Bad Voltage

Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge travel to SCaLE 14x in Pasadena, California to perform Bad Voltage Live on stage in front of a packed ballroom. Hear Bryan and Stuart argue about the notion of free software for everything (and the loser get forcibly waxed), the contestants in Wrong in 60 Seconds compete for a Pogo Linux workstation, a golden ticket holder win a ZaReason laptop, and Bad Voltage Family Feud in which we survey a hundred people and then nobody guesses their answers. Watch the show at badvoltage.org/scale2016!

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which all your credit cards still have magnetic stripes on, there is a disturbing level of coincidental alignment in views of the future, and:

00:03:05 The Bad Voltage team give their predictions for what will happen in the tech world in 2016!

00:31:29 Jono reviews Coin, a credit card which replaces all your other credit cards… in theory. In practice, not so much…

00:46:45 Jorge Castro talks to us about Ubuntu’s Juju, software for managing and deploying things on cloud services

The next show will be Live Voltage at SCaLE 14x! See you in Los Angeles!

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which Bryan has no voice and is thus not with us, Jono has a cold and yet manfully overcomes this to be with us, the future is made of steel-sheathed blockchain-based arguments about the GPL, and:

00:03:17 We review the predictions we made a year ago in shows 33 and 34, and see how we did in our role as Cassandras. The tl;dr here is, don’t give up your day job, Nostradamus, although the world would look a lot nicer if it was what we predicted

00:35:17 The Linux Foundation is shepherding a new collaborative effort to advance blockchain technology between lots of major tech and financial firms: Cisco, Deutsche Borse, JP Morgan, Intel, IBM, Accenture, and the like. Is this going to actually accomplish anything? Is a distributed ledger going to provide any benefits to we consumers?

00:49:05 Stuart reviews Titan: “the toughest cable on earth”, a steel-sheathed phone charging cable and asks: is this useful?

00:59:22 There’s a love triangle, except without much love, going on between the Software Freedom Conservancy, the Linux Foundation, and VMWare around alleged VMWare GPL violations and Linux Foundation accusations of conflict of interest; what’s it all about? What’s going on here?

Have a good New Year, everybody. We’ll see you in 2016 (possibly at Live Voltage at the end of January!).

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Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which there is an accidental oversupply of buzzwords, there is no podfading, and:

00:04:35 Mozilla have declared that they’ll stop selling FirefoxOS phones through carriers and will “pivot” to an IoT; Jolla have run out of money; these two recent changes knock a big hole in the idea of Linux-based non-Android phones, and Canonical’s Ubuntu phones haven’t exactly taken over the market either. What’s going on?

00:30:45 Jeremy reviews two wifi security cameras: the Arlo by Netgear and the Guardian DCS-2630L by D-link

00:48:20 Can we solve the energy crisis by building solar panels on the moon and then beaming the power back to earth with microwaves? Maybe. Let’s do it!

2015 year in review: our favourite and least-favourite technology things from this year

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Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which there is a sad absence of Jeremy Garcia and we suffer for it, we beg for a new economy, and:

00:03:10 Is begging the new economy? The New York Times asks about gofundme and kickstarter and whether people are now internet beggars. What’s the deal with these sorts of things?

00:16:30 Stuart has a new OnePlus X phone and has some thoughts; the rest of the team ask questions while marvelling at its greatness. And if you want one, you need an invite… and we have one to give to you. Listen to the show to find out how!

00:32:55 The American Department of Justice is claiming that Apple must unlock an iPhone for them because Apple own the software on the phone (since software is not sold, only licensed) and the DoJ don’t want to compel the owner to unlock because of the right to avoid self-incrimination. Apple, are entirely to their credit, fighting back. A very interesting case. Schadenfreude plus privacy… whose side are we on?

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Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which we are curmudgeonly, we are ethical philosophers, and:

00:02:00 Are developers learning libraries and not learning the actual programmnig languages they’ve chosen? And is this a problem? Are JavaScript hackers just using jQuery or PHP hackers just using Laravel when they shouldn’t? Or is this greybeards complaining about the kids today?

00:16:47 Review: the Blue Yeti USB microphone. Almost by coincidence, the whole Bad Voltage team have purchased the Yeti USB mic from Blue Microphones, and so we all review it together

00:27:20 The rise of self-driving cars brings up the question of algorithmic morality; how should the car be programmed in the event of an unavoidable accident? Protect the driver at all costs; reduce loss of life overall even if the owner gets the short end of that stick; what? This is a big decision that needs to be made: how do we think this should be handled?

