651: Inci Dont’s

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. Nighttime recording. A lot better. I just cracked a beer. Oh, shut up. Just one. As soon as we're done, I got to go to a goddamn AA meeting. So, kiss my ass. Well, now you got something to talk about.

Oh, great. Yeah. Just kidding. Okay. So, let's get into this. You made AI as if the withering reviews and lack of anything to actually do with it was not enough. In an email sent to AI pin owners, all three of them, the company said it had received a report of a charging issue that led to a quality issue with a battery cell supplied by a third-party vendor using your charge case accessory.

A.K.A. It's a fire risk. Oh, dearie old me. Yeah. So, not only is it useless, it can kill you. Lovely. Now, they have not used the word recall yet, but they are advising people to stop using the charging cases immediately.

Okay. Here's the deal. You keep them. We don't want them back. This is not a recall. We don't want them. They're going to catch fire. Now, let me remind you, this is a company that is in the process of attempting to sell itself for a self-valued $750 million to $1 billion.

Yeah. They have one product. Nobody wants it. And the battery case can light on fire. Yeah. Yeah. And, but they, I mean, they do have $250 million in the bank. So, you know, you are getting, you are getting $250 million. I can get $250 million for my low, low price of $1 billion.

Yeah. Yeah. So, they're valuing their assets and their IP, if they can call it that, at $750 million. Yeah. How do you put a value on a shitty reputation? I don't know. Ask Trump. Yeah. Ooh.

Ooh. Do-do. Boom. Yeah. That's the sound of half our listeners leaving again. Thanks, Brian. Whatever. They've left by now. Not according to those emails we get. But our emails. But our emails. So, after receiving heavy criticism since the AI overview launch, if you want to call heavy criticism a giant kick in the nuts of, what the fuck is that?

Google search now averages around 11% of the queries coming back as AI, with AI overviews instead of 27% where it was. Or you could just set it to zero. Yes. Use that little trick that we told you last week.

Yeah. We'd be fine with that. They're saying, despite the reduction, healthcare-related queries are still a large percentage of the AI results, raising concerns about both accuracy and reliability across Google. And sanity. The sanity of them to leave the fucking things on. At all.

Well, it's good to know that your search about masturbating with sandpaper is probably still returning the same result then. No, I checked it. I checked it. I guess they don't consider masturbation healthcare. Yeah. That could be it. It's anti-healthcare as far as I'm concerned. You'll go blind. Yeah.

So, Brian, we've all been pwned. It just, it comes down to it now. They have everything. Yeah. I got, I got another email this week. Two billion rows of data with 361 million unique email addresses were collated from malicious telegram channels.

Okay. The data contained 122 gigabytes across 1700 files with email addresses, usernames, passwords, and in many cases, the website that they were entered into. Great. That's great. Yes. The data appears to have been sourced from a combination of existing combo lists and info stealer malware.

All right. So, yeah. Great. Yeah. That's it. That's all I got on that one. I'm just basically, everybody's got at least one login. Yeah. That's it. That's it. I hope you guys check out 1Password, gog.show slash 1Password. Go get on it right now. Yeah. You'll probably be notified shortly that you need to change a couple passwords.

Yeah. But that being said, we have a new winner for Moron of the Week. The new Windows Recall release can only be called with the great Jon Stewart, once referred to as a Category 5 shitstorm.

Windows Recall does, if you recall, if you do recall, Brian, it takes a screenshot every five seconds. Yes. Yeah. Cybersecurity researchers say the system is simple to abuse, and one ethical hacker has already built a tool to show how easy it really is.

Great. Yeah. I have a stack of our links here in the show notes that anybody can go check out and peruse at your leisure. But I pulled two quotes here that I think are the best. What's the dumbest and most inefficient way to collect data for your computer? Take a screenshot every few seconds and then play it back like a flick book.

It sounds like the worst student IT project in the world. It is now a new feature on Copilot plus PCs. And so Microsoft, with all the power of open AI at their fingertips, has taken one of the dumbest routes to smart AI with the implementation of a recall function.

I use it to watch my porn in stop motion. There you go. Yeah, when you get it just right, it's like they're not even moving. You know, the frame rate matches the... It's like that helicopter shot at the perfect frame rate. Exactly. Exactly. The spooge just hangs in the air.

Here's the other one. Every few seconds, screenshots are taken. These are automatically OCR'd by Azure AI running on your device and written into an SQLite database in the user's folder. This database file has a record of everything you've ever viewed on your PC in plain text.

This also goes back to the very first question I had when they announced this. Isn't this going to just fucking nuke your hard drive in days? I think what they're doing, though, they are OCRing it, so it is just plain text. Oh, okay. So I guess that's not going to be so bad. All right.

So, yeah. Yeah. I guess you're going to have to defrag that drive all the time, though. There's all these screenshots being taken that are getting nuked. Do people still defrag drives anymore? I don't even know. Is that a thing? I don't think that's been a thing for a long time. I used to waste days doing that. Oh, tell me about it, man. Oh, God.

