In This Episode: A guest from down under. 1963 computer speech demo. Viruses as expensive art. The death of iTunes. Bad IoT things happen when clouds go down. Breach of the week — Aussie edition. Happy 10th birthday (but does anyone use?) Bing!
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01:50 — 29.6MB)
This Week’s Hosts
- Leo Notenboom, “Chief Question Answerer” at tech education site Ask Leo!
- Kevin Savetz, web site publisher and Computer Historian at Atari Podcast.
- Michael Mulhern, retro tech enthusiast and geek.
- Longer Bios on the Hosts page.
Show Notes
- In the warmup, we welcomed guest host Michael Mulhurn, another retro-computing enthusiast to the podcast. Kevin talked about digitizing “Hee Saw Dhuh Kaet”, a 1963 computer speech demonstration, now available at archive.org. Leo once again tested remote computing and access from his travel trailer, in the guise of visiting out of the area family.
- Kevin wonders why a virus-packed laptop sold as artwork for $1.3 million. We also discussed the “Malware Museum” where you can experience malware without the bad side effects.
- Leo discussed the breaking news that Apple is dissolving iTunes into new apps (via the BBC, but there are many sources). Many people think it’s about time, but of concern to Leo was the phrase “iTunes will remain unchanged on Windows platforms.”
- We discussed the major outage at Google, affecting primarily the US’s east coast, that impacted Nest users who couldn’t do things like unlock doors or use their air conditioning. Some devices just need manual fallbacks! Turns out to be unrelated, but Google Fi (we decided it rhymes with “eye”) also had an outage that prevented people from using the phone service.
- We resurrect “breach of the week” for Michael to share that even Australia has ’em, this time a poorly designed money transfer interface at WestPac, one of Australia’s larger banks (that Michael was quick to point out he didn’t opt in to when it was first offered).
- Bing turned 10, but Leo wonders … is anyone using it? Turns out 2.4% are. What was more surprising were the rankings of the top six search engines, and we all got our guess at number two wrong.