In This Episode: Meet us in Denver tonight. BASIC. The Internet Archive sucks up Google+ (in a hurry!) Office Depot is busted in fraud scheme. Space junk. And will Apple News+ help, or hurt, the publishing industry? Either way: “subscription fatigue” is growing.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:06:46 — 30.6MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True.
- Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
- 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
- In the warmup: we’re all together in Denver, and we’re hosting a Meetup this evening if you’re in the area. Kevin got a haul of old computers: pictures here. Kevin also read Endless Loop: The History of the BASIC Programming Language, and talked about Jaroslav Švelch, author of Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Gary talked about selling his car, which has several tech tie-ins.
- Kevin talked about the Internet Archive, which is more than old web pages. Its “archive team” is doing a side project trying to save Google Plus before it shuts down completely (it has broken 1.2 petabytes). The Archive is sustained by donations — and the guys encouraged that.
- Randy talked about Office Depot being caught doing fake “malware remediation” — lying that customer computers have malware so they can “fix” it for a fee. They’ve been fined $35 million by the Federal Trade Commission, The Verge says.
- After seeing a news article in February, Gary wondered if “space junk” is an actual problem. Randy says yes: not only from space junk going back to the 1960s, but despite unenforceable agreements between nations to minimize it, NASA says a recent anti-satellite missile test by India endangers the space station.
- And Gary talked about Apple’s new Apple News+ — is it good or bad for the magazine publishing industry? That led to a discussion culminating in a headline Randy found, that there are so many companies pushing subscription services that Poynter says it’s leading to subscription fatique“.