77: Ello Clarice...

One does not simply walk into Mordor. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started.

Hello, Governor. Hello, sir. How are you? I'm good. Hello, hello. I do not have a cold. I would like to state that out of the gate. Even though I may sound like it. I sound sultry today. We had a little fire pit on Tuesday night because we were out skateboarding.

I was in charge of getting the fire going and then I took in a snootful of piping hot smoke and burned my throat and lungs. That sounds lovely. Oh, it sucks. Well, you may be sultry, but I'm completely and utterly out of it. I had more fun homeowner explosions last night, so I have not been able to really go through a bunch of this stuff.

So, Jason, you're doing the heavy lifting today. I will hold your hand. All right. Thank you very much. I just want to state for the record that there's a lot of – the world has gone very organic. As we become more technologically inclined with things, with our foods and with our house and our environments, we are very organic now.

I love chemicals. Okay. So, I had a little issue with kitchen sink last night. It started to back up. Thought it was maybe the garbage disposal, whatever. So, there was a lot of, you know, let's shove the hand down the drain, try to grab stuff out, whatever, all that sort of stuff.

And then, you know, we went through the entire raft of organic bullshit that wifey likes to use. You know, vinegar and baking soda going down the drain, some special crap that she bought at whole fucking paycheck, of course, that is, you know, supposed to organically take care of the drains. None of that worked.

You know what worked? Drano. I love chemicals. You put Drano down a garbage disposal? It's just – it wasn't the garbage disposal that was the problem. The pipes were backed up. Oh, okay. I'm like – I'm not even a homeowner and I know not to put Drano down a garbage disposal. Well, I left out the bit where I, you know, I did the troubleshooting and found out it wasn't the garbage disposal.

Gotcha. Yeah. Anyways, that was a good time. And yay chemicals because they work. They do work. Through the environment. Let's just – I'm all for it. Drano serves a purpose. I agree. And speaking of things that work, I just want to state biggest pet peeve ever solved.

Thank you, Apple. You've gotten a lot of shit, but when I upgraded to iOS 8.0.2, Bluetooth did not fucking automagically turn on. Yay. I thought Apple fired all your clients. Well, that'll probably happen soon too, but whatever. Who cares? It doesn't matter. I'm so thrilled because if you've been listening to this podcast, you know the exceeding amount of anger that that's caused me on every single update.

Well, I'm glad that they've solved at least one problem for you. Yes, but they have unfortunately caused a lot of other ones, so we'll get to that later. Cool. So I found an article a couple weeks ago, and I just wanted to bring it up real quick because it goes back to something that we always talk about, which is working from home.

And it's an article in The Atlantic about agoraphobia and the telecommuter. And it basically says that working from home may not cause issues with agoraphobia, but if you have latent issues, it will exacerbate them like nobody's business.

Well, that's kind of a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it? It kind of is, and as I was reading this article, because I got this sent to me by a couple people, that's why I wanted to bring it up. This woman already had major problems. And, you know, she was carrying Xanax and like a full-on survival kit in her bag.

And I'm like, you know, I don't know if the telecommuting really had anything to do with your crazy. I think you just might have been crazy. Yeah, it's a bit like saying, you know, if you don't have a drug problem, you're probably okay sitting around a house that's got pounds and miles of cocaine sitting around. But if you do, that might cause a problem.

Yes, indeed. So I'd take this one with a grain of salt. Yes, I do notice that I do get a little more socially inept after, you know, seven days of not leaving the house. Yeah. But I used to have, I mean, I've always had, you know, social anxiety problems. But it's one of those things where, you know, immersion therapy works wonders.

Get out. Be with people. I used to be, I was a receptionist at an art gallery. And for years after that, you know, could talk to anybody. It was great. But then you move to telecommuting and you don't talk to anybody. It's a muscle. You know, you've got to exercise it. Yeah, I mean, I've been working from home for, gosh, almost 15 plus years now.

But the key has always been I have a fairly active social life. I make sure I get out on weekends. I get out, grab a beer after work with someone. Get out of the damn house. Talk to people. Yeah, indeed. So this week has been just one insane thing after another.

Yes, it has. I mean, just insane. The social media escape has been quite fun. And you have a little follow-up on social media gaps that we always talk about. Yeah, we talk about them quite a lot. I mean, it kind of comes down to why you should hire professionals. But even professionals screw up. I think the big news this week was Joan Rivers came back from the dead to pimp the iPhone 6.

Yeah, I totally missed that one. I must have been flying or something. It was quick. And it only popped up on Instagram. And to the company, to whatever company that was doing this, brokering this deal, running Joan Rivers social media, whatever, I'm sure that they were actually wondering if they'd be getting any more paychecks anyway.

So are we actually working on this? Who knows? But yeah, she obviously had some pre-made deal with Apple to do a promotional post on Instagram. It was only up for 20 minutes. But this is the world that we live in now. And within that 20 minutes, a lot of people captured it and sent it out.

And it made the rounds. And they look stupid. So it happens. And I have collected a little – I found a link on Salon that has collected some of the worst corporate social media gaps in history. They're pretty good. So we'll just throw that in the show notes. There's no point in really talking about a lot of them. But it's kind of funny if you're into this sort of thing.

So like three or four shows ago, I was talking about Buffer and how they needed a pause button. Yes. When the ISIS thing happened and my friend was posting a bunch of just silly things, I'm like, just pause it for 24 hours and let things go. So they just got their head cut off. Yeah. And it's like, Buffer doesn't have a pause button.

I think what Buffer needs now is a dead man switch. They need to incorporate my Death Vault technology into Buffer. So if you don't check in every 24 hours, everything stops. Because if you're dead, then you should be posting about a phone that didn't exist before you died that you had had a PR wonk right like three months ago.

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly the thing. But that's even – that's last case scenario checking. But if you go to the Salon link, one of the last ones is the Australian poster for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was pushed out on September 11th, which involves the turtles leaping out of a building that's exploding in the background.

Yeah. That was a bad one. You know, there you go. Well, I mean, it's the Australian guys. They didn't really – What do they know? They don't have the September 11th context that we do. This is true. So I had a couple of work frustrating things, which will – you know, there's a lot of security-related ones as well.

But again, why you should really hire professionals, part 8,821. We do things like make sure the email account associated with your massively popular Twitter account isn't shut down, thus enabling you to actually access the account when you forget your password. And we keep records of things like passwords too. I know you guys think you know how to do everything, but you don't.

That's why you pay us the big – pay us some bucks. Pay us the tiny bucks, yes. Pay us some bucks. What else, Jason? There was another link that you posted about the iCloud security hole. Oh, yes. Well, apparently they were aware of it about six months ahead of time, but there you go.

