. We like filters. We like cropping. We like doing all the other stuff in the apps. But what we don't want is you selling us, so we want to pay for it.

All we want, really, is Facebook to come to Jesus and not sell our data to the advertisers and let us pay them $20 a month or $5 a month or whatever. That's what we want. And give us a timeline, an actual timeline that's time-based. Kill the algorithm. Kill the algorithm.

That's it. And that's where Halo app has gone wrong. They missed the mark on that fundamental theory that, oh, no, people really do like Facebook and Facebook like apps where strangers can watch them. You can block them. Do everything you want to do on Facebook except get rid of the algorithm.

Get rid of the ads. Let us pay for it. So it is a feature-poor app right now, which sucks because- You know what else it is? It's people-poor. It's people-poor. Yeah. There's four people I know on there, and now there's three because I didn't know you deleted it. So now it's just like, okay, what's the fucking point?

You know, Halo is the new Elo. It really is. Let's say, I think I posted two things. I posted Halo, and then I posted a Tumbleweed. I know, that Tumbleweed was funny. It took me a second. I'm like, is Brian going into the- Oh, I got it. Yeah, that's kind of it.

That's kind of it. So I went on a little- I had a little retail therapy this week. As per usual. Yes. Well, not per usual. I've been good. I've been really good because I've been selling basically everything. My dad's going to France soon, but he's going to France.

I bought them a Sony Alpha mirrorless camera, and they're like, eh, we're not going to take this. I'm like, well, thanks. Can I have it back? It was fucking two grand. They're like, we're just going to take our phones. And I'm like, okay. And then I look, his phone is like one of the first colored, it was like a blue Apple 7 or something, or an iPhone 7 or some crap like that.

And I'm like, I don't even think the networks in Europe are going to let you go over there. So I decided to give him my, I know he doesn't listen to this show, so I can talk about this stuff. I'm going to give him my Apple iPhone 11 Pro with, it's only got 64 gig memory on it, but that should be enough, you know, for taking pictures around France and things like that.

And so I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to go get the latest and greatest. And because it's going to be months until the 13's out. And with the chip shortage, the availability is going to be till like November. And I'm like, screw it. Let's just do it now. So I got the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

I got, I went back up to the max. Okay. This thing is fucking huge. I forgot how fucking. They've gotten back to phablets. I forgot how big they are. No wonder they don't sell the, the iPad mini anymore. I mean, I, that's, that's what I said before.

I just, but it's such a stark contrast holding my 11 and my, my 12 max side by side. It's like, wow, that thing is fucking huge. But I went with the max because the cameras are better and I'm going to have it for two years. So I figured might as well just get the best of the best. And I got it with 512 gig because I kept running out of space.

I'm like, whatever. It's just, I gave up. I gave up. I'm just like, just take all the fucking monies and be done with it. Side effect of that is I didn't go through AT&T and now I have to spend four hours on the phone because when I go to my AT&T account and try and log in, it gives me all of the phone numbers to verify my identity, except the one that is the master phone number of the account because I changed phones.

Like, thanks. Thanks AT&T. But at least I got my 12 max unlocked. So it's not carrier dependent. Good. That's nice. Yep. I had a little follow up too, because last week with Eric, we were talking about my Sennheiser Pro Audio HD 650 open back professional headphones.

Oh my God. They're so nice, Brian. You would love these things. You would absolutely love these things. The open back does, it does bleed a little bit, but it doesn't bleed into the microphone surprisingly because I'm talking to you while I'm listening on them. You know what'll happen if I get them though?

If I get them and put them on, you will complain. 700s will come out. Yeah. Well, that too. But then you'll complain that there is bleeding because that's what you do anytime I use the same stuff you use. Oh yeah. Well, because I use it properly. That's all. Yeah. Oh, I've been putting the headphones around my nose, just like other people do with their masks.

Yeah. But man, the sound quality on these things are just amazing. But yeah, you do hear room noise and you do get a little out bleed, but when the room's quiet and you're just listening to great audio, oh my God. And they're comfortable.

I can wear these with my glasses all day instead of those Sonys that just dig into my head. Yeah. The Sonys are not comfortable. No, and they're closed back. So you get a little bit more, you know, isolation from the surrounding area. But these things, I mean, they're expensive as shit, but they were a Christmas or a birthday present.

So I'll take them. You know, I'm a huge fan of Sennheiser. They're my faves. Absolutely. And we got this one from Josh. Hi, geeks. I just donated 20 big ones to the cause, which is super overdue being that I've listened to every episode since nearly the beginning. If it's not too much to ask, I'd love some product recommendations from Jason for a work from home Zoom setup.

I'm planning on buying for my girlfriend. I saw the Audio-Technica ATR 2100X USB, but I was curious if you had any recommendations on a camera and lighting. She's a software engineer and planning on working from home probably for the rest of her career. So any tips, well, the closer she gets to 40, we can know that, you know, that's your timeline right there.

