In This Episode: Meet us in Denver tonight. BASIC. The Internet Archive sucks up Google+ (in a hurry!) Office Depot is busted in fraud scheme. Space junk. And will Apple News+ help, or hurt, the publishing industry? Either way: “subscription fatigue” is growing.
This Week’s Hosts
Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True.Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.Longer Bios on the Hosts page.Show Notes
In the warmup: we’re all together in Denver, and we’re hosting a Meetup this evening if you’re in the area. Kevin got a haul of old computers: pictures here. Kevin also read Endless Loop: The History of the BASIC Programming Language, and talked about Jaroslav Švelch, author of Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Gary talked about selling his car, which has several tech tie-ins.Kevin talked about the Internet Archive, which is more than old web pages. Its “archive team” is doing a side project trying to save Google Plus before it shuts down completely (it has broken 1.2 petabytes). The Archive is sustained by donations — and the guys encouraged that.Randy talked about Office Depot being caught doing fake “malware remediation” — lying that customer computers have malware so they can “fix” it for a fee. They’ve been fined $35 million by the Federal Trade Commission, The Verge says.After seeing a news article in February, Gary wondered if “space junk” is an actual problem. Randy says yes: not only from space junk going back to the 1960s, but despite unenforceable agreements between nations to minimize it, NASA says a recent anti-satellite missile test by India endangers the space station.And Gary talked about Apple’s new Apple News+ — is it good or bad for the magazine publishing industry? That led to a discussion culminating in a headline Randy found, that there are so many companies pushing subscription services that Poynter says it’s leading to subscription fatique“.
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