Well, yeah, they were tipped off by this guy who said that, look, look, there's this bug in Find Your Friends that lets you brute force. Yeah. And this guy has a history of actually giving them bugs and them ignoring them, and they did the same thing again. And, like, the last time he gave them a bug, they – it was the – remember the old developer account bug?

Yes, yes. People could, like, pull the developer accounts, and they shut down the dev site for almost a week. Yeah, I remember that. This is the same guy that found that. They should really be listening to him at this point. I know. He should have a direct line to – He should have a job is what he should have. That's true. So, yeah.

But, I mean, again, it's one of those things where, you know, this is – it's making the news, and it's getting a lot more play because of what's happened with all these celebrities that – But they didn't really follow best practices on their accounts, and what were they doing putting it up in the cloud anyways, and why weren't they doing best privacy and security practices, and why was their password, I'm hot?

Well, because they're normal people. Yes. Well, just because they like to play pretend for a living and dress up, sometimes they like to undress, too. You know, they're just normal people. They just happen to have, you know, a higher – was it – target attack vector or whatever the hell the security people call it.

Or the Q rating, whatever. They got a bigger target on their butts, literally. Speaking of that, you're a big find this week, which I found hilarious. So there's a company now that is making EMF-proof underwear. Protect your balls. Yeah. As soon as you posted that, I just went and Googled codpiece and found a nice shot of the guy from Wasp wearing one saying, this has been around for a long time.

Yeah. We've got to put that in the show notes with the sparklers shooting out of his junk. But it's this company called Ripper Row. That's a horrible name for underwear, by the way. Ripper Row, Ripper Row, I don't know. Reflect, repair, relax. I'm not buying a pair of underwear that has the name Rip in it.

Well, yeah, that's true. Don't miss the launch of Ripper Row. We protect your balls from 99.99% electromagnetic radiation from your cell phone and computer. Yeah. And here's the thing that just pisses me off. It says, get your free pair today.

Find out more by joining the revolution. You put in your email address, and it's one of those damn Ponzi schemes where you have to get five more people to sign up before you get your free pair. That's shocking. Yeah, really. Shocker monkey.

Comment of the week. Our comment of the week comes from Beach Mama. She says, it's been a while, but I'm back. Thanks for making me laugh and for great content. Love you guys. And she also sent us a nice little donation, which you can too. Go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and click on the donate button. We appreciate it.

And thank you very much, Beach Mama. Good to know you're still out there listening. I know. I feel like for a while we didn't have our lucky charm, and now she's back. Yeah, it's good stuff. It's nice to know that people stick with us. Indeed. So, our Ask a Geek this week comes from previous guest Jordan Cooper.

Question. If an iPhone 6 Plus bends in the back pocket and no one's there to complain about it, is Apple still doomed? Now, I follow Jordan on Twitter, and it's basically been a week and a half of bending jokes. So, good job. Keep them rolling. Yeah.

Now, Jordan has another podcast. It is a Blenderhead podcast, besides Tech Douchebags. And his last one, episode 124, Robotic Finger Extensions, where he reviews his iPhone 6 Plus. Right. And I love this episode because he came to the exact same conclusion that, okay, I've got the phone.

It's the same fucking thing as I had before. It's just bigger. Right. And my life hasn't changed any, which is why I didn't buy a 6 Plus. So, I recommend going and checking out this podcast episode, and just subscribe to Jordan. He's an awesome guy. Yeah. And I was just laughing my ass off because I'm like, see? Told you so.

Well, everything I've heard is that the 6 Plus is actually not a one-handed device, and I want my phone to be a one-handed device. It is not a one-handed device. The 6 is barely a one-handed device. I know. I'm a bit worried about that. When I was in San Francisco last weekend, our friends David and Chen, Chen got hers, and when she pulled it out of the box, I'm like, did you get a Plus?

She's like, no, this is just a 6. I'm like, did they send you a Plus on accident? She's like, no, this is how big it is. I'm like, holy Jesus, that thing's huge. Oh, man. And I played with it. Man, it feels really good, but I don't know if I can do a Plus. It's like a little too much. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk about the story that is but isn't about the Plus.

Yeah, let's get back to Jordan's comment, the bendy comment. Yes, the bending. That's a bendy question. No, Apple is still not doomed. They're doomed because they're just stepping on their dick every other day. Right. Yeah, I agree. And they're still not doomed from that. It's just it's been a crap two weeks for them.

Yeah, well, let's be honest and let's be fair here. If BlackBerry would have come out with any of this stuff, people would be screaming from the rafters about how awesome they are. It's just because we have way higher expectations of Apple. Now, the first day that the iPhone 5 came out, I was sitting at a bar with a couple friends who had just got them, and one of them literally sat there and bent his iPhone 5.

He's like, wow, this flexes a lot. Right. And then it stayed flexed. I'm like – he just got this sad look on his face. He's like, oh, I just bent my phone. Well, don't bend your phones. Don't bend them. Now, the video that kind of set this off, which we'll have linked in our show notes from Gizmodo, this dude is straining.

He's probably close to having an aneurysm trying to bend this damn thing, but then he finally does it and goes, look, I bent it. Yeah. Well, duh. If I hit it with a fucking hammer, it's going to break. No shit. You try and bend it, it's going to bend. It's not made of adamantium.

No. No, this happens, and it will happen, and don't bend your phone. And Apple has come back and said only – so far, only nine customers have actually complained about – I love that it has a name, Bendgate, because everything's a fucking scandal these days. A bunch of people sitting around trying to break their phones, break their phones, and this is a scandal?

You're trying to do it. It's not like you're just normal wear and tear. In fact, I think it was the Verge – I'll have to find the link and throw it in the show notes – where they actually went on a tour of the facility that Apple uses to test their phones and beat the shit out of them. And the guy was like, yeah, it will bend if you apply excessive force to it.

But what are you doing applying excessive force to your $1,000 phone? Yeah, no doubt. It's a computer made of glass and aluminum. Just be gentle. I don't take my – I don't put my MacBook in my pocket and sit on it and see if it bends.

Jesus, stupid-ass people. Yeah. Well, it's happening, and I do love the idea that they all work for Samsung because it is – Samsung is running an entire online campaign based on things like this. They find every potential flaw that pops up on somebody's Twitter feed about the phone, and then boom, they have an ad about it.

And Apple is just an easy target to manipulate the stock. So if you short the stock, create a crap scandal, stock goes down, boom, cash in. This has been going on for years now. It's stupid. I tell you what, just go follow Jordan on Twitter. We'll have his Twitter handle in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 77.

Funny as shit, just puts a smile on your face every day. So thank you for the question, Jordan. Yes, thank you. And keep up the bendy jokes. I'm enjoying them. I like the taco ones and the pizza ones the best. Yeah, the Skynet ones about the 801 update were pretty funny too.

I mentioned that I did the 8.0.2 update and was very happy about the lack of Bluetooth being turned on. So thanks for fixing that switch, Apple. I missed 8.0.1, which I guess had some problems.

