Bad Voltage

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which apparently it is Coventry’s turn in the barrel, and:

[00:02:07] And Now This: Tourists in Rishikesh, India ignored quarantine to go wandering and were made to write “I did not follow the lockdown, I am sorry” 500 times on sheets of paper, Taiwanese baseball team the Rakuten Monkeys will have dressed-up robot mannequins in the stands to watch them play instead of crowds, people in the UK are burning down 5g masts because they think they cause coronavirus, and Stanford have made

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we begin a new series, the world is under lockdown, and:

[00:01:40] And Finally: a medical fetish site donates its stock of scrubs after being contacted by the NHS, cops in Hamilton bust a cocaine dealer for doing “non essential business” during the coronavirus lockdown, more cops bust a man for teaching his dog to drive, and don’t use shredded T-shirts as toilet paper…

[00:05:47] News: the BBC suggest that the compulsory licence fee could be replaced by a broadband levy, Twitter are removing a whole bunch of misinformation but Ben Thomson at Stratechery has issues, and yet another Zoom issue, this time that they’ve misleadingly claimed that their meetings are end-to-end encrypted although the UK government don’t seem to mind…

[00:16:40] Main discussion: What’s the role of technology, open source, open data, and the community in a large-scale crisis scenario? Are there useful ways to contribute, or is it best to just stay out of the way? Can, and should, you get involved?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×01-see-the-whole-staircase/12347

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we are all waaaaay more invested in email than certain companies would like us to be, and:

In this episode we discuss Superhuman, a new email app. Jono, the email power user’s email power user, has been getting to grips with it and is frankly a bit of a fan. Jeremy and Stuart are perhaps a bit more sceptical of some of the claims that it makes. So, we drill down into it; what does it do, how does it work, who needs it… and what does this mean for the development of design-led apps as a whole? Is this a move in a good direction? All the people trying to claim that email is dead so you use their proprietary system instead… are they wrong? Is this the way to prove that? And why didn’t Gmail do it already?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×65-email-avengers-assemble/12332

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which is discussed the prodigal’s opinions of what we got up to while he was prodigaling, the Wurzels get a second look-in, and:

<

ul>

[00:01:40] People who have fled Wuhan, site of the largest outbreak of coronavirus, are reputedly being “digitally” quarantined; cut off from WeChat, which renders them unable to pay for rather a lot of things such as hotels, petrol, and so on, and the Chinese computerised ID system. Relatedly, Uber in Australia are suspending drivers and passengers as risk of spreading the virus. Is this sort of “digital quarantine” an acceptable response to contagious medical crises? We have some surprisingly nuanced and undecided thoughts on the matter

[00:24:04] Microsoft have pledged to be carbon negative by 2030, meaning that they remove more carbon from the atmosphere than they create, to the point where by 2050 they’ve removed more carbon than the company have ever put into the atmosphere. Is this… plausible? Is it a good idea? Will others follow where MS lead? And do we believe them?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×64-nobrac/12330

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which the nature of purchasing goods is discussed.

There seem to have recently been various examples of companies selling a thing and then exerting control over it after they’ve sold it. Sonos speakers have “recycle mode”, HP printer cartridges in their “Instant Ink” programme stop working if you unsubscribe, and farmers buy 30-year-old tractors rather than new ones because they’re still fixable in the field. But are these actually examples of a trend for the worse, or is this not actually the problem that it’s being painted as? Is this just how capitalism works, and is this how we want it to work? We’ll dive into this, from a few different perspectives, and see where we end up…

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×63-give-you-the-key/12326

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which what will happen in 2020 is laid out for your consideration with perfect precision. Yes, it’s the predictions episode! This is what will happen in the next year:

Stuart

Slack will be purchased by either Microsoft, WebEx (Cisco) or Zoom. (Jeremy thinks the same, but by Salesforce, Google, or Amazon, in that order)

There will have been no convictions under the CCPA by the end of 2020

It’s the end of cookie warnings, as the EU ePrivacy stuff actually starts to kick in

