93: We're in the Wrong Racket.

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Hey, Jason. How's it going?

Oh, it's going peachy quino, shiny beano over here. Right. Well, I want to welcome everybody to a very special episode of Grumpy Old Geeks. This is what I'm going to call the Jason podcast. OK, why? Because how we typically do this is we have our online show notes and, you know, we record on Friday and then we try to get it up on Friday as well.

And then you and I basically take the weekend off and then usually come Monday, you know, we'll start loading up our show notes and dropping in interesting stories and things that we want to talk about kind of slowly over the week up until Friday again when we record. Right. That's how it usually goes. Yes.

Yeah. Well, I had a bit of a crazy weekend. I worked all weekend. I'll talk about that a little bit later. When I finally got around to looking at the show notes, this is probably late Monday night. You had already basically filled this entire thing with enough for basically five shows.

Well, it's a holding place. I just I throw shit in. And then over the course of the week, it things, you know, bump it out. I knock them out and, you know, shuffle the show until Thursday night when we put everything in place. And that's when we bake. That's when we bake the cake. Right. Yeah. It's slightly different than normal.

So this time I only have a couple of my own stories because I already saw like, wow, that's about six hours worth of show. Now we just got to kick. We got to kick it up. Keep the pace going. All right. Let's keep the pace going. All right. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Something drove me nuts this week. And you actually put an article in the show notes.

So this is Brian Schulmeister number one. I have a problem when people email me, ask me for a favor, ask me for advice. And then I go through the hassle. I read it. I do my little bit of research or whatever. Bust my knowledge out. Send it back to them. And they never say thanks.

No, no thank you email. No just response whatsoever that they even fucking got it. Drives me crazy. So in the future, if you if you have been a person in the past who has not said thank you, do not expect to reply if you ask me a question.

I agree with you completely on this. That happens to me all the time as well. The amount of time that times I'm asked for favors or, you know, can you please just do this or can you please help me with this? And usually these are things that I get paid $100 an hour for to take care of, you know, friends and family, all that sort of stuff.

I'm happy to help. It's no big deal. But I do expect and want some sort of acknowledgement that I've helped you. If even just a reply that lets me know that you got what I sent you and did it work. That would be nice. That would be fan fucking tastic. Three letters. Here's all. All I need are three letters. THX.

Yes. But apparently not everybody does feel that way because I saw you complain about that and I googled it and the business writing blog has a nice little article about do email. Thanks, please or provoke you. Of course, there's no actual opinion in there and it's it's clickbait to get you to, you know, you know, it's a question. It's a question. Yes. Let's let's talk about this so I can up my numbers.

But she says this is a by Lynn. No last name provided. Some people complain that thanks emails waste their time. They have to stop what they're doing. Click and open the email to see if anything comes beneath. Thanks and delete it. Well, I took my time to stop and help you. Yeah.

How about you read the thanks email or send me a thanks email or whatever is it? I want the thanks email. I don't. It's no big deal. It's an email. It takes 10 seconds. Come on, people. Yeah. Seriously. It's not a it's not tough. Yeah. So I'm with you 100 percent on that. No argument. Let's transition into some of the other things that I saw this week that I wanted to talk about really quickly.

I know it's not really a tech thing, but it is something we've talked about a lot. Income inequality. We did have the State of the Union as well where this was addressed. And Oxfam came out with a report basically saying that what is the specific numbers here?

The richest 1 percent are likely to control half of all global wealth by the by 2016. That's a big deal. That's kind of what we knew was going on. Exactly. It's it's a slight shift. We're basically going from it was it took 85 of the world's billionaires to equal 1.9 trillion, which is the same as the shared by the bottom 3.5 billion people in the world.

It's going from 85 billionaires to only 80 billionaires by by 2016. So it's only switching by another five people. But that is just not good. It shouldn't be that way in general. And the funny thing is this Oxfam report is just generated tons of angry people saying this is this is all crap.

What does it matter? And then they go off, you know, tiny specifics. But I'm just saying that in general, it shouldn't be this way at all. And this is bad and it is wrong. So what do you propose? How do we fix it? Revolution? We got a fight club. We got a fight club this shit. Project Mayhem.

Project Mayhem or project whatever. Microsoft is calling their new browser. Maybe that'll fix it all. And a couple other things came along in the same vein this week. I'm obviously kind of connected to by by marriage to the big country of Canada.

And I have lots of friends up there. They never had Target for a lot of reasons. Target, the deep discount store here in the U.S., mainly because, you know, they do things like free health care, which they get by taxing items more than we tax things here. So there is no such thing as deep discount in Canada.

But Target did try to open there. It failed. It lasted about a year and it is closing. There are 17,600 Canadian employees of Target at the moment. And the CEO of Target is getting a bigger severance package than the amount of money set aside for all of those employees.

Yeah, that's kind of bullshitty. Yeah. And it's pretty typical. We have a link in the show notes that goes through and discusses Walmart kind of doing the same shit. And, again, it's just showing that the gap is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's really kind of screwing us and will in the long term.

Now, speaking of some Canadian follow-up, I've got something that actually matters to people like me. Whenever I send you to Canada, you go with one specific purpose, and that's to bring me back a box of fucking maple cookies. And I have yet to get one from you. So, I got an email from a friend today, or not today, a couple days ago, with a picture of maple cookies that you can get at Target.

Not Target, now I've got Target on the brain. Trader Joe's, sorry. Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's, yes. Trader Joe's maple cookies are not as good, but they are a usable facsimile there of actual Canadian maple cookies. I'm going to say, if you're mad at Canada for any reason, you can just go to Trader Joe's and, you know, not ship your money to Canada.

Because, apparently, the maple cookies coming across the border never make it to you anyway. To be fair, I did buy a box once for you, but then I ate them. Exactly. They are delicious. Therein lies the problem. So, Trader Joe's maple cookies, well, I put them at about 92% as good as actual maple cookies from Canada.

All right, well, I intend to go probably sometime again in, say, March-ish, and I will remember your cookies this time. Well, if you go in March, maybe I'll just meet you up there. Okay, well, you might want to wait until my later trip in the year, because it's still pretty damn cold there in March. I'm in Chicago.

