All of your data, all of it

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders. Episode 79, recorded Friday, 7th of April 2017. All of your data, all of it, with your hosts, Mike Wise and Steve Rogers. Hey Steve.

You can call me the data monster. You are the cookie version of the data monster. You mean the data version of the cookie monster. So last week on Space Welders.

That's not Sesame Street's new character, isn't it? The data monster. The data monster. They have cookie monster.

It's close. So last week on Space Welders we were attending Cast Away and thank you very much for everyone. And we had a slightly later than usual release of the episode because we had plenty of interviews and other things that we wanted to include and hopefully everyone was happy with that. This week it's back to normal.

Back to business. So strap on. So strap on. Get ready.

Strap on? Strap in you mean. Strap in. Yeah.

That's the one. You may strap on. I mean. Sure.

Sure. If you're listening to this. If it's USB connected. If you're listening to this while you're driving be careful.

Pull over. Handbrake on. Handbrake on. I mean they have laws against phones.

Anyway let's move swiftly on from that one. Swiftly on. So whilst we're away a couple of things happened. A lot of stuff has happened and generally every day something happens at the moment in 2017.

What a year to be alive. Back in October 2016 they were bringing in some new laws in the states around the Federal Communications Commission and what they were attempting to achieve with these laws is that they're basically trying to open up access to the data which is captured through internet service providers. So if you're paying for your internet service provider in the states at the moment like Comcast or whatever, Verizon, and they previously weren't able to use any of the data that for example your browsing habits which they would see through capturing in logs and other things which they would possibly be doing. But they were never really able to use that data for any other purpose other than their own which is probably a part of their terms and conditions.

But now a law has been passed since we've been away. It's now into law. So it was signed by Trump allowing the providers to now sell the information for profit. So I'm sure of course they won't do that.

That would be bad. They may be allowed to do it but I'm sure that they won't. Since then Comcast, Verizon, Charter, AT&T and a couple of broadband providers have come out and said no no no we're not really going to sell your information even though that we're now legally able to do that. So they might.

Okay. So which one's going to be first? Comcast. Yeah.

Totally. Comcast. Without a doubt. They will go and mine your information.

So how is it they're possibly doing this? So every time that you go to a website you're requesting a name for that website, a name off through the name server. It's then resolving to an IP address and then the web browser through the resolution to an IP address is talking to a web server and it goes through a route of interaction across the internet to the other server where it serves you the web page and the web page returns. And so the ISP sees all of that edge interaction outward and inward.

So they're now able to quite willingly track all of the sorts of sites and the IPs that you go to. But I think more importantly for law enforcement they're probably retaining this anyway if folks from government agencies wish to look at where you've been going for example like dark web or into the naughty sites then they've probably got this tracking in place. And they're probably using things like Lattice and big data techniques to be able to extract a lot of that information. So I think also having the law there but then having the technical capability of inspecting that data and understanding what your browsing habits were.

So in Australia this has been done in a small scale. I know that we've been involved with projects where they were doing this against the school systems. They're providing internet services to school systems and what they were doing was looking at the browsing habits of children and then critiquing schools by their browsing habits and altering funding based on that. But if kids were searching more math sites and more science-y sites then this was high fives for the principals of those schools.

Slightly different in this case. This is just straight up now your privacy is, this is just another step towards invading privacy and another step towards, you know, there's going to be workarounds. The internet always finds a way. You'll find people who are selling telling services or anonymous services start to take off in the coming months I'm pretty sure.

So folks like TunnelBear, which we've mentioned before, provide VPN tunnels. Another way you can do it is through SSH and various other techniques similar to that where you can just buy or get a free tier something from Amazon or from AWS or Rackspace and just set up your own anonymous proxy and off you go. You can start surfing the web that way. That's generally the considered technical way of doing it.

