In This Episode: Relief from Robocalls is coming. Will your next ID be implanted? Exploring planet Mercury. Might Elon Musk tweet for …eternity?! Media player vulnerabilities.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:58 — 26.6MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of This is True and the Randy behind the meme site Randy’s Random.
- 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, Randy saw First Man about Neil Armstrong (and liked it), Kevin visited the Living Computer Museum and Microsoft, and went to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Leo took a bunch of pictures of (d’awwww!) Corgi puppies, and Gary is working on his new web site, WPtipsandHacks.com — announced here first!
- Gary brought up a story about a Swedish company that is implanting chips into peoples’ hands as a form of ID (NPR). That turned into a discussion of carrying less stuff, and Palm’s new tiny phone which Popular Mechanics panned, even if they like some aspects.
- Randy says relief from robocalls is coming soon, thanks to the terribly named STIR/SHAKEN initiative by a consortium of phone companies.
- Randy is also enthusiastic with the recent launch of two spacecraft on seven-year voyage to planet Mercury — and why it’s taking 7 years to get there (CBS News.
- Leo brought up the concept of Digital Avatars of real people — lasting posthumously? While Elon Musk is the clickbait, the ramifcations are both fascinating and scary (Teslarati).
- Adding on to last week’s discussion, Kevin notes that there are newly found critical vulnerabilities in the VLC and MPlayer Media Playerers …which have likely been there for years (TechRadar), which led to a brief discussion about Winamp being updated, and that Archive.org has a large collection of Winamp Skins.
- In the outtro, Gary will be working more on his new site, Leo is updating the Best of Ask Leo!, Randy is continuing work on his new B2B site, which isn’t ready to be announced quite yet, and Kevin is learning Python to fool around with programming again.