61: Good Evening Monsters

Psycho. Psycho. Psycho. Psycho. Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? Are you leaping or am I? I have leapt. So have you. Hello. Hello. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks yet again.

Yes, it's very early in the morning for me. This new 9 a.m. thing is, uh, I woke up out of bed and I was like, I'm in a pretty good mood. Then I sat down to go over our show notes. Man, I'm pissed off now. That'll do it to you. That'll do it to you. Yeah, I've been, well, I started off the day with, you know, trying to get the show notes ready and reading everything.

But before I did that, I had to kind of sit down and watch the first episode of Orange is the New Black because it came out today. Oh, that's right. I was, uh, all the, all the reviews started to hit yesterday and people were talking about it. So I was like, I was all excited last night. I was like, oh, Orange is the New Black came out because I didn't actually read anything because nobody reads on the internet.

Uh, so I loaded up Netflix last night when I, when I had my dinner out and I was like, so excited to watch the first episode and I was like, oh shit, it's not out yet. Midnight yet. You got to wait till midnight. So I'm one in. It's good. It's nice to have them back. There's only 13 of them. So from this point on, I must pace myself.

Oh, you're, you're going to pace and not binge. Okay. No, I said, I'm, well, I said that, but that's not what's going to happen as we all know that. Yeah. As soon as you're done with this, you're going to go watch another three. Yeah. I'll be sitting there with like, you know, red eyes and a pile of my own juices by the end of the day, probably. That's attractive. I know. I know.

Oh man. So I, things that are going to piss me off this week. Let's just start off. Okay. Let's get into it because this is going to be a real grump fest. We haven't done one of these in a while, but this week pissed me off. Well, I mean, it started off. I told you last week that I canceled most of my email subscriptions for like, you know, the news of the day stuff.

And dig was the first one that got, you know, killed. So, but I still get the weekly roundup and I went and checked it. And there's the intro to their weekly roundup. I'm just going to read it for you just because this is real quick. We sincerely hope you didn't spend the weekend attached to a computer. That's our job.

You should be out enjoying your life with friends and family. And since we don't have any friends, we had the time to break down the news you missed. Right. Now, if that wasn't so just, it angers me. This angers me because there's some nerd that's typing this up or copyright or somebody that's typing this up.

And this is going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy at some point because they are not going to have any friends because they did sit around and play with the computer all weekend. You know how we've invented the term humblebrag? This is basically a social media slash whatever invention that has come out. It's a new term.

The humblebrag. Yes, it's in the douche-denary. Exactly. Well, we also need a term for things that are written as if they are ironic, but they're actually probably really true and not ironic. And this guy cried a little bit as he was writing it. Are you being attacked by robots right now? Apparently, the Transformers are directly outside. Apologies for that one second here while Bumblebee transforms into fiddly butt.

I don't know the Transformers, obviously, as you can tell. Maybe it's a Dinobot. I heard they're bringing the Dinobots out. No, that is the lovely Santa Monica recycling thing. Apologies. Anyways, moving on. Okay, back to the humblebrag. Yes, but we need a term for these things that are obviously, you know, they're attempting to be ironic and write something funny, but this is actually real.

I have no doubt that this poor fellow spent the entire week and not doing anything. Yes, it's, you know, self-deprecation. Yes. But to the point where it's like, you know, they're Dig. I know they're not the old Dig. They're the new Dig. They should say that their swanky algorithms have, you know, been hard at work or something.

Not that – now I feel bad that some schlub had to sit around in a cubicle all weekend, like, looking for stories to entertain me. Well, no. If we're supposed to believe the lie of new media and this new world, he was using his iPad while sitting on a beach somewhere, relaxing with friends who are all multicultural and in perfect shape and smiling.

Okay. Yeah. That's how we all live, right? Because that's how the commercials portray all this. I don't know about you. That's pretty much my day. Okay. Sweet. Yeah. I'm sitting in the back covered in Band-Aid Soleil having some, you know, fruity drinks and sunning myself. Right.

Watching Orange is the New Black streaming. Exactly. It's through my Google Glass. Whilst twerking, of course. While twerking? Whilst – I don't – Not twerking. Like, I don't twerk. Jesus Christ. If we want to get some real traffic, we should put a video of you twerking up. No. That would not be good.

I don't even want to know the types of traffic we'd get. We already get enough with the ladyboys from the Joey Rabier episode. Yeah, I know. If you ever want to really get some truth about the internet, you should – everybody out there should get a peek at our stats. Very scary. Because the way people find us is basically ladyboys and other random things we put in our titles.

Yeah. Could explain why our numbers aren't so great. What are you talking about, man? Our brown hat SEO just totally kicked ass. I think we're still in the second result for Best Productivity Podcast. There you go. We're so productive. Okay. Let's get into it.

Let's get into the stuff that really pissed us off. You sent me a link from Salon last week. I mean, it's a little bit old now. It was on May 26th. It's called The Internet As We Know It Is Dying. Yeah, this is a great article, and it's something that you and I have been talking about for a long time.

I mean, we started this podcast kind of talking about the good old days when we did fun and interesting stuff on the internets and how that's totally gone away. This is a really good ramp-up and kind of updating of that because it basically just talks about how Google and Facebook have taken over the entire internet, and that's that.

And to a lesser extent, Amazon has controlled the retail marketplace online, and it's the big three, and that's it. Well, here's the thing about this. There is a part of me that is 100% on board with what this guy is saying.

Yes, Facebook and Google pretty much control a huge swath of the traffic that anybody gets, and they can squash anybody like a bug. Look at Mahalo. Mahalo went out, multimillion-dollar business, just turned off in the blink of an eye because Google said, no, this is not good content.

You're a farm. You're a content farm. Good riddance. Goodbye, Calacanis. Go get a real job. I was okay with that one. Then you look at what happened to Metafilter. Metafilter is basically having to lay off staff. They're one of the oldest boards on the net, and great conversations.

They have editors, and they have content minions who sort through it and make sure there's no spam. And they basically got killed by a page rank algorithm change, and all their ads went away. So things like that where Google is in control, Google can just kill a business.

But this also comes to the point that we've made many times where don't build your company on the back of somebody else's technology, which is a lot of what people did with Facebook and gaming on Facebook and the currency models around Facebook, which is why Zynga is in the shitter. And several other ones, you know, Noah Kagan had a company that was basically killed by Facebook because they were doing online transactions.

So these guys wield massive amounts of power, but they don't really have the power unless you give it to them in some cases. Well, yes and no. I totally see what you're saying, but I see this more as these are the – your Googles and your Facebooks are killing the middle class of the internet, as it were.

It is almost impossible to be a site, a content site, or any other type of site, really, and get by with – because nobody searches for things anymore. They really – it's socially shared. It's controlled by Facebook. How do you find anything anymore?

You don't. You have to play the game. I don't – Google wouldn't really be in business if people weren't searching for things. Well, you know what I mean. Well, you know, and yes, okay, big swaths of the middle – I would say the middle class of the internet are going away.

That's fine for me. I really couldn't care less because that's where the boring shit is. If you really want to, like, you know, make a good amount of money, be on the edges, be on the fringes, find niches, get out of this, like, where everybody's competing, move off to the side, find a new way to do it. But I don't think – I mean, if you want to make real money, the endgame is always to sell to one of these two.

That's where the real money is. Nobody's going to keep anything running. You can subsist and get by for a while, but everybody's positioning to sell. They're back. They're going to get you. Transformers are back. Apologies, everyone. I just – I thought it was a really good and interesting article, and it has fundamentally – you and I both know the internet has fundamentally changed.

It's not – it's big corporate business now and a story. I mean, that's the reality. The one problem I really have with this article is as kind of his big point, he talks about this site that I've never even heard of ever. What was it?

Twitch TV. Right. This is an offshoot of what Justin TV used to be and became Twitch TV. So these are the Justin TV guys using their technology to live stream video game – like video games in progress and people narrating on their adventures through Quake 3 Arena or whatnot.

Not being a gamer at all, this sounds so absolutely ridiculous. I'd be like, why would anybody ever want to do this? But apparently it's fucking huge. I mean, this is a big site. And the problem I have with the article is that he actually – he's saying it's a shame that it's kind of being dismantled because of Google's copyright filters.

Well, he says that's what the big worry is. The community is worried that the content sniffers that come with the acquisition by Google will basically ruin the site and the experience because people tend to listen to music in the backgrounds while they're walking through. And they should be worried because they are stealing content.

That is illegal. Well, it's not like they're laying down a track to – for money. It's them watching their game listening to a tune. But this is where the line blurs because you're making a TV show out of it. And what do you mean there's no money involved? I'm sure there is.

Why else would people – the site wouldn't be so big if there wasn't money involved? Yeah, I don't think the actual people who are publishing get paid anything. Who knows? I don't know. But I mean that is – well, like I said, I know nothing about this site. I know nothing about the gaming world. There's got to be something going on.