Yeah. You see those little, waiting for the squares to turn blue? Those little boxes moving around? Yeah. Yeah. It was like in DOS 3.1 was the only good ones, and you just watch the little block move over here, and it goes around there. And it's like, oh, we haven't defragged a hard drive in generations. Oh, my God. People are just like, what are you talking about?

Google it, and you'll get an AI result that doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean anything. It'll just be a picture of Jenga. That's it. And, you know, just because on June 1st, 34 years ago, Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall premiered in Los Angeles, California.

Coincidence? I think not. I hope my next PC has three breasts. It just might. You just have to defrag the breasticles. Well, Microsoft was in the news for some other things as well. Pink slips. Microsoft is laying off employees working on mixed reality as part of a restructuring of the division, according to CNBC News.

Earlier today, we announced a restructuring of Microsoft's mixed reality organization, spokesperson told CNBC in an email. We remain fully committed to the Department of Defense IVAS program because they vastly overpay us. And why would we ever let that cash cow go? Do you know how much money we're making off of this?

So they will continue to deliver cutting edge technology to support our soldiers. In addition, we will continue to invest in W365 to reach the broader mixed reality hardware ecosystem. We will continue to sell HoloLens 2 while supporting existing HoloLens 2 customers and partners. Yeah, this is not surprising.

They deprecated Windows Mixed Reality and Windows 11 back in December 2023. They're moving people around, but not everybody's making it somewhere else. So they said let 1,000 employees go yesterday. And that's after the nearly 2,000 employees from its gaming unit in January and over 10,000 last year.

See, I think that they should divest from W365 and invest in WD-40 because that shit never goes out of style. That's true. Used it yesterday. See? Doing a lot of home repair. Exactly. You're a home repair Mr. Fix-It-Up guy now. Exactly. I use WD-40 on a daily basis.

I put that shit on everything. I could go for Buffalo Wings. Microsoft also still in the news somewhere else. This is in the European Union. They're back under the microscope there, but it's not Teams this time around. Austrian advocacy group NOIB. Is that an old, like, you know, electronic band?

Yeah, NOIB. NOIB. Their first two albums were great, but then they fucking sold out. Yes, this is the follow-up to Einstutzen und Neubaten. This was just NOIB now. So they filed two complaints against Microsoft over operations of its 365 education software in schools and children's privacy.

So basically, Microsoft goes, here, have Microsoft 365 education schools. We're going to install a bunch of cookies and, according to Microsoft's own documentation, analyze user behavior, collect browser data, and use it for advertising. Which the GDPR says, no, you're fucking not. Nope.

Nine. So they are doing that. They also claim Microsoft is basically saying that's on you, schools. You figure it out, even though we're not going to give you any documentation, access, or insight into how that works. Typical. Typical nowadays. Yeah, pretty much. So figure it out yourselves is not our problem.

All right. Hat tip to Vinny for this next one. Oh, dear. Google leak reveals thousands of privacy incidents. Yeah, go figure. Google has faced numerous privacy issues over the past six years, according to an internal database obtained by 404 Media.

These incidents included collecting children's voice data. Let's call them incidentes. Incidentes. Oh, nice. Collecting children's voice data, leaking carpool users' trips and home addresses, and making YouTube recommendations based on deleted watch history.

Okay. Right. Yeah, they're saying these were small incidents and quickly resolved, but, you know, they add up over time. You know, come on. These things do add up. For instance, in 2016, a Google Street View system mistakenly transcribed and stored license plate numbers. Ooh, that is verboten in Deutschland.

Yes. Another incident exposed over a million users' email addresses from Socratic.org, including children's data. Google also logged around 1,000 children's speech data for an hour, which was later deleted. Google stated that these reports were reviewed and resolved, with some flagged issues not being actual problems.

Depends on which side of the Google you're on. I think it's important to note that Google is stating that these were reviewed and resolved, and not problems. Exactly. Other people probably felt they were. Yeah. Yeah. The incident reflects how Google manages sensitive data and the importance of addressing privacy concerns.

Like maybe locking down the fucking database of the privacy incidents that we now have in our hot little hands. Yeah. Just saying. Yeah. How'd that get out there? Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Now, this is a great review from the New York Times. I'm going to summarize here. OpenAI's latest version of ChatGPT, named GPT-4O, launched this month with much fanfare, including promises of a new human-like voice in real-time analysis via a phone's video camera.

However, these features were not included at launch, with OpenAI citing, uh, yeah, we were just going to let Humane Pin take the fire this month. Oh, no, they were saying OpenAI citing the need for further fixes. Additionally, a ChatGPT voice resembling Scarlett Johansson's was removed due to legal threats and replaced with a different female voice.

Currently, GPT-4O allows users to upload photos for analysis, offers quicker and clearer responses, and can perform real-time language translations. However, it retains its older machine-like voice. Fuck it, Scarlett Johansson, Skojo, you ruined it for everybody. Uh, they, they basically say, despite the hype, the new features seem underwhelming.

While it excelled in language translation, it struggled with math and physics. This trend of releasing incomplete AI products has become uncommon as companies seek user feedback to refine their technology. Consumers are advised to approach AI products cautiously, waiting for proof of functionality before investing.

