BCB IT Stuff recording 22 August 2018 transmission 23/24 August 2018 [0] Hello listeners and welcome to IT Stuff your monthly sober reflection on information technology and its serious consequences for you, its victims. Yer what? you don’t care, big business doesn’t care, I don’t care, Kriss doesn’t care, and Shi only cares on Wednesdays when she goes to cello practice. And our pal Dick only cares cos PC world has just lost his data. Anyway. [2 Min] If you want an illustration of modern morality come with me to biggest wildfire in US History, raging now at Mendocino in California. Santa Clara County Fire dept has a large incident command and control truck and it has a Verizon contract for unlimited high speed wireless. Guess what happened when their unlimited data allowance had used 25 gig - Verizon throttled the command and control truck to a trickle, for weeks, while they haggled over upgrading the unlimited contract from 37-99 a month to 39-99 or 99-99. [5 Min] Another illustration of 21 st century life MEP Julia Reda put online a paper detailing why the EU proposal for compusory automatic content filters (Art 13 of the copyright directive) was a bad idea. It got de-indexed by Google’s voluntary automatic content filter. [7 Min] Data breaches: (dixons pcworld superdrug) should we worry? -> haveibeenpwned [9 Min] You know we’ve mentioned about face recognition well in America the ACLU proved a point by feeding Amazon’s system with 25,000 criminal mugshots and all 535 members of Congress. It decided that 28 congressitians were crims, disproportionately people of colour. The test cost them $12.33 by the way. [11 Min] Security nightmare of the month Evil hackers can use your Belkin Wemo Insight smartplug to hack your smart teevee and spy on you. (Ok it’s not so good as the fishtank and the casino the other month). Meanwhile there’s a new device for keeping your bitcoin secure, the BitFi secure wallet turns out to be a $30 phone that you can open with your fingernails, somebody cracked it so thoroughly that they could play Doom on it. Downtime of the month, Gatwick Airport’s departure screens, and don’t try to buy a Railcard. [14 Min] You're listening to IT Stuff, Cash or card? cash! Check out itstuff.org.uk [14 Min] [ANNIVERSARY] The Pirate Bay is 15 years old [16 Min] [WORLD OF STUFF] Couple of local projects, WY fire & rescue drones on BBC Breakfast, and there’s a new 5GHz high speed wireless in the city centre. Meanwhile out in China, their regulatory authority for games hasn’t approved any in months. And Apple’s dropping OpenGL and OpenCL. [19 Min] [SINGULARITY WATCH] As seen in The Register, Microsoft’s chatbot Xiaoice has composed a book of poems, wanna hear one? She married many colours in the world The stars are shining for days The red sun See Miles of Angels in the world I was like a dream Look at the stars that Twinkle The Sun on the West Hill That frog is in the shallow water She married many colours in the world Here’s what the critcs said: “It disgusted me with its slippery tone and rhythm. The sentences were aimless and superficial, lacking the inner logic for emotional expression”. Quick shout out to Facebook, which adorned a message to a survivor of the Indonesian earthquake with Party Ballons and confetti! This is the same Facebook that wants data from everybody’s bank. [22 Min] Local Events Coder Dojo Shut until September [23 Min] Go Home Elon You're Drunk It’s been a difficult month, cos he said so. Let’s ignore the Tesla money thing. First, rapper Azealia Banks moaned on Instagram that she had waited while Elon’s girlfriend (the rapper Grimes) “coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on twitter while on acid” and more. We’ll spare you the intermediate stages but now Elon has unfollowed Grimes on the Twitters :O [25 Min] Musicstuffs In memory of Pound World we leave you with: Pound Shop Boys - Come to my party! C64 Cracktro - STRIKE FORCE (1988)