613: Dirty Laundry

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. 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. Man, Maui sucks. It's really sad, man. I mean, I hope the banyan tree survives, obviously. It'd be nice if a lot of the people survived.

Yeah. The counts going up as they're finding things. Man, that is a storm. You do not want a hurricane winds with fire on an island. That's bad. Yeah, on an island. I was just checking this morning. I had a friend of the show, Fogarty.

I've only been to Maui once. And when we were there, we flash mobbed Charlie's Restaurant and Saloon. I don't know if you've ever been there. But we went there with the creme de la creme of Irish folk music and just showed up one night. Because we were on the cruise and the cruise pulled in and we had like literally the royalty of Irish music.

And just popped in and did a set. And it was so awesome. It was so awesome. I've gone past Charlie's Restaurant and Saloon because Mama's Fish House is one of my favorite restaurants in the world, which is just a little bit further down that road. Yeah, so my roommate's niece and nephew are there.

She's a photographer and he does tour boat stuff for, you know, like a deckhand on dives and things like that. They went out for a shoot for her business. And by the time they came back, both of their places had been burnt to the ground. They literally had what they were carrying on them.

It's a mess. It is a mess. It's a mess. But, you know, there's no climate change. None whatsoever. Moving on. Well, we've got a little bit of good news. Voyager 2 is alive. NASA has regained contact with Voyager 2.

They use a network of ground-based transmitters to shout a command at the probe, telling it to turn back towards Earth. Obviously, this is more effective than when I shout at my child and turn around and come back. So it did take 18.5 hours to reach. So maybe I should give Lucas a little time. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe he's just slow. Yeah. And I have not changed any of my setup regarding social media. So I still see X every time I launch my browser. It's starting to live up to its name. I mean, I know I'm a good-looking guy. But really, in the last few weeks, I've had two to three new followers a day.

And it's amazing, Jason. They're all really, really hot chicks that have just joined the site. Oh, man, what a throwback. Yeah. What a throwback. Things are going really great over there. Wow. Okay. Yeah, it's all spam now, man.

All of it. All spam and bots. Well, you know, Elon did say there were a lot of bots on the platform when he had to buy it. Yep. That's about all that's left now. Yeah. I saw this and I just – I almost did a spit take.

FBI alert. Crypto scammers are masquerading as NFT developers. Now, it's a little redundant because you could take masquerading out of that and still be – And as. It's just crypto scammers are NFT developers.

Yeah. I mean, you could completely just make the case on that one. By the way, how does one develop an NFT? Right click? No, that's how you steal an NFT. No, you have to make a smart contract, Brian, and then you have to – Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah. Here, let me read this from the article. In these fraudulent schemes, criminals either obtain direct access to NFT developer social media accounts or create lookalike accounts to promote quote-unquote exclusive new NFT releases, often employing misleading advertising campaigns that create a sense of urgency to pull them off.

Also, don't need a fraudulent person. That's just an NFT developer. Quote, links provided in these announcements are phishing links directing victims to a spoofed website that appears to be a legitimate extension of a particular NFT project, the FBI said in an advisory last week.

The replica websites urge potential targets to connect their cryptocurrency wallets and purchase the NFT, only for the threat actors to siphon the funds and NFTs to wallets under their control. Also, the same thing that general NFT developers do.

So, what does Bittner always say, a distinction without a difference? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just add in a dash of a spoofed website and you're pretty much the same thing. That's it. Well, the room temperature superconductor seems to be a bust as nobody's been able to replicate it.

Nope. But we did get this. Scientists have reproduced last year's nuclear fusion breakthrough. Scientists in a federally funded research center in the U.S. have successfully conducted a second, that means it's been reproduced, nuclear fusion reaction experiment that resulted in a net energy gain.

That's pretty awesome. So, the process is said to have a lot of potential as a source of sustainable, low-carbon energy that could help combat climate change. Obviously, there's quite some way to go until this becomes a viable option for mainstream energy production with the capability of powering homes.

So, basically, we'll get a chance to install a flux capacitor into our car right about the time self-driving actually works. Yep, that's about it. 20-some-odd years. Yes, Mr. Fusion. Tomorrow. The cool thing about the second experiment, though, is they actually improved on the output from the first experiment.

Yeah, they did. So, it's getting better, not worse. You know, that's a plus. But speaking of worse, not getting better, PayPal has launched their own stablecoin because they apparently think this is three years ago. Got to do something.

When's the last time you even talked about PayPal? And PayPal's actual core business is probably going to go out of the way pretty soon because people basically have been using it to transfer money to each other, like a Venmo, as a competitor. But the U.S. government is starting to launch one that will be just built into your bank apps.

Exactly. And I'm pretty sure PayPal owns Venmo. So, there's that. I think they do, too. But do you remember that time not long ago, in the days of WikiLeaks, when PayPal shut them down and then everybody flipped a Bitcoin to send their donations to Wikipedia?

I mean, not Wikipedia, WikiLeaks. As much as Jimmy Wales is always on me to donate to Wikipedia, maybe they should have taken that, too. But that was the first real legitimacy given to Bitcoin was the WikiLeaks thing that PayPal started.

So, screw you, PayPal. Screw your stablecoin. And if you read the press release about the stablecoin, you know, stablecoins are backed by government currencies, which is the U.S. dollar. And they're all big on the press release saying, hey, you can do all the things that you can do with cash and the U.S. dollar.

Or just use the U.S. dollar. Fucking U.S. dollar. I know. I was reading through this. It'll enable person-to-person payments, purchases at checkouts, and transfers. If only there were ways to do that already. I know. I know. Thanks, tech bros. Yeah.

Yeah. I understand that, you know, the point is that they can maybe put this on other exchanges and things like that. So, other people can steal your money. Yeah. Yeah. Because exchanges are going so well. Yeah. Pour one out for Tether and Terra USD. I believe they were the last stablecoin that imploded.

But, yeah, this is just – I stand by the fact that I think that they did this because they spent all this money buying the licenses and they just had to do it because the shareholders would be like, why did you waste all this money on these licenses and all this regulation that you jumped through and then not do anything with it?

Yeah. Something to do. Yeah. Day late and five years too short there on that one. Day late and a stablecoin short. Yep. TikTok users will soon be able to opt out of the algorithm over across the pond in Europe. Or if you're using a VPN.

I suppose you could do this too. That'd be nice. Yeah. Well, the thing is, TikTok's killer feature is their algorithm. That's true. That's true. That's what makes TikTok, TikTok. A timeline version of TikTok means absolutely nothing because nobody has any real friends on TikTok.

