642: Nerd Plumage

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. Well, Jason, it's been two months since the groundbreaking Changing Our Lives Apple Vision Pro was released. Okay. I haven't heard much about it. Oh, really? I've heard a lot. I haven't heard anything. There's not a lot going on and we don't have a lot of stories about it. Nothing.

I did finally see one in the wild and I mean, I know we made a lot of fun of the Google Glasses when they came out, but you look like you came off a Milan runway in those compared to wearing one of these things. This guy looked like a total moron.

Okay. I'm just, look, I love Apple. I get, look, trust me, I get the Apple Vision Pro is a completely different device with different usages than Google Glass. Like it's a different thing completely.

But I can see myself, you know, I talked about like version two, version three, maybe I would get one and I could see myself using it in a work situation in an office with all the blinds drawn and the doors closed because you do not want to see, you don't want anybody seeing you wearing this thing.

Oh, I mean, it's still, it's just like an Oculus. You don't want to be wearing one of those. Yeah, same, same. It's just, you know, it's the Apple is not known for having devices that if you wear them, I mean, I hate to say it, you know, Galloway's right. This thing is a, is, is a very good system to retain your virginity.

See, the thing is, I think that's a self-selecting sample, you know, I think you're going to be, I think the people that are, you want to mate with are probably going to be attracted to you. It's like plumage. It is nerd plumage. Nerd plumage. Look at it that way. Yeah. And, you know, think about AirPods. When AirPods first came out, everybody was just like, you look like an idiot wearing those.

What are those? Those white things in your ears. Yeah, you got ear boogers. Why do you have ear boogers? And now it's like, everybody's got them, nobody cares. So there will be a cultural issue. I don't think this is going to be quite the AirPods situation, but. Probably not. Yeah. No. No.

Yeah, it was, it was, I just, I actually, I stood and gawked. I really did. You know, they can see you, right? Don't care. Okay. Does he know we can see him? Yeah, apparently not. Have you looked in a mirror with that thing on? It's the reality distortion field, Brian.

It very much so is. Yeah. Now here, I've heard a lot from people who are actually developing for it, but not much from the public because not many people have them, you know? Yeah, that's true. There's not that many out there really. So I was kind of surprised to actually see one. Yeah, you should have picked his pocket because he was doing other shit, you know?

Yeah. I don't understand people that wear them out in public. It's just like. Yeah, that's the thing. Like, I get it sitting in an office. I totally get that. But like, out and about? What are you doing? Yeah, they're like Speedos, you know? They're comfortable, but you don't want to get caught wearing them. Yeah, unless you're European.

Yeah. Oh, my God. And speaking of the Apple Vision Pro, they just released their fifth piece of content for the Apple Vision Pro. Two months. Five pieces of content. I know. Five. Oh, yeah. This is just a short film that highlights the 2023 Major League Soccer Cup playoffs.

Oh, and who among us cannot forget that game? Well, if you've got a memory. I'm a soccer fan. Couldn't fucking tell you. Yeah, 110 days ago was when the final was. Yeah. That takes a little bit of time from, you know, stop to publish. If you're going to go with the synergy thing, be timely.

Yeah. Like, I get it. You bought the rights to MLS. You're going to do MLS, even though nobody cares about MLS. But 110 days after the final, I can watch some recap of what was not a very interesting game to begin with. Thanks. Yeah. There you go. At least they distill it down to five minutes.

It's five minutes too long. I haven't heard anybody talk about any of the other content that's on there either. It's mostly talking about productivity and how it's easy to work with and different use cases for working with it as kind of like, you know, your virtual desktop thing. And some people like it.

Some people hate it. It's definitely, it's polarizing in different areas. But I'm just, yeah, I'm waiting for this. We've said it from the beginning. Where's version two? Yeah. When version two comes out, let's talk. Well, let's talk about somebody that isn't polarizing. Everybody hates this guy.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was just sentenced the other day to 25 years behind bars in a ruling handed forth by New York's Southern District Court. Judge Louis A. Kaplan announced the decision, I think it was yesterday morning, I believe. As posted by CNN, he, Bankman-Fried, expressed regret for his actions and the people he harmed.

It's been excruciating to watch, he said. Tell me about it, buddy. Customers don't deserve any of that pain. He also acknowledged the serious time he will be likely to spend behind bars. My useful life is probably over, thus bringing up the argument, when was it useful? When was it useful? What exactly did you do that was useful?

He laid out his reasoning for delivering such a harsh sentence to the one-time golden boy of the crypto community, suggesting he could be in a position to do something very bad in the future. So the sentence was issued for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can be appropriately be done for a significant period of time.

In other words, you're a bad guy who will continue to do bad things, so go rot. 25 years is nothing for what he did. I think so, too. It's insane what he did. Compare his sentence to Bernie Madoff, not even in the same ballpark. Bernie got like 150 years and stole far less money.

Yep. And even that was lenient, I thought. But it got the job done, I guess, you know. He ended up where he needed to be at the right time. Well, if the entire point of the judicial system is to stop further behavior, it did not get the job done, obviously.

Sam Bankman-Frey did not get the memo from that. In the news. This is an interesting story, Brian. Project Ghostbusters. Facebook is accused of using your phone to wiretap Snapchat.

Who are they going to call? The lawyers. That's who they're going to call. So this is kind of an old story, which is interesting, but it's finally coming into the court. And there's some unsealed court documents that are making their rounds and have two stories attached to them today.

The first is the Project Ghostbusters, where they were using their own VPN to basically sniff traffic on people's phones for other apps. And they could see it in the decrypted state, which gave them a leg up so they could watch, you know, what was going on on Snapchat, YouTube, other ones, too.

And Amazon and see what, you know, and glean from their traffic, what they were doing and how they could get a competitive advantage. Old story. And it's so old. This is what a meta-spokesperson said. The plaintiff's claims are baseless and completely irrelevant to the case.

Nothing new here. Continuing that the issue was reported on years ago. Okay, just because you did it a long time ago still doesn't make it not bad. Yes, still doesn't mean you shouldn't be punished for it. Yes. Unbelievable. I'm sorry. I killed all those kids 10 years ago.

Ah, it's old news. By the way, just, I mean, of course, obviously people are dumb and they don't pay attention. But you have a company, Meta. We all know they do horrible, horrible things. And then you decide to go ahead and use their VPN software? Yeah, you kind of deserve that one.

I mean, come on. Yeah. What the fuck were you thinking? Yeah. Of course Meta's VPN is going to do something really bad because everything Meta releases does something really bad. Really bad. Yeah. I think we said that the same time when the story first came out.

I think so, too. I was like, who would use this? Yeah. Why would you use any other product of theirs? Like, I get that, you know, we're all in this Facebook world now. Well, not everybody. But a lot of people use Facebook and a lot of people use Instagram and a lot of people use Telegram and all the other things that Meta owns.

But a VPN? Why? Why would you do that to yourself? Well, here's the fun part. That led to the revelation from the unsealed document that Meta was in bed. Meta, back then, Facebook, was in bed with Netflix, right?

Netflix is a major advertiser on Facebook. Yes. To the tune of about $200 million a year. Okay. Facebook thought that, well, since everybody else is doing this streaming video thing, we should, too. So they created Facebook Watch. I remember. With a $750 billion or $750 million budget.

$750 billion is what they're spending on their stupid headsets. Now, $750 million was the budget for Facebook Watch. Right. So they ended up killing Facebook Watch because it was going to take away from their advertising revenue, which was a guarantee from Netflix.

And at the same time, they were giving Netflix access to all of the data from Facebook's users about Netflix. Yeah, this kind of goes back to everything Facebook touches is evil. Yes, I agree. I think so as well. Mm-hmm.

All right. So I had a very interesting experience with Facebook this week. And, you know, my usage has declined tons, but I still post occasionally and I still occasionally manage to see a Friends update every now and then in between all the ads and everything else. But, you know, I'm still on Facebook as it was.

And I've always been a proponent of when it works properly, which it hasn't for years. It's a good thing. But I was having a moment. I probably had a glass or two of wine and I was getting a little cranky, as we do. Otherwise, we wouldn't be doing a podcast called Grumpy Old Geeks. And I was fired up and I was writing a post.

I was writing a post about how now I'm terrified to accidentally click on any ad because that means that's all I'm going to be served in this stupid platform ever again, even though I don't care about whatever stupid ad I just accidentally clicked on. But now that's my entire life online for the next two weeks.

