Bad Voltage

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which brick-and-mortar shops go under, brick-and-mortar shops go from strength to strength, things are a bit delayed after a very tough week, and:

[00:01:18] News: Blast from the past UK electronics store Maplinare in talks to sell the business, along with rueful speculations on how Radio Shack are doing too… In an unoracular move, beneath the market’s din, Oracle open sources DTrace under the GPL… Google removes “view image” from the Google Image Search after a settlement with Getty Images, inspiring a whole bunch of rage and/or plaudits… Snapchat updates UI, 1.2 million people sign a change.org petition complaining about it, Snapchat responds and says things will get easier, honest… FreeBSD release their new code of conduct, which takes a much more detailed approach to listing acceptable and unacceptable behaviour than most projects do… some thoughts on Amazon’s real-world bookshops…

[00:32:20] In the last show, Jeremy asked this question: “if success on the Linux desktop ends up meaning that we have to move to a paid app ecosystem, with a mixture of closed and open source apps, would you prefer that we have that success, or stay with what we have now?” We said, “this is a big enough discussion to deserve a whole section of the show to itself”, and… this is exactly that discussion.

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

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

Jeremy Garcia, Stuart Langridge, and special guest presenter Steve Walli from the Microsoft Azure team present Bad Voltage, in which Walli is to his relief not the star of the sting before the intro, and:

[00:02:20] Stuart thinks that people are now so averse to the GPL and reciprocal licensing that Apple were prepared to write a browser mostly from scratch and Google may be replacing Linux with Fuchsia from scratch just to avoid the GPL. Jeremy and Steve are not all that convinced. We look at why GPL use is trending down, and what it means

[00:24:38] Steve Walli is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, has spent his career working with open source, and also worked at Microsoft back in the early 2000s when they were certainly the enemy of Linux. But now MS are the fifth biggest contributor to the Linux kernel, half the developers in the world are using VS Code as their editor, and so the ship seems to be turning. Is it just lip service, or is this something real? We take the opportunity to bombard Walli with questions and concerns about whether Microsoft are actually really into open source or if it’s a fair-weather friendship. We have lots of questions. And Steve’s agreed to answer _your_ questions in a similar vein; go to community.badvoltage.org if you want to ask things about Microsoft and open source that we didn’t get to

Jeremy’s speaking at FOSDEM on February 3rd, so say hello and watch his talk if you’re there.

Also, we’ve set up a Slack channel! We’ll be talking about this in the next show, but if you want to get in early and hang out with the BV community, sign in to our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

http://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×25-the-first-17-pages/11461

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we look down the barrel of 2018, 2018 gazes back into us spectrally and meltdownily, nobody shines Jono’s shoes for him, and:

[00:02:30] The news: the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities are here to eat the world — you know that a security issue is serious when it gets its own Wikipedia article… one of the lead engineers (perhaps) behind the VW emissions scandal was sent to prison, and we’re not sure (and discuss in some depth) just how responsible he was and how culpability applies to engineering staff as well as decision-makers… the US state of Oregon allows you to fill your own car with petrol, Oregonians freak out about it, the internet are beside themselves with laughter… Amazon patent “watch a video ad for a product and the more of the ad you watch, the more the price of the product drops“, everyone agrees that nobody watches the ad… eHarmony claim that their dating algorithm is scientifically proven, get slapped by the Advertising Standards Authority who take a very dim view of this sort of thing… Amazon release Linux 2 on premises… Linux Journal saved from the jaws of destruction by Private Internet Access, leading to discussion about getting magazines on paper…

[00:29:10] Predictions for 2018! What do we think will happen? Jono looks into Facebook VR, Red Hat’s finances, Google’s Flutter, and the PlayStation; Stuart has things about augmented reality, healthcare and tech, Microsoft and Linux, and Twitter and Trump; and Jeremy’s seeing stuff in 2018 for Tesla, harmful IoT devices, Bitcoin, and AI!