You just follow randos who, you know, do dancer cat videos that you kind of like. Yeah. You know, the algorithm is the secret sauce. So it'll be very interesting to see how that plays out once it kicks in. That's a good point because I don't really use TikTok very often.

But I'd imagine people will choose not to do that because it does kind of destroy the purpose. I mean, if you want to kill half a day, you just open TikTok and watch one video and boom, you know, then you're sucked in. That's all there is to it. Their algorithm is, you know, it is just mystical, mythical, mad genius fairy dust.

And I hate it. That's why I've removed it. I cannot be trusted with the TikTok on my phone. I seriously can't be trusted. I don't think anybody can be trusted, honestly. No, they can't. That's why people are talking about banning it everywhere. Yep. That's it. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. So Twitter slash X in the news, obviously.

Twix! I've noticed nobody's adopted your Twix, Jason. I have seen variations of X, then with Twitter in parentheses, or Twitter, then with X in parentheses. Nobody's really settled on anything yet. Nobody called them a dickie either after my, you know, 10 years on. I've been trying to get the dickie picked up, but no.

Nope. Well, X is giving advertisers new ways to have some control over what type of content can appear near their ads. They're adding sensitivity settings, or what I call the Nazi setting, that allows advertisers to choose between different types of content filtering for their ads. So they're desperately trying to get advertisers back.

People have been getting upset about their major brands. McDonald's being placed near neo-Nazi accounts, Holocaust deniers, and other previously suspended users like, say, I don't know, Donald Trump. With the new tool, they will use machine learning to reduce adjacency to varying levels of content according to a sensitivity threshold.

So there will be conservative and standard, and then they plan to launch the basically unfiltered, relaxed setting soon. So, thanks, I guess. I don't know if that's really going to work. Can they install that on their CEO? I wish.

That would be great. I would like a very conservative setting put on that guy, so I hear a lot less. They have been fined for belatedly complying, complying, sorry, compiling. What am I, a programmer again? With a search warrant for Donald Trump's account. He was, Special Counsel Jack Smith was granted a search warrant for former President Donald Trump's Twitter account as part of his investigation into the events of January 6, 2020.

He got the warrant in January, but he had trouble getting the records from Twitter. Imagine that. First, they encountered an inoperative website used for law enforcement to make legal requests. I guess they shut that down. After they were able to serve the warrant, they were slow to respond, according to court records, and they finally turned things over three days after the court basically told them they had to.

So they got a big whopping $350,000 fine for being held in contempt. You know, for most companies, we would make a joke that that's just, you know, coffee cream or money. But for X, that is – Not anymore. Yeah, for them, that's actually significant. That's a couple rents, I think.

That they're not going to pay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested to see if they actually pay this bill on time. Yeah. I'm sure they will because you don't fuck with the government. Well, it's Elon. Who knows? That's true. He doesn't care. Who knows? Zoom is back in the news this week with not good news.

They are saying that, hey, if you're kind of around an office, you need to be on site at least two days a week because – Or Zoom. Yeah. That's just – Okay. Yeah, they're going for a structured hybrid approach.

Which I think is the right way to do things. I get it. I know it's a joke. It's Zoom. Why would they need to be in person? Yeah. But, you know, some people do. Some people do. I think the funniest headline I saw about Zoom is something along the lines of, Zoom desperately hoping for another pandemic because they're doing so poorly.

Oh, man. I'm on Zoom every day for at least two hours, and I swear I love Zoom. I don't know why everybody's all up in arms about it, but I guess for me it's different. Well, they've got their privacy concerns, right? That's a big deal that's popping out there right now because they basically just suck in all your data and don't care and turn around and sell it.

Blah, blah. Like, why do you need all this? Why are you collecting all this? Yeah, because – Because they need money. The other thing that they're in the news for this week is if they're training their AI data on user data, you know, if they're building their models based on our conversations and they're swearing up and down, no, no, no, we're not.

You can opt in if you want to. But, no, no, no, we're not doing it. But you can opt in if you really want to. But, no, we're really good about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. On that same note, though, OpenAI has come out this week and said that you can now block their web crawler using the robots.txt file.

Okay. So – Which should have been the setting from the beginning. Yeah. It actually should have been. If they were not obeying the robots.txt file, then that's bad on them. But, yeah.

So, we'll see how that goes. But GPTBot is a thing. So, now, if you want to opt out, you can. All right. Well, we have some news from Lyft. First off, they're still around. I was going to say, they're still here? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They're not doing so great, but they have announced a new plan to ditch surge pricing, which the CEO said riders hate with a fiery passion, as opposed to the fiery death you would get from the robo-taxi.

Yep. Yeah. More on that next. They call it prime time, which typically kicks in when there aren't enough drivers to meet demand. They've had an increase in drivers, so they're able to basically lower it down, which means less money for them. So, they're getting more riders now, but they're making less money.

Yeah. How's that going to work out? It's not. It's a race to the bottom again. This is not a profitable business to be in, except for Uber, which finally made a profit after 10-plus years. Sort of. And that's mostly because they were delivering food. Yeah. And there's some shenanigans going on there, too.

Yeah, of course there is. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of shenanigans, though, robo-taxis have been greenlit to work in San Francisco for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Great. A six-and-a-half-hour public meeting was held. I would not have wanted to be in that thing.

Nope. I'd rather be in a robo-taxi. I'd rather be in a robo-taxi. You probably wouldn't have moved there, either. So, yeah, Waymo and cruise can now basically fuck up traffic 24 hours a day. It's great. Well, conveniently, the city of San Francisco basically has nobody in it anymore.

Yeah. So this will be relatively safe. Yeah. It's – oh, God. I got a picture from a friend of the show, Chen, the other day about a picture of one of the robo-taxis stuck in traffic that had been there for, like, 15 minutes. Just not moving. The thing is now, like, you know, we're just going to arm all the homeless people with the orange cones to just place on all the cars.

So the interesting thing about this meeting was apparently there were a lot of people on the side of saying, no, no, no, no, no. But the robo-taxi companies wheeled out all of their disabled users and said, look at our poor and our helpless.

They need their robo-taxis. Please give them the robo-taxis. Well, do they, because with a regular taxi, you've got a driver that can help you get in and out of the cab. I know. Hmm. Okay. That's why everybody's saying that the companies rolled these people out literally so they could do that.