So you VPN to this thing and then you anonymous browse from there onwards to do whatever it is you need to do. But if it's going to come down to that I think people might just provide that as a service, Steve. Well, I mean, the whole thing's kind of all related to what we've talked about with regards to everything moving to the cloud and IoT and you don't really know where your data is so your data could be sitting on one of these US servers that they can sell off and all of that good stuff even though you're an Australian company. So it's kind of scary even though they say, oh, we're not going to do anything bad with it just yet.

Yeah, right. Well, I mean, there might be solutions for folks to use VPN at home or be more aware of some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing such a thing in cloaking your browsing habits and history, obviously, tracking, you know, there's a certain amount of tracking that does go on even in terms of how sites are reporting that back to you. You've probably noticed we've also talked about it again before the cookies issue and what the EU wants you to do with cookies. But I think it's important to understand that this is now passed into law so it's another step towards whatever net neutrality, like Trump is very much against net neutrality, so that, you know, we could be looking at something, a very different future in a couple of years where the internet was a levelling playing field for all companies to participate in no matter who you were, whether you were Apple with billions and millions of dollars to spend or you were just Sam the Umbrella Man with five bucks and a website on WordPress, you were still equal, had equal footing in the web.

So there, you know, is something going to come and change, but again, you know, folks internet will always find a way around these things because it's, you know, again, just trying to put your fingers in a damn wall, but, you know, there might be improvements in terms of the VPN standards and how VPN works, there might be more lightweight tools out there for people to get on board with or just pop across to Linux, you've got stuff there already. But if you wanted to talk to somebody, Steve, and have your own IVR, not just have your own VPN, but have your own IVR, how would you go about it? Every time you just pick up the phone you just talk in a semi-robotic voice and make people push the buttons. Press one for Steve, press two for Mike, press three for Jukes.

So Amazon have recently released a new service, which was a bit confusing because when I read this, I thought, oh, I can have my own Indian call center. No. So Amazon Connect is a new service from Amazon, of course, to provide what seems to be an IVR call center management thingy bobs. So like you can press one for Bill Shock, press two for outages, press three for insulting taunt.

Well, it's essentially record a phone tree, isn't it? Make your own phone tree now in seven easy steps. Push one to continue. So as Amazon says, it's a simple service, it's a cloud-based contact center, but it's got skills-based routing, so it allows you to design how you want to be able to direct your customers.

You can record conversations on this service itself, which is very interesting. I think that is a big request, like for most companies, being able to record what customers had actually said for training purposes and quotes. The other aspect is just integrate it with your various CRMs, so people called, and then when you go and look at the CRM, you'll see a call log or call history or some, be able to recall what was previously done, and also put in sort of interactions with Amazon's other Amazon features, like they've got speech recognition and other sorts of helpful features, which they want to try and use more of in a global way. So I think it's interesting.

So Amazon's just yet again trying- Just to end the monopoly that is Cisco on phones and phone integration services, don't you think? Yeah, so- Cisco's had that market for too long. But if you and your, I'm looking at a Cisco phone now, you and your fancy bridge icon, what even is that? It's just a bunch of lines.

Well, I don't know. Cisco have ruled the roost for a long time here, like you've got it in free format, if you want to do it now, you can get images on Linux, you can get the Asterix system. So Asterix itself is just a self-configured SIP server, and SIP this, that, and the other, and you can connect it to an existing SIP voice protocol-based services for building IVR and having press one for this and press one for that, and voice recording and downloading voice office. So there is a free alternative out there in the Linux world.

So I think it's interesting, you know, Amazon's just basically moving on with just providing everything that's possible. Also keeping on the Amazon note, Jeff Bezos has recently sold like a billion dollars worth of stock. Now the reason why he's doing this is I think he's just cashing his chips in and going off and working on his, well, everyone wants to get into space. In SpaceX, we didn't mention Multiple Way, they've got their reusable rocket technology, which seems to be slightly sort of getting somewhere, but Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin...