So any tips you could give to help her not look like she's broadcasting to her co-workers from the 50s would be awesome. Thanks. I talked to Josh and his budget was a little low for what I was going to recommend, but here's the basic tips on this.

As far as webcams go, get the Logitech Brio. It's a 4K. I'm not sure what they're running right now. There's like around 200, I think. You have mine. So that's the one that you have. So it's a 4K camera. It's okay.

It's good. You know, it's good enough for what you're going to do unless you go to a DSLR with, you know, a capture card and things like that, which is going to run you a lot more way out the budget. The other thing, it's the Elgato Keylight.

That is a great light because it comes with a great stand. You can move it around. It's just basically an LED panel that's Wi-Fi enabled so you can change the color temperature and you can change the, you know, the amount of lighted outputs. It looks really good. I had two of those in my other studio. They're fantastic, but they're not cheap either.

And but between that camera, that microphone and that light, you should be fine. I think for a decent looking setup. So, right. There you go. Yep. And Quibble wrote in, I'd like to hear more about right to repair stories on the show.

Stuff like this link below is popping up on my front page more and more. I'd love to hear what you guys think about it all. And this is why the McFlurry machine company just got hit with the restraining order. We talked about this a while back because these things were breaking so often that somebody built a bot to keep track of which machines are broken so you could look it up and see if you can get a McFlurry or not.

Yep. So, there's an independent company called Kitch that has made a device that helps McDonald's franchise owners repair the ice cream machines and keep them running. And Taylor, which is the company that makes the McFlurry machines, has a monopoly on repairs of the ice cream machines.

And now they're suing each other left, right, and center over this and blah, blah, blah. I mean, we've been pretty clear about right to repair and our thoughts on it. We 100% agree with it. And there should be competition in these markets. There shouldn't be a monopoly from somebody that makes a machine saying they're the only people that can repair a machine.

Other people should be able to repair machines. There's that 100% we're on board with that. And, you know, it's just like if I were McDonald's, which I'm not because I'm not a multi-billion dollar corporation, I would look into basically using it, have somebody else build your McFlurry machines.

Don't get locked into monopolies like that. That's crazy. It's bad for business. Yeah. Or buy both of these companies. Just pick them both up. Or just do that. Yeah. Buy them both. Buy them McFlurry. Then create a new monopoly. Exactly. Just do that. Seems like a simple solution to me.

I don't know about you. Yeah. I don't quite get it either. I mean, I 100% agree with right to repair. And I think it's crazy that these companies, in all walks of life, not just pick Flurry machines, that have created these certified technicians who are the only people allowed to work on stuff and then they can charge a premium for services.

That's crazy. Brian, I did something that I shouldn't have done. I read a book about Facebook. I read An Ugly Truth Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Shira Frankel and Cecilia Kang.

Let me just say, I'm glad that you did so I don't have to. I read the whole thing. I did read the whole thing, too. Like, the last time I started one of these, I couldn't do it. But, yeah. Let me ask you, having listened to a number of their interviews, including the one with the on on what is it called again?

Pivot. Do I need to read the book or did I get enough just from my knowledge of Facebook already and the interviews? Trust me, it was way worse than you think. It was way worse than you think. These people should not be allowed to run a company, especially one with the power that they have.

They are just it's a cross section between Mark Zuckerberg and just not given any fucks. You know, no fucks book is what it should be called. And Sheryl Sandberg is his enabler, hands down. They have neither one of them have a soul.

Neither one of them have a soul. I mean, that's the real problem here, isn't it, is we basically you have a sociopath with no human experience or experience running a business who is now being enabled by somebody who is very good at running a business but also has no scruples.

Yeah, that's really the thing. And when it when I was really I'm like, yeah, OK, they're stupid. They're kids. You know, he doesn't have any real world experience. And then it came down to the Russian interference and how much they knew beforehand. And they just said, well, you don't tell anybody on the C-suite because they need plausible deniability.

And I'm just like and even though they did kind of know, it's just like they buried the whole thing. It's they are a terrible company. I really, really, really want to get rid of my my Facebook account, my Instagram account. Problem is, I just bought one hundred dollars worth of games for my Oculus and they're tied to that.

I tried to cancel. I tried to cancel my Facebook account and my Oculus stopped working. So I have to finish these damn games so then I can get back to canceling the rest of the shit because I can't I cannot in good faith give them any business anymore. I really I mean, Brian, if you read this, you would you would delete your account.

I don't I don't need to read it. And the problem is, you know, I tried Allo app and I tried Allo website and I've tried all the other things. And the reality is my friends are on Instagram and my friends are on Facebook. And your friends have a phone and they're on email, too.

And what I was able to do and what I did was I divested from Facebook. I was an investor and I could no longer in good conscience have an investment in that company. And that's what I did. And as soon as there's some other social network that all my friends are on, I will switch to it.

Email and telephones. I did that. That was please. Okay, grandpa. Okay, Brian. Part of my break was to actually I stayed off of social media for my entire break, my birthday week. And it was it was great. I actually did talk to friends on the phone.

