Bad Voltage

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which there is more GDPR but not as much as there is on every website everywhere, there is discussion of rolling pins which is probably taking the retro-technology trend a bit too far, and:

[00:01:49] News: Python community generally feel that having no leader is gonna be OK, at least for now; Bad Voltage team say, this is our sceptical face … Facebook to start reviewing people on their “trustworthiness”; also debates changing logo to a black pot surrounded by 2.2 billion kettles … and London “fake news is not our friend” FB ads get “adapted” by Protest Stencil to say “it’s our business model” … the FBI decide they can solve crimes by just demanding Google tell them everyone who was nearby at the time; Google say: pull the other one, J. Edgar, it’s got bells on … and according to the Verge, $1000 phones have become normal, although it’s not clear anyone knows what normal is, these days …

[00:40:25] Slack. What is it good for? There are companies with a three-person team all in the same room who communicate through a Slack with six channels, and there are some trying to run a 10,000+ people community through it (or deliberately stopping doing so). What’s it supposed to be for? And is it succeeding? Has it stopped being trendy now, or are these merely growing pains?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×37-amidst-the-turmoil-and-darkness/11781

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we know what time it is, maybe we should set up a startup called Votr, yet another Google Pixel goes in the toilet, and:

[00:02:18] Some time ago, Jono and Stuart built BBQPad, a service to track your barbecue cooks, and now we’re closing it down. But we’d like to open source the code, maybe see a new community grow around it, so… how do we best do that? What do we do about the licence? Maybe someone out there is interested in taking it on? We’ll cover our thoughts on what we’re doing here

[00:17:50] Patrick Volkerding from Slackware is having some financial problems, and Cassidy Blaede is going full time on Elementary; some thoughts on the perennial topic of how open source projects get money, and what this might mean for each of these OSes

[00:44:08] ARM Chromebooks, and how installing Linux on them is nowhere near as trivial as you may have thought

[00:52:08] News: Android 9, “Pie”, is released, and the first phone to get it is Jeremy’s Essential PH1, rather surprisingly … The American FCC admits that the “hack” that they claimed happened to their comment system over net neutrality never actually happened, blames the previous CIO … Google Pixel 3 is coming in October and specs are now out there, including a “Pixel Stand” which basically turns your phone into a Google Home … the name of Palm rises from the dead with a new upcoming phone, the attractively-named PVG100, which is just running Android, after HP sold Palm in 2014 … West Virginia in the US plan to introduce mobile phone voting for midterm elections, via the services of a startup called, depressingly, Voatz, who are also using a blockchain, for extra lolz; this is an idea so stupid that it even hit xkcd … Apple may be replacing the keyboard with a touchbar style screen in the future … and Jono discovers Public Enemy, thirty years later …

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×36-open-cooks/11757

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we answer a question from @peterrenshu about what a Linux expert is, we are unsurprisingly loath to upload all our passwords to a startup with a big smile and a Bootstrap website, and:

[00:02:25] News: Equity firm finds the “buy the company” section of YaST, buys SUSE Linux for $2.5 billion …

the cryptocurrency bubble declines enough that people who want to process graphics can afford to buy graphics processing units again …

Google is now a platinum member of the Linux Foundation …

Bloke gets banned from Airbnb and they won’t tell him why: if you’re big enough to be a utility, maybe you should have to adhere to utility rules and can’t just do what you like as private companies do …

Google issues all 85,000 employees two-factor-auth Yubikey devices, completely eliminates employee phishing, according to Google at least …

PeerTube provides a way to share out bandwidth costs for videos you post on your website like BitTorrent does; not all of us think this is useful …

Guido van Rossum steps down from being Python BDFL, at least partially because the arguments (in the Python community, of all places) are so unpleasant; next presumably comes dogs and cats living together and the end of days …

Officials of the UK Labour Party ran a microtargeted FB ad campaign which showed ads demonstrating they were doing the thing that party leader Jeremy Corbyn wanted, but only to JC himself and people he trusted; we can’t decide whether to laugh or cry about this …

[00:44:05] What do you do with your data when you die? Give your family access? Delete it? Google have an Inactive Account Manager; LastPass and Dashlane both offer “emergency access” to your password manager passwords; Facebook let you appoint a “Legacy Contact”; Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram allow “memorialising” an account. What about your phone login? Or your desktop machine? Is only stuff in the cloud important? How much prep do you and should you have to do before death to account for this? And… is anyone doing that? It seems not. Should we be?

