Bad Voltage

Stuart Langridge and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono is away (and not fired, promise), there is too much news, and:

[00:02:00] News: Juicero has run out of juice in the latest high-profile IoT market exit… Reddit close their source, igniting entirely atypical Redditor drama frenzy and prompting questions about whether anyone can stay open after getting millions of dollars… Oracle basically close down Solaris (gave it “a bullet in the head”, says James Gosling), so pour out a valedictory drink for Sun, now essentially gone away…

[00:20:33] The Essential Phone: the hot new kid on the Android block. Lots of love and anticipation, and then a terrible tale of missing shipping and CCed photo IDs: is this going to be the next big thing? Would it have been the next big thing if they’d got the release right? Jeremy holds up his newly acquired phone and we look into the story around a product launch… and what you should do with goodwill when you find some

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the Samsung Galaxy S5 is too big (unless it’s too small), it’s certainly too old (unless we’re too old), and:

[00:02:00] News: DJI make over-the-air firmware updates for their drones mandatory, community spend only an hour working out how to circumvent it, 59 minutes of which was watching the eclipse… Stuart still harping on about being “forced” to listen to a U2 album one time years ago… the new Android Oreo release is out, along with the now traditional news blitz of articles explaining why you don’t have it and how to force it anyway… how big your phone ought to be and intemperate rhetoric thereof… Github CEO Chris Wanstrath steps down to spend more time with his text editor, help find new CEO to “lead Github into the next stage of growth”…

[00:24:45] Jeremy reviews the Jarvis Bamboo standing desk from Fully, along with a bunch of discussion about whether standing desks as a whole are actually worth it and what the feature set you really need is

[00:41:10] What’s the deal with AI and robots? On our forum, paulgault talked about killer robots and asked: “will mankind terminate itself with its own creations?” We’ll get into that, AI, and what this all means for our jobs and the future of the species. It’s a big topic, this one. (And we’d love to hear your thoughts on it too.)

Extra music by bensound.com. Artwork by David Revoy.

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we will not be your friend, we learn some Italian, the show actually gets mixed on time, and:

[00:02:09] The news… Google “manifestbro” posts a screed about Google’s internal attitudes to diversity and opposing affirmative action programmes, says that the way to fix the gender gap is to stop alienating conservatives, gets fired (and we have a discussion thread going on this already)… Creators of GRSecurity Linux kernel security patches sue Bruce Perens after he says that using their stuff might lead to legal trouble… UK data protection people worrying about government employees use of Slack because it makes freedom of information and transparency harder…

[00:19:40] What should you use to run your website? Lots of people reach for WordPress, and that’s got a broad community; what else is out there? If you are using WP, are there a good set of plugins and themes that you might find good? Also including a whole discussion about IFTTT and Zapier and “glue code” for tying many services together

[00:44:33] Ben Thompson put forward the idea of “curated journalism”: that publishers stop being employers of creators and start instead being curated publications of creators who already exist, in a detailed article for Stratechery. Does this idea actually hang together? Is it just the obvious next step? And are we likely to see new companies spring up or existing companies pivot to becoming the service provider to creators rather than the owner of them?

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we do not have “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance”, we mention that Oggcamp is coming up in the UK and you should volunteer to be on the crew, nobody buys any illegally traded goods, and:

[00:02:00] The news… Adobe kill Flash and Stuart defends it (up is down, down is up)… the police cooperate internationally to shut down two major darkweb markets in order to deny our previous assertions that the rozzers know nothing about technology… Microsoft kill MS Paint, internet erupts with sadness, Microsoft wire the corpse to the mains, er, grant a stay of execution and put it in the Windows Store, which is not quite the same thing as death…

[00:15:15] Is there too much screen time in our lives? Are we spending too much time looking at things on screen and not in reality, or is this merely more old man yelling at cloud? And are we seeing some more long-term psychological effects — narcissism, shallowness of affect, shortness of attention span — which have come about because our relationships are now mediated in 140-character bursts? It’s a worry. Or maybe it isn’t. We have… many thoughts