Yeah, if you got 8.0.1, it just turned everything off. You didn't have to worry about Bluetooth. You couldn't make a phone call. Your fingerprint didn't work anymore. So God forbid you forget your passcode. And yeah, they pulled it within an hour, but it was all over Twitter. They say only 40,000 people were affected, but I think all 40,000 of them are on my Twitter stream because everybody was just like, my phone doesn't work.

My phone doesn't work. Oh, shit. Yeah. I mean, that's the way everything happens now though, right? Like you can't mess up. If you mess up and it's up there for more than 30 seconds, end of story. Now, here's where it gets fun. So Bloomberg put out an article basically describing – they had some insider knowledge of what went on with this because they've got some moles, I guess.

Right. So in their article, they say, the same person at Apple that was in charge of catching problems before both products were released, this being the 8.0.1 update and Apple Maps. I forgot to put that in the quote. Josh Williams, the mid-level manager overseeing quality assurance for Apple's iOS mobile software group was also in charge of quality control for Maps, according to people familiar with Apple's management structure.

Okay, time to fire this guy. I don't care if his tie is cornflower blue and, you know, I don't care. He needs to go. Seriously. A, he fucked up Maps and then you put him in charge of quality control, like for mobile software. Mobile software is the biggest piece of software your company runs, okay?

Gee, I don't know if there's nepotism going on here. I don't know exactly what's happening, you know, who he's got dirt on, but seriously. Time to find a new job. Send him to Samsung. Yeah, well, there's been a lot of talk about leaning in this last year, but it usually seems to be failing up.

Yeah, that's true. There's a lot of that happening in tech. This guy, he should just go straight to Congress, you know? Yeah, might as well. Forget tech. Just send him to Congress. He's apparently got the perfect resume for it. Yeah, apparently. But having said that with all these problems, I've been saying that I'm not going to be upgrading until my contract is up with Verizon.

For those of you lucky people that aren't in the U.S. and aren't tied to these insane things, this is what cell phone providers do here. They basically subsidize the cost of a phone by giving you upgrades every two years, and I'm not on the track to get an upgrade right now. However, every single provider here in the States is offering trade-in deals for old iPhones to try to get everybody onto the 6, and I might be doing that because they're going to give me basically – I'll be able to basically just take my phone in and get a 6.

So you have a 5 now, correct? I do, yes. Yeah. See, I've got a 5S, and we've known about these subsidies since the iPhone 1. You're paying like $200 for the $800 phone, but you still have to pay tax on the $800 phone, which is your first tip-off, and they just bump your bill up to pay for the phone over the course of the two years.

That's why there's the cancellation fee because you haven't paid for your entire phone yet. So, yeah, this has been in place since day one. Yeah, but they've never done this – we'll offer your trade-in things. They've never done that before. The trade-in thing is new. So that is something I think that we kind of need to take advantage of.

I mean, I'm not going to get a shot like this again. Well, here's the thing. Before you actually just walk into the Verizon store – Oh, by the way, you can't. I did call to check on that because they don't have enough in stock. What you have to do, at least with Verizon, and I had a friend of mine that is on Sprint who said the same thing.

What you have to do is sign up online, and they will send you a phone, and you pay the $200, and then you send in your old phone, and once they receive it, they will recredit you for the $200. Okay. And are you sure it's $200? Because on AT&T for my 5S, the trade-in value is only $160, and you're trading in a $5.

I ran through the online thing, and it said $200, but obviously they take a look at it and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So I just – I locked in with Gazelle for $220. Right. So that's – it's $60 more. Yeah. So I'll just take that $220 and slap it on my Amex bill.

But I'm still like on the fence. I want to see a 6-plus in person before I make any decisions. Yeah, I think I'm going to be swinging by an Apple store this weekend before I know. But I mean this is – I feel like I have to take advantage of it. Otherwise, I'll be sitting around for a year. Do what you got to do, man.

All right. I will. I want you to get one so you can review it and bitch about it. I know. I feel like this is what I do. I should definitely have one. So I'm probably going to go for it. I will be talking about it next week because I'm sure that I will enter into the process. Now, I saw an article on Slate about is Apple picking a fight with the U.S. government?

Because apparently in iOS 8, the security is really, really, really, really good. Yeah. We covered this in security last week, how they don't have the keys anymore to the castle. So they can't just go and unlock your encrypted data, which is encrypted the instant that you create a passcode, which is why everybody should create a passcode.

Yes. You have to create a passcode, not just use your finger, people. And the Slate article was interesting because they had two different sides of the argument, one that says it was against the public good for law enforcement. Well, they can't catch more criminals, but they're saying, no, it's actually for the public good because then not anybody can just go and find the keys and unlock the phone.

Because then there are no skeleton keys that can unlock every device. Which I am on the side of Apple with this. I'm like, this is a great call. Thumbs up. No, I'm completely on the same side as well. I'm really happy about this. I don't think that the government should have skeleton keys to everything.

This is fantastic. And I recommend if you're at all interested, read this article because it is a very well-written article that does cover both points and does it in a very smart way. This is one of the better Slate articles I've actually read. No, it is very good. That's why I popped it in there. I'm consciously aware every single time I put in anything from Slate that you're going to make fun of me.

But I thought this was a very good one. And also in the news, Adobe acquires photo editing platform Aviary. Okay. Now, I was on the fence about putting this in because I use Aviary in one of the apps that I consult on.

We use it for the photo editing stuff. And it just kind of scared me that, oh, God, now Adobe is going to have access to it and screw it up. But they seem to be getting somewhat better. I mean, they bought Behance, which was that portfolio site. And this kind of dovetails into it with being able to edit on your phone.

So they'll keep giving away these free tools for inserting into your iOS applications or Android apps for photo editing to make photo editing better for anybody who wants to start their own app. And it was a godsend for us. I mean, it just upped the level of our app tenfold just from a quality standpoint.

So I'm hopeful that Adobe is not going to screw it up. But I just wanted to throw it in just because I thought it was an interesting acquirer. Yeah. And the entire Aviary team is going to go join Adobe. So the people at Aviary are spot on good. I really like what they did.

So I'm happy that, like, a good team is going to Adobe. The more good people that we can get to Adobe, the better because I really don't want Adobe to fail. And they've had so many screw-ups in the past so many years. I'm still pissed off about the stupid cloud. I hate the subscription service. I can't stand that.

I still hate it. I know. But if you look – the thing is, though, the old days, you would spend $1,200 for a copy of Photoshop. Now you can spend, like, $400 a year and get everything and just keep getting the upgrades. I think over time, the prices come down.