Oh, good point. Yeah, and then, this just blows my mind, Shazam just got valued at above $1 billion. Well, it's interesting, because I've been seeing them a lot more than I used to. They kind of went underground for a long time, and they were just kind of this thing that was always there.

But I went to the movie the other day, and there was, you know, you could Shazam parts of the commercials and get coupons. And I think they're actually doing some smart stuff to try and make themselves relevant again. Well, that's exactly the interesting thing for me, that they are doing a good job with that.

They're certainly made a lot of deals with various entertainment industry-type things to move beyond just the, hey, what's that song, which is what we all use Shazam for for years. They got a recent $30 million investment basically to pivot.

They're getting paid money to figure out what to do next as a business to make themselves relevant, which is, we are totally in the wrong racket, Jason. Well, here's the deal. This isn't a full pivot. This is what this is, is it's just an add-on to the current model. They're still going to be doing the music thing, but they're trying to branch out into other areas, which, you know, is not changing their business model.

That's just, it's finding new markets is what they're doing. The biggest problem I have with them is I can't unlock my phone, get to Shazam fast enough to actually do something if it's on like a TV commercial. Yeah, I always grew up with that too. By the time I realized that I want to do this and I have an app to do it and I find the app on my phone, it's already over.

Yeah, that's the biggest problem. And it's not like you're going to go with your DVR and like go back, then pull up Shazam. There's a flaw in their plan. Now, if they would integrate with like Siri, so I could just press my Siri button and go Shazam, and then it would start going.

That way, it would also be kind of funny and cool. Like all these people going Shazam. That would be funny. They should get on that. See, we just throw out these great ideas. Yeah. And then finally, in super depressing news, because this does need to be reported as well, the doomsday clock by the Bulletin of the Atomics Scientists has been moved forward another two minutes, and we are three minutes away from destruction now.

They list unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals as the main reason to move ahead yet another two minutes. I would argue that climate change is a big part of climate change, and that relates directly to my announcement of what my gig is, which I've been talking about for a long time.

I've started working for Live Earth, which is the Al Gore-run organization that is going to put up a series of concerts all in one day this year, leading up to the climate conference in Paris in December. And there you go. It was announced this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos with Pharrell Williams as our head creative director, and that's what I'm doing for the foreseeable future.

And what is your actual role over there? That's a damn good question. Chief bitcher and moaner? There's a lot of those. There's a lot of those. I'm brought on as part of the creative team. We're still trying to figure out exactly what that is. Basically, I've been the one standing there right now just going, hey, guys, we need to start doing stuff.

So, OK, that sounds fantastic. It should be fun. It's something I do believe in, so I'm kind of looking forward to it. It's a lot more interesting than just another album cycle release, which is what I would have been doing had this not come along. Oh, you definitely believe in bitching about things.

Yeah, and there's a lot to bitch about here. But I will keep the politics to a minimum regardless of this job. Comment of the week. Our comment of the week comes from Jeff Clark on Twitter, who tweeted us and said, what's the current best way to have solid passwords?

Is there a specific app or service I should use? Welcome to the show, Jeff Clark. Apparently, you haven't listened to the previous any of our previous episodes. So I'm assuming that you're a new listener. So welcome. We specifically recommend using one password. That's what we all use.

It's amazing. Set it to give you the longest password, the longest and most complex password you can get for a particular site. Marry it with the mobile apps. So you always have your passwords with you. And that's it. That's all you need. No, you don't have to come up with any kind of particular mental algorithms to come up with, you know, XKCD style passwords.

Just get just drop the money. Get one password. Make them as long as possible. But minimum of like 13 characters. I think it's 13 to 14 random characters. And your life will be complete. That's it. That's really I use it. It's unbelievable.

It took me a long time to come around to doing it. Now I do it. I can't imagine doing anything else. I have never been hacked. And I recommend it to all my friends. Definitely use it. It's it's great. And you don't have to write us a thank you for this for this information because we're giving it freely over a podcast.

But you can go to our iTunes page and give us a five star rating. In the news. In Microsoft news this week, which is fun to say, they announced Windows 10 and nobody actually cared.

That is not true at all. You are such an Apple bitch and you always have been. And you've been converting me slowly but steadily over the 20 some odd years we've known each other. I care. I still love Windows. I still use Windows. I no longer have a Windows laptop, but I still have a Windows desktop that I actually do most of my development on still.

Before you before you begin there. Yes. For the first half of our tenure as grumpy old geeks, all you could do is bitch about Windows 8 and how it was not a creator's platform. I still agree with that. Windows. I still run Windows 7. I think Windows 7 is probably the most stable operating system that's ever been released in the history of humanity.

I think it's one of the best ones. I still use it daily. And I like it. Windows 8 was a travesty. I don't know what happened to Windows 9. I'm sure this is a marketing thing. No. So much better. No, it's not a marketing thing. I can tell you exactly what it's about. It's about a regular expression that they used for Windows 95 back in the day that still is embedded in a ton of Windows code.

So they had to actually skip Windows 9 because of Windows 95. That's pretty funny, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm excited about it. And some of the – there are a lot of PC people out there, Windows people out there. Remember how we used to just say PC or Mac, but it's not quite the same anymore because there's a lot of different things that could be happening.

There are a lot of Windows users out there that are very excited about this. I've scanned some of the reports about it. Some people are saying that this OS is actually extremely good, that it does a very good job of combining the line between the Windows 8 consumer-style stuff versus the Windows 7. We can actually make things stuff.

So we'll see. I mean, I might even upgrade to it, although I am going increasingly Mac all the time. Yeah, this has the impact on me about as much as the latest version of Ubuntu, really. Well, one thing is going to have a big impact on you and me both, and this is a good impact because with Windows 10 comes the death of Internet Explorer, the bane of all web developers' existence.

Yeah, that is pretty much the only good news to ever come out of this. So now we've got a new browser. It's called Project Spartan. That's a great name. That's an awesome name. It's really good. Oh, yeah. Obviously, they're probably going to get rid of Project.