Nobody gets involved unless there's money involved. Nobody – Well, this is – I mean this is just a single example that he's pointing out of how Google and Facebook buying up the little guys to add to their empires is just affecting how things work. No, I agree. So it was just an interesting article and like I said, it started off – it was the kickstart for my piss-off-ness.

Yeah, this was just like – this was tier one. This is the entry point into it. Next, we get into something that actually just came out a few minutes ago where Facebook puts everyone on notice about the death of organic reach. This is a Forbes article that just came out today. Well, I read – Take it away.

The original article written by the guy – I actually feel really bad for this poor guy. What is his name? I'm sorry. Brian Boland. Yeah, Brian Boland who has a very large, dorky-looking photo of himself on the top of the Facebook page for which this was released 22 hours ago at this point.

This will forever be attached to his name. This article is such a load of fuckery. It's unbelievable. I don't actually feel so bad for him because I know there's no way that he personally wrote this. Every single word was vetted by lawyers and gone over by – 18 times by relative people.

This is the – This is written by committee. Yeah, this is written by committee. This is the organic reach on Facebook. Your question is answered because as we've been talking about many times on here and everybody knows, Facebook is no longer useful for brands at all because everything has been shuffled away and they're pushing you to pay for ads to get anything and you can no longer use it for free to promote your brand.

Yeah, yeah. Let's make a clarification there. Blah, blah, blah. It is still useful for brands but they have to pay now. But they have to pay now. So I – this hit my – I was actually on Facebook when this was first published and I was like, oh, well, that's interesting. Click. And I started to read it and by the end of the article, I had reached that point that I had reached in the Battlestar Galactica finale where if I would have had a bottle of whiskey near me, I would have thrown it through my monitor.

I'll just hit on the one key point. Paragraph three. Is organic reach dropping because Facebook is trying to make more money? He then spends two to three paragraphs saying, of course not. We're not after your money. There are so many – there's so much content now and we're trying to do adaptive filtering and we're trying to make it a better experience for everyone.

But it's not about money. Then later in the article – later in the article, can businesses succeed on Facebook with decreasing organic reach? Because at least they finally admit – it is kind of a big deal that Facebook admits that we have killed organic reach.

So they admit it and he says, well, can your business still succeed? Keep in mind, he basically just finished saying that Facebook is not trying to make more money from businesses. So on the bit where he talks about – he gives a couple case studies of small businesses that are doing well on Facebook with the decreased organic reach.

Every single case talks about how they bought ads. Yep. That's the thing. Hey, you want it? You pay for it. That's what they – see, this is what they provide now. They provide you the audience. Instead of going to Google and paying for ads on websites to get clients, now you just go to Facebook and pay ads to Facebook to get clients.

And all they've done is they've built their own little microcosmic internet is what they've done. Exactly. It's a gated community. It's the gated wall that we all used to try to kind of figure out how to do way back in the day and Facebook mastered it. And they got you. They got you. They hooked you. They had you build your entire business using them and now they're going to charge you for it.

And it's your own damn fault if you got busted with this. No, it's very true. It's your own damn fault. I was screaming about this even back in the MySpace days in my particular business with artists. I'm like, do not rely on these things. Still have a strong site. Drive people to your site. Build your community there.

But everybody was too lazy and it was free so we didn't have to spend any money and that's – we don't have to spend money. That's great. And boom, now we're fucked. Yeah. I just want to print out the dictionary definition of ephemeral and hand it to a client every time they want to build something on something. And say, these things aren't going to last.

If you build your own presence on the internet, it will remain once these people come and go. How many businesses are still working on LiveJournal? You tell me that. Well, and another good example. Geocities. So many people are using Tumblr now. Oh, yeah. Same time.

Yeah, and it's going to be the same deal, people. I have to give credit to most of the brands I worked with that used Tumblr. They used it in a smart way as an offshoot of their main marketing campaign from their main website. But they also spent a ton of money on Facebook to get people to the website.

I think marketers are starting to finally get savvy even though a day late and a dollar is short. But as far as Tumblr goes, I think most of the people are smart enough not to put their entire website on Tumblr. Most. I say most. Most that I've worked with. Some people within my industry do do that, and it's very frustrating.

Some of the people that I work with, we're using it in a different way that I think is smart, which is that's where you can do a lot of user-generated content and repost people's images and repost people's artwork that they do based on your artists and all that sort of stuff. It's perfect for that because you don't want to clutter up your main site with that.

But Tumblr is great for it. Yeah. Building awareness campaigns, that kind of thing. Yeah. And I still don't understand when people say you've got to use Instagram for anything. I don't get that at all. There's no links. What's the fucking point? There's no links. Eyeballs and awareness, sure, fine.

But why spend more than five minutes on it? No, it makes no sense. It makes no sense at all. Now, you sent me another – well, we've got a couple articles you sent. This next one is on Medium. It's called Content Used to be King, Now It's the Joker. This was written by a journalist. Her name is Amy Westervelt.

Yes. Westervelt. It's an odd name. And so she's a journalist who has been in the content mill business for quite a while because the journalism well dried up. And she's been – basically, I didn't know that this was a thing. She's been ghostwriting articles for CEOs that post on Forbes and New York Times and all this stuff.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which remind me later when we get to the Kevin Rose article because now I've got to call him out and ask him about this. And she's finally had enough. She's like – She's taken a stand. Well done. I'm proud of her for that. But this is a – This is one of those things where she should have seen what was coming at the beginning.

Getting 50 bucks an article is – when you're a professional journalist is – A, it's shitting in the well because it's just a ridiculous thing to do. Even if you just need the cash, it's like go work at Target, which fortunately she says she does.

I mean she's got a list of jobs that she will do that aren't around writing. But she's had enough and is moving on and is encouraging other journalists to do the same. There's an issue with that though. There's an army of kids waiting in line that just got out of school who have nothing to do, no job prospects that are going to fill that void immediately.

That is the problem. I mean it's one thing – I love the concept of what she's doing and that sounds great and I'm 100 percent behind her and I wish her well. But yeah, you're about to – there's a deluge of people coming out of college every year that will do those jobs for the 50 bucks and they don't realize – it's the same thing in our industry.

You and I have both dealt with people that like we know this website should cost 20 grand to build but there's a kid out there that will do it for five. He'll do it for two. He'll do it for two and it screws up the entire fucking industry and there's nothing you can really do about it. And I don't – this article just pissed me off again.

It's like this is – is any of this fair? No, but this is the world that we live in now. I don't understand how people are going to make livings anymore. Well, I mean I just lost a $10,000 bid to build a website to somebody who went with Squarespace. I'm like, hey, more power to you.

Call me when you realize that's not going to work out for you. But yeah, it's – but I mean good on her but she's tilting at a windmill that she's never going to knock down. No, but it's an important argument to get out there. So people do need to start talking about this a little bit more.

People start to – again, it's lifting the veil behind what people are actually doing. Like you had no idea that there were ghostwriters and this is what a lot of journalists end up doing. They work for big companies. They write fucking stupid ad copy and things like – they probably wrote that fucking Facebook article.

That wasn't that dude. That was a series of paid journalists. Yeah, I think one of the really things you got to knock me over with the feather with – Gary Vaynerchuk, Mr. Social Media Dude. He had some of his books ghostwritten, which I was just like, what? You know? Yeah. That was a come-to-Jesus moment.

I'm like, damn. Even that guy is ghostwriting stuff. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's good stuff. If all the real journalists stuck together and kind of – I don't know if they can go off and build the thing themselves, get in their own boat and go build an island or whatever.

But we do need more solid, good journalism out there and we've lost a lot of that, which we've – we know that. We know it. We know that. As you can – by the rise of the listicle. Remember the great big hope was that Bezos bought a paper and we hope because he had so much money from Amazon that he would actually just fill it up with true journalism.

I don't think that's happened. Yeah. I haven't been following that story because I just – I haven't. Yeah. Because there's too many listicles to read. I know. Twenty-six ways to make you a booty bigger. Yeah. And then in the same realm, I read an article on the New York Times, which I sent to you as well, Full Screen Ahead.

This is an op-ed by – gosh. Why do they make it so hard to find the names these days? It's right there at the top of the thing with this picture on the left. Oh, look. It's not that hard. It's not a circle picture. I guess I didn't see it because I'm so used to those now. This is just a great op-ed piece about how, again, journalism has died.

We don't have news. Nobody stays and listens, and all we do is read headlines and then go to Twitter and make a bunch of shitty comments about it before we do. Yeah, this was actually a really good article. It's not in the same vein as the other stuff we talked about. But it was a really good article talking about how people are building basically conclusions on Twitter headlines and on real news events where you don't even have all the facts yet.

This is nothing new, but it's a really well-written piece that I quite enjoyed. Yeah, it's very good. I mean this used to just be the realm of the talking heads on TV because we didn't have the ability for all of us to jump in immediately. That was your Sunday roundtables and everything, which is – we don't have the full story yet, but we've got to make a half-an-hour program out of this.