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the po-po are f***ed, accusations of posh schooling are levelled, and:

[00:02:00] The news… Someone raises $80k for a Jolla tablet… meanwhile Jolla themselves raise a startling thousand times as much to “develop Sailfish OS as the rival of Android”… Fedora 26 arrives for your full crimson headgear goodness… Ubuntu on Windows is now in the Windows Store, as the prophecy predicted…

[00:20:22] System76 release Pop!_OS, “a powerful operating system just for creators”. What’s the deal here? There seems to be some confusion, and we’re here to sort it out. Or be more confused. Do we like the idea? Do we like the company? Do we like the name? Two out of three ain’t bad

[00:49:37] In a previous show we referenced computers from our childhood, and here, a bit more depth. What did we use? What did you grow up with? Let us know on the forum!

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we don’t chop anyone’s Endless in half, we measure immeasurable things, and:

[00:01:58] The news… Google get fined €2.4 billion for antitrust violations by the EU (who have a different approach to antitrust than the US)… the Five Eyes (of Sauron) countries are now all thinking of banning encryption… you can now circumvent the DMCA to repair stuff, although you’re not guaranteed to succeed… the word of 2017 seems to be randomware with the new amusingly-named but not amusingly-functioned “Not-Petya”… a report on FOSS Talk Live and charity runs ending in New Era Field at the weekend… Mycrofts are starting to arrive, in accordance with the prophecy, so look out for a review…

[00:21:58] The Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act (or ACDC Act, let there be rock) is a proposed US government bill which gives permission to companies and individuals to try and identify the computer or location of a cyber-attack against them. That is: if you’re being hacked, it makes it explicitly legal for you to “hack back”; to attack the perpetrator’s computer. Is this empowering people to help themselves in the face of an unhelpful government, or a romanticised view of the Wild West as applied to the internet? Crime prevention control a la the Guardian Angels or legitimisation of vigilanteism? There are some pretty nuanced outcomes from this law…

[00:41:57] Wikipedia and Benjamin Mako Hill invent a gamified tutorial for new wikipedia contributors; everyone who takes it likes it and lots of people take it but it doesn’t actually achieve the goals of increasing the number and richness of Wikipedia contributions from participants. Some thoughts on how to (and whether to) gamify your community, and how to decide on and track metrics, and doing proper statistics (referencing Evan Miller’s work (not Evan Williams, sorry))

[00:64:10] In the last show we asked you for your blue-sky suggestions for skills for Alexa and other home assistants… and we got a zillion responses, thank you all! We list a few of our best, and choose our winner, and they will be receiving their Mission One in due course. Thank you to Endless for giving us the prize to give away; now, skill developers, never complain again that you don’t have a good idea for a skill…

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we command Alexa to play our podcast and it works, Jono turns off his phone so it doesn’t explode with helpful comments every time we say “OK Google” (you may wish to do the same), and:

[00:01:55] The news… Verizon spends $4.5 billion on Yahoo for reasons we don’t understand… Pinboard buy Delicious, hilariously… Apple add podcast analytics with possible big implications for the advertising industry… and Apple also confirm that they’re working on self-driving cars… while losing a bunch of value in their share price, along with everyone else in tech…

[00:18:35] Voice controlled “assistants”, on phones (“OK Google”, Siri, Cortana) or on in-home devices (Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home, the upcoming Mycroft and Apple devices) are a whole new platform in its early stages. We’ve been testing out some of what’s on the market, and experimenting with how they fit into our lives and with how one might use them in the future. Are they a revolutionary new thing like smartphones? Or a flash in the pan like smartwatches? The Bad Voltage verdict…