Bonuses: Epic store releases on Linux; it’ll be common to have drone displays instead of fireworks

Jono

Benioff leaves as CEO at Salesforce

Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will all offer quantum computing services for their clouds, which will not be in preview but will actually be in beta or final

Amazon will release a color kindle

Bonuses: Canonical will get acquired; Playstation 5 will launch to very positive press reviews; Facebook Spaces will continue to be something people don’t care about; Dorsey steps down as Twitter CEO

Jeremy

Disney acquires EA, or Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard

Just a few short years after Ubuntu pulled the cord on convergence, a phone of that nature is released by a major manufacturer

Uber shutters Uber Eats

Bonuses: There will be no level 5 autonomous cars in 2020

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

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which a tenth of a point is more important than one might think it is, Mother Shipton is turning in her grave, and:

[00:02:10] A year ago we predicted everything that would happen in technology in 2019. Now… we revisit those predictions and see how we did. No spoilers, but we will say: when we return in 2020 and give new predictions for the upcoming year… we’ll probably do better. In advance of us doing so in the New Year, why not hop over to community.badvoltage.org to tell us what you think will happen?

[00:50:30] And it’s goodbye from us for 2019! With some brief diversions into Craigslist getting its first official app after 24 years and a brief check in on the Ubports Ubuntu phone project

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×61-frankly-much-smarter/12321

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we are very different on flights, Jono knows about the Bills, and:

[00:01:30] The .org registry has been sold to a private equity firm, and there is a whole lot of suspicion about how that deal went down. We’ll unpack it a bit.

[00:15:00] Google release Stadia, their streaming gaming platform, to early adopters. Reception was… mixed. Here are some thoughts.

[00:33:30] Lex Luthor Elon Musk invents a low-poly truck. What’s the market for the Cybertruck? Are we going to buy one?

[00:49:25] The launch of Disney+, and their market. Disney now own rather a lot of video — their own films, but Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Hulu, Touchstone — and will this make Disney+ the thing that people buy instead of Netflix?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×60-thanks-given/12313

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono and Jeremy are coming to you direct from the Open Source Summit in France, the word for “full of incitement” is not “inciteful”, Stuart, and:

[00:01:55] Facebook News and what it should include and what not: what responsibility, if any, does Facebook’s newly-proposed News tab have to choose the journalistic contributions that go into it?

[00:25:05] Using “AI” in job interviews and whether this is a good idea

[00:33:30] Disney seem to be stopping good older films from going into cinemas

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×59-inciteful/12308

Stuart Langridge and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the summer break is over except that Jono is temporarily away, free software has some problems, and:

[00:01:45] Is the definition of free software still fit for purpose? We’ve got companies trying to solve the problem of “we pay to build a thing then AWS get paid for it” and people trying to solve the problem of “we sweat to build a thing then ICE get to use it”, and both groups are doing so by looking at what the goals of free software are today, and whether current free software licences are still a good way of achieving those current goals. Matthew Garrett wrote some thoughts about this, and we have Opinions too, as we suspect will you. Give us your ideas on this topic at community.badvoltage.org.

[00:23:02] There is speculation that the UK government are offering up quotes to the media which use the key words from negative stories in a new context, in an attempt to push those negative stories down the search rankings for those words. Real life SEO to get bad stories out of the news. Andy Maturin flags this for a search for “boris johnson model” (attempting to push this story down the rankings in favour of this story)

[00:30:50] Gnome are being sued over a software patent (“a method that involves capturing a bunch of images, filtering them based on a topic, theme or individual, and wirelessly transmitting the filtered images to another device”) which Shotwell allegedly violates

[00:40:08] The dating app maker, Match, are being sued by the US FTC for fraud for allegedly knowingly profiting from and sometimes augmenting the flood of fake profiles on their dating sites

[00:45:45] More on Google’s determination to have a robot voice ring up restaurants and make bookings by talking to a real person: “Reserve With Google” seems to be the latest iteration of this plan, and it doesn’t seem to work all that well

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×58-fat-for-purpose/12300