And I went to hit like send or post or whatever, and I got the, your post is being processed. We will notify you when it's ready to post. That's new. Now, the plot thickens. Yes.

I go look at my timeline. Blank entry. Just no text. It shows that I've done an update, but there's no text. Hmm. I try to post again, just something normal, like, hey, watching a soccer game. Your post is being processed. You'll be notified when it's ready.

Same thing. I think, okay, all right, whatever. All right. Not in my mind thinking that, oh, they might have read what used, used their machine algorithms to see what I was posting and not being happy about it. I didn't think that at all. I was like, okay, well, I'm using Facebook Purity on this plugin, on this browser.

Let me, I'll log in on, on Google, Chrome, and I'll try posting from there. Same thing. Okay. I will try. I run through all the browsers on my machine. Cannot make a post. Keep getting the message that my post is being processed and I'll be notified when it's ready.

Every single post is showing up. Blank. No text. No nothing. Try my phone. Phone works fine. Interesting. Try my iPad. iPad works fine. My, I cannot, and I still cannot post from my computer on Facebook, no matter what browser I use.

They didn't do like an account ban, but they seem to have done like a device ban. I can't think of any other reason that it's going, any other reason to explain this. Yeah. I think they, I think they fingerprinted your Mac address. Yep. Because that is the one thing that is going to remain stable with that machine.

You wouldn't by chance happen to have Parallels installed on that computer, would you? No, I don't. Oh. One of the great features of Parallels is you can go in and create a unique disposable Mac address. Ah. So you can, you could test from the same machine and just change the Mac address and see if that, if it would let you post that way.

Yeah. Okay. I might have to give that a go because, you know, this is what we do. We talk about this sort of stuff and now it's happened to me. Ooh. So yeah, I just think it's really interesting. I've been banned because I made a post that was kind of complaining about their stupid algorithms. Well, you know, they are becoming sentient faster than we thought.

Yes, they are. I should apologize. You should. I don't want to die. So in other crappy services news, Meta and Google are facing claims of restricting reproductive health ads and fueling misinformation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ooh, okay. MSI Reproductive Choices and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which partnered on the report, claimed that the companies have restricted local abortion providers' ads and allowed misinformation to fester, among other misdoings.

Women and girls are being neglected by these major tech platforms who are putting their bottom lines above the public good, said Whitney Chin-Gun. Oh boy, that's a long one. Now I understand when people screw up my name. Chinogwanea, marketing specialist at MSI Reproductive Choices, said in a statement.

So this is about accurate online information is a lifeline for those seeking timely care and facts about their reproductive options, yet anti-choice groups are able to spread disinformation and toxic narratives online with impunity. What is worse, platforms like Google and Meta are currently enabling and profiting for from this dangerous propaganda?

So, yeah, nothing new there. What do they think they are, the Supreme Court? I guess so. And in another report that came out, anti-trans hate is widespread on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Okay. Not too surprising there. This is a new report from Vlad. And they're basically saying Meta is failing to enforce its own rules against anti-trans hate speech on its platform.

They found that extreme anti-trans hate content remains widespread across all their platforms. The report documents dozens of examples of hate speech from Meta's app, which, Glad, says were reported to the company between June 2023 and March 2024. And although the posts appear to be clear violations of the company's own policies, Meta either replied that the posts were not volatile or simply did not take action on them.

So, nobody's home. They have to send it to that stupid oversight board. Yeah, the advisory board will then say, hey, you guys, you're not following your own policies. And Meta will go, and? And? Shut up and go spend our money and leave us alone. Exactly. So, Twitter.

Twitter is a broke-ass motherfucker. So, what's it going to do now, Brian, when you need money online? Hmm. Turn to porn. Well, old reliable. Yeah. Have you ever played with the Twitter communities feature?

No. No. I joined, like, three or four communities, a couple hacker communities, and some other one. I can't even remember. Anyway, I can't remember because communities are dumb. They're fucking dumb. Or is it just, like, group a bunch of different people's tweets into something?

No. It actually is kind of like a, you know, a little private forum. But the UX is so terrible, it's hard to make heads or tails of what's going on. It's a really, it's a fuster cluck of a feature. It's really terrible. But what Twitter is exploring now is the ability, I should say, to create NSFW communities.

Okay. Because, you know, they need money. Yes. And Twitter has become a vital platform for online sex workers due to its lenient policy on adult content. Right. Yeah. Probably, of course, in violation of their own rules, you know.

No, we, you know, we don't have to follow our own rules. That's what we've learned about all these companies. Right, right. Elon just sends you a poop emoji. Because he's into the German scheisse porn. It's the most popular community on Twitter. Yes. Twitter does remain cautious about adult content monetization, though, due to challenges in detecting non-consensual content.

No mention of copyright either in there, by the way. We're not going to do anything with that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Just go out. They should go have a talk with Pornhub right now. They're not doing too well. Maybe they can get together and come back with a super brand.

Right. Triple X. And they can get together with True Social, too. Oh, yeah. Come on. Let's get all the baddies together. Oh, God. I'll talk about them in a second. Another bit of Twitter news has come out. And this one is just hilarious. Twitter, for years, has a lawsuit against the U.S. government asking for more transparency on their surveillance practices because, you know, they keep getting all these requests for user data and things like that.

Well, turns out, turns out Twitter basically sells its firehose of data to a surveillance firm called Dataminer. It's right there on the tin what they do. So there's no denying who they're selling their data to. Dataminer is basically just a front for the government.

So the firehose goes to Dataminer. Dataminer has alerts set up for basically all law enforcement that wants to subscribe to it and then sends them alerts on things that they're searching for. Right. So they just get ahead of the game right there.

So we're suing the government because we sold the data to the company that gives it to the government? Kind of. Yeah. Okay. Just checking. Yeah. Right hand, left hand. Let's introduce you to. Yeah. And they're saying it's, well, you know, since this is kind of an arm's length transaction, there's no law being broken here.

And it's just business as usual. It's the same thing we've talked about, about cell phone records and all data miners and data brokers. It's just funny that Twitter is trying to put up a front by saying, oh, we're going to sue the government because they're just wrong. Wrongy McRongenstein. Well, turns out.

It turns out you're getting paid to give them that data. Yeah. Well, the FTC is close to wrapping up a multi-year investigation into TikTok, which could result in a lawsuit or major fine. According to Politico, the investigation is reportedly centered around the app's privacy and security practices, which are zero, including its handling of children's user data.

According to Politico, the FTC is looking into potential violations of the COPPA Act, as well as allegations that the company misled its users by stating falsely that individuals in China do not have access to U.S. user data. They could be penalized for violating the terms of its 2019 settlement with regulators over data privacy.

And of course, all this is going on as there is still the continued push to have TikTok divest and become a U.S. company or get shut down. So TikTok is not having the best couple months. No, they haven't been having the best couple of years, at least as far as on that front.

I think as far as growth and monetization go, they're doing just fine. It's been great. Thanks for the free press, FTC. Appreciate it. And a little news from my neck of the woods. Now that I live in Toronto, Ontario, four major Ontario school boards are taking some of the largest social media companies to court over their products, alleging the way they designed is negatively rewired the way children think, behave and learn and disrupted the way schools operate.

This includes the public district school board here in Toronto that my kid is part of and a couple other ones. And they're looking for $4.5 billion in total damages from Meta, Snap, ByteDance and basically everybody else ever. Now, is that $4.5 billion U.S. or $4.5 billion Canadian?

There's a difference. It's Canadian. Ah, it's 20 bucks. Yeah, they said these social media companies have knowingly created a product that is addictive and is marketed to kids. And they're not wrong. We need them to be held accountable and we need for them to create safer products.

And that's not going to happen. Yeah, it's not going to happen. But there's a big push kind of happening all over the place about this stuff. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit at the library if I'm not mistaken. It will, quite a bit, yes. And I have a little bit of more local news. Just Dan.

Dan wrote in, and he obviously must be Canadian. Seems there might be room for regulation on data roaming. My mistake. I forgot to put my phone in airplane mode in my last drive to the USA until our first stop. 508 megabytes. $1,234.31 Canadian. $1,500 with tax.

Kind of feels like highway robbery. No, Dan. That's information super highway robbery. Yes, it is. Yeah, it's well known that, you know, obviously the Canadian companies here, the mobile companies are incredibly expensive to begin with.

And the roaming is just kill you. Little secret here, Dan, and I almost don't want to say this because it might go away. Next time you cross the border, go get yourself a Verizon phone. I pay $80 a month, all in U.S. dollars. I can use it streaming unlimited here in Canada.

