65: Not Your Parents Sex Toy

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. Hello, Brian.

Hello, Jason. How are you? My brain is fried. I've read over a thousand articles researching this week's episode. Yes, you've been a very busy boy. There's an awful lot of stuff in our little show notes here. I've been very busy as well, but not reading articles. It's been an insane week, and I literally have my suitcase right next to me and my computer bag ready to go, so as soon as we're done recording, I just throw it in the bag, and I'm off to the airport. So, hello, Toronto.

Woo-hoo. All right, so let's get started here. Okay. So, now, this week, we're going to start off with something a little different here, and if you're not into the, how shall we say, the technology of self-love, you may want to skip ahead about five or ten minutes here.

Right. Now, I'm not one for insider baseball on these podcasts, but I do want to make one quick note here, Jason. Go for it. You know, as part of our process of trying to figure out a way to kind of reach a larger audience and kind of keep this whole grumpy old geeks thing rolling, we've read it all of our bumpers and took out the naughty words.

Yes. So, the first segment that you've put together with these new cleaner bumpers is all about how to get your iPhone to jack you off. But, you know, we don't have to use any naughty language here. This is, you know, like I said, it's the technology of self-love.

Fair enough. I mean, this is a topic that is, you know, as you and I both remember in the wild, wild west days of the internet, and basically all technology, it has always been the adult industry that has kind of blazed the trails, so to speak. Yeah. And in the news this week, Fleshlight, the makers of the, you know, covert wanking apparati.

I don't think there's anything covert about that. That thing's huge. Well, I guess it depends on your man. So, they came out with an iPad accessory, which is indistinguishable from duct tape, which you strap on the back of your iPad and give her a go.

Right. Yes. And, you know, it's made the rounds. People are just like, oh, that's kind of, it's not very high tech. You know, granted, like I said, it's indistinguishable from duct tape. Well, you know, at the end of the day, when you're interfacing between tech and wetware, as it were, it's not going to look that high tech.

It's kind of scary looking, actually. Yeah, it kind of is. We will not have pictures in the show notes. You can go out on your own to find that. Yes. But so, what I want to kind of discuss is, in this mass market of, the emerging market of wearables, is there a mass market for, shall we say, to be kid-friendly, effables?

Effables. Okay. I mean, we're not going to see sex kit from Apple anytime soon, because, you know, they're puritanical. Exactly. So, with doing my research on this, and, you know, being in that, tickled in that business every now and again, I have a fairly deep understanding of where the market is.

Except, nowadays, you can Kickstarter something that you build at home that you can wank with. We saw the recent introduction of the Autoblow 2, which was, I think it was Indiegogo'd.

So, it was totally crowdfunded. Blue passed their remark. Sorry about that. I do have to say that, of all the products out there, this is the best name I've ever seen. Yes. And there is an original Autoblow, but that was at roboticblowjob.com.

I think I might wait for Autoblow 3. Get the kinks out, as it were. Ooh. Oh, see what I did there. No. Unfortunately, I did. Vice did a really good job of covering this guy who created it and all of the technology behind it. And, sadly, if you do go to the Autoblow2.com website, you will see some very explicit videos where they have a clear version.

So, you can see how it works on a real dude in real time, which is not for the faint of heart. And I'm forewarned, you cannot unsee it. I just scrolled down. That was a mistake. You don't have to do that. Actually, I really enjoyed the Vice article with this guy.

He was very funny. He does not take it seriously at all. But he is aware of an emerging market, as it were. And he is – there is – I believe there is a market for this. I mean, he got funded. There's definitely a market for this.

And he's really good at salesmanship because if you do go to the site right now, this is – we're recording this the day before Independence Day, the 4th of July. There's a little banner across the top saying, celebrate Independence by doing it yourself. And they're offering a coupon. I like the dude.

I totally like the dude. He's got personality and he's funny and he knows exactly what he's doing. And that's most of the people that you meet in that industry, I got to say. They've all got personality and they're all like, screw it. I don't care. And this is not the first one. They've been around in different configurations and levels of complexity.

The most complex one that was out, oh, I guess maybe about six or seven years I think was the RealTouch. I remember that from ages and ages ago. Yeah. Sadly, they just went out of business in January. Apparently, they used some – they licensed some patented technology and they couldn't get the license renewed.

So they could sell the ones that they had left. But their video service is still online. And the differentiator between the RealTouch and the Autoblow or any of the other self-jerking machines is that you watch a video and the motion in the machine matches the girl on the screen.

I don't think that's really required. They totally overthought it. You show guys a picture of like a football and they're like, oh, I'm done. OK. It doesn't really matter. You really don't have to go that far. And it was pay-per-view.

So it's like you had to buy it in an hour blocks in probably two-minute increments. Yeah. That's always the thing. Nobody needs an hour. Well, that's why phone sex lines were always so expensive because they looked at their numbers and it's like, guys are getting on here. They talked to a girl and they're gone in 60 seconds.

Isn't that a movie? Yes, it is. OK. And so I don't know. So just going back into it, I was like, oh, what else is out there? Because for guys, there's really not a whole lot. For women, vibrators are de rigueur. Everybody's got one.

Everybody jokes about it. And you expect every woman to – when you see a woman at Juul with a – Juul is our local grocery store – with a 30-pack of D batteries and you're like, ah, I know what she's doing tonight. But for guys, it hasn't really – like the technology hasn't really hit.

So this is interesting that we're now getting into – now it's like the maker world. So everybody is going to be home. And for women, they've been doing this for a while. So to keep with the kid-friendly language, there's the effing machines for the ladies.

And you can go – there's a full website. They make tons of stuff, tons of stuff. And I saw them demonstrated at Ars Electronica. The guys from Monochrome in Austria do it, Johannes and those guys in there. It was really fun. I went to it.

I watched a girl get banged by a robot. And Jake Applebaum, who had basically a chainsaw with tongues on it, slapped it on her little man in the rowboat and she had a good old time. Well, first off, Ars Electronica really should be an industrial band.

That is a fantastic name for like a German hardcore band. Well, these guys are from Austria. So yeah, it's close enough. So I want some music too. Secondly, I briefly looked at the F Machines link that you put in there because briefly is really all you need. If I met a woman that owned one of these things, I would be so intimidated for the rest of my life.

I would be like, hey, I can watch football on Sundays and not have to be bothered. Well, I guess there's that factor too. There's always that. And you can actually buy – not replicas but the same kind of device. It's just basically a piston with a dildo on it on Amazon. Right.

You can go to Amazon.com and buy one of these for your lady for Valentine's Day if you're going to be out of town say. Okay. And I think it's funny. I posted a link in the show notes from Wired from the Ars Electronica I went to and they have a picture of Jake Applebaum up there with – like in leather and with the chainsaw of tongues, whatever that was called.

I forget the name of the damn thing. But he got this girl off and was happy as a clam about it. And this was when he was like the – well, he was like the network engineer at kink.com. Jake Applebaum has kind of moved on from that. I don't know if you're familiar with what he does now.

But he is basically the – like the US spokesperson for WikiLeaks. Yeah, a bit of a change. Major privacy advocate. He's wanted by everybody. Like they track him and listen to his phone and he can't get through an airport.

If you're on his contact list, you're screwed. He's turned into an interesting – well, he was always an interesting dude. But his dad was murdered once. Well, I guess that's all it takes is once. Yeah, it's usually one time, does it? And he went on vacation in Iraq during the war. Like you do. He's a crazy adventurous dude.

I used to know him up in San Francisco and I dug him. He was a character. I'll give you that. Yeah. And kind of the last one that was around this week. That's why there's a whole theme this week. I noticed, yes. I effing love science. They had an article about an automatic sperm extractor in a Chinese hospital.

And just because this is – I'm telling you, this is a fad. It broke their website. They got so much traffic to this article. Well, you know, ClickFarms and of course that's going to get a lot of links these days. But yeah, that was a little creepy. I mean I thought this stuff had been around for ages. Don't we use this with livestock?

Well, yeah. Okay. Just checking. Yeah. I'm pretty sure we do. Hopefully not the same one. Well, not the same one that you – well, hopefully not the same one they used to milk the cow to milk the cow. But the one that's in the Chinese hospital is actually a model that you can – in doing my research, I've found on regular sites that you can buy for home use.

Right. Right. The exact same model. But they had it out in the lobby. So I'm really hoping that they don't force you to drop trow and stick it in the lobby while you're waiting around in the waiting room. Gosh, that would be horrible. Do not go to that hospital. That's the only hospital I'd want to go to less than the one in Grey's Anatomy because if you ever have a problem and you go to that hospital, you're going to die.

Die before the next commercial break? Exactly. Yeah. All those dreamy doctors can't do anything for you. So after I got hit with your deluge of vaguely kind of sex item stuff, as I was surfing about this week, I did see that there are a couple stories that have popped up on kind of the more political gender issue stuff that kind of relates to a certain extent.