So we're going to spout bullshit. Now everyone does it. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah, if anything, this whole Elliot Rodgers thing this week has just made me mute 90% of the people I follow on Twitter. I've got enough filters going on right now to choke a horse. So the only bright point of this week was John Oliver.

My god, that man is – I was unsure about his show in the first episode, but I'm still unsure about the show as a whole. But with every week, he's got a talking point. He's got something that's going viral and something that's great, and this one kicked ass. This was the best one he's done yet.

I've been watching the show, and I enjoy it, but yeah, it's not stellar quality yet, but he's getting there real fast. So he basically had a rant on net neutrality, and it was – the very end where he – It was pretty epic.

When he addresses the trolls was genius. I mean a couple million views at this point, and he took down the FCC site. Yes, he did a call to action because that's important. That's number five on your list of things to do. Call of action for everybody to go to the FCC website and comment on it because the FCC has opened themselves up for comments for what, a week or two weeks or something like that?

I thought it was six weeks. Maybe six weeks, a period of time where they're taking comments from the public about net neutrality. Yeah, the Oliver Eitz crashed the server. Thank god. Good job. Yeah, they must have had the same people that did healthcare.gov do the FCC site. Yeah, and for those of you out there that still don't really get the – what net neutrality is, he actually does a really good explanation of it before he starts being really funny.

Oh, it's fantastic. It is a fantastic, well-thought-out, accessible piece for everybody to watch. So – and all of these links will be in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 61. Yes, good evening monsters is how he starts his call to arms. He did make really funny points about commenting as well in there.

Oh, they were genius. They were genius. And he called some of his detractors out too, which was hilarious. Yeah, it was very funny. And on a side note on that, you remember the site Ain't It Cool News? Harry Knowles, I believe was his name that ran it. It was a huge site. Maybe it still is.

I think it's still around. He still does a film festival. It is still around because I actually randomly just went to look at it for probably the first time in four years yesterday. And I saw some article about Star Wars or whatever and I clicked on it and it was just a little quick thing. But the comments – like there were 50,000 comments or whatever and it was all just people calling each other ass-munchers or you stupid fucking rapist or – what the fuck is wrong with people?

This is what happens when you have like people unfiltered. People are monsters. Yeah, people are monsters. It really is disgusting. Yeah, and somebody was saying that – like there was another shooting yesterday and it was somebody on Twitter who was like, man, CNN comments are like a thousand times worse than YouTube, which was saying something.

Yeah, yeah. That's what you get for going to CNN anyway. That's true. Or if I ran any kind of major content site, at this point I'd be shutting comments off. But that's where you get a lot of your traffic. Well, it's interesting what Boing Boing did where they're trying to have longer form discourse on some of their articles.

So they just started a forum. They killed comments and said, here, we have a forum now. You can talk on the forum. It all comes full circle. Yeah. Well, yeah. No doubt. Next, sign up for their newsletter, their daily newsletter where you'll get all the top comments. So it's interesting how they abstracted the discussion from the content, which I like.

I actually do like that. It's a pain in the ass if you want to build it yourself and to maintain it. But it's an interesting way to go. I'm curious how the numbers are working for them. I'd have to look into that a little more. But it's neat. I'm glad that they're – because the last thing I want to see at the end of an article is some ass muncher's comments, as it were.

Now, this next video – did you get to watch the video I sent you from the teenagers who get to watch an old advertisement for the internet? I did watch it. I was – I laughed.

No, no, no. You lulled. Yes, I lulled. It was very – it was funny. This is on the Sployed offshoot of Gizmodo. And they basically sat the – the articles there, the video comes from a different – outlet, the Fine Brothers.

But they had teenagers sit down and watch this ad for the internet, which I remember. Do you remember this thing? No, I don't remember ever seeing this back in the day. I saw it. And we laughed at it back then because at that point we were a little more savvy. But this is the age of CNET, CNET TV. And just – I don't know what got my goat about these kids.

It was – the Asian kid was actually the smartest of the bunch, you'll figure. And he – You can't – We can't profile people like that. Hey, well, I'm just saying he was the smartest of the bunch. Okay. And it was interesting that none of them knew that .com stood for commercial.

Right. That was interesting. But they're making fun of how everybody nowadays grows up and knows how to use the internet. And they give a two-year-old an iPad and they know what to do. It's like – it's a little more complicated than that, kids. And they didn't know what a modem was. That should be in your pub trivia. What's modem stand for?

Nobody would know. They'd actually win that one. That'd be nice. Okay. What is it? You tell me. Modular – oh, crap. I'd have to look it up. It's been years, man. When was the last time you had a modem? Actually, you know what? I found one in a box the other day because I've moved. I found like an old 19-4 modem.

Really? Yeah. No, it stands for modulate, demodulate. See? I got the modulate part. I forgot the demodulate. Yeah. Modem. Modem. Modet. It was funny. It's funny. It's funny. It's worth watching. If you're an old fogey and remember these commercials, it was pretty entertaining.

And I just said I hate children. But they do mention Barbie.com, which we both worked on. That is, I think, the first project you and I both ever worked on together. It was probably around that time. I never – you know what I got to do for it? I got to make the splash page, and I got credit on that splash page for like three years. The only thing I did on it, I had to go to a meeting at Mattel in El Segundo and be stuck in a room, a pink room for two hours while we talked about strategy.

Yeah. I think I did – I just remember for Barbie.com, that was my experience in tables, and I wrote some table that was like nested 17 different times. Oh, man. Do you remember on the door at BoxStop where we used to work? We did the site for Major League Soccer.

Yeah. And that dude printed out the table for the homepage, and it was like this just wall, like a seven-foot-long table. Yeah. One table, and it was seven feet of code. That was awesome. Oh, the good old days. Dems was the days. Last week you talked about how – what was that brain – whatever site?

Lumosity. Lumosity. When you quit, they said, hey, thanks for quitting. Here's a big discount if you want to come back. Exactly, yes. Well, Media Temple joins that club now because I've been finally closing out most of my accounts with them and moving everything to Linode or Linode. Yeah.

And as soon as I hit cancel, they say, hey, we've just checked, and you are eligible for a massive discount. Yeah. It's really unbelievable. If you have a Media Temple account, if you have a Media Temple account, go hit cancel right now, and you'll get – they will give you a box that says, would you like us to evaluate your account and see how much money we can cut off your bill?

Seriously. If you have a Media Temple account, go do that. Renegotiate. Get some money. They're owned by GoDaddy now, so don't feel bad. Comment of the week. Comment of the week. Comment of the week. Actually, we got a question from a listener who prefers to remain anonymous given the subject matter.

The deep web. He asked, deep web, interesting frontier or full of kiddie fiddlers and dullerts? Kid touchers. Why don't you quickly touch on what the deep web is, Jason? The deep web is kind of the unaccessible portion that you don't find in search engines, really.

You have to have special software to get there. It's unlisted type of stuff. Generally, you equate it with Tor. So you get Tor, and it gives you a whole subsection of sites that aren't generally accessible, like the Silk Road was. Silk Road, yeah.

All that stuff that was in the news a little while back. It's also kind of the main place where people were using Bitcoin before Bitcoin went semi-mainstream because you could not track the money, and you could make lots of supposedly nefarious purchases. I wonder if the kiddie fiddlers use butt coin.

Butt coin. I know. That was bad. Sorry. Booty coin. Anyways. Continue. I think that Jason and I are both on board. I got a couple points, but point number one is neither Jason or I have actually explored the deep web.

I'm not going to until Edward Snowden gives me the all clear. Well, he did that with TrueCrypt, and look how that turned out. Yeah. It's something I've never even tried to explore just because I have plenty enough privacy concerns and issues with the NSA and what they may or may not be hearing from me, so I've stayed away from even installing and looking around.

My other take on it. My other take on it is unless Amazon.com ends up on there for some reason, there's not much of a point for me going there. My assumption would be that it is probably just full of kiddie fiddlers and dullards and people – well, no. I think – I wouldn't say dullards.

I wouldn't say dullards. I don't think kiddie fiddlers is the big part of it. It's black market. It's drugs, be it legal in some countries and not in others or illegal everywhere. I've always had the opinion, and this is – Jason always hates when I say this.

This is an Adam Carolla thing. I got nothing to hide, so why would I go on this? Because I can get everything that I want on my regular webs, and I just assume because this is hidden, this is probably not good. Okay, here's the problem I have with that.

See, I knew you'd have something. We're – no, this is actually for both of us. We're discussing this by what we've read in the media. We haven't actually experienced it, so by saying that it's all drugs and kid touchers and all that shit, we are just actually echoing what we read in the media.

True. We haven't actually sat down and tried it out, and that comes back to what you just said. Amazon's not there. There's honestly nothing that I'm missing in my daily life where I need to go explore the backwaters of the internet to find it. And that also said, a long time ago, I made a pact with myself that I would never fucking go to jail.

So I don't do anything illegal on the internet because I know how easy it is for them to find you. Okay? Yeah. Look at the greatest hackers in the world. Most of them have been in jail. All of them have been caught pretty much except for the ones that are somewhere in Russia. And those guys are getting cracked down on hard too.