Right. Yes. I mean, I've had to call actual cabs for people in wheelchairs that needed disability access. And the drivers are key in helping you get in and out of the vehicle. Yes. So when you call, when a blind person calls one of these robo-taxis and ends up in the trunk, whose fault is that?

Whose fault is that? But this is going to be a mess. This is just going to be a mess. Yep. I'm getting the popcorn ready. Yep. And I've got two final stories this week that are just awesome. Paulina Poriskova and Bella Hadid were both sued over pictures that they posted on Instagram that they didn't own.

Right. I love it. I love it. Bella, yeah, Bella's going to court. Paulina settled out of court. She was the smart one. And Paulina actually said, hey, look, my bad. I didn't know. I couldn't do this. And it is illegal. Bella's like, I'll see you in court.

So. I tell you, if this were me, I would just walk into court and I would be my own defense and I would just say Pinterest. Yeah. Well, that doesn't work, unfortunately. No, it doesn't. That doesn't work. So, yeah, posting pictures that other people took, even if you're in them, is still illegal, people.

Still illegal. You got paid to be in that photo. You don't own the photo. Well, not technically on Bella's case. Those were candidates on the street. Oh, OK. She did not get paid for those. Those were pictures of her just. Basically, I think this guy is like, you know, a paparazzi scumbag.

But still, it's still his camera, his time, his photograph. Doesn't matter. Still his.

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So, I mentioned last week that my birthday was on Saturday. Mm-hmm. And so, I had a Jason Bourne festival because my name's Jason and I was born that day. Get it? Very clever. Yeah. I got it. Yeah. I didn't.

I fell down laughing. I wasn't that clever. A friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, actually, pointed that one out. Okay. There you go. So, I watched the first two movies. Me and my roommate watched the first two. Now, see, the first movie was directed by Doug Liman and is a classic.

I love that movie. Even though, when you go back to it, Jason Bourne, aka Matt Damon, is like five years old in it now. This movie is over 20 years old. Right. Can you believe that? No, I can't. I cannot believe this movie is over 20 years old. It really seems like it's like not that long ago.

And I love that movie. It's a fantastic movie beginning to end. Then Paul Greengrass stepped in and all I swear to God, the only thing he did was try and do the same movie and just shake the camera the entire time.

It's just the worst use of shaky camera. It was nauseating. Did Blair Witch come out somehow in between there? No, Blair Witch was – I think he directed that too. That's probably 30 years old, right? Yeah. Oh, at least, at least. But, man, it was so disconcerting to watch.

I mean, it was so bad. It was so bad. And he did two, three, and five. So, I stopped. I'm not even going to bother watching the other ones. Tony Gilroy did number four, that weird one in the middle with – what's his name? Who got run over by the snow plow?

Jeremy Renner. Jeremy Renner was in that one. Yeah. But I still – I got to say the first movie has legs. I still enjoyed it. All right. And what's her name? Frankie Potent from Run, Lola, Run. Oh, yeah. I remember she was in one of those. Yeah, she was in the first one and about five minutes in the second one.

But also, if you want a great movie, go back and watch Run, Lola, Run while you're on the treadmill. It's good for you. That's a great movie. Great soundtrack, too. The best part of that movie is the soundtrack. Yeah. Star Trek Strange New Worlds had its season finale last night. I did not see it. Okay.

I was up watching the Netherlands and Spain, played in the Women's World Cup until well past my bedtime. So, I just didn't get a chance, but I heard it's good. You fucker. I actually – I came into the office early because you put it in here and I thought you saw it. So, I actually scrubbed the last 20 minutes so I could get to the end to see what happened so we'd have something to talk about.

Well, sorry about that. Well, spoiler alert, cliffhanger. That's what I've heard. You can't – again, with the internet now, you can't launch any website without things getting spoiled. Yeah, which you did in this next story. So, go ahead by putting this one in, asshole.

No, I didn't tell you. It doesn't say what happened. And again, I read this. I don't know why I read this. Neil Gaiman won't let Good Omen's story end like that. I haven't finished Good Omen Season 2 yet. I've watched the first four episodes, so I've got two to go. But apparently, there is a bit of a cliffhanger for the ending.

And they asked him on – I guess he still hangs out on Tumblr. He asked him, if it doesn't get renewed for Season 3, how are we going to find out what happened? And he said he'd write a book. Okay. If they don't do it. So, I'd almost prefer that. I wouldn't.

I'm honest. Look, I like the characters. I like the visuals. I like how they're doing it. Yeah. Me too, but I love a good book. That's true. That's true. And so does Apple TV+, apparently, except for not Foundation. Dan Ackerman, the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, has accused Apple TV and the producers of the Tetris movie that they just did.

I can't remember what it was called. Tetris. Tetris. There you go. Tough one there. Shocking. Tetris. Well, you know, that's – yeah. Anyways, they ripped off his book, The Tetris Effect, which tells the history of the game in the form of a Cold War-era thriller.

So, he kind of – he got a – he wrote the book back in 2016, and later that year, he got a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter from the company that owns Tetris, the Tetris company, to stop him from pursuing film and TV opportunities, which lets you know they were working on something.

And he is basically saying that they basically stole huge parts out of his book, which, I mean, it was a real-life thing that happened. So, I don't know how you prove that. It's historical, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that's going to be – he's going to have a hard time proving that. But Disney Plus is raising prices. Oh, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

I got something to say about this Tetris action here. I tried to watch the movie. It's terrible. So – I got five minutes into it, and I said, no. Yeah, okay. We got about the same. Yeah. It was weird. The pacing was all messed up.

And so, I hope his book is actually better than the movie because the movie was just bad. I mean, and some people got halfway through it and said it got bad halfway through. And I'm like, if it got bad halfway through, your taste really sucks because it was bad from the get.

Yeah, it didn't have a good start. No, it did not at all. Yeah. Okay, continue. Well, Bob Iger, in his quarterly earnings call, announced that the ad-free Disney Plus premium tier would be raised to $13.99 on October 12th. It's the second $3 price increase in the last year.

The current $10.99 subscription price was set in December. Hulu's ad-free plan is also getting the bump, raising it to $17.99 a month. $17.99 for Hulu. Yeah. See, I get Hulu as kind of a free add-on for Disney Plus from an old package I'm grandfathered in on that I got on Spotify.

