72: The Grumpy Old Geeks Nominate You!

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. So have you dumped a bucket of ice cold water over your head yet, Jason?

I put some on my balls. That's it. I did not. I will not. No. Yeah. Well, we're not in danger of being challenged anytime soon, but I've already donated money to a different charity because ALS is doing quite well at the moment.

This has caused, of course, a lot of sturm and drang all over the internet. People are freaking out. People say bad things about it, then they get attacked because how dare you say anything bad about a charity. I myself have been all over the map on this. I got super fucking annoyed with it, but then I go, well, whatever. It is charity. So that's good.

Yeah. I don't know. Right now, I cannot look at anything online without being inundated with it. My Facebook feed is full of it. Twitter is full of it. Everything is full of it. Everybody is full of it. And I was totally okay. I am still totally okay with when people just kind of stand there and shoot it with their iPhone and dump a bucket of water over themselves.

If you're here in California, you better be standing on grass or over plants and not be dumping it onto pavement. But I'm totally fine with that. When I started to get upset was when earlier this week, when I started to see the ones that were, especially here in California or Los Angeles specifically, where you could see the assistant directors and the creative types who were then doing these drone shots from the roof overlooking the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.

And it became, look how cool I am and not about the charity anymore. If you need a director of photography to do a stunt meme, then you're doing it wrong. Yeah. There are some elaborate budgets being involved on these latest challenges. And that's not the point, right? This is when it gets stupid.

And this is when we're allowed to bitch about it. Yeah? Okay. I mean, my whole thing about it was that you guys have no water out there to begin with and you're all dumping it on your heads. It's like, okay, well, you just wasted some water, you idiot. Yeah. You have 99.8% of California is covered in a severe drought.

At least Zane Lamprey, who we have limb-baseded a few times for his crappy merchandise from his Kickstarter, at least he had the foresight to basically use beer. So he dumped beer on his head. I give him props for that. And, you know, it wasn't good beer, so that's fine.

It would have been a tragedy had it been anything other than Coors Light. Yeah. If he used Guinness, I'd be very upset. But he used Coors Light, which, you know, it's kind of the same as water. Pretty much, yes. Yeah. So how is the drought treating you? Have you cut back on your consumption?

I don't consume wastefully anyways. I grew up here in Los Angeles. I grew up here in Southern California, and droughts are a way of life. I have no yard to water. I have, you know, I take a shower a day, and it's a pretty quick one.

I don't linger. I'm not throwing water over my head, my friend's head. So I haven't noticed much, and I've always been very conscientious of not wasting water. So for me, it's no big deal. The one thing that does drive me absolutely insane, of course, is just government waste, as per usual.

Seeing, you know, the sprinkler systems that are broken and, you know, just water shooting straight down the street and into the sewer system because we can't be bothered to fix it. And why are these things still going on anyways? Let's cut them off. Let's have sensors.

Have something. I mean, we have technology. I don't understand why we don't implement them in our government systems here. So walking around California and walking around my neighborhood, I find, you know, so much waste that's ridiculous. But in my own personal life, I'm a goddamn angel.

So it actually reminded me of the Dean Kamen slingshot system that he's been working on, which I can't wait for that thing to get into, you know, widespread use. But basically, you put in a pile of cow poop, and it comes out with fresh, clean water. It's an incredible system.

They're just – I think they're still like $10,000 a piece, but he's working on it. But it seems pretty damn cool, and I forget what the numbers were. It's like you can get 1,000 liters of water a day out of one with minimal fuel. So at some point, you guys might be looking to install those.

So it's not looking good for you guys. It's raining here right now, and I've got extra water. So much, it even comes in the basement. It's looking for a new home. No, it is not looking good for us. And there's no relief in sight anytime soon from what all the weather forecasters seem to be saying.

So it's not good. The Holy Grail always is desalinization and getting that down to a financial possibility. But I don't see that happening here anytime soon either. Yeah, too much energy. Exactly. So while you were ice bucketing over on Facebook, Twitter was all Ferguson still.

I called that, by the way. I called that one. No, we both did last time. That's what it was. I mean that's what it always is. Facebook is for fun. No, no, no. Twitter is for people who kind of care about other things. I know that. But I mean I called the fact that Ferguson wasn't done because there was rays of hope when we recorded our last podcast and hopefully everything was about to get better.

And I was thinking in the back of my mind, no, this is not done yet. Oh, no. It is not. It blew up again and then again and then again. Well, apparently – I mean last night everybody basically – I think they got fatigued. They got Ferguson fatigued and went home. They sent the National Guard home.

And yeah, I got Ferguson fatigued because I would – I was checking it before I went to bed, reading up everything, falling asleep, waking up at 5 a.m. with terrible dreams, checking it again, going back to sleep, getting up and checking it again to see who was – if anybody was shot or killed.

And fortunately, the only person that really got killed was somebody else in St. Louis, which is another entire story that's blowing up. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm just – I have – definitely have Ferguson fatigue and I am really glad my inner adult caught up with me and said, no, you know what?

You're not getting paid. Don't go down there because I wanted to go down and shoot it and I could have probably gotten some amazing shots. But then it dawned on me. I'm not a photojournalist. I wanted to be when I was a kid. Right now, I'm an old, fat programmer. So stick to what you know because I wouldn't have had the stamina to do that anymore.

It would have been fun as hell for about the first 10 minutes. But man, I would have been miserable. Yeah. I'm kind of glad he didn't go as well because, I mean, that was part of the big problem. I mean, not that you would have been a problem because you're level-headed. You would have gone there to take your shots and that's about it.

But we had every fucking idiot, just liberal rabble-rousers and conservative ones, people on both sides just that were near enough that basically just, again, like the ALS ice bucket challenges. It's all about them and they went down there to have it be about them.

And basically, I mean, I think Ferguson would have been shortened by half if the town didn't fill up with idiots. Yeah. Well, I mean, they had outside instigators and all that. But I don't want to go down that road. I would have been fine, I think, at least from a documentation standpoint because I've got experience doing protests and that kind of thing.

I know how to stay out of the way and I know how to be invisible. But like I said, I'm six feet tall, way too 50. It's kind of hard to be invisible and I'm fairly intimidating. People are scared of me just when I say hi. So going around with a camera and all that stuff might have not been the best course of action, being a big old white guy with all these fat white cops down there pointing their guns at people.

That is true. So I am glad that I stayed home. And just speaking of the whole Twitter, Facebook thing, I'm in the middle of an experiment. I'm about a week in now and it's a no-share experiment. I read.

I consume. I check Facebook every two days. I check Twitter a couple times a day just for fun and seeing what's going on because Twitter still is a great source for news. But I have not shared anything that is not original content. Like I still post to a photo a day and I'll share that stuff but I'm not like giving commentary like everybody does.

I'm not posting what I ate for breakfast. I'm not doing all these different things. And it was hard the first couple of days because every thought that pops into your head, you're like, oh, shit, I got to tweet that. And when you get out of that habit, it's amazing how much clearer your head is because then you think about things longer than 140 characters and you can actually put better thoughts together on a topic.

You know, it's very zen-like but it's been excellent I think for me personally just because I don't have that 140-character dopamine hit. It slows me down and I don't think about it as much. I don't reach for my phone to even look at Twitter and Facebook as much as I did because I'm not in the mindset of I got to post something too.

Yeah. See what I'm saying? No, I totally get that. I mean I remember when I was getting really into posting, not so much on Twitter as we all know that listen to this. I'm not a huge fan of Twitter. But I was always like – in the back of my mind, it was like I'm distilling down the essence of something so I can post it on Facebook and that's no way to live, man.

I got over that and I'm getting over it more and more and I have to – you know, Twitter, I've been on more often than not recently or at least more so than I ever used to because you're right. It is a fantastic source for news and with all the various things that have happened over the last two weeks, I found myself basically compelled to be checking Twitter because things would break there first without a doubt.

I mean beating everything else. It was always on Twitter first and then I got the same thing. I have total Twitter fatigue and I think I posted like yesterday morning or something, Twitter bums me out or it was two days ago and that was it because Twitter was totally bumming me out. I could not keep up with it and it was just depressing.

Well, I mean my solution for that is to unfollow the people that are bumming me out or unfollow the people that are reporting on the scene that's bumming me out. Like the Ferguson stuff, I have – I'm down – I got rid of everybody. I moved them over to a list. So if I want to go check out Ferguson, I got all the journalists and all the local politicians and everybody in a single list and I can just go there and get my hit as it were.

And the rest of it is just friends and mostly – hell, mostly my Twitter feed is security people and journalists who I know or funny people. That's it. And the funny people really keep my sanity when I'm listening to like Jake Applebaum talk about the sky is falling.

It helps. So yeah, this – not focusing on that has given me the opportunity to have more brain power to work on more creative endeavors and write more and other stuff. I don't find myself losing concentration as fast.