It's going up, and then it's coming back down again. Yeah, it's going up and coming back down, being reusable, but Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin, we'll have links in the description, also wants to start getting into space and space contracting, because that just seems to be the way to go at the moment. Also Steve, recently YouTube, they've been blocking a lot of, well, they're in a lot of trouble, big advertisers have been pulling the support, meaning their juicy, juicy advertising dollars, simply because of YouTube not able to have the ads pop up in the right places on the videos and be appropriate, and also controlling the content of the videos. So there's a big sort of restriction push at the moment, so you can browse YouTube in restricted mode and pretty much see nothing, but they've got a big problem where they can't have the videos and the advertising turn up at the right place at the right time, with the right content being content that's not going to offend the particular brand advertisers.

Well, advertisers are finally starting to realise that they can't control what their ads sit beside, like you can with traditional media, television, radio, newspapers, things like that, where you can control when and where your ad will appear, with the automated ads that YouTube serves, they just appear on a video, you can give tags for the ads that you want, and YouTube will do a bit of their magic, their secret sauce. CGP Grey actually yesterday released a very good video about how the YouTube ad algorithm works, it's essentially an auction, so YouTube will say, hey, we need to serve an ad, it's on this video, and this kind of person is watching it, who wants it, and all of the ad bots will bid for it, and the highest ad bot wins, basically. But they're now realising that, okay, maybe that's not so great, because then we can get put beside videos that have hate messages in them, that promote Nazi propaganda, that's PewDiePie, completely unrelated to either of any of those two things, I'm sure. And so these big ad companies, instead of maybe, I don't know, working with YouTube to come to a resolution for this, have just decided to pull their ads completely.

What effect this will actually have on the greater ad revenue, I mean, YouTube's still making billions of dollars, just today they said they're not going to allow channels with less than 10,000 total views to even have ads at all on their videos. So that's a case of trying to stop the proliferation of channels that steal a video, re-upload it, and then it goes viral, and you've got a channel that's stolen it, so you can't monetise until you get a certain number of views. We work with a number of distributors, and one of the biggest problems, or things that we see, is Russian guys uploading content, take the money, and then get blocked, and they go, yeah, okay, fine, they've already got the money. So this is sort of another way of having a flaw that they must get above before it becomes significant or a problem, because by the time you've got 10,000 views total across all of your posts, they would have caught you by then.

But also, YouTube have just recently announced YouTube TV, this is beyond YouTube Red, this is actually a legitimate streaming TV service for networks like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and other sort of cable networks. And Mike, how much would you expect to pay for a service like that? Well, holy shit, it's actually $35 a month. Cancel any time, mind you, cancel any time.

Available only in selected US cities. Available only in selected US cities. Screw you, rest of the world. Available only in San Francisco, probably.

Oh no, we're going to miss out on all of that ESPN programming. Yeah, damn it. No. It seems a bit sport heavy.

So it's got ESPN, you've got just about everything. It does have Sci-Fi Channel on there, so we would be able to see Expanse, like, legit. But you know, wait for it to come up on Netflix. So yeah, they've decided that beyond YouTube Red, they've got extreme cable cutting.

It's too expensive for what it is, and I don't know what the terms are. A lot of the channels that they have in there are traditional cable channels in the US, so I don't know if you also need a cable subscription to get it in the US, which is why it's only available in selected cities. I don't know if you sign up for this, are you still at the mercy of what these networks deign to put up onto the service. A lot of these networks now have, and we talked about this, have their own streaming services in competition to Netflix.

The problem is, now that everything has a service, people are being turned off, because now you've got to subscribe to 10 different services each for $20 a month, rather than one service like Netflix for $30 or whatever. Sure, if there are movies on here that I could watch, like, there is Showtime, but you actually have to pay an extra $11 per month on top of your current subscription. Got to get that price gouging where you can. My god, and then if you want to watch Soccer Plus, that's another $15.