So, I don't, these are all messed up. These are all messed up. Yeah, it's all messed up. And they're also going to be pushing back against account sharing soon, stating that the company is actively exploring ways to address account sharing and the best options for paying subscribers to share their accounts with friends and family.

So, we will see what they're going to do about that. Disney is in a bit of a different position than Netflix when you think about it. Because a lot of people get Disney for their kids, and they want that Disney to be available at grandma's house. Mm-hmm. And they don't want to pay extra for that.

Yeah. We'll see. That's going to be a landmine for them. And, you know, there's going to be people that age out. Like, the kids are going to age out, and people are going to cancel their Disney Plus. But people keep making more people, so I think they've got a pretty good churn rate there. Well, Disney's done a very good job of protecting against aging out by getting, you know, the Marvel stuff and getting the Star Wars stuff.

Are they? Are people going to age out? I don't think so. I don't know. I think that there's a – between the 20s and the 40s, I think that there might be a gap there because the Marvel stuff has kind of run its course. That's when they need to fold ESPN back in.

Yeah. That's when you're going to get your people that age group. Yeah. So, no, I mean, they're in a good position, I think. And because they talked about subscriber loss, but a lot of that subscriber loss comes from these whacked-ass deals that they did in India. So, it's like kind of not – it's like apples and oranges.

It's – you know, they're looking at the bigger picture. But like in the U.S. and Canada, I think it's kind of probably about the same. I think there was a slight loss. But still, everybody's raising prices. I cover this on BootUp all the time. Like everybody is raising their prices and at this point, we're seeing those fast channels, the ad-supported channels, really starting to tick up in adoption because you can just turn those on and watch stuff for free.

I don't know. Like TV fucking used to be. I feel like every story is just people reinventing things that already existed. It's unbelievable. So, thanks, tech bros, again. Well, this next story we have is slightly different.

Well, this is new. This is new. Google is in talks with Universal Music to start licensing melodies and voices so they can create their own deep fakes. I don't know if you can talk about this article at all since you might be in the belly of the beast on that one.

I can't really talk too much about it. But the one thing I like about it is they're building in, it's entirely artist approved. The artist has to sign off on not only it being used, but how it's used and the way it's used. So, that's a plus. And they get paid for it. Theoretically.

Theoretically. They don't get paid for their regular music, so why would they get paid for this? I know. I know. It's kind of crazy. Hey, any word on that, you know, Grimes' AI challenge to let people use whatever they want of her stuff? Have we gotten any hits out of that yet?

Not a one. Not a one, Jason. Yep. All we get is continued interviews with Grimes, recently talking about her first date with Elon Musk. How did she become a celebrity? Oh, yeah. She dated Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. Before that, absolutely nobody cared about her music except for maybe 10,000 people.

Hey, 10,000 true fans is all it takes nowadays. Oh. Well, that's why she's still making music, I suppose. I guess. I guess. That Elon money probably helps. Just saying. Apps and doodads. Brian, I use the IMDB app all the damn time.

Okay. It's annoying. It's always annoying because they always want you to sign in or get an account. And I never want to get an account because I'm just looking up someone's details. That's it. Right. I just want to find out what they were in to scratch that itch. Well, there's a new app called Call Sheet from Casey Liss, who is the third wheel on the Accidental Tech Podcast and my least favorite host, which is very interesting.

I was trying to listen to it the other night. They did a bit on this app and I fell asleep before it got to that, which is how I usually get through Accidental Tech Podcast. But I didn't realize it was him until I checked out the article on it. It's a cleaner interface than IMDB, no logging in necessary.

And so I went and I pulled up one of my favorite movies of all time, Megaforce from 1982. And it shows you the cast and the crew. And I click on Barry Bostwick and it says, Known for Acting.

I click on every member and at the very top, it always says, Known for Acting. Then I get to the cast or the crew and I click on Hal Needham, who is the director. Known for Acting. He's the director. He was a stunt coordinator.

Not really known for acting. Anyway. Not pulling great data. It's coming from some movie database, like an open source movie database. But I tell you what, for ease of use, it's not bad. It's, I think his rounded corners are a little too bulbous for my taste.

My OCD is giving me really twitchy itchies because it kind of cuts into the, anything with a longer title cuts into the actual artwork and really gets my, you know, that feeling that when you see something that is just quite off enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

Yeah, it's that. It's that. I usually just, I fire up the Google bot and type in, you know, movie or TV show name cast and get all the information I need that way. You know, there's always that too. There's always that too. Again, of a solution not needed.

Well, anyway, check it out if you are an IMDB addict like I am. I saw this come through and I thought this might be up your alley since you were the Flash guy. I always fucking hated Flash, but you were, you made a good living off of making Flash apps.

There's a new, yeah, there's a new open source emulator called Ruffle that is, I guess it's built by, in part by a former Newgrounds employee. I can't remember what Newgrounds is anyway. The name is familiar. I thought maybe you would know. Don't know that one. Well, here's the deal.

They made an emulator for Flash. Why? And you can start playing old games. Well, I think it's kind of cool that you can bring out some of the old games. It apparently gets rid of the security problems that Flash had, which is nice, and the Chinese railroads can run again. I was going to ask about that.

Yeah, link in the show notes if you don't know what I'm talking about. I never build games. I built a lot of websites based on it, but yeah, it was a fun program to use for a period of time, and then it went away, as it should have. It should have went away 15 years before it did. Yes, yes.

But it's nice to have it back just in case, because there's some old stuff that I definitely would like, you know, some old games that I had for the movie Face Off. We did, most of the website was in Flash. The Grease re-release, we had some Flash games for that.

Yeah, well, our good old mutual friend Riggs, that's what he did for a living for quite a few years, just built games in Flash. Yeah, he was my, I hired him at Paramount to be my right-hand man on those movies. He was my guy. So, I'll be able to actually play some of those old demos, which will be kind of fun.

Kind of fun. This one's very interesting. So, DJI is in the news right now, because if you have ever bought a DJI drone and got the app for your Android phone, and you got it from the Google Play Store, yeah, that wasn't from them.

That was not from them. They pulled all of their apps in 2021 because, get this, the Google Play Store sucked. They're like, no, we're not going to deal with this shit anymore.

You have to come to our website to download the Android versions. Well, Scammer's going to scam. They saw a market opportunity there and decided to say, hey, we're just going to make our own fake DJI apps. And we're going to make them look pretty real because they're going to use the DJI API.

Yeah. Well, DJI is now, you know, trying to fix this whack-a-mole problem. And the problem here is threefold. And nobody is in the right here. Customers are stupid because they don't follow instructions. Google is shitty because they let these apps get through without any kind of verification.