So I can actually focus longer. And that's actually helped with my work too which has been a great boon because I got behind on a couple of projects. And now it's like I can sit here for four hours straight, not think about grabbing my phone, not thinking about opening Facebook and just write code for four hours, feel really good when I'm done, feel like I've accomplished something and not had to worry about being scatterbrained.

It's awesome. I recommend everybody try it. Just do it for a week even and see how you feel at the end of the week. I know the first week for me has been great and I'm going to try and keep it up for 30 days at least and see how that works. Yeah, I've got to do it. I mean I definitely had that issue this week. I think we've gone over kind of what my general schedule is on previous episodes and it is a bit scattered.

There's little bits here. There's little bits there. And part of my job is unfortunately is to be on the social networks because I handle that stuff for certain clients. But this week I had to actually sit and do basically a gigantic government grant proposal.

And those things are intimidating and they're long and it's not something that you can dive into for like an hour and a half and step away from. So this entire week I've just kind of been sitting here and I've been writing and I've had to force myself. It was a conscious effort to not keep looking over at Facebook or over at Twitter.

And it's a good feeling when you break it. And I did a little bit and I got everything done. But the first like day or two was a nightmare. Yeah, it's tough that first couple of days. It really is because you're just used to it. It's part of your life now. Check your phone. Yeah, it's a physical habit.

You have to break the physical habit. So I just put my phone down to charge, turn it off so I don't hear it beep and get to work and not think about it. I've got all the bookmarks in my – the bookmark bar in my browser. I've taken all of the one-click links out and it goes away.

It really does. It's really not hard to break that habit. I mean you can do it. Trust me. Speaking of breaking habits. Bring it. Adam Carolla. What a – he settled. After all of his pomp and grandstanding, he settled.

Now, all right. Credit where credit is due. Carolla took the brunt of this patent troll podcasting lawsuit, which would have affected basically all of us and the shows that we listen to. And Carolla fought the fight. He was the face of it. He was the one that went out there and did not want to drop the lawsuit and unfortunately kept going on about how he is definitely not going to drop this lawsuit.

No way we are taking it to the bitter end except for the fact that he didn't, but we should – he did settle this week. There's a 45-day gag order on either side discussing exactly what terms happened. For right now, I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I will wait until the – I guess we're down to 40 days now until the gag order is lifted and he does – he said that he will discuss everything. He will lay it all out there. He's going to tell us everything that actually really happened. So I will wait and see. I'm disappointed that he went back on his word, especially since a lot of my day is spent being entertained by various shows on his network and that he is on.

And for the last six months, there hasn't been a lot of entertainment on those shows. It's been him rambling on and on and on about how he's not going to give up and how much these people suck and how much money it's costing him. On the plus side, maybe we'll get some decent shows again now. Yeah. Well, there's that.

The EFF has a really good write-up on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the settlement, which I recommend. If you're interested in this topic, go read it. I mean the real downside is that they're still open to come after podcasters. Granted, now that they've figured out that there is absolutely zero money – there's negative money coming after podcasters.

We're probably safe. But he did not slay the dragon by any stretch of the imagination. That was what he was going on about for quite a long time, that it actually had nothing. Nothing to even do with this specific trial. It's the whole thing of being a patent troll, of just going after people and your entire business being just going and basically extorting money out of people.

That's what he was up against. But he did give up. He did. And here's the thing that really – this is what pisses me off is on their Fund Anything campaign, they're still accepting donations. Well, again, I'm not surprised by that because he has discussed that he has spent already well over what they took in his donations.

So he's just trying to break even, one would think. But he hasn't really mentioned that. Yeah. There's no update on the site that says we have settled and we're trying to recoup our costs. There's no update whatsoever about anything. That would be a good thing for them to do. Yeah, no, it's false advertising and fraud basically as far as I'm concerned to have everything up there saying we're fighting this fight.

Please give us money. And people who have not heard that he settled are now like still giving him money based on like old shows even though the suit is over. Well, you should sue him for fraud because now we know he'll give up and settle. Yeah, no shit, pussy.

Comment of the week. A person who wishes to remain anonymous writes, just curious what methods you both use to back up your data. I'd love to hear your thoughts on backing up to the cloud in a future podcast. Well, welcome to the future, my friend. I work for a small company looking to back up one terabyte of data to the cloud.

Yep. I'm concerned about bandwidth, how much is enough, and also the time it would take to completely restore from the cloud if we ever had to do that. I've heard awful things about restoring from the cloud. Would love to hear your thoughts and insights. Thanks. Yeah, this is a good one. I actually had to consult for a client about this very same thing.

So go for it, Jason. You chime in first. Well, no, you did the research. Let's hear you. Oh, I didn't do any research. I just said one terabyte of data over the cloud, you're going to dedicate like fucking seven weeks to this? That's stupid. It does take a while. I mean, yeah, it's easy to do the math on this.

Look at what your max upload speed is and then take out what your general use per day is. Then you factor overnight when the pipes are clean what you can get through. Here's what it's going to take. It's going to take a hell of a lot of time. Yep. A long, long, long, long time.

Yeah. A terabyte isn't that much data. I just bought a two terabyte drive for $99. What I generally do is I've got a three drive system. I have two at the house. One is live that I use all day. The other is in a fireproof box, which I sync probably once a week.

And another one, which I sync once a week, is off-site. That's my standard backup for my two terabytes of general data. Plus I've got, what do you call it, a time capsule downstairs, a two terabyte time capsule for just network backup. I don't use any cloud backup except for I've got some stuff on S3 that's like, you know, it's been sitting there for ages.

They're old like CD-ROM images from back when I used to make CD-ROMs and just haven't pulled it off yet. That cost me a whopping 78 cents a month, so I'm not in a rush. And nowadays you can get file transporter, which is basically transporter. The URL is filetransporter.com.

And you can set up your own Dropbox-like system and have off-site mirroring of the data, which is cool. And it's pretty cheap. You know, it's a little dongle boxy thing, and then you plug in your own drives to it, and you can have as much storage as you want. For one terabyte of data, it's not that much data is the thing.

So I would just do, you know, I would use Sneakernet and maybe file transporter. But, you know, you need to have off-site backup, period, especially if it's a business. That's why I have it because I'm a business. So that's my take on it.

I would stay away from cloud storage. I know a lot of people that use it, but it takes forever to get the original stuff up there. Some of them you can send them a drive, and they will, you know, seed your – basically seed your account with the data from that drive. Yeah. Which, you know, takes out the original time, and then you're just doing diffs.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the cloud. I don't like not knowing or being responsible for the actual hardware itself or not even knowing where the hardware is. We haven't had any major, major downs from cloud people, but we have – you know, we've had entire systems that just go away, and you've lost your data because they're just gone.

They're not legally responsible to get that back to you in any way, shape, or form, and if they're insolvent as a business, they can't anyway. So putting your stuff in the cloud to me is just – is risky. I love the file transporter. I think those things are fantastic because one of my clients' desires and the reason that they thought they should put it up in the cloud and the fact that everybody just says cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud all the time was they wanted to be able to access some of the data sometimes from off-site.

They were talking like – I mean, we were talking like 200 terabytes of data that they wanted to deal with, and I was just like, you're not going to upload all this stuff. Go buy like two or three of these transporters, figure out what data that you want to have available. Make sure you copy things over there.

Again, it's – if you don't have – Well, actually, for 200 terabytes, I mean, you're in like serious NAS world and some major stuff. 200 terabytes is a lot of data. No, it's a ton of data, and I have no – and they also have no person that understands any IT whatsoever in their organization. So it also – I know the client you're talking about.

You do know the client I'm talking about. So, you know, first off, I had to figure out what they were even talking about because they had no idea. And then I was just like, well, you need to have somebody who actually knows how to work this stuff on staff, and you don't. So how about let's just give up on that idea completely. Anyways, my standard advice is always, you know, it's the – if it doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist at all.

I don't go as far as Jason does. I don't run drives around the world to different physical locations. I have one of those drives that does automatic backups onto a second drive housed in the case. So if one craps out, it'll know and it'll swap it out immediately. So I've got two copies there, basically. I do regular backups locally to another drive, which goes in the safe, which is fireproof.

I don't have an off-site copy of absolutely everything, but I do have my own servers for all my currently ongoing client stuff. I always upload raw materials outside of the web route onto the server. So if I need to get to stuff when I'm traveling or if a drive craps out, I still have the bare-bone basics to keep things running.

So that's what I do. Yeah. I mean your big problem is if your house burns down, you're fucked. Fireproof safe or not. Well, if my house burns down, I've got more problems going on than just my clients. Yeah. But here's the difference with me.

If my house burns down, I still have a backup of everything so I can get back up to speed pretty quickly because I'm going to need that money to rebuild the house that just burnt down. Yeah. Fair enough. But, I mean, I do, like I said, a lot of the bare-bone stuff, enough to keep everything running and everything that I'm currently working on is stored off-site on my actual web servers.