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

Discuss this on the forum!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which vertical video is truly a thing, editing doesn’t happen as much as it should, and:

[00:03:22] News: Ubuntu release a first analysis of the data they collect about user hardware … WHO add “Gaming Disorder” to their disease classification manual … Gitlab move from Azure to Google Cloud … symbolics.com is the oldest domain, from 1985, according to Frederic Cambus … Akon wants to build a “techno city” in Senegal and fund it with cryptocurrency to make “a real-life Wakanda” … Tencent joins the Linux Foundation … the US supreme court declares that protection from searches applies to cell tower tracking … Instagram are estimated to be worth more than $100 billion …

[00:38:30] In January, Microsoft published a blog post proudly boasting of the contracts it had signed with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. Recently, ICE have been in the news a lot over border control issues and separation of children from parents; MS therefore got a bunch of pushback about this, and Satya himself commented, walking it back. Google were part of a US military AI project and in April 3100 employees signed a petition requesting that they pull out; they walked it back. The Open Source Definition specifically says that there will be “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor”. Should tech companies take ethical stances, or is the software industry merely a neutral provider of technology and the users have to deal with all the ethical questions?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×34-destroying-angel/11696

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which people apparently are allowed to just set up a company about rockets now, we don’t have HBO’s budget, and:

[00:02:30] Microsoft buys GitHub, which is all the tech world talked about for a whole week; now the dust has settled a little, our thoughts on the whole thing

[00:19:00] Apparently, all accredited journalists at the Kim Trump summit got a free USB fan. We hope that nobody plugged them in…

[00:21:10] Famous actor Bandicoot Tennismatch Bumberslam Censorbar, er, Benedict Cumberbatch fights off four muggers

[00:22:40] Apple’s WWDC conference was on, after ten years of the iOS App Store, and a question arises: do you cruise the app store just looking for apps to install? More people do this than you may think… but maybe not all that many

[00:29:10] The FBI asked everyone to reboot their router, to track the spread of possibly-governmental router malware VPNFilter

[00:32:30] Open Source Security, maker of the grsecurity Linux kernel patches, has been directed to pay Bruce Perens and his legal team almost $260,000 following a failed defamation claim

[00:36:30] After the “John Oliver effect” directed millions of people to object to the US FCC’s net neutrality changes in May 2017, the FCC’s website went down, unable to take comments and they claimed this was due to a distributed denial of service. Looks like they might have just made that up.

[00:41:50] Another Bitcoin exchange is hacked, drops $42b in market value, while it’s revealed that Bitcoin consumes as much power as Ireland, and Wells Fargo now won’t let you buy cryptocurrency on their credit cards at all

[00:47:20] Jono’s bought a Fitbit Versa: what makes it different from previous Fitbits? And is it any good? Bad Voltage review a piece of technology that was actually released recently, for a change

[00:52:00] The FOSS Talk Live open source podcast conference was on in London, and Stuart was there representing Bad Voltage (his longer review), which prompts some thoughts on small conferences, or large meetups, and doing things for fun rather than business

This show is dedicated to two inspiring people who recently died: open source journalist Robin “roblimo” Miller and chef and food writer Anthony Bourdain.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×33-visual-github/11671

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJIP0zIbpKo

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which it was Google.IO, the big G’s developer conference, and they had a lot to announce… so we take a deeper dive into some of the upcoming stuff and what we think.

[00:00:45] General feelings and the overall feel

[00:02:25] Duplex: Google Assistant making phone calls to real people to book hair salon appointments and the like. This was by far the thing which got the most press from this IO, and… we have some thoughts. Lots.

[00:25:00] Android P: swipe gestures are coming (again)

[00:27:05] Digital wellness: helping people unplug, a bit, from their devices. This is an interesting turn from Google, whether done for cynical reasons or shining ones, and the sort of thing that the Center for Humane Technology have been talking about a lot

[00:36:40] Google News are planning to use (say it with me) AI and machine learning to curate news and automatically pull in other reads of a given story from different points on the political spectrum

[00:44:00] Smart Compose is a new Gmail feature which will make writing suggestions to you when writing a mail; we’re still arguing about Smart Replies, the pre-canned single-button responses, which Stuart bizarrely doesn’t like for no good reason and Jeremy and Jono point this out at some length

[00:51:10] Smart displays with Google Assistant, and the Echo Show

[00:53:00] Google Photos automatically picking up foreground objects by using AI and machine learning (ya rly!), potentially bringing the “portrait lighting” mode from the iPhone X to Android natively rather than a million manual apps in the Play Store

[00:54:16] Maps now has augmented-reality walking directions, with a little cartoon fox for you to follow. And some discussion of whether integrating lots of stuff into Maps is a good idea or not

[01:02:00] A grab-bag of extras: Leap to translate menus with AR, Chromebooks being able to run Linux apps, and overall thoughts on Google’s direction