So no, people don't mess around with that shit anymore, and you can be found. That's it. And most of it comes from informants, people flipping on you. Just ask Kevin Mitnick. Almost everybody that goes to jail has somebody that flips on them at some point because these people are – well, they're criminals and thieves and basically have no moral compass.

And they just want to protect themselves. But anyway, that doesn't really equate with the dark web that much. I'm just saying I don't want to go to jail. Well, here's my thought. You and I are very – extremely well-connected on the internet. We know people that are very involved. We're in there.

We kind of know everything. Not everything, but you know what I mean. Yeah, seriously. We're very fucking plugged in, and not one person ever has told me or you, you really need to hop on tour and go check out this site. Yep, never.

Not once. So I'm thinking – And here's the other part of it. We're not political dissidents in a third-world country. We are entitled fat, rich, white boy fucks. We have no reason to really do anything in private. I can see where this comes in handy if you are trying to plan sedition and overthrow your government.

Once again, in the suburbs of Chicago, I don't have much need for that. For people who need to be protected from their governments, I can see this being a fantastic tool, which it is. So that's where it's not just kid touchers and dullards. Yeah, yeah.

I think that there is a fantastic use for it, but I just don't see it in our sphere. So I can't say I'm an expert on it by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't think I will ever be an expert on it because nobody is paying me to become an expert on it. That is kind of the limits of my internet exploration these days as well.

If somebody wanted to pay me to build a site on the deep web, I would get involved and explore it more. Yeah, sign me up. Sign me up. I'm in. So thank you very much for the question, listener. And if you're going to go ahead and explore, please report back because we'd like some firsthand accounts. But we have not been there. And practice safe surfing.

Yes. And don't buy any drugs or children.

Now, I have to apologize if I'm a little echoey this week. I'm at my new setup. I have a standing desk again. It's been six months since my hideous accident and surgery and all that shit, and I can stand again. So I just bought a new standing desk.

But the new room that I'm in is not very conducive to sound. I'm ordering some acoustical panels, and that should be fixed hopefully next week. But I'm also sweating my balls off because I'm standing up while we're doing this show, and it's a hot box up here. So apologies, especially – they say don't let them see you sweat, so I'm not because this is radio.

I thought you were just all sweaty because you're such an Apple fanboy, and our entire in the news section seems to be Apple. Well, it is appropriate since this is WWDC week and has been talked to death by everybody. But I can share some personal experience with some of the new stuff that I – that will not break the NDA.

I'll just say that because as much as I don't really build any Apple software, I still have my developer account. And I'd like to keep it because it is handy. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So I want to start off with the video that was on Recode about Jimmy and Eddie talking about the Beats deal.

Right. Since this is your area with the headphone-y, music-y thing, I'm just going to let you – what's your thought on it? Well, I'm actually – that video came out on May 30th, so we're a week past it, plus WWDC has been announced, plus there's been a few leaks about the new iPhone.

So I'm actually – it was a lot of – that was a lot of corporate ease, lifestyle, attracting younger people that aren't kind of blown away with Apple as like all of us in our 30s and 40s are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The real reason seems to be – I don't know if you've even seen this yet, and I didn't get the article in the show notes that I saw. So there were some leaked docs about the new iPhone where there's no longer going to be a headphone jack because they're going to be using the wireless headphone technology that Beats has.

Oh, no. For the phones, yes. No. That seems to be the real reason. So we will be getting Beats headphones with the new iPhones, not the lovely white ones that we've gotten used to. God damn it. How am I going to plug it into my car? Well, that seems to be the deal.

Now, hopefully – there's a huge backlash just on that article already saying, no, you cannot fucking do this, Apple. So we shall see. But that does seem to be – they seem to be going for the headphone tech more than anything else, which is unfortunate because those headphones fucking suck balls.

Yeah. Yeah. That does suck. I thought they were doing it for the music industry insider that they got with the deal. So anyway, that sucks. I hope that's not true. I hope it's not true as well. But other than that, there is – I mean, other than the cool factor, and there does seem to be an issue with that.

Apple does feel that they've lost the cool factor with younger people, and younger people love Beats. So those seem to be the double-edged reasons behind this deal. It's certainly not for their fucking streaming service. Okay. Well, there's that. So here's the question. Are you selling your stock or are you keeping it?

I'm asking you. So far, it looks like it's going up, so I'd keep it. Yeah, I'm not getting rid of it yet. People just start – it's one of those things with tech where for a period of time there, late 90s, early 2000s, like every WWDC, Apple just killed it with an amazing new product.

And people just expect that, and tech is leveled out. We're not going to have these kind of amazing breakthroughs all the time. Apple is still consistently putting out the best products on market. They're not being beaten no matter what everybody else says. It's all the bullshit articles that Android puts out there.

iPhone is still kicking ass, and there are a million other products that Apple has that are still best in field. So I'm not getting rid of my stock anytime soon. Yeah, I think what really came out of WWDC for me this year was the fact that they are putting more effort into, A, their cloud shit, which has sucked.

Across the board, everybody agrees iCloud has been a massive boondoggle for them, and it looks like they finally are putting the right resources in. And if the new stuff works and they can make their ecosystem solid, then it's a home run, you know, it's a total home run.

At this point, we've got to wait to see if it works. I ran iOS 8 beta on my phone, which this is always the three months of the year. Where I laugh at you. Exactly, where I just go, nope, can't take a picture this week, you know. And this turned out to be the worst beta since probably four or five.

It's unusable. My phone would reboot every eight minutes, which hence the iOS 8. So I had to revert and go back. That's a feature. I'm actually in the process of taking Yosemite off my iMac because it has turned out to be unusable as well.

So, yeah, so far the betas are definitely not ready for prime time. The one thing that they did not do that pisses me off still, I cannot be listening to iTunes on my Mac, pick up my phone, walk out of the house, and be listening to the same damn thing I was listening to. What the hell?

What the hell? We've got all this technology, and I cannot pick up a damn song from one device to the other. Yeah. And I'm using iTunes Match. They know what I'm listening to. I have it on both devices. To be fair, they've done a really good job with the podcasts on that. Yeah, somewhat. If you use the built-in podcast app, it picks up exactly where I left off, and it syncs wirelessly.

So as I'm listening to a podcast here, and then I decide I need to get off my ass and go do a bike ride, boom, as soon as I plug in my headphones, it's right where I was. Why can't they do that with the music? Do not know. Maybe Beats will fix that. Oh, yeah. Great. So they released a new language, Swift, which is more – the syntax is more scripty language.

So people like web developers and back-end developers who write in JavaScript and other dot notation type of languages will have an easier time moving into iOS and OSX development. I played with it for about 10 minutes. I went through the original docs and played with it on Xcode 6 in the playground.

It's cool. And I'm going to be digging into it because this is where they're going. So it makes sense at the genesis of the language to really kind of just get your toes in and learn it. Yeah. I've read a little bit about it, and I'm going to do a couple of programming exercises in it. And I'm happy about it because I hate C.

I can't stand it. Well, it's objective C, which is this crazy, verbose language that I just could never get my head wrapped around because of the syntax. The syntax is so different from anything else that I write, which is JavaScript or PHP. So this hopefully – Swift is an easier transition, I think, and I'm excited about it.

Unfortunately, again, it's one of those things where, like, nobody is paying me to build an app. So as soon as somebody does, I can't wait to dive in and try to do something with Swift. But I'm definitely going to dip the toes in, and I'm excited about it. There was an interesting article that came out.

It actually started with – I've talked about Farad Manjou, who used to write for Slate and then now is with the Wall Street Journal, I believe. Super big tech writer guy, tech journalist all over Twitter. Or as soon as this was announced, he put out on Twitter, why does the world need another programming language?

And then somebody decided to answer him, and I thought it was a really good article off of Fast Company. Yeah, it was a good article, and inside that article is a deeper dive into what's different in Swift from Objective-C, which I recommend checking out. That was a good kind of overview.

Yeah. So – and yeah, we do need more programming languages. We need easier programming languages. So I'm fine with that. More is the merit. And they also had to – they've got Google coming up with Go, so they're like, here's ours, bitches. And anything to make iOS and OS X development easier, I am all for.

And to your point where you're like, I'm not going to do it unless somebody pays me. Well, I want to have the skills so when somebody does come to me and say, hey, I want to pay you. Can you do this? There's not a two-month ramp where I have to learn the damn language. And so I'm ready. And that can have demo apps and say, look, I already did this, so this is why you should hire me.

That's why I'm doing it now. No, I agree. I'm going to build the modern-day equivalent of a Hello World app with it just to make sure that I know what I'm doing. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of new tools in iOS that make it easier than it used to be. So storyboards, other shit that nobody cares about besides us.

I'm going to play with it, and I'm going to definitely – since it is just starting, get into it now, so I'm not playing catch-up. I did that with Objective-C when the SDK first came out for iOS, and I never got caught back up because I felt like I was so far behind.