Yeah. And for local stuff, for a terabyte, you know, if you want to have more than a terabyte, like look at Synology or Drobos, even Drobos is kind of like the poor man's NAS. Yeah. And you can have, like, redundant stuff based on the same thing with hot-swappable drives.

There's tons of stuff you can do with this stuff. Yeah. I mean we're getting down the rabbit hole with it. But I cannot stress enough. I know you're going to disagree with me, but off-site backup is key. It's for continuity of business. That's all it is. No, I understand where you're coming from.

I just haven't done it yet. And it's simple enough for me to do. I should just grab one more drive, make another backup every now and then, and when I'm out on my bike ride, drop it off at my business partner's house, so I've got one over there as well. No, no, no, no, no. You guys both live by the beach. You're one tsunami away from total business failure.

So you have folks that live in Orange County that you go see every now and again. Take it to their house. Next time you go visit, take your other drive, run ChronoSync, boom, Bob's your uncle. Tummies, fires, whatever. If all that shit happens. California's screwed anyway. You're all going to die pretty quick.

Yeah. So anyways, that's a lot of thoughts about that. I do, I got to say that file transporter, it's sexy. It looks cool. It's fun. I can't recommend one of those enough. I think they're great, and we'll have a link to purchase them in the show notes so you can click through and help support us.

In the news. We're going to talk about football. Not American football. We're going to talk about European football, the kind that you like, Brian. Ole, ole, ole. Four stars for Germany. Okay. So, okay.

Well, I didn't expect that. Thanks. I was trying to throw you a bone, but then you crapped on it. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Premier League warns about posting goal videos online. Apparently, they have a twig up their bum because people are posting the goals faster than they can sell access to the cable subscriptions to show it to their viewers and basically being ruinous bastards.

And they're upset about it. So they're telling people, please don't do this. It's against the law. Suckers. Ain't going to happen. No, and somewhere right now at the Burbank Airport in a dark corner on a retired and creaky 1970s private jet that still is liberally dusted with old cocaine, old music industry moguls are gathered in the back, smoking the last of their Cubans, chuckling quietly to themselves, going, ha, ha, good luck.

Good luck with that. Yeah. So that's not going to happen. You know, somebody up there, you know, just got hired and needs to, you know, got in on the conference call and said, we need to stop all this. You know, I think it's actually good. I mean, people look at the goals and they get more interested in the game.

They want to go back and see. It's not just about the goals for people that are into soccer. This is no big deal. Let them go. Whatever. Yeah. It's not good. It just breeds ill will. It does. And makes you look stupid. Speaking of making you look stupid and breeding ill will, oopsies.

Some private conversations between the NFL and some music industry managers went semi-public this week as the NFL basically did a pay-to-play thing for the Super Bowl. So it's, you know, 1970 on the Sunset Strip. You want to play our venue?

You got to pay us. Now, let me remind you. I had to look this up and I actually got into a bit of a debate with a couple friends online about this. The NFL has an annual revenue of over $9 billion per year. Billion. That's with a B.

With a B. Yeah. But the NFL still feels that like, hey, the Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the world on TV, except for the World Cup. And you're going to play it. That's going to be good for you. So, you know, so they reached out to the, I guess, the top three artists right now that they're looking to have play the Super Bowl, Rihanna, Coldplay, or Katy Perry.

Basically reached out to the management companies and said, would you be willing to split some of your revenue and pay into the league to play the Super Bowl? And needless to say, I'll just read the quote from the article here on Rolling Stone. When reaching out to artists, league representatives asked some acts if they would exchange a headlining slot for a portion of their post-Super Bowl tour earnings or make another type of financial contribution to the NFL.

Sources told the journal that the suggestion, perhaps unsurprisingly, got a chilly reception from the candidates' representatives. Shocking. Well, yeah, I mean, well, here's the deal. You don't go to the top of the top if you want to get, like, a rev share. You go to, you know, tier three. Yeah. And like, hey, if you want to be on – because these people are making millions already.

But you go to tier three and say, hey, if you want to be on the Super Bowl, cut us a deal and we'll do a split. You don't go to the people who are already making the money who can say, I don't need your money. I don't need your show. I'm already a superstar or whatever you want to call them. And I was actually talking about this a little bit last night as well.

A friend of the show, Mike Walter, who will now post on Facebook that he got a shout-out on the show again. But that's funny, so I like that. He actually also mentioned a really good point as well. The Super Bowl halftime show is already sponsored up the wazoo. So if I were an artist paying and paying the league to go ahead and play the Super Bowl, I would demand that all the branding for the halftime show be taken off.

This is no longer the Bud Light halftime show. This is a goddamn Coldplay halftime show. I'm paying. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys get enough money. Stop trying to squeeze it out of every goddamn crevice. You are the NFL. You are the most successful sports league in the universe. Knock it off. Besides. Yeah.

Seriously, if I was Coldplay, I'd be like, okay, I'll give you some of my tour revenue, but I want five cents on every Coke that you sold because of the advertisement that's under my mic stand during the show. Yeah. There's a lot of craziness going on there. It was just a poorly conceived notion, but it's funny that it got leaked.

Let's stick with the stupid thing. Okay. So Facebook thinks users are dumb because they want to add a satire tag to the articles that are satire. And The Onion posted a beautiful response saying that, yes, Facebook users are in fact dumb.

Yes. There you go. They are not wrong. Yeah. And The Onion's article about it was absolute genius. It was a great response. I think it's lame. I think it's stupid. Are you going to start to tag everything with like, okay.

This is news. This is entertainment. This is, yeah. I want the grain of salt tag to be added to things. Take this with a grain of salt. Yeah. Facebook users are dumb. Nobody reads anymore. There's numerous articles that came out of all the different times that politicians got caught posting things that were blatantly false.

It happens, but not if you actually read. Here's the thing. If Facebook wants to like do something that actually has a difference, run a Snopes filter on every bullshit article that people post and just turn it red and say, no, this guy posted some bullshit.

That's it. You know, run a Snopes filter. That's all I'm saying. If you're going to run a satire filter or any other filter, run a truthiness filter. Give Colbert the credit. I don't care. Just make it that people don't post crap to my timeline that is patently false. Like that, what, the cop and the baby last week or whatever it was.

I mean there are so many that went around last week that were just patent lies. So fix that first before you go after the onion in something that's funny. If they don't get the joke, they don't get the joke. Fuck them. Agreed. And now Twitter is jumping on the bandwagon. Of course.

Well, they're doing something a little bit different. They're taking anything that you quote-unquote star or fave and posting that into other people's timelines, which is stupid. Nobody uses those favorites and stars for what they were intended for. They use them for bookmarking to come back later.

Almost everybody I know, that is the point of the star. Nobody cares about it. It doesn't give anybody extra visibility. Well, it does now, I guess. But it's like it was a different vector of engagement. It's not a share. It's not a retweet. Why are you treating it like a retweet, you fucking morons?

Well, I mean, it's softening the blow for the timeline to have interjected and paid for interjections. So that's all. It's stupid. I'm sorry it's stupid. No, it is. But, you know, you don't – they're businesses and they're free.

So you don't get to complain too much. Well, there's a good article on firstlook.org about Facebook and Google and Twitter being the arbiters of everything we get to see. It will be in the show notes. I recommend reading it. But here's the deal. Well, yeah, they're, as they call, private actors in the stage and they get to do whatever the fuck they want, even if it's stupid, even if it's patently stupid.

Speaking of patently stupid, strangers keep getting into other people's cars because they think it's their Uber or Lyft. You had posted this link I think a day or two ago and I'd read it and I was laughing and I was like, seriously, that can't possibly be happening. As I was walking home last night down Main Street here in Santa Monica, a liberally lubricated young couple stumbled out of the bar and were waiting for their Uber.

Basically, a guy pulled up that was there to pick up his girlfriend and they tried to get into the guy's car. It was awesome. It happens all the time. Just stand outside of any bar in San Francisco. You'll see it like 10 times a night easily. If you drive a black car, this is the time to become an abductor.

If you want to start kidnapping people, go get a 2010 Suburban and you are gold. Grumpy old geeks does not endorse abduction in any way, shape or form. Says you. Yeah. So let's keep on with dumb stuff and young kids.

Snapchat is now the number three social app among millennials. I still find this stunning. I don't get it. Because you're old. I know. I guess I'm old. I'm old. But Snapchat, I have it installed on my phone. There are like two people I know that actually have it because we're all old.

I have tried to use it and figure out how to use it to have any sort of meaningful interaction. It doesn't provide that. You mean you're not sharing pictures of your saggy old man balls to all your friends? Because that's what the kids do. Hey, they're still taught. I use solves.

Well, you see, you should put the ice water on it. Oh, yeah. There we go. Full circle. There's your ice bucket challenge right there. Yeah. Keep some fresh and nubile. This is from TechCrunch, which always provides a lot of fodder for our show. But yeah, it's number three. Facebook is still number one by a long shot.

