Bad Voltage

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we h4XX0r the Dark Web to pwn your s3ns3s, other people are inexplicably less annoyed about this than Stuart is, and:

[00:01:15] After a terrorist murdered 22 people and injured 24 others in the mass shooting in El Paso in 2019, police said that they are “reasonably confident” that the shooter published an anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant manifesto published on 8chan, a messageboard heavily linked to alt-right propaganda and mass shootings. Cloudflare then dropped their support for 8chan, refusing to provide them with DDOS protection.

In the midst of this, Kevin Roose, a tech writer for the NYT, said: there’s a big, interesting debate here about which layers of the internet should be responsible for banning extreme content. And we agree. So, this is that interesting debate: which levels should be banning stuff like this? ISPs, literally the provision of an internet service? Facebook and other end-user applications? Cloudflare and other infrastricture providers? And what justifies a decision to ban? Government regulation? Corporate PR? The CEO’s personal opinions? Is there a risk that challenging the orthodoxy results in banning by the mob, or is that just a fig-leaf used by those who want to keep their awful opinions? A bit of all of that, perhaps: we dig into the whole topic from a few different angles.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×57-banned-on-the-run/12294

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which there might be toilet paper conferences, you don’t know, and:

[00:01:15] What makes a good conference? We’re digging into this in some depth; what makes a conference fun, or useful, or beneficial, or all of the above, and what stops it from being those things? What’s the point of conferences anyway? A wide-ranging discussion trying to work out what people are doing well, and not so well.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×56-solvitur-ambulando/12290

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the Mona Lisa is bobbins, it is important to have your privacy policy meet the overall goals you’re pushing, and:

[00:01:00] There’s a new site launched calling for a ban on facial recognition. Should it be banned? There are dangers here, but perhaps the genie is out of the bottle on this one; what needs to be done?

[00:30:30] More than 1,000 Android apps harvest data even after you deny permissions. iOS has similar issues. Is this just a bug, or a symptom of a more deep-seated malaise? And what, if anything, can and should be done about it?

[00:44:13] British Airways faces record £183m fine for data breach; it’s the biggest penalty from the UK’s ICO ever

[00:47:40] Someone writes a bit of software called “DeepNude” which takes a picture of women (only) and fakes a nude image of them, in a catastrophic misreading of the room. We tell them: don’t do this sort of thing, and then answer a question asked, which was: does this water down the power of blackmailers?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×55-moaner-lisa/12281

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we only get the bad bits of Neuromancer, apparently “stank” is a noun, and:

[00:01:13] More and more companies are going for some sort of “open core” business model approach to software distribution: parts of the software are open and parts are closed, or there’s a licence which prohibits its use by cloud providers without paying, or you have to pay for the branded version. We take a look into the different approaches here, and what it means for open source in general and the direction of the industry

[00:27:50] This past weekend has seen a bit of dancing about whether Ubuntu will drop 32-bit libraries from the archive, ending up with a statement from Canonical about it saying they aren’t going to (and Valve have responded saying that they’ll continue to support Steam on Ubuntu, although that was after we recorded the show)

[00:44:17] Facebook have released a cryptocurrency, Libra. What’s the deal here? We have some thoughts, not surprisingly

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×54-well-baffled/12260

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Stuart gets the episode number wrong, the ghosts of KWebStat and Jokosher are unearthed, and:

[00:01:52] Github Sponsors: a new donations programme from Github where people can give money to support an open source project. A good idea? Well, maybe. We have some thoughts on this latest attempt to bring money into the open source ecosystem, and whether they’re doing better than Tidelift or OpenCollective or any of the others

[00:21:40] Stadia: Google’s upcoming streaming video gaming service (or possibly a terrible hatchback car from the 1980s). Are we on board? Or are there problems? Well, maybe a bit of both. Bringing the subscription model to gaming excites a lot of comment as a concept, and whether Google are the right people to do it is also a concern

[00:34:57] Sign in with Apple: Apple’s new rival to signing in with Google or Facebook. Privacy preserving? Yes, at least partially. Mandatory for anyone using anyone else’s single sign on? Also yes. So, we are on the fence a bit here; time to dig into it, and what the iceberg is that this is the tip of as integration between services becomes more critical and harder to get away from

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×53-the-route-of-all-evil/12238

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which there is charity and there is hope but there is not a lot of faith, and:

[00:02:50] Lenovo are apparently making a Thinkpad-brand foldable PC next year. We have Thoughts, not surprisingly

[00:08:40] Uber finally do their IPO, which manages to seriously underperform expectations and yet still be the 9th biggest US IPO ever

[00:11:10] Someone comes up with a worrying Whatsapp remote exploit — dial a call which would then buffer overflow the target and install software on it. It went unmentioned in the release notes, although maybe that’s a good thing because people don’t install security updates?