And, you know, if you're not just getting your software from Sweden for professionals – and it's a write-off. For me, it's a write-off. So it doesn't bother me. And I like having access to the entire Adobe suite. So, yeah, the software subscription model in itself is an annoyance. You have to do it, especially if you hit a lean time and, you know, you're in between billing cycles and you're like, oh, Jesus, I've got to spend $120 this month on Adobe.

It's like, oh. Yeah. But, you know, so I just, like, pay the yearly subscription and it's much cheaper. But, yeah, the whole software subscription model, it's not going away for big products like this. So just get used to it and embrace it.

And hopefully, if more people do it, then the price will come down. That's true. That is very true. So, I mean, I'm doing it. I don't have a choice. I need to have all the software. I need to have it legally. So I'm subscribing to Adobe. I just – bad taste in the mouth. You know what I mean? Oh, trust me. I know.

Yeah. I just – remember Flash. Yes. Remember Flash. I know. So, yeah. Let's – I don't want to get too into this again. I was going to make a joke about Bono's nude photos showing up in the iOS. It's 8.02 update, but I'm not going to. Time has an exclusive article with U2 and Apple.

They apparently have another surprise for us. In this article, they talk about how they're working on a secret Apple project that might just save the music industry. Now, it's an interesting read. I can't imagine what it will be. We all know that Neil Young's Pono didn't work. But with Apple behind it, that could be good.

However, there has been a follow-up since then. I had mentioned I was listening to this new podcast called Geeks and Beats a while ago, which is out of Canada. And it's a tech guy and a music guy who do a podcast together, and it's really good. The music guy is an old-school radio guy, so he actually has access to people.

He did an interview with The Edge on the latest podcast where basically The Edge – it was actually really good. The Edge was kind of just like, look, we gave you our album. If you don't like it, whatever. Sorry. Blah, blah, blah. But he did talk a bit about the technology, and The Edge kind of backstepped away from it being some new format or anything.

Mostly, they were just going to do something with Apple in terms of rolling out another album in an interesting way. So I'm not sure if this is bullshit or not now at this point. We'll see what happens. Because I was – yeah, the way that they say it is that there's going to be a new digital format.

Yeah. And that's what they teased. And anybody that has even the basics of the fundamentals of how technology works knows that the genie is out of the bottle. It is not going back in. There is no format on the planet that is going to save the music industry from the MP3. No.

Fifteen years ago, I kept telling clients and management companies that if you can play something on your computer, you can find a way to record it and save it. Yeah. If it plays, it stays. If it plays, it stays. And that will never, ever change. So I'm interested to see what this may lead to.

I find it hard to believe that time.com would have a cover exclusive that is wrong, but we'll see. It's time. I think they've jumped the shark a long time. Well, I'm sorry. They've nuked the fridge a long time ago. Right. Now, Facebook has come out with its – their counterpoint to Google's Internet Everywhere blimp thing.

And now they're going to try and do drones. To do what? Give Internet to the unwashed masses of the Gobi Desert. Oh, okay. Provide Internet access. I thought they'd send a drone over to your house if you hadn't posted a status update in a week. No, they send the drone over to your house and then they see if your privacy settings are correct on your house.

No, we can see in the third window. So we're going to flip that switch on your profile. Right. No, it's – they just want to have drones that are up for years that have Internet access in there. There's a lot of regulatory issues like every drone has to have a pilot so you can't have 100 drones up there and 100 people sitting in a room watching them.

Right, right. And the fact that they have to fly like between 60,000, 80,000 feet and drone technology just doesn't work that well yet to keep a plane in the air for years. No. So they've got a long road to hoe but – I'm 100 percent on board for providing blanket Internet access across the globe.

I love that concept and I hope it's a big company that will do it basically for free and not try to screw people out of it. Didn't we talk about like 20 episodes ago? Wasn't – didn't Google have some sort of like balloon technology that they were going to throw up? Yeah, this is their comeback to that.

Okay. And you just said for free, which we all know doesn't work. No, it doesn't. And I don't want to get my Internet from Facebook. And actually, I don't want to get my Internet from Google. I'd like to get it from a third party and I'd like to pay for it. Okay. And speaking of Facebook, the great gay exodus has begun.

I love how this started with transvestites who wanted to keep their stage names. I know. It is so fabulous. It is fabulous. And this dovetails into the fact that where are we going to go? Honey, hello. It's fabulous. Everybody started to go to hello.

Well, everybody with a grain of salt. Everybody meaning 4,000 people an hour to start with and then it jumped up to like 34,000, 37,000 people per hour. It's gaining traction quickly, very quickly. At this point, I've got 25% of the most important people in my network that are already there.

The other 75% either are just not techno-savvy enough, don't care enough, are fine with Facebook. But the most people I like to talk to are getting there very quickly. Hold on a second because this goes right into my point about it.

Yes, everybody that is super techno-savvy, all the cutting-edge tech people, which is 99% of your friends, Jason, and a lot of mine, are on board with this. But everyone I've talked to that doesn't really give a shit about tech and just uses it for their life doesn't give a shit about Elo.

I've even asked. I was like, who wants an invite code? And a bunch of my friends are just like, nah. Yeah, see, most of mine did. I ran out of invites and I had a ton of them. It's a very self-selecting sample that's going to Elo. I love the concept of Elo, but even the design itself is not meant for non-tech people.

It is a tech-looking design. It's your and my wet dream of a design for a social network. It's straight out of war games. It's old school. It is not, I would say, female-friendly. Terra accepted, of course, and a bunch of other women like Terra. It's a tech site that's meant to appeal to tech people.

It will not appeal to the masses. Of course, it's having a spike right now. Hell, Google Plus did when they launched, too. I mean, you couldn't get in there fast enough. Everybody's signed up. Everybody's going to sign up for this. Will it have traction over time? I don't think so. Well, see, here's the thing. We both suck at predicting what is going to get traction.

This is true. So I don't want to, I'm not going to, at this point, I'm just watching and playing. I'm having a good time in there since a lot of my friends are there. I looked at Twitter twice yesterday, mainly to go watch Jordan's Bendy jokes. But so far, it's an interesting story to watch.

And yes, nothing is going to get critical mass out of the gate. You just can't. No, I know that. The infrastructure is not there. Everything is a slow roll. Everybody hated Twitter in the beginning. Everybody hated MySpace in the beginning. And hell, even LiveJournal, everybody hated it in the beginning, except for the few people that were there. And then it grew.

That's how these things go. I realized making the critical traction thing was a mistake. And Sean Bonner called me out on it immediately on the site. And I apologize for that. That was not true. But there are other things that are not true. One of the headlines in an article that we're talking about right here is, Mysterious Social Network LO Explodes in Popularity for People Fleeing Facebook.

I would immediately argue that people aren't fleeing Facebook. They're still on Facebook. They're checking out LO. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Nobody has left Facebook to go purely to LO now. No, and they'd be idiots to do so. Yes. Just because it's like, you don't know if it's going to be there next week.

