In This Episode: How to tell if click-bait stories are worth paying attention to. Amazon Web Services accidentally reveals GoDaddy internal “trade secret” documents. New AI finds who was overlooked by Wikipedia — and it’s mostly women.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04:18 — 29.5MB)
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!
- Gary Rosenzweig host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- In the warmup, Gary’s back from his trip through Central Europe by rail to see Venice, Vienna, Budapest and Prague, and he visited a Globe Museum and the Apple Museum. Randy is still trying to sell his house, and buy a new one. And Leo finished Orange is the New Black (NO SPOILERS!), and fired up the latest World of Warcraft expansion on Monday’s release.
- Breach of the Week: Amazon Web Services is in more places than you might think. Example? Leo talked about an AWS error that exposed GoDaddy business secrets. (Wait: GoDaddy uses AWS?! ZDNet) As part of that discussion, who are the biggest cloud storage providers? Amazon is not number one. A different ZDNet article says who.
- Randy talked about a new Artificial Intelligence application that has spotted 40,000 “prominent” scientists that were overlooked by Wikipedia — mostly women. It even writes a draft article when it finds one! (The Verge)
- Gary outlined his 3-point test for whether to pay attention to click-baity articles, such as this one on “Zero Day” exploits, which claims there’s a new Apple macOS vulnerability paves the way for system compromise with a single click. Yeah, probably not. Gary’s criteria: 1. Does it require physical access to the machine? 2. Does it require that you are already logged in to a user account? 3. Does it require that malware already be installed on the machine? If so, probably not a big deal when it comes to the real world. Leo responded with his 2-point test: 1) How Likely is it to impact real users? 2) Is there something users can do about it? If not, chill!
- And as we wound down, Gary started work on 11th edition of his best-selling book, My iPad. Randy installed an outdoor antenna to flood his back yard with WiFi, thanks to the less-than-$80 EnGenius Access Point/Bridge (and with 2 of them, you can do multi-mile point-to-point).
Hi,
I was catching up on some podcasts the other day, and caught Randy talking about his networking set up.
I provide small business network services, and thought you all might want to look at Ubiquitis offerings. They provide a ton of professional level networking equipment at very reasonable price points. I do buy and resell/install a fair amount of their stuff, but I’m not directly affiliated with them in any way. Just thought they might appeal to the lot of you next time you need to change or upgrade. Not quite consumer level plug and play, but generally simple set up UIs that any techy type can figure out.
For example the wireless shot from Randy’s house to office could have been easily handled with a pair of their nano bridges for closer to $200.
The reason mine was so expensive isn’t just because it’s pro-level, but because I bought it 10+ years ago! (And amazingly, it still works.) Yep, definitely know there are much cheaper — and better (e.g., higher speed) solutions today.
But thanks for the suggestion (and for listening!)