I did email friends. I went around. I do that, too, Jason. Well, then why do you need Facebook? Because I have a larger social circle than you do. And I have people that I stay kind of in touch with. But I don't pick up the phone and call them or I don't text with them. Did you? And I like being in touch with them still.

But did you not say that it's almost useless because you don't get to see their updates anymore because it's all algorithm based? The key there is almost useless. Oh, God. What's it going to take? What's it going to take? I divested. God.

All right. I also read Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein or Weinstein. Great little books. Bunch of short stories. One of them I swear they used in Black Mirror. If they didn't. No, the Black Mirror one would have been written by Harvey Weinstein. Exactly. Yeah.

But it's at least some of the concepts in there were definitely in Black Mirror. I don't know which came first, the Children of the New World or Black Mirror. But either way, it was a fun little book if you're into dystopianized futures. I don't know the author. So thanks for that. I'll check him out.

I was surprisingly good. It's not like that one was the Ted Chiang one where three quarters of the book was great. But that was that giant, always big storyline that just never paid off. That's why I like this one. It was nice and short. Cool.

And I'm reading Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. This came out in 1968. Okay. This reads like a Cory Doctorow novel from 2020. Okay. But this guy was predicting all of this crap way back then and nailed a bunch of it.

I still – the book itself is – it's a little confusing at the beginning because I'm just like, what the hell is going on? But I'm starting to get into it. I'm probably going to go back and reread it when it's done. But it's really good. I mean I'm laughing my ass off with it.

But it's a little bit – because I'm listening to it. And the guy who's reading it has a zillion voices. He's so good. This is one of the best read audiobooks I've ever heard. But it's kind of hard. There's so many characters. It's kind of hard to keep track of everybody. And I don't even think reading it would probably help.

But it's funny. It's really good. And it's about life in 2010 from a perspective of a novelist in 1968. So it's pretty interesting. Cool. The other cool thing about it is his other book, The Shockwave Writer, which came out in 1975, he actually coined the term worm.

Oh, very cool. Yeah. It's pretty cool. So this guy is good. He didn't write a lot. He's dead now. But this is Stand on Zanzibar. I'm really liking. There was a foreword by Bruce Sterling that apparently came with the book but is not in the audiobook as far as I can tell. Maybe it's at the end.

They put the foreword at the end. The backward. And I do want to give a shout out to a friend of the show, Demetheus Jackson. He wrote The Candle of Crest, a rhyming epic adventure. And you can get this on Audible. He sent us a sample chapter.

I don't know if you ever got to listen to it. I listened to it. It's not my cup of tea because it's just the genre is not my cup of tea. But he did a really good job with it. Go check out the sample and hook a brother up. It's good. I mean, he did a really good job.

The production is really good. The story is, you know, good for what it is. I'm just not into that type of genre. But go check it out. The Candle of Crest, a rhyming epic adventure. Link will be in the show notes. Brian, I found this story and it just kind of chapped my dazzle, as I like to say.

It's called The Day the Good Internet Died. And it's about the day that Google Reader went under. I'm like... Well, that's not really a seismic thing that signals a new age of the internet to me. It was a massive thing. It really fucked up blogging big time.

I mean, it was really bad for blogging because that's what people used who did not know what an RSS reader was in general. You know, they didn't have Net Newswire. They didn't have an app for it. But Google Reader made it easy for people to read RSS. And I'm just like, no, no, no, mon cherie.

That is not the day the good internet died. The day the good internet died was the day that AOL got access to Usenet. That's the day the good internet died, when the unwashed masses came in. And it was called Eternal September. And I love this because everybody used to know that when September came around, college students were going to college and the freshmen would come in and they would get on Usenet.

And it took them a while to learn the ropes, learn the rules and things like that. And when AOL came on, nobody bothered to learn the rules. They just shit on Usenet completely. So Katie Baker, I'm sorry. No, the day the good internet died was long before the death of Google Reader.

Yeah, it was. And then you threw this one in here. Research suggests we're all getting less creative and scientists think they know why. I actually read this article a couple of weeks back too. Give you, this should really be filed under no shit, Sherlock. Why do you think we're less creative?

Oh, because everybody's consuming and they are not, basically there's no, there's no downtime. You're not, there's no silence. There's no boredom, which is why I took that week off from everything. No consumption for a week. I became a hell of a lot more creative because you have to entertain yourself is what our parents used to tell us.

Yes, all of these tools that were supposedly built for us to save time have actually sucked up more of our time and we're all passively being entertained and scrolling through our news feeds. And that's, and we're not just sitting and reading and doing anything anymore. We have cut way down on my kid's media consumption because I've started to see that he's being less creative.

And after a couple of weeks, this kid's drawing all over the house. He's doing crazy stuff. He's inventing stories. It's so much better. This stuff is poison for kids. Absolute poison. And I saw something else this week that gave me some pause and it's kind of, it's kind of related here.