I was actually going to get a Canadian cell phone, but why bother now? I can pay $80 and I can use my phone in the U.S. and Canada. Unlimited, no anything. So you might want to try that. $80? Unlimited? Unlimited. Shit, I need one of those.

Unlimited in Canada, unlimited in the U.S. It's fucking phenomenal. I feel like I've won the lottery with my phone. Now I just set it, so we might need to edit this out because maybe Verizon fucked up. Yeah, seriously. I'm going to go get one of those before I post.

Because I think I'm paying $160 a month for mine. Damn. AT&T, baby. AT&T. Here's some interesting news. In a significant case highlighting potential biases in artificial intelligence systems, Pa Adresa Manjang, a black Uber Eats courier, received a payout from Uber following accusations of racial discrimination.

This stems from repeated failures of Uber's facial recognition technology developed by Microsoft to correctly identify him, leading to his account suspension and termination. This incident dating back to Uber or when Uber implemented the real-time ID check in the U.K., which was April 2020.

So, April 2020, that was before there was any AI talk. Guys, there's no AI there. Sorry. Sorry. No fucking AI. So, basically, the U.K. law is a little bit behind the times, but they're finally getting caught up. It took him a couple years. But, yeah, finally, the guy got some cash for it.

So, what it was was he kept trying to log into his account, but since we know Microsoft facial recognition really sucks at black people, it was mislabeling him, saying, this is not you, this is not you, this is not you, and finally banned his account for, you know, repeated failed attempts.

Right. So, yeah. Nice one, guys. Nice one. Nice one. So, let's talk about Truth Social for a second. There's a lot of articles flipping around. I put a couple of them here in the show notes.

You can go check them out at your leisure. But the long and the short of it is if you invest in Truth Social, don't expect to get your money back at all. The stock popped on day one. It then decided to unpop, and it's going to continue to unpop.

The issue here right now is that the board at Truth Social is basically made up of family members of Trump and confidants. So, what were they originally were thinking was, okay, Trump can get a windfall from this, but he can't sell his stock for six months.

Well, the board can vote to change that, and he can pull his money out whenever he wants. Better do it tomorrow. Yeah. It's probably in the works right now. I'd imagine so. Yeah. So, all of the, you know, the retail investors, the mom and pops who wanted to support the big Donster put in their money, and they're just going to get taken to the bank.

They should have just invested in crypto because it's about the same. Nowadays, they'll get a better return. If their goal was to support the Donald, they certainly have done so. Yes, they would have just donated to his campaign, but then he could have, he can only use that money for certain things.

So, I guess if he gets it this way, he can use it or, oh, I don't know, all the different fines that he owes right now. Yeah. Yep. Great. To back those bonds that he needs. Oh, but he doesn't have a Bible company now. So, I don't know if you saw that one. Oh, I saw. It's just, I've given up.

Like, there's just no, there's no end to the hypocrisy. No, it's not. It's bottomless. It's absolutely bottomless. So, yeah, if you did buy into True Social, you might want to consider divesting pretty soon. I think it was at about $62 last night from a peak of almost $80.

Right. So, and I'm guessing it's- I mean, there's no business there. No. It's like trading on 1,500 times earnings. Yeah. It's something ridiculous like that. Yeah. No, it's beyond belief.

Beyond belief. I mean, they live in a completely different universe, in a completely different world. Media Candy.

Now, we talked about Ghostbusters already in the show with Facebook. I don't know if you've noticed, Brian, there's a new Ghostbusters movie out. I've noticed. I've heard it's quite good. It's delightful. Did you see it? Yes, it's absolutely delightful. Oh, nice. Yeah.

All right. I am a fan. I am an absolute fan. I thought the first reboot one wasn't so bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. But that's great to hear that they're actually rebuilding a franchise again. They are. Yeah. It builds on the last one.

And I thought the last one was decent. This one's better. You know? Wow. So, moving on up. Excellent. Yeah. Definitely recommend it. The Three-Body Problem. Did you finish that yet? I have not. I've gotten three episodes into The Three-Body Problem.

Okay. Mixed reviews coming from The Three-Body Problem. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's mixed reviews about The Three-Body Books. And this is, the series is obviously, you know, it's combining bits from all the books. I don't think that, you know, they're going to do one wrapped up story here, I guess.

But I don't know. I'm not really enjoying it, to be honest. I don't know if that gets better or worse, depending on your point of view. There's some interesting stuff around Episode 5 that's pretty incredible just to watch. There's a lot of 6 and 7 that I ended up fast-forwarding because it was just relationship crap that I didn't care about at all.

Right. And Episode 8 was okay. The thing is, the people that I'm hearing who really liked it are people who have never heard of the book. Right. You know, it's the foundationification of The Three-Body Problem, which is probably a good thing.

Because I was telling a friend who was texting me about it, saying, man, this is great. This is really fun. And I'm like, yeah, you obviously didn't read the books because you're not screaming at the television going, where's my favorite characters? What happened to them? Who are these people?

What is this story? What the fuck? But he's like, yeah, I guess I am. I'm going to go back to watching it now because I'm enjoying it. Now, shut up and leave me alone. Let me enjoy my crap, damn it. Yeah. So, I mean, I finished the whole thing in three days. And I was left with, I'll keep watching it.

It's not great, but it's not terrible. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I just think some of the relationship dynamics and stuff were filler, just absolute filler. So, didn't need those. But, yeah, if they make some more, I'll probably pick it up.

But it's definitely not the, you know, knockdown, drag-out blockbuster that I think everybody was expecting, especially Netflix. Yeah, it's not the new Game of Thrones, that's for sure. Well, it kind of is because it's probably going to have a terrible ending. I think that's pretty safe to say, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I just find, like, I know it's there. Apple TV tells me it's there, and I should continue watching. I just, my finger hovers over it and moves on. Well, hopefully it moves on to The Gentleman by Guy Ritchie. I watched the trailers for this. I want to watch it. Dude, it is such a sharp, sharp contrast to the three-body problem, which is all graphics, like, you know, CGI and all this crap.

Then you go to The Gentleman. It is a character and story-driven eight episodes that are fucking phenomenal. Okay, great. It was so good. So good. We actually had to stop and, like, you know, pace it because it was like, okay, no, no, no, we can't do it because it's so good.

It is really, really good. I mean, I love Guy Ritchie movies. This is like having eight Guy Ritchie movies at your fingertips, and it's one great story that he could tell properly, you know, because a lot of Guy Ritchie movies are kind of run together to the big run-up at the end. You know, where all this shit kind of culminates and coalesces into this ball of craziness and violence and all that stuff.

So you have a lot of that. It's great. I love it. I can't wait to watch it. I'm definitely looking forward to it. It's on the list. One of the reasons I haven't gotten to it is I'm still finishing Better Call Saul. I just watched the penultimate episode. Boy, does that show get sad. I forgot how sad it was. But, yeah, I've got the last episode to go, which I'll probably watch tonight.

So finish that up. Yep. Yep, enjoy. And I have been dipping my toes back into Constellation. I've watched, I believe, four episodes now, and I'm actually really enjoying it. Okay. Yeah. I'm stuck at episode seven. All right.

My finger is the same problem. I had the hover problem. I'm like, do I want to spend the last hour of the night on that? No. That's what it comes down to. I'm curious if you finish it, what your thoughts are on it. Okay. I'm curious what your thoughts are when you finish it.

I'm going to finish it for sure. I'm into it enough to keep going. All right, Jason. There's a new podcast network in town. Oh, great. Just what I fucking need. Well, you know, maybe they'll give us a million dollars for our shows. But I doubt it because it's Bill Maher.

Great. Yes, Bill Maher is running a podcast network now, Club Random Studios. He's announced two shows that will be on his new podcast network besides his own show, obviously. Are you ready for this one? I'm ready. Hit me. Fred Durst and Billy Corgan.

Oh, two of the greatest people of all time. The Limp Bizkit singer will discuss UFOs and conspiracy theories. Yep. Probably going to make a gazillion dollars on that. While Billy Corgan's focus has not been specified, which I think it's safe to say about Billy Corgan for his whole career.

His focus has not been specified. Yeah. Yeah. Since he got all woo-woo at that tea shop in Chicago, I bet it'll be tea and meditation. Yeah. Maybe some wrestling or he's not involved in that at all. I don't know. He fucked over the people I know in wrestling so hard.