Yeah, but who wants to watch soccer? Who wants to watch soccer? Yeah, so this is above their standard, you know, join YouTube and pay for YouTube Red so you don't get ads, and then they've got YouTube TV. Also, we've been watching this, and I had a story a couple of weeks ago about this, is PS Now.

So PS Now is a gaming streaming service by Sony, and it's sort of been on again, off again. You go onto Wikipedia and you have a look at PS Now, I'll have links in the description, you can work this out for yourself. PS Now is starting to currently advertise again to get in and get games. So the idea is that you have the ability to play PlayStation games, like PlayStation 3 and various other games off their PlayStation Network, in an online format.

So you just need to download a client, you can run it on your PC, you connect your client to the, your game controller to the client, and then you can play things like Red Dead Redemption. So that's the only way I'm probably going to be able to play Red Dead Redemption original flavor is through PS Now. But it is coming to Australia, so I've actually signed up for getting into PS Now, now. But it's not available in Australia just yet, so I think it's interesting, and it's been on again, off again.

I think plenty of people have been trying to do this. Maybe they don't have local servers. I think it's been coming and going from various devices and various games and various prices and things like that. They've kind of been coming in and out.

I barely play my Xbox at home. I barely play it. By barely I mean I don't. If you had a PC, play some Steam games.

I play a modded handheld. I won't say what it is, but I play a modded handheld with a main on it, and then I play my main games. Old school. Grisor.

Yeah, Grisor. So there's all of my Mario stuff. You know, if you just want to play GBA, you know, or GB type games, then that's a perfectly good way to do it. Because you've got kids, so there's a run around the bed, you just wake up in the morning, Saturday, you pull out your handheld and off you go.

So that's a thing. Steve, whether or not PSN now is going up or down, something out there in the coding world is definitely going down. It's going away. And it has been a significant resource for programmers for a very long time.

Oh, what's that, Mike? That would be CodePlex, Steve. No! A Microsoft...

You mean that worse version of GitHub? Well, it used to have an SVN, and then they migrated it over to Git and do all sorts of cool things. And it was a great place. If you had some code and you wanted to share your code and you wanted to show people how amazing your coding skills are...

are, then CodePlex was a place to do it. And it's been around for 11 years, so 2006 when it started. And that was the last time it was updated. Yes, and you can basically, they've got like genres and areas to go and places to find and explore and things to see and do inside of CodePlex.

Predominantly it was all C-sharp examples of code or regularly maintained open source that Microsoft wanted to put out. And generally, you know, you'd find some projects were top of the pops inside of there and then they migrated once sort of GitHub came out. But Microsoft have formed a very significant relationship with GitHub and that seems to be the dominant, you know, code repository sharing. Well, as soon as Microsoft kind of jumped ship with .NET Core and EF Core and ToTheCore and TheCore.

It's a crap movie, by the way. It was really the beginning of the end for CodePlex, wasn't it? I mean, why would you choose a third-party service to host your new hotness of code base on, rather than the one you've already been using? It's clearly because it's better.

It's interesting, there's other services like Bitbucket, which we use, and Visual Studio Team Services. Which no one uses. Which some people use, but anyway. I feel sorry for you.

Look, there's a couple of first, they call it first class ways of getting out of CodePlex. That's an interesting way of describing it. Next you want to describe something, you just put first class on it and people think you're a bit classy. But yeah, so they've got some ways to be able to migrate your code out and do whatever you want to do with it.

They've got a couple of wikis to talk about the things to see and do. Most people just simply just re-upload it back into GitHub and say, hey we're here, and then put a referring link back into CodePlex. But I think it's... It doesn't help when CodePlex shuts down completely.

But one of the interesting things about online code bases, where you've got free software out there, apart from the navigability and discoverability. So GitHub regularly has things to see and do. They've in fact got a trending area where you can go and see trending code base, or trending languages, or you can explore whole topics. Like if you just wanted to get into AI, how would you do it?

And there's a place where you can kind of accumulate things together inside of GitHub. And I go there regularly. It's good fun to sit there and read. It's much as much fun as anything else.