So for the entire year we've been doing this show, there's been article after article after article after article saying Facebook is dead. No, not at all. It is number one still. Almost double the amount of Instagram, which is number two. Snapchat.

Which is, by the way, also Facebook. Yeah. Instagram is now also Facebook as well. Snapchat's number three. Twitter is four. And goddamn, Vine is still alive. Who knew? Man, that was the one thing about Ferguson. Everybody was like, Vine for freedom.

Vine. I'm like, who's down there is giving you stickers and paying you and spiking your free water? Yeah. Yeah, I can't believe Vine is still around. I mean, barely hanging on, but still around. Yeah. And any of the good, any of the Vines that came out of Ferguson were just too short to give contacts.

That was the problem. It's not a good news source. Yeah. If you want a good news source, the Vice guys were like kicking it out of the park. Yeah. You go look at their roundups every day on YouTube. They had like a 15 to 20 minute roundup of what happened the night before. And man, they were good. So yeah, Vice, yes. Vine, no. It's amazing what happens when you actually have journalists.

Good job, Vice. So Peter Sund is in prison. The Pirate Bay, one of the four co-founders of the Pirate Bay finally got nabbed and he's doing his eight month stint in prison. Yep. And one of the party members went and visited him and did a pretty good write up on Torrent Freak.

You actually posted this one, I believe. I did. I thought it was really interesting to see what he had to say about what. It's a weird thing. It's a weird world that we're living in right now because let's be, Pirate Bay is illegal. They, their entire business began stealing people's copywritten material.

It's completely and utterly illegal, but they're starting to deal. They never, the Pirate Bay never posted any copyrighted material. They posted where you can get it. They were a search engine. That is all. I know. And you can go to Google and still put in your favorite movie, space torrent, and it will give you almost exactly the same results that you would have gotten from Pirate Bay.

I agree. Well, if you agree, then you just said Google is posting copyrighted illegal material as well. They are. I'm not arguing with that either. The largest threat against copyright infringement is Google. I was going to say it was BuzzFeed, but.

Well, they're trying to change the course on that one, but that's not going to happen either. No, Google is way worse. I agree. But I just thought this was really interesting, especially, I mean, Pirate Bay is this weird space right now where people that are kind of cutting edge are actually using it. I know a lot of kind of cutting edge underground artists are releasing their albums on Pirate Bay now.

Well, Sean Bonner, our previous guest, they released his record on Pirate Bay. Sean Bonner did. Ministry is doing that as well. It's kind of a – it's become this cool, like, funky thing. But the founder is not exactly impressed with what they're doing over there now. He's not a fan. He seems like a really interesting guy, so I really enjoyed the article.

Yeah, he is actually a pretty cool guy, and he's also the founder of Flatter, which is the micropayment system for artists so you can get paid for your work. Everybody puts the money in a pool, and if you get Flatter, then you get a piece of the pool. Yeah, that was a great idea that just never took off, unfortunately. I know. Well, because he's in jail, and he can't promote the damn thing.

But that does – yeah, that does hurt promotion. I'm glad it's only eight months, and he'll be out soon. He's a good guy. I respect him. I respect his take on things because he's very eloquent when he explains what the – his thought process behind the Pirate Bay and all the sharing.

And honestly, they still were just a search engine. If you wanted to arrest somebody, go after the people that were seating the torrents, not the guys who were just saying, here are the guys that are seating the torrents. If anything, they should get a pat on the back for pointing to the people who are seating the torrents that the law enforcement could then go get.

Nobody sees it that way though, do they? No, they do not. Okay. Let's talk about this motorcycle crash in Russia because it's making the rounds, and I just want to – I just want your opinion on it. Real, yes or no? I don't know.

I can't tell. This is – this brings up a major issue that we're going to be dealing with in the very near future and we're starting to deal with now. It is so easy, especially kind of with these handheld, choppy things, to fake videos these days.

Anybody can do it, and it's going to be very difficult for us moving forward in the future to know what's real or not. It used to be like, oh, we have it on video. Boom. It's real. Done. Not anymore. I don't know. I mean a million things happen every day that could be considered unbelievably impossible, and maybe they caught this on film.

Who knows? Yeah, I am – I'm with the real crowd because if you just look at the physics on his angle, the speed, the way he flipped, and the smoking bike, everything. If they fake this, there's – I cannot see why this would – I mean, yeah, granted, that's not a good defense.

Why would it be fake? That's no reason but – because people have time on their hands and very expensive equipment. But just from looking at how the crash happened, the way he flipped, the way he landed, and the way he backslid off the car, I mean, just everything looked to me legit. So I'm going to go with legit.

OK. Too legit to quit. Can't be proven, so – Can't be proven. The main problem I have with this is actually it's been co-opted by the crazy-ass religious right. There are – it's being reposted about with a tagline, Peter Parker or Miracle Motorcycle Crash.

Because if you'll notice at zero, three seconds in the video, there's a cross that goes across the screen right before the biker is miraculously saved. No, it's after. And it's after the guy slams on his brakes and his little – his dashboard tchotchke fell off. That's all it is. No, man.

That's God. I follow God on Twitter. He's not that smart. Yeah. OK. But back to smart. Clay Shirky, one of my favorite people on the internet who always writes amazing stuff, wrote a good article on Medium called Last Call, the End of the Printed Newspaper,

which is a really good take on the newspaper industry and why you should be terrified if you're a working journalist at one of those places that gives you day-old news on dead trees delivered to your door. Yeah, I didn't see the article last night, but the pie chart – or not the pie chart, but the graph of the advertising revenue adjusted for inflation from 1950 to 2012 is doing the rounds out there.

And yeah, newspapers are dead. I mean honestly, he could have just posted that graph. Yeah, that's all you need. And with underneath and said, you might want to get a new job. And that would have been it. That would have been all he needed to do. But it was a really well-written, well-thought-out article because it's Clay. Clay is one of the smartest people I've ever met and he's a good guy.

So check it out. We'll be in the show notes. Now, this is actually a bit of follow-up, this last one. We talked about Product Hunt for a while and we used it to find some interesting, although mostly not, startups that are coming out in Silicon Valley.

Those little bitches got funded for that, which is nothing more than a message board where people can come post their new stuff and put some details about their company. It is a front end to a really crappy database and Google Ventures gave them money.

And guess who gave money? My old buddy, Kevin Rose. Well, you know. He got sucked into it, these guys. He was like the first guest on their podcast. But, yeah, they've got money now. I don't know what the hell they're going to do with it. Look, nobody is 100% on investments, so Kevin Rose won't be either.

I gave up. I gave up after Yo. After Yo got money, I was like, I'm done. None of this makes any sense to me. There's no rhyme or reason. It's absolutely ridiculous. Good on them for squeezing out some money. I don't know what you're ever going to do. Thanks. Somebody posted a great tweet a couple weeks ago.

It might have been Jordan Cooper, or he might have favorited it, or I can't remember. Basically, the job interview for Yo, for new engineers, is to not laugh for the 45 minutes while you're being interviewed, and then you're hired. Makes sense.

I am so glad to be back with security because it has been such a dead zone for a while, and this week we have a cornucopia of security news.

It makes me happy and sad and fearful for the future at the very same time. So, Brian, what's your hack of the week? Well, first off, I'm never thrilled. This does not fill me with glee because I would like to have a completely blank security segment every single week because then I'd feel much better and be able to sleep at night. But, hey, here we go.

Hack of the week. It's been a while. This one is so big that basically even mainstream media has been picking up on it. A hospital network was hacked. 4.5 million records were stolen. It's not just records. Like when you hear records, you go, oh, what, they get an email address?

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Full names, social security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays, telephone numbers. A basic kit of everything that you would need to completely steal someone's identity with no effort whatsoever. And with the social security numbers, this is going to be a future nightmare for all these people.

Piece of cake for anybody to do anything to them now. Right, but the hospital is going to give them free fraud protection and identity theft protection for the next year. This does seem to be the solution right now. Yeah. They do say that they have insurance to cover for these kind of things, but I don't think their policy is going to be that big.

No. 4.5 million is big. If it was just, you know, okay, they got your name and social, that's fine, but they gave them the keys to the castle. They did. And no matter how much they want to help, the bureaucracy that's going to be involved for that, if you do get hacked, at minimum, is going to make a year of your life extremely difficult.

Oh my God. So, and as a follow-up, a professor in San Francisco actually hacked Health Conway, which is, you know, a pretty big healthcare conglomerate, live in front of his class. He called them and told them, so it's lucky he's not in jail, seriously.

Because if they didn't, you know, if they took this one way, they could just say, you're, you know, you're in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you're going to jail. So, lucky for him, he's not in jail and they're trying to fix the holes, but, oh man, talk about, you just don't do that, man.

No, that's silly. Funny. In a surprising turn, though, UPS this week, they got hacked. They got hacked with that huge POS bug, point of sale, bug that was going around where everybody just left the default credentials in and people were coming in and just, you know, slurping stuff up.