I couldn't care less about him. So, no. All right. Well, there you go. Three people I actively do dislike. So, I think I'll be passing on all of those. But you're a Bill Maher fan. So, are you going to tune in to Bill's show? No. No. I like real time if it has interesting guests.

That's it. Okay. Okay. Anybody can have a podcast. Speaking of anybody that can have a podcast, episode two of Schmackters with James Marsters and Mark Devine, a show that I co-produce, is out.

So, check out episode two if you can. Please. Pretty please. Rate, review, subscribe. Mash that like button. Mm-hmm. Yep. Mash that button, baby. Please. Do Jason a solid. Link is in the show notes.

Just saying. If you got nothing else to do, come on. It's 28 minutes of fun. All right. I was briefly singing the praises of Verizon earlier. Now, I will sing the praises of T-Mobile, mostly because I personally am not a customer of them. But my wife gets her phone through her work through T-Mobile.

So, she is. Yesterday was opening day for baseball. I'm a big fan of baseball. And one of the perks of being a T-Mobile customer is you get one free year of MLB TV. Every year, they've done this eight years in a row running that right now. So, that's a, if you're a baseball fan, that costs you $150 a year.

And you get it basically for free if you're on T-Mobile, which is pretty nice. And they've extended that deal through 2028. You get to watch all out-of-market regular season games and select spring training games. And, of course, there are blockout restrictions, which there shouldn't be if you're paying $150 for a streaming service that calls itself MLB TV.

But, hey, use that Facebook VPN and you can get right around those blackout restrictions. Perfect. So, there you go. I wonder if you can get a T-Mobile account for under $30 a month and then come out ahead. Maybe. Who knows?

It'd be worth it just for that. I think they do the restrictions where you have to have certain levels of account to be able to do it. I can't remember. All I know is thanks to my wife and Universal Music, I get free MLB TV every year. And a house to live in. Yeah, that too. Because this podcasting gig ain't cutting it.

This ain't cutting it. Does she have a sister? Two of them. Hook a brother up. Well, they're not lawyers. Oh, shit. Damn it. Oh, I think the last time I had a T-Mobile account was when I had my Danger Sidekick.

Oh, God. I love those phones. They were so great. They were so great. Okay. So, because we mentioned this last episode and now I feel fucking old, Heathers has been out for – it was released on March 31st, 1989. In two days, that will be 35 years.

Look, man, one of the few things I get from Facebook in my feed is like I subscribe to a lot of different music sites like Consequence and Alt Nation and other things like that. My feed is a constant stream of I'm old. It's 30 years ago, Jesus and Mary Chain released Sidewinder.

35 years ago, The Cure released Disintegration. 44 years ago, The Cure is the Forest was released. That's all my feed is. Oh, my God. You might want to unsubscribe to that one just for your mental health. I know. Or your existential health, at least. We're old.

Yeah. I tell you what, though. It's still got legs. Actually, I just saw this morning. 30 years ago, today, the Crow soundtrack was released. Oh, my God. I saw that this morning. I forgot about that. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. I'm just going to go crawl in a ball and turn to dust. You can't crawl into a ball. You're old and your bones don't bend that way anymore. They don't. They actually don't bend that way. I'm going to lie in a very crooked position and turn to dust. Yeah.

All right. So, yeah, if you got a chance, go check it out if you haven't seen it. Great movie. Ever or in a while. It's great. It is great. I saw this article called The Future of Star Trek from Starfleet Academy to New Movies and Michelle Yeoh, How the 58-Year-Old Franchise is Planning for the Next Generation of Fans.

So, this is a big article over at Variety. Yeah. It's got interesting artwork that needs some work. There's no Gowron. I mean, it's a gazillion characters from Star Trek. It is a Where's Waldo of Star Trek. But there's no Gowron, which saddens me.

And Riker is tiny compared to New Spock and Michelle. It's like, what the hell? Riker's, that guy should be front and center for all of it since he's been in most of them. He's been in everything. That's true. I like this article because it's some of the first screenshots I've seen of Section 31, which I was starting to wonder, is that actually ever even going to come out?

It's wrapped. Yeah, they just had a wrap party here in Toronto and some of the next, what's the, oh, goddammit, what's the new show that we all like so much? Strange New World. Strange New World. Half of that cast was there, too. And I was like, oh, man, they're just down the street from me somewhere. Got to find them. Yeah.

Stock, stock, stock, stock, stock, stock, stock, stock, stock. Here I am, like a 50-year-old man. Hi, I like you. Your show's great. But, you see, according to the article and according to Jonathan Frakes, that's the problem with Star Trek right now is it's a bunch of old white dudes like us who are fans.

They're like, we need new blood. Old white dudes, always the problem. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. So it'll be interesting. I can't wait for Section 31 to come out. They have been filming Strange New Worlds. And Jonathan Frakes said that one of the episodes is the best thing he's ever done on TV.

So I can't wait for that. Is it even better than In Search Of? Apparently. That was a great show. No, that wasn't. He didn't do In Search Of. That was Leonard Nimoy. That was Nimoy. Damn, that was his Mysteries something or other. I can't remember. I can't remember what that was either. But that was a fun show.

I didn't really like him back then even. And I still like that show. That's pretty fun. So more Star Trek on its way. Oh, that was the other thing that they mentioned in here. They are still trying to get another movie done with the Chris Pine branch. Yeah, let it go.

Seriously. Just let it go. It's been too long. It's been too long. They weren't that great. Yeah, the first movie was decent. Then they lost Chekhov in the middle of it. You know, so it's like. And then the last one was just like, what the hell? I literally fell asleep in the theater on that last one.

Was that the it's not con? It's not con? Okay, it's con. Yeah, pretty much. It's their marketing for it. What a fucking load of shit. Yeah. Anyway. Moving on. Apps and doodads. Adobe. I have a problem with Adobe this week.

Me too. You first. Okay. So I was paying $55 a month for the all you can eat package. Yep. So I get all the apps and all the doodads and Google ads and all that crap with it. And they said, well, hey, here's a little note for you. We're just going to charge you five bucks more a month. So we're just going to bring it up to almost $60 a month for a bunch of apps that I don't use.

So I said, let me go. I seem to remember a long time ago there was an a la carte option. So I went and I looked. There's a photographer's package, which gives you Photoshop, Lightroom, and something else. All I care about is Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.

Those are the only two that I actively use on any given day. You know, every now and again, I need Illustrator for something. But I'm like, there are workarounds for that. And it's definitely a workaround when you're going to be paying $60 a month. So I got mine down to $19.99 a month for the apps that I want.

Perfect. Which, you know, still works out to $240 a year, which if you think about the old days when you had to upgrade the software in the box, I'm okay with that. Because that's still, you know, that works out to be about the same. You know, paying $720 a year is a big difference.

So I'm down for the shift. So, you know, thanks for raising your price, Adobe. You just saved me a lot of money. Yeah. So let me ask you, as an individual user, when you went to downgrade your package, were you able to do that manually? Yes. Well, guess what you can't do if you're a corporate user?

Downgrade manually? I had to do this for my company. We had some personnel changes. So there were two packages. One was just a Photoshop package and one was the all-in package that I had to basically get rid of. We didn't need those two subscriptions anymore. We had a bunch of other ones still. They're making lots of money from me.

You go into the enterprise solution to try to downgrade a package or remove anything. No buttons for it. You have to go to chat. Oh, my God. So they have basically taken the SiriusXM model, which I've ranted about on this show many a time.

They make it impossible, impossible for you to do this without talking to someone. When you start talking to someone, you get the upsells, you get the discounts, you get the blah, blah, blah, blah. You have to spend almost an hour talking to someone. And then finally, I'm just like, can you remove these or not? Because if not, we're going to cancel all of this.

I don't care if it takes my company down. I got so upset. So, yeah, they've basically just inshittified the entire process of downgrading. You can add things, piece of cake. You can add those completely without anybody involved.

You just click a button and boom, you're paying more. But if you try to remove anything, you have to go through their customer service. They've got their script. You have to jump through 7,000 hoops. And then finally, they will take a product off of your thing. It's like a Chinese finger puzzle. You can keep going in, but you can't get out.

Yep. It's absolutely infuriating that they're doing this. As a major company that they are. It's infuriating. Fuck you, Adobe. I'm just looking at the price difference here for the enterprise version for the same thing I was getting. Yours is $111.99 Canadian.

And mine was $54.99 U.S. And I don't think there's that much of a discrepancy in the exchange rate at this point. No, there's not. No, that's kind of... Canadian pricing tends to be higher anyways, though. It's not just, you know, it's not just... Tariffs. Healthcare and all that sort of shit, so...