They're just going to call the browser Spartan, one would think, right? Well, I doubt that's even going to be the name. Yeah. Well, it is Microsoft. It's going to have a horrible name such as Internet of Discovery or some bullshit like that. Yeah, it'll be pretty bad. So we'll see what actually is going to come out of it.

But the only browser with built-in note-taking and sharing, that doesn't sound very Spartan-like. No, it doesn't sound very... Microsoft doesn't do Spartan. They just don't. Project Bloat is what it should have been called. But as long as they have a decent modern rendering engine behind it, I don't give a shit.

Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I mean, you know their history. Yeah, I do. But anything's better than Internet Explorer. Anything. True that. True that. Yeah. And speaking of things that Microsoft is trying to get into, you dropped in a link for Project HoloLens off of Wired.

It's Microsoft's holographic goggles. I have zero interest in Oculus Rift, in Google Glass, in wearing anything on my head that makes me look like RoboCop. Yeah. And I have no interest in 3D environments.

I just, I don't care about this stuff. But I have to say that according to most of this article, Microsoft did a really good job. And it's a better experience than Oculus. And this might actually go somewhere. Yep. Still in way beta. So we'll see how it comes out.

But, I mean, as far as, you know, an aesthetic goes, the glasses actually don't look half bad. No, these are the best looking of anything I've seen. For sure. Yeah. We'll see. I just want some contacts. Put this shit in some contacts. I'm good to go. Well, that's the kick-ass way.

When we can actually just do the contacts and we can pull up web browsers in our head. Project Spartan. Who the hell knows? That's when I will get interested. I'm just not interested in rendered 3D environments. I never was, even as a kid. I was bored by the, well, except for the Tron video game.

That was pretty badass. Now, what if you could have 3D exploding kittens? Huh. We. Yeah. Okay. We need to get back to our Kickstarter in the ball segment. Because Exploding Kittens, the board of the card game, who is in the news hand over fist, because they got $1 million in seven hours.

And now they're up to $3.37 million with 27 days to go. Yeah. I mean, that's an awful lot of money to fund the card game. So congratulations, guys. You win. It's clever. I mean, I like the whole, it's very creative. Exploding Kittens, a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.

That's very funny. It's right up my alley. Will I ever buy it or play it? No. I wouldn't go that far. You play Cards Against Humanity. So I think this is probably the same set. Like the same crowd. Probably. We'll see. I mean, it does seem to be, yeah. It looks clever. It looks funny.

We'll see. Who knows? But yeah, for the Kickstarter segment coming back, I think we might have to. TLC went from chasing waterfalls to chasing dollars on Kickstarter to fund their final album. Yeah, TLC, if you're old like us, you remember them.

Left Eye Lopez, one of the members, tragically passed away a while ago. She was the fun one that did crazy ass shit like torture her husband's house. Their music wasn't bad. I mean, you know, for the area that they came out in in the 90s when I was like totally into rave music and all that sort of stuff, it wasn't what I listened to.

But I liked it. I liked their songs. They disappeared for obviously a long time. They've gone bankrupt multiple times and they don't have a record deal anymore. They have a distribution deal, but not an actual record deal anymore. So they went to Kickstarter to do their final album, which is the best way to get publicity.

You don't just say, I'm going to do another album. But I guarantee you, since this did well, this will not be the final album. No way, no day. No way, no day. So that's a complete load of shit. But, you know, get on them. I'm fine with it. That is the kind of use for Kickstarter that I don't mind.

It's when a completely signed and funded and incredibly popular band already goes to Kickstarter to fund their project. Okay. That's when I have a problem. I need a graph or I need like a chart of all the rules that you have for who can and can't go on Kickstarter sometimes.

Hey, you know, it's not a black and white world, Jason. Shades of gray. 50 of them even. So I found an article speaking of people who earn lots of money. The highest YouTube earner of 2014 made nearly $5 million just by opening Disney toy packages.

Uh, yeah, I've been aware of this YouTube channel for a while. Um, why I have a lot of friends that have kids of a certain age and, you know, and they know what I do for a living. And we talk about these things. And some, uh, friend of mine showed me this and I was like, I don't get it.

And, and he was like, I don't really either, but everybody, you know, the kids find this and they look at the toys and they figure out which ones they want, or they're just fascinated by it. So the, the page views or the video views just go through the roof. It's, it's ridiculous. I mean, I can't believe this person's making $5 million.

Well, yeah, we're looking at, uh, estimated annual earnings of $4.8 million with, uh, total subscribers, 3.2 million month, monthly views of 379 million. And the videos are just, uh, opening boxes and nobody knows who it is.

Yeah. That's the crazy part. It's probably wise that he or she is staying anonymous because God damn, I'm, I'm angry. Yeah. I'm not angry. I mean, Hey, if you can, if you can hack the system that way, go for it, find a, find a niche and go and run with it.

You know what we're going to eventually find out is that he or she hasn't paid taxes. Well, that's not my problem. Okay. Not my problem. Uh, Google came out with some news this week that they're going to make it easier to buy tickets for live events just from the search results.

When you're searching on Google, I haven't been able to recreate this yet. I'm trying and I haven't seen it in the wild yet. Yeah. I looked at it as well and I haven't seen it. Um, so this might be a press release that came out with some sort of like, Hey, we've got this going on, but we haven't plugged it into the main system yet, or it's going to be a rollout or it's going to be something.

Um, well, it comes from the Google webmaster central blog. Yeah. So, so I, I haven't seen it. Um, cool. I mean, I, that's fine. That doesn't bother me at all. No, I think it's great. I would love to have this cause it's sometimes it's just like, okay. I mean, it would definitely up the impulse by quotient, you know, and they're, most certainly and they're, they're partnering with, you know, most of the major ticket players at this point.

Yeah. Ticket fly ticket master, a X S. Um, I'm sure that the negotiations for that took a year minimum. Um, but I'm glad it's got, yeah, it's just makes things easier. That's the whole point of the internet, right? Sometimes. Yes. No, I just thought this was a cool one. So another cool one was we talk about teenagers and social media a lot and we just don't get it.

