Bad Voltage

Stuart Langridge and Jeremy Garcia present an abbreviated Bad Voltage, in the lead up to Bad Voltage Live at SCaLE in Pasadena, California on March 8th! With some thoughts on what makes a good conference, some confusion as to what the hell Essential are doing releasing a paid-for email app, and a slightly different take on Apple’s Facetime bug where at least one of us thinks that maybe it’s been blown a little out of proportion.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×47-get-oval-shortbread/12042

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we look forward for the year and describe what we think will happen in tech in 2019! Our predictions are:

Jono:

These companies will IPO: Uber (the largest IPO ever), Peloton, Lyft, Slack, Cloudflare

Netflix will start selling films/programmes for a one-off cost, not part of your Netflix subscription, a la, Amazon Prime, or…

Netflix will launch a streaming gaming service

Jim Whitehurst will be announced as IBM CEO

Zuckerberg will no longer be Facebook CEO (half a point of whining for this), and Sheryl Sandberg will be CEO

Facebook Spaces will continue to be a thing nobody cares about

Stuart:

A CEO will be fired for a data breach

The world finally embraces USB-C

The first high-profile deepfake video (not porn; politics or celebrity somehow) will happen and mislead people

The world will not care at all about folding phones

Jeremy:

The US will pass at least one major nationwide piece of privacy legislation (akin to the GDPR or similar)

The US goes into a recession (by someone’s definition, for example two consecutive quarters of decline, or the NBER’s definition)

Foldable phones will outsell true 5G phones, despite the latter getting much more hype

Sheryl Sanderg steps down from Facebook to become the CEO of Disney

The PS5 will not ship in 2019

Now it’s your turn to get involved! What we want you to do is go to community.badvoltage.org and tell us which one of our predictions is most likely to happen, which one is least likely to happen, and one of your own!

And in a real prediction of something that will happen in 2019, we bring our fantastic live show back to SCaLE in Pasadena, California on March 8th 2019! Keep listening for more details, but if you haven’t yet got your tickets for SCaLE, we’ve got a discount code to give you so that you can see Bad Voltage Live and all the rest of SCaLE as well. See you there! Go to badvoltage.org/live for more details and to see the trailer!

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×46-a-giant-loser/12022

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we look back on our predictions for 2018 and see how we did. Not wishing to give anything away, but if you were expecting clairvoyant genius… you might want to tone down your hopes a bit.

And in a real prediction of something that will happen in 2019, we bring our fantastic live show back to SCaLE in Pasadena, California on March 8th 2019! Keep listening for more details, but if you haven’t yet got your tickets for SCaLE, we’ve got a discount code to give you so that you can see Bad Voltage Live and all the rest of SCaLE as well. See you there!

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

Discuss this episode, and vote in the poll for who you think won, on the forum!

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which there are more rants than expected, there are seven seconds of panic, and:

[00:02:00] Google drop the latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts, where “the latest” is “we’re cancelling Allo”, which both people on Allo are presumably sad about

[00:16:40] Microsoft are dropping EdgeHTML, their browser rendering engine, and rebuilding Edge to be based on Chrome, which is a more nuanced thing than it might at first appear

[00:25:51] NASA’s InSight landed on Mars. Nice one, NASA. Six and a half months of travel and it will study the interior of the planet, and “Marsquakes”. Watch the launch video, and then spend some time contemplating ancient technology and admiring this excellent Twitter bot of old 80s home computer magazines

[00:32:50] Apparently smartphone growth is actually starting to decline, which we think may be at least partially because there’s nothing left to make with phones any more. See Jono’s views on the “notch” for details

[00:44:00] Someone patents the concept of formal software verification, as long as you’re doing it to financial software, at which all we can do is roll our eyes

[00:50:10] NHS told to ditch ‘absurd’ fax machines, to which at least some people say “hey, they work”, and others say “shut up grandad, we don’t care”

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×44-seven-systems/11955

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest Alan Pope standing in for Jeremy present Bad Voltage, in which Tiger Tokens are a more viable currency than you think, AI gets things wrong again, and:

[00:02:20] A popular open source dependency in use by many packages, with two million weekly downloads, was “compromised” in maybe a new and interesting way. The maintainer handed over the package to another developer… who then published an update which stole cryptocurrency wallets. The problem was identified and handled pretty quickly, but this has ignited a great deal of conversation and controversy about the role and responsibilities of open source project maintainers, npm, and the like. We get into it.

