In This Episode: Big changes coming to music copyrights. Google backpedals on WWW. Android turns 10. Do you answer your phone if you don’t know who’s calling? Scrabble is OK with EW.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01:15 — 28.1MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True.
- 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, Randy was called out to help a medical chopper land — and was then drafted to go to the crash himself as a medic. His meme site’s Princess Bride series starts here. Gary’s new iOS Mojave course launched. And Kevin 1) ordered a Tesla Model 3, 2) got his Twitter feed back thanks to keyword muting, and 3) Recommends the book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers.
- Randy has a follow-up to Episode 39: Google is backing away from removing “www.” and “m.” from URLs in Chrome after a user backlash (ZDnet).
- Gary talked about the Music Modernization Act moving through a unanimous(!) U.S. Congress that would change and update the way artists and songwriters get paid from streaming media companies. The odd thing: everyone seems to be pretty happy with the bill: music publishers, artists, and streaming companies. (Billboard magazine, here and here.)
- Randy noted Android turned 10 on Sunday. C|Net offers 6 ways the first Android phone changed absolutely everything.
- Kern baby kern: Kevin says there’s a new font to pad out your school essays: Times Newer Roman (which led to a discussion about how school is changing: who turns in printed essays anymore?!)
- Don’t Answer That! Kevin also notes that there are multiple reports that “Nearly half of all calls to cell phones will be spam or scams by next near” (C|net, Fortune), but it seems to be a story planted by a company selling caller-ID and scam blocking, so is it legit? (On the other hand, all three hosts say their cell call volume is already >50% spam!) Which led to Randy asking the others the question, Do you answer calls from unknown numbers? He says no; the others say no …but.
- And last, Scrabble has added 300 new words to its official dictionary (OK is finally OK!)
Just listened to the podcast and the comments about the vinyl record store. Wumo had a great comic about that on Monday.
P.S. The system erased my message because I didn’t click on the prove you are a human before typing. That is also a comic by Wumo, yesterday.
Heh! Both are good.
No more breach of the week?
We will do them when there’s something of interest (and can be learned from). We’ll decide on a case-by-case basis when they happen.