In This Episode: Reader question: answered. Facebook gives back (a little!) Domain names, Falcon Heavy, and …CAT scan malware?!
This Week’s Hosts
- Randy Cassingham, founder of 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.
- Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- In the warmup, Randy talked about doing a Facebook Fundraiser for a group he works with, the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team — which brought in more than $1,000 for the non-profit. That led to a longer discussion about FB fundraisers, and fundraising in general. Kevin renewed a big pile of domain names, which freaked out a credit card company (which led to a discussion of credit card notifications — a good idea to watch for fraud), and took two second prizes in the 10-line BASIC programming contest. Leo did the “Web hosting shuffle” — moving a site four times in a year to get everything needed for a site he was helping with, which led to a discussion about hosting, IP addresses, and more. And Gary helped people at a Meetup with their WordPress sites, and mentioned the common problems he’s seeing.
- Randy talked about the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, and the three-fer landing of its boosters — though the central booster was lost at sea.
- Got a virus at the hospital? Researchers created malware that can add or remove cancer signs from CT scans. The results easily fooled radiologists, even when they were told the scans may have been tampered with, which led to a discussion of how insular communities can be led to think they’re “safe” from intrusion and fail to take basic security precautions. Leo also mentioned the use of AI in medicine. Turns out he was thinking of Randy’s podcast on the subject, Extending Thinking Beyond Humans.
- Gary talked about how an iPhone security feature makes some iPhones less recyclable, but the solution is to disable it when you hand it in, not before. Forbes says a recycler lost 66,000 phones that way.
- And Kevin has yet another GPS Rollover update: New York City’s traffic light and water monitoring systems were among the victims of the rollover, again apparently from not keeping software updated despite an expensive contract that was supposed to help them.
Just a heads up but android phones, especially Samsung devices, have the lock capabilities. We have had several customers fire someone who has a corporate phone and then find they can no longer use the phone because it is locked to the ex employees personal Gmail account. The only way around it is to send the phone back to the manufacturer to get it resets. We recommend that companies have the user unlock the phone as part of the termination process.