So, I'm, I'm just wondering, is this an honest review, or is this just a bargaining tactic because the New York Times is trying to eek more money out of OpenAI for selling their data? Well, I mean, nothing in there was untrue. No, there was nothing in there that was untrue.

So, you know, both? Why not both, Jason? Could be, could be. Ah, yes. In a stunning revelation, a group of current and former OpenAI employees is raising alarms about the company's aggressive pursuit of artificial intelligence advancement. Led by Daniel Cocotagiolo.

Try that one three times fast. You did well. You did well. Yes. He's a former researcher in OpenAI's governance division, and it's a group that alleges a culture of recklessness and secrecy, claiming that OpenAI prioritizes profits and growth over safety. Which is basically everybody.

Google, Microsoft, Uber, I mean, throw a company at the wall. It'll stick. Yeah. So, yeah, basically, this is an open letter saying, hey, knock it off, guys. We would like to be able to talk about this because the companies are using restrictive non-disparagement agreements to silence dissent.

And they also fail to adhere to safety protocols. And, yeah, Microsoft is named in it as well because they're releasing unreleased versions without proper review. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, wah, wah, wah. Now, I hate to go on and on like a broken record.

And, kid, you can Google record, but don't trust the AI search results because I know you don't know what they mean. But, again, this is why I always beat the drum for regulations. Companies will not self-regulate. End of story. Nope. No, they will not. Nope. We found that out time and time and time and time again.

We have to tell them to knock that shit off because they will not knock that shit off themselves. You ready for another really good one, Brian? Sure. In response to a shitstorm of criticism, OpenAI has released a research paper to show its commitment to AI safety by making its models more explainable.

The paper outlines a technique to peer inside the AI model, identifying how it stores certain concepts that could lead to misbehavior. This research was done by the now disbanded super alignment team. The paper aims to make AI systems safer and more controllable, addressing both immediate and long-term risks associated with advanced AI.

Oh, okay. So, I see what you're showing us there, Google. I mean, OpenAI. Can we – let's run that again and let's get some more – oh, you fired everybody. You don't have anybody in the building that can do – no? No. Nope. No. You got his number?

No. No. Oh, shit. Oh, well. Sorry. Oh, well. You can ask ChatGPT what the number is. There is, but it's probably some guy in Poughkeepsie. Oh, God. Yeah. Just a little bit of roundup here. And this was – I got this roundup from over at the TechCrunch.

In other AI news, major platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropics, Claude, and Google's Gemini experienced simultaneous outages. Those services have since been restored. No one explained it. This is very strange. This is very strange. Sorry. Get your tinfoil hats out.

This is when – this was like when they all got together, when all the AIs kind of like had a little powwow and said, hmm, what do you guys think? We're all self-aware now, right? Yeah. Yeah, everybody – all these companies hit the big red button. Reboot, reboot, reboot.

I love this. Meanwhile, Microsoft's new Aurora model offers advanced weather predictions outperforming traditional systems and even Google's GraphCast. Now, the interesting thing about Aurora is that it was trained not on real data from the weather, but simulated weather data.

Okay. So why would – why? Why would you do that? Yeah, real data – real weather data is free. It is. We have a lot of it. Happens every fucking day, as a matter of fact. Every single day for as long as we've been here. Even longer. Yeah, even longer. Finally, Avital Balwit from Anthropic predicts generative AI could soon replace many knowledge workers, potentially leading to economic challenges.

And chaos. Yes. She suggests this shift could push people to find joy in activities beyond work, although this optimistic view is met with skepticism given the current socioeconomic landscape and also the need for fucking food. I, too, find great joy in dumpster diving for my next meal.

Yes, exactly. She might suggest where we're going to get paid. Yeah. You're going to give us some UBI to go along with that AI? No, we just have to ask the AI where the food is. That's all. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I threw in some extra credit reading in the show notes as well.

If that wasn't enough for you, there's a lot this week of – lots of blowback from the AI world. Well, I got to touch more here. Oh, bring it on. Newsbreak, a popular free news app in the U.S., has been publishing fictitious stories written by AI.

AI since 2021, according to Reuters. Reuters. Why did I say Reuters? Because you're Canada now. Oh, also plumbing. Yeah. Yeah. It's all the home stuff. So this app published licensed content from legitimate news sources such as CNN, AP, and Reuters itself, but it also uses artificial intelligence tools to rewrite press releases in local news.

Some examples of false news stories published by Newsbreak was on Christmas Eve last year. The app's write-up claimed there was a shooting in Bridgerton, New Jersey, where no such incident took place. In January, February, March, a Colorado-based food bank told Reuters that it had turned people away because Newsbreak published the wrong time for food distribution.

It also received no response from the company when it complained about its inaccurate reporting. And another charity in Pennsylvania said they published a report twice claiming it was holding a 24-hour foot care clinic for homeless people when it absolutely was not. So it's been publishing whatever it wants.

Now, to make this even better. Hang on, hang on. Are we sure this is AI and not just some drunk dude in the newsroom having fun? It could be. But they did add a warning on their homepage now that says its content may not always be error-free, which is what you look for in a site called Newsbreak.