And there's a lot of mystery surrounding LO because they're like, yes, we have this manifesto and we're not going to sell your things and all this stuff. And Andy Bio did a little bit of research and he found out they are VC-backed. Of course they are. To the tune of over $400,000.

And Greg Cohen, my friend who used to work at Yahoo and is a very smart dude and knows VC, is like, don't discount it just yet because he did research on the fund. And the fund is a small fund that has a track record of investing in smaller companies where the owners do have ethics and don't want to charge ads.

So this story is unfolding, definitely. And to just jump back to the design aesthetic, I hate it. I think it is one of the ugliest, hardest to use sites I've ever used. You have to, you know, it is almost like a game where you have to figure out where the buttons are, what it does, what it doesn't do.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's going to evolve. They've got a list of stuff that they want to roll out because it is. I mean, it was in private beta. Yeah. It's still in private beta. It's not, this is not for release software. So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. Now I'm going to watch the story, see how it unfolds.

And, you know, it's just kind of how it goes. But I just don't want to, you know, just blanket shut them off out of the gate because I did that with Twitter and I was dead wrong. I was dead wrong. And what I like about this one, it's a hybrid between Facebook, Tumblr, Tumblr, and Twitter. Google Plus is just Google Plus.

Yeah, but it's got the circles and, you know, the friends and noise and the drag and drop, which is a Google Plus thing. So it is, I'm not against it. I like what they're trying to do. I think that they've made some serious missteps coming out of the gate. And you have to argue that with this kind of explosion now, even if they say they're in beta, they're coming out of the gate.

They've done a very good job of doing promotion and trying to get people over there. So I would say, you know, you're in prime time now. You can't really claim to be beta anymore. I do think that there's serious issues with their manifesto and what's been discovered about the VC funding and, you know, their claims that they're, you know, ad-free.

Well, they're ad-free for now, but if you've got VC funding behind you, you're going to have to make money at some point. And the servers have to pay for themselves and they're going to have to pay for bandwidth. None of this stuff is free. And they're going to have to make money in some way, shape, or form someday. Yeah, and their, you know, their quote-unquote manifesto states that we will just charge for premium features.

Right. And we'll see how that goes because you and I both know historically people don't pay for premium features. Yeah. No, they have some, like if you say we're to link to LO from your Facebook and it pulls in the meta tag with the descriptors and all that sort of stuff, they state in the descriptor that there's private messaging.

Well, there isn't yet. No, they're working on it. Yeah, they're working on that, but they state that in their description. So there are a lot of little things about them that I find niggling. But yes, you claim beta. I say it's not beta anymore. Well, since you can't walk in and sign up, still beta.

And also, the way that they have grown, I think they probably would have gotten to some of these features right now, but they're, you know, they're pouring buckets on their servers to keep them from exploding. So this, you know, premature explosive growth takes away from the engineering time that would have been spent building up features.

So I'm going to give them, yeah, I'm going to give them a little bit of slack on that. But they are, they said they are bringing in more employees to help. So hopefully they're bringing in enough people. I'm just, like I said, you know, I'm looking this, this is a new party. I'm not going to say that party sucks until I've gone and tried out the party. And, you know, if you get to the party early and there's nobody there, then just come back a little later.

And, you know, you don't want to be the first person at the party, but, you know, you want to show up fashionably late, but not too late that the party's over. I'm at the party, I'm hanging out, and, you know, I'm just, I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid yet. That's, I'm, I'm arguing for caution and I'm looking at the things that are wrong with it and saying, you know, this party could really use some more chips.

And jello shots. No jello shots, that brings the chicks. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The annoying loud ones, not the cool ones. Oh, not the cool ones. And the one thing that, my favorite part of these new social networks is the land rush. I love the land rush. Oh, grab the names, grab the names.

Yep. Grab the names. I've got some choice ones. So, I, besides being JPD, which I love, the fact that I can get in early enough to get my three-letter JPD handle like I have on Instagram. I'm a fan, even though I haven't used Instagram in months. But here you go. I mean, hold on a second.

Let's talk about this point for one second. Because the reason the great, the great gay Facebook exodus began was because these guys couldn't, Facebook instituted real name policies, as do most social networks. Now, they, they left because they wanted to keep their, you know, amazingly fabulous names and be able to use that because that's, that's what they go by.

Fair enough. But the reason that most social networks institute real name policies is because of the great, the land grabs. Because people go and get 7,000 different names and then you're going to have the, you know, I'm sure somebody's already grabbed a bunch of the big bands in the world and now there's going to be lawsuits about, well, that's my name and I need to be able to use that.

It's a problem when people do this. Listen, I didn't get the Goo Goo Dolls. I didn't get any of your, your clients. I got, I got Fucko and I got retarded. Yeah. Okay. But you know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? And that's, that is why social networks have real name policies.

Now, granted. I don't, I, well, I think that's part of it, but they also have real name policies so they can match you to other records that have your buying history, which then they can sell ads against. That's the, that's the real reason that they have the real name policy. Not because your, your little band can't, you know, talk to their fans.

Their reason is because I want to find out that Brian Schulmeister over here used to shop at Urban Outfitters and now he shops at the Gap. So now I can give him more Urban Outfitter ads to try and bring him back. That's right. So I recommend, uh, Quinn Norton wrote a, an interesting article called, uh, what does ethical social networking software look like?

Yeah. It's an interesting read and she, she wrote this before the, uh, Andy Bio, uh, VC funding thing came out. She does tack it on at the end of the article, but she doesn't go back and discuss it. Yeah. So she might follow it, but Quinn is a fantastic journalist. You know, we posted a couple of her things before and, but she also says that the interface is not female friendly.

She doesn't care for it. Yeah. I didn't think most women won't. It's, uh, I don't even like it because I'm so used to modern style interfaces. Going back to this just makes me feel a little bit weird. It does. I hate courier. I don't like the font. And I also don't like the fact that this feels like they let a bunch of amateurs at their JavaScript because it doesn't work half the time, especially on the phone.

So anyway, goodbye, LO for now. We'll be back. We'll check your party out later. Security. Ha. It's been a fun week for internet security, right, Jason? Oh, Jiminy, my butt hurts.

Yeah. Okay. Let's start off on the hacks of the week. Okay. Let's run through. Yep. Jimmy John's confirms breach of 216 stores. I don't even know what Jimmy John's is. It's like a subway type of place. Oh, okay. There you go. Well, they, they put up an incident report.

They list all the stores and dates that were breached. Oh, good job, guys. And it's only on people that walked in with cards and were swiped. It does not, uh, have anything to do with phone orders or internet orders. Great. Which is good because I use them for internet orders all the time. Because when I was laid up and couldn't leave the house, they brought me very many tasty sandwiches.

