Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which our denials fall on deaf ears, nobody is gallivanting around the world, and:

[00:02:05] News: 50 Cent lets people buy 2014 album with bitcoin, forgets about it, goes bankrupt, then remembers the bitcoin account and finds it’s now worth eight million dollars … Fractal Audio release the actually-more-interesting-than-you’d-think Axe FX III guitar amp modeller … Nintendo release Labo, a bunch of cardboard peripherals for a Switch, possibly enabling a whole new community of creators and possibly just enabling people who want to become cardboard Liberace … elementary OS change how they’re handling upgrades for paid apps you didn’t pay for, in a new approach as a business model, leading to lots of conversation about money in the world of open source, and what the best direction is … Intel release Vaunt, a pair of glasses which are smart but don’t look like they are, in accordance with the prophecy … and the EU loosely word proposed law so that anyone who hosts files might have to implement Content ID, causing sighs and/or panic across the tech industry …

[00:41:38] Building computers, not buying laptops: despite the world largely moving to buying prebuilt laptops, it’s still possible to build your own desktop machine, and it’s actually rather fun, according to us. Here’s the story of a venture into this field for the first time in fifteen years!

[01:00:45] Deepfakes: software gets released which allows replacing one person’s face in a video with someone else’s. While this has been possible for years if you’re Industrial Light and Magic, now it’s also possible if you’ve got a high-end nVidia card and a few days to let your Windows machine chug away at the problem. Of course, the internet seems to have taken this amazing technology and used it for pornography (and the r/deepfakes subreddit was banned in between us recording the show and releasing it!). What’s the deal with this sort of tech? Is it going to undermine our faith in video footage generally? Were we wrong to have that faith anyway?

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

Discuss in the community at http://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×26-shining-emerald-city/11478