So there was an article on medium, actually two of them, uh, teenagers view on social media written by an actual teen and a follow-up what teens really think about YouTube, Google plus Reddit and other social media. Both of these articles I thought were great. They really kind of, you know, pointed out the, the, some of the things that we knew they hate Facebook, but they have to be on it.

They don't understand Twitter. Well, I think everybody feels that way about Facebook now. Oh yeah. To be fair. That's not just teens. We all hate it, but we have to be on it. Oh, have to is kind of a stretch, but it's, it's, it is what it is, but it was interesting to read like the, what messaging apps they like, what they don't, there was, there was one in there I'd never even heard of.

I think it was called plague or something. I've never even heard of that one. Yeah. I've never heard of that either. I've never, I have no idea what it is, which is I'm feeling old. Hey, but they do talk about LO and said, yeah, everybody was gone by the time we got there. So fuck it. Um, swarm.

They don't understand. Yeah. Cause they're like, why, why do we need another app when I can just geo tag my photos and Instagram and boom, I'm done. You know, what's the point? The great one that we really, I was really glad to see my space. I'm just going to read what he wrote at this point.

They just need to get rid of the name and rebrand. No matter how amazing of a site they build, my space will always be the butt of a joke. I would just look for a new brand that matches the revitalized direction of the company. First. Yes. That's very, very funny and very true. It's very true. And this gets 19.

I was about to say as a teenager, did you understand the concept of rebranding back in the day? Like everybody is so accelerated now. It's unbelievable. No, it's ridiculous. We're, we're, we're, we are dinosaurs. We are utter fucking dinosaurs.

When I was in my teen, I was trying to get somebody to buy me booze so I could go to a concert. I wasn't talking about the revitalized directions of branding. I was running away from cops in, in, in parking garages just because I wanted to do some slappies, you know? What a world.

Yeah. What a world. It really has changed. Well, good on you, kid. You're whoever, whatever that teenager was, he's spot on with a lot of this stuff. And no, I hadn't heard of, uh, of, uh, plague either. That's a, sounds like it's a kind of a local messaging thing for small, tiny networks. Very similar to, uh, I can't remember the name of that app that I tried out a while ago, which was just a bunch of people over at a local community college, making really bad racist jokes.

Yik yak. Bingo. Sounds like it's an updated yik yak. Okay. This one doesn't really have a lot to do with anything, but I threw it in because it's fun. Um, this is a, an artist who took the terms and conditions of the Apple Eula and basically, uh, redacted a lot of it and turned it into a poem with, with, you know, it's a printed book with little Mylar sheets with redactions over it that you can just make a really pretty little poem out of.

Yeah. It's very clever, very creative, very funny. Yeah. That's all there is to it. Link, link for that one will be in the show notes. I recommend checking it out because it's cute. I hope she is selling it. Yeah. These are for sale and things that cost a lot of money. Elon Musk wants to spend $10 billion building the internet and space.

Okay. Go for it, man. That's all I can say. Sure. Hey, you got enough money, but how about you sort out a couple of other, we could use a lot more before this. I'm just saying, I mean, it's your, it's, it's his money. He can do what he wants with it. And he has a space company. So it, for him, this makes sense.

What I don't understand is there, they found a place to build, or they're working on a place to build the Hyperloop track. They're building a five mile test track for the Hyperloop. See that I want. I don't know. Space internet sounds pretty fucking good to me. You got to get up into space first. Well, he does. He's got, he owns SpaceX, you know, it's really.

Well, dial that in and then do the internet. Now, this one I thought would be up your alley. The Uber CEO is over in Europe now, and he seems to have finally figured out that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Right. So he's, he was over at the DLD conference in, in Munich and talking to a lot of Europe, Europe's leaders saying, look, guys, let's not fight. What we're doing, what we're going to do is going to create a lot more jobs. And it's like, oh, well, hey, if you put it that way, instead of saying, you're just going to come in and strong arm us out and maybe we can talk more, you know, if they, why didn't they start with that from the get go?

Because they're arrogant pricks. That's why. Okay. Because they said we're worth billions of dollars. We can do what we want. We can do no wrong and fuck you. That, that was their approach and it didn't work. So good. Hey, I, I'm fine with Uber.

Uber, as long as Uber plays the game, like everybody else has to, they're going to play the game. Good enough. Speaking of Uber personal story. I opted out of all their communications and I got an unsolicited text this week telling me that the sandwich that I ordered from Uber fresh once two months ago is available.

Now, did that come from Uber? Did it come from the shop that came from Uber? Yeah. Well, yeah. So there you go. Fix that crap. Were you hungry? Did you get another sandwich? I was very tempted because I love that damn sandwich. See, I don't know. But, uh, but no, I, I went out of my way to make sure that I opted out of all those kinds of communications that they shouldn't be able to text me, et cetera, et cetera.

So I was a little surprised to get that. As I wasn't surprised because it's Uber. Now my last article for the day is comes from the guardian and it, it, and it's a question article. Yeah. Yeah. But I love the author's name, Van Badham.

Yeah. And it's a very, uh, sultry photo of her. Sort of. Um, she looks like, you know, a naughty secretary. Yeah. Ex goth. Yeah. Now the title of the article is, are you drinking because you're working long hours or are you working long hours to justify drinking?

I don't have to do anything to justify drinking. Oh, no shit, Sherlock. So it's interesting. It's a Finnish, uh, research article that they, they start with. And by the end of it, they basically say, we don't know and don't really have any kind of statistical things to back anything up.

So if you do see this and want to send it to me on Facebook, please don't, I've seen it and it says nothing. Yeah. This is a, there's, there's no point to this article. There's no real statistics. There's no nothing. I was just getting it a lot on Facebook. So I wanted to pass it along and say, look, we've seen it.

We understand. You think we're a bunch of luscious. Fine. The time is now to be realistic that a broader context of alcoholism exists. Thanks for that. Security. Ah, drones.

Drones. First, they've just been annoying people on Venice beach. Now they're being used to commit major crimes. A meth laden drone crashed near the U S Mexico border. This should not be shocking to anyone because that makes total sense. Why dig a tunnel underneath the border when you can buy a drone and fly the shit over.