Children born during pandemics have, during the pandemic have lower IQs according to US study now. So great. And it's entirely, it's entirely because the first couple of years of a child's life are critical to cognitive development. People are trying to work from home.

Businesses have been closed. Nurseries have been closed. Schools have been closed. Playgrounds have been closed. Kids are suffering because of all this. See, I take a little umbrance with this because the kids are just, they're too young to really get a good read on their cognitive abilities at this point. I was one of those kids who just ignored and abandoned, you know, for, you know, nine tenths of my childhood.

I got 136 IQ. So I don't, I mean, maybe I'd have had 180 if they'd have paid attention, but, you know. I think they're also talking emotional intelligence. Hey, well, you know, there are trade-offs with everything. There are trade-offs with everything. Yeah. You put a fucking puzzle book in front of me.

I'll clear through that thing in a second. But you want me to actually go have a conversation with somebody? Eh, well, that might be a little bit different. But I don't know. I think this is, I think this is a little too soon to really tell. And I think they, this might be one of the things, one of the things where they're like trying to prove a hypothesis without really, I think it's too short.

I think it's too short of a timeline for them to really get a read on it. But that's just me. I'm not a scientist. That is just you. And I will have to say, I don't, you know, I haven't run IQ tests on the kids that I know. But I've certainly seen the effects. I've definitely seen the effects. The kids you know are in Santa Monica, though.

So they're going to be kind of dumb anyway. All right. You also put this other link in there, why pop music is obsessed with this one note. And this is by YouTuber Andrew Huang, who also is a recording engineer and all that sort of stuff. Jesus Christ, YouTubers are annoying.

I put it in here because I thought it was interesting. That's all. Because I don't know music theory. Oh, it is interesting. And yes, yes, it's totally interesting. And it's all about this. It's called a supertonic. It's the note that's one up from the bass note of the scale. And it's a current obsession, yes, in music because it actually works.

But it's also a cyclical thing. Music goes through cycles of what people are listening to and what the earhooks are and what the worms are. There are classical music pieces that do the same damn thing. And it would have actually been an interesting video if he mentioned that and maybe gotten into the music theory and history behind the supertonic.

But I looked at his entire list of videos and they're all titles like, this is the most crazy thing being used in music all the time now. Sign up for my music production classes. So at some point we're going to have to separate content, which this could have been, from advertising, which this is.

Well, he's got to make the advertising pay for the content production, you know. Well, you know, this goes back to our original beef about the internet, which is the big mistake was let's decide everything's fucking free. Yeah, that's about it. Security?

Ha! All right, the gang is all back together and we're here again with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyberware 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 since we haven't talked to Dave for two weeks, how many new shows you got, Dave? None. None. Mercifully none. I know. I know. I know.

It's good to be back, though. I missed you guys. Everything going well? Yeah, we missed you, too. Well, Brian, back in Canada. So congratulations. Where he belongs. Thank you. Traitor is rich. Or can I come visit one of the two?

Yeah, exactly. Right. We're all laughing until we realize what the sweet deal he has on health care. What's that? We also have a lot of the water and the oil, you know, so there's that. That's right. And in the next few years, you're going to have the ideal climate that we used to have.

Yes. It is moving north, isn't it? Right. Moving to Saskatoon, bitches. Get my waterfront property. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We just got to notice this morning that the Colorado River Basin has been labeled as a, yeah, there's no water left.

So Californians, please, please don't water your lawn. Yeah. Yeah. That's a fun time. We're waiting for that one. But we stopped watering our lawn a long time ago because you look at the numbers on it. It's like, well, we can just get fake grass for what we do for 10 months of watering our lawn. So, hey, win-win.

Meanwhile, we're literally drowning in water up here. Wow. We've got lots of water here as well. So fortunately, it's been a very rainy summer. It's been hot, but rainy. So everything is very lush. Screw you guys. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, it wasn't a mystery that California is a desert, right? Yeah. Yeah. No. Well. All right. Well, listen, before we dig into stories this week, I have exciting news that the other day I went to my CyberWire mailbox. And what did I find but a package from the Australia Post?

And I think this is the first time I've ever received a package from Australia. And this is from friend of the show, Elaine, who volunteered to send us, and by us, I mean me, the package full of stickers from Woolies. These are the furry stickers.

Remember we talked about the furry stickers? Oh, yes. Yes. So I have the package, and I've been waiting to open it so I could do it live on the air with you all. So this package has been sitting here taunting me that Elaine sent at great expense. It cost him $24 Australian.

I don't know what that is in real money, but $24 Australian. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. It's all upside down. All right. So here, let me just open the package here. This is exciting audio content for our listeners. Yeah, but good foley.

Smokes. Wow. There's a lot in here. Wow. Okay. So this is – imagine a pile full of trading cards. Actually, these cards are the size of your vaccine verification card.

So almost a three-by-five card. Yeah. And there must be – there's at least 100 of them here, maybe probably more than that. Wow. And they say Woolworth's Aussie heroes, Olympics and Paralympics.

