In This Episode: Microsoft pays a boatload of money for GitHub: will that affect open source software? We bring in a guest to talk about it. Now that Net Neutrality is officially repealed, now what? And a prediction about GDPR.
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True and the Internet Spam Primer.
- 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.
- Greg Bulmash, programmer with experience at IMDB, Microsoft, and Amazon, and the author of one of the first online virals, the McDonalds job application, and is active on GitHub.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- Yes, we skipped last week since several of us couldn’t make it.
- In the warmup, Randy mentioned the nearby 416 Fire near Durango is choking SW Colorado with smoke that is even affecting the Denver area: Gary can see it! Kevin has launched two new reference web sites, Paper Size Reference and Mathematical Constants. Gary launched a new iOS game app, Scenic Solitare, and went on a hike and used apps to help: Topo Maps+ and PeakFinder. And Greg walked the Lard Butt 1K in Seattle, and is getting up to speed with his new job at Amazon Web Services, which powers large swaths of the Internet.
- We spent a fair amount of time talking about the big news in the geek world, Microsoft buying GitHub (for $7.5 billion!): how will that affect Open Source software? Is it a good thing, or bad? (Ars Technica)
- Breach of the Week: a vulnerability in the Steam online gaming platform left users vulnerable for 10 years, but it appears no one’s information was actually leaked …that anyone knows of. It was found by a security researcher, according to Motherboard on Vice.
- Net Neutrality officially ended today (Monday). Now what? We explored various angles.
- That delved into a side chat about the GDPR privacy rules, and Randy (author of the crazy lawsuit book True Stella Awards) predicts there will be “private” lawsuits filed against even small web sites for technical violations — as has happened with the American with Disabilities Act (aka the ADA). Greg then related the story of him being sued for $25 million over a small web project, with a mention of a site that tracks such “extortion” tactics, Extortion Letter Info.
- Heading into the calendar, Greg is going to the Raspberry Pi Foundation workshop, Gary is studying changes in Apple OSs, Kevin is gearing up for the KansasFest Apple II convention, Randy is reading How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs, as recommended by co-host Leo, and is finding it fascinating.