Now, the thing is, obviously they did not read the instruction manual on the drone because the drone can hold up to almost five pounds of camera equipment. And they put six pounds of math on it. Well, you know, they just got to dial in the details. Dial. But somebody posted on Twitter something that I thought was hilarious.

He's like, I can't wait for the world when we watch a drone chase, like with a drug drone being chased by a cop drone from a news drone. You know, that'll happen at some point in the future. We'll have news drones following cop drones chase doing high speed chases with, you know, criminal drones.

And it'll be just like, you know, pod racing. Yeah, it will be. It's it's I mean, this is a brave new world. We're heading into these these the drone stuff is going to be a big deal this year. We're going to have a lot of stories about drones. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see more powerful drones that have T-shirt cannons on them, because that's what I figured out would be the best way to take down a drone.

You just put a you put a net in a T-shirt cannon and boom. There you go. Got it. That's actually a really good idea. Again, we just spawned these. Let's kickstarter that one. I actually have some drone friends that might be able to help with that one. I actually have quite a few now these days as well.

It's funny how my Facebook feed is just filled up with nothing but drone footage, which the first time is really interesting. But just like, you know, everybody's photos of sunsets, you start to go, oh, my God. OK, enough. Illinois says rule breaking students must give teachers their Facebook passwords.

I actually saw this on the news last night. This is getting some some pretty good press. Well, it should because it's bullshit. It is bullshit. It's a massive invasion of privacy. And Facebook and schools do not, you know, separation of social media and state. Yeah, no.

Yeah. We should call it this week an overreach of government. Totally. That's ridiculous. But, you know, it's Illinois. No offense, Jason. No, no, no. We're fucking fast backwards. Look, half of our half of our governors are in prison. Well, actually, more than half. If you if you end up being governor of Illinois, you just might as well, you know, get your orange suit out and do your acceptance speech in your prison outfit because that's where you're going at some point.

So Verizon, have you heard about this hack? I have. Yes. Verizon Fios app vulnerability exposes five million customers email addresses. Now, this is an interesting story because this is Verizon in how to do it right. They got notified by security researchers that their API in their app was was basically vulnerable to sending it different types of requests and getting back other people's

info and even checking what's in their inbox and sending mail as them. So this was a big API issue. Forty 48 hours from report to patch fixed it. Very quick. Good job. Very quick. Yeah. And I just wanted to point out that this was an API patch, you know, not a real huge OS level fix like we talked about before with Google and Microsoft with their O days and how we how we said three months might not be enough for an OS level fix.

So I just wanted to make sure that we were we're still cool on that. Yeah. We're cool on that. Cool. Now, this is another one that really kind of kind of irked me this week. This comes from the New York Times. NSA breached North Korean networks before Sony attack. Officials say unnamed sources within the NSA have said that we've been there for a while.

We've been watching some that that's how we knew that they were behind it. Still no proof. No, nothing. Everybody. They're shaping the story to fit the conclusion that it was North Korea. Right. I don't know. I'm still not buying it. Yeah, me either. I look, I think the NSA has breached almost every country's network.

This is not surprising, but I don't think that North Korea had anything to do with the Sony attack. Still don't. Keeping on with that theme in their Spiegel. There's an article called the digital arms race. NSA preps America for future battle, which goes right back into this saying with with a lot of evidence from the Snowden docs talking about a lot of what we've done in the past by breaching all these networks.

We are starting to get to the point where these articles are not about what the Snowden releases were originally intended to do, which was talk about the NSA spying on Americans. Basically, what this article does is tell the world exactly what the NSA is doing, where it doesn't really have very much to do with spying on us.

This is where it's starting to get to the point where it's like, OK, you guys should stop now because you're you're crossing the line. Right. But since the documents are in the wild, they're not going to cross the line because they've got their own agendas. And it's this is where it's really starting to put our playbook out there for what we've done.

And now they can they can, you know, come back at us for it. It's it's as we said before, slippery slope. But I don't know. I did this reading this article made me feel extremely uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, I scanned it. Look, I have it does make me uncomfortable.

I also see this as let's let's change the story from what the NSA did to our own people to what they're doing elsewhere, which, you know, a lot of us will go rah, rah, rah. Yay. Good. The NSA is doing this. I don't know. This is I really don't know how I feel about this, because to some degree, I want our government to be out there and and looking at other places and seeing what's going on.

That's that's their job. That's what I that's what I want them to be doing. I don't like the way they're going about it. I don't like a lot of the things that I'm hearing. And the spin that they use on this article is that the NSA is exploiting holes in these systems and in some cases creating these holes in the systems, which make us less secure in the long run.

Yes, that's that's the spin. And that is actually quite true. I mean, that is that's undeniable. The fact that they are, you know, cataloging these security vulnerabilities using them. And in some cases, when they get caught, the malware that's there shows other people how to use them to come back at us.

So instead of patching the holes where these things exist, it's just, you know, it's offense versus defense. And it's it's a really gray, murky area. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Obama calls for a 30 day breach notification policy policy for hacked companies. OK, never going to happen.

Nope, not going to happen. Not going to happen too much politics going on with that one. And the next one up is Obama's proposed hacking law could unwittingly make you a criminal. This is this is 100 percent true. And this is a problem with a lot of the current laws that we have on the books for hacking because they're they're extraordinarily vague.

Yeah, that's the problem. That's because I wonder. I mean, they don't really seem to have some people that are too bad. This is this is what happens when you have a highly knowledgeable people that are way down on the chain of how these things get drafted.

Yeah, they take a little bit of their information and then lawyers just cream it to nothing. Hopefully this will not make it past anybody and will fix some of the old laws. But the current hacking laws are just really, really bad. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is horrible.

It's bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, you know, at the end of the day, this is just government. It's this is the way we're going to move forward. We're not going to have a perfectly drafted law ever if we can fix some of the things that are in the old one. And this will just keep moving forward. So at least it's progress.

At least Obama is his administration tried to do something rather than just let the mess that currently exists keep going. Yeah, it's just the problem is that his new mess is going to be worse than the old mess. Yeah, but I don't think this will make it all the way through. This is just proposed, so it's going to get kicked around a lot. Let's keep an eye on it. The thing that they really need to focus on is we need to have loopholes for research.