And let's see what it says here. I've got to take my glasses off. It says open here. All right. I will. I will open here. Let's see what we got. My goodness. These are – this is very exciting. Let's see what we got. Oh, all right. So we have a boxer. It's a man. Jeff Horn is his name.

Are we going to go through all 100 of these? Because I can go, like, take a nap if we are. Well, but there's a furry version of him there. I'll just do one more so we get a sense here. So there's a boxer, Jeff Horn, and there's a furry – I don't know. It might be a kangaroo. It's hard to say.

It's too close up to see the whole body. All right. I'm going to do one more. Let's see here. All right. This is Oceana McKenzie. She's a rock climber, and there's a furry – don't know what it is. It's got a tail. It also might be a kangaroo.

Maybe that's the thing. Maybe they're all kangaroos. But they're definitely furries. Oh, these are cute. All right. So I've got to find a place to put these. And, again, thank you to our listener, Elaine, for sending this to me.

This is quite kind of you, quite generous. Boy, there are a lot of these. So I'm going to be generous in sharing these with my friends and family. But I appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time and effort. This is a lot of fun. All right. Well, send us a picture that we can put in the show notes.

Excellent, listeners. All righty. Yeah. Now that we're past the furries, let's talk about the children. Let's talk about the children. Are we ever really past the furries? Well, this – I know I'm not. They could be tied together here. You never know. This could be a conjoined topic here.

So while you guys were gone, I had the discussion with Eric Hundley on the last show about the whole CSAM issue with what Apple is doing to scan while things are going up to iCloud. And that's only one part of the story. Whatever.

We covered that. There's the other part of the story that I didn't want to go into with Eric because neither him – he or I have children. And this is the new system in messages where it tries to find the nudes and tells the kids, are you sure you want to click on that, junior?

We're going to tell mom and pop. And if he does, then they send it to mom and pop and blah, blah, blah. This is if you have a family plan and you have enabled it. This is opt-in, which is strange to hear somebody that's actually doing something opt-in for once. It's usually the other way around.

So since you guys have kids and I'm sure you're both up to speed on what's happened and we do have a video from Craig Federighi, the main Apple software chief on the Wall Street Journal talking about this in the notes, hopefully everybody is up to speed. And I would like your opinion on this since you guys have kids and I am in no way, shape, or form qualified to make any fucks to give about this.

This is all you guys. What do you think? Happy, sad? Creeped? Happy is opt-in. I think that's good. This is one of those stories that much like the metaverse that in the two weeks in which I was not really paying any attention to tech news, this kind of exploded.

You guys already covered kind of the rest of it, which it's a strange thing for Apple to do given Apple's privacy bottom line, but it seems they're trying to get ahead of legislation in various countries. It's coming down the pipe.

My other thought about this just really quickly is one of the things that I have learned and cannot unlearn having done this show over the six years is how much child pornography there is out there. I always assumed it was kind of just an edge case thing where there are, surely there isn't this much of this out there.

But what we have discovered doing this show is, oh, yes, there is. And it's a real issue and a real problem. As far as just the messaging and alerting the parents thing, again, like I said, I'm happy it's opt-in. I see it as a parenting tool in which there are a lot of them out there.

There's all kinds of net nannies and all that sort of stuff. I would hope to have a relationship with my child in which I would not feel compelled to turn this on and would prefer my child be either comfortable letting me see the phone on a regular basis or whatnot and to keep track of what he's up to online.

Having said that, Jason, you are somewhat qualified to have some sort of discussion about this because once we hit a certain age, which is still considered a child by Apple or most other people or the law in many states, possibly not some states.

But if we would have had this technology when we were 14 or 15, the nudes would have been a flying. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They sure as hell would have been. Because this is what we talked about in our Discord channel for a little bit.

I'm like, yeah, back in the day we had Polaroids and we passed them around. You know, the girls had Polaroid cameras. The boys had Polaroid cameras. We'd swap pictures. It was just kind of a natural thing because it was the 70s. Why not? You know, let's be free and do that. But then you're like, well, those Polaroids didn't get blasted out to everyone in the entire world when you took them.

You had to bike over to your friend's house to share those pictures. You weren't able to post them on 4chan in two seconds. So that is the big difference. You know, again, like I said, I get what they want to do.

And I do think it could be a useful tool in the parenting toolbox. But I would prefer to have a relationship in which I did not have to use it, if that makes any sense. Yes, I largely agree with everything Brian just said.

And first of all, I think, are we all in agreement that Apple is coming at this from a position of good faith? Yes, I do. I think so. And one of the criticisms that I saw online is this, you know, it's the standard slippery slope discussion that people get into.

And I think we need to give credit where credit is due. And Apple is due some credit here. They are pretty good at this sort of thing in general. If they say they're going to do something and keep it in one particular sandbox, they tend to do that. And I'm not too worried about that.

Yeah. So my understanding of this is that it basically happens in two different tiers depending on the age of the child. That if the child is below the teen years, then you can opt in, as Brian said.