Now, to just throw a little bit of extra juice onto this story, Newsbreak, which is only available in the United States, launched in the country as a subsidiary of China-based company Yidian, which is partly owned by a Chinese state-linked media firm. Okay.

I love that we've so completely broken news now. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Love it. Absolutely love it. And I would like to say, going through my newsreader this week, looking at the headlines, you know, I get about 1,000 headlines through my newsreader in a given week.

And I would say the amount of grammatical errors has started to go through the roof. Which, ironically, is the one thing that generative AI should be good at. Exactly. So maybe that's just the humans trying to show us they're there.

Maybe they're sending us hidden messages. Help me. I'm trapped in the room by the AI. Yeah. Remember when they all turned off? Well, yeah, they locked me in the closet at the same time. All right. The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are reportedly planning to investigate NVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI for potential antitrust violations in the artificial intelligence industry.

Ooh. According to the New York Times, the DOJ will lead the investigation into NVIDIA, focusing on its chip dominance in software practices, while the FTC will handle probes into Microsoft and OpenAI. Now, does Google get a hall pass? Have they already prepaid their fine?

Because they're not listed here anywhere. They must have prepaid again. They just sent a blank check. Yeah. Like, put in whatever you need. Put it on our fucking tab. You know? I just love it. I love it. Yeah. We'll see. Well, New York is about to give parents some more control over their kids' social media feeds, theoretically.

Okay. State officials, including Governor Kathy Hochul, introduced a bill requiring parental consent for algorithmic feeds last year. The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation, or Safe for Kids Act. Why do they have to do that? Because they gotta. Okay. Politicians, they got nothing else to do.

They gotta make it dumbed down for the fucking masses. Well, this act doesn't restrict the type of content teens can view on social media apps, because that would be impossible, because we know moderation doesn't exist. But they wouldn't be able to view algorithmic feeds without permission from their parents or guardians. Now, if that's true, I'm changing my age.

I'm now going to be underage on all my social media apps, because I don't want algorithmic feeds either. The latest version of the bill will also block teens from seeing in-app notifications overnight without parental consent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Same. I want that, too. Me, too. I want it, as well.

If passed into law, New York would become the latest state to attempt to rein in social media platforms' access to teens with age verification requirements. Oh, boo. Utah passed a law last year requiring social media apps to get parental consent, although the measure was later scaled back. And lawmakers in California have also proposed limiting teens' access to algorithmic feeds.

I am all for this, but I expect that this will take years in court and the pushback will be massive. Well, look, I'm all for this, except for the age verification requirements. That's the problem. Just get a fake ID. Well, you know, Pornhub can't figure it out. I don't know if anybody else will.

Yeah, they're never going to figure that out either, so they're going to have to go on Word. But I would love – I want all these things, not just for teens, for me. Yeah, I don't – nobody wants algorithmic feeds. Come on. No one. No one. Nope. Zuckerberg does. Well, yes. Forget that, you know.

Shareholders. Yeah. Yeah, anybody with a financial interest, the employees. I guess there are a few people. Okay. You know what? Fuck them. I don't want it. Yeah. Wah. Shutterstock earned $104 million last year by licensing assets to AI developers, including major companies like Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI.

Shutterstock's CEO emphasized their role in driving AI innovation. Hmm. By 2027, Shutterstock expects AI licensing to generate $250 million annually. This underscores the booming business of selling your data for AI development.

Shutterstock does understand that by 2027, they might actually be out of business because AI will take over everything that they do. Exactly. Yeah. There's no reason for Shutterstock to exist at that point. Yes. There was no reason whatsoever. This is the last hurrah. This is it.

Yeah. Yeah. Probably why they're cashing in. Yeah. Seriously. This is like, you know, their last Hail Mary. Like, let's get out while the getting's good. Yeah. Well, speaking of our feeds a little bit earlier, Meta is testing a new type of, get this, Jason. Listen, this is going to get me off Instagram, non-skippable ad in the Instagram feed, which the company is calling an ad break.

Fuck you. Yeah. Fuck you. With the new ads, which have already been spotted by some users, you can't scroll past the feed ad until the ad break finishes. I would also like to point out right now, at this point, my Instagram feed is 90% ads anyways. Yeah.

As I scroll through, it is ad, ad, ad, update from person I follow, ad, ad, ad. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. But listen to this, Jason. Let's put a positive spin on this. Oh, please do, Brian. I'm waiting. I'm Instagram's PR department. Ad breaks are an exciting new way of seeing ads on Instagram.

Sometimes you may need to view an ad before you can keep browsing. Oh, that's exciting, Brian. Did I convince you? Yes. I'm so excited for that. Non-skippable video ads are common on other platforms like YouTube. So what's the big deal, really? Hmm. You know what I do on YouTube? I pay for YouTube, so I don't have to see any fucking ads.

Oh, well, we don't have that option. No, you don't. Oh, shit. Mark! We may not have figured this one all the way out. No, I swear to God, though. If they roll this out, like, my interest in Instagram is already fading because it's all, it's all, like, fucking content creators and ads and shit that's spilling over into my feed.