Now is a chance for everybody to get a fresh start. And Objective-C still works. It's not like – Swift is just a layer on top of Objective-C. Yeah, which is what most of these – I mean, when you talk about why we keep getting new programming languages, we're basically just, for the most part, layering on top of existing technologies but making it basically easier to code.

Yeah, everything gets translated to machine language. These are all just front ends to make it machine language. And the HealthKit thing came out. The home automation stuff came out. That's a toss-up if anybody is going to jump on that stuff. It's basically just a framework for providers of those types of services to latch on to, to have like – I think you've got the Passbook thing or PassKit or whatever the hell it was that nobody used.

Yeah. But I mean I'm interested in the HealthKit thing because we spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about quantifying health data and things like that and how all these kind of third-party apps come along. They're decent for a while and they totally screw the pooch. This one looks good. And do you think it's going to kill the market for a lot of the other ones?

Obviously, you're still going to have the wearables because Apple hasn't introduced their – or didn't announce their – what we all know is coming, which is a wristband-y type thing. That will then take over the wearables market. But at least as far as apps go, do you think HealthKit is going to do it?

Do you think – I hope so. Yeah, me too because all these other apps suck balls. God, the Misfit app. I ended up having – like last night I was updating my tracker for my Misfit that I got last week and the software is just terrible. It asked me five times in a row if I wanted to rate the app. Four times I hit no, no, no.

And then the last time I'm like, yep, one star, bitches. That's what you get for bugging me. The whole would you please rate my app thing needs to go away. I mean granted, we – and we are please aside to rate our podcast. Yeah, having said that, please rate our podcast.

No, that's good to know because I was actually going to follow up with you about the Misfit because I was still thinking about getting it. But it seems to me right now is a good time to hold off on exploring any new alternatives for quantified health stuff and wait and see what shakes out. Well, I mean all the HealthKit stuff is just a – it's a storage mechanism for the data that's coming off of them.

So I don't see a reason not to get it if that's what you're looking for. I only have this thing really to track my sleep. And I'm even considering not wearing it during the day and just wearing it at night. But as far as the sleep stuff goes, it's been pretty damn good. I'm happy with the results. And yeah, the app sucks, but what are you going to do?

Yeah. And compared with the Fitbit app, which has had a long time to get better because the Fitbit stuff sucked at the beginning too. And they've gotten – they've come a long way. So I'm happy with both of my purchases so far. So if I can just go to one app, I'm all for that. Yeah.

I want it to be all one app. That would be very nice. So maybe Apple will do it. We'll see. Yeah. And like a desktop version of it so I can just log into my Mac and check it out. That would be genius. So now we have talked many times about Kickstarter and the way things never seem to go right.

And one of the ones that was making the rounds was the Solar Roadways. Right. And somebody made a 29-minute video about how dumb an idea the Solar Roadways one was because they got funded to the tune of like $1.7, $1.8 million. Right. So this guy went – I did not watch this because – You haven't watched it?

28 minutes made me go, no fucking way. I'm not watching this. It's hilarious. You have to watch it. It's hilarious. It's called Solar Freaking Roadways. Are they real? And this guy just tears it apart. Everything about it is great. Okay. Well, I guess I'll have to go watch it.

The Solar Roadways thing has been bouncing around for a while. I think we even talked about it, the original one where it was someplace in Sweden or Norway that did it and it looked awesome. I don't know. I guess it wouldn't work here. I just – this was one of the best things that came out of my week because I love it when people just tear apart some of the Kickstarter things that are out there.

And they used bits from the videos of the people who put it together and just kicked it in the nuts over and over and over again. It was hilarious. Well worth the watch. All right. I will definitely watch it, although they did get their money. Yeah, they did, but they won't get any more.

Let's just say that because it's not going to work. The last thing I got for the news, and I don't know. This is kind of insidery baseball. It's called Kill the Hamburger Button. I actually had no idea it was called – or you could call it a hamburger button, which I think is hilarious and awesome.

I didn't – oh, okay. Yeah, I totally – I've been railing against the hamburger for a long time. For the listeners who can't see the pretty pictures we're looking at, the hamburger icon is when you're in an app and you see those three lines, which can mean anything and typically means more or like nav or something like that.

It's ambiguous. It's annoying because you never know what you're going to get. Are you going to get a pop down or a layover or a side scroll? You just don't know what you're going to get. Now, I have less of a problem with this. I freely admit that I use the hamburger button on a couple mobile sites that I have built.

I think it's relatively standard for a mobile site to know that that's your menu. Well, that's the point that it's becoming standard, but it's not standard. Right. That's the thing. It's just a generic icon for – this is the shit that we can figure out how to put on our – in our UI.

Because you have so little room to play with. You want people to be able to read things, so you hide your menu. And by the way, Jason, not to get all metaphysical, but no standard starts as a standard. The great thing about standards is you have so many to choose from. This is a good read on TechCrunch, which is like the first good read on TechCrunch I've seen in a very, very long time.

Zumba. I think actually on our mobile version of Grumpy Old Geeks, we use the hamburger as well. We have a hamburger button as well. Yes, we do. What are you going to do? I don't mind them. See, I get it. It's funny, but I have no problem with them. I want the cheeseburger. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger.

Security. This week, the major internet companies wrote a letter. They wrote a letter to the government saying, yeah, we're kind of bummed. Can you stop it? It's cute that they invited LinkedIn.

Why is it cute? All these big companies. LinkedIn is huge now, man. Yeah, but everybody knows it's useless. That's about to go away. Well, you mock LinkedIn, but Yahoo's on here. Okay? So let's see who's more nowadays. Good point.

Oh, and AOL. Yeah, AOL. Well, I like this letter, but it's just one of those things where, where does the world come to when Google and Apple are charging to our rescue? Hey, you know. This is on reformgovernmentsurveillance.com.

It's part of the reset the net thingy that was going on yesterday. Another one of those big things where everybody goes, today's the day that we're going to do something on the internet. Hello? Hello? Yeah. Is anybody here? Yeah, that's pretty much it. So on an upside, though, Google has announced that they are going to be doing end-to-end encryption for your emails.

Which is pretty awesome. You have to use Chrome, though. Yeah. Which I've been actually getting away from Chrome because it's been, these recent updates have made it buggier and buggier. Yeah, they're following the Firefox plan pretty spot on right now, which is amazing browser, amazing browser.

I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to stick with it. Oh, my God, this is starting to suck. Oh, my God, I hate this browser. Yeah, that is the lifespan of a browser. It's just like, let's start off lean, fast, secure, everything is great. And then, you know, we need another version number, so let's put some more shit in it. And the interesting thing, though, remember I bitched about the notification bar showing up in my menu bar with the little bell?

Yeah. And I'm like, what the fuck is this thing back for? I turned it off three times. Well, this time I didn't turn it off, and it went away. It just went away by itself. So they must have updated Chrome again because I've got the auto-update thing on. And boom, it's gone again. So next week when they update, I guess it will be back. I just can't do auto-update because of that.

I hate being surprised. Come on. It's always fun to wake up. I don't want it to be a crapshoot every single time I load a new program. Well, it's the one that you base your livelihood on. So why wouldn't you want to wake up every day wondering if you're going to be able to work or not?

I just don't like that kind of excitement in my life, Jason. Oh, man, live a little. Live on the edge. The bleeding edge. Right. So the New York Times came out with a story about the NSA is collecting millions of faces from the web. Shocking. Yeah. File this one under, yeah.

Figured that one was coming. So all they need to do is just subpoena Facebook. They've got all the faces. Yeah. It's the book of them. It is the book of the faces. It's in the fucking name, people. Yeah, seriously. And their, man, their facial recognition stuff is scary good.

It is scary good. When people actually start to realize, like, when that goes into public consciousness, how good facial recognition software is. I mean, we talked about this a long time ago where Facebook, I guess, scaled back the tech because it was actually freaking out users when they introduced it and test it. Yeah, it's nuts.

I posted a picture. Here's the picture I posted. 22 years ago, a picture of me on a skateboard ramp with my buddy sitting next to me that was a cell phone picture that had to be taken on a razor. It was so bad. And emailed, like, four times, posted on Instagram with filters.

Then I posted it to Facebook, and it still picked us both out. Yeah. It's that good. 22 years later. It's like, holy shit. You guys are scary. Mm-hmm. This is all fucking frightening. There's just, yeah, it's crazy. I mean, if we could trust them to use it for good. And I keep saying, if the NSA just rebranded themselves as the National Archive Association, where they're just archiving human life in existence.

So in the future, we can go back and look at our follies and re-enjoy our youth. If they were just an archival company, or not a company, an archival branch, if they were like the Library of Congress for everything, then it's a marketing issue with the NSA.

That's all it is. It's marketing. They really just need to add a happy face to their logo and maybe do, like, one of those cutesy Web 2.0 names. It should be NSA Fee. Yeah. And get rid of, you know what? Get rid of the eagle, because the eagles are, you know, scary. It's scary, yeah. So get a little Tweety Bird up there. Yeah. You know, maybe holding a kitten and a unicorn with a rainbow coming out of its ass, and that's your new NSA.