Apparently, there's this crazy online group started up on Reddit the past couple of weeks called Red Pill, and it's very angry men who resent women for withholding sex. And, I mean, this has always been there. I just think that there's a lot of angry guys out there that aren't getting what they want and think that they basically deserve something from other people, and I don't think that's the way the world works.

And I find it's kind of a – it's a feedback loop with these guys because once they say something and they get egged on by other guys, it just builds and builds and builds and gets kind of frightening. There's a decent article in Salon that talks about it a little bit. It's worth a read.

It's a little scary. Again, a lot of this I also see as kind of a generational divide to a certain extent. The guys now in their late 20s, 30s, 40s who have this money that are in the tech industry that are making money and doing well for themselves.

It wasn't easy for us to get sex when we were growing up, and it probably still isn't because they probably don't have the best social skills. We were taught we had to work for the attention of the ladies, and we had to impress them. And so these guys went out, and they worked hard, and they achieved, and now they're going, well, why am I not having the easy access that all these – this hookup culture that's going on for the teens and the early 20s are?

So they're pissed off. Yeah, and here's what they forgot to factor into the be successful and all that. Not be a fucking douchebag. Yeah, don't be a douchebag about it. And just because you're successful doesn't mean you flipped a switch now and you just get things. You don't. You got to be nice. It really does come down to be nice.

Be human, be human. Be human or buy one of these damn machines then. Exactly. Scroll up. We should find some affiliate links so we can make some money from these guys because if nothing else, I'd like to take their money if I can't beat them into sensefulness. I mean, and it's funny. You look back. Little Rascals, the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

This is like the umpteenth generation of it. But these guys are just kind of lost souls and angry. They really are. They're really just like horrible, horrible people. Yeah, it's some frightening stuff. And apparently one of the guys that founded Tinder or the guys that founded Tinder are pretty much right in that group.

There's some really interesting articles coming out now about those guys and how they're basically women haters and basically started Tinder just to be able to bang the hell out of chicks and to hell with them. So there's another article. This is the New York Magazine, which is also in our show links at clumpyoldgeeks.com, where a woman started to basically talk a little bit about Tinder and how can we stop pretending that it's actually good for women.

I don't really understand how it ever was. Now, I'm not judging. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a woman who wants to just basically hook up with someone and have a night of fun and that's that. Great. That's awesome. Everybody, you know, if you're into that, do it by all means. There's no judging here.

But everybody that I've ever talked to ever, especially every single guy, has never called Tinder a dating app. It's always just been a hookup app. Yeah, it's a hookup. And that's how people referred to it as. So this entire article is almost coming from this crazy premise that it's some sort of dating app.

It's not. It's about looks. It's quick response. Usually when you're drunk, there's no information about the people. You don't learn anything about them. This is totally just, let's hook up. I'm at the bar. It's closing. And everybody in here is uglier than this guy on my phone. End of story. You want serious dating, you go to eHarmony or Match or something like that.

You go to eHarmony if you're Christian and right wing. Isn't that Christianmingle.com? I don't know. Yeah, no, eHarmony was the first one to be on the douchey block. If you're an atheist or gay, forget it. Just forget them. I don't know. I'm only on FarmersOnly.com.

This is the group of DTF apps. Yeah, that's all it is. So I don't understand who was pretending that Tinder is good for women. Well, actually, there's almost a reverse feminism in play here because it does kind of assume that women only want to date. Some women do just want to hook up. I've seen women really enjoying Tinder at the bar and like, oh, this guy is really hot.

I've got to send a message. Whatever. It is what it is. Call it what it is. Don't pretend that it's anything more than what it is. So in closing, I would just like to say that with the maker revolution, I would like to see a renaissance of teledildonics. Yeah. And let's get these things network enabled.

Forget the wired home. You know, get your wired junk on. That's it. Okay. So in a little follow-up, remember good old Ann Coulter last week? Oh, do I? Yes. Yeah. Man, everywhere I go, people are bitching about her.

But, you know, and everybody kind of agrees she's just a professional troll. Yeah, but one of the worst things that you can ever possibly do, I mean, granted it probably worked for her. I think this one might have backfired a little bit. But when all of a sudden the country was getting behind our team, and then they played their hearts out in a big game, and then you just say, hey, by the way, these guys suck.

No, no, no, no. Bad move. So the U.S.-Portugal game was the most watched soccer match ever on U.S. TV, higher than any of the NBA finals, and higher than the average of the 2013 World Series. Yep. It's got amazing ratings.

People were well into it. You know, I was out for the game against Belgium, which was on Tuesday, and it was on Tuesday at 1 p.m. here in Los Angeles and at 4 p.m. on the East Coast. So people were supposed to still be at work. The entire Main Street, every single bar packed.

Packed. Oh, yeah. And people were watching the game, and that's amazing, and I'm really happy about that. So people are getting into it. The only problem with this is, of course, it's going to be four years until there's an event of this magnitude again, and people do tend to lose interest. But hopefully they don't, and they keep building, because I just love the sport, and I'm really, really happy to see America doing as well as they did.

So, yeah, I work – like I freelance for probably a 220-person ad agency out in L.A. Yeah. And at about 8 in the morning on – was it Wednesday was the game? Yeah, Tuesday. Tuesday. Sorry, Tuesday. I get an email, a company-wide email, and there's like – they usually have after work on Thursdays.

They have like a little drinking thing for everybody. They're like, nope, we're moving this to Wednesday. Everybody in the company all meet in the kitchen. We're watching the game. Right. So the whole company got a pass. They brought in booze and tequila. He specifically mentioned tequila, so I'm like, eh, it's a good agency I guess.

So it's definitely a thing. And just go stuff it. Now, this last one I got just for a little bit of follow-up. We talked about the robot journalism a while back. And there's an article in GigaOM this week why they should – why journalists should be celebrating the rise of robot journalism.

And it's like, OK, well, this offsets some of the grunt work that we have to do. So we can go focus on real journalism, the stuff that we went to college for and long-form stuff. Yeah, but there's no market for long-form journalism anymore. Well, what their argument is is that there will be because you'll be – your time will be freed up from doing the – just the statistical grunt work articles and all that crap.

But companies generally are like, well, no. I can just save the money by not having people here and keep my long-form journalism exactly as it was with this little 2 percent of the pot pile and go do that. Thinking that, oh, no, that the wealth will rise up and give everybody more jobs.

I think their logic is flawed there. Yeah, this is trickle-down economics as the Republicans, which we know doesn't work. This is – like the X-Files, I want to believe this, but we know it's not going to. They're not going to be hiring on more people to do long-form journalism.

They'll keep the few people that they have. And let's be honest here. We all know click rates and we know how long people stay on pages and we can track how far people read into stories and there's just not enough demand for it. If we want this to happen, start fucking reading, people.

Yeah. That's about it. But I just think it's misguided. She's totally misguided. Yeah, this is – She doesn't get it. This is a bullshit article. I don't like it. I don't like you. I don't – I think you're wrong. It was making the rounds through the ranks, so I thought I'd bring it up.

Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. There you go. So in closing, again, now we – so I read an article that statistically states that men in a committed relationship masturbate far more than single men.

So I would just like to leave everybody with Brian has to be the bigger wanker on our show because he's married and I'm single. So just leaving you with that. Yeah, but that assumes that the single guys are going out there and chasing it and I know you're just staying at home, researching until it is long. Eh.

Eh.

Comment of the week. Our comment of the week comes from our website from Regia or Regia, something like that. Regia. So he has a little snarky comment about our intro last week where it says, work is dried up. The work is out there.

Okie doke. I think we were – it was fairly confusing I think on our part. So Brian, would you like to clarify your statements on the work is dried up and the work is out there? Sure. No problem. I actually don't consider it to be all that confusing because there's a difference between macro and micro.

Macro economics, we're still in a recession. Bigger jobs have dried up. Entire markets have been completely decimated. And in general, as a smaller company or contractor, you're going up against larger companies or other contractors completely willing to underbid you and drive down your markets either as – so they – the larger companies are a loss leader to lock up a client or the smaller contractors out of complete and utter desperation.

And then there's micro. And I was specifically talking in our intro of last week's episode about a specific case scenario, which is people out there that are trying to get a start in a new industry, that are trying to build up experience.

In our case specifically, I was talking about voiceover actors as we were trying to get some to do our thing. And people who are – I have many actor friends here who basically have no work, and I was offering them a little bit of work to help them pad their resume.

There are tons of jobs like that everywhere. I mean all the time. There's no lack of work for you to have for a friend that you will basically get paid next to nothing for, but you can build up experience. And if you're in a situation where you're trying to get a start in a new industry, that makes sense, and you should never say no to those types of situations because you need the experience.

Okay. Makes sense? See the differentiation between the larger and the smaller situations? I completely understand. At least that's where I was going, so I apologize if I didn't make that clearer enough, but I was definitely ranting specifically about that sort of thing. So it's the same with my industry, Jason, with web stuff.