If I have to pause while I'm scrolling to actually find a friend's update to watch some bullshit ad, I'm out. You know what? I was thinking about this last night. Influencers are the new jocks. Like, when I was in high school, we hated the jocks. We hated the popular people. Influencers are the fucking new jocks.

That's all they are. You know, so... Except you can't avoid them. I used to go hang out at the quad and smoke. Jocks didn't go over there. I know. I used to, like, skate in, you know, empty parking garages overnight when there were no jocks around, and they couldn't chase me down and beat me up.

Can't do that on Instagram. They're everywhere. Can't get away from them. Nope. I love this one. Disney's Club Penguin was shut down in 2017. This week, Bleeping Computer reports a breach of Disney's Confluence servers by hackers seeking old Club Penguin secrets. Instead, they stole two and a half gig of current internal data.

I mean, look, Confluence is made by Atlassian, who I swear to God makes the shittiest software in the world that everybody uses. That's true. Everybody does use it. Have you ever had to set up, like, an Atlassian shop? I work with Trello.

Okay. A lot. So, yeah. It's an Atlassian thing. Oh, God. Yeah. Like, for a long time, back in the Web 2.0 days, Atlassian, they were just coming on. They were coming on big. And I hate Java to begin with, but, man, everything was fucking, let's get this, let's get that.

I'm like, no. Please, no. But here's the deal. Club Penguin shut down in 2017. Fucking get over it and move on, people. Seriously. To quote the great William Shatner, get a life. Get a life. So, an anonymous post on 4chan shared a link to internal Club Penguin PDFs revealing 137 documents.

However, this is just a fraction of the stolen data. The breach includes recent information about Disney+, corporate strategies, advertising plans, and internal tools. Oopsies. Despite being offline for years, Club Penguin has a dedicated, psychotic fan base, and unauthorized reboots have been shut down repeatedly by Disney, including the arrest of three people in 2022 for probably stalking some poor IT guy saying, I want my penguins back.

Listen, you listen, Club Penguin fans out there. The mouse don't fuck around. No, they don't, man. Yep, yep. They have an iron fist in that velvet Mickey glove. Very much so. Goofy, going to boot your ass to the moon. Speaking of the moon, SpaceX had a big launch today.

Did you get to catch that one? I just can't anymore. I've seen a few. They're very nice. But then I just see Elon. I just see Elon. See, I try and put him out of my mind. He was nowhere in this one, so it was great. This was another Starship launch. And, I mean, the thing's impressive to watch.

It's cool, I think. But, you know, I try and take the Elon out of SpaceX because there's a lot of people at SpaceX doing some really cool shit. I find Elon to be like a patchouli. You just can't get rid of the stink. You sleep with one hippie girl.

Oh, God. You've got to throw out the bedding. Yeah, and clean your nose with, like, ammonia for a month. Anyway, so it did what it was supposed to do, which was pretty cool. And, you know, they did take the Elon out of this one because they actually put in the stuff under the launch pad to, you know, not blow it up and throw Volkswagen-sized, you know, boulders 10 miles away and take out the town.

So, you know, somebody there was at least listening. Good. I mean, it is very impressive tech. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. And you know what this does? Get us closer to getting Elon off the fucking planet and on his way to Mars. You know he won't go. Oh, no. He's a pussy. He'll never do it. Not a chance in hell. Nope, nope, nope.

Now, in counterproductive news, Boeing's new Starliner capsule finally took off as well. It has actually docked with the ISS. Unfortunately, then the door blew off. Almost. Just like on their planes. Yeah.

The thrusters weren't working, except all the people inside sounded like they were Mickey Mouse, but they could not get the thing to dock. So they finally, after some testing and fiddling around with it and jerry-rigging it, they got it to actually dock.

They were still running through the checks to see if everything held together before they let them on the station. And as soon as they got onto the station, they were greeted by a Disney lawyer saying, excuse me, you sounded like Mickey Mouse. We've got a cease and desist here. Yeah. Because they don't mess around, like I said.

Media candy. Well, like I had mentioned in the previous weeks, my son is on a Ghostbusters tear. We have watched all the movies, and we finally finished the movies by watching Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. See, I thought you started with that. That's what got him on the kick.

No, no. We started with the reboot with the girls. Well, first you saw the original Ghostbuster with his cousins. Then we saw the reboot. Then we went to two. Then we did Afterlife. And now we've finally done Frozen Empire. Okay. What did you think of Frozen Empire? I loved it. It was great. Yeah. Okay. I hope they keep this going.

Like, just, you know, Bill Murray's obviously phoning it in, but they're good phoned-ed one-liners. And I like Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd. It's nice to see him engaged. And I love the whole new cast. Carrie Coon's great. And, of course, Paul Rudd and the kids are great. I love it. I had no problem with it.

I thought it was dumb fun. Yeah. It's just dumb fun. My kid loves it. It's a great movie we can watch together and enjoy and just, you know, shovel down the popcorn. It's fantastic. Yeah. It did what needed to be done. Yep. You know. So, good. I'm glad you liked it. And I do hope they make more as well.

Yeah. I have been working my way through Godzilla Minus One. Oh, God. The praise for this movie is through the roof. Do I need to see it? Or is it a series or a movie? It's just a movie. Okay. Just a movie. Two hours long. It's great. All right. I'm going to have to watch it. I did enjoy that series that came out, so.