Well, I'm glad that they, uh, they did it right. This is the way you do it. So far, so good. Uh, breaking, sort of, uh, Japan Airlines network has been breached. And info on up to 750,000 frequent flyers stolen. And all the data has been sent to China. Oh, boy.

That one might affect me. Uh, story is, uh, evolving. And big news this week was Kevin Mitnick, once the world's most wanted hacker, now has a zero-day exploits, uh, marketplace. Okay. He's basically taking exploits from hackers and selling them to governments and corporate businesses.

Well, that's not good. Minimum. I, I, well, we'll get to that. We'll actually get to this because the wired piece that they did on it was almost kind of a hack job. Right. And, you know, minimum an exploit cost is a hundred grand. And what he's, what he's trying to do here is, well, he does vet every, every possible client.

Okay. And make sure that they're not going to use it for ill. I mean, well, they, they don't actually tell them what they're going to use it for. Right. But, you know, he's vetting the companies. It's not like, he's not selling an exploit for, you know, company A to company B. Right, right. Okay. He's not selling, you know, how to hack an iPhone to Syria.

So he's definitely trying to be a bit of a white hat here. Yes, absolutely. And he's just taking a brokerage fee. Okay. That's an interesting marketplace. It's not illegal. Right. There's nothing illegal about it. Yet. And, well, yeah, I mean, I don't know how, how you would make that illegal.

That's true. So you're selling information is what you're doing. And he's not using the information. He's brokering the information. So I don't, it would take a pretty interesting law to take this out. Now, yeah, people came out against him. It's like, this is bullshit. I can't believe you're doing this. You know, you're just making money off of people who are hacking stuff.

I'm like, good. He's in a unique position to get to the people that are finding these O-days and sell them to the companies that can, A, fix them possibly. Right. Like, you know, I find an O-day in Flash. Adobe buys it from me. Profit. You know, because as we've seen with the Apple stuff, they're not responsive.

So let's put a higher price tag on it and say, this is that important. This is a $100,000 screw up you guys have. Pay me and you can have it. Right. And he's got a really cool escrow model where it's like, okay, we guarantee that this O-day will not be found by anybody for, say, 90 days.

Right. So you get doled out the cash based on how many days it hasn't been found. So if somebody finds it in there, you only get partial money. But if you get to the 90 days plus, then you get all the money. So it's a cool escrow thing. So somebody from Bright Side of News came out and was like, did the actual piece where he's like, no, he's not selling this stuff to hackers.

He's actually being ethical about it, which I believe because this is too big a business for him. This just made Kevin Mitnick a gazillionaire. Right. And he's not going to screw it up by selling this willy-nilly to anybody. Yeah. Good point. All right. Well, that's super interesting. I'm definitely going to follow it. Now, let's talk about the bash bug.

Yes. This one ruined both of our days, I'm sure. Yes, it did. I spent about close to 24 hours fixing all my servers. And our Macs are still vulnerable to it. Yes. Because there hasn't been a patch. So what it is, is bash, which is one of the shells that when you go to a terminal, you type in, you know, your commands, it's the command line, you know, interpreter, processor.

It is what it is. Command line interface. Yes. Yeah. It has been vulnerable for years and years and years going back forever. Yes. Pretty much forever. It let you just tack on arbitrary commands. So the big issue is Apache uses bash for a lot of its post-processing.

So there are, there are hacks out there where I can actually just put in a, change the, what is the user agent, which you could easily do in Safari to say, okay, this is my custom user agent. Put in a bash string that will DDoS, or not DDoS, it'll just DDoS, a server.

Yeah. It'll basically do a little fork attack and say, okay, I'm hosed. So it's very dangerous. So if you, if you don't know about it, go read up. If you run a server, you probably already know about it. If you run a server and you don't know about it, you're probably running NT. Yeah.

Probably. So. This was, this is a very big one. It was bigger than Heartbleed actually, as far as impact goes. It was, but it was also, I felt dealt with very quickly. Uh, you know. Because it was that bad. This was a, this was a category 10 shit storm. Yeah. Yeah. There were stories going around saying the entire internet is going to come down and it could have, but, uh, you know, people got to it pretty quickly and the information is out there.

And again, yeah, if you're running a server or if you're marginally in charge of one, talk to your tech people immediately. I actually had to migrate two servers because the OS's were so old, they weren't being, being updated anymore. Right. And then I looked at it, I'm like, yeah, I could patch, bash, patch, bash on these servers, but there's so many holes in them already for being so old.

Yeah. That it was a good opportunity to get management to say, okay, here's, here's a bucket of money, go fix everything. So all of my servers now are running on the latest Linux versions or I use sent, sent seven is mine. Okay. Flavor du jour. Du jour. And everything's running on that now.

So it was just, it was a stressful, but kind of exciting day actually. It was a little fun, wasn't it? Yeah. I woke up in the morning and I just basically told all my clients that, uh, everything that I had planned to do for them today is off. So talk to you tomorrow. Exactly. Uh, Mozilla comes back with another bug in Firefox.

This was a phishing friendly cryptographic bug, which it was, uh, you know, another TSA or TLS SSL bug with their certificates. Again, they have, they have fixed it. So make sure that your Firefox and Thunderbird, which I know you use are updated. I still use it and I have updated.

Yes. Immediately. So again, it's, it's very simple to update these things as, and taking care of done. Uh, there was a, a jQuery bug this week, a malware attack where somebody had figured out a way to basically inject some, I didn't read too much into it.

It was like a drive-by attack. So if you're using jQuery CDN, uh, you could have some badness come. Yes. Yes. I don't use the jQuery CDN, so I didn't have anything to worry about. But if you use jQuery, check the show notes and make sure that you're, you're patched and safe and using the proper versions of jQuery that are not affected.

And if you were affected, then, you know, do your scramble, not the fires. Exactly. I don't use CDN either. So I was all good, but that one terrified me when I first saw the headline. Cause I was like, oh crap. Oh yeah, I'm fine. Yeah. Um, my buddy, John Chevron, who, uh, listens to the show.

Hey John, always sends me these things on, on Facebook, which is funny. Um, so he sends me these all day long. So it's, it's fun to get these and, uh, appreciate it. Keep them coming. And if you have any security fun bits, send them to podcast at grumpy old geeks.com. Yeah. Or use the ask the geeks at, uh, grumpy old geeks.com section.

Now there's a followup that the Atlantic did on the stingray technology. Yeah. Basically the, you know, the cell tower in a briefcase. Technology. What they've determined is basically what the, the law enforcement agencies are doing is probably illegal. Yeah. So thanks to help with the ACLU.

So this is just some followup. We've got a link in the show notes, check it out. It's a little bit of a longer article, but it, it goes through a lot of the legal things that they're, they're supposed to do. They didn't do. They should do. And why they're keeping quiet on, uh, freedom of information act requests. And well, this is just an extension of, uh, this is the tech version of what law enforcement groups have been doing anyways, which is using military technology.