00:39:50 THe UK government have recently started making more noises about banning encryption from being used by ordinary people, to prevent terrorists from being able to communicate without security services reading it. It’s the Crypto Wars and the Clipper chip, all over again. Meanwhile, Apple have made a big point of how they work hard to protect their customers’ privacy by ensuring that iMessages are end-to-end encrypted and so forth. Clearly, these proposals are in opposition. The question is this: if Apple declared that these government proposals were incompatible with their customers’ privacy and so threatened to pull out of the UK market… who would blink first? And would Apple do this? And is it OK that they might have this level of power?

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Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which Jeremy is unwell and yet battles on heroically, everyone is cynical about politicians and yet battle on heroically, and:

00:02:14 The rise of inexpensive open source computers: the PocketChip and DragonBox Pyra are examples of new cheap open source computing devices, and everyone knows about the Raspberry Pi. Are these things cool for people who aren’t the Bad Voltage team? What good are they? Isn’t it great that these exist?

00:12:22 “Vigilante malware” as a concept is in the news again; this time, there’s a real example, Linux.Wifatch, a network worm which infects Linux-based routers and embedded devices and then… turns off insecure options and makes sure they’re up to date with patches. It’s malware, but on the side of good. Maybe this is the way forward? Question mark?

00:27:55 We’ve been asked about Owncloud quite a lot, and brought it up for discussion frequently: now we speak to project founder Frank Karlitschek about what Owncloud’s up to now and why it might be a good idea

00:44:37 Why don’t the open source community continually introduce laws saying things like “all router firmware must be open source” so the enemy has to spend resources and time battling these things, much like they keep introducing laws saying “everyone must use DOCX” and we have to battle them? Why not fight fire with fire?

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Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which the legitimacy of colleges are called into question, nobody has a big enough backpack, and:

00:01:52 Volkswagen was recently revealed to have written custom software for their diesel cars to make them cheat on government emissions tests: when the car is being tested it runs in a low-power mode to cut its emissions and so pass the test. What does this mean for a world controlled by software, and how have the company handled the reveal in public?

00:18:42 Bryan reviews the System76 Serval Workstation, a beast of a “desktop-class laptop” with an alarming 6GB of video memory and weighing 8lb. We examine the use cases for this sort of and size of laptop, and whether the Serval is a good example

00:35:35 The idea of a “Delayed Public Licence“: release your code under a proprietary licence now but it automatically becomes open source after a year. Useful, potentially, for people releasing mobile games for money but who also want to contribute to the commons? We see whether we think this idea would work and how useful it might be.

00:51:45 Hack Voltage: email to SMS gateways provided by your phone carrier, so you can send an email and have it be a text message. Mostly outside the US these are all gone, but they’re perhaps very useful to US customers!

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This is not that show. Instead, it’s a pointer to that show, because it was videoed, and you’ll want to watch the video; live shows don’t translate very well to a pure audio podcast. So, go to badvoltage.org/fulda2015 or the Bad Voltage YouTube channel and you can watch us discuss how to stop cybercrime, that you are the biggest risk facing open source, and hear some truly gratuitous German insults. Thank you to the OpenNMS team and Tarus Balog for inviting us to perform, and we hope you like the show.

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Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you the wonderful world of Bad Voltage, in which you get a mat underfoot because your feet hurt, there is a small Lunduke on the scene, and:

00:04:48 Mycroft, the open source “AI for everyone” home automation thing that you can put in your house and speak commands to, has achieved its Kickstarter goals and will happen. We like it. Here’s why

00:24:48 Chris Waid from Thinkpenguin and savewifi.org speaks about the American FCC’s consultation which requires restricting wireless devices from using unapproved frequencies. Understandably, the SaveWiFi team are very concerned this will result in outright banning of open source router firmware and possibly open source wireless drivers generally. Today we discuss the issue with Chris, whether it’s quite as big a problem as is suggested, and what can be done about it

00:48:17 Hack Voltage: Jeremy spends a minute recommending a cool thing. In this episode, a bathroom mirror which runs Android

00:49:24 Unbiasedly leading on from Mycroft, one of the things it touts itself as is integrating with your home automation; Internet–of-Things things around your house, whether thermometers or Dropcams or smart fridges. We’ve been getting into home automation to varying degrees, and it’s a big area; here we talk about it and open standards

01:08:14 Jono reviews the LIFT standing desk conversion kit, and the idea of standing desks generally

We’re doing a live show, and you can be in the audience! See details of Bad Voltage Live, in Fulda, Germany on September 30th 2015, at badvoltage.org/live!

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