 

http://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×24-they-werent-that-shiny-anyway/11442

[00:02:30] Apple buys Shazam, for reasons as yet unstated… Nintendo have sold 10 million Switches in nine months… Windows’s AFD.SYS, the “Ancillary Function Driver”, was actually named when one of the team leads of the Windows network team learned they had to write a driver in kernel mode and said, “what? Another f***ing driver???”. LOL, etc… The French government is planning to ban students from using mobile phones in the country’s primary, junior and middle schools… A six-year-old makes $11 million reviewing toys on YouTube… 129 million Americans only have one option for broadband internet service in their area, which explains some things about the whole net neutrality debate… The man program no longer says “gimme gimme gimme” after midnight… Hilarious extra wrinkle to the “Uber get hacked, pay blackmailers to get the hacked data back” story: to further conceal the damage, Uber executives also made it appear as if the payout had been part of a “bug bounty”…

[00:31:50] In show 2×01 we gave our predictions for what would happen in 2017. Now, let’s look back and see how we did in our role as Cassandras. Place your bets now on who did best: Jono, Stuart, or Jeremy!

Discuss in the community!

Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we still don’t have a trillion bitcoins, Bitcoin still don’t have a trillion Bad Voltages, and:

Google will remove Play Store apps that use Accessibility Services for anything except helping disabled users, which is a good idea from a security point of view but has a pretty far-reaching effect on some automation and scripting capabilities… Mozilla work on Project “Common Voice”, a crowdsourced speech project to collect a voice corpus, work on speech recognition, and so on… Mozilla release their all-new faster version of Firefox, named “Quantum”, which we’re all going to try for the next show… Should third-party Android ROM creators be responsible for ensuring that emergency calls work? Or is it caveat emptor? … Someone accidentally burns $300m in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin splits into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, leading Del Boy to point out that we can double our money on this, and lots of other cryptocurrency goings-on… the Compuserve forums are shutting down, for those of you still using it: hope your 10285789,4963 address isn’t too much of a loss, but maybe you can win a Toyota to take the edge off… AOL still have millions of dialup users… Intel now base their “Management Engine” on Minix, so the invisible chip-within-a-chip now runs open source code, which you can’t change; Andrew Tanenbaum, Minix author, writes an open letter saying “hey, you might have mentioned it!”… Apparently 65 out of the 100 most cited papers are paywalled; whether you read this as “35% of the most cited papers are Open Access!” or a searing indictment of the current academic publishing industry or both depends on where you sit, perhaps, especially whether you have access to Google Scholar or not and what your views on academic copyright are… Reddit may go public in 2020, leading to asking: what benefit is there to the vast majority of Reddit users if this happens? Your thoughts invited… a rather disturbing article about bots creating autogenerated YouTube videos aimed at kids which are actually quite disturbing in a very unfeeling robot way which doesn’t seem to understand what makes things funny rather than creepy… and finally, Iron Maiden are going on tour (and Bruce Dickinson has a new book out); anyone going?

http://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×22-known-to-be-carcinogenic/11376

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest presenter Alan Pope from the Ubuntu podcast and Canonical and Ubuntu (standing in for Jeremy while he tours Europe) present Bad Voltage, in which popey has a hundred job titles, we race to put out the show before the Ubuntu Podcast people do, and:

[00:02:20] In the news: Sony Japan announces a next generation “Aibo” personal canine robot, causing extreme Jono mockery for buying an early protoaibo years ago… everyone hates Perl, Delphi, and VBA, in more shocking reveals from Stack Overflow… Google Drive is locking some docs from sharing because they are “violations of the terms of service”… Github publish State of the Octoverse 2017, where there are 25 million active repositories, all of which are new JavaScript web frameworks… bloke says that nobody uses libraries and librarians are “sad people who can’t get proper work”, gets 110,000 replies vehemently disagreeing: watch out for librarians, they’re tough… Man takes daughter to his work at Apple, lets daughter film new unreleased iPhone X and publish the video, gets fired, not all that surprisingly

[00:42:35] Ubuntu release the new 17.10 release, and we talk to Alan about it. This leads into discussions of being data-driven when planning, what the deal with snaps are, and upstream relationships

And news on recent conferences: Jono at Open Source Summit Europe, Alan at Freenode #live, and Stuart at Hackference

Discuss this show with the community!