And DJI is stupid because they didn't at least put up an official app on Google Play that said, just even if it's a splash screen, says, hey, thanks for downloading this. This isn't going to work. Go to DJI.com and download the proper app. So there's no winners on this one.

But yeah, I thought it was pretty funny. And Dan wrote in and said, hey, Jason, you said last show or so, you wish there was a website to find which service movies are on. There is justwatch.com. It's great. Plug a title in and we'll show you where it streams for free, rent or purchase. Also, if you sign up, you can tell which services you have and then search for genres.

It's free and I love it. And I remember we talked about this when it first launched or not to or whatever. I was already in Canada at some point and they didn't do Canada, basically, but now they do. So I've got a bookmark now. It's kind of useful. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go sign up and plug in my services now because it's like I am.

I get so confused with which TV shows. And, you know, Apple TV is great for the services that support the watch later feature. Yeah. But not everybody does. If everybody did it, it's like it's like self-driving cars. If everybody did it, life would be fine.

Not everybody does it. So you're still screwed. So thank you, Dan. That is thank you for the reminder. I do remember covering that, but I never followed up. But now I have a legitimate use and I'm going to go check it out. At the library.

I finished Singularity Sky by Charlie Strauss. That was the sci-fi. It was the part one of a two-parter sci-fi from back. I think it was 2009. I enjoyed most of the book, but it didn't really stick the landing.

So I actually went back and returned it. Or I returned the second one because I pre-bought the second one. I didn't return that book because that would have been a dick move. I returned the second one that I bought. And while I was doing it, I had to do it via chat because I had hit the limit of returns. And while I'm in the chat, what they try and do is they try and upsell you on the next book you're going to get.

And they tried to sell me a James Patterson book saying that it was in my wheelhouse. And I'm like, well. No, it's not. No. Your algorithm sucks, buddy, because I have never bought a James Patterson book. I will never buy a James Patterson book. And now I am offended that you thought I would buy a James Patterson book.

So, ew. Move along. But here's the thing. What they will do is if you say, hmm, I might be interested in that, they will automatically add it to your wish list for you. Oh, that's nice of them. Yeah. Yeah. So somebody is getting paid along the way for that one.

Yep. So in between that book and a little time later, Charlie Strauss came out with Season of Skulls, Laundry Files, book 12. Now, this is the final book in the trilogy that started with Dead Lies Dreaming and then went on to Quantum of Nightmares.

It's a standalone three-part series. I am three-quarters through this book and fucking love it. I love it. Because I did not like the first two. See, I did. I put aside the original Laundry Files series with Bob and his girlfriend and that whole – once they closed out that whole series, I really started to get into the new ones and kind of let myself go and said, okay, I'm just going to get into these.

And they're really good books because they're set in a world of Laundry Files. I'm really excited to see what he does after this because he can either come back with a new in-a-world series or shut the whole thing down. I'll be happy either way.

But I'm really liking how he's closing this whole trilogy out. I think it's very clever, some of the stuff he's done. And I'm just – I'm really enjoying it. So if you're – if you do like the Laundry Files stuff, just put away – put aside that it's not Bob anymore.

Bob is gone. Well, I read the other two. So since you like this one, I feel like I should finish it out too. I think they're doing a really good job of bringing it all together. All right. Well, I was looking for a little popcorn sci-fi to start reading, and I stumbled across a book called Wherever Seeds May Fall, First Contact by Peter Cowdron.

I'd never heard of him before, but he's doing something really interesting that made me want to take a chance on it. He's written about 28 books. Oh, Jesus. All of which deal with first contact. Really? Exploring the idea of first contact 28 different ways. That's kind of fascinating to me.

Talk about finding your genre. Yeah. Like one topic basically that he just hits from – he just sits and thinks about it and has come up with all 28 different scenarios so far. There's got to be some re-swizzling of the same thing in there a couple times.

You can't be that original 28 times. Well, you know our rule too is we never should read a bunch of books from the same person in order. So I would not recommend reading all 28 of these in a row because that would probably bum you out. You'd probably find a lot of examples of that. Yeah. Really enjoyed it.

Really enjoyed it. Really? It was a great read. Okay. Fun and quick and clever and interesting. Now, randomly, I guess I picked – he also had a rule, no sequels. Yeah. Except for I randomly picked the one book that he decided to write a sequel for because he thought there were more ideas.

Okay. So then I read the sequel, which is Generation of Vipers, First Contact by him. Not as good as the first one. I don't think he needed to explore those other ideas. Okay. But the first one, great. I'm definitely going to check out a few more books in this series.

Yeah. We put that rule in place for a reason. You know, you need a break between the first and the second because the second is never as good as the first. And you need that break to let yourself forget how good the first one was. Yep. I should have done that. The Dark Side. Ha!

With Dave. We are back with Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, and the host of Control Loop. Go to thecyberwire.com for links to all of Dave's amazing shows and whatever new ones he comes up with by the times this airs.

That's right. By the times this airs. Me talk pretty good. Yeah. Words important are. Any new shows in the pipeline there, Dave? No, no, I'm good with the ones I have at the moment. I think you need a new one called the Mustache Minute.

Yeah. Yeah. I was – it's been a busy week this week. It's – you know, as we're recording this, it's Friday, and I just – like on Wednesday, I felt like it should have been Thursday. Right. It was just one of those weeks where the front part of the week was just front-loaded and packed with lots of interviews.

And so I am rolling into this weekend and ready. Coming in hot. Ready to go. Yes, yes. So away we go. Yeah. Last week it was – I had been dealing with a sick dog that had been in the emergency room for like a lot.

Pneumonia. It was bad. Coughing up blood. It was a shitty week. But I decided last week also to fire up my – because I'm doing my daily show now, which I know you know lots about. Yeah. I said, hey, why don't I record this at night so it's ready and fresh in the morning for people.

Turned out to be the best decision I ever made. I record the show between 8.30 and 9.30 at night so it's ready to go out at midnight. And it is so relaxing to not have the pressure in the morning to get up, get the show out, and get it done that I think the show is actually better.

And I'm getting good feedback from the listeners that they like it earlier. And I'm more confident and comfortable. It's great. Yeah, that is great. You might want to try that, Dave. Oh, sure. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I'm just trying to be helpful here.