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

Discuss this show in the forum!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which you must be this tall to ride the HTTP, loads of things are related directly or indirectly to Facebook’s F8 conference, and:

Comcast bump speeds for cable subscribers (if they take TV services too) up to as much as 400Mbps…

the US state of Georgia start legalising “hacking back”; Microsoft and Google implore them to not…

UK MPs threaten Zuckerberg with a formal summons to appear in front of UK Parliament…

Facebook is launching a dating feature…

the Oculus Go, a standalone VR headset from Facebook; is this the last hope for this iteration of VR?…

a new device policy to allow Linux VMs on Chrome OS for the purpose of running containerized Linux desktop GUI applications…

Google releases another chat app, but this one’s a bit different…

The .app top-level domain is now open for business…

US mobile phone operators T-Mobile and Sprint merge to form a rival to the larger US operators…

4chan captured Shia LeBoeuf’s hidden “He Will Not Divide Us” flag, as if we couldn’t see that coming…

why HTTP GETs must be safe, or “my garage door keeps opening“, a cautionary tale

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×31-just-in-case-delivery/11608

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which Jono can’t stop laughing, you too are affected by the GDPR, and:

[00:01:55] Various antivirus, browser, and backup companies embed tracking info in their installers… Microsoft release their own Linux distro as was foretold by the prophecy… a WhatsApp drug dealer is IDed from his fingerprint in a photo of his hand… the Bully Hunters anti-harrassment CounterStrike vigilante organisation starts up and shuts right back down again… ex-FBI-director James Comey complains about encryption and the FBI “going dark”… Google loses a “right to be forgotten” case in the UK… a man was caught by facial recognition at a Chinese pop concert… Tesla says Model 3 production has been shut down temporarily…

[00:42:30] There are quite a lot of “interesting” situations going on right now where legal requirements are conflicting with internet services. Service providers are now increasingly responsible for the content on their sites, which has caused Craigslist and Backpage to shut down their sexual advertising services amid accusations of sex trafficking, the GDPR is coming very soon to the EU and requires radical changes in organisations’ data-handling policies, upcoming copyright laws may be widely-drawn enough that they require Github to Content-ID everything that’s uploaded. Are these laws good in concept? More importantly, are they good in execution? Are we as a society treating the symptoms rather than the disease? Are the consequences of these laws reaching way beyond where they should, and is this accidental overreach by non-tech-savvy legislators or a deliberate attempt to curtail the spread of free culture and bring the internet under control? Lots of angles in this one…

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×30-accidental-loot/11588

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we are raided, we sell the forum (temporarily) to Alan Pope as part of the Papal Weekend, we are the youth gone wild, and:

[00:05:00] Cloudflare spin up a new DNS service at 1.1.1.1… Google launching mid-range Pixel – likely focused on India… Revisiting our Mycroft review in the light of their 18.02 release: Stuart comments in detail, while Mycroft calls Jono a fool (really!)… Apple to move to ARM chips made by themselves in laptops, from 2020… Mark Shuttleworth talks about Canonical IPO… US restaurant PaneraBread leaks millions of customer records… Mozilla Reality: a browser, in VR… Profile Engine scraped hundreds of millions of users’ Facebook profiles in 2007-2010… Google vs Oracle: Google loses appeal, APIs are copyrightable… we’ve been playing with the MarcoPolo “video walkie-talkie” app, and review it…

[01:01:00] Jeremy and Stuart and others have been working on building Measure, a tool for people who manage open source projects. It helps you know what’s going on in the community, who’s contributing and who isn’t, and generally gives you more visibility, while being easy to understand and opinionated in which things it shows you. We talk about it here, and Jeremy spoke about Measure at SCaLE 16x in more detail still if you want to know even more.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×29-extra-meaty-skid/11564

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which space is raided, beans are endless, and:

[00:01:55] News: An Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian… Google announce the “Google News Initiative“, which seems to be some sort of subscription service, an attempt to fact-check fake news, and a way to help journalists connect privately and securely to the internet… Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are under a great deal of fire about data harvesting and influence over election proceedings and public perceptions in the UK and the US… WebOS is open source (again)… NVIDIA and Microsoft collaborate on RTX, some real-time raytracing in DirectX to produce “cinematic quality” real-time games… and RIP Stephen Hawking, legendary physicist and actor in Star Trek: The Next Generation…

[00:37:26] Mycroft are working towards their Mark II release: fully funded on Kickstarter in six hours and got up to nearly $400,000, but can this be good? Some thoughts on the Mark 1, and prospects for the Mark 2, and what Mycroft will need to succeed. Just don’t ask it “Mycroft, what are beans?“

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×28-renamed-to-spectre/11540