[00:13:50] Drinking six or more coffees a day can be detrimental to your health. In other news, a bear prays, and the Pope was seen heading into the woods with a roll of toilet paper

[00:15:20] Our main feature: lots of people think it’s unfair if their open source software is bundled up and sold by someone putting no effort into it. This is certainly legal, but there seem to be more developers who are disillusioned about this, both for personal projects and in large enterprises. Historically the response has been: that’s legal, so you just have to live with it. But as the open source world has changed, is that still a good answer? Maybe those developers do need to live with it, but perhaps there should be a better explanation as to why living with it is actually better in the long term? Or maybe the open source pitch itself should change, or the world should: can we do better than dismissing people’s concerns rather than helping them understand?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×52-apples-to-oranges/12185

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest presenter Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which apparently reading A Song of Ice and Fire is as bad as being a Crossfit person or using Arch, Jorge refuses to publicly state just how many HDMI devices he has, and:

[00:02:30] The Sony PlayStation 5 is coming. In 2020, probably. What’s going to be good, and what’s going to be less good?

[00:17:40] Employee wellness programs apparently may not work: “The study concluded that the program didn’t seem to have much effect on total medical spending, employee productivity, or health behavior in the first year.

[00:24:50] Is “996”, the idea that workers should work 9am-9pm six days a week, a good idea? Jack Ma of Alibaba says it is. Workers in China disagree. We have thoughts.

[00:35:20] In light of the UK’s upcoming online harms” strategy document and porn blocking plans, how do you monitor or control your children’s internet access and screen time, or do you not? Do you block the things your kids can see, and if so how? Limit their time online, and how? Or none of the above?

[00:49:50] Cloudflare plan to offer a free VPN for everyone.

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×51-game-of-groans/12150

Stuart Langridge and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Jono is at death’s door and not present, Stuart mixes the show and therefore any complaints should be directed to him (and obviously these will make Jono feel good about himself), and:

[00:1:20] A short review of SCaLE17x and what we liked about it, along with some words on the mighty Bad Voltage live show, coming soon to a podcast and video site near you!

[00:8:55] Apparently Google Docs is the new place that teens at school chat, because they can see it and not their other apps (thankyou schultzer for the suggestion!)

[00:14:19] Beto O’Rourke, prospective candidate for president of the USA, was in legendary hacker group the Cult of the Dead Cow in his youth

[00:18:51] A major international bank accidentally published a private package of their own to the public npm registry and then sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon and Cloudflare for hosting “stolen code”

[00:25:25] YouTube, repeatedly accused of not doing enough to limit the spread of propaganda and ghoulish exploitation of tragedy, outline some of what they did after the Christchurch mosque mass shootings to stop uploads of videos

[00:35:55] Facebook backtracks after removing adverts from US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren calling for Facebook to be broken up. A more nuanced story than it may at first appear, and with ramifications for journalism and how it’s done

[00:45:00] 5G. It’s coming, apparently. We’d like to look into it in more detail, after a suggestion by Greg Lowe. But… what do you, the community, want to know about it? Give us your questions for research and opinions!

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×50-born-in-a-log-cabin/12110

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we declare a moratorium on social media, there is Tinder but for livestock, and:

[00:03:00] Google may be killing the back button in Android Q

[00:10:40] Project Alias: block your home assistant from listening to you, and make your own custom commands

[00:19:00] Marriott get hacked, let you fill in your personal info into a web form to see if your personal information was compromised, sigh

[00:20:50] Social networking: more on the techlash, and the UK Parliament says Facebook have been acting like “digital gangsters”, and addictive technologies. Meanwhile, Reddit users are apparently less valuable than any other social network

[00:43:50] Google Maps just accidentally exposed Taiwan’s secret missile sites

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×49-social-missiles/12065

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we take ourselves up on a challenge we set a couple of episodes ago.

Social media. There’s pretty wide agreement that there are issues with it; that it fosters divisiveness and a lack of nuance, it amplifies the narcissistic, that it’s easy to harass and bully people, that there are ways in which it’s had a detrimental impact on society. But is that the fault of the social media networks, or the fault of humanity who just didn’t have an audible voice before? And if that’s the case… what can be done about it? Anything?

We have some thoughts, and have been reading up about social media, engagement, and the “techlash” more generally, and the motives behind some of these actions. So, why’s it happening, and can it be fixed?

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

https://community.badvoltage.org/t/2×48-antisocial-media/12054