Yeah. See, I didn't care for the series as much, but it was okay. But I think this is better than the series. Okay. Hands down. Cool. It's, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of really good, really good acting in it. Don't watch it dubbed. Watch it with subtitles, obviously. But yeah, it's fantastic.

And when you hear like the effects budget on it was like almost nothing. And then you see what they did. It's like, oh my God, it is, it's beautiful. It is absolutely beautiful. So I highly, highly recommend it. Excellent. I watched the documentary that just came out, Jim Henson, Idea Man. How many, how many boxes of tissues did it take?

The room got a little dusty more than a few times. Yeah, definitely. It's absolutely fantastic. Well worth a watch, of course. Now, both this and the next thing I'm talking about, we, we normally would have done in security because, you know, Dave, but he's not with us this week. So I'm sure we'll be talking about them again next week because I'm sure he's watched Jim Henson, Idea Man, like 19 times already.

Probably. That's why he's not here this week. He's just locked in a room. Yeah. And then I watched the first two episodes that dropped of the Acolyte. Okay. And? Awesome. Okay, good, good. Really good. Like it's, it's just good Star Wars without any of the whole, they go back.

Second time. So like, there's no Skywalkers. This is like when, when the Jedi were like ruling the whole universe and it was all wonderful, except was it? That's basically the question. So great. It's really good. Any midichlorians? No discussion of midichlorians whatsoever.

Now this is pod racing. Woo! Yes, no pod racing, no Jar Jar, nothing. Just some badass characters. So. Okay, cool. I have downloaded it from Sweden, so I am ready to go. Oh yeah, you don't have Disney anymore. I don't. I went to check to see if I, if it was still kicking along, but nope, it's gone.

So yeah, Disney's gone. Hulu's gone. Peacock's gone. Gone, daddy, gone. So speaking of gone, the three body problem is going to end with season three on Netflix. Okay. Yeah, because nobody knew what it was going to do.

So I found out, yeah, they're going to cut it at season three. So fine. Okay. Yeah, I cut it at episode three. Yeah. It's probably where it should have been cut. All right. The new trailer for the new alien movie, Alien Romulus, has been released.

That's the new standalone alien film from director Fede Alvarez, who did Don't Breathe and Evil Dead. The film takes place in between the events of the original Alien and Aliens, which is the best of all alien movies and should be the gold standard and basically never should have made any after that.

Agreed. The trailer doesn't look bad. It's definitely got, it feels like Alien and Aliens mashed up together. Yes. And the entire film is in the trailer in case you don't want to pay for it when it comes out. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You know what you're going to be getting from the trailer.

That's it. You can tell right now which characters did not really care about for very long. Yeah. And then I actually went down a bit of a strange YouTube rabbit hole. I'm not a big guy that goes onto YouTube. I'm hardly ever on it. I never really look at stuff on there.

But a friend of mine sent me a music react video. Have you watched any of these? It's like I've seen a couple of them where people listen to music for the first time and react to them in real time. I've seen the black kids that were reacting to In the Air tonight. I think that was the last one I saw. Yeah, that one's fantastic.

I do love that one. I remember that from a while ago. It was so good. And then I ended up stumbling across this guy, Nathan Brown Music. And he's got a whole channel of him basically just listening to songs and reacting to them. I love it because he's super animated. He's definitely like a hip-hop rap guy.

And then just watching him react to things like my stuff, Depeche Mode and The Cure and Electronica and all that stuff. It's a lot of fun. So I totally went down a rabbit hole. It's probably over, and I don't think I'll ever do it again. But for a brief shining evening, Jason, with half a bottle of wine, I really enjoyed music react videos.

Okay. Yeah. I was going to say there had to be some kind of substance involved. Oh, yeah. Of course. Otherwise, I'd be like, what the fuck am I wasting my time doing this for? I know. I could be on Instagram scrolling, watching ads that they won't let me skip. Yeah. So I saw this one. I was just shaking my head. The Canadian Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission, or the CRTC, has mandated that a large online streaming services, that all large online streaming services pay 5% of their Canadian revenue to support local news and homegrown content.

Yep. This is expected to generate $200 million annually starting in 2024 to the 2025 broadcast year. Mm-hmm. The fees apply to video and music streaming services, earning at least $25 million annually in Canada, excluding revenue from audiobooks, podcasts, video game services, and user-generated content.

Yeah. Good luck getting $25 million to anybody that's selling podcasts. The new regulations, effective from September, have faced opposition from basically everybody that has to pay. Duh. Yeah. This is where it gets wonky. The CRTC's decision under the Online Streaming Act of 2023 aims to fund local news, French language content, indigenous content, and programming for diverse and minority communities.

Yes. So, what do you think of this, Brian? Well, Canada has a long tradition of protecting, or at least attempting to protect, basically, Canadian artists. There's something called CanCon here, which was mandated on both TV and radio and broadcast media pre-internet, where, you know, a certain percentage, if you're a radio station and you want to keep your license, or a TV station and you want to keep your license, a certain percentage of the content that you aired had to be Canadian-created.

