BCB IT Stuff recording 21 August 2019 transmission 22/23 August 2019 [0] Howdy ho! Somehow you've ended up listening to IT Stuff, opinion based topical geekshow. If you like analogies, we're the suspicious brown foam washed up on the blue flag beach that is BCB Radio 106.6fm. Here as usual are my human companions Kriss and Shi. [2 Min] We're kicking off with Don't Be Evil [EVIL] This month's evil is sponsored by a company called Moviepass. As the name suggests this was, still is, a firm that flogged all the movies you can watch for a fixed fee, $9.99, the silly so and so's set the price so low that the more subscriptions they got the more money they lost. And this came to a crisis point a year ago when they had to shut down temporarily to get an emergency bank loan to carry on. What happened next? At the time people thought it was just a bad unreliable service but it turns out Moviepass deliberately changed the passwords of half the subscribers so they couldn't use the service and told them they were working on a technical issue. And then they started to pretend that there were no more screenings. [5 Min] Artificial Intelligence, facial recognition has been in the news, we've been warning about it for years. The potato guy in China. The woman whose face was on an advert on a bus. But it's not all evil. Our NHS is setting up an AI Lab, £250m for starters. We can do that with Alexa and WebMD. And British Airways is going to distract passengers from their regular IT meltdowns with magic hats ... in first class. Finally, a survey found that people actually don't mind losing their jobs so long as it's an AI that's taking over. What people really hate is losing their jobs to other people through outsourcing and globalisation. [8 Min] Security fail of the month, it turns out that a building security system named Biostar 2 used in 1 1/2 Million buildings around the world had a global database of 28 million records right out in the open on the internet. Access codes, fingerprints, facial recognition and all that, for getting into, well, you name it, banks warehouses businesses, whatever. Hack of the Month is also Fail of the Month. Come on down someone called Droogie, he's a security researcher in California. Here's his big idea, over there you can choose your own car number plate. What if, he thought, what if your number plate was NULL. The word NULL. Maybe the motoring fines system would go sproing and never be able to fine you. What actually happened was he started getting fines from all the other cases where the system didn't have a number. $12,049 later, plod is refusing to let him off and he's sulking and won't change his number. [12 Min] This is BCB Radio 106.6 and some of you might still be listening to IT Stuff. I dunno, it's ok to mentally tune out innit. We're not even here, this is recorded, no point pretending. ProTip of the Month, the Kinsey Institute, yes that one, the one that researches, erm, jiggy-jiggy, it's a proper academic paper, they say folk who do texts with lots of emoji get more dates and end up with more, err, more betterer, err social life. Statistics don't lie. [13 Min] Youtube news [YOUPOOP] You can't own the minor scale! Let's talk about a legal verdict in a copyright dispute between Katy Perry and a rapper named Flame. Over to Adam Neely on Youtube to explain [KATYPERRY] Why is this a disaster? ... It's not all bad news, YouTube are changing the rules on copyright disputes, “manual claims” no longer permitted. Finally, here's another ProTip from Boing Boing. If you find yourself at a neo-nazi rally, play some copyrighted music really loud. They won't be able to put it on Youtube. [17 Min] Eco News [ECONEWS] So it turns out that windfarm energy is now cheaper than natural gas. So who do we trust more, the Russians or Lancashire? Tricky. Anyway if you're up for a bargain, get this, there's going to be 20 electric vehicle charging points around Bradford that'll be free to use until Oct 2021, already started at Vicar Lane, can this be true? All you need is a car, eg. experimental flying car from NEC in Japan, it's a one person giant quadrocopter with 3 wheels. Less radical, Hyundai are gonna flog cars with a solar panel roof. Better idea than the experiment in France making a road out of solar panels. After a 2 year trial, turns out the critics were right. FAIL. [21 Min] Right! Plugging a couple of local events, Wuthering Bytes next week in Hebden Bridge, dunno if there's tickets still for the Friday but there's a whole week of it, including Open Source Hardware Camp if you want to have a go like soldering up electronics and stuff. Another way to be a cool kid, Bradford Coder Dojo is starting up again for school age wannabe hackers, 28th September (that's a Saturday morning), bradford-coderdojo.github.io for deets and reg. [23 Min] Go Home Elon, after a poor showing last month we've got two manifestations of Musk. First up, a press release from his startup company for brain/computer interfaces, Neuralink. So uhh “The plan is to access the brain via a hole less than eight millimeters across. This small hole would allow Neuralink to implant an even smaller (4mm x 4mm) chip and its associated wiring into the brain” etc etc yuck. Second, he's gone back to tweets about terraforming the planet Mars. His idea? “Nuke Mars” he tweeted. Yep he wants to nuke the ice caps on Mars to release carbon dioxide to make global warming happen on Mars. Lovely. He followed up: “T-shirt soon”. [25 Min] And that's it from us, enjoy your bank holiday folks, a bientot [AUGMUSIC]