TEH 034: Scotty! Beam Me Up

In This Episode: Sure, give prison inmates tablets and online access — what could go wrong? Hacking attendees at a cybercurrency conference nets $5 million. Dropbox gets bigger. Star Trek sound effects.

This Week’s Hosts

  • Randy Cassingham, founder of the Internet’s oldest entertainment newsletter, This is True.
  • Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
  • Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
  • Longer Bios on the Hosts page.

Show Notes

  • In the warmup, Randy couldn’t get online at a hotel (except…), Kevin is finally back from the Apple II conference KansasFest, and then a side trip to the California Extreme Arcade Game Show, and Leo hosted 100+ (yes, at least a hundred!) Corgis in his backyard. The photos Leo mentioned are here. The event is a fundraiser for CorgiAid.
  • Kevin talked about how Idaho prison inmates exploited a JPad prison tablet vulnerability to steal $225,000 in credits (The Verge).
  • Meanwhile, a hacker used social engineering to allegedly steal $5 million from attendees at a cryptocurrency conference (Vice).
  • Japan may have its own “Y2K” like bug coming up, thanks the the peculiar way the country’s calendar works (The Guardian).
  • Randy talked about the death of Star Trek (TOS) sound designer Doug Grindstaff; Randy wrote about him today for his newsletter, and the hosts talked about creating sound effects in the analog tape era. (You can buy an album of Trek’s sound effects on vinyl, cassette, or CD from Amazon.
  • Dropbox is increasing the amount of cloud storage it provides — but only to paying customers (Dropbox).
  • And while he was in Kansas, Kevin went to the Museum of Independent Telephony.

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