There's no lack of smaller gigs out there I could be picking up, but they're tiny. They're not well-paid, and they're for smaller friends, family, and people. And as you and I have talked about many times on this episode, those gigs are the absolute worst. They become complete and utter nightmares and end up costing you way more time and effort than you ever thought you would ever put in, and we get no money from them.

And you and I have been doing this for so long that we shouldn't have to take those gigs. We've got a lot of experience, but there are very few gigs out there that are commensurate with our experience and the kind of pay grade that we're at. It's easy to find gigs, hard to have a career. Well, thank you for clearing that up.

No problem.

Now, do we call this latest Facebook scandal Facebook Ultra or MK News Feed? I like Facebook Ultra, but it sounds like a crappy app they're about to put out that does nothing. So we'll go with MK News Feed?

Sure. Let's do that one. Okay. So if you don't know what we're talking about, back in the 60s and 70s, I think, well, maybe it ended in the 60s. Project MK Ultra was like a CIA mind control experiment where they dosed people with things like LSD who did not know they were being dosed and saw how they reacted and took notes.

Yeah. There's also a really crappy movie about it with George Clooney. I'll skip that one. So, yeah, the big news this week was the Facebook experiment where they, you know, tweak the settings a little in their algorithm. So to see if happy people were more happy if they saw happy stories, more sad if they saw sad stories.

Okay. We know this happens, right? The big kerfuffle now is that it's public. Yeah, because a lot of people – one of the first things that came out was people just saying, well, this is normal for a company. They always do A-B testing, but they keep it private and they keep their results private to make a better product.

And interestingly enough, as this whole thing has played out over the week, a lot of the sponsored ads in my news feed on Facebook have name-checked A-B testing. I'm wondering if they're sticking that in there now on purpose. Very well could be. And the points that have been coming out are very interesting because – and this one I haven't done as much fact-checking on because I only saw it in one article that the Army co-sponsored this study.

Yeah. I haven't found anybody else talking about that, but it was in one specific piece. But they may have actually read the paper and saw that it was sponsored by them, but I can't confirm that one. The other thing that came out was they got permission to do this research in their – well, they put the permission that we granted them in their terms of service four months after the study.

So technically they were in breach of their own terms of service. That's not good. And last night I found one from the Wall Street Journal that interviews a couple of the ex-Facebook researchers and they're like, yeah, we kind of did what we wanted. We didn't really have any oversight at all and we just would play around with stuff, which for a researcher, that's one of the biggest sandboxes – I mean it is the biggest sandbox.

Yeah, there's nothing bigger than that. Of social interaction ever made. So I can see the allure, you know. Yeah. But I think what it really does come down to – and this kind of comes from Dana Boyd's piece on Medium that she just posted, which was an excellent piece.

It really kind of rounds up the whole topic. But it's more about now that it's in our face and we see what they're doing and they're publishing about it, it's like our discomfort with big data in general and what these companies are doing to manipulate us. So even though we know they're manipulating us, now it's like, OK, here's the proof and here's what they're doing.

And that's like really where the outrage comes from. Yeah, and understandably so. I mean I've got more than a few thoughts about this whole thing. But just based on that point, Facebook is playing a bit of a dangerous game for themselves right now because 99% of Facebook's future is kind of based on users' trust.

And they've definitely been dicking around with that an awful lot over the last couple of years. Over their entire lifetime. Yeah, over their entire lifetime. But this one is the most flagrant and this one is going to be, I think, we're going to look back as a tipping point. And Facebook is either going to reel themselves in and realize that they're nothing without the users.

And right now they can get away with it because they're the only game in town and they've got critical mass. But they keep up with this. We've talked a long time about how there's a market for another version of Facebook that plays nice with their users. And I don't doubt right now that there are a bunch of people thinking the same thing and starting to build up something.

Well, I hope so. But in looking at this and reading all of the news about it, it really just kind of puts into perspective how big of a machine Facebook is. Like how they handle all this data. You can't just go and rent an EC2 instance off Amazon and hack together something that is going to even remotely compete.

You have to have huge infrastructure just to even handle a million users. And they're in the billions now. So it's not a small task. But start small. Have a better proposition for the people and work your way up. But it's one of those things that's like, yeah, they're the only game in town now.

So they can just say, yeah, whatever. Deal with it. Yeah. No, I agree. Or they can be more proactive. Again, the reality is there are two sides to this. The number one is it's a free service. And you get what you pay for.

They're willing to do whatever – I mean they're welcome to do whatever the hell they want with our feeds. And they've made that clear over the years by keeping changing them. And this is just the first time that they've come out and basically used scientific methods and research methodology and admitted to it.

They have published several research papers, but it's mostly around the computer science side of it, how they do what they do. Yeah, I mean actual emotional manipulation, which is what they did this time around. So it's a bit weird. I went to school and got a degree in psychology.

And one of the things that we did is we were tasked with coming up with experiments, and I did one very similar to this. There wasn't Facebook or anything like that at the time. And certainly that's the other thing is just these billions of users is a researcher's wet dream. You cannot imagine what people are salivating to try out on all of us here.

But I did an experiment where I played people two different types of music. I played them like industrial angry stuff for like a minute or they listened to classical, and then you run them through a series of questions that basically you figure out their mood. Are they more anxious? Are they more angry? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's basically what Facebook did on a much wider scale by manipulating our news feeds. What we have to do, though, when you're in the scientific realm is we have to actually have ethics about these sorts of things. Yes. And inform our subjects what we're doing, and they have to agree to be a part of the study.

Now, obviously, there's some misdirection involved because you don't want to taint the study. But at the very least, they have agreed to become a part of a study. I would be completely fine with Facebook having done this if at some point when you logged in, a little window popped up and Facebook just said, you're in the process of doing a few different experimental psychological research studies.

Do you agree to be a part of this or not? And thousands upon thousands upon thousands of millions of people would probably just say yes. But it doesn't have to be what it's about. You don't even have to specify that. Just say, are you willing for a period of four months to be a part of a study?

Here's the problem. They did do that. It's called the updated terms of service. And you agreed to it. Yeah. So there's your button right there. But you know that's bullshit. Hang on, hang on. If they say you want to be part of a study, it could taint the results because then everything they do is not going to be natural.

And here's the other one is the experiment that they did where they kicked off like two million users and said, oh, we think you're a robot. Right. Would you please re-up? And they knew full well that these people weren't robots. It was just an experiment to see if people would fight against it, come back, do whatever.

Yeah. That was an experiment. They knew full well that these people weren't robots. You know, shit like that just drives me mad. Yeah. No, I agree. But this has definitely got everybody up in arms and it's going to be interesting. One of the things that I actually wanted to talk about more on this particular episode but we had to kind of can it because I just couldn't do the research is I have a firm belief that people just don't care.

And I think that there's a lot of sturm and dring right now about Facebook having done this to us. And I'm hoping that this will cause some changes and people will not forget. But I'm more realistic in the thought that in about two months this will have completely blown over. We'll see.

We'll see how it goes. We'll see how many people they lose out of it or what the – if there's a Facebook group for complaining about it. Right. Which is – always makes me scratch my head. But yeah, here's the deal. Get off of it and then send them a letter or just don't use them.

I mean the problem is here. They're a public company. They have to increase profits. Yeah. They are beholden to the shareholder now. You're not the shareholder. But if you are a shareholder, then you should know better than to get on Facebook. And fair enough, straight up, right away, if you know how to manipulate emotional feelings in your users, you can get better ad results.

End of story. So this is going to make them money. This research will make them more money. Yeah. Here, down the line. I'm brand A. I want to put an ad on but I only – I want to set the emotional slider for – OK, I only want to advertise – if I have a feel-good product, I only want to advertise to people who are in a crappy mood.

So do they then show more crappiness to the user in their news feed just so I can get more ads placed just because they have that inventory? When does the emotional slider come in to changing people's emotions just to be able to publish a single ad that somebody paid for based on that criteria?

Yeah. I mean, look at this. I'll just give you a dead easy example from my world, which is music marketing. So I am going to pay to promote an ad on Facebook because that's the only way I can get anybody to look at it anymore. Say one of my bands is going out on tour and I want to promote the tour dates.

So first, I already have the sliders to do location. So I can target things for specific shows in specific areas. Now they add a slider saying mood and then they give me a couple different options. If I know a user is in a good mood and the band that I'm working for has a very popular happy song, I will put that happy song on my ad for the tour.

If I know they're in a bad mood and then the band has an angry song, I'll stick that one on the ad instead. It will be more effective. Exactly. How long until that happens, you think? I don't think it's going to be that long. I don't think it will be that long. If there's no outrage coming from their users for this, then they have carte blanche to keep going with it.

Yeah, and it would be incredibly useful for me. Well, then you're part of the damn problem. Well, yeah. But this is the whole bigger argument that we're going to have to start to get into. And this is why I didn't get to read all of Dana Boyd's article. But data manipulation is going to be a huge issue.

I mean, I was even thinking about that just this morning because I was watching the Today Show, as I've mentioned before, which I just kind of do in the morning. And they were talking again about that idiot guy that was researching how long a kid has to be in a car in heat before the kid will die.