They did a really good job of covering it after the fact. They closed the hole and then they put up a page on their site that said, this is the timeframe that this was open. These are all the stores that got, that were affected, you know, and it's a small percentage of their overall base because it's a franchise base.

So, it wasn't like everybody, but it was a decent amount, like 50 some odd stores, which is, those stores get pretty good foot traffic. And they did, I thought they did a really good job of coming out and saying, this is exactly what happened. We're sorry, we're fixing it.

And, you know, here it is. This is exactly how you do it. This is how everybody should do it every time they have a hack. So, this is amazing. Yeah, good for you, UPS. Woohoo. So, you posted this. Now, let's get to the tinfoil hat.

Yeah, this is the one I'm most curious about. And this is definitely Jason tinfoil hat territory because I read through this article and I don't understand a damn thing. Tell me, tell me, Jason. Okay. Krebs on security posted an article about lorem ipsum.

Yep. Which is the, you know, the placeholder text that you put in your documents when you're trying to, you know, align for where the text is going to go, how things are going to flow around the text. Or let's be honest. This is what you use when your clients can't be bothered to actually get you any of the content. Right.

And you still have to build the site and you need to know what's going to go there. So, you put in some lipsum, as they call it. Yep. Well, they figured out that if you run that copy back through Google Translate, it doesn't give you what you think it should give you. It was giving you very crypto stuff.

Like, if you change capitalization, letter wording, and rearranging of it, you could get, like, pretty crazy strings that, you know, reference Russia, China, the internet, NATO, business on the internet, all this crazy stuff.

And, you know, like, if you did ipsum, ipsum, lorem, lorem, lorem, ipsum with different capitalizations, you would get back the launch of China and the Chinese in Google Translate, which is pretty interesting. Now, here's where I don't have the tinfoil hat.

I talked to a couple people about this. This is just somebody at Google fucking with us. No, I don't think it's somebody at Google. I think it's somebody outside of Google fucking with us because they basically used a bunch of different algorithms to build these translations.

A good friend of the show who will remain nameless said, I think it's just a glitch in the matrix, which is, you know, not really the best term because the last time there was a glitch in the matrix, the entire team got killed and Morpheus got captured. So, bad analogy. I think what it is is definitely somebody screwing with the algorithm and playing with it and seeing if they could do it.

I wish this was a real hack because this would have been genius. You know, to actually embed some kind of secret code into Lorem Ipsum, which everybody ignores and never thinks to like, oh, I'm just going to go run this through Google Translator. Yeah. To have a code in, you know, in front of everybody, in the open, in plain text where anybody can see it and nobody knows that it's a code is awesome to think that that could be a thing.

I don't think it was a thing, though. I think it was a screw-up. Okay. That's it. I mean, I really wish it was a thing because that would be great for a cool spy novel. It would be, actually. It would be fantastic. I've got to say the absolute best part of this entire article are the comments. Wow.

People are crazy. Hey, man, I took one for the team on the last episode, so I'm not doing it again. If you want to read the comments, go for it. I'm staying away from them. Dude, they are awesome. They are priceless. I mean, these people have tinfoil houses. Okay, so back to the news.

When I was talking about going to Ferguson and doing, you know, the photojournalist thing, I've got my own kit that I always carry. It's fairly, you know, fairly complete. But Quinn Norton, who we talked about on the show before, who did another post on Medium. Wow, man.

You're posting a lot of Medium articles. Just saying. I know. Well, it's like four of them maybe at this point. Two of them were from the same person. Quinn has a great write-up on gear and tactics, on what to take, you know, to a protest. But it actually translates well for international travel as well.

So I recommend checking it out. I did notice that, actually. Yeah, I started reading this and I was like, why am I reading this? I'm not planning to go protest anything. I do not need all these sorts of things. And I was like, huh, oh, that Muji bag is really cool. I could totally use that when I travel. I love Muji so much.

Muji is the best. They just opened up a big store right down the street from me, man. There's one in Santa Monica now? Yeah. Because I know there's one in Hollywood. No, there's one on Main Street right down here in between. Oh, man. Okay. You're going down there after the show and you're going to mail me some pens because they get the best pens in the world. Okay, I will do that.

Let's see. What else is in the news? I saw an article about – we've talked a lot about surveillance and all that sort of stuff. Now, there is an article that appeared on the MIT Technology Review, which is really fantastic and often completely over my head. Technology can make lawful surveillance both open and ineffective.

This is a long argument that with cryptography, we can actually do all the sorts of things that we're already doing now but have them be safer. Yeah, this was actually a really good article. And I subscribe to the Technology Review magazine, recommend it. It's really good. And it's – half the time, it's over my head too.

But it's a fun read. It makes me think. Yeah. And this is actually a really good argument. I don't think it's ever going to happen where everybody has got their set of crypto keys and you need the judge's crypto key to decrypt the data that you're getting and be able to search it more efficiently.

And what they're saying is it will be more efficient for law enforcement if we use this model because we can get exactly to where you need to be. Not sure how it works but just – because they don't really say a lot about the mechanics of how it would work. But it's an interesting article if you take it at face value that they have come up with a system that will be more efficient for law enforcement to get the data they need for like bank robbers or terrorists or whoever.

It would be more efficient for law enforcement and better for all the rest of us because basically it would stop everybody else from being able to get any of our information just throughout the day as well. So it's good stuff. So there's an article that's been going around. I've seen it on a couple sites.

We're going to link to the Gizmodo one. I think there's an Ars Technica one as well. Hacking into traffic lights with plain old laptops is scary simple. There's a caveat with this because they make it sound like all you need is a laptop from the title so it's fairly link-baity. You still need – You need quite a lot of stuff.

Yeah, you need some specialized gear to do the hack. But once you do the hack, once you get into the network, the network is unprotected. You can put a packet sniffer on that network and find out every command that goes to these lights, reverse engineer what those commands do, and then build scripts to – you run the lights in a city.

Basically, as soon as you're in the network and you figure out what the commands do, which they said is not hard because there's nothing encrypted. You know, that part is a little bit scary. So it's an interesting article on the hack. But, I mean, it's not a very sophisticated hack.

I was not impressed with the technical sophistication of the hack. It's more about social engineering your way into getting one of the transmitters that works on their frequency. Once you have that and you're in, it's not really hard to get that far. Yeah, and if this actually – I mean, now that this information is out there, all of this stuff is relatively easy to fix for cities and infrastructure.

So I expect that that won't last too long anyways. No, and their wireless network supports WPA2. So all they've got to do is turn it on. Yeah, switch it on. Turn that on and change the default passwords that come with the software. What? Don't use admin? No admin.

Oh, I got admin coming up in a second. And this one came through last night thanks to our good friend Ted Ridingold, Tedder, who used to be from Dogster and Catster. That's where I used to know him. He posted a link on Vox about the White House cybersecurity czar brags about his lack of technical expertise.

Yeah. This is a forehead slapper. This really is a forehead slapper. If this guy is that dumb that he would make this statement to the press and on video for the White House security video channel, it's like, oh. You know, the Jesus and Mary Chain used to say that the reason that they wrote such good songs is because they didn't actually know how to play their instruments.

Well, I'm glad the Surgeon General of the United States at least has held a scalpel once, you know? Yeah. No, this is ridiculous. And this guy, I mean, what an idiot. Oh, well. Yeah, he's just a paper pusher anyways. Whatever. He's just whatever. Yeah.

No, it's a stupid appointment and proving ridiculously stupid. Yeah. Stupider or by the second. I know stupider isn't a word, but Ars Technica did come out with a really cool article this morning about how you can steal encryption keys by just touching the computer and, you know, detecting the variances in the change of the signal.

Yeah. I'm like, you guys really need to get laid. Seriously. The researchers note that this works better in hot weather due to the lower resistance of sweaty fingers. I know. It's a really cool article on the technology and how they figured this out. Yeah.

But, man, seriously. Yeah. Without more. Yeah. Get a hot. I seriously recommend reading – yes, if you want hot, sweaty weather, get a chick and go to a hot tub. Yeah. Put the computer away for a little while and stop figuring out how to ruin everybody's day. Try a hobby, something.

Come on. And Boing Boing reports that apparently Tor, you know, the Onion Router, they get bug reports every month from spies basically from NSA and GHCQ who find flaws in the Tor system and report them so they can be fixed because they don't like the idea of them spying on their own people.

So they're spies with consciences. Yeah. That's nice. We like that. No, it's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. And finally, to round out the day, I wanted to end on a high note with this one. We've talked about the Secret app before. Not only did we talk about it, we got in a huge Twitter battle with them.

Yeah. We piled on to the CEO of Secret. It was me, you, Sean Bonner, and a couple other people. We just basically, you know, took them to task for the fact that they said, we use, you know, industry standard encryption and it is as safe as email was his reply to us.