There must be a way to research computers without becoming a felon. It's simple as that. In not so shocking news, the CIA review board clears the spy agency of wrongdoing in the Senate hack. This comes as absolutely no surprise to anybody, I'm sure. But yes, the CIA, after getting busted, going through some of the Senate's computers, basically before the torture report came out, and they wanted to go see what was going on, and they're saying, oh no, it was a misunderstanding.

Our guys are okay. Nobody did anything wrong. Let's move on. Yeah. Yes. So not surprised at that one. No. And this is something that Obama should be looking at. Take a look at that. No, he's probably the one that said, no, don't look at that, please.

Probably, yeah. And in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, cyber jihadists have been wreaking havoc on French websites. About 19,000 have been attacked so far. This is the world that we live in now. It's not just a bomb. It's a bunch of other things as well.

It's not just a shooting. It's all this other stuff. There's going to be a lot more of this. You know, I was happy to see that Anonymous leapt in and basically declared war against ISIS and terrorists online. Unfortunately, they haven't been terribly effective, but I'm all about Team Anonymous right now.

You know, the government's kind of moved a bit slow on this stuff. And sure, we don't know who Anonymous is, hence the name. But they basically leapt in immediately and said, hey, we are going to start taking down terrorists online everywhere that we can find them. We are waging war. And I'm down with that.

Hopefully, they'll be a little bit better than they were with everything else they've done recently because they've been kind of toothless. You know, they can make a good video and they can put up a good press release, but I haven't seen much action on their part lately. Yeah. Right now, Anonymous seems to be very good PR people and not the best hackers in the world.

Maybe they need to up their ranks a little bit. Oh, I think most of them have been caught is the problem. Yeah, that's a big part of the problem. Yeah, they're all working in a basement at the CIA and NSA right now trying to hack Senate. At the library.

So I finished a new book by the author Ian Trigellis, who wrote the Milkweed Triptych, which I talked about a little while back ago, which was awesome. You know, the super-powered Nazis versus the English-controlled demons. And it was a great story.

I really, really enjoyed it. So I was thrilled when he put out something new. This is called Something More Than Night. And rather than the Nazi kind of thing that he did last time, this one's about heaven, bored angels, and an attempt to basically describe the realm of heaven in physics.

It was really pretty good. The only problem I had with it is most of it was written in kind of a, one of the particular angels had adopted kind of a human persona that basically was Raymond Chandler, 1950s detective style. So, so much of the book was written in that voice, and I don't like that voice.

So I had a hard time getting over that, but I really enjoyed the story overall. And if you don't have any problems with the potboiler, 50s-style detective stories, you'll probably really enjoy this. Interesting. Okay. I might have to check it out. He's a good writer. I'm really interested to see what he does next.

So I definitely think I've found a new author that I really like. Well, fortunately, I have too. Mr. Brandon Sanderson. We talked about his first book, Before Steelheart. Yep. Love that. Which was, yeah, it was a really cool story. Nice way to start a new universe. And Firefight, The Reckoners, book two is out.

And we talked about getting it a couple weeks ago, and I finally sat down with it. I read it in a day. Loved it. Start to finish. I'm working my way through it right now, so I don't want you to give me any spoilers. No spoilers. I'm probably about halfway through. Like I said, I love Steelheart, and I'm enjoying this one as well.

What I will say, though, is going from Ian Tregellis' book to Brandon Sanderson's book, literally, I finished, like, at 11.30 p.m. and then switched over to the other one immediately. Brandon Sanderson is not a great writer.

His English, his use of the language, his construction of sentences are very, very simplistic, especially compared to Tregellis. But it's a great story. It is. Yeah, it's a great story. And I thought this one had a much better use of humor than the last one.

I found myself laughing a lot during this book. Yeah, yeah. It is. It's quite funny so far. And, yeah, I'm totally wrapped up in it. So I'm halfway through, and I'll probably finish it within the next day or two. So it's good. And I do remember hearing that there was some, it had been, Steelheart had been optioned for a movie.

I think that would be fantastic. Oh, that would be great. Yeah. And, yeah, I think this is a perfect follow-up. And, yes, his writing is a little bit more simplistic, but fortunately, so am I. So we also mentioned before Good Omens, the BBC did a radio dramatization of it, and it was out for free.

And, of course, I'm not having the time to sit down and go through episode after episode after episode. I was waiting for them to put it up on Audible so I could just buy it. So I did listen to it yesterday. It's pretty short. It's only like four and a half, five hours, about close to five hours, and the last 20 minutes is outtakes, which is fantastic.

But it was a great dramatization. I don't know if I liked it as much as reading the book, though, because I've read the book so many times, it felt like there were key points that were missing that would have been really hard to do in a dramatization. Yeah, well, that's that's my theory of why I ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent of the time prefer the book over any other version of a story.

You just get that that depth of detail that you can't get into any kind of live action or real time thing. Yeah. I mean, the difference is this isn't like a reading of the book. This is it's a dramatization. So it's a it's a radio play, which is super entertaining. And they did a really good job with it.

But yeah, if you haven't read the book, I could not recommend this before reading the book. You have to read the book first. Yeah. And the book is one of the best ever written. I mean, I feel the same way. You know, the Hitchhiker's Guide started as radio dramatizations, not a book. And I went back and listened to it after I, you know, I discovered it through the books and then found out about the history behind it and went back and listened to all the history or the Hitchhiker's Guide radio stuff.

And it was fine. But the book is a thousand times better. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hands down. No contest. Software, apps and gadgets. An old favorite has been updated this week.

Audio Hijack 3 has finally, finally arrived. It's an app from Rogue Amoeba who've been around for ages. And it's just an easy way for you to use your Mac to get audio from one place to another or save something that's streaming. It's one of my go-tos.

I always use it. It's an extremely useful app. I have not gotten the third Audio Hijack 3 yet. But yeah, it's a great app. I use it all the time. Yeah, I got the new version. It's got this crazy new drag and drop interface where you can just build an audio chain visually.