Yeah. Oh, well. I'm sorry that you had to go through that, but... It's just, you know, you think Adobe's not that bad of a company. It shouldn't be. It's not... You'd be surprised. Well, I don't have any illusions anymore or any illustrations even. Yeah. Any illustrators.

Nothing. Okay. Moving on. I saw this one. Google says Apple is bringing RCS to the iPhone in the fall of 2024. Okay. So RCS is the rich communication services, which, you know, would kind of bring them up to parity for their instant messaging stuff.

And this is part of the lawsuit that, you know, Apple is fighting here in the U.S. right now. And they say, they're like, well, we were going to do it. We said we were going to do it. We're going to do it. You know? So finally coming to pass, I'm just wondering if the bubbles are still going to be green. I want them to be green.

Because... I'm ashamed to say this, Brian, but I'm a divisist. Well, no shit. I have an active disdain for my friends that have an Android phone. And I can't help it. It's not that I want to be. It's just how I was raised.

Look, I agree. I'm with you. I do want RCS to come in because I want this to fix the texting from my laptop to Android, screwing up all the time, requiring these signing out and rebooting and signing out and rebooting to be able to text back to an Android.

Yeah, that is so, so, like, haphazard. How can they have not have fixed that yet? I've got it working on two computers out of my five. So... Mine usually works for two to three days. And then by day four, I've got to go through the whole fucking process.

Get booted out. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is a fuster clunk. So they're saying it's going to be... They don't know if it's going to be in iOS 18 when it launches or in an update, but probably an update the way things are going with them. Apple just hasn't been really that great with these software updates lately.

The new 14.4 update or whatever the 18.4, I can't even remember. Whatever the macOS update was, broke so many things, it's ridiculous. So, yeah, we'll see how this comes out. But, you know, it's a move in the right direction, but I still want my green bubbles.

Oh, they can't get rid of that. It's such a meme. It's such a thing. I know, but it's part of the lawsuit, so they might. Who knows? Well, can they make them purple? I'm down with that. As long as they're not the same color, I don't care. We got to read that fine print there, Apple, on that lawsuit. Yeah, seriously. All right, YouTube revealed that its short-form video service, Shorts, now boasts over 70 billion views daily, which is a lot.

It's kind of a lot. Man, those Quibi guys are sitting over in the corner going, God damn it! What did we do wrong? Quibi. So, you know, this is their play to try and get TikTok's lunch while nobody's looking.

And it seems to be working somewhat. You know, the creators are actually getting paid. That is the big thing. Yeah. If any of these services would have realized, if you actually pay the creators, they will use you. But, you know, they're getting paid for now.

We'll see how long. I'm guessing it's going to be going pretty long. I mean, the YouTube Partner Program, it's 16 years old. It can drive now, believe it or not. Yeah. In the past three years, they've paid out $70 billion to its contributors. They could have almost bought two Twitters if they unionized.

Okay. Just saying. Yeah. That's a lot of money. Good. Pay the creators. That's what you should be doing. Yeah. Good luck getting any of that money because there's so many people on YouTube. Yeah. Such a fight. Such a fight.

Now, some actual app news. Mac Whisper. I've talked about that. That was the – it's basically the program that puts a front end onto OpenAI's Whisper transcription. I think I spent $30 on Mac Whisper Pro. And it paid for itself in spades yesterday because I'm working with a musician.

We're putting out his first single. And right as we're getting ready to go, they're like, oh, we need the lyrics for it. And this is like a hip-hop dance track. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to have to sit there and write this thing up. This is going to take hours. And I'm like, okay, this shouldn't work, but let's try it.

And I ran the song through Mac Whisper. There were two words wrong in the entire song. Gave me the entire thing with the background, with everybody. It was flawless, except for those little few words. It actually did that song better than it does some of the podcasts that I run through it.

Amazing. Well worth it. I could not believe that it could extract the lyrics from a song as good as it did. Where was that 20 years ago when all I was doing was artists' websites and putting up lyrics for their 15 albums was the bane of my existence because nobody actually had proper ones.

Nobody was sure where to get them from. The fucking band didn't have them. The management didn't have them. Where was that damn thing? I know. Oh, man. It would have been so – remember when we were kids just trying to figure out when you get an album and it didn't have liner notes in it?

And you're making up the words in your head and those words stick with you for, you know, 30 years? Excuse me while I kiss this guy is all I keep hearing in my head. Might as well be the real song now. Mine was Africa by Toto. I had the completely – I mean almost every word and it was wrong.

But I had this fantastic story in my head and then I read the actual lyrics and I'm like – My song's better. My song is a thousand times better. I should have written down my lyrics before I read those lyrics because now I can't remember my original lyrics. So it's like, oh, bummer.

Oh, okay. Moving on here real quick. We got to wrap this puppy up. I found a great website called woe.onrender.com, which basically is an API to get every woe that Keanu Reeves has ever said in a movie. Now that's what the internet's for, people.

This is what it's for. Yes. It's fantastic. Go check it out. You can get it back in all sorts of different formats. It's got a JSON engine in it. It's like – I mean it's seriously one of those things where – chef's kiss. Chef's kiss.

Very nice. Avi Momenko is the guy's name. Cheers. Cheers, brother. It's perfect. New article from Cal Newport called Can AI Make Plans in the New Yorker? It is a great breakdown on why these large language models cannot, you know, predict the future.

It's because they're not built to. But what is built to are gaming engines. The AIs that are learning to play chess and Go and all those things, those are predictive engines. They can actually predict the future. So it's an interesting article about how you can merge those two to really fuck up someone's job or day.

Great. Yeah. So it's a great read. Cal does great explainers on the AI stuff. So definitely worth – besides being a productivity guy, he's also actual an MIT-trained computer scientist. So he wears many hats.

And our lovely president has ordered every U.S. agency to appoint a chief AI officer. Okay. Okay. I almost have nothing to say on that because it's so fucking stupid. See? AI is creating jobs. It is. It is.

Oh, God. So, you know, we're going to have – we're going to have these guys. We're going to have chief AI officers and robot mechanics. That's going to be our future. And we're all going to be drinking Brondo. Okay. And there's a great article over on – I think it was Futurism. And it's called Disillusioned to Businesses Discovering that AI Kind of Sucks.

I've been saying this for quite some time now. I love this article. You have. This is right up your alley. This is – I'm like Brian could have written this. Yeah, I mean, it pretty much straightforward says, you know, all your bosses were saying use AI, use AI, use AI.

For what? It doesn't really help us here. We just make hamburgers. There's a great quote here too. No one wants to build a product and a model that makes things up. The core problem is that Gen AI models are not information retrieval systems.

They're synthesizing systems with no ability to discern from data it's trained on unless significant guardrails are put in place. Well, we know that they're not in the guardrail business for most of these people. It's just worth reading. I put it in here. It's in the show notes. Go check it out. It is a fantastic read and it sums up everything Brian's been saying for the past six months.

Yeah, pretty much. Like I'm done here. Thank you. Mic drop. I read a book this week, Brian.

Actually, I read two. But the first one is the one I want to talk about. Our friend Jonathan Haidt is back again and he wrote a book. It's called The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It's worth it for just the graphs alone that come with it.

But God damn, we fucked up. Yeah. There's a lot of articles out about this book right now. And yes, it couldn't have come out at a better time. Obviously, this is right in my wheelhouse. I have downloaded it. I'm going to start reading it. I have a lot of concerns about this and it's not looking good.

It's not. It's not looking good at all. You know, I think that Jonathan is hitting this at the right time. I mean, his original one, the – what was it? The – oh, The Coddling of the American Mind I think was the original one. That was a great piece.

But this one has actionable intel on it that actually shows causation, not just correlation from all the studies that they've been doing about how this is just fucking up an entire generation of kids, multiple generations of kids. And we haven't even gotten to what it does to adults, you know.

Yeah. Who cares about us anymore? We're in a corner, not rolled into a ball. Not rolled into a ball. Turning into dust. Where's my dones? Yeah. No, no, no. This is – there's a lot of stuff out there about this. I've been reading a lot about it and it's really important because, you know, I believe the children are our future, Jason.

Well, they're at least yours because you're going to need them to take care of you and bring you wine while you're rolled up. Yeah, you're going to rely on a robot. Yeah. No, you have to read this book. It made me – it kind of spun me into a little depressive tale for a little bit.