Yes. That alone was just like, oh, you're all fucked. Yes. So, yeah, Wired has posted a long article saying your anonymous posts to Secret aren't anonymous after all, which is not surprising. Yeah, these guys figure out – well, to back up a second, they've got a bug bounty on Secret and there have been 42 bugs that have been reported from 38 different people and they've been fixing them.

But this was the simplest hack. I mean it makes perfect sense. It's so easy. There's a threshold of people that you can share with until you like get into a network, which is seven. You have to have like, you know, a bunch of people in your address book and if seven of those people are on Secret, then, you know, you get to see their secret.

Well, what you do is you put in the email address of one person that's your target and everybody else is fake. So once you hit the threshold and they start showing you secrets from your network, you're only seeing secrets from your target. Drop dead simple. So there you go.

You have to know their email address. Ooh, tough one. Yeah, that's not tough at all. So, yeah, there you go. We stand justified for our Twitter battle. Yep. You can't out-engineer stupidity. So it's been a fun week in security. I'm like happy now.

I need a nap. Go for it. Maybe some comfort food. Get some pizziz. Some tinfoil. Software apps and gadgets. I bought another app. It's two weeks in a row that I've actually paid for an app and have new apps.

And I'm still enjoying my Bald Brian sound effects app. But this is what you and I have kind of been waiting for. We've been talking a lot about our iPhones and the battery drains and how quickly they seem to be draining now and desperately wishing for quantified data as opposed to self-experimentation, i.e., okay, so now I'm just going to run this one app on my phone and see how quickly it drains and just sit there and look at it, which is a massive waste of our time.

We now have an app that does this for us. I'm very excited about this. It's called Normal. Link in the show notes. It's only 99 cents, which is really nice. It's pretty cool. I'm digging it so far. What I've definitely discovered is that what I really need to do all the time is make sure that I completely kill apps.

That's been kind of an ongoing thing online where people haven't been able to decide if that actually does anything. Should you double-click your little home button and then scroll through and quit out of every single app? Does it make a difference? What this app tells us is categorically yes. Every single app that basically runs in the background roughly kills about an hour of your battery.

So I have been religiously, since I got this app, religiously going through and killing every single app, and I've noticed a massive battery increase. Interesting, because I was under the impression that they wouldn't be able to get that data because of the sandboxing of the apps. I thought this was a little snake-oily at first.

I think they might be getting it through inference of some kind, but I don't know the actual mechanisms on iOS. But I thought that you really couldn't – the only way that you could talk to another app is through like the URL scheme with the predefined prefix and say, okay, I can send something to another app.

But I didn't know you had introspection on the system to be able to see what's running and where your battery is at. Let me know how this goes because I'm curious. No, I'm really curious about it as well. I felt the same way when I downloaded it, and I'm not sure.

I don't know how they're technically achieving all of this, and it seems to be definitely one of these things that the more – they need aggregated more data to be able to tell us. So the more people that actually get this app and the more data that's being sent into them, we're going to get better ideas of what's going on as we aggregate an average over a larger user base and more time spent running the app.

But we'll see. I'm going to keep an eye on it because this is information that is very useful. I want to know what apps are killing my battery, and if this is a way to get it, that's good. I mean the rough impression I'm getting is basically most apps drain about an hour.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the biggest one so far. Argus actually isn't all that bad, which I still am using for tracking stuff all the time. But, yeah, I'm basically just – since I got this app, I kill every single app, and I have noticed that my battery actually survives a lot better than it used to.

So we'll see. That's interesting. Okay, that's interesting. And the fact that they need more – the more people that use it, they need more data to make the determinations leads me to believe that it is based on inference. Yeah, I believe it's inference. Unless you jailbreak your phone, I don't think you can get any of that kind of information any other way.

But inference is better than nothing. That's true. Yeah, I mean if it saves you some time – well, I don't have Facebook on my phone anymore, so that's fine. But like I said in a previous episode, my battery life has gone to crap lately. And I've turned off as many backgrounding – like app backgroundings as I could, removed geolocation on stuff, and so it doesn't have to ping the radio.

Although as long as you have one ping in the radio, they share the data, so it doesn't really matter all that much. It doesn't matter. Okay. Yeah, I mean give it a shot. Go through and just make sure that you kill everything if you're not actually using it and see if you notice a difference. Oh, on a related note, because we had talked about this a couple weeks back, I was having the issue where my phone would power down when it hit 20 percent no matter what.

I've tried your method, which was let it drain out completely and then completely recharge it. That works, but the effect of it goes away after a week, and I basically have to do it again and again and again. Oh, damn. So for a while, it will be fine. It will actually get down to like 10 or 5 percent before powering off, but within a few days, it's back to – when it hits 20 percent, boom, done.

So then I have to completely let it drain again and recharge. I smell another class action lawsuit. Yeah, me too. There's another 40 bucks coming to my bank account in two years. Well, what they fixed before was the home button or the power button. Like you couldn't sleep it.

So that's how my roommate got his new phone for – his new 5 for free because they – actually, they fixed it. They were doing a fix program for that. But anyway, I just want to know, how did your experiment with just using the Bald Brian SoundDrop app for a day ago? I decided to not be a dick.

Good idea. Yeah. Good idea. I used it like twice, and it was very funny. Okay, so I've got some app follow-up. I talked about an app on our December 15th show from 2013, episode 38, called The Walk.

And it's basically an app that has a story along with it. And what I forgot was it was a 500-mile app. So it made you walk 500 miles before you got to the end of the story. Did it play that damn song the whole time? No, thank God.

I like the song, but it does great on you after half a play. So I had a problem with the app, just the way that it functioned, the UX, the UI. It was a pain in the ass to use because you had to press the buttons all – you couldn't – it didn't autoplay.

So you had to open the app, find where you're at, how far you went, and then play the segment of the story where you're at. And they could last from 30 seconds to four minutes for the segment, and it was a pain. So what I decided to do was I'm just going to run the app.

I'm going to set up the new stories when they finish because it doesn't move to the next story. You have to manually go in and say, okay, I'm on to the next story, the next story, the next story. And each day is about 70 to 80 minutes of walking. It was a pain in the ass. But you know what? As – I just wanted to be persistent, and I wanted to get through it because I paid four bucks for it, damn it.

I'm going to get to the end. And I like the story. So I finally got to the end. And now I'm going back, and they at least have a feature where you can go to the farthest back that you haven't played and press play. And if you toggle a switch, it will just start playing the whole story for you straight through.

And I'm making my way through it. It's a lot of story, man. I mean it really is a lot of story. There's at least 15 minutes per day of audio content. And it's interesting. It's a goofy spy end of the world thing, but it's fun.

So I just wanted to put out there that I am persistent, damn it. And I do have follow-up on things that we talked about in the past, and I got to the end. And here's the sad part. When I got to the end, nothing happened. I didn't get a badge. I didn't get fireworks. I didn't get shit.

Wow. No badge. Save your $3.99. All right. Yeah, I was never really going to do that anyways. I've got to say, though, I just want to make a quick note about this because this is another little thing that I noticed recently. I'm still using Argus because there's nothing better yet. Quantification of stuff really does make a difference.

I've probably dropped about five pounds in the last, I'd say, month, month and a half. I had my goal of getting 10,000 steps a day. At first, that's a pain in the ass, and it's really hard. But when you start to stick with it, you just start to notice. I am regularly averaging 12,000 to 15,000 a day now just because I'm aware of it.

And I force myself to do it. This stuff works, people. It really does. No, you have to pay attention to it. Yep. So I talked on the past about some of my favorite WordPress plug-ins that I use on every site. Yeah. Unfortunately, one of them has kind of started to cause problems, and that was limit login attempts.

Yeah. And that just stops people from logging into your site. I had to go on a quest, as it were, to find a new replacement for it because it was locking out people who had like reverse proxies on their networks, and it would hit it a bunch of times before they actually got to the login, and then it would lock them out before they even got to the screen.

Yeah. So I found one called Word Fence, and it's kind of a beast. It's got a ton of stuff in it, but it does have like login protection. Okay. And a bunch of other stuff. There is a free version and a paid version, and it does malware scanning, and it does a bunch of other stuff.

And so far, it's been pretty good. All right. I might have to try that one out. I'm still using it. No, you have to. Yeah. If you're using Limit Login, get rid of it, install this, and I still run this with Securi, which has had like 47 updates in the past week. Like every time I turn around, the damn thing's updated, which has been a pain in the ass.

But at least that one does what it's supposed to do as well. It's got its own set of security stuff. Automatic has a ton of money in the bank. Go buy every one of these companies and bake it into WordPress because I'm getting tired of this shit. I really am. Yeah. I agree.

Okay. I got from Securi, they now have brute force attack notifications where they tell you how many times a certain IP has tried to break into your system. Yeah. They don't do anything with that. They just tell you that's why you need WordFence to go do something about it. Last week on grumpyoldgeeks.com, we had over, I think it was 7,900 break-in attempts.

Wow. I'm like, dude, we're a podcast and a blog. What the hell do you want? I'm like, you can go get a server for 10 bucks. Just go get one and do your crap from there. Get a fake credit card from the healthcare people that released everything and get your own goddamn server on Linode and do your thing.