And they're not supposed to be, the cops are not supposed to be military. Nope, but they are. Yeah. They're buying tanks and now they've got these things. They're getting the tanks given to them for free. I know. It's insane. Well, that makes me wonder why. Yeah. Why are, why are they, why are we militarizing our law enforcement in every way, shape and form, including technology now?

It's, it's terrifying. Don't let me put my, or don't let me take my tinfoil hat off because I can go for probably another hour. All right. Let's move on and talk about Home Depot and Target. So yeah, last one. Um, apparently they were just using Windows XP. Yeah. If they were using Windows seven, if they had taken the time to upgraded, uh, to upgrade, they would not have run into this issue.

So it was basically, they were able to scrape the RAM because it was just an old, old exploit in Windows XP and just nobody upgraded. Uh, well, I'm sure that somebody in their IT department said, Hey guys, we, we, we, you know that when XP thing is going away, we've really got to upgrade. And they looked at the budget and said, Nope.

Yeah. Well, that's, it also comes to the downside of using Windows because you have to pay the licensing fees, move to Linux. It's, you know, cheaper and somewhat more secure as we've learned. Somewhat. Yeah. But Windows is still the biggest, you know, it's got the biggest attack surface.

So people are going to go after it. And this one, they didn't even have to go after because it's been known for years. Yeah. So that is this week in security. I need, I need a Gatorade after that one. At the library. I, uh, working my way through the handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood.

It's actually the one that makes all the best sci-fi lists. It's not Oryx and Craig that is considered the, uh, the great book by her. It's the handmaid's tale. I'm struggling with this one. Um, I loved Oryx and Craig. I love that entire series. Uh, the handmaid's tale is very different.

It's very written from one woman's perspective. She doesn't have a lot of interaction with other people. It's, it's a lot of her own thoughts and, and it's very slow going. Um, again, the, the idea is good, but I am struggling right now. Uh, so I have not finished it yet, so I don't want to say much beyond that, but that's why I don't have a book because I've been, this one's been slow going.

I've got a book this week. Okay. Called Ghostman. All right. It is not sci-fi. Boo. It is not, uh, future tech. It is literally about a guy who works with bank robbers. That's cool. And you can't find them because he's the master of disguise and turns into other people.

And it is a amazing book. It is written by this guy, Roger Hobbs, and it's his first book. Nice. It's, it is incredible. Hat tip to David and Chen again for turning me onto this. They're like, you have to get this. This is, this is up your alley. And they were totally right.

If you like any kind of, I mean, it's almost spy-esque, but it's like, like almost noir genre. It is super cool. I really love this book. His, his follow-ups coming out in spring and next year. Excellent. And I'm sure this has been optioned for a movie by now because it is so good.

I highly recommend it. If you like any kind of spy thriller, crime drama type of stuff, it is, it is really cool. He came up with a, a really good character in this. That's going to be a long series. I can tell you right now. Nice. All right. I might check that out after I get through this handmaid's tale.

Media candy. I ran into two articles by two filmmakers that I thought were actually really good reads. Um, I have not seen the movies for, for either yet, but let's, let's just get into it. Uh, Salon has an amazing interview with Terry Gilliam. Uh, the title Hollywood is just gray frightened people holding on for dear life.

Um, it's a really good, I've, I've always been a fan of Terry Gilliam, not so much always his movies. Uh, but I do like his, his vision and his approach. And you can certainly say he is really damn interesting. Uh, if you don't know, he was also a member of Monty Python, which is pretty awesome. Uh, but I really love this interview where he talked about how hard it is to make anything that isn't cookie cutter or a tentpole movie in Hollywood anymore.

Yeah. He's done amazing movies. I mean, Brazil, 12 monkeys. Yeah. And, uh, the adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is one of my favorite, most underrated films. Right. And his new movie, I can't remember the name of it right now, but it's zero something, right?

Zero theorem. Zero theorem. I've seen this movie. Yeah. You said it was not that good. Don't see this movie. I wanted it to be good. He, and he's saying it's like the end of the, you know, that trilogy of Brazil, 12 monkeys and then zero theorem. And it is not, it is not even hold a candle to either of those.

I mean, yes, it's like going, if you're, if you're want to have your trilogy on a downward slope of quality, then that's what it would be. Well, like Star Wars. Yeah, pretty much. So I would skip the movie, but Terry Gilliam is awesome. Yeah. And the interview, I really can't recommend it enough.

It's a great read about creativity in the modern age and how it's suffering. A second article I read was by Simon Pegg, who is an awesome guy. Shaun of the Dead actually just had its 10th anniversary as well. And Spaced has its 15th anniversary. Yeah.

There you go. Spaced is, there's a great article that I saw. It's like 15 reasons why Spaced is the greatest comedy of all time. And I agree with every single one of them. So if you've never seen Spaced, chalk off a weekend and just watch it. It's only two seasons. It's, you know, BBC real quick. And if you can get the DVD set, because at the end they have like follow-ups with the characters several years later.

But yeah, Spaced is, that's what made him a star. Yeah, it definitely did. So this article is not as good as the Terry Gilliam one, but what it did make me do is really want to go see his new movie, which is called Hector and the Search for Happiness. It sounds like a really right up our alley.

Well, it reminded me, the title's like Walter Mitty. You know, it seems like it's kind of in the same vein. And I saw the trailer for it. It looks amazing. It actually looks really fun. Yeah. The thing that surprised me about Simon Pegg was he quit drinking like four years ago. Yeah. And he's never felt better. He's like on a super health kick because he's got kids now and he wants to, you know, be around for him.

Yeah. So, and he looks great. So his career is just off the charts now. It is off the charts. And I can't think of somebody that deserves it more. I've been a fan of his since day one. Absolutely. I found some music, actually. I did try, speaking of trying to, you know, find happiness, I've throttled down my podcast listening, particularly Corolla.

And found some new stuff. There is an act out there, a single woman singer-songwriter who does some, you know, she works with a couple different EDM guys to do basically electro pop called Indiana. And now any geek out there should really like this aspect of it.

She took her stage name because of her love of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We named the dog Indiana. We named the dog Indiana. And we named this pop singer-songwriter Indiana as well. I really enjoy it. There's an EP on Spotify or iTunes called Solo Dancing, which I love the song and I love the remixes.

And in even better news, the Aphex Twin Zero album finally came out and it didn't even come out in the dark web. It's on iTunes. And it is great. And Spotify. And Spotify, yes. And really, really good. I've listened to that the entire day when I was debugging and fixing a bash. Yeah, when you posted this in the show notes, I went and got it and listened to it basically on loop.

It is great background work music. I loved it. Yeah, it was absolutely fantastic. Also on iTunes, and full disclosure, this is my buddy's film. It's a documentary called Delivery. I probably wouldn't have watched it otherwise. Well, actually, I wouldn't have because I'm just not really a movie guy. But I really enjoyed it.