It can scan the photos. If a photo comes across that it thinks is problematic, it will put up a warning to the child and say, hey, we think this is a problem. Here's why we think you might not want to look at it. Think twice before clicking through. If the child says, no, I still want to look at this.

It says, okay, one more place for you to click to see this. But heads up, we're going to tell your parents that you're looking at this. And if they click on it, then they see the picture and the message gets sent. Now, my understanding is that if the child is 18, the same series of things happen, but there is no message sent to the parents.

I think it's 13 to 17. Right. Yeah. Once they're over 18, it's their phone. They don't get – there's none of that. It's just 13 to 17. Right. Right. Exactly. So – and I think that's the right choice. I think we've seen a lot of concerns that this could inadvertently out kids who are not out to their parents and could suffer consequences by being outed to their parents.

So I think it's good that for the kids who are of teen age where we want to say post-pubescent, I suppose. And look, it's always hard to draw lines with these things, right? But for those post-pubescent kids to afford them some amount of privacy when it comes to this while still looking out for them and maybe causing them a moment of reflection before they click through things or who knows.

And, yes, 16-year-old boys are well-known for their moments of reflection. Yeah. Well, I know. I know. Refraction. Maybe. Yeah. I know. I know. But, again, I think it seems to be pretty well thought out.

I think Apple is coming at this in a – like we said, from a position of good faith and it's good that it's opt-in. One little detail that I did note was that a parent – evidently a parent is not allowed to dial back the age of their child once the child enrolls in this.

So, for example, if my kid is 14 and says, yes, I'll be part of this, the parent cannot then retroactively roll the kid's age back to eight to be alerted. Apple is not going to allow that. So, make sure you're with your kid when that date is set.

Yes. Or make sure you're with your parents when your date is set. Yeah. Exactly. Right? Because you might be three. Yeah. Well, so – Now, just a quick question in terms of functionality because I'm already like my – I'm dipping back into my 15-year-old self.

I get a picture. It comes with a warning because my parents have set this up on my phone. Can I forward that message without any warning being triggered, i.e., my best buddy, he has crappy parents who didn't turn this on?

Or an Android phone. Right. I don't know the answer to that. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if it's outbound or just incoming. Right. My impression is that it's just inbound, but I'm not 100% sure on that. I think that they probably – Interesting.

I mean, kids will always find a way. Yeah. Sure. I think they might figure that out at Apple. Maybe. Yeah. Although I've been surprised in the past. No. Well, again, at the end of the day, my feeling on it is fine. And it's a parent – it's just another tool for a parent that can choose to use it.

I applaud the fact that it's opt-in. I think that's great. If it were opt-out, I think that would be troublesome. I would not be too down with that. But the opt-in and the ability to have these different age ranges where there's different functionality, I would like that to be more of a sliding scale.

I think it would be great if parents could actually control the specific age ranges and what happens at what age range rather than Apple kind of decreeing that this will – if you're 13 and under, then it'll do this. And if you're 13 to 18, it'll do this. But then again, I always decry the fact that we no longer get microcontrol over our phones or our technology.

So my other question for you guys is, does it creep you out that it is all on device using machine learning to figure out what is actually in the content of the photos? Or do you find that actually a good thing? I actually think it's a good thing.

I'd rather Apple employees not be looking at these things. And the machine learning is – this is such a basic subset. This is genitalia. But machine learning has gotten quite good at identifying that. Hot dog or not. Yeah, I'm with Brian.

I think this is the best way to do it and it helps protect the privacy, the end-to-end encryption that's part of iMessage. You can still have that be in place and do it this way. So that doesn't bother me at all.

I understand why some people are creeped out about it and I understand why people who some describe as privacy absolutists are upset that anything of this sort happens on the phone. And I get the argument. But in this case, for me as a parent, I think it's – I don't have any trouble with this at all.

And honestly, privacy absolutists should not be on the internet. No. Period. I mean if you're a privacy absolutist, there's a shack in the woods that has your name on it because if you're on the internet, nothing is private. Yeah. Not even your privates.

Nice. Nice. So let's move on then. Now that we've cleared that up and we have solved the problems of the day, Amazon is now going to pay you $10 for your palm print. Should you be worried, says the headline here? Well, no, because you opt in for this.

Why would you be worried? Yeah, you don't have to do it, right? Yeah, exactly. So if you're worried about it, don't give them your palm print. I don't plan on it. I don't need to wave my hand over a device to walk out of a store quicker. I'm fine doing it other very, very quick ways that don't involve having my biometrics.

Apple Pay, NFC. Yeah, exactly. I think the creepy factor is the fact that they're offering to pay for it, which makes you go, huh? Yeah, Congress has also asked that same question, by the way. They're like, what? Why do you want it so badly?

Why is this so valuable to you? Exactly, exactly. And it may be just that they believe that the process of getting out of a store so quickly with so little friction is going to be such a game changer that they want to incentivize people to enroll.