Yeah. And it imports all your old stuff from Audio Hijack 2. So if you own Audio Hijack 2, it's a $25 upgrade. So I've already got it. I've been playing around with it. But yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, it looks pretty. It's way prettier. It was well overdue for an upgrade.

Now, you're a Pro Tools user, right? Back in the day when I was doing all the music that you hear in this podcast as well as other places. Yeah, I learned Pro Tools very, you know, I spent a lot of time using it. I've done a lot of recording with it. I even have somewhere in a box a Pro Tools keyboard, specific keyboard that is all nicely colored so you know where all your quickies are for everything.

Yeah, Pro Tools. It's your standard. Well, they're finally releasing a free version. Yeah. Well, that's not surprising. It's going to be... Pro Tools is intense. The real version of Pro Tools requires an insane amount of very fast hardware and you use gazillions of plugins.

It's very, very complicated. But I'm sure Pro Tools felt that they were missing out a little bit on the GarageBand market. And I'm sure this will be a very nice, very free version of their software to get people hooked on it. So when they get their record deal, they will then go ahead and invest in a full-on Pro Tools suite.

Yeah, I thought it was very smart because there is no way to just, you know, dip your toe into Pro Tools. You just got to go buy it, you know? Exactly, exactly. And with the way people are now, with everybody just being, you know, laptop musicians, this was a no-brainer for them. Get them hooked on the interface. Let them see how powerful Pro Tools can be.

Get them used to using it instead of GarageBand because going from GarageBand to Pro Tools is like going from Legos to actually building, you know, becoming an architect. It's that different, so. Oh, I'm sure, yeah. Because I was getting ready to buy a copy of Logic because I need something a little more powerful than what I'm using now.

Yeah. And then this came out, so I'm thinking, maybe I'll wait, see if I can use this one before dropping like 220 bucks on Logic. Yeah. Pro Tools has always done a very good job, so I'm sure that this piece of software is going to be great. I mean, as soon as it's available, I'm going to download it and check it out because I don't have Pro Tools on my laptop anymore.

Yeah, I actually don't have a full install of Pro Tools anymore anymore because I wasn't going to pay to upgrade the last time it came around because I figured I'm never going to use it. But I will definitely use this free app. Now, Kelly Gumont, who I was on the Internet Outrage Machine with a while back and also used to write for Metblogs, posted an article which was a review about the Mountie, which is a little gadget that you use to attach your iPhone to the side of your MacBook.

This looks genius. It looks amazing. I cannot wait to get one. Yeah. I'm totally getting one. In fact, bookmark. No, it's literally just a clip that is balanced and made to put, you can get up to a full-size iPad on it.

She tried it with an iPad Air, which I don't think I'll be doing, but just to have your phone clipped next to your laptop so you don't have to be looking at it, like looking for it or losing it. Or you can get up every couple seconds to see if some random, you know, you got pinged on some random app.

Yeah. No, it's great. It's genius and it keeps it right at eye level and it's 25 bucks. That is a no-brainer. I'm getting one. That's a no-brainer for me as well. I'm totally going to get this. Good find. Thank you. Yeah, we'll be reviewing it in an upcoming episode when it actually shows up.

Media Candy. Mythbusters is back on the air. And it is bizarre. It's different. They definitely rebooted the entire show. Everything is different. They're using different cameras.

They're using different graphic imagery. They're using different intros. They're using different approaches. It's 100% new show. Completely new show. They killed the B-team, which is fine by me. I miss them. I like them a lot. You just miss Carrie. No, I liked all three of them.

I think they really worked well. And I was kind of hoping that the network would offer the three of them a show together. But unfortunately, that was not the way of things. And everybody is scattered to the winds. Yeah, they're all gone. They're all doing their own things now. Which is definitely sad. Because they had chemistry together, the three of them.

They really... I enjoyed the B-team a lot. And that is the one thing I'm sad about. But otherwise, the show desperately needed a reboot. And I'm glad it got one. And I've enjoyed it so far. I don't like the fact that it's all TV and movie, quote-unquote, myths. Because that's just...

Those aren't myths. Those are fictions. I agree with you about that completely. You can't go... I really enjoyed the Raiders of the Lost Ark episode. I'm not going to lie about that. But they are relying on that. But they've been running for how long now? And the show is definitely running out of steam.

So my impression of this and what I've heard is this is going to be the last season. But we'll see. Because they are just doing movies and TV for almost every episode this year. It's so sad. I wish they would, like, actually flip it around and go for a Penn & Teller bullshit kind of thing.

And actually try and do something that's a little more... That has more meat on it, you know? To hell with that. Let's just get Penn & Teller back doing bullshit again. Because that show was fucking great. It was. You know what? They're running into the same problem. They just ran out of shit to do. Yeah. You ran out of shit to do. You only last so long.

That's why, you know, the UK model for TV shows is like two to three years is a long run. We don't do... They don't do 10-year, 12-year runs except for their crappy soap operas. But if you want some... If you're a Mythbuster fan, as Jason and I both are, I would suggest you go listen to Still Untitled, the Adam Savage podcast on a particular episode.

I think the first one that came out this year, it's titled The Mythbusters Reboot. And he goes into really in-depth details about how they decided to deconstruct the program and basically redo it completely differently. He talks a lot about the reasons why they did what they did.

And it's pretty interesting. Yeah, it's definitely an interesting listen. I would recommend listening to it after you watch at least one episode, though. Yeah, definitely. Or at least just watch the first episode, the Simpsons one, because there are spoilers in that one. And, you know, I don't know. I like the fact that they're spending more time on showing the builds, but I'm also, you know, I'm cynical and I realize they were shooting all that stuff anyways, and they realize that they were spending too much money.

And why blow all this? Because we're doing it, so let's build it around and make it cheaper by spending more time showing all this, us building all this stuff. But I'm fascinated by that, but I have a feeling it might wear a little thin as the season goes on. Oh, yeah, definitely.

And I was going to say, just those intro credits, I think, are kind of fucking cheesy. They're cheesy. They're really cheesy. But, you know, it's so are Adam and Jamie. I mean, it's a fit. It fits who they are. Like, they're never going to be Penn and Teller.