Yeah, I know. All of your intentions are good, Jason, and I think that's adorable. But I think that – and I don't want to sound like a jerk or anything, but we have a few more cogs in our little cyber wire machine that would be thrown into a tizzy if we tried to make a fundamental shift like that.

Not that it's not possible, but it is not – this battleship don't turn quickly anymore. I remember back when I was running my own company and I had a partner and we were also dating, which I don't recommend you do as a business partner, but we were.

I was married to my business partner for 20 years, so I know what you're talking about. You know of which I speak, Dave. Yeah. It is not a wise move, but nevertheless, you and I both did it. Yeah. But we did decide at one point that we would become nocturnal and we would stay up all night and sleep during the day.

And we did that for about a month. And let me tell you, it's not good for you long term. No. No. I'm still in bed by 10 o'clock. You're in early – but that's like fucking three in the morning for you, given your schedule. Yeah, pretty much.

The biggest thing I found of working with your spouse – and by the way, she is still my spouse – is that you don't have anyone to go home to who's going to pat you on the back or rub your shoulder and say, oh, honey, you had a tough day at work.

Let me do some stuff for you. Because chances are, if you had a bad day, you both had a bad day. Also, nobody to complain about about that jerk that you work with. Yeah, that's all at work. Well, the flip side is that if you both had a good day at work, then you have – that celebration can be amplified.

So it – Sex is on. It just swings more – the pendulum is longer in either direction, I would say. It is. It's – everything is amplified to some degree. Yeah. That's right. That's right. So. Well, got a little follow-up from last week here. Sean Aru from Discord – and I edited this one for brevity – he said, just getting around to listening to the latest show and Jason talking about playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES when he broke his leg.

The underwater level where you're trying to defuse all the bombs under the dam was notoriously difficult. That's the one. That's the one I got stuck on. Okay. The fact that I – I mean I almost got like just angry when he brought that up because I'm like that – oh, now I remember all the feels.

I hate that level. I could never get past that level. Isn't that the worst? Oh, you know what I remember? What was it? Myst. Remember Myst? Yes, I do. So Myst was groundbreaking and beautiful and fun and everybody had it at the time, but there was that damn puzzle level.

You know, there was just like the maze. Every level is a puzzle level. Well, no, but there was a maze level where, you know, I think you were like underground and you were traveling on rails. You know what the secret to that one was? Sound. Yeah. Well – I remember that very well.

But I guess what I'm getting to is it sucks when there's a game that you were otherwise enjoying, but then there's one level – like I remember Marathon had a level like that back in the day on the Mac. There was one level. It's just like, oh, God, it's just a chore to get through.

And I want to get to the rest of the game because beyond this level I'm having fun, but this level just sucks. And I wonder what's up with the developers where they're like, oh, man, they're going to suffer through this level. Well, nowadays you can go to YouTube, but do you want to know my trick?

I know – the reason I remember that level so well, Dave, is because I couldn't get through it either. And you know how I found out how to get through it? Usenet. Right. Sure. I went to Usenet to find the hack on that one. Yeah. No, I remember I had a little map drawn out in a notebook.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. North, south, east, west, and just trying to map the whole thing out to get out of there. But it was just laborious. Yeah. No, I remember that so well because the same frustration, same level. Yeah. I rarely feel left out on this podcast, but I'm just sitting here going, nope, don't get this at all.

You never played Myst? For me, the stumper on Myst was launching it and then just going, what am I supposed to do? This is – where's my gun? Now you know how, Brian, when you and Dave go off on a Star Wars tangent.

I just sit in the back and shut up. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. No. And ebrown16 says the free Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game on Netflix is solid, has all the old feels. So if you have a Netflix account, you can get that one for free.

Yeah, my son said he was playing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game after we went to see the movie. So I suspect it's probably that one. Yeah, probably that one. Probably that one. I haven't given that a shot. I tried the Stranger Things game and it was so mediocre that I figured all the Netflix games were probably going to be like that, just quick turn and burns.

But I'll give it a shot because it's free. Why not? Yeah, you never know. Yep, and losing but not wrong says, huh, happy coincidence, just released. And this is a link to the nine best Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle games. Yours, Dave, the arcade comes in at number one. Okay. Yeah, mine comes in at number seven for the NES.

By the way, I did get a couple of notes from folks on Mastodon who said they enjoyed our conversation about billionaires last week. So I don't know if you got any other. Oh, we got a few on the Discord as well. Did you? Okay, good. They like the deep dives. Did anybody hate it? Billionaires.

Billionaires. Billionaires. Right. Elon back-channeled me and said, don't do that again. Yeah. It's going to cut off your funding. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Yep. Yep. No, people did seem to like it. So that's good. That's nice.

Good. Nobody came for our heads. Not yet. Not yet. Yep. Yet. I saw this one and, of course, thought of you guys because, you know, it's Star Wars based here. Star Wars-themed burlesque show, The Empire Strips Back, is still going. So then I had to go do a little deep dive on that because, of course.

And, yeah, that looks like something I would very much enjoy going to see. I would see it if it came to my town. I would be there. Sure. Yes. I would go. I would go. Something about the sexy Imperial Guards that's really getting me here. The lone Yoda sitting in the theater, though, is a bit creepy.

That was funny. I was cracking up. What's he doing under that robe? Yeah. Oh, it's wait-listed for Toronto. Perhaps I shall be seeing this. I will report back, gentlemen. Please do. Please do. Yeah. It reminds me, did either of you guys ever see One Man Star Wars?

No. No. There was a guy who was making the rounds, and he came to our community. Every summer we do a festival of the arts, and some of that we do smaller shows. And there's a guy who does One Man Star Wars, and he also does One Man Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Star Wars one, I've seen both of them, and the Star Wars one is definitely the better of the two. More material to work with, I think. Yeah. And he just, he, it's, I guess, it's sort of in the spirit of Lego Star Wars, you know, where they make fun of everything, and that's what he does.

But he goes through the Holy Trinity, the first three movies, and acts them out, acts out all the parts, pantomimes things, and it's very entertaining and very fun. He does a great job, and I don't know if he's still doing it.

This was probably 10 years ago that he came to our town, but it's, I enjoyed it. If you're a Star Wars fan, it's a fun, funny night. Lots of, you know, he knows his audience and plays to them well. So, I'm working through all the original movies now with my kid, so Empire Strikes Back is up this weekend, which will be fun.

But, to your point, those Lego Star Wars things are hilarious. Yeah. They are so well done. If you haven't watched them yet, they are just, my son just loves them. He's howling with laughter. It's really good stuff. Okay, now that you're watching them with your kid, this begs the question, which versions?