But I'm coming back out of it. And I was just – you know, it makes you think. It's like, man. And it's not just social media. When you actually lay over high-speed internet access versus the rates of depression in the world, yeah, they correlate pretty well.

Yeah. It's not good. I mean, it's not surprising. It's not the internet we meant to build, Jason. It's not what we were doing when we were kids and it's not what we were doing in our 20s. It's just – it's all been commodified and we picked – It's been weaponized.

It's been weaponized. It's been commodified. It's – all it does is sell things to you and make money for the big companies. That's it. They don't give a fuck about us. Well, you know, and you know what? We probably wouldn't be giving a fuck either if we were the ones making the money. But we're the sour grapers, you know?

Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, it would have been nice to have made some of that coin since we helped build the damn thing. But no, no, sour grapes. Anyway, if you have a kid or are thinking of having a kid, go read this book. It's a must-read. It seriously is a must-read.

There's so much information, so many studies. And like I said, the graphs alone are worth it. So go check it out. And I did finish The Bezel by Cory Doctorow. All right. It's the second in the series. I think it was Red Team Blues was the first book. This one is not as good as the first one.

It felt like a short story compared to a novel. It felt like half of it was missing for some reason. It wasn't bad per se, but it just didn't feel as flushed out as the first novel. So I'm hoping that the third one in the series will kind of tie it all together because they're kind of out of different timelines.

Like the first book was more in the future than the second one. It's a weird mix-up and mash-up. But it wasn't bad, but it just wasn't what I expected. It was decent. It was deece, you know, C+. C+. I give the first one a solid A-, it was really good.

I really enjoyed it. It wasn't like, you know, knock me over with a feather good, but it was really good. I mean, I still think about it, so it's that good. But, you know, I think since this is a trilogy, I'm going to give them, you know, the sophomore slump on number two. We'll see what happens with number three. See if he can bring it home for a landing.

Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean.

The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Woo-hoo! Welcome back, Dave! It's good to be back. Sorry I was away for a couple weeks. You're fired! Thank you. Oh, no.

Scheduling. Please don't throw me in the briar patch. You can't anymore. That ride's gone from Disneyland. That's true. Yeah, scheduling just conspired against me, but it's good to be back. Well, I hope you're having a good Friday. Good Friday, yes.

That's right. You didn't miss too much, although we did start a whole new segment on home repair and home improvements, so we might rope you into that to go with our shit showering and shaving. Okay. That might be next, yeah. No, I'm down with that. I am a fearless home improver. We'll get to that in future episodes, I'm sure.

But Sebastian wrote in. I don't know if you remember Sebastian, Dave. He's the one that does. Of course I do. Who can forget Sebastian? He's a bit lovely to us. He says, hey guys, it's Sebastian again. I just heard your latest episode and wanted to apologize if my comment came across as a bit rude.

Please adjust it for German politeness and a physicist's people skills. Well, you just needed to preface with it that you were German, Sebastian, and all would have been understood. Yeah, exactly. Anyway. I'm not rude. I'm just German. Yes, exactly. I understand that. Looking forward for the follow-up comment you mentioned.

I think I cannot see it yet because I listened to the early access feed and wanted to add a little visual aid to what I meant. Be nice to Sebastian. He pays. Ah, I see. Well, you know. Now that I know he's German, I no longer have problems. You've probably seen a macro shot of LCD subpixels at some point, or OLD, or even old CRT.

It's just different patterns and different technologies to create those RGB subpixels. Any color on screen comes from those three spatially separated fixed colors, and they just change their brightness. Well, maybe I misjudge how often you see those macro shots, but I think they are among these stock image cliches for computer-related news articles. Best wishes.

Yes. So, clear it up. Thank you, Sebastian. Danke, Shane. We're fast friends now, and now that we have the appropriate context that both your German-ness and your nerdy physicist, yes.

It all is clear, and no offense taken. Ausgesignet! My only German word. I love it. Marky Mark also wrote in. Had to drop you guys a line on the image I had in my mind after Dave's story about Facebook reels of you both sitting on a couch, Beavis and Butthead style.

Come on, keep scrolling, Brian. Damn it. Keep up the good work, gentlemen. Love the show. Yeah, that's probably pretty much what it would come down to if we were actually together. Yeah. That's funny. And Lars wrote in. Hey, Geek Fathers, do you have advice on the management of password management?

I found myself now using three management tools from years of tech life, and it's getting messy, and I think I should clean it up. I have one for my web browser, iCloud, and one password. Is it unsafe to have more than one manager, or perhaps is it preferable in case one system goes down or other unforeseen problems, such as family access, if I'm unavailable?

For me personally, I think I can safely retire the web browser manager, but I'm torn if I should keep both one password and iCloud. I'm mostly Apple these days for phone, tablet, and very recently switched to macOS, so iCloud is pretty integrated into my life, but I really like one password, as it has a lot of features and information stored beyond just passwords.

Thank you, and grump on. I just use one password, but I don't store it in their cloud. I store it on my own device cloud. Oh, okay. So I don't rely on their cloud being up and running, but I guess I have to rely on mine. So, you know.

There's a cloud somewhere, Brian. There's a cloud somewhere. So, yeah. You know, I just see, to me, it's overkill to have multiple things. I just have the one, so. I agree. I would say, and I think Lars is on the right path here. The first one I would get rid of is the one built into the browser.

Yep. To me, that's the most vulnerable one, most likely to get, you know, clipped by somebody. But, yeah. I mean, I think just moving it all to one password would probably be fine. That's what I do.

Yep. Just as long as you have good multi-factor authentication on the one password. The only asterisk I would add here is that I would explore where you think your future might be when it comes to past keys.

Because past keys are going to be, I think, part of our future and whoever gets that integration right first. And Apple is, has some of it there. I'm not sure to what degree one password has it there.

But I would have that be part of my equation. How easy is it going to be for me to integrate past keys in the future? Yeah. That's just my guess. But I don't know, you know. One password definitely has. I just haven't. I haven't actually gone and done any of it yet. So, I don't know how easy it is or how well it's integrated.

Everything else with one password is pretty well integrated. It works great on my Apple devices across the board. So, it's, there's no reason for me to use Apple's particular system, at least not right now. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm with Lars. I've got all three. And I know, it's one of those things where the browser one is like, I know I need to go clean it out and turn it off.

But I'm lazy, so I haven't. Yeah. The iCloud keychain sharing, I have on because there are more things that you store in your iCloud keychain than just website passwords. There's, like, different tokens that are system tokens, like, you know, SSH keys and things like that.

So, I keep that regardless. Right, right. But, yeah. Most of my stuff's in one password and split between the web browser, which is, it is actually annoying because sometimes you get dueling pop-ups. Yep. And you're trying to click one to get rid of the old one. It's like, oh, it didn't update in that one, but I know the password's good in that one.

So, I need to get to that one to click on that one. So, yeah, it would probably be wise to just fix that. But life is short, and sometimes I don't give a shit. Right. I think Lars is probably into that same boat. That's why we have three of them, Lars. I'm with you, buddy.

No, I mean, that's the constant tension, right, between security and convenience. Look, I find it hard to, like, clean up my physical life. My digital life is just, I've given up. I've gone, like, shit's just a mess, right? Like, I've got crap everywhere and socks on the floor.

You know, at some point, I think it was, like, the last time that my iTunes finally crashed, and I lost my entire music collection, and I never went back through and cleaned it up, even though I have all the MP3s. But all the tags got screwed up on everything, and I just went, fuck it. I'm done. This is a job for future generations.

Exactly. I was talking to one of my colleagues here, and she was saying that when she moved from the Middle East to the United States, she had her whole music library up in Apple, stored with Apple. And when she moved, Apple said, oh, no, you've moved countries too many times, and deleted it all.

Just gone. Wow. Just gone. Yeah. Now, I know, you know, the whole idea of having your own curated and stored music library is quaint these days, and Apple and the other platforms really want you to move away from that and just trust their massive streaming platforms.

And I've adopted the attitude of I'm not going to push back against that. I'm just, that's, it's easier to not fight that fight, I think. See, I still fight that fight every day. I've got, I have an Apple music library that is local on my computer, and I sync my phone to it.

And if there's something new, I get a copy of it. And then if it's on the streaming site, I don't feel bad about putting it on my phone because I pay for the streaming site. I just download the MP3s and put it on my phone the way God intended, with local file storage. So I have my entire library with me all the time.

