In This Episode: The FBI wants you to reboot your router — but is that enough? (The REAL story is how they know about this.) No, Amazon’s Alexa isn’t sending everything you say to others. Star Wars Solo. And countries are pushing to go cashless — but how does that affect buskers?!
Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:31 — 25.5MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True and the Meme site Randy’s Random.
- 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
- Atari co-founder Ted Dabney died this weekend. He talked about being forced out of the company in a 2010 podcast.
- The FBI wants you to reboot your router, but how they know is the interesting part of the story.
- The “Alexa is recording everything” controversy is completely overblown: Amazon isn’t eavesdropping, it was the user who was at fault.
- And really: stop using “formulas” for your passwords: As Lifehacker points out, Password Formulas Don’t Fool Hackers. Randy mentioned a site that will show if your password has been found in the available lists of compromised passwords. It’s part of the Have I Been Pwned site. It reports, for instance, that the password 12345678 “has been seen 2,680,521 times before” in those lists, which shows just how stupid a lot of users are.
- Gary and Randy went on a side rant on grammar. A grammar meme is Randy’s most-viral Facebook post: You Are Judged By Your Grammar has been shared (as of this writing) 1,113,443 times.
- Gary saw the new Star Wars movie Solo, and manages to give it a thumbs up. Randy rolled his eyes a bit about how the Hollywood Reporter called its weekend box office Dismal (since softened to “Soft” in the headline) when the gross was $168 million. (But yeah, we know: it cost $250 million to make it, and Rogue One did better.)
- That went into a side chat about MoviePass, and the bozos who try to take your carefully reserved seat. Hey, grabbing a better seat doesn’t work at concerts or on airplanes. Move!
- As countries push to go cashless (led by Sweden), how will traditionally cash-only businesses survive? London has a solution for buskers.
- And Kevin threw in an “Easter Egg” right at the very end. 🙂
“And countries are pushing to go cash-only — but how does that affect buskers?!” Shouldn’t that be cash-less? and “(But yeah, we know: it cost $250 million to make it, and Rogue One had did better.)” is “had did better” correct?
Yes, and no! Both corrected. You may be able to tell I was too tired to be writing stuff at that hour! 🙂
I won’t leave a review on I-tunes because I don’t use it.
Great podcasts. Randy and Leo have blogs I read regularly.
Thanks, Bill, for your kind words. But yeah, if you’re not an iTunes user, it’s pretty hard to leave a review there. 🙂