But there are so many easier ways to do that. Again, Apple Pay. Like, I have never used something more easy, especially if I have an Apple Watch. Like, it's ridiculous. So, you know, I think that, you know, we talked a couple weeks back about there was a cryptocurrency that was going to give you free crypto for scanning your iris.

Like, why would you do that? And this is, again, this falls into the why would you do that category for me? I mean, maybe they're doing it because they need the data set to actually train on. That's why they're offering the money for it. Probably. And probably people are legitimately and I think deservedly a suspect of doing it to begin with.

And maybe the fact that, oh, they're going to give me 10 bucks is enough incentive for some for enough people to start to do it to get the ball rolling. I don't know. You know, there's going to be a lot of people that do it. Come on. I mean. Yes, because there are a lot of dumb people. Eight years in, we know that there are going to be a lot of dumb people that do this.

Well, here's a question, though. Can you, for example, with California's privacy law, suppose down the road you want them to erase that. Can you get your 10 bucks and then later on say, hey, never mind? Maybe. Yeah. I'm sure there's some sort of length in their terms of service for this one.

Yeah. And I'm sure there's Illinois specific language in there as well. If you're in Illinois, stay the fuck away from us. We don't want you. We already paid you guys enough money for that kind of thing. Wait, no, that was Facebook. That was Facebook that got the big fine in Illinois for the face scanning.

That's right. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, anyway. Okay. Yeah. I don't think any of us are going to do it. So we'll just move right along. No, there's a reason to. No, there's not. Yeah, there's absolutely no reason to. I've been to the Amazon Prime store. They actually just sent me a bunch of coupons, which means I'm going again because those coupons are great.

Dude, 20 bucks off a $50 order. I am there. Yeah, that is good. I'm going to go get me some lobster tails and scallops and maybe a chicken. But the checkout there is just like, it's literally hold your phone to the cart and you walk out the door because it's a smart cart.

You know, it weighs everything as you go. It is so simple already. There's no reason to need biometrics. I can see why they might want it for, you know, their quick pickup stores, but everybody's got a phone. Everybody's got a phone. And if they don't have that quick thing, I have my Amazon credit card tied to my Apple Pay.

So even that's easy enough. The hardest one to check out of is Whole Foods, which they ironically own because the scanners don't work on that stupid QR code they give you. It's like, if you guys can't figure out how to scan a QR code, how do you think you're going to get a palm print? I mean, how arrogant do you have to be?

Come on. Yeah. Yeah. And what would it cost to update those scanners? Come on, guys. Yeah. About three minutes of the coffee budget. That's about it. Right. Whole paycheck. Seriously.

All right. We got this one from Barrett. One of you guys want to read this? Because I have the answer. Sure. So here's a weird occurrence. So here's a weird occurrence. Three days ago, I was out shooting photos in Pittsburgh when two guys asked me if I ever did any photo work for putting together an LP or CD. What the hell is an LP or CD?

I wasn't interested, but they told me their band name. If I ever wanted to look them up, I didn't. Today, I was on YouTube and out of nowhere, a pretty lo-fi video from them popped up as a suggestion. Probably coincidence, and so we live in the same city, but still odd, mainly since at no point did I ever listen to Mumble, SoundCloud, Rap, and at no point did I ever Google anything about them.

Well, I think this is an easy one, and I think you guys might be on my side with this one. He was in close contact with the band, and they all have phones, and they have a YouTube channel, and Geolocation Match, you're on YouTube, it matches, you know?

You guys were in the same place at the same time, so there you go, and it's simple. I mean, this one, it's a no-brainer. I had a whole paragraph of crap there, and there's just no reason to be that simple. It's the same reason when I was taking my kid to preschool, that all of a sudden, the parents for the other kids at the school started to pop up in my Facebook, you may know this person thing, which I did not want to see them in, and I did not want to become friends with them, because they just happened to have a kid going to the same damn school.

It's because every single day, our phones were in the exact same locations together. Yeah, it's the same thing, and this also comes back to the, my phone is listening to me argument, because, okay, you're with two people, you're talking about the same thing, you split up, the other person could very well, just as easily go Google it, and since you were in the same place, they can infer that you were at the same table talking about the same subject if there's

a time limit around when that person Googled and your interaction with them. Very simple cross-reference there. So I think this is the same type of creepiness that they all do, you know, just because your phones are in the same location at the same time, they're going to find those vectors and they're going to put you together.

That's what they do. And there was that case from a few years back, and it, I don't know, it may be apocryphal, but it was where a pizza delivery person got robbed, and then a few hours later, the robber came up on their Facebook as someone you may know. I don't remember that one.

Yeah, they were able to track down the thief because he popped up on the person's Facebook, and it was exactly this. They were in the same place at the same time, and so the app said, you might know this person, and that's how they tracked them down. As a matter of fact, I do. Yes. Can I get my shit back, please?

Right. The law of unintended consequences sometimes has a sense of humor. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, and I got this last one here. Scammer service will ban anyone from Instagram for $60. This comes from- Now, anyone?