I can play music when I don't have an internet connection, which is nice. And yeah, I still have mine. It's like a 250 gig library, like 28,000 songs or something in it. I'm not going to go away from that. I, like Brian, have been burned.

And I just, I, but I keep multiple copies of it that sync on multiple drives. I treat that like, you know, any top tier data product, like my photos and my music, all of those are, yeah, they're all synced and they're all spread out just in case, because I don't want to, I don't want to rely on streaming because every now and again, I want to hear Killing an Air by The Cure.

And that's the only way to do it. Yeah. There are some songs that just aren't anywhere else. I think, you know, if I didn't have a wife and a child, I would probably be more on board with this. I, I, I've resigned to the fact that getting my music collection back up and running is probably going to have to be an, an empty nester project when I'm very, you've got a few years to go.

Yeah. I got a, I got a ways to go. So yeah, that is right. Actually, that is on my horizon. But my horizon isn't much closer than yours, I guess, because it's some on the East Coast, but, um, yeah, I just, I just, you have to do a cost benefit analysis and see if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Is it, are you really going to listen to that stuff that much that it's worth going through and doing that? Well, that's the thing. I'm no longer in my twenties or thirties. I don't need the multiple live versions of Nine Inch Nails, uh, concerts from 1980 or 1992 anymore. Like I'm never going to go back and listen to that.

There are a few things that I've, I've searched for on streaming that wasn't around, uh, but they're so rare. Yeah. And odds are they're on YouTube. Yeah. And if, yeah, that's where I ended up finding them. So, you know, if I can't find it on, on Spotify, it will be on YouTube somewhere. So that's what I've done before.

But, uh, you know, who's, who's listening to music anyways? We're all listening to podcasts at this point. And Dave, mostly Dave's because they're, that's really the only option there is anymore. There's no choice. Yeah. You're just clogging up all the pipes. But I did find one podcast you aren't on, but I think you would be very interested in, and I've listened to all of it.

So I can, I can actually say that, yes, this is, this juice was worth the squeeze. It's a podcast called Keys to the Kingdom, Dave. I don't know if you've seen this one. It's an unprecedented eight part docuseries exploring the peculiar backstage life of theme park characters, performers, and fans. I have heard of this one, but no, I have not actually, uh, checked it out.

So I, yeah, so these are, uh, they both worked. They both grew up where I did in Orange County. They both worked at Disneyland and Universal and all these other places, because that's kind of what you do if you grow up down there. This guy, Matt Gourley, who is also involved with the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast and some other drunk history and things like that.

And his wife, Amanda Lund, who is the Erios co-founder, a complete woman and new girl podcast each. Um, yeah, they get into it. You know, the first one was about princesses, which is, uh, playing princesses and all that, which, you know, not really in my wheelhouse, but still interesting. But, uh, it went on from there and just, it was, uh, it was delightful.

It was a delightful podcast. That's fun. I'll have to check it out. And, uh, you know, I, I mentioned here before that my wife worked at the Disney studios, uh, back in the day. She was one of the, um, backstage studio tour, uh, tour guides and, and, uh, tram drivers.

Um, but she did get to spend one day as a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Nice. Because somebody didn't show up. Yeah. So she got to put the ninja, I don't remember which turtle she was, but she said it was miserable. It was miserable. It was so hot in that thing. And she was exhausted by the end of the day.

Yeah. They, they, they, they go into the rankings of, of what you play and the people that wear those costumes are the lowest ranked. Yeah. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So yeah, give it a listen, Jason, or Jason, Jason doesn't care. Give it a listen, Dave. You'll, I think you'll really enjoy it.

Well, speaking of which, uh, I'll, uh, call an audible here and recommend a podcast that I just started listening to. It's called What Went Wrong. And, uh, what went, I'll read you the description here. What Went Wrong covers Hollywood's most notoriously disastrous movie productions, digging into the behind the scenes insanity of everything from massive flops to record-breaking blockbusters.

Um, so, uh, uh, an old, uh, associate, colleague, whatever, acquaintance of mine, that's the word I'm looking for, uh, who's a Steadicam operator, uh, was in their most recent episode talking about his experience on Donnie Darko. Um, so, yeah.

So if you're, uh, into Hollywood stuff like I am, and you like some of this juicy behind the scenes kind of stuff, uh, check out What Went Wrong. Excellent. I'm definitely going to listen to this. Yeah. I want to thank you again, Dave, for the Strong Songs recommendation. I am addicted to that podcast.

That's so good. I just wish there were more of them. Me too. Yeah. I absolutely love it. It's just phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. And once again, might I recommend Schmackters with James Marsters and Mark Devine? Go to schmackters.com and download today.

Hit the mash that button, baby. Mash that button. Pretty please. Just saying. Just saying. I'm not sure what just happened, but okay. It's called a callback, Dave. It's called a callback. I see. Well, all right. Yeah. Got it. All right.

I actually have some interesting news here. In an effort to enhance subway safety, NYC Mayor Eric Adams has announced a new initiative involving AI-equipped metal detectors. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah. Can we all say it together? Oh, God.

Despite the ambitious comparison of the Apollo moon missions, early demonstrations have revealed a critical three-second delay in the system's response to detecting a gun, raising concerns about its effectiveness. You think? Yeah. Three, two, pow.

Ow. Okay. These advanced detectors, developed by Evolve, are designed to distinguish between guns and harmless metal objects like cell phones without slowing pedestrian flow. However, the practical application of the AI technology and its ability to accurately identify threats remain unclear because somebody did ask Evolve, so what's the AI in here?

And they're like, I don't know. Yeah. The marketing department sent that over. Yeah. So there's a 90-day evaluation period before they're deployed. But yeah. Again, what could go wrong? I mean, I don't see how this could practically work in a subway system like New York's especially.

You know what it reminds me of, what was the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger on Total Recall? I was thinking the exact same thing. I was thinking the same thing. Yes. And that would take care of your three-second problem. Exactly. If you had a little tunnel that you had to go through. Basically, a man trap, like a three-second man trap.

Right. Right. Yeah. So what could happen is, so you have, this is the worst lottery of all time. You're going through the tunnel and then somebody behind you is detected with a gun and then they lock you all in there. So then you're locked in. They contain the guy with the gun.

Sure. Except you're trapped in the box with the guy with the gun. Yeah. It has gone from a mass shooting event to a hostage negotiation in one go. I mean, this is brought to you by the efficiency of airport security.

Yeah. That's great. We've talked a lot about cell phone tracking and anonymized and de-anonymized data on the show. And this new investigation by Wired just had me tickled pink. Because a company formerly known as Near Intelligence and now Azira, basically what they did was they went back through their trove of data and they identified about 200 people going to and from Epstein's Island.

Right. I think they would have rebranded as Nearer to Intelligence. I want that list so bad. I want it incorporated into that game we were talking about last week. That would be so good. That's the, what is it, DLC.

That would be the ultimate DLC. This list is never, ever going to come out. So, yeah. I don't know. I mean, so you think about like, well, I talked about this on yesterday's Cyber Wire. Ben Yellen and I often talk about on Caveat, this whole thing about how easy it is to de-anonymize people, as we've talked about here.

If you know where someone works and you know where someone lives, you can figure out who that person is. So, with this thing, you know where the island is and then you track where they went. It's either their home or their office or eventually they're going there.

You figure out who they are and you come up with your list of people who are on the island. What I wonder and what I hope with Pollyanna optimism is that perhaps this could be the thing.

If we were to shine a light on the rich and powerful and not exclude them from this data tracking, could this be the thing that gets Congress to get off their asses and make some actual privacy legislation?

Same way that back in the 80s with the video rental stores caused, you know, somebody released the video rental. I wasn't a judge. Bjork was who was his video rental was released back in the 80s in Congress, but quick passed a law outlawing that.

But it took hitting the right people for that to happen. And I'm guessing that is the right person. Well, as sad as it is that in this case, the right people are the rich and the powerful who who pay visits to pedophile island. Maybe this could move the needle.

But on the other hand, there is what both of you said, that there's a decent chance that this data will never see the light of day. There is an extremely large amount of vested interest in this list not ever getting out that involves a fuck ton of money. Yeah. Yeah, this is going to get locked away in a vault with Ghislaine Maxwell's little black book.

It's not like we don't have this information. It's all out there. It's just never going to get released. Well, but I wonder, too, how diffuse is this information? How many people have bought and sold this information just as parts of big, giant piles of data? Yeah. This information must be in a bunch of piles.