And that happened. And now he's on trial. And I was just thinking how creepy it is that – I mean, it's good in this case because they're going to be able to grab this guy. But the ability to just go back and find out everything that you've done online after you've been caught or even not caught, just maybe it's a false claim against you and somebody starts an investigation against you that isn't even correct.

The amount of data that anybody can get about you that is just being saved everywhere, it's starting to freak people out. And it's a weird thing that we're just going to have to deal with because right now, the way we're going, this is the reality. Everything that you do online is known.

Absolutely. And can now be fucked with. And so does – this is my last point on this Facebook thing. I don't want to beat it to death. But let's say they're using me for data research. Yeah. They want to take everything that I've deleted off of Facebook and see if there's a pattern to it.

So does that give them the right to keep all of the stuff that I've actually deleted, which I wholeheartedly believe they do anyway. Keep all that stuff and then run pattern matching against that and then craft an experience for me based on the things that I've already gotten rid of.

Does that give them the right to do that just because they say we can use your data for research purposes? Yeah. And that brings up a whole other can of worms, which is deleting is no longer deleting, and it should be. So I don't know. It's such a strange world that we're heading into.

And on the technical side of deleting, they've got so many systems, and this stuff is mirrored across so many drives and computers and archives and tape backups. You can't delete everything anymore. No, it's impossible. Even if you jump through the hoops to get your Facebook account technically deleted, I'm sure that stuff is always going to be there.

And somebody with a subpoena can go find it. Yeah. So. Okay, enough of Facebook. All right, moving on. So. I think we both actually posted this one to the show notes. It's the pitchforks are coming for us plutocrats. Yeah, this was a good article.

It's definitely, you know, I think it's something that you and I have been saying for quite a while, but I like it coming from somebody who is actually a, you know, a Silicon Valley gazillionaire. Okay. Well, the article is from Nick Hanauer. Yeah. Who is a, he's basically an Amazon gazillionaire.

He'd be invested in Bezos early. Yeah. And then, you know, ran with it and is now worth a bloody fortune. He calls himself a zillionaire. Yeah. And he's. Two of my fellow zillionaires. Yeah. The whole thing is about, you know, how people need to wise up and share the wealth or we're going to be coming after them.

Yeah. Us po-folk are going to be coming after them, which seems to be the way things are tipping because every day there's a little bit more and more just animosity. You know, people are fighting. People are fighting for more. There seems to be give and take. You know, it's like it is a push and a pull.

But if everybody, all the zillionaires jumped on this theory that is like, okay, let's pay people a living wage, like more than a living wage, and it will come back to us. It will mean more business and we'll just get richer. Yeah. But, you know, trying to change the minds of all the people with all the money, this is a tough sell.

It's an attempt to trickle down, which doesn't work. You got to pay the bottom up. You can't. I've been screaming about the middle class going away for ages. This article, he's admitting that it is happening for sure, without a doubt. It's a really good article. It's a good read. But unfortunately, those of us that listen to this podcast reading it already know this, and we need those rich people to read it.

He does make an extremely good historical point. If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't come out eventually.

You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. No counterexamples, none. And that is exactly true, and that's where we're headed. Okay. You just summed up the entire article, so you don't need to go read it. That's the whole thing. No, it's still out of agreement. In a nutshell, that's the whole damn thing.

That is true. So Medium, who I've mocked incessantly on this show, has hired tech writer Stephen Levy as it's kind of moved into its content creation side, which makes me – it just tells me they have no idea what the hell they're going to do with this thing.

They've built a lovely little platform that people like you or I can publish to for no money. They get nothing out of it, especially traffic to your own site, and now they're going to just be writing their own content with the free content. So it's just going to be this mishmash.

I just don't think they have a clear idea where the service is going, and I've been saying that. Like how the hell are they going to monetize it? So are they going to force me to pay them to put my shit on their service? To get nothing out of it. That's not going to work. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I don't have an article to go with this, but I was talking to a couple of friends of mine, and apparently LinkedIn is now trying to pivot that way as well.

And they've reached out to a lot of people that do kind of generic blog writing within certain industries to come and publish your articles at LinkedIn. Is there any pay? No. So it's like why? Why would I do that? They have no idea what's going on over there.

I mean, the business-to-business or employee-to-business model never worked. I never got a job out of them. I killed my account probably over a year ago now. Yeah. So I don't even go to LinkedIn. I know it's still quote-unquote big, but I don't think anybody gets much value out of it whatsoever.

So that's why they're on their pivoting. I don't either. But you want to talk a good use of data mining. If I were a big employee or employer, I would just be monitoring LinkedIn because I've noticed that the only time, anybody ever updates or reaches out and makes new connections is when they're getting ready to switch jobs.

That's true. There's some data mining for you. Well, yeah. Data mining on your own employees to see who's unhappy and is ready to jump ship. Exactly. Now, going back to gazillionaires, Uber has started to partner with a helicopter booking app called Blade. Yes.

This will be the Uber Platinum plans. Oh, man. If you're trying to – I just – well, I'm not going to go with Blade X. People with their own helicopters are going to come pick me up on my rooftop. I'll skip that one. But I guess if you're in the Uber rich, you can afford to pick up a helicopter and jet around wherever.

I don't see many – I don't see that working too much here in Chicago, but who knows? Who knows? Who knows? It will be big in L.A. and New York for the gazillionaires, the zillionaires that are saying to hell with it and just want to see our society collapse. Especially in San Francisco, if you get an Uber and you're going to your house where all the Google picketers are, you just get a helicopter instead and you just fast line down into your backyard and you're done.

You skip the whole process and then you can have the helicopter hover over the guys and blow away all their little makeshift Google Go Home signs. Right. Yeah. Oh, man. I'm going to skip this one. I want to talk about an article that was in Salon about the future of music.

Yeah. Because I want to get your take on this. It's an article talking about how the next Pixies or White Stripes is going to come from the ranks of the indie bands. There is no indie anymore. There's either incredibly massively highly successful pop artists or there's people barely getting by.

No more musical middle class? No. We're squeezing out middle classes in every aspect of society, in every job market, in every entertainment industry, in everything. It's the haves and the have-nots now. That's all it is. I think it's an interesting choice that the author chose the Pixies, who never really established any kind of financial success.

I mean, they got by because it was that time, but they're not millionaires by any means. They were a very influential band, but not a successful band. The White Stripes, an incredibly successful band. That did start as an indie label. But again, it was timing. If the White Stripes came out now, they wouldn't do shit.

And Adele, who is a massively successful pop artist, one of these does not fit with the others. In fact, neither of them really fit together at all. They're completely different examples and completely different paths to where they happen to be, two of which successful, except the White Stripes ended a long time ago.

And he's off doing his own thing. He's making boutique vinyl records now. Yeah, and the Pixies, who never really achieved much success and are still out there slogging on the road because they need to make money. I don't see any kind of indie alternative music scene out there that's coalesced.

I mean, there's stuff, you know, if you go to pitchfork.com, I mean, there's a gazillion bands I've never heard of that tons of people, I guess, are into. But they're not really making any money. I don't think alternative music will ever scale those kind of heights again. The financial landscape right now doesn't allow it. The model that this author is talking about is basically Nirvana, a band that kicked around long enough on sub-pop and just touring as an indie that then got picked up by a major label and heavily promoted and crossed over into the mainstream.

Maybe that'll happen again. I don't know who it's going to be. I don't see any rock and roll bands doing well that aren't legacy acts, meaning they got successful back when you could and are still basically existing off of that and on touring. Pop music does all right, but those are heavily marketed machines.

And you still see some stuff going on with rap and hip-hop and R&B and country for sure. But even that, I see it very stratified these days. It's the people that made it and the people that are just going to keep struggling away at it.

And until there's some major shift in the industry, I don't see anything changing. So now I want to ask you just because now everybody has the tools to make music. In their own home. Yeah. And we have more musicians out there, more bands. Yeah. Is this also a problem of just too much talent? You know, like the attention span is spread so thin.

I'm sure that it's really hard to find somebody that you can really get into. I'm sure that there's a lot of talent out there, but the opening of the ranks and the availability to easily record music yourself also means there's a lot of people that are really, really, really, really, really, really bad out there. There are gems buried within.

And then part of the problem again, and I can't believe I'm going to be defending major labels right now, but I'm going to. Because what major labels used to do, and they screwed the pooch on this themselves because they stopped doing it because they got scared about money, was they would foster artists. And they would give them a couple albums to find themselves and find their voice and hone their craft and become great artists as opposed to decent.

You find talent and you hone it. It's just not built in. And that's what labels used to do. The other major function that major labels used to do was filtering. If you got signed, you got on the radio. You had to go through the process to get signed first, which means A&R guys went out and saw you, and they basically said, you're not good enough yet.

Go tour some more. Go write some more. Go work on it some more. Okay, now we'll sign you, and now we'll foster you. So the entire filtering process is completely gone. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. No, I totally understand that. Yeah. I mean, we see it in journalism as well.