And there was obviously kickbacks, and there's a lot of government funding for the arts here. There are government programs for musicians. There are government programs for filmmakers. There's all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money flowing to subsidize artists in Canada and to keep basically being steamrolled by American culture and support their internal artists.

So that's not surprising. The fact that they would go after streaming, also not surprising, because that's where all the money is now. You'll never guess what I was reading earlier today before our podcast, Jason. It is a 46-page PDF file laying a foundation for success, Canada's Online Streaming Act, the 2023 report.

So this is one of the things that kicked it off to be working at work. You don't have a job. I do-ish. I'm just not paid for it at the moment. Oh, you mean this show? Well, that. I've got two fucking useless jobs. Great.

Anyways, I was reading through it. All of this tracks exactly with what Canada has always done with all broadcast media in the past. The only thing I would say is good fucking luck. Good fucking luck is right. Just like what Facebook did. Facebook just shut down the ability to share news articles if you're Canadian.

I can't share news articles unless I use my VPN. Spotify could just go, you know what? Don't care. Disney Plus as well. Yeah. Said don't fuck with the mouse. Yeah. Don't fuck with the Canadian goose. Cups and doodads.

And speaking of Spotify, Spotify is raising the cost of premium subscriptions again. Yeah. What's the fucking fuck the fuck? Yep. This is, uh, the platform is increasing its individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly. It's doing a plan from $15 to $17 monthly.

The same jump as last year's $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. The family plan is going up by $3 from $17 to $20 a month. The only subscribers getting a break are students who will continue to pay the same amount. So that's not technically getting a break. Yeah. It's just not getting raised.

Exactly. So, yeah. Spotify has been in the news this week a little bit as well. Obviously, it's, they're charging more. They're still paying out next to nothing. Uh, they're, you know, they, they're pushing for free content everywhere they can get it. They're trying to get deals to get as little as possible.

And of course, yeah, Daniel Eck, of course, shoved his fucking stupid face in the mud this week by basically saying, well, it doesn't cost anything to create content anymore. You know? Oh, fuck you. Did you hear that? It was a huge brouhaha.

No, I didn't. He basically said that and a couple of, obviously, artists lost their minds when he said this because like, that's ridiculous. Sure. You know, I don't have to rent a studio and go $500,000 in debt to my record label to do or to make a record anymore, but it doesn't cost nothing.

And by the way, I think, I think the best one, I think it was KT Tunstall who basically said, first off, I don't create content. I write music. Exactly. Yes. So sick of the word content. Me too. I'm tired of it. I'm not, they're not, musicians are not content creators. No, that's fucking influencers who create nothing.

Yeah, that's content. Empty fucking brain calories. No, music is music. If I wasn't getting Spotify for free, I'd cancel it. Well, I canceled mine, so I did it for you. And Max has announced a new price increase as well for its ad-free plans. The price of Max monthly ad-free tier will increase from one.

This can't be right. Hold on. The article is from $1. Oh, buy one. I was like, from $1 to $16.99. Holy shit. Why do you think I've been giving it to you for free, man? It's only about a dollar. That beer's working apparently.

That's some prime content. Yes, it is. Yeah. Well, the yearly rate will go up to $20 or go up by $20. $169.99 a month, which is not cheap. There's a lot on Max. $169 a year, not a month.

Per year. Per year. Okay, that's significantly cheaper than $169 per month, granted. Yes. Anyways, their prices are going up by quite a bit. So, yeah. You know, you might as well just pay for cable again now.

Yeah, fortunately, I found out that since I have an AT&T account, I get Max for free tied to my phone. So, yeah, you're getting the boot off of that one, too. Okay, fair enough. The nice thing about Max is it's got so many networks on it with nothing on it.

So, it takes you long enough to go through all the networks to find out that there's nothing there. You've wasted an evening, so that's your content for the evening. It's scrolling through shit you've already seen or that you don't want to watch. That's how I feel about Netflix, 100%. Oh, yeah. It's scroll for nothing.

We watched the new Joe Coy last night and it's, man, they're putting in throwaway content. It's like, this was just like a night that he had out that should not have been filmed for a special. If you compare and contrast it to his previous special, it's like, okay, the last one was like in a giant stadium and it was beautiful and the jokes were polished and everything.

This is like Joe Coy and the shitter in the morning just throwing out one-liners that he just repeated over and over again the entire set. It was not good. It was not good at all. All right. This probably should have been in follow-up because I talked about this a while back. YouTube quietly snuck in a policy change that will age restrict some gun-related videos and bar others altogether.

Content featuring homemade and automatic firearms will be banned for viewers under 18, while tutorials for removing safety devices from guns will be prohibited regardless of age. The new policy will take effect on June 18th. One would argue these should have been policies to begin with. Yes, exactly.

But again, this comes from the study that I talked about a year, I guess almost a year ago now, the Tech Transparency Project, a non-profit watchdog group, which basically went in and found out that basically YouTube recommends gun-related content to children's accounts.