It's just a matter of somebody going through it and doing the correlation. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And then they disappear completely forever. Right. Oh, man. It's so dark and so frustrating. Yep.

Frustrating. Yes. Frustrating is the word. Yeah. But I like your optimism, Dave. I hope someday that you'll be proven right. I don't expect to live to see that day, but maybe it will come. No, me neither. We'll see. Yeah. So while in the couple of weeks that I was away, I was thinking about something.

I don't remember the exact thing that caused me to kind of sit and percolate on this, but I thought it'd be worth talking about here. And it is the I refer to this as on the on the wisdom of keeping your mouth fucking shut.

I was going to say perhaps a conversation with your wife, because that's what makes me think about that. Actually, no, you know what? Actually, no, I now that I'm saying it, I do remember what caused me to say it. And it was it was a conversation with someone who is near and dear to me.

And it was about music and about taste in music. And someone was saying, I really want you to listen to this because I think you'll really enjoy it. And I did. And I absolutely hated it. But I didn't say that. What I said was, you know, when it comes to art, there is no right or wrong.

Art is what moves the individual. If it has meaning to you, like Duke Ellington said, if it sounds good, it is good. And so at no point did I say to this person, I hate this and I never want to listen to it again, which was my honest reaction to it.

Most people feel that way about Nickelback. Don't worry. So, but it got me thinking about how I think as we get older, hopefully, I think for many of us, this is a bit of wisdom that only comes with time and suffering.

Learning to keep your mouth shut and to just smile and nod when someone is either saying something that is really stupid or trying to bait you into some kind of conversation you don't want to be in or trying to get you riled up or trying to insult you of just the wisdom of not engaging.

So you're talking about the Internet in general? Well, I'm talking about the Internet in general. Yeah. I mean, there is that. That's really it, right? Like you can engage when somebody comes at you or not. And the Internet is just kind of built for that. Just that's me.

That's me on social networks. Keeping my mouth fucking shut. The other thing, though, I was thinking along with this was I think with this attitude comes a certain amount of privilege, which is the privilege of being able to have – to keep your mouth shut.

Right. Without serious consequence. And I want to be clear that when I'm talking about keeping your mouth shut, I don't mean not standing up for the weak and the vulnerable when keeping – when standing up for them could make a difference.

And by using your position, your privilege, your – you know, in my case, my middle-aged white maleness to defend someone, that is not what I'm talking about here of smiling and nodding and allowing someone to beat up on someone else and just minding my own business.

You're talking about does this make my ass look fat situations? Maybe. No, but – well, so here – no, no, no. So here's an example. Let's say – okay.

So there was – there's an anecdote I think I've shared on the show before where someone had recently bought a iMac Pro. And they bought an iMac Pro that was maxed out with the maximum amount of RAM that you could get in this thing. Okay.

And I'm just going to make up a number here and say that it was 128 gigabytes of RAM. I don't know if that's the actual number. It doesn't matter for the purposes of my story. The person who bought this computer posted on social media and said, I just bought an iMac Pro with 128 gigabytes of RAM.

That's more than the Apple 2 Plus. More than every Apple 2 Plus combined. Okay. Right. So the total number of Apple 2 Pluses sold, which maxed out at 64K, I believe, you know, times whatever was less than this 128 gigabytes of RAM that was in this single computer.

Right. So I shared that anecdote with someone and that person, rather than saying, oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's funny. Oh, how – oh, my gosh. What a great story. Immediately started doing the math. Yeah. Yeah. Right?

And I'm like, just shut the fuck up. But Dave, we wouldn't have a show. I know. This is exactly what we do. I literally do pull out a calculator sometimes and go, let's run through the math. I was doing the math in my head as soon as you were telling the story.

Well, gentlemen, gentlemen, shut the fuck up. All right. Well, it's been nice talking to you, Dave. We will not be back next week. But do you understand what I'm getting – so using that illustration, do you understand what I'm getting at?

Like, sometimes, let the person have their fun story. You do not need to challenge it. You do not need to dissect it. If you want to check the math, check the math afterwards and feel good about yourself for knowing the truth. But there are just so many people.

That's part of their personality. That's who they are. It's like the first people. The people that always have – first! Why? What? Who cares? Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree with you. And, yeah, there's a – boy, they can be frustrating.

But then again, that's also what we do. All right. It's frustrating when they do it. When we do it, it's entertaining. Yes, when I do it. When we do it, it's art. That's right. There you go. All right. You're right. Well, last but not least, I have a link here to something that has been taking up way too much of my attention that I cannot believe that I have come this far without knowing about.

And this is a series of Star Wars shorts that some Star Wars fans made with the Unreal Engine. And these are – mostly they follow a couple of stormtroopers. One who is brand new, right out of the academy, and one who is a grizzled veteran who's got 20 years in and just wants to get to his 20 years so he can retire.

And it is the interpersonal – Well, technically, stormtroopers haven't really been around for 20 years. So it's just going to run the math here. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. I mean, he would have been a clone at that point.

Oh, my God. So anyway, Jason. So for the same reason that, you know, some of these recent series, Star Wars series have been fun because they give you a view into the behind the scenes of how the Empire runs.

This is mostly about these two stormtroopers who are just trying to make it through their day, and they insert them into some behind the scenes of some scenes we know from the movies. And they are very funny. They're very well-written and well-acted. And so, Brian, I know you will laugh out loud at some of these.

And Jason probably used to. I've watched one or two. They're phenomenal. So I didn't realize there were as many as there are, so I'm going to have to go through and see some of the rest of them. They're great. Yeah, they're really funny. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. And everybody, enjoy that.

And don't question, you know. Please write in with any nitpicks you have about this segment in general. There you go. Yes. Yes, we love them. This is like the purge, but for pedantic motherfuckers. That's it. We give you one day.

You get one email. That's it. Right. How do you spell pedantic? With dick. Yeah. Maybe we need to rename the show, like, Quiet Old Geeks.

Nah, that wouldn't work. Well-medicated old geeks. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Sedated old geeks. All right. Thanks, everybody. Okay. Have fun. Closing shout-outs!

Over at Patreon, we've got Luke, P, and Benjamin with a big 20 bucks. Woo-hoo! Welcome, folks. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal, we've got David, Charlie, Simon, and Haway. Over at the tip jar, we've got Josh, Daryl, and Adam. Thanks, everybody, for keeping the show going.

And just a reminder, if you want to head on over to Patreon, you, too, can help to support the show for $3 a month, minimum. But you can pay more, like Benjamin did. Be like Benjamin. Then you get the show a little bit early and ad-free. Oh, yeah. Hi-res, too. Woo-hoo! That's right. And we have a new five-star review, Tax Season Sanity.

Love your podcast. My views greatly differ on many of your views, but this is a great podcast to listen and broaden my own points of view while understanding others. Love all the info and news I learned about that I would otherwise have to research myself. Keep on grumping. Well, thanks so much. I'm glad that that's exactly what this should be for, instead of shutting the fuck up.

Right? And belated birthday wishes to friend of the show, Chen. Yes, happy birthday. I've actually been chatting with her because she had watched. Dune and Dune 2 and then read Dune, and then she wrote me to talk about the Dune reading strategies, how far should she go, blah, blah, blah.

That's important. I didn't even realize it was her birthday, so happy birthday. Happy birthday. And sad news, Louis Gossett Jr., the first black man to win supporting Oscar, supporting actor Oscar, has died at 87. Now, my first Louis Gossett Jr. movie was Iron Eagle.

Fantastic movie. Still has legs. Was he Enemy Mine? Was that him? I believe so. I think that might have been my first Louis Gossett Jr. movie, if that was him. I think it was, too. I think it was. Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr., right? I think. I never saw Enemy Mine, but I remember seeing little bits and pieces here and there.

Yeah. It was him. Yes, correct. Okay. Yeah. Iron Eagle was a classic on HBO when I was a kid. They were running it all the time. And then I was surprised to find out later that David Suchet of Hercule Poirot fame played the evil dictator or military commander in it.

I think it's that they're going to try and blow up because the kid's dad was taken prisoner. He learns how to fly a fighter jet. It's a great 80s movie. Sounds like it. I don't think I saw that one. And it's got Queen in the soundtrack. Come on. Well, there you go. Can't go wrong. Wasn't it mandated that all 80s movies had a Queen song in their soundtrack?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, Highlander was all Queen, so they hit the jackpot. But there is some Dio in Iron Eagle as well, so can't go wrong with that. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 624.

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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 we can read on the air. Stay grumpy. But polite and silent. Shut the fuck up.