Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which we are curmudgeonly, we are ethical philosophers, and:

00:02:00 Are developers learning libraries and not learning the actual programmnig languages they’ve chosen? And is this a problem? Are JavaScript hackers just using jQuery or PHP hackers just using Laravel when they shouldn’t? Or is this greybeards complaining about the kids today?

00:16:47 Review: the Blue Yeti USB microphone. Almost by coincidence, the whole Bad Voltage team have purchased the Yeti USB mic from Blue Microphones, and so we all review it together

00:27:20 The rise of self-driving cars brings up the question of algorithmic morality; how should the car be programmed in the event of an unavoidable accident? Protect the driver at all costs; reduce loss of life overall even if the owner gets the short end of that stick; what? This is a big decision that needs to be made: how do we think this should be handled?

00:39:50 THe UK government have recently started making more noises about banning encryption from being used by ordinary people, to prevent terrorists from being able to communicate without security services reading it. It’s the Crypto Wars and the Clipper chip, all over again. Meanwhile, Apple have made a big point of how they work hard to protect their customers’ privacy by ensuring that iMessages are end-to-end encrypted and so forth. Clearly, these proposals are in opposition. The question is this: if Apple declared that these government proposals were incompatible with their customers’ privacy and so threatened to pull out of the UK market… who would blink first? And would Apple do this? And is it OK that they might have this level of power?

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