Which versions? Well, whatever's on Disney. Oh, oh. Disney Plus. So, yeah. Man, you're a bad dad. You are a bad dad. Oh, Jason. Jason, Jason, Jason. This is the second time on this episode I'm going to say how adorable you are.

Dave, Dave, you're the guy that made me go get all of the original cuts for you if you don't. Yes, yeah. No, no, no, no. Look, I'm with you. Look, I'm with you on the original cuts. However, that is outweighed by one of the fundamental principles of parenting, which is you pick your battles.

Yep. And so, those movies being on Disney, where they are easy to get, battle won. There you go. Battle won. Yeah, yeah. So, in principle, I'm with you. And practicality, I have to side with Brian on this one.

Yeah, because I don't have, like, a Plex server, media server, or anything. I'd have to, like, hook my laptop up to the TV. Okay, bad geek, bad dad. Come on. The fact that you don't have a Plex server in your house, what is wrong with you? Well, you know, it was either have a child or continue on as a child myself, and I opted for the first one.

See, that was your first mistake. I know. I'm aware of that now, but it's a bit late. Too late. It's too late. No refunds, no returns. No, when they get this old, it's hard to put them up for adoption. Believe me, I've checked. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah.

I've got a couple of just little items before we wrap up today. For whatever reason, I decided earlier this week that I wanted to hear Don Henley's song, Dirty Laundry. I have not thought about that song in 20-plus years, and I desperately want to hear it now, too.

Yeah. I haven't heard it in 20 years, and I desperately don't want to hear it now. We are all on the wrong page today. It's not on iTunes at all. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good. So I reached out to my audio editing team, and they checked, and it is on Spotify, so I did obtain a copy.

But it's not on iTunes. And of course, the Eagles are notoriously bad when it comes to their stuff being on platforms, so it's not on YouTube either. But it just seemed like a strange hole in the library because there's lots of other Don Henley stuff.

His albums are up there. But for whatever reason, that song is not on iTunes, and I don't get it. It's stuck in the same room that The Cure's Killing an Arab is. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, well, you know, there's holes all over all the streaming media, which is, to Jason's point, maybe I should have kept my library.

Yep. Because, I mean, there's bands I love, like there's this band Curve that I just, I think they're one of the best, most underrated bands of all time. And only their last album is available on streaming. It's not available anywhere. All the old stuff, all the really good stuff, all the B-sides, all the singles.

Yeah. Nowhere to be found. And it's just gone unless I dust off my MP3 player. It sucks. Yeah. I'll reiterate another pet peeve of mine, which is that there are, there's an issue with soundtracks on some of these platforms. Oh, very bad. Yeah. The Miami Vice soundtrack is not available.

They're always missing a song or two because it didn't get licensed properly. And somebody didn't want to pay for it. The worst one that I've found so far is the Ghostbusters soundtrack, where the songs are all there, but lots of them are different versions than the ones that were actually on the Ghostbusters soundtrack that you could buy.

Right. And to me, that's, you know, that's not the Ghostbusters soundtrack. Right. Yeah. Lost Boys is the same way with People Are Strange by Echo and the Bunnymen. Really? It's a different version. It's really hard to find the correct version of that. But I have it in my MP3 library that is sitting on my laptop.

There you go. Because unlike Brian, I never deleted mine. I got 300 gig of MP3 sitting on my laptop. To be fair to me, I didn't delete it either. iTunes fucking did. Back up to my friend. I have a hard drive sitting in a drawer here.

That's my collection of MP3s. And this was, I don't know, about a decade ago. I was doing some work down at ABC News down in D.C. And a buddy of mine who's an audio guy down there pulled me aside one day and he said, Hey, Dave, do you like music?

I was like, has there ever been a more rhetorical question? Of course, I like music. You know, I like music. I'm the music man. That's right. And he said, okay. And this is kind of like one of those, you know, do you want to buy an A? You know, like the guy on Sesame Street.

He says, all right, well, bring me a one gigabyte or a terabyte hard drive. Just bring in a terabyte hard drive. I said, okay, I'll do that. So I bring in a terabyte hard drive and he goes away for a while and he comes back. And basically he had copied the ABC music library. Oh, geez.

Nice. Which was everything. It was everything. And I actually went through a little bit of a, I don't know, sense of loss isn't the right description for it, but I was faced with too many options, right?

What do you do when you have everything? How do I organize this? How do I, how do I approach this? How do I call this or, or yeah. So I still struggle with that, with Spotify, like just even launching it. And I'm just like, I don't know what I want to listen to.

I used to just walk over to my CD racks and that would help me make a decision. And when you just like scrolling and like, how do I save things and how do I making a playlist is kind of just, it's not the same. It's not. It's funny. I actually, in my iTunes library, I organized everything by category and I made my own categories up.

So I have, I have the goth, whiny and girly section. I have the Irishy section for Irish music. That's not quite folk music, but it's not quite punk rock. You know, I did it all based on mood. So when I feel a mood coming on, I can just go to a category in iTunes and select that category and hit shuffle and I'll get, get what I'm looking for.

It still works to this day. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Mine was meticulous bootlegs, official releases. Oh, I remember I had a copy of it. Yeah. You had a copy. If you still have a copy of my library, let me know. I wish I did. I wish I did. That's back when hard drives actually cost real money.

So. Yeah. I know. Yeah. I had a playlist called driving in my car at night and it was just good songs to play when you're driving in your car at night by yourself, you know, like, so. One other thing I dropped in here today and Jason, this is primarily for you as the world's most foremost expert on security cameras.

On which ones not to buy. Chinese focus. Right. So I just bought a handful of new security cameras. We've, we're hopefully coming up on the tail end of a kind of a major renovation project at our house.

We built a whole new set of decks on the back of the house and it's been a whole thing. But I got some new security cams and I got some from Eufy, which is, is that how you guys would say that word? Eufy? Yeah.

You say Eufy? Is it Weefy? Eufy? Eufy. Eufy? All right. So I've been happy with Eufy products in the past. I've had, what do I have? I have a bathroom scale and I have a robot, a little, a robot vacuum cleaner from Eufy and they've all been fine.

So did my due diligence on YouTube and other places and bought some of the new 4K Eufy security cameras and their doorbell cams and their doorbell cams and their doorbell cam, basically their version of the, the, the ring.