[00:15:40] Jaywalking is a crime in China, and they have cameras to detect it and then publish the pictures publicly to shame the jaywalker. Dong Mingzhu, head of a major Chinese company, got shamed… because the cameras took a picture of a picture of her on the side of a bus and thought it was her. Is this just lulz, or a(nother)cautionary tale about the increasing role of flawed AI in decision making?

[00:25:40] Google employees ask their bosses to cancel Project Dragonfly, the big G’s planned search engine for China which obeys the Chinese government’s requirements on blocking certain search terms around human rights and banned religions. Amnesty International have weighed in, and there will be protests. This all speaks to a larger discussion about the power of collective bargaining, and a culture which gives (or doesn’t) employees the ability to speak up about high-level decisions they disagree with.

[00:39:25] The Android hacking community are alight with speculation after a Huawei developer adds a commit to Google’s Fuchsia kernel to enable their Kirin 970 board. The Internet Extrapolation Engine is in overdrive, speculating this means the so-called “Android replacement” is being tested on the “Honor Play” series of Huawei devices. Is this a thing? And a detour into the nature of Android replacements; why do Samsung have Tizen and bada?

[00:49:00] Twitter: some are specifically recommending that you screenshot, not quote-tweet, controversial tweets that you disagree with because Twitter sees a quote-tweet as an implicit “this is worth sharing” vote and adds credit to that controversial message. Some thoughts on whether this is a good idea, and how small decisions can lead to behavioural bad choices, along with more dodgy AI decisions as Twitter spend some time banning people who tweet about killing Sean Bean in Hitman 2. We’re interested in feedback on how to solve this problem without taking your ball and going home by opting out of social media entirely; let us know on the forum or Slack. Can social media be used as a force for good without also enabling this sort of thing?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×43-shouting-and-shaming/11927

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the show was recorded in slightly unusual circumstances because people are travelling at our normal time, phones are now literally twice as big as they ought to be if you like tiny phones which apparently nobody does, and:

[00:02:15] Samsung unveil their new foldable phone, which we are, to be honest with you, not all that impressed with

[00:11:35] In an update on a previous segment, phone companies in the USA have been slammed by FCC for not doing more to handle robocalls, and a whole bunch of information about call screening and automatically routing scam calls to voicemail if you can manage it. How should such things be fixed, or regulated, if at all?

[00:22:25] Motorola are the first major phone manufacturers to sell official DIY phone repair kits, which is somewhat against previous phone vendors’ approaches to who is allowed to repair their devices. Is this a good thing, or too little too late? And would you buy a Motorola just to get it?

[00:32:30] Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, says we need to regulate facial recognition tech before ‘the year 2024 looks like the book “1984”‘, which prompts quite a lot of discussion about the role of companies and research in the 21st century and how societal norms may change and may have already changed

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×42-the-book-2024/11900

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which a proof through poetry is presented and utterly fails to move the audience, Red Hat maintains a ton of things, and:

[00:01:20] IBM acquires Red Hat; let the hot takes begin

[00:24:30] Microsoft deal to acquire Github completes, and Nat Friedman is now CEO

[00:29:23] Working around DRM in the US is now OK, as long as you keep the tools a secret

[00:35:47] The Google Home Hub is deeply insecure, says a Techcrunch article

[00:39:50] A global Google staff walkout over misconduct and inequality concerns

[00:49:25] ExMedicus, an apparently revolutionary health smartwatch, looks a bit fishy to us

[00:57:40] System76 explain about their factory setup and release shots of their new “Thelio” desktop which has a wooden case and they plant a tree for each one they make

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×41-to-star-repeat-5-forward-100-right-144/11885