Just rebrand. You can do the same scary shit. We talked about Google's Please Forget Me thing that they launched last week. And so far, well, when I put it in here, which was on the 2nd, so four days ago, as of four days ago, 12,000 Europeans have asked to be forgotten.

Well, why wouldn't you? I would, too. But like we discussed, are they actually going to do it? At some point. But, man, it's screwing up with their personal brand. Everybody's got to have a personal brand. Why would you want your personal brand to be, you know, people are trying to get in Google. Why would you want to get out?

People are trying to be the first hit, and you're trying to get out of there? What's wrong with you people? Don't you want the entire world to know what you're doing at every second? You're missing market opportunities to monetize. Exactly. Your personal brand is taking a hit. Luckily, there are 20,000 people out there who come, like, 15th or 20th on Google that will help you fix your brand.

They'll charge you for it. No, I mean, I love this idea. I think it's great. I'm not surprised that people sign up for it. It's exactly like when the don't call list went on the internet here in the U.S. And everybody just immediately went to the site and put in their number. I still get phone calls. So here's an interesting one. Now, if they're going to handle cases like this.

A long time ago, I used to run a site called blogging.la. And on that site, one time, I bashed an internet company because on their website – well, I worked on Tomb Raider.com. Right. And these guys took credit for the entire site, whereas they just did a little tiny flash widget.

And I bashed them publicly. And Blogging LA had some juice back then. We were powerful. So the first result for their company was my article bashing them, calling them liars and cheats. I got an email from the president of the company begging me to take it down. I said, we fixed it.

We're sorry. And I was young and an asshole. As opposed to the old and an asshole now. I never took it down. No, good. People like that should be shamed publicly forever. Yeah. And it forced them to rebrand and change their company name, wherein I went back to my original article and ran and changed the name of this company.

I'm like, update. This company is now rebranded. And then I lost track of them after that. But yes. So I'm wondering if companies like that will try and get things like my post removed from the index. Well, that is an interesting thing because you have to remember here in the U.S., companies are considered people. It's not the same in Europe.

So we'd actually – we'd need some lawyers for this one. Yeah, definitely. But it's definitely a possibility. Yeah. I wonder what ever happened to those guys. I would feel – I would actually feel bad about it if they didn't – if they weren't liars. You know?

Yeah. They were trying to get business off work that I did and my company did. And we busted our ass on it. Yeah. And you don't just get to do a mea culpa once you've been caught. Exactly. So there are consequences, people. Exactly. Speaking of consequences, here's something that will never probably have any kind of consequence because Comcast is basically taking over the internet all across the U.S.

But this freaked me out and I was not aware of this. Did you know that your Comcast router, should you happen to have one, sitting in your house, which you think is very private and you can lock down and all that sort of stuff? Basically, Comcast is turning those into public Wi-Fi hotspots on you.

Your God, why? You have to opt out. Not in. Out. Now, I glanced at this article. This was on Lifehacker. What the hell are you reading Lifehacker for? They're so viral, man. So they say that it doesn't use your bandwidth.

I don't believe that. Whose bandwidth is it using? Well, here's the deal. If there's that much extra bandwidth on the pipe that they can give free Wi-Fi hotspots to other people, why isn't that my bandwidth? Yeah. You know? Yeah. We've got the best connection that we can get, so we're paying for the premium connections, and there's extra bandwidth that you're just giving away for free to other people?

What the hell? Are you putting up like a fucking firewall? Are you portioning this connection through my Wi-Fi hotspot? What the fuck's going on, people? Yeah, turn it off if you've got Comcast. That's some crazy shit. They say that it's separated from your network so people can't get to it.

I would like to say that traffic from other people coming through my router has, at some point, the ability to get to the rest of my network. Exactly. I know how smart these fucking hackers are. There are ways that they can figure that out. If the bits are coming through my router, which, granted, is Comcast's router because we have to rent it, but still, that's bullshit.

That is bullshit. I agree. And granted, Comcast has upped us to a 100 megabit connection for basically free. Well, you. Not all of us. I think we were paying for 20 megabits, and they're just like, oh, here, have 100. But you have to share it with everyone.

I wonder how fast those things can actually go. I'm very curious about that. I mean, we all know that we've – all the reports come out about how our connectivity is way down compared to other countries in the world. But they've got – they're throttling it. Like, let these suckers go, and let's see what we got.

Well, here's the deal. So, yeah, no, them giving us free bandwidth or upping our caps, PR. It's all PR. Oh, yeah. I've said it before. It's all PR. They're giving us – they're making us feel good because they're going to take something away over there, or they're going to buy – you know, was it Time Warner?

And basically just keep building these monopolies. So this is just – it's all fucking PR. Yeah. I agree. Speaking of PR, MySpace is in the news. Were they on that letter? No, they weren't asked. No, no. But how often did you ever think you would hear those words again?

MySpace is in the news. Oh, I don't know. Never. So I found this one on the Naked Security blog at Sophos, which I recommend everybody check out. It's a great, great blog. MySpace emails cringeworthy old photos to lure users back.

This is genius. It is absolutely genius. I mean, it's not going to work because nobody gives a crap. It is a dick move. Well, here's my issue with it. When MySpace was in the process of shutting down, I was a little too busy dealing with – I had a bunch of my client – artists were up on MySpace, so I was trying to make sure that the transition went okay to whatever their bullshit new pages were, which I just ripped in news feeds and tour dates and shit like that.

I've totally forgot about my account because I had stopped using it ages ago, but I had a ton of photos in there because I used MySpace during that period of time that we all did. And great photos. I mean, I'm sure I have them somewhere else, but they were all organized, and they were put into great little folders, and I had done captions, and there were comments, and I was like, I would love to grab all that stuff.

By the time I actually remembered, I went back and they basically told me it was all gone. It's not gone. It's not gone, buddy. They've got all of this stuff sitting somewhere. Did you get your Blackmailian email? I have not. I have not gotten one yet, which is a little surprising.

I feel left out. Yeah, I wonder if they curbed it a bit after the Mashable article, but still, that was a seriously dick move. Yeah, yeah. Funny, but a dick move. I just don't even get it. Yeah, kudos to whoever thought of it. Yeah, somebody thought of this, and it was just genius, but I don't get what their game plan is.

I mean, does anyone go to MySpace anymore for anything? I don't even think the employees go there. They're fucking around on Facebook. Exactly. So the next article I found is, it's not so much security, but kind of is. It's called Uber Anxiety, when your car service is judging you back.

Kevin Rose supposedly wrote this article, because now I don't know, because they're obviously CEOs doing ghostwriting. He's not a CEO anymore. He's a partner at Google, not a partner, but something at Google Ventures. Right. And it's an interesting story, because I always knew this going in, that when you have an Uber ride, you rate the driver, and the driver rates you.

That's always been the case. I have never forgotten that, ever, because it was ingrained to me. I'm like, I've got to be nice to this guy, because that is just common fucking courtesy. It's also just common courtesy. There's no reason to be a dick. It's almost like we're having to force – it's the gamification of forcing just general niceties.

Here's the deal. I'm okay with that part. Me too. I'm fine with that. Go read some comments on the internet, and there you go. I understand that if I call my local Domino's Pizza, and they come over, and they deliver my pizza, and I fucking stiff them on a tip, they're going to know that. I get that.

Yeah. I mean, that's going to be found out by Sneakernet and all the drivers just talking to each other, and there might be note fields in your address record. There are. There are, and most restaurants do the same for regular customers. There are note fields. So I'm fine with this. I'm totally fine with this. It was interesting because he found out that he wasn't the perfect citizen and got like a – he's got a 4.8.

I've been out with him a couple of times drinking, and we party it up sometimes, and I can understand where sometimes you might get a ding on the record just for being boisterous and loud and just fucking crazy. So shit like that happens. But it's interesting on the Uber side where they talk about how if you have like a 3, they won't even pick you up.

You know? So you're blacklisted from the black car, as it were. It's an interesting article, and the other part of it, it's surprisingly well written. So I'm wondering. I'm seriously wondering. Yeah.

Well, I'm still so on the fence with the whole Uber thing, not only for just kind of general disruption reasons versus how this works and certifications and all that sort of stuff. And then again – and this week, at least here in L.A., there's been a handful of news stories about Uber drivers gone bad.

A woman supposedly picked up by an off-duty Uber driver, woke up next to him in a hotel. She was drunk and wasted, and it's unclear whether she completed the call to Uber to pick her up or whether the doorman at the bar just kind of waved over this guy, having recognized him from pickups previously.

Another Uber driver reportedly demanded just a hug from a woman for payment as opposed to anything else. You know, these are ongoing stories, but there's updates every day about, well, maybe this didn't happen, maybe that didn't happen. But as per our previous article, we're chiming in and talking about it now.