Right. And they're nice. And they're nice. And they're nice. I'm really pleased so far. There's a base station that comes with them. There's no subscription fee. It's not cheap. The three cameras in the base station were probably around $500. But they're 4K cameras.

They have built-in solar panels. So the ones that are out back and facing the sun, they're battery powered, but they've been at a hundred percent power the couple of weeks that I've had them now. We'll see how they do in the wintertime. So I'm curious about that.

I'll let you go through the first winter. That's right. That's right. And I've been really pleased. The image quality is good. Having a 4K camera is neat in that, you know, if somebody walks by one of the cameras and they're far away, the system automatically crops them out and sends me a picture of them.

And it's still, you can still kind of see, you know, who it is or what they're up to. And, oh, look, someone's walking their dog and that sort of thing. I'm still suffering from a little bit of alert fatigue, just fine tuning them to not tell me every time someone walks by my front door, you know, the sidewalk in front of my house.

But we'll get there. But anyway, so far, so good. And so, Jason, I wanted to check in with you to see if, well, is it safe to say that you have in the past sampled this brand of camera? I've never heard of this brand of camera. Wow.

Okay. I mean, these guys are relatively, relatively new because I remember when they were first announced. Yeah. And then I looked at them a little bit when I was getting a video doorbell and they just kind of, they were relatively new, didn't have a lot of reviews. So I ended up going with the Google one, which I, which I like as well.

So, yeah, but yeah, this is definitely a very nice, like if you're going to go all out, a good integrated system. Yeah. It seems like, yeah, very much so. It's definitely a premium product. But so far, like I said, I'm pleased with the image quality is quite good.

The quality seems good. They seem substantial. The app sucks less than other apps I've used, which is about as high a praise as you can get. But, you know, it's easy to share. Multiple family members can see the cameras and monitor things.

And so, so far, so good. No, they look really nice. I mean, they're definitely not cheap. Right. Exactly. By any stretch of the imagination here. No, they are not. They are not. It is a, it is definitely a premium, a premium product.

Yeah. The 4 cam 4K kit with the one terabyte base station is $859. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But you can get a smart sock for your, for your baby. That is only $279, which apparently, I guess, based on foot movement, we'll keep track of your baby's real time sleep data.

All right. Just what we need. Yeah. Okay. Well, like I said. I was overkill with the cameras, but yeah. I've been impressed with their robot vacuum cleaner and their Bluetooth bathroom scale as well. So just from a brand, and they're owned by Anker, A-N-K-E-R, you know, the power supply is good stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's, they're a subsidiary of them. So everything I've had so far is, I've been impressed with the quality. So I'll keep you posted. Okay. If anybody gets this Mach V1 Ultra Stick Mop Vac thing, this looks pretty cool.

It's a, it's basically like a Dyson, but it has a steam cleaner in it. This looks kind of nice. Huh. Okay. I could get behind that, except I still got a, still got my Dyson. But this thing probably is very expensive. Let's, let's do some real time here.

Yeah. $774.99. Wow. That's right up there with the Dyson. That's actually cheaper than the last Dyson I got though. So, hey, we might have talked. Yeah. But cool. Cool. I do like steam cleaning the floors though. That is nice.

Yeah. What a podcast. This is enthralling. Hey man, if we can get past billionaires, I think we can get past some steam cleaning action here. Yeah. Oh man. Look man, I cover strips. It polishes up those wood floors, man. Next week, major appliances. Have I got a stove for you guys?

Oh man. Oh. Oh, that middle burner where you could do their breakfast. Oh, so good. Mm-hmm. My, my favorite brand of socks. Next week on Grumpy Old Geeks. Look man, I preloaded the show with, uh, with sexy stormtroopers. So, come on.

Give me, give me a break. I at least, uh, at least helped us out a little bit there. That's true. That's true. That's true. Hope they mopped that floor. That's right. All right, guys. I will see you next time. Later. Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got JC, Dan, Jonathan, James, Kirsten, who says, keep up the great work. I always look forward to your podcast. So, signing up for a membership is long overdue. You have made many a commute more tolerable. Thanks so much, guys. Thank you, Kirsten. And Ariel, and Ariel writes in, happy birthday, Jason, and well done on seven plus months of sober.

Much respect. Thank you very much. Brian, watching 65 for the benefit of your audience is admirable. But honestly, none of us are worth such agony. Excited to be a patron. Thank you, Ariel. Well, you know, it was with a, with a Coke and whiskey and Coke on a plane. So, it wasn't so bad.

But yeah, don't watch it. Over at PayPal, we've got Benjamin, Ralph, and Miles. Thank you all so much. Over at the tip chair, we've got Jeff and Joseph. And just a quick reminder, if you do sign up for a Patreon account, three bucks a month will get you ad-free episodes and a little bit early when, when available.

When available. Yeah. Your results may vary. Results may vary. It will be out earlier than the other version. It might be five hours, but it might be five minutes. Yeah. And we have a new five-star review from DRJ3141. Great grumping.

I really enjoy the hosts and their content. I'm about the same age as these two, and my career trajectory somewhat follows theirs. I look forward to each Friday and a new show. Woo-hoo! Thank you. All right. And we got a note from Robert. Robert says, Hi, a rare compliment instead of early drinking on a Saturday rants.

I had to move to a hearing aid, and since then, I've noticed how god-awful the sound on most podcasts and YouTube is. This and boot up are two of the three that aren't a chore to get through. Thank you. P.S. Convince Dave to do Movember. I don't, I don't think we have to convince Dave.

I think we have to convince Dave's wife. Yes. That's how that works. Yes. Thank you, Robert. I'm glad, glad this sounds okay for you and your hearing aid. Those new hearing aids are stellar. I can't wait to, I can't wait till I get old enough. I can't wait to lose my hearing. Till I need one. Exactly. I know it's coming.

I know it's coming. So come on. Yeah. And sad news from the development world. Bram Moulinar has died. He was the creator of Vim, the command line text editor that most Unix and Linux heads used quite a bit, unless you're an Emacs nerd.

I was a Vim user. I used Emacs. See, yeah, no, I can still, I can still rock some Vim any, any day of the week. I still know my, those, those key commands are built in. I will, I will put those on my tombstone because it's easy to remember.

Easy, easy to open your tombstone. Easy to open my tombstone. That's right. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 613. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

Sharing the show with your friends, enemies, or anyone in between is free and can be almost as good as cash. Not really. At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about.

GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that will read on the air. Stay grumpy.

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