BCB IT Stuff recording 12 December 2018 transmission 13/14 December 2018 [0] Hello everybody, this is IT Stuff for December 2018, regular listeners will know that in these difficult times only IT Stuff can stare without fear into the abyss of chaos. And what do we see swirling around down there? There’s the O2 outage, Facebook in deep doodoo, Marriott Hotels leaking billions of guests’ passport details, and here’s Kriss and Shi :) [2 Min] Let’s start with Don’t Be Evil Google! [EVILJINGLE] this won’t take long; Google Plus is shutting down early. And a contractor has sued them after he worked on an undercover project to map British shopping centres, he’s a UK citizen of Moroccan descent and got picked up repeatedly as a terrorist and Google wouldn’t admit what he was really doing. Settled for £4000 apparently. [5 Min] Let’s move on to the turmoil at Tumblr, now under new ownership that has decided to ban porn. From Tumblr. From 19th December. “female-presenting nipples”. The net’s full of examples of stuff - Tumblr is incorrectly flagging as porn - Picassos, Christ on the cross, vases, a carrot... [9 Min] Youtube update! someone’s done a Youtube rich list and coming out on top is a seven year old American kid Ryan, out of Ryan Toys Reviews, who made more than 17 million quid last year. [RYANTOYREV] NBC News asked Ryan why he was successful. “Because I’m entertaining and I’m funny.” but the money comes from adverts, sponsorship and in-channel Ryan-based merch. [12 Min] Dr Shifro from Belarus claims to be able to rescue your computer from ransomware, for a fee he can crack the code and restore your computer. Well, reputable security company Checkpoint did a bit of a sting, turns out he does this by contacting the bad guys, negotiating a bulk discount, and adding a slice for himself on the top. They reckon he’s making maybe £150k per year. [14 Min] You're listening to BCB 106.6FM, this is IT Stuff, otherwise available at itstuff.org.uk. Quick check on our pretend investments! Bitcoin’s doing great, $2700, down from over 19 thousand exactly a year ago, and Ethereum’s even better, 98% down. Floyd Mayweather just got fined $600k for plugging cryptocurrencies for money on the twitters. Is cryptocurrency a scam? Maywether got paid $300k to shill that stuff... was paid in dollars, not in BTC [16 Min] Anniversary Corner, [ANNIVERSARY] 50 years ago the Engelbart “mother of all demos” invented the future, the mouse + copy/paste, hyperlinks, collaborative document editing, [ENGELBART] [19 Min] Singularity Watch, did you hear the one where a famous Chinese businesswoman Dong Mingzhu got on the bad side of the Chinese Police? A camera with facial recognition technology spotted her crossing a busy road where it’s not allowed. Turns out, it was her picture in an advert for her electric company on the side of a bus. Here’s another one, somebody trained an AI on loads of fingerprints and came up with a random fingerprint generator, they fed the fake fingerprints into biometric authentication software and got a 20% pass rate. And researchers in the Netherlands and France reckon their AI can spot lies in President Trump’s twitters. they found significant linguistic differences between factually accurate and inaccurate Trump tweets, and used this finding to construct a language-based lie detection model with 73% accuracy. Correct statements contained more positive feelings while incorrect statements were more evasive and had more negations, tentative words, and comparisons, less # and @ symbols and money-related words were found to be more likely to be false. And lastly an Amazon robot at a warehouse in the states punctured a can of bear repellant spray and landed 24 Amazon humans in hospital. [24 Min] Go home Elon You’re Drunk yet another interview, he estimates there’s a 70% chance he’ll be going to Mars maybe as soon as 7 years, “Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than on Earth, there’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space. We think you can come back but we’re not sure." Does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people? [25 Min] To play us out, Shatner’s got a christmas album out! Rudolf by Shatner [DECMUSIC]