Now that there's – we talked just a little bit ago about the people that write long-form content, and those authors and those writers and journalists are still out there. But there aren't any new ones, and if they are, they're publishing all over the place. They're publishing on Medium. They're publishing on Huffington Post. And their talent isn't being honed, and they're not being fostered, and they're never going to reach any kind of critical acclaim.

They're just stuck writing listicles now. Exactly. So sticking with the music thing, there was the news this week about SoundCloud basically giving Universal the keys to the castle to go in and find stuff that they think infringes on their copyright and pull it without any oversight from SoundCloud themselves.

I'm pretty sure that's in SoundCloud's terms of service that that can happen anyways. I'm not surprised by this. In fact, it's just all of this already existed. The infrastructure to do this already existed. I've dealt with this ages ago when I thought it was going to be a really good idea to get artists that I work with to get their stuff up on SoundCloud because it's just more eyeballs, and I like people being able to comment on bits and pieces.

Nine times out of ten, every time I had to put a song up by an artist for the official artist on an official artist account, it would end up getting pulled, and I'd get copyright notices, and I'd have to do the dance anyways. And that was just their built-in automated system, which YouTube has as well and everybody else does. And all they basically did this time around was say, all right, well, instead of us doing it internally, here, here's the keys.

Go ahead, Universal. Find your own stuff. Yeah, we don't make enough money to look over your shoulders. Exactly. We're not making enough money to do this ourselves, so if you're so concerned about it, you go in and take care of it. And then the process exists to go ahead and try to figure out, go through the appeal process, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like YouTube itself, it's just SoundCloud, there's tons of people putting up copyrighted material up there.

Just because you've made a mixtape doesn't mean you get to take my track, which you then overlay with somebody else's in the last 30 seconds, throw it up on your SoundCloud, and let people listen to it. I'm not getting paid. Yeah. Okay. That's all I wanted to know. As a musician, what your thoughts were.

Again, there has to be some sort of massive shift and sea change within the industry for any of this to start making sense. Right now, it just doesn't. Okay. Yeah. Now, you tell me about this one. You posted this last article for the news.

I started to see a bunch of posts popping up on Facebook or Twitter from people that got early invitations to the new emoji-only social network. Their names are things like the two beers clinking together or a heart or a bunch of kittens. After I read this article, I went and tried to register the little piece of poo in a storm cloud, but somebody had already gotten it, so I couldn't get it.

This is – I'm going to coin a new term today. Okay. I'm going to call it shark baiting. All right. Building a shark fin website specifically built to get you a lot of publicity, traffic, and users in a very short time that you know is not going to work just so you can use that as a stepping stone to your next gig.

Oh, I agree. That's totally what this is. So I call this – I call the emoji-ly shark baiting. That's it. It's a flash in the pan idiot idea that just wasted a bunch of my Twitter feed. We won't hear about this social network again in three or four weeks, but these guys will have moved on to a bigger and better job.

Unless they merge with yo. What's the emoji for yo? I'm going to send you a yo and a poop. No, the poop is the yo. Oh. Poop. Security. Ha. Keeping up with the Android hacks and cracks and all that, which I would just love to talk about, there's a serious Android crypto key theft vulnerability.

It only affected 86 percent of Android devices out there. Well, 86 percent. Oopsies. That's not bad. And since you have most of the time on Android, it's like at the carrier's discretion to upgrade you to the latest version of Android, they're probably still vulnerable.

So it's basically with the way they store keys and lets you get the keys to spoof other apps and things like that. I looked into it a little bit, but it's a fairly sizable vulnerability, and I just like making fun of Android and their lack of security.

Yeah. Yeah. Not good. I'm still glad I have an iPhone. Well, at least that's the upside of having the iPhone is, yeah, you don't get to hack it as much unless you jailbreak it and all that. But the desire to keep it up to date is great because they add new features to it all the time, and it's one company.

It's not distributed. It's not open source. You don't have 100 different phone manufacturers hacking their own versions, putting on their crapware. Yep, and every app that you submit to the Apple Store goes through a rigorous and painful, I can speak from experience, process of Q&A by then. Yes, a very thorough proctological exam.

Yes. So before we covered the Google removing records under the Right to be Forgotten Act, remember that? Yes, I do remember that. And we had some pretty good laughs at it that will probably never happen until they can find a couple interns under a rock that they could stick on it.

Well, they've actually started. All right. Believe it or not, they're taking people's records out. I'm good with this, but my question, since we just talked about how there is no such thing as real deletion anymore, all they're doing is removing how easy it is to find the stuff.

They're not actually removing the stuff. Well, you know, tomato, tomato. Yeah. Well, I mean, these days, if you type it into Google and it doesn't show up, it doesn't exist anymore. But we've talked a little bit in the past about the – I always get these confused. Which one's the dark web and which one's the deep web?

The dark web is the Tor thing and then the deep web is the massive amounts of stuff that's out there that just isn't in Google and is harder to find and all that sort of stuff, right? Close enough. All right. Close enough. Anyways, there's still that. So all the stuff that's out there is just going to be harder for people to find but not gone.

But I applaud Google for doing this. I think that this is the way that we do need to start dealing with this sort of stuff. This is when regulations and laws and all that sort of stuff actually on the internet starts to make a bit of sense. I'm happy about this. Well, the Europeans have always been much more stringent with data collection and retention.

They do it right. Yeah, I agree. For the most part. For the most part. It can be a little draconian with it. But yeah, I wish they had it here. Me too. Maybe we'll get that. Maybe Facebook can tell that I'm happy about this. Well, we don't have a security breach of the week, unfortunately.

I'm sure it's out there. I mean, out of all the articles I went through, I couldn't find any big breaches this week. But if you add up all of the breaches in 2013, 14% of the world's debit cards were exposed. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a hell of a lot.

That is not a trivial number. No, and I got to say, I mean, maybe this is just me being old and not having had an issue with my credit cards in a long time. But I did have an issue this week where there was a charge that I didn't quite understand. And in the past, what I would do would be call my credit card company and just kind of go, I don't know what this charge is.

Can you guys figure it out? And then they would basically just kind of push that charge off into some amorphous area where they would do some research on it and then get back to me and say, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you do whatever. And that would be that. Credit cards don't even mess around anymore. If you call and you have a question about something, they cancel it.

Your card is canceled. We're sending you a new one. End of story. There's no just, can you investigate this anymore? It's just, your card's done. Yeah. Next card. Which is good because of all this sort of stuff, but it is a pain in the ass. Especially if you're on vacation.

Especially if you're on vacation or about to leave on one. Yeah. Microsoft kind of went little balls to the wall this week. That was some serious shit. Microsoft just went, all right, screw it. We're going to fix this. They basically took over a bunch of domains from the company called No IP, which does anonymous DNS service.

So you can, you know, if you have like a transient home IP, like for your cable modem, you can attach a domain to it and you have an agent running on your computer. And if your IP changes, it will tell the service so you can have a stable domain name automatically. Well, a lot of spammers and spam bot owners and basically like spam bot network owners use these kind of services for their command and control servers because the servers change IPs all the time.

Yeah. Because they're bouncing around. They're using all sorts of tactics to get away from people. And Microsoft is like, look, you guys are part of this problem because they're using your network and we can track like, you know, 25 million machines that are, you know, calling home to these things through your network.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to just take it over. Yeah. And we promise we're going to let through the good traffic and we're going to block the bad traffic. And apparently that didn't happen. And like four million, four million legitimate sites have gone dark. People have paid for the service.

It has gone dark because Microsoft is just like, eh, well, well. Oh, well. We're doing, we're doing a greater good. Yeah. No, thank you. I mean, I've used a dynamic, was it? Yeah. Dynamic DNS, DYN DNS. Yeah. In the past when they were free. Now they've got a pay model only, I think.

But yeah, it was a great service and I used it for that purpose. Not the spam bot purpose, but for, you know, having a server at my house and illegally hosting it on my cable connection, which you're not allowed to do. Yeah. But it works. Works great. Yeah. It does work. And, you know, there are, I'm sure there are a lot of, well, obviously there's like four million legitimate sites.

But the reality is these kinds of services are used by, by the bad guys always. But you know what? If you want to, if you want to solve the problem of people's computers getting hacked and turned into spam bots, Microsoft had telling these people that they're doing something wrong.

It's kind of the pot cull in the fucking kettle black. Honestly. That is true. Fix your OS. Fix Outlook. Oh, Jesus. Now, the way that they, like the court documents that they submitted to get this injunction or whatever, to get the power to do this. Yeah.

They spelled the word steal, as in steal your passwords, as S-T-E-E-L. Right there, the judge should have said, you can't spell, get the hell out of my courtroom. That's all I got. That's it. Proofread. Yeah. Yeah. Idiots. Well, you know, once we get robot journalism, we won't have misspellings.