It's a great little doc on giving birth, but not really because he and his buddies also tried to do stand-up comedy for the first time at the same time. So it was very, very funny. And to get you to try to watch it, these guys are all like mid-30s or whatever, except one of their buddies is like a 70-year-old Norwegian dude, and he steals the entire movie.

He is hilarious. Okay, I'll check it out. Yeah, it was really well done. So good job. A shout-out to Mark Myers. Great job. Now, speaking of documentaries, I saw a documentary called Filmage, The Story of Descendants slash All. Now, if you know punk rock or music at any level, you know The Descendants.

Descendants were one of the greatest punk pop bands and basically probably started the whole punk pop genre back in the 80s. And this movie goes from the inception to where they're at now, like soup to nuts. It is amazing. We got a pre-release copy of it for my roommate's website so he could review it.

So I got to, you know, sit along and watch it. And we'll put a link to his review in the show notes as well as a link to the movie. It's coming out next week, I believe, on, you know, the standard channels. You should be able to buy it. Not in the theaters. But it is good. I mean, it is really, really good.

If you've ever liked The Descendants, watch this movie. Now, is it watchable if you don't know who The Descendants are? Absolutely. Excellent. That's fantastic. Absolutely, yeah. It's just a great story. I mean, it's a great story of, you know, these kids who liked to fish who then became punk rock legends.

Yeah. Great band, too. Yeah. And, you know, the strange part was it's a drummer-led band. The drummer is like, you know, the mastermind behind the whole thing, Bill Stevenson. Kind of like. And his story is awesome. Kind of like Genesis. Except not. Moron of the Week.

Once again, we have a plethora of morons. This time, two. First one up is. I don't think plethora means two, but go for it. Do you know what a plethora is? No. It's a plethora. I love that movie. Anyways, let's move on.

Let's talk about Evan Thornley, or Evan Thornley, who is the CEO, I believe, multimillionaire founder of LookSmart, an online advertising company. He was speaking at a tech conference in Sydney, Australia, on why he hires women, because they're cheaper.

They're like men, only cheaper, is what he said. Okay. Well, he now does not look smart. No, he does not. He's a moron. And moron number two, the situation, who I thought we'd never hear about again. He made over $9 million for doing absolutely nothing, and now he's being indicted for tax fraud because he couldn't be bothered to pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He is going to jail. That's a real situation.

The web's not dead.

My favorite site of the week is WhoIsU2.com. What is a U2, and why is it on my phone? This is just great. This guy started up a site. For us, this horse has already been beaten to death, but apparently, it's still happening. This guy just started up a site, and he's pulling in the best tweets, and he's kind of hand-selecting them about people who are freaked out about U2 showing up on their iPhones.

These are classic. It's great, and it's still going. I mean, these are from today, so this is fantastic. Yeah, these are now, in real time. So his tagline is, we're here to revel in the hysteria with hand-picked updates throughout the day. This totally reminds me of all the Who the Fuck is Arcade Fire when they won the Grammy a few years back, but this is just great.

This is great. I love it. Love it. Are you kidding me? So it's long been thought that no piece of square dry paper can be folded in half more than eight times. Now, apparently, this is no longer true, and we have a link to the science behind it.

Folding paper in half 12 times, the story of an impossible challenge solved at the Historical Society office. And she goes very deep into the math on this, which is pretty awesome. And then Jason brought to my attention something I totally forgot, which is the fact that the Mythbusters did this before her, but they only got to 11.

They got it to 11. This makes final tap. Hers goes up to 12. Closing shout-outs. I just want to give a shout-out to Mark Myers again, a friend of mine, friend of the show, and his movie Delivery. He's doing the film festival rounds right now, so go take a look at it. And good job, man.

Congratulations. Hope it all goes real well for you. Mark Myers, not to be confused with Mike Myers. Yes, Mike Myers. Who did a fantastic movie in San Francisco called So I Married an Axe Murderer. That is my favorite of his. It is so good. And speaking of San Francisco, I was just there this past weekend having the rounds.

I got to go check out the Buddha Lounge, which is the greatest bar that you should never go to because I don't want anybody to go there. And I had some amazing Chinese food. I ate pig intestines and all sorts of really gross things that tasted delicious.

Yeah, so a shout-out to my hosts, David and Chan, and Jordan Harbinger for coming and hanging out with us from the Art of Charm podcast, who he was also on the show before. We had a rousing time that a lot of us don't remember a lot of. Excellent. Now, since you asked me and my experience with Uber was I did not get a bottle of water, did you?

Yes, I got several. It depends on the car, depends on the driver, and depends on the level. So UberX, never. Uber Black, yes. For three out of four. All right. Not bad. So, and one of the things I did want to bring up, you said after you tried Uber that you still hate the company and you want them to die.

So my question is, why did you give them any money to begin with and not just take a cab? I got to do research for this podcast, man. Okay. Okay. But so now, from now on, is Uber, have you blacklisted Uber Black? I will never, ever use them here in LA. Should I be back up in San Francisco just because I saw how difficult it was to get a regular cab, I will probably have to use them.

But I don't know. It's going to be case by case on Citi and what I have to do. But I will not use them in LA, no. And I got to say, surge pricing is the biggest ripoff in the world. Yes, I cannot stand that. I was unfortunately very not diligent about looking at my timing for the trip.

And Folsom Street Fair was last weekend. Ah. And that was a really dumb time to try and Uber around because I ended up spending way too much money. A ride that would cost me $8 and a cab would cost me $27 on Uber X. And you still took Uber, right?

Because I needed a car. Yeah. I mean, we could have spent time getting a cab, but I hurt my legs so much the first night when I was there that I couldn't actually walk to get a cab. I was in pain pretty much the whole time. What is up with you and your leg, man? Well, it was going down hills. Like, I can go up the hills fine because I have stairs, but going down the hills, it pulled all the muscles on the front of my legs.

It hurts. Listen. I live in the flatlands of the Midwest. We don't have hills. Loyal listeners, we're just going to have to chip in to get Jason a fucking wheelchair at this point. So go give us a donation at grumpyoldgeeks.com because Jason can no longer walk. I want a badass Mad Max-like robo-segue that I can trick out with guns and a turret and spikes on the wheels.

So donate a little more so I can get something swanky at least. All right. All right, man. I'll talk to you next week. I'll talk to you next week, man.

Music for the podcast is by Among Us. That'd be me. We're available on iTunes and Spotify. You can listen there as well while you're listening to the Aphex Twin. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. Keep up with us at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, on Twitter, we're at twitter.com slash GOGpodcasts, or simply email us at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

You can also get our iPhone app at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iPhone. Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 77. Hello. Goodbye. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

We're driving to Florida.

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