They couldn't do a bullshit because they aren't those guys. Well, see, I think that's what the problem is with the credits. The credits make it look super scientific-y and serious. And then Adam comes on, and he's just goofy. You know, he's just fucking goofy. Yeah. I don't know.

Anyway, I still think it's worth watching. I'm going to give it this season, and we'll see what happens. Because I was actually done after last season. I was done. And once they said they were going to reboot it, I'm like, okay, I'll give it another shot. And I think that's why they did that, because everybody was done.

Yeah, I agree. It was, you know, it was their top show for ages. And over the years, people just dropped off, and it got too formulaic, and it got too boring. And we knew what was going to happen every time. And yeah, so I'm glad they rebooted it. So far, I'm okay with it. I like the two episodes I've seen. In other TV news, Fox is in talks for an X-Files miniseries.

You first or me first? Let me go first here, because there's something about this that none of the news outlets are covering. That's the fact that this entire thing came out of a Nerdist podcast with Jillian Anderson, where they just said, fuck it. Let's just start a new hashtag and get everybody talking about it.

Then maybe the people at Fox will pick it up, and we can get some steam out of it. And you don't see that anywhere in any of the news. So it's like, I don't know how much of this is manufactured, how much of it's real, or if Nerdist actually did the job and got Fox talking about it to get the ball rolling.

Well, I'm sure that Fox is actually potentially talking about it. Chris Cooper, I believe, was he the creator of the X-Files? Is that the right name? I don't know. I don't have it in front of me. He has never stopped talking about it, about revisiting X-Files.

The problem I have with it is every time they try to revisit the X-Files, they fuck it up. I was such a huge X-Files fan. Then they screwed up the series by getting rid of, you know, Duchovny leaving and then Anderson leaving and then replacing him with new characters, and that got horrible.

The movies were crap. They were just so bad. You've kind of destroyed the franchise. I don't know if I even want this unless they're really going to go back and, like, we're going to pretend the movies didn't even exist, and we're going to pick up with Mulder and Scully when they left the original series and do a miniseries about that.

All right. I'm all in. Otherwise, you've already destroyed this franchise for me, guys. Yeah. It's Chris Carter, not Chris Cooper. Chris Carter. But they can write their way out of anything. You know, I would like to just see them back in the saddle. Yeah. And if you look at what they did with 24 with the latest miniseries, I thought they did a great job with that.

They brought that back, and that was a really fun little miniseries. And if they could do the same thing, compress it down, make it action-packed, and somehow bring back the lone gunman, even though they're theoretically dead. But, you know, those guys, you just resurrect them.

Well, the nice part about doing a miniseries is they may not necessarily have to follow the canon of what's existed and everything that they've done so far. But the problem is, you know, unless they're going to do the big story, the main story, the alien thing with Mulder's sister and Gillian Anderson and how her character ended up getting potentially impregnated by something.

But we don't know what. I want a wrap-up of that, which they just botched thousands of times. Yeah, I think that's the only way that that's really going to work, I think, if they ever want to make another miniseries. But, yeah, they can't go back to the big screen because they have totally taken that.

They've gone back to the well too many times there and screwed it. They peed in the well. Yes, they did. Now, this is a new show that I am very reluctant to talk about, but it was so ridiculous that, I mean, this really kind of smells like almost a Black Mirror event.

Yeah. This is all you, dude. I'm not even going to talk about this. I can't believe you found it. Well, just say what it is. It's called Sex Box is the name of the show. And it's a British TV series that they're bringing over to WeTV, where people actually have sex in a box on a stage in front of people.

You can't see them having the sex, but then they come out and they talk to a panelist of psychologists and other people that I don't actually recognize about their relationships. And I watched the trailer a minute ago while you were getting some tea, and I don't know what the hell people are thinking anymore.

They better be using Justin Timberlake's dick in a box as the soundtrack. That's all I got to say. This is dumb. This is like, this is worse. This is like North America, or well, I guess Europe originally, trying to make a Japanese game show. Let's leave this stuff with the Japanese.

In slightly related news that for some reason is all over the internet, Britain's beloved Page 3 was threatened to stop putting their topless chicks in the newspaper. But apparently that's been rescinded. So Britain will continue to enjoy the topless women in their newspaper every morning.

Free the nipple. Free the nipple. And stop making crappy TV shows. Can we see Mulder and Scully fuck in a box? That I wouldn't mind seeing. Just saying. Closing shout outs! I want to give a shout out to friends of the show, Suzanne and Rob, who are starting up a new internet radio podcast thing.

I don't really know what it is. Premiere show is coming up this Wednesday on Blog Talk Radio, whatever that is. So, we'll have a link in the show notes. They are going to be talking about dating. Our friend Suzanne runs a site called the Fantasy Dating Game.

And Rob is a smooth motherfucker. So, it should be really interesting. For those of you that are single, you might want to give it a listen. They're really funny and good people. Very cool. Very cool. And I also just will give a quick shout out to LiveEarth, Road to Paris, LiveEarth.org, which is the new organization I'm working with.

We are attempting to collect a billion signatures to deliver to Paris to demand climate action from our world leaders. We're the organization. And so far, also paying the bills. There you go. And you get to bitch and not write any code. I ended up getting pressed into doing coding.

I didn't think I was going to have to, but I ended up having to because I could. And nobody else in the room did. Okay. So, I'm not as jealous as I once was then, if you still have to code. We do have a new Does It Have Legs coming out, hopefully, this evening. Finally, we got back together and we did Hackers.

Finally. Angelina Jolie's breasts will always have legs, which is a very weird image by some crazy artist. Yeah, that really just is. It's burned into my head now. Thank you very much. Hey, just here to help. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show.

If you'd like to help keep the lights on, you can donate on our website at grumpyoldgeeks.com. A donation of $10 or more will get you a copy of our official soundtrack provided by the band Among Us, who you can also find on iTunes and Spotify. On social media, you can find us at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks or twitter.com slash gogpodcast.

We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few stars or words. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 93.

Sex box! Bob's here, uncle. Tonight we drink! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha! Ha-ha!

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