Leave us alone. Yeah. Leave our poor little site alone. Every site of mine, though, it's in the thousands every week. If you have a WordPress site running, A, never use admin because the cool thing about admin and WordFence is there's a checkbox that says, if anybody logs in with an account that does not exist, ban them immediately.

Right. And you can set a 60-day ban on them. And I don't use admin on any of my accounts. So I basically check that box and I come back in the morning and there's a thousand banned IPs. And it shows you what country they're from because WordFence has a cloud component where they phone back home and do all the DNS lookup and stuff on their end.

Right. So you can see where they're coming from. It's interesting. It's free. It's cool. But add that to your WordPress toolkit. And if you have something that's better that you use, let me know. Jason at grumpyoldgeeks.com or pod. I actually send it to podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

So Brian and I both get it. Yep. I need that. Seriously. I am so goddamn tired of dealing with WordPress security. You have no idea. Oh, I have a pretty good idea. Yeah. See previous 71 episodes. Exactly. On a happier note, I use Parallels all the time and Parallels 10 just was released this week and it is unbelievably fast.

I mean, I don't know what the hell they did. It is so fast. Well worth the $50 upgrade if you have Parallels 8 or 9. It'll upgrade from either one of those. And if you don't have either one, it's worth the price to get it if you need to run Windows on your Mac or Linux or Chrome.

It can run basically any damn OS. It's just a virtual machine engine. It is so fast now. I'm so happy with it because it was always a dog. Yeah. It was always slow as hell. This is why I never, ever use it. I just didn't care. But I definitely have to check it out if it's actually running decent now. Yeah. You probably need a new Mac though because your Mac is kind of crusty.

Yeah. I know. The laptop is not going to have to get an upgrade at some point. I need some more work first. I mentioned that I got the latest and greatest one. And then, of course, 31 days later, as predicted, they came out with the upgraded ones, which weren't that big of an upgrade.

No, there's no better way to determine when Apple is going to release something new because as soon as you buy something, it's coming. Yeah. It is the best method. I looked at it. I mean, I knew it was coming too because I looked at the charts and said, okay, it's X amount of days old since a refresh.

And I knew it, but I needed it so bad. And then I got it. And I'm like, okay, well, if something comes out, I'll take it back because I got a 30-day window. Nope, 31 days. And they are Nazis about it. You cannot get it back. I'm almost positive that MacRumors.com watches your credit card. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Seriously. One other thing I want to do a quick shout-out for is Source Code Pro, which is a free font from Adobe. If you write code, HTML, CSS, PHP, Ruby, if you're a Java person, forget it.

Yeah. But it is an amazingly good free font. Got it. It's great. Installed it immediately. It is fantastic. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's great. Absolutely great. This is a must-have for all you coders out there except for you, John. Yeah, and I'm using it with Sublime Text Pro or Sublime Text 2, sorry, which I talked about a couple episodes ago.

I'm loving that so much. I still kind of miss my BB edit. And I was using Coda before that. When I started with Coda, with Coda 1, I used Panic Sans, which is a great font that comes with Coda that Panic does.

But this is just, it's so much nicer. It's so much nicer. Yeah, it's a really great font. Fantastic. And another thing I talked about on the show before, which is my final follow-up in software is iStatMenus 5 is out. They did a great job with this update. It's a free update if you've got previous versions.

Oh, good. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It looks great, and it works with Yosemite. It's built to work with their dark bar. But the dark mode actually works with the light bar in Mavericks, so it looks even better now. They've got a bunch of add-ons and stuff.

It's a really nice free update. I'm glad those guys did that. I'm glad it's free. And we're going to have a bunch of updates coming soon because Yosemite is imminent. Oh, I can't wait. I can't. I'm looking forward to it. I want dark mode. Yeah, actually, me too.

That's going to be great.

I've always been a huge fan of the Aphex Twin. He hasn't done anything in a long time, but not only does he do great agro-electro, he also has written some of the finest ambient electronica that's ever been written. Really good stuff. He's disappeared for quite a while.

He hasn't done much of anything. Last week, some subtle things started to happen, like his logo was seen floating over the London skyline, and also something in New York about his logo appearing. I don't quite remember the entire story.

But we knew something was about to happen. And what happened is we basically have the first promotional usage of the deep web. He has announced that he has a new album, Ciro, coming out, and it was announced via tour, basically. I don't know who found it and how it came out into the mainstream media, but there you go.

This is, you know, we have now... Yeah, I'm sure it was leaked. Yeah, I'm sure it was leaked as well. Like, hey, somebody should go look at this. So did you go get it? Well, no, the album isn't actually out there. It was just an announcement. Oh, I thought you could get the album there.

No, no. He's just announcing that it's coming. It was, you know, like basically a press release was dropped onto the deep web. Oh, that's some bullshit. I thought you could get the album there. Okay, never mind. No, album is not actually out yet. He just used it to announce the album, which I thought was hilarious that the deep web is now just basically Twitter.

What's interesting, on that page, when you go to it, he's using that canvas hack to do the thumb printing of your machine and giving you all the data. So he's using that hack on there. It was pretty clever, I thought. Yeah, it was actually, it's nicely done and what I would expect from him. So very cool.

And looking forward to the album and downloading it from the Pirate Bay. He had a really scary video that I remember from like 96, 97 that was just creepy as hell. He's done a few. He's done a few crazy ass videos. So yeah, good stuff. If you're not an Apex Twin fan, give it a listen.

It's pretty awesome. So I've got a new podcast from Eliza Schlesinger. She's a comedian, but she used to run a TV show, like a late night dating TV show called Excused. That's where I first found her and I follow her on Twitter.

She's hilarious. She's really funny. She's got a Netflix one, like one hour special. She's now got a podcast. It's called Truth and Eliza. Very good. The first guest was, I think, Joe Rogan. Jim Jeffries was on.

So the standard podcast roundabouts. Absolutely. But she's funny as hell. So I'm going to listen to whatever she does. So if you want some funny, go for it. Will do. Oh, sorry. I didn't know this was me. I was very excited.

I totally spaced out for a second. I was actually looking up the podcast and subscribing to it, which I shouldn't be doing when I'm doing a podcast. My bad. Be present. Be present. Be present and in the moment. Well, let's talk about something that takes us out of being present and in the moment for up to four hours at a time.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, number 53, is finally out. I believe it's the wrap-up for World War I. I don't know. I'm halfway through it. Yeah, I haven't gotten to the end yet either, so I don't really know. But knowing him and how intense it gets in, probably not.

It's World War I. I don't think he's done yet. Yeah, I don't think he's done yet either. So it is absolutely fantastic, though. It's been riveting. It's been very difficult to actually do my work. So Show 53 Blueprint for Armageddon 4 is now available. And you and I love this guy.

Can't stress it enough. We've talked about him a ton of times. If you aren't listening yet, you're an idiot. Yeah, he was on Tim Ferriss' show recently. Awesome interview. Go check that out. We talked about it last episode. It's in the show notes. Also, now that he's done with this episode of Hardcore History, he took a break and went back to his other podcast, which is Common Sense with Dan Carlin.

And he has a new episode of that out as well, which was excellent. I agree with 99.9% of everything he always says in that podcast. So you can glean my views from there. But we both agree that any cop in Ferguson that points a gun at a civilian protester should be fired on the spot.

Agreed. So check it out. It's a great episode. He's had a couple stinkers because he was busy with Hardcore History. But his Common Sense shows, I love. I like those sometimes almost more than the Hardcore Histories because they come out more often. So good stuff.

I also found another podcast. So that's two weeks in a row for me on that as well, which is amazing. A friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, actually turned me on to this. He listens to us regularly and said, hey, man, have you ever listened to Geeks and Beats podcast? And I said, no, no, I have not.

So I downloaded it and started to get into it. It's really good. I mean, it's very, you know, it's even more music and less geeky than us. But Geeks and Beats is two guys, radio legend Alan Cross and TV's Michael Hainsworth.

Alan Cross is an old school Canadian DJ guy that's been around forever, super into music. So he's got all of that going on. Michael Hainsworth hosts some sort of tech-based TV show, I believe, also in Canada. It's a little Canadian-centric, which is OK for me, but maybe for people that won't get Massey Hall as a reference, which is a large concert venue in Toronto or, you know, doesn't know what Blue Rodeo is as a band.

Yeah, I thought when you said that, I thought you meant Massey Star or something. No, no, no. So there's a lot of references to things that are kind of very Canadian. But very funny. I mean, this guy's been on, Alan Cross has been on radio forever, so he has this down. He, you know, he knows how to do a show. And the banter between the two of them, because Alan has no, like, technology experience whatsoever.

He just knows music, but he tries to get into it because you can't be into music now without understanding technology. So it's a fun little podcast. I've enjoyed listening to it. They kind of do some theme shows every now and then where they talk about specific kind of musical things and then just go off and talk about their lives a little bit.