Well, I mean, it technically wasn't misspelled as a contextual error. No, sir. But it was still, it was still completely, the first thing I saw, I'm like, steal? Is that like a new term? I was like, oh, oh, Jesus, really? Idiots. And I'm sure they paid a lot of people to make a really bad PowerPoint presentation that that slide came from.

Because it was, if you look at it, it's terrible. Yeah. It is. We always talk about password stuff, and we love 1Password. Yep. And there was a demo out there for how they're going to integrate with iOS 8, and it looks really cool. It's like, the way they have the new sharing stuff looks great.

I cannot wait, because I hate jumping between apps, you know? And using the in, like the in 1Password browser is a pain in the ass. Yeah, I hate that browser. So now you'll be able to like integrate with any of the apps that have like the share capabilities, like there's crazy new share capabilities in iOS 8.

So I'm really looking forward to it. Just hit the thumb button, you're done. Yeah, it looks cool. Definitely means I'm going to have to get a new phone. Oh, that's right. You have a 5. Yeah, I got to upgrade. Well, 6 is coming. It might even be big. You might even get your iFablet. I don't want an iFablet.

Oh, well. No. Speaking of passwords, there was a great article on Medium called, so this guy, we're pimping the hell out of him. He's not going to get any ad traffic. How a password changed my life. It's a cute story about how a guy is going through a divorce or whatever and trying to come up with a password that he would remember.

He basically used affirmations as his password, which is cute. I mean – It's cute, but honestly, this is so easily hackable. You do some life hacking on this guy, you could figure out his passwords. No, no. Go look at the XKCD password, the password cartoon that we talked about before.

These are long passwords. It's hard to figure out. Okay. Entropy on those is pretty high. It definitely gets back into the whole psychology thing, forcing yourself to type something out every single time you had to access something. Except he should still be using one password and have multiples for everything.

I agree. If it worked for him, it helped him get skinny, I guess, or quit smoking, one of the two. And get over his ex-wife and not drink for two months and get a cat. He should check out our teledildonic segment. And FaceTime his mom on Sunday.

Don't confuse the apps if you're calling your mom. Definitely not. Don't open up your RealTouch app when you try and call your mom or vice versa. That would be bad. You definitely don't want to find out that she has one and she answers. Wrong. There was a good TED Talk I found this week, and I think it might be an older one because it was filmed in October 2013.

It's an interesting talk on cyber warfare. And this guy is like, he used the word cyber a lot, which I'm like, ASL? You know? Anyone? Anyone? And it talks about how he takes the ones and zeros and turns them into visual representation so they can quickly identify different pieces of code based on our ability to visually do pattern recognition.

Yeah. The troubling part about the talk is his entire premise is blowing up a terrorist cell phone in his hand. That's the whole thing. We want to blow up the terrorist phone. I'm like, okay. If you can do that, you can blow up my phone too. I think you might have want to let that out of the presentation there, buddy.

There's an awful lot of comments saying, I really do not want my phone to blow up, and now I'm terrified. Now, if you take it, I posted this on our Facebook page, but if you take it to, he uses pictures of kittens quite a bit. I'm like, if you take it to its illogical conclusion, they will soon one day be able to blow up kittens with the press of a button.

But yes. Now, in our ranting and raving about WordPress hacks, it's not only the little guys in that crappy plug-in from Joe Schmoe down the street that can cause problems.

Discuss the huge comment system. Massively used almost everywhere. Yep. They got hit with a flaw in their WordPress plug-in too. So even the big boys have issues because it is open source, and anybody can look at your code. So if you publish it, make sure you check the shit out of it.

Seriously. Open source giveth, and open source screw you the next day. Yes, it does. And finally, this morning, there was a great article on Ars Technica about the black phone. Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while. Is it finally coming? It is.

It's shipping later this month, and for pre-orders, you'll be able to buy it soon after. And it looks cool. I mean, it looks like a standard run-of-the-mill smartphone. They say it's a little slower, but it's not meant for speed, and it's basically made for security.

And from the security standpoint, it passes the test. Yeah, it just simply doesn't let you install any applications. It literally is just – there's no power because there's no – there's nothing. It is literally – The camera doesn't work. I mean, you know, it's perfect. It's a shiny black brick.

That's it. If you need to get somebody's attention with it, you hit them in the head with it. No, it's cool. I mean, it's good-looking. It's really interesting. They definitely put a lot of thought into it. They have definitely thought a lot about the security, but the reality is, you know, 90% of the things that you probably want to use, you can't.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, you can make phone calls sometimes. And apparently, they don't have the corporate lockdown stuff yet, and that's coming. So, like, you know, so you can have your, like, corporate policies spread out to all your phones in your company. That's coming down the line. But if you just tell people how to use it or set it up for them and tell them not to change your settings, it should be pretty good to go for you from security-wise.

Lots of proxy work and lots of stuff baked in. You get all sorts of stuff. It's pretty cool looking. It's pretty cool, and I like it just because I think that a phone like this is pushing the boundaries on this sort of stuff, and publicizing it is going to help out in the long run for our iPhones. This is stuff that, you know, Apple's going to look at and go, huh, that's a really good idea.

Maybe we should put that in. Yeah. If people start buying it, Apple will steal it. Exactly. Last week, we talked about Robo-pocalypse. Yep. Love it. They're a great book.

And we mentioned that Robo-Genesis was out, the follow-up. Yep. Bought it. And since, unfortunately, I've read 1,000 articles this week, I haven't had much time for actual reading, but I got into this one. I'm about 20% to 30% into it. Holy shit, it's good. Yeah.

You're a little further on than I am. It's definitely, he pivoted. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Right out of the gate. It's like, whoa. Yeah. It's been a good read so far. I'm hoping I'll probably knock off, I'll probably finish it on the plane today.

That's my plan anyways. But we'll see where it's going to go. I, this is one of those ones where I, I'm not sure this could, this could go totally right or just horrible, horribly wrong. Horribly wrong. Yeah. So far though, it, it's holding, it's holding my attention.

And unfortunately, I was reading some of it before I went to bed the other night. Crazy bad dreams. Crazy bad dreams. That never happens to me, but I'm sure. Oh, I'm not going to do any spoilers yet because I really recommend that people read these books because they were actually really good. And it looks like they might be making a movie.

Steven Spielberg's on to direct. Yeah. Rob apocalypse would make a great movie. There's, there's no doubt about it. I mean, I hope that they do what the book did and focus on the stories and the emotions and, and not just go with crazy robots running around everywhere. Yeah. Hopefully they'll do it better than though.

Since this book is based on the world, no, the world war Z because world war Z had the same framework of, of the storytelling and then they just turned it into something completely different. I never actually even saw the movie world war Z because I liked the book so much and everybody just said it was nothing like the book.

So I was like, well, here's the deal. It's nothing like the books, but if you want a popcorn action zombie movie, it was okay. It was a B. It wasn't, it wasn't a bad movie. Just think of it as, you know, Z, not world war Z. It's just BZ, Brad Z. Okay. Brad, world war pit. World war pit.

There, that's better. That's better. Software apps and gadgets. Fitbit. My favorite. You love it. Came out with a big update. Mm-hmm. So now, uh, in run keeper style, you can track your walks slash runs.

No bike riding. Sorry, Brian. With, with maps and data and all this stuff. And, uh, also food tracking. They've added like 350,000 items that you can bar scan and all that crap. The, the exercise tracking. Yeah. Abysmal.

Ugh. Great. It is terrible. I did a, a side by side with run keeper. I started at the same time, open both apps, hit start. Yeah. Did, did like a little over a mile walk, stopped them at the same time. And, uh, the fit bit thought I traveled about 0.4 miles and run keeper with the, I looked at the map, but between the two and run keeper had mine, right?

It was 1.2 miles, which is exactly the, I've driven that track. It is 1.2 miles on the nose. Yeah. I'm going to have a separate blog post that will be on grumpy old geeks.com that will have the side by side links to the, um, the output so you can just check it out. But man, they got a long way to go. Yeah. I, okay.

So I still have Argus because I haven't found anything better or that does everything that I needed to do. Cause the reality for me is I need exercise tracking. I need steps. I need biking. Uh, I can't find anything that does it as well as Argus does. Argus actually just did another update recently and I've got to say they've gotten a bit better with some of their stuff.

Um, a complaint, number one, uh, I turned off all the social settings because that freaked me out. Remember I had the heart attack when all of a sudden people were, you know, I, I had no idea that there were social settings. And when I did an update a while back, all of a sudden I had 25 people requesting me as a friend and commenting on my bike rides saying how great they were.

Um, when the update came, all of a sudden I went and I did my yoga and, uh, I had people commenting on my yoga again. I'm like, what the hell? And then I had went into the privacy settings and it had magically switched on a couple of the things and turned them onto social again. Is Argus owned by Facebook?

I'm starting to feel that way. Uh, no, but they were very happy cause they're in a, they're in an Apple commercial. So they're all talking about that. Uh, I still use Argus just because I don't have anything better. I'm getting more and more annoyed by it, but I do want to track my stuff. Um, I have a feeling I'm just going to have to wait and see what people do with the, with the iOS eight stuff.