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we appeal for Colgate corporate sponsorship, nobody adds a fake notch, and:

[00:01:30] Google release the Pixel 3 phone and Pixel Slate ChromeOS tablet/laptop, with no surprises given all the press leaks ahead of time

[00:16:30] Google announce the upcoming shutdown of Google Plus, citing “low usage and engagement”. It also seems they had a privacy leak of G+ user data which it’s being claimed they covered up to avoid looking bad and might also have contributed to the decision. Something of a eulogy is required from us, G+ users in the past

[00:31:48] Microsoft contribute 60,000 software patents to the open source world, which is pretty much an unambiguously good thing, surely?

[00:41:26] Tim Berners-Lee unveils Solid, his new plan to upend the World Wide Web. Some thoughts on the philosophy it’s trying to bring, and whether it’s going to overturn everything (spoiler alert: no)

[00:52:18] GDPR seems to be changing things, but in unpredictable ways: website trackers are down 4% in the EU, but up for US users. What’s that all about?

[00:56:05] A call to our community: Almost half of US cellphone calls will be scams by next year, and Jeremy’s seeing this up at the sharp end. Are you also experiencing this radical rise in scam phone calls? Is this specific to the USA? We’d like to know: tell us on community.badvoltage.org or @badvoltage on twitter

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×40-teeth-will-be-provided/11866

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the hardest part of being a developer is personal development, the BV team average two-thirds of a workout per day, and:

[00:02:10] Apple release the Apple Watch 4 with a bunch of health additions, and iOS 12 is apparently pretty good, while at the same time they reject iPhone apps which mention the new Apple phone models … Signing into a Google thing now signs you into the browser whether you want it or not, although it can at least be turned off in later versions if you don’t like it … Elon Musk is in the early stages of McAfee syndrome, according to a chap on Twitter … Jono’s got a Peloton exercise bike and has a mini review…

[00:38:50] Linus Torvalds writes that he’s taking some time off to get some assistance in understanding people’s emotions and apologises for his past behaviour, vowing to try to do better. The community welcome this new personal insight, or condemn other people for unduly influencing Linus into this decision, and everything in between. We have some thoughts on how we got here, and what’s next.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×39-snark-of-the-covenant/11835

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest presenter Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which there is temporarily less Jeremy, everyone should have a figurine on their desk which watches over them (tell us on the forum what yours is!), and:

[00:03:05] Debian are discussing packages in their distro which have problematic names. The main one is weboob, “Web Outside Of Browsers” and there are others. Issues were recently raised in Ubuntu and Plasma, among other places. Do people care, are these names actually a problem? Should these packages be removed or renamed?

[00:13:00] NVIDIA launch RTX real-time raytracing graphics cards

[00:27:45] If you own a car and can access it from your phone, that doesn’t get revoked when you sell the car, and you can continue to access it afterwards. Do people use this stuff? Is this worrying, or just caveat emptor? And does this apply to other consumer electronics as well — Teslas, Alexas, connected houses, orthopaedic pillows…?

[00:40:44] The National Library of Scotland produce a “side-by-side” map viewer of the UK, which shows a modern map and old maps from the early 1900s together, so moving one moves the other. Everyone in the UK immediately looks up where they live and their home town, and it’s fascinating. Nice one, NLS. Also mentioned, pretty minimalist US city map posters

[00:47:10] The Google Pixel 3 is coming, and we know this because there have been a million leaks. A suspiciously high number of leaks, actually… we’re starting to think that these aren’t leaks at all but a carefully managed PR campaign

[00:56:55] Twitter remove their facebook app; every cross-posted tweet gets deleted. Er, hooray? Although good luck getting that to happen for your Facebook app…

[00:59:30] According to a Microsoft-commissioned survey, 50% of parents in the U.S. with children aged 18 and under believed coding and computer programming to be the most beneficial subject to their child’s future employability… but interestingly major tech company CEOs tend to limit their children’s use of tech and want them to read books. Which may or may not be the same issue at all…

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×38-rambling-uncle-at-christmas/11799