Yeah, definitely. I tell you, when I go to – if I'm in San Francisco, I only use Uber. And when I was in L.A. last time, I had two Ubers to get to the train station and lunch and all that. A lot of my friends really love it. I still have not used Uber, but I just don't have much call for it.

And there aren't that many cars on your side of town. Yeah. So if you ever get a chance, man, it's great. It's expensive, but it's great. You got a great car. They give you a free bottle of water when you get in. Drivers are always nice. They're never smoking or listening to crazy loud music. They'll put on the radio whatever you like or turn it off and leave you alone, which is my favorite feature.

Yeah, I like that as well. Especially in San Francisco when I'm done with like a three-day bender with my buddies and I'm just going to the airport to get on the plane. I'm like, can you turn the radio off and can we just chill? And they're like, cool. Yeah, let's go. Whereas Lyft, you get in the car and you're supposed to be chatty. That's – no, thanks.

Fuck that. I will never, ever, ever use Lyft. No. Besides the stupid mustache, I'm just – besides being embarrassed to get in the damn car, I don't want to chat with anybody. You know, they have done an upgrade. A lot of the female drivers of Lyft now don't have the mustache. They have the pink eyelashes coming off the headlights.

God. Yeah. I wonder when people are going to start – here's the thing. San Francisco, I bet the hipsters are going to start driving around in their little Priuses or whatever with Hitler mustaches on their car. Right. Okay. Went too far. Yeah. So the Secret Service is apparently trying to buy some sarcasm-detecting software to know whether your last tweet was funny or you were seriously thinking about blowing something up or shooting somebody.

And ironically, this is – Not the onion. Triggered a deluge of sarcastic tweets. Go figure. You know, it's funny because everybody is just crapping on it. But, you know, nothing that the government ends up working on, such as their facial recognition software, would surprise me.

And they've got the resources and money to throw at it, and I wouldn't be surprised if they could actually make this work. I don't see the point, but – I totally see the point. Wasting money going after every idiot who says something stupid. I guess that's true, considering the comment situation on the internet these days.

Yeah. Let's save some money. You can buy some software. Here's the deal. 99.9999999% of every tweet that's about something stupid is sarcastic and stupid. So, yeah. Here, candy, candy, candy, candy. Part of the fun of – fun, I guess – of music these days is that because of our social media and all that sort of stuff, we hear about things the entire time as they're going through the process of being written and promoted and before they come out.

I talked about Ruby, who was one of my favorite kind of 90s trip-hop artists. She wrote some great albums way back in the day. Her single came out a couple months back. I talked about it then. The album – the full album is actually out now, for those of you who actually know what an album is.

It's called Waiting for Light. She's got a nice little band camp set up, and it's available on iTunes, and I actually love this album. I've listened to it for a couple days straight now. It's really good. If you were into that kind of sound with a great female vocalist, I can't recommend it enough. Cool.

I'll check it out. Yeah. Is she on the YouTube? I believe she is on the tube of the U. Didn't not look, but that's, I assume, where all the kids will hear it. It should be on Spotify soon. Single is definitely up there. Plus, they finally added in her older albums from the 90s, which are awesome.

And those should definitely get a listen. Those are up on all your streaming services. And I stumped, well, this site's been out for a while, but I completely, totally forgot about it. The guy that runs it now does the Darkwave segment on SiriusXM, 80s channel, which I listen to regularly.

Do we have a visitor? Yeah, sadly, I've been visited by someone small and white and furry. Oh, cute. There's a great site if you're into the kind of music that I truly love, which is like your late 80s, 90s alternative, slicingupeyeballs.com. The banner is just a collection of tapes.

I had every single one of those. But it's good for music news about, you know, all the Smiths, Morrissey, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Lemon Rockets, all that sort of stuff. I had totally forgotten about this site and gone back to it. And I just look at it once a day to see what's going on and just to get my nostalgia flashback back when music was good.

Okay, okay. I'll check it out for sure then. Yeah. So I've been checking out something that you talked about before called An Idiot Abroad. Yes, I love that show. I was asked what I was asking about because I watched the first episode and it was mildly entertaining. I enjoyed it quite a bit. But, you know, it's definitely a time commitment, especially with Orange is the New Blackout.

But I need something to have in the background during the day. So you do recommend An Idiot Abroad for the full run? I do. I mean, you're either into Carl Pilkington and that humor or you're not. But it's also interesting as a travel show because he does go to some pretty interesting places.

I mean, you and I were both really into the Michael Palin travel stuff. This is similar but dumber but more funny. I thought he was pretty funny. I dug him. I thought he was actually smarter than I thought he was going to be. Well, you know, the whole thing is it is a joke. He is acting. Yeah.

But it is genius. I howled for the first two seasons. I had an issue by the time they got to season three because, you know, the premise kind of does wear thin a bit. And they knew that so they added Warwick Davis as his travel companion.

Willow? Yes, Willow himself or the main Ewok. Yeah. So they added him. He seems to be a favorite of – oh, God. What's his face? Blanking on the name. Gervais. Ricky Gervais because he's been on a couple of his different shows. I think it starts to fall a little flat by season three.

I didn't enjoy season three as much, and I didn't feel that Warwick and Carl – they didn't really work together. But maybe that's just me. Season one and two killed me. Season three, meh. Okay, cool. Well, at least check out the first two then. Yeah, definitely. I can't recommend it enough.

So I saw a commercial for the show called Rising Star. It's a new thing on ABC. And it's, you know, one of those singing, everybody votes type of shows. Like there's a gazillion of them. The American Idol model. Yeah. Yeah, that's originally what I saw.

I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ, another one. But this one, you vote in real time, and it's the audience that votes. And you find out while they're on stage if they get through or not. Okay. So they up their tech. Finally, somebody has cracked the nut on this and is doing it.

We've had this technology for a long time now, and finally they're just building a show around it. Well – I'm excited for that. You know, they didn't do it the first time, the first few times around, even though they could have because basically they were counting on these people to actually have music careers. So they were rigging the books a little bit to hedge their bets and make sure that they could actually have a viable album and make some money off these people.

Now they realize that nobody gives a shit anymore. So why not? Seriously. And it reminded me of a great book called Interface. It was a Neil Stevenson book that he co-wrote with his uncle, I believe, under a pseudonym. But it's an amazing book, and it's a book about this basically presidential campaign that was rigged by using biofeedback monitoring from this cross-section of the audience.

So in real time, he could craft his speeches to the public. Like if he knows something's going sideways, they can like talk in his ear and say, no, talk about this, talk about that. It's a really good book. Really good book. That's only like a part of the book. It's more of a thriller type of thing after that. Great book though.

Check it out. Interface. Look, we did ear candy and at the library in one segment. Sweet. No, seriously? Are you shitting me? Did you know that there's a metal that remembers its shape? I have seen something about this, and don't you like you can bend it all up and then pour some water on it and it snaps back?

It's like kind of temperature-based. Like if you put it in a certain shape and then you bring up the temperature and then you pour water on it, which brings down the temperature, it snaps right back to the shape that you had it in. It's called nitinol. It is the coolest thing ever, and I don't know why this isn't more publicly known because it's awesome.

I saw this a couple of years ago actually, so it's been around for a bit, but what's the practical use case of it? I don't know. It's cool. It's very cool, but I just wondered what the practical use case is. Well, there has to be some sort of practical use case. I mean I could see something like some weird backpack that you could transform into different shapes depending on – find ways to control it.

Yeah, but then when you get hot and you're walking around and then it snaps back into the original thing because you've got sweat running down you. I'm sure we can figure out a way to control such things. Okay. Air-conditioned, moldable backpacks. Exactly. I don't know. That was – I just saw it and it kind of blew me away.

We have the video in the show notes. It's cool. That was my – instead of finding a crazy-ass fact, I saw that and I was like, wow, that is – are you shitting me? That's exactly what I did, so I put it in the segment. Excellent. Okay. No trivia this week then. Okay. No trivia this week. There were a couple other things that I stumbled across.

There was – well, there was an ad, of course, that popped up in my face at some point. WeSpec. It's a – WeSpec A, which is close to German but not really. It's some sort of language thing. They're taking over Rosetta Stone and their take on it is, wouldn't it be better if you are actually speaking with a real person?

So they hire people that speak languages to sit there and you can Google chat with them or whatever. Interesting enough concept but I'm – the only person that finds it amusing that something helping you learn languages is name something that isn't a word in any language. Well, they're just – they just threw all the letters together and that was in some languages and arranged them to something that kind of looked like it should be something.

Yeah. So now it's an interesting concept but I actually had a friend who is learning Mandarin Chinese and was – Yeah, he's been going to – there's a language institute near you. It's like the Beverly Hills Language Institute and he went there for like six or seven months and he's getting pretty good.

But he found that he just – I don't know if he put a Craigslist ad out or something. But he found people that were trying to learn English that spoke Mandarin and would just get on and chat with them. And they would like – they would do like just phone calls and it was cheaper than using a service. He got to meet different people in China.