You can almost get nearly anyone banned. Because I would, let's see, I will pony up $60 to get Kim Kardashian banned from Instagram. I said almost anyone. Oh, my God. Yeah. It was actually a Darknet Diaries about this not too long ago, where this guy kept getting harassed by these scammers saying that they wanted their handle.

This guy had a really nice handle, and the guy wanted it, and he's like, pony up or I'm going to make your life hell, and started ordering pizzas to his house, and he's a little troll hacker, a little nobody. Right. And then he finally got them banned from Instagram, so he could, you know, maybe hopefully get the handle later.

Or it was one of those, if you can't have it, nobody can type of things. And the guy ended up befriending him, the hacker troll. It's a great episode. I recommend going back and listening to it, because it ties right into this. And it's just one of those things where, you know, there's a loophole where you can get people banned fairly easily on these platforms, because there's no adult supervision or human oversight anymore.

No, and there's no real customer service accounts, and there's nobody to call, and there's nobody to reach out to, and there's no board that's going to review things or put the time in to actually do a study of what happened. There's no internet police. No, and there's like- We've said that time and time again. Yeah, here's a case in point.

My roommate, like, dealt with somebody and got a crappy Zillow review from this guy, even though their beef was nothing about real estate. But he went on her Zillow account and left a nasty message. So, you know, put in a review request, and they're like, no, no, this seems valid.

This is an automated reply, blah, blah, blah. And it escalated to a human. The human looked at it and said, no, no, no, this looks legit to us. They never had any dealings whatsoever, and it stuck out as a one-star review on there. And there's no recourse for things like that, none whatsoever.

I mean, how are we supposed to respond to the people that give us one-star ratings on Apple iTunes? Make fun of them on the air. That's what we do. We turn lemons into lemonade. It becomes content. Yep. It's the thing I keep saying over and over again.

I keep shouting at clouds, which is if you can't do that thing at scale, then maybe you shouldn't do that thing. Oh, that's a good one. I like that. Yeah, that's true. So much for the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hopefully the metaverse will be different, guys.

Oh, yes. That's right. Dustin off my VR goggles now. By the way, does anybody want a set of Oculus goggles? Because once I play through these games, I want to get rid of this thing so I can cancel my Facebook account.

But they still have the Star Wars games on them. So I can send it to you guys and you can play them before I 86 the account because I'm not going to use them. It's hard enough. What did I buy these? A year and a half ago? I've used them for literally 12 minutes. But I started to play the Star Wars game and you guys, I think, really might like it.

It's fun. So who's going to call dibs on the Oculus headset first? Yes, please. Okay. I will. International shipping is quite expensive, Jason. Well, I mean, it's the Canada. Come on. Dave can just drive it up.

He's like 10 minutes away. I mean, yeah. Wow, you have been gone from the East Coast for quite some time, Jason. Gladly. Gladly gone. You haven't been on I-95 in a while. COVID, the traffic is back, let me tell you. It's not like it was during the lockdown.

So I would be happy to try the Oculus if you would be so generous. And when I'm done with it, I'd be happy to send it on to Brian as well. All right. Yeah. There you go. It's like the old book clubs. Thanks, guys. Exactly. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

All right. Talk to you next week. I'll go open my stickers. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got William and John. And over at PayPal, we've got Miles, Peter, Linda, Josh, Andrew, Natalie, Open Source Fabrication, Nathaniel, Tom, and Michelle.

Woo-hoo. Thank you. And over at our tip tar, Joshua B. and Sean M. with a subscription. And he says, monthly tip sent. Finally doing a recurring instead of a one-time payment. You guys rock it. The only podcast I listen to consistently. Jason, it is because of your obsession with sound.

I cannot stand bad sound. Your obsession is appreciated. Well, you're going to hate this episode. Your money is appreciated. And I'll do what I can about Brian in the cave. And over at iTunes, we got a five-star rating from Bob Z. Just plain awesome. A colleague referred you guys a couple weeks ago, and now I'm hooked.

Great show, guys. Only regret, I have to find 500 hours of time to listen to your whole playlist. No, you don't. Don't do that. No, you don't. You really, really don't. Oh, man. And a big thank you to edtechnologyco.uk for six essential podcasts for tech heads to tune into.

We really appreciate this. And what was her name again? Her name is, oh, God, had block detected. Sorry about that. Jenna Ash-Brown. Thank you, Jenna. Yep. Thank you for the write-up. And a shout-out to the greatest striker, Gerd Müller, legendary German forward who just passed away at age 75.

I remember watching him as a kid. My dad was a huge fan. All right. You'd be proud. I was going down the street for my walk the other day, and somebody had one of the German soccer league flags pinned up to their fence outside their house.

It was, like, massive. Nice. You know, maybe it was in memoriam for this guy. Perhaps. Perhaps. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever.

You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 518. There you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel. If you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans, you can also head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. And don't forget our Allo app channel. Oh, wait. No. No, we don't have that. None of those. Stay grumpy.

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