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which some people watch Star Trek Discovery and some emphatically do not, some are at conferences and some are not, and:

[00:02:45] Every wifi device on the planet is broken by a fully-branded attack named Krack, suggesting that nobody listened to the plan to “Just say no”… Google Maps now also covers various planets and moons across the solar system, giving whole worlds of alien customers to be asked to add their photos of the venue they’re in… Microsoft add support for Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora to Windows, not a moment too soon… Essential the phone people are sued by the bloke who set up Nest over the external-devices connector… Netflix adds 5.3 million subscribers in Q3, presumably from all the people on Europa who now have Google Maps as well…

[00:28:25] The Purism Librem 5 hits its crowdfunding target of $1.5 million with a week still to go, so lots of people are certainly sure it’s viable enough to be worth buying. New entrants into the phone market are fairly common, and them dying having had little-to-no success is equally common, but the Librem 5 might be different; are they going after the mass market? Can a “security and privacy-focused phone” hit sustainability while only selling to people who are already convinced by the ideas it embodies? And can it be any good? We dive in

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we are all Google all the time, all news all the time, and:

[00:03:00] News: Apple open source the kernels for iOS and Mac OS, with obvious discussion about how useful this is and the nature of open sourcing… the new wheeze is web ads that mine bitcoin and Stuart’s controversial defence of why that’s actually not as bad as everyone seems to think it is… Evan Prodromou releases Evancoin, a cryptocurrency where you can buy hours of his time or possibly create a new market… Elon Musk proposes speeding up intercontinental flying by shooting people across the sea in ICBMs, which literally everybody thinks is mad, so we’ll find out in fifty years when you take Saturn V down to the shops… the US Senate approves self-driving car legislation and bans the states from creating regulations to stop it… Google scrap their First Click Free policy, to cautious applause from every newspaper with a paywall… Bill Gates switches to Android, which might be the real death knell for Windows Phone, not that that wasn’t obvious already… and in more Microsoft news, they will release their browser, Edge, for iOS and Android, prompting discussion about what makes a browser beyond its rendering engine, and how to do tab groups in both Chrome (ish) and Firefox (entirely)…

[00:40:30] Google release a slew of new hardware in their Made by Google event for October 2017. There are home assistants in three different sizes (the existing Google Home and the new Home Mini and Home Max), a new(ish) Daydream VR headset, a Google Clips camera, Pixel Buds (better named as “puds”) headphones, a new high-end Chromebook called the Pixel Book, and the next iteration of the Google phone, the Pixel 2. We’re gonna take a look at what the deal is with all this shiny new kit and whether we’d buy any of it

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we have not podfaded for one hundred shows (count ’em, a hundred), two-thirds of the team are at the Open Source Summit in LA, there is literally no news about the iPhones 8 or X, and:

[00:03:00] News: the “BlueBorne” bundle of bluetooth attacks in which everything is vulnerable except iOS 10… the Linux Foundation announce CHAOSS, a project to make toold to measure open source community health, in the world’s best example of choosing the name and then finding a project to fit it… Equifax get hacked, expose 143 million users’ details, hilariously issue people PINs which are just the date through a pseudo-phishing website, cause end of the world… a mobile phone powered by radio waves which can make Skype calls on three microwatts (!) of power…

[00:22:15] Jono and Jeremy are as mentioned at the Open Source Summit in LA; what’s the deal with it? Fun conference? We review what’s going on and what it’s all about, as well as some thoughts on the hallway track at conferences and what some tips on being a good public speaker

[00:37:45] HitRecord (that’s “hit record”, not “hit record”) is “a new kind of online community working together as a production company”, set up by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to be a movie/music/creative arts production company where people collaborate together to make things, or possibly to Fight The Power but in a way where everyone still gets paid. Sounds sorta Creative Commons-y, maybe… but is this one more dead idea powered by stardom, or the new way things will get made? We’ve got some thoughts. Generally positive ones. And maybe there’s some Bad Voltage things we could do on HitRecord? Tell us your ideas!

Discuss this show in the community!