BCB IT Stuff recording 17 October 2019 transmission 18/19 October 2019 [0 Min] Hello lifeforms and welcome to IT Stuff, in which we offer our humble opinions on how the world is being reshaped by information technology. tl;dr we're not entirely convinced. Like, for example Facebook Libra, right, this new money thing that we warned you about before, well Visa Mastercard Paypal eBay and more have all dumped it afore it's even got started. Good call! And we'd better get IT Stuff started before you dump us, specifically that's Kriss over there, and Shi over here, and I'm Colleen Rooney. [2 Min] Yeah er about Facebook. Turns out Snapchat has a highly secret thing called Project Voldemort that's a huge dossier of all the anticompetitive things FB has done (like if you mention Snap on IG it gets buried). Stealing an idea from Twitter, Facebook has a policy that you can't lie in paid-for advertising on Facebook, with one exception: politicians. So presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wound Zuck up by paying for an advert that claimed Zuck had endorsed Trump. And Facebook Dating is a thing now in the States, any concerns about that? And Facebook has bought CTRL-labs, a New York startup that specializes in allowing humans to control computers using their brains via a wristband. Like, you think 'click' and it'll click, or something. And, not their fault but there's now a treaty between the US and UK forcing Facebook, Whatsapp etc to hand over messages on demand from the UK police. Does that make you feel safer? [7 Min] It's been a good month for data breaches. We've got Tesco leaving tens of millions of car parking pictures unsecured on Azure. Cafe Press (they do merch) lost 23m peoples' deets. And as a follow up to the Huawei security thing, in the States they are getting themselves worked up that trains built in China could be spying on them. Yep. Spy trains might surreptitiously monitor their passengers' faces, movements, conversations or phone calls. Or not. Twitter has been using your phone number to advertise at you. Best of the lot, some demented Japanese stalker bloke managed to find a Japanese singer by matching reflections in her eyes on Twitter to her local train station on Google Street view. [12 Min] You're listening to IT Stuff, and we've had a memo from Mrs Trellis of Rawson Road, who says we'd better tell you lots of Ofcom stuff every quarter of an hour, or else we're in bother. So. You are listening to original speech output on licence number CR000021BA/2, I'm still Colleen Rooney, and we're doing the bit that says “facilitation of discussion and the expression of opinion”. cobblers innit. On the subject of Ofcom, new mobile phone usage data says the most talkative people in Britain are in Liverpool 6:51 per voice call and the least talkative? Bradford 3:15 [13 Min] Singularity Watch [SINGULARITY] So you can now get Alexa to sit on your face, Alexa glasses are a thing “Echo Frames”. Deepfake news, in private beta test is a deepfake for your own voice with a thing called Overdub, it's to help you crank out your podcasts youtubes audiobooks, and radio obvsly :) Here's a protip from Facebook for spotting deepfake faces, double eyebrows. Robot news, remember the security guard robot that drowned itself in a shopping mall pond? Well the same brand of robot has been in the news again. It's 5 feet tall blue and white with Police on it and trundles round making some park in the States safe. But a fight broke out so a woman pressed the panic button on the top. Did it call for help? No. It said “Step out of the way”, rolled away playing a tune and kept saying “Please keep the park clean”. And Microsoft is going to use AI to bleep out rude words from Xbox live gaming. [19 Min] Still another ten minutes to fill up, wanna do some news quickies? • Amazon in the states has ordered a hundred thousand electric trucks. • The University of the West of England is working on mycelial network computers. • Xiaomi has a phone out that has displays on the front and back and sides. • The Queen's Peach promises gigabit broadband for everybody. • Brass neck of the Month is our astronaut Tim Peake who was headlining a Microsoft AI spectacular, he recalled that time he dialled the wrong number from space and blamed it on Excel “I imported my contacts address book in Excel and all the 9s got rounded up to 0s”. [23 Min] Time for Go Home Elon you're drunk, this month he's got blamed for something he hasn't done. A year ago Elon Musk pretended he'd bought Fortnite and was going to shut it down to, quote, save those kids from eternal virginity. Well, this week Fortnight shut itself down except for a swirling black hole thing and people seriously thought it was the Muskageddon, er no it was a publicity stunt for the next season. Meh. [25 Min] And that's all we've got, so to play us out here's the best bit of the show, David The Hoff Hasselhoff has got a new covers album out, and like we'll never know how this happened but he's done a Jesus and Mary Chain cover. Crikey. Tarra!