So he actually met people and could polish his language a couple times a week and it was cheaper. And both helping each other which is pretty damn cool. Exactly. That's the cool part about it. So, yeah, there's services for this but honestly, just put an ad out and find somebody who wants to learn the language that you speak and speaks the language you want to learn.

But hold on a second, Jason. We've just found a way to disrupt the entire language learning infrastructure. We have democratized something. We can take them down. We can put up an app ourselves called SPIC and take out all the vowels and we're done. We've disrupted the entire industry and we can get crowdfunding.

That's our first Kickstarter. There we go. We found one. We found one. Here, pay us to do something that you could just go do yourself for far cheaper. We're in. We are in. Exactly. Hey, it works for everyone else. So in keeping running with languages, let's go with Roman.

Super Bowl 50 logo was released and they have done it without the Roman numeral because I think Super Bowl L would have confused people. I don't – here's my take on it. Since Super Bowl IX, there's been an X in the Roman numeral. Super Bowl IX was I-X because you move the one and there's your nine.

And yes, going from everything with I's and V's and X's to just the letter L is jarring for people who don't know their Roman numerals, which is almost everybody nowadays. In high school, I learned the Roman numerals. As did I. Exactly. And they're really not hard.

There's only a couple of them and you just figure out the formula of how they're put together and boom, Bob's your uncle. And here's my take on it though. Super Bowl L? Lame. Super Bowl Lame. That's right. That would be the first thing out on everybody's Twitter. It's like, what the fuck is L?

It's going to be a lame one this year. Losers. So I think this is a marketing stunt instead of what it is. Yeah, it is what it is. I'll be interested to – I mean I assume this is the death of Roman numerals for the Super Bowl from now on. It's just going to be 50, 51.

It's over. Yeah. It's done. Yeah. Back to Arabic. Numerals. Not Arabic speaking. I don't know. How would you say Super Bowl in Arabic? I don't know. I have no idea. I'm not up on my Farsi. There would be lots of consonants and spittle involved if I tried to do it.

Save that mic. Closing shout out! I'd like to give a shout out to a friend of the show and our previous guest, Felicia Michaels. She has launched the show she was discussing way back on her appearance on episode – because I don't remember – Peeping Comics.

First episode is up on YouTube and we've got it in our show notes. So take a look. Oh, I'm going to check that out. Yeah, it should be pretty good. She seems to be getting a good response for it and she's pretty happy. She also does have her new comedy CD out, Milf and Cookies. So you should also take a look at that.

She's one sexy, funny lady. Yes, she is. And I want to give a shout out to a great World Cup commercial, which is done by Beats, sadly. Can you say irony? I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, Taylor Swifty ever have a pair of Beats headphones because they suck unless they come with the next iPhone.

Yes, because we're all going to get them with the next iPhone. But it really did ramp me up for the World Cup. It's a pretty good commercial. I really enjoy the song. It does give a bit of a – it just – it ramped me up. But as per usual, they felt the need to throw in a bunch of USA familiar faces that have absolutely nothing to do with soccer just because, you know, it's America.

But it's a great commercial, totally worth watching. And I can't wait for the World Cup. Six days, man. Six days. Oh, I was getting her ass. When does it start? Six days. Oh, Jesus. That's soon. I'm going to have to get some – oh, Christ. It's in our time zone though, right? Early game, close-ish.

Well, let's see. Yeah. We're going to have to tailor our recording schedule around your fucking need to watch football. Every single game, yes. Yeah, yeah. No, it's pretty decent. I think the early games are 7 a.m. for me, so 9 a.m. for you. And then the later ones are in the afternoon.

So it's not bad. Okay. Who are you rooting for so I know who I should keep an eye on? Germany. Germany always. Deutschland, Deutschland. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. And they are pretty much – they're a damn good team. I'm not going to say they're favored because everybody goes on and on about Brazil and how it's there and they're definitely favored and they're going to win it all.

They're Argentina or blah, blah, blah. To hell with Spain. Screw them. It's all Germany for me. Okie dokie. Rooting for the fatherland. Yeah, this is so good. I was going to put this in another segment that we unfortunately killed.

But this is an onion piece. It is – this is up there with the first onion piece that they did on Facebook while Zuckerberg was the greatest CIA agent of all time for building Facebook. This is new Facebook features scans profile to pinpoint exactly when things went wrong, which is – it's just – it's fucking hilarious.

And you can match to your friends to find out if their life sucks more than yours does. And it is the funniest two minutes I've found this week. It's extremely funny. And you know what? Probable. Yes, that's the thing. You could do this probably. Oh, not probably.

You could do this. You just – all you need is a follower count at this point. A follower count and merge it with your calendar and your four square history and your Facebook history and the number of friends you have, the number of likes. Yeah, this is an easy to build feature actually. And they probably have it internally. Probably, yes.

So as with great comedy, it's always pretty close to the truth. Yes, it was a great little clip and very funny. So I highly recommend you watching it. So another thing that I just wanted to do a quick shout out this week, I bought a camera. I'm back into the game. I am complete.

Congratulations. I bought a Nikon D7100. It's sexy. Only downside is the raw files are 35 megabytes. That's pretty big. I took 14 pictures and it was a half a gig. I could not – I'm just like, what? But I mean the pictures are 6,000 by 4,000 pixels, which is just insane.

It's ridiculous. Now, I have not kept up at all with fancy-dancy, super expensive cameras. Are these all like kitted out or have they stayed away from like we'll connect you to Wi-Fi and you can upload directly to Facebook from here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Well, interestingly, you should mention that. The one that I got came with a Wi-Fi adapter so I can transfer files with it with this little dongly thing.

But at 35 megapop, it's going to take a day and a half to just get a bit over. That's true. It is probably running G, not N or anything like that. But they don't have any fancy software that will automatically knock it down inside. No. I haven't played with it yet. I literally just got it yesterday afternoon.

Right. But I got it because I wanted to talk about the importance of hobbies, which was – I wanted to have this as a separate topic sometime, but I'm just going to run through this because I got a new site coming up this week. Okay. For a couple of years, I did a site called A Photo a Day. And literally, I got out of the house and went and took a picture every single day.

And it was one of the greatest things. It was a lot of work, but it was a blast and it got me away from the computer. And I just noticed that in the past couple of years, I got rid of my camera. I bought another one from Kent Nichols, the Ask a Ninja Dude, and it just didn't quite live up to what I needed. So I bought a new one, getting back on the horse, and I'm going to start that site back up.

I'll put up all the old stuff just so there's some history there if you want to go check it out. But, man, hobbies. You've got to have hobbies, especially if you live in a place like this where like six months out of the year, you can't leave the house. No, I think you need to have hobbies anyways, and it's super important that they not be related to what you do for a living.

If you are on the internet for a living, your hobby has to be off of it. Well, that's why this is a nice hybrid because I have to leave the house. I have to go get sun, air to take pictures unless I take pictures of the dog all day, which is not going to happen. There's already been quite a few of those on your Facebook feed. Well, the first picture I posted was of the dog.

We'll put that picture up in the show notes this week so you can see the first picture with the new camera, and it is a dog. But I live near Chicago now. It's 20 minutes to get downtown. Chicago is one of the most picturesque cities in the country. I love shooting Chicago, so I'm so thrilled to be getting out of the house again.

So that's it. I'm ecstatic. I'm giddy. Well, I'm giddy adjacent. I've checked in near giddy. Yes. Plus, giddy minus two. I'll do that factor. Okay. Well, I agree 100% with that.

And I hope your hobby is listening to our podcast. That was horrible. That was pretty bad. Absolutely horrible. Because you're just talking to somebody that's already listened to the whole damn show. You know, Jason and I did a little experiment this week where we paid attention to a few people that seem to know what's going on with podcasting and how we can increase numbers and quantify ourselves and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it was all a load of crap. And so I just went for a little marketing spiel there. Yeah, no, it's funny because, you know, since we do this show and we like people to listen to it. But finding new audience members is always a pain because we don't know where to go. So we went to the pros. We went to the pros.

These guys have like thousands of dollars worth of courses that they sell to people to get them better podcasts. And everything that these guys talked about for an hour, you can figure out in 10 minutes. Yeah, that's what we call the no shit methodology. Yeah, seriously.

Brian just kept emailing me. He's like, no shit. He's like, duh. I just keep getting these emails. He's like, well, that was fucking stupid. Oh, my God. Maybe we can make money commentaring on their commentary. We should pop up like the little – This could be our new gig. We could be the grumpy old geeks and we pop up during live chats in the corners just like Waldorf and Statler from The Muppets.

Yep. Let's change our icons now. That's our new thing. Well, it was good talking to you again, Jason, as always. And I hope everybody enjoyed the listen and we'll see you all next week. Definitely. And try and get some sleep between your games so you're not dead to the world next week when we record. Maybe we'll see you next week.

I've got to look at the schedule. Yeah, we're going to be recording at 2 in the morning when all the games are over and Brian can't see straight. He's like, go home. Go home. Of course. All right, man. I'll see you next week. All right. Bye. Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

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