It's a lot of fun. You can get past the Canadian stuff. OK. Yeah, that's right. So my friends Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine are back with a new Poorly Explained. This time they take on Gluten.

Gluten, Gluten, Gluten, Gluten, Gluten, Gluten, Globin. Oh, I love that song. So check it out. It's on the U's of the tubes. It's pretty good, as always. I'm just happy that they're still doing them. The last one was World Cup Poorly Explained and before that was Bitcoin Poorly Explained.

Check them out. They're funny. They're short. They're like three to five minutes. It'll get you chuckling. Yeah, they're short and funny and well worth watching. I've enjoyed every single one that they've done. I stumbled across a little article from Wandering Sound. It's called The Secret History of the Hidden Track.

I just thought it was a real fun read if you're approximately our age and you remember there being records and then CDs. The hidden track is basically dead these days because nobody buys records or CDs and it's very difficult to hide a track on a list of MP3s other than just having a really long song.

But that's a giveaway as well. iTunes also labels it hidden track. Yeah, hidden track, which is great. Yeah. So, but this was, I mean, I love the hidden track always. It was, it was just, it's one of those bygone things now like reading liner notes and looking at artwork.

You know, a little trip down nostalgia lane. It was a really good article. I do not miss the hidden track by any stretch because it was always a pain to rip those. So, yeah, there you go. I ran an article, I ran across an article from, it came via dig this week from polygon.com who I've never heard of, but it, the title grabbed me.

It's like, you can watch an unaltered version of Star Wars in HD today if you bend the law. Now, what do they mean by unaltered? They mean that somebody has gone back and reconstructed Star Wars as it was in the theater. In the theater.

Okay. So this is pre-George Lucas messing about with it because that's the only version that's been released in HD. Exactly. And actually any version, I mean, you can't get the original version, period. These guys, it's the Harmy version and these guys have spent years deconstructing it, reconstructing it, building it back up, frankensteining it back together.

It is awesome. I'm sorry. I have written off Star Wars so many times years ago. I went back and I saw a couple scenes from this. I watched the Death Star scene and the cantina scene.

Oh, my God. It's so much better. Wow. Okay. They should throw George Lucas in film jail for what he did to that movie. It was so perfect from the get-go and he ruined it. Yes, Han shot first. It was so much better. Yeah. And they did a beautiful job with the reconstruction of this.

There are versions of Empire and Jedi as well. I haven't been able to find Jedi, but I found Empire. And man, these look good. They sound good. But the most important part, they could sound like crap. They could be postage stamp-sized video if they were the original cut.

And what these guys did was they found all the pieces, put them back together. They found people with 16-millimeter prints who had like original prints and then could reconstruct it. So they knew the blueprint. And they would take the new releases that had parts that were unaltered and then splice them in and do all this stuff.

It is so cool. I'm sorry. It's cool. Okay. Go break the law. Go break the law. Get back at Lucas. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm a little exasperated. It was fun. It renewed my vigor for Star Wars is all I got to say.

Just in time to be disappointed again. Yeah. Me so no happy. Oh, boy. And I was going to put this in our usual Webs Not Dead segment, but it's just a Twitter account that I was really enjoying and I have been enjoying. It's Bored Elon Musk.

That is a good one. I've liked or whatever you do on followed. Boy, I'm so good with technology these days. I followed this quite a while ago and it's very funny. Yeah. Half the ideas are ridiculous, but the other half are like, hmm, that actually might work.

Airplane mode for people. That's all I needed. That was awesome. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Every week as I just kind of sit around and deal with my day job and the Internet and all that sort of stuff, I wait to kind of grab one thing for this segment.

Are you kidding me? It can be all over the map. Sometimes I try to make it have something to do with what we talked about in this episode. This time, not at all. Nothing to do with the episode. More to do with my state of mind because, as we were talking about, there's a bit of a burnout going on with bad news and the constant beating.

So, this one struck me and made me feel like I need a break. And Vermont's got it right. Who would have thought? Vermont. Getting something right. But here we go. In order to preserve the state's natural beauty, billboards are completely banned in the state of Vermont and have been for over 45 years.

Can you imagine? No billboards. Closing shoutouts. Doctor Who starts again on Sunday. Saturday. Saturday. Who? Yes. Saturday. Who's on first? Doctor's on first. Peter Capaldi is actually the new doctor. He's on first.

Actually, he's probably 11th or 10th or – I can't even remember. There's so many damn doctors now. He used to play the Angel Islington in the TV version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. So, I like him. He's creepy. He should be a good doctor. And I didn't like Matt Smith at all.

So, this is a complete departure from Matt Smith. So, I'm happy. And I'm excited. How long did Matt Smith do it for? Interminably. Okay. That's all I got to say. Well, there's a real metric for that, I'm sure. But Twitter blew up again a little bit last night.

And this was sad, unfortunately. Mythbusters has basically dropped the B team. Kerry Byron, Grant Amahara, and Tori Belichi will not be coming back for the next season. I hate it when things I like take a, quote, a new direction, end quote.

This is not a new direction. This is an old direction. No, I know. Going back to their roots. Exactly. It's going back. Well, hopefully, they're not going to bring back that crazy lady that talked about the various. Oh, God. She was terrible. So, let's not go back that far. So, yeah. The next season of Mythbusters will just be the two main guys again.

I'm sad about this. I really, you know, Grant Amahara, Tori Belichi, I thought they added a lot to the show. And, of course, every geek's dream girl, Kerry Byron. You know, we're going to miss them. Yeah, yeah. We'll definitely miss the eye candy of Kerry. But all in all, I'm happy about this. I never really cared for the B team because they always did subpar experiments compared to the big dogs.

You know? Let the big dogs back and let them do their thing and let them do longer experiments where they can get deeper because it was a segmented show. I watched the last couple episodes and it's like two different shows. They don't communicate anymore. It's kind of silly. So, I'm glad that they're going back to the old format.

Yeah. I mean, we'll see. I agree with that. I have felt that, you know, the show's kind of lost something over the last season or two. They're definitely running out of ideas. So, maybe getting rid of the B team and changing up the format again and basically just having the two guys and hopefully getting way more into the science and deeper into things will bring a little bit of life back to the show.

But still, sad to see them go. Big fan of the show and I've enjoyed it. I do have a prediction. I think the next season of Mythbusters will be the last. Oh, I agree. It's almost done. They're out of stuff. And that was the other problem with the two teams. They had to cover twice as many myths.

Yeah. So, they ran out of stuff faster. So, I think now that they're out of ideas, they've got to pare it back to like one myth per episode or two maybe. Yeah. And I think this show is not long for this world. I think they've had a good run.

It's run, of course. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. I agree. So, I got a shout out to Resistance Pro Wrestling. Yeah, that's right. Wrestling. On Sunday, August 24th, this show is going to air today on August 22nd. If you're in the Chicago area, get some tickets and come down to the Arabian Nights Farm in Willowbrook and hang out with all of us watching Billy Corgan's and the Brothers Baron Wrestling Federation.

It's an independent wrestling. We'll hang out. They're there filming the TV show. It's going to be a blast. All right. I will not be there. I'm still in L.A. Well, not for long. It's going to burn to the ground soon. Wait. I thought it was a tsunami. Can you pick how I'm going to die?

Well, there's so many vectors for your imminent demise. I can't pick one. I don't know. Death by hipster. Oh, God. No, you've got to be in San Francisco for that. I don't know. I just want to do a quick show update. The show that I talked about last week that was launching this week, I was a bad researcher.

I really was. I looked on iTunes for a podcast named Good Morning Internet. And, well, there's a massive podcast called Hello Internet, which, you know, there's some brand confusion there that could happen. There was also a television show called Good Morning Internet and a web show and all that stuff.

So I pulled back from it and I'm rebranding and next week will be the actual show. There will be a link in the show notes. So sorry to the, you know, the few people that went and got the – my starter episode. I'll fix that. My bad. My bad.

New episodes will be under a new title that have no way, shape or form anything to do with anything that has come before it. And thank you to Brian for the title. No problem. So thank you. Anytime. All right, man. It's been fun. Good luck with that.

I know. Seriously. And knowing is half the battle will return next week. Oh. What are we going to do this time? Tease us. I'm not going to tease you because I'm still working on the secret sauce for it. Okay. If you have anything that you're pissed off about that, you know, where people are tricking you and taking your money that aren't from Nigeria because we all know that one, then send me your ideas at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com.

Music for the grumpy old geeks is provided by among us. We are also hosted by Libsyn. And if you use the coupon code GOG while signing up, you may receive up to two months free. Keep up with us at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks on Twitter.

We're at twitter.com slash GOG podcast, or simply email us at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com show notes for this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 72. Yo. Okay. Last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer.

We're driving to Florida. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love. From beauty and fashion, to home, culinary, and outdoor living.

Shop now at QVC.com. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel.

Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.