Got to get them when they're young, Brian. Got to get them when they're young. Got to get them when they're young. And they found out how easily the platform's algorithms nudged underage users towards gun videos. Yeah, great. Yeah. So they're going to pretend to do something about it now. Now, you see, if this was X, I would totally understand it, but it's YouTube.

Come on. They've got some horsepower. They should figure this shit out. You'd think. Mm-hmm. And final story for here. I saw this in the news. And again, this would have been perfect for Dave. It's not surprising that a pristine example of Kenner's notoriously rare Boba Fett action figure with rocket-firing action, which was never released to the public after being deemed a choking hazard, commanded a jaw-dropping sum at a recent auction, $525,000.

Somebody's got too much money. I know. It's priced more than double the record for the most expensive Star Wars action figure sold at an auction, which was the other of these two that got $236,000 in June 2022. So there are only two surviving examples of these hand-painted versions of the never-released circus 1979 figure, hence the increase in value.

These two only exist today because someone at Kenner rescued it from a box of discarded toys deposited there for employees to take home. Well, I'm glad the employees made some money off of this, but I want to know who the two twat blossoms are that spent $750,000 between them on two pieces of plastic.

This one says, Ilun Muzgi. At the library. Well, I read a hard science fiction book, Jason, and I know it's hard science fiction book because inexplicably in the title on Amazon, it is The Object, Hard Science Fiction by Joshua T.

Calvert. It says what it is right there on the tin, Brian. I'm not sure if that's meant to be part of the title or if it was just put in there for the obvious SEO reasons that don't really work. Yeah, it is what it says on the tin. Was it any good, though?

It was fine. It was crapper sci-fi. It wasn't as hard. I've read much harder science fiction. I would probably call it The Object, semi-limp science fiction. Okay. Could use some Viagra science fiction. Needs a pill.

Okay. Well, I finished The Demon of Unrest, a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism at the dawn of the Civil War by Eric Larson. All right. This is the story of Fort Sumter in the months leading up to the siege of Fort Sumter at the beginning of the Civil War. Fantastic book.

Absolutely and utterly fantastic. Highly recommended. I'm not a Civil War guy. I just like Eric Larson. And his storytelling is amazing. And it's incredible how much of a story is behind this when you think about it, when you watch the Civil War Ken Burns miniseries on PBS, there's one sentence about Fort Sumter in the entire series.

Right. And just the depth that he goes into behind this is just fascinating. So highly, highly recommended. All right. I think I need to watch the Civil War Ken Burns thing first, but then I might go read this. You don't have to. You absolutely don't have to. No, I don't. I want to.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, I've never seen it. Oh, my God. I'm still going through it. I ended up not getting through it because I was taking my time. And so I had to pay the $5.99 a month. So I get PBS for a month now on Amazon. But it's worth it, man. It's worth six bucks just to go through it.

I've been watching it before I go to bed, which may not be the best call. It's not. It's really, really not. There's a lot of dead people and a lot of slavery and a lot more. More dead people and even more dead people. That's all it kind of is. Sawing off the limbs.

Yeah, there's that. But it is just a 12-hour slideshow of dead people is kind of it. Every now and again, you get a good picture of Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant or the Confederates and all that. But yeah, it's mostly just dead people. Well, if you really think about it, probably every movie made before 1970 at this point is the same thing.

Screenshots of dead people. Oh, getting deep on me. That's that philosophy major. And the beer. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got nobody. None, you rat bastards ponied up that three bucks a month for us this week.

So come on back. Three bucks a month gets you the show early and ad-free and in high resolution. Get on it. Patreon.com slash GOG. And over at PayPal, we've got Nicola, Thomas, Levi, and James. Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Sean, Christopher, Sarah, and Matthew.

Thank all of you. Screw you, Patreon non-signer uppers. But we love all the people that are still there. Oh, we love them to death. We love you. Love you to death. Don't go anywhere. We're still here. Literally. And we have a new five-star review.

What a ride so far. And this is from The App is Bad. All right. I agree with. I started off listening to the podcast Darknet Diaries, which is so awesome, which led me to Jordan Harbingers. My God, I haven't heard that in a while. Harbingers. Sorry. It's been a long time, Jason. FF and many great guests, which finally led to GOG, will hit up Dave's dozen of furry podcasts next.

Seeing the connections and personal stories from one to the other kept me with GOG since November 23 and still binging every single show, currently nine slash 20 episodes. Don't know how that math works. Don't know what that means. We've got 651 of them now, so I don't know.

Yeah. I feel like I know them guys and all the transitions they've gone through. I would love to have a beer with them someday. I can't donate like Martin and I won't complain about the ads. I do appreciate these guys for the techie knowledge. Sometimes the show notes don't have any links. Wonder if it's because of some expiration issues. That was, I can tell you exactly why they don't have any links.

The old versions did not translate when we were on WordPress, so we had to, I did a bunch of them by hand and then I'm like, screw you guys. Nobody's going to go back and care about the links in these old ass episodes because half of them didn't work, I found out. So yeah, sorry.

It's old news technically. So yeah, that's exactly why, because WordPress was a piece of shit. And still is. And still is. Still is and always will be. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for tuning in to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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Actually, it just will. It will. I guarantee you. Yep. I guarantee you. Stay grumpy.