And, uh, I'm sure somebody is going to come up with a good app from that probably Fitbit. So yeah, well, we'll see if they can fix it. Yeah. I still like, if I want to track an actual workout, run keeper is perfect. If you're looking for distance and mapping, it's great. The GPS works great. It's pretty spot on.

So I'll stick with that. I had a problem with battery on Argus too. Yeah, it's, it's still not good for that either. So, uh, it's, I'm pretty much just going to stick with Argus until I get my new phone. I think that's the way it's going to go. And, uh, at that point I'll probably, I'll see, I'll talk to you about Fitbit and see what's going on.

Cause I really just, I want one great app that can do all this stuff. And it's, you know, it's, it's not too much to ask for, for a health application track. Well, you're talking to a guy that's wearing a Misfit Shine, a Fitbit, like two devices and run three apps. So I have not found a, uh, the, the Holy Grail of apps yet.

Yeah. Well, we won't discuss what you're wearing below your pants because I think we talked about that in the first segment. Rewind to admit it too. So we talked about Spritz before that, that, uh, speed reading technology. Yeah. Which just kind of hurt my eyes. Well, there's finally an app out.

It's called ReadMe that it's the first one to integrate Spritz into, uh, it's reading app and you can put in, uh, eBooks like the EPUB format, nothing you can't, you can't use the ones that you buy from iBooks or you can't do .mobi from Kindle. All right. So I gave it a shot.

I dropped the 99 cents on it. And as I'm, as I'm doing it, there's warnings about how I need to back up my library because there was a bug in a version that they're working on a fix and all this. Open it up. Interface is terrible. I, I installed, uh, uh, Morrissey's autobiography.

I'm like, I'll give it a shot. I will read Morrissey's autobiography. It's autobiography with Spritz. Okay. About two minutes into it, the world starts to go dark around me and all I can see is this little bar and I start to get woozy. Wow. That actually sounds like a Morrissey song right now. It really does.

The world has gone dark. And so I stopped it and I just kind of looked around the room and I felt like a Cylon. I just had this white bar that I could see through it. Everything else was just like, whoa. Now let me add a quick question just because, uh, having read the Morrissey book in the EPUB format myself, uh, does, does the Spritz reader bring in the same font used in the books or does it just kind of default or let you switch it?

Because I remember that, that, that Morrissey book, the font that they picked was absolutely horrible. And that hurt my eyes even to begin with. I think it's the same font. It comes with a built-in book from Gutenberg and I think it's the same font that that one uses. So I'm pretty sure it's like the, a standard font.

And it would break often, uh, apostrophes are a problem, which is kind of a problem for a reading app that reads books and it would break every time I got to a page that was just an image and then I'd have to, I'd have to finger through the, uh, the pages and get to the next, you know, starting chapter and then press the top word again.

And then Spritz would take time to ramp up and then it would go. Really annoying. Save your money. Spritz might work in the future. I did change it, uh, because what they do is they have this little Spritz overlay in the middle of the book and the book can be white, sepia or black, you know, like, you know, the three standard, I, I switched it to black and I didn't have as much of a problem with, you know, the world going crazy around me.

But when it's what, when it was on a white background, just watching the Spritz thing go by my manage, it, it, it messes up your brain. It really does. It's a bit stroby really. Right. I mean, it, Oh, it's totally stroby. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you have epilepsy, do not use Spritz. It will give you the shits.

Media candy. The internet is a flitter or Twitter or whatever you want to call it about, uh, the Aaron Swartz documentary, the internet's own boy came out finally this week. It was kickstarted, made it, made its money on the Kickstarter.

And, uh, when it came out, you could get it on Vimeo, but you had to buy it. Yeah. And a lot of people who actually kicked in for Kickstarter wanted to buy it and they couldn't because they weren't in the U S so, um, you could also get it from our friends in Sweden, but now you can get it on archive.org and get it for free because it is a, uh, creative commons licensed film.

And that would make sense since he was involved in that. So, uh, Aaron Swartz, you know, internet activist, amazingly smart kid. I only met him once. I mean, the kid is just super unbelievably smart and had his heart in the right place, did all sorts of stuff and then did some stupid stuff, got busted by, um, the law and basically facing, you know, lots of, lots of years in prison and lots of money and fines gave up and hung

himself, which, I mean, it's a really tough story just cause I followed this kid from when he came on the scene until the end. And I, I, I really liked the movie. Yes. The movie does have an agenda because it is a documentary and all documentaries have an agenda and, but I thought they treated the subject very well.

And especially when they get to the end with the, the prosecution of what he did by stealing these documents was over the top. Even the people that didn't, that he stole the documents from and steal is, is, you know, a relative term. Yes. Based on what he did, but they, they, they dropped, well, they dropped the charge.

It's like, we don't want to prosecute him. Okay. I don't want to prosecute him. And then the government hung him out to dry. Just, just the one phrase. Steal is not a relative term. He did steal. It's not relative. Now, was it, was he, should he have been prosecuted to the extent that he was?

No, but he did steal. Yeah. Yeah, he did. Okay. See that, that is the same. That's the problem I had with the entire documentary. I really, really enjoyed it, but they did exactly what you just did. Which is, let's, let's dance over the actual illegal stuff that he really did do.

And, and, and I do, I do remember when it, when the court documents came out and everybody saw him, I'm like, yeah, he was an idiot. He really did something stupid. He was an idiot. He did something stupid. Yeah. And he got caught. Very stupid. And he got caught. Now, should he have been prosecuted the way he was? Should he have even faced jail time?

No, not particularly. Should he have been fined a shit ton? Yes. Should he have been forced to apologize or maybe start up a new nonprofit that actually pays attention to things like rights and intellectual properties and all of that sort of thing. I come from this from a different place than you do because I'm, I was aware of Aaron Schwartz.

You can't not be in work in the industry. But I didn't have any personal connections with him. I thought a lot of the stuff that he did was great. He was obviously extremely smart. I liked a lot of the different organizations that he started and I wish they would have taken off and gotten more traction and been adopted and people looked at his ideas and took them.

Not that people didn't take them seriously. They certainly did, but they didn't end up becoming adopted basically. Creative commons is great, but it's not part of day-to-day life and intellectual property, at least in any country in the world yet. Should it be? Yes. But should be doesn't excuse breaking the law.

Just because it should be this way doesn't mean you get to go do it. Well, that, if you remember the introductory quote in the movie, it's about, you know, do we break these laws that are unjust or do we fight against the laws? It's, I can't remember the exact quote, but your point is like taken by that initial quote in the movie.

Go back and watch that initial quote and then, you know, then think about it some more and see if you still agree with that, you know, your, your take on it. And if what he did was right or not, that's where I come from. I think what he did was what he was trying to do was right, but he just did it in a really dumb way.

Well, he did it in a dumb way and this is, here's the deal. Yeah, it was a good movie. I highly recommend everybody see it. Yeah, let's not, let's not debate the point of Aaron Swartz. Let's talk about the movie. The movie was great. You can get it for free. Just go watch it, make your own opinions on it. Um, there's it, I thought it was fantastic.

I thought it was very well done. Um, you know, he's definitely, uh, watching him from being just this precocious kid that you want to kick his teeth in, but you know, he's damn smart, uh, to his whole process and the various things that he was trying to achieve, um, admirable and a really good story.

And if you are listening to this podcast, you're going to be into this because you probably already know who he is and you probably already know a lot of this stuff. You've probably already seen the movie. You've probably already seen the movie, but it touches on a lot of the things that, um, the gray areas that the internet is really causing and the fact that the laws haven't necessarily kept up with the way the world actually is now.

So, yep. So we're going to stick with the last two things are not so, uh, you know, tough to deal with. Uh, stars developing the American God series. Cause we talk about Neil Gaiman a lot and that you hate his wife. So I thought it, I thought it was fun. We should just bring this up there.

Stars is making it into a series. Hopefully it won't fail. Like all the other times people have tried to make this into a series or never wear or Sandman. So my, my, I'm like, woo, let's go. Make it happen this time. How stars track record on developing shows. I think they're pretty good. All right.

They've done, they've done some really good stuff. I like it. I do remember liking American gods. I couldn't tell you a damn thing about the book right now, but, uh, maybe I'll have to go back and read it since they're going to do a show. Go back and read it. And, um, I actually recommend listening to it because audible did like a 10th anniversary edition. It was a full cast recording that was excellent.

It was really excellent. So in other good nerd news, Sherlock renewed for a fourth season and they're throwing in a special. Well, now that it's made four seasons, I guess I can actually start watching it now. You've never watched Sherlock? No. Oh my God. You're missing out. I hear, but I always wait to make sure the shows actually make it right now because I hate getting invested in something and, uh, then, uh, you know, just finding it getting canceled.

Speaking of which, I forgot. You're one of those, you're just like Bob and our guy and those other people that do that. And that's why shows get canceled. You, you simpering little bitches. Well, if you want to punch you in the throat, something is good, watch it. And then they'll make more of it.