[00:51:15] You can win an Endless Mission One computer, which the Endless people have given to us to give away! Simply enter our competition: think up the best idea you can for a “skill” or plugin for voice-controlled assistants like Alexa or OK Google. You can aim to inspire us with a great idea, or make us laugh with a daft one. (And you don’t have to _write_ it, just think of the idea.) Email your suggestions to [email protected] by Monday 26th June 2017 and we’ll choose the best suggestion from somewhere in Europe and they’ll win the Endless Mission One! (You have to be in Europe to win, here. Loose definition; if you think you’re in Europe, you probably are. But this competition is only open to people in Europe, because the previous one was only US and Canada.)

and finally, if you want to hear Stuart answer a particular question, he’s doing a live “mashup” show as part of FOSS Talk Live in London on June 24th 2017; Stuart, Joe Ressington, Dave Megins-Nichols, and Marius Quabeck will be answering your questions, so fill in a question you want their views on!

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which wifi is a problem, updating is a problem, and:

[00:02:10] Real news… WannaCry (or WannaCrypt; did the name just get cut off by a tweet?) ransomware worm infects 400,000 machines… Microsoft call out the NSA for hoarding 0-days… will anyone change their update policy… Android O focusing on “vitals”, modular updates, battery life… Stuart’s net connection dies and he receives a bunch of mean abuse for it…

[00:15:03] Fake news… it’s a problem. But maybe there’s a community solution? Jono has a plan for how a crowdsourcing karma-based approach might help provide balance to news articles. There is scepticism, certainly, but this also throws up some much deeper discussions about what “fake” news is, and who decides it’s fake. Can collective action help with this sort of problem? Stack Overflow may be an example of where it does work (and we spoke to Jeff Atwood about that); Reddit might be seen as an example of where it works or an example of it not working. And perhaps this is something worth building? A long-form discussion of how this might work, and a call to people who want to build such a platform

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we are secure, we wear the juice, we get to the choppa, and:

[00:02:15] The news this week, including

going

to prison in Portland for calling yourself an engineer without permission, more fast-food incredulity

at the KFC Double Down, robbing

banks while invisible, and Intel’s

chips are all vulnerable to a security exploit and you should check and get it fixed if it needs fixing

[00:12:38] In a world where Intel and ARM are massively dominant, is there space for some more open architecture? OpenPOWER and SuperH

could be candidates technologically, but what’s standing in the way of this from a business point of view? Would

anyone make hardware on these less-popular architecture? Should we even want them to?

[00:28:21] VPNs are the hot topic right now, for all sorts of reasons. Protecting your privacy from governments or your

work from your client’s network, connecting to your employer’s systems from elsewhere, getting around geoblocking… there are

all sorts of reasons you might want to use a VPN, but which ones out there are actually good, and how do you make a decision?

A good place to start may be thatoneprivacysite.net, and we’re currently using

some combination of Opera Browser’s built-in VPN, Lantern, PrivateInternetAccess,

ExpressVPN, and Nord VPN; we certainly also want to hear recommendations for other providers and why you’re using those in particular; there are lots of different reasons why people

want a VPN, and lots more why people should

[00:44:23] We were asked by a listener to talk about working for oneself: all three presenters either

work for themselves right now or have done so for over a decade, so we’ve got quite a few thoughts and

war-stories about all this. Herewith, some ideas on why working for oneself is good (or why it isn’t), and

what we’ve learned (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes less so) along the way…

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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono is repeatedly smug about Facebook VR, nobody urinates on a laptop, we devote almost the whole show to one topic, and:

[00:02:30] In the news: Google settle an antitrust case in Russia by basically removing all their monopoly rules, but only in Russia… 90% of drivers admit to using smartphones behind the wheel despite how you really really shouldn’t do that… and a “Garadget” IoT garage door device was deliberately remotely bricked by the company after a customer left a bad Amazon review, with worrying implications for the future of dissent..

[00:21:15] Canonical have said that Ubuntu will dropping the Unity desktop and a bunch of associated technologies. The conversation around this has got a bit heated at times. What does it mean for Ubuntu and for the free desktop more generally? Is this the right thing to do? And what’s next?

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