If you wait and don't watch it, they won't make more of it. And then sometimes you like it and you watched it and they don't make more of it anyway, but you have a better chance of them making more of it. If you watch it, I, I, yes, I, I do definitely agree with that. So it's on Netflix, so go get it. What is that a new show that the lost people are doing?

I can't remember the name of it right now. And it's killing me because I actually took a chance and watched the, the debut episode of it. I will, I will pull up the name. You tell me about the show. The show involves, uh, it's not left behind. It's, uh, you know, people wake up. It's the leftovers.

The leftovers. Okay. Yes. It's a mysterious occurrence occurs. Um, and everybody said, you know, don't, don't, don't put too many spoilers in it. Cause it's in my queue. I'm not giving you any spoilers. There isn't anything that isn't in the trailers. 2% of the world's population disappears. Uh, nobody really knows why, and the show is going to investigate the after effects of that happening.

Uh, I enjoy the cast. It was, they've definitely spent a lot of money on it. It's well acted. It's well done. I'm terrified that they're going to completely skip around any answers ever. Um, cause the, that's what they did with lost as well.

And the guy that, uh, did the writing for lost that wrote this is also already going around doing interviews saying how the show's really about the emotional impact, not so much the occurrence. Oh, I won't be watching this then. Exactly. So you know where that's going to go. And it does feel like leftover plot lines from lost so far.

Um, yeah, I think this is, this is one of, this is my case in point that I should probably have waited to see if it lasts more than one season. Yeah. Well, I mean, you, you, you lost me at the lost guys. Yeah. As soon as he started doing interviews where he was saying that I was like, Oh, that means you're never going to answer this.

And this is just the, uh, the, what's it called? The deus ex machina. Deus ex machina. That. Yeah. Sorry. I think I spit on my microphone for that. I didn't want to spit on my mic. I like it. Okay. I'll pass. I'll pass on the leftovers. Yeah. I'm off on that one, but I will get on Sherlock.

Not literally. Yes, please do. Moron of the week. Our moron of the week is Adam Richman. Adam Richman was the star of man versus food, uh, and funny little TV show about him going out and finding really horrible food, but delicious.

And then doing a big food challenge at the end of every show where he tried to eat so much that it would make you sick. Um, how very American of him over the past few years, he has lost a lot of weight. Uh, and I had actually thought he had quit the show when he lost the weight, but apparently he was still doing it because he went off and did a crazy rant online and has had a show taken away from him now.

Oops. Oopsies. Um, so yeah, because he lost a lot of weight and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He ended up getting in a pissing match online because he used the term thinspiration, which then somebody got mad at because they said that that's a term that anorexics use. And then he basically called people C words and called them fat fucks and a bunch of other things.

Um, and this is exactly why if your livelihood depends on the masses, i.e. you're a celebrity, you hire people like me to do this away, to do this stuff for you. And you step away from the iPhone. It's not that you can't have an opinion. You can, but having an opinion and pissing people off tend to be at odds with keeping a TV show.

Unless you're like a professional comedian and then you're good at it. You know, you could, you're, you're used to handling trolls. You're used to handling people like that. Yeah. Now I think his replies were justified because these people were kind of snotty trolly. Um, he should have had a separate account to do it from, run it through an anonymizing proxy in another country.

And if you really want to feed the trolls, it's kind of like hacking a bank. You just never do it from your own home. That's it. So that's my, that's my take on Adam Richmond. I never really, I never really liked his show, so I don't really care, but it's funny. He's an idiot. The show was okay. It was no diners, drive-ins and dives, which I actually like, but that guy's an idiot too.

But it's just, it's, uh, justified or not, you're not going to be keeping your TV show if you do that. It was stupid. Well, he'll probably get to keep it. They just pushed it back a while. Yeah. We'll see. Maybe you can do something with Paula Deen. Yeah.

Ooh, fancy. I ran across this thing this week called the Mayo Gesture Control Armband. I'd never seen it before. Apparently it's, you know, I, it's been around for a little bit. You can get a dev kit for it, but it's a unit that you put on your forearm that lets you basically have the force.

You wave your hand around and shit happens on your computer or you can play video games with it. It is the coolest looking thing. Now, just a quick question. Did or did not the entire Microsoft, whatever the hell they call that Xbox, uh, connect, connect, even get rid of the need to wear anything. You just move.

Well, kind of, sort of, oopsies, but that works. This works with your computer. That only works with your Xbox. But this one, this one goes to 11. Well, it's cool. It's got like nine axis motors and inertial measurement units, uh, proprietary muscle activity sensors.

Uh, it works on Bluetooth low energy. It's got a bunch of goodies in it. It looks like it's fun and it's not, it's not that much. It's like 160 bucks for the dev kit. I'm not going to order it because I don't write C so I wouldn't be able to write anything for it. Right. So I'll wait till it comes out, but it looks fun.

So if you get one of those coupled with the, uh, the VR headsets that, you know, just got bought by Facebook, uh, you know, you can have some fun. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, much like the rings that you talked about last week that, uh, that attached to your phone, um, I would like to see the studded armband version of this as opposed to just the black.

I want, I want giant metal studs coming off each of these panels. So I can go to like a punk rock show and move things with my, with my force arm. Unless the, unless the punk rock show is being broadcast by a computer and not a bunch of sweaty old men on stage, then you might be, yeah.

Might have to go to the industrial music scene then. They're kind of punk with computers. Yeah, it could be, could be. You could, you can, oh, you could DJ with it. There you go. There you go. Wiki, wiki, wiki.

Are you kidding me? The words written on Twitter every day would fill a book of 10 million pages. It's either the most boring book ever written or better yet, it's Macbeth. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Dramatic reading over.

Closing shout outs. We are recording this on Thursday, the 3rd of July, 2014. So I would like to say happy birthday to Julian Assange. It's his third year stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy. So I'm sure he's having a fun time for his birthday. I'm sure he's having a blast and I'm sure he's not willing to celebrate tomorrow's birthday.

Happy birthday, America. America! Fuck yeah! I want to give a shout out to the Save Our Podcast Legal Defense Fund. Please go to fundanything.com slash patent troll. This is the fight that Adam Carolla has been fighting for all of us that do podcasts. Go check it out.

Toss him a couple bucks because if he doesn't win this, then podcasting as we know it will probably go away. Yep, I've kicked in a few bucks. I don't know about you, but I have. I have as well. And finally, I want to give a shout out to yoga. Yoga in general. But yoga specifically before you're about to get on a flight.

As we're wrapping this up, I will be shutting down my computer and I'll be getting ready to head over to LAX to do a five and a half hour flight. Plus the one and a half hours that you have to be there ahead of time. And I've started a recent tradition slash process slash whatever of always doing.

I've got a quick little 30-minute yoga program that I use. And I do that before I head off to the airport every single time now. And I've got to say, it helps. Not only does it help in terms of mood when you're dealing with the security people. What I'm going to need you to do for me right now, sir, is step back, sir.

Please take off your shoes, sir. Please put your shoes back on, sir. No, you don't take off your hat. Yes, you take off your hat. What do I do with my laptop? Blah, blah, blah, blah. It helps with that. But I also just find that the 30 minutes of stretching and all that makes a five-hour flight a lot more bearable for these old bones. Well, also, when the TSA agents ask you to reach over and grab your ankles, you're already stretched.

So you don't pull anything. You don't pull anything. I have absolutely no problem doing that. Yeah. So the reach around goes much easier. So a little booze follow-up. I said I was going on my booze sabbatical. Yep. Going well. Lost four and a half pounds in the past four and a half days. So I'm digging it so far.

And I've kind of switched up. No more breads. Only having – like for lunch, I'm going to have an eggplant. Yesterday, I had a squash. Well, there you go. You know, going kind of edgy. Still having some meats. A little meats. I'm not doing that vegan thing. It's not my shtick. Yeah. I would like to say I'm off the booze, but Germany plays France on Friday.

Oh, dear. There will be lots of booze. And do more yoga. And more yoga. So I had a quick follow-up on last week's sound quality. We know. We know. Quit bitching. We know. We fixed it. So this week, we have a full new outro. And I would like to do a shout-out to our own Brian Schulmeister and his band Among Us for supplying the music for the new and improved Grumpy Old Geeks version 3.

I own the copyright, so I can do what the fuck I want with them. So if it goes on SoundCloud, do you have the power to remove it? No. No. Maybe. I don't even know. I don't care anymore. This album's been out for a while. It's good stuff. If you enjoy it, please take a look and listen to the EV.

And I would like to say that Grumpy Old Geeks is hosted by the good people at Libsyn. They do great podcast hosting. So if you need some hosting for your podcast, go use the coupon code GOG at checkout, and you will receive up to two months free. Woo-hoo! Help support the show.

Keep up with us at GrumpyOldGeeks.com on Facebook at Facebook.com slash GrumpyOldGeeks. On Twitter, we're at Twitter.com slash GOG Podcast. Or simply email us at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. Show notes for this episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 65. Yo.

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