Like one of the things I'll call out this week, Steve, the place that I go for regular read is called Papers We Love. So on GitHub, there's this excellent resource called Papers We Love. And it's pretty much devoted to computer science or topics around computer science. Say for example, gamification, cryptography, computer vision, clustering, caching, biocomputing, AI, API designing, and all that sort of stuff.

But it's just a completely free resource to have. It's companioned with a website called PapersWeLove.org. And it's fantastic if you're just into reading PDFs and stuff. Like when I did Bob, before there was sort of much interest in drones and having your own personal drones, and you wanted to build your own AHRS, how would you do it?

And if you had to understand the maths to go do it, then you would try and scour the internet for PDFs, where people who were talking about Kalman filters and integrals and, you know, a lot of stuff hiding behind complex mathematics. And if you find these papers, I actually found one for Bob, which was written in Spanish, and I decoded the PDF back into English. So I understood at least half of it, but the maths was pretty good. And so I just transferred it and built a Kalman filter, my own AHRS, put it into an Arduino, and off I go.

I had my own little floating robot, which then put guns on it, napalm, you could do that, and then took it to a show. I connected it to a Microsoft Kinect and then demoed it at a show. And everyone died. And everyone died after that.

We went crazy. It was weird, huh? Yeah, it happened. So Papers We Love is on GitHub.

It's a fantastic resource if you want to get into understanding things like combinatorial logic. I was looking for something to do this weekend. Combinatorial logic. And if you're into discrete mathematics, here is the place.

Like speech recognition, if you want to understand how speech recognition works, like the simplest explanation for it is just white noise that's modulated very quickly. And that's my version of it. I mean, that's all I hear when I listen to you talk anyway. That is, yeah.

So that's the MicroBee Talker. That's my impression of MicroBee Talker. That's a pretty old reference. It was the first speech synthesis tool I've ever heard in my life back in the day.

So guys, time for a little bit of media. My wife's been watching Big Little Lies. I think that's... Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet...

Oh no, it's Sweet Little Lies, isn't it? That's the other one. Fleetwood Mac. Is it?

Yeah. Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies. I suppose I should believe you this is the guy listening to 4BH or 4KQ or whatever the hell it was today. I recommend this to you.

Easy listening at work. I have been listening to so much music this week. Coming up next, it's racist arsehole call-in hour. Today I decided that iHeart Radio...

iHeart Radio is pretty big. You can listen to different radio stations across the planet on iHeart Radio. And so I love radio. And you can listen to streaming.

In particular, in Queensland, in this country, in Brisbane in particular, we've got a particular easily listening radio station. And if you want to drive around in your ute, which is an Australian form of transport, Steve, with four wheels and it's got... Pick-up truck. Pick-up truck would be the equivalent.

And you want to have some sort of dodgy easy listening, then 4KQ is for you. And it's streaming. And it's amazing. It had every track you could think of.

And it just does one after another. But to me, it was like a... What's the lemon thing that comes in the middle of a meal? The palate cleanser?

It's like that, but for your brain. Right. Something like that. Or...

The only time I have ever listened... Or the demagnetiser for your brain. The degausser of your brain. The only time I've ever listened to an AM radio station, when I was flying around in little aeroplanes, they have an instrument in them called an ADF, an automatic direction finder, and it uses signals on the AM megahertz band.

And so you could tune it into an AM radio station and it had audio. So you could listen to AM radio instead of the beeping that the beacons normally do. And the indicator, which points towards the station that you tune, would point towards the broadcasting tower of the station. So if you were ever lost, 4KQ could get you home.

Just like it gets you home at five to seven weekdays. That's like the... What do moths fly into? Something similar.

Lights? Yes. So what have you been watching, Steve? It's been very exciting.

So I've recently just started watching Black Mirror, which I'm a little bit behind because it's been out for a little while, but I just got around to watching it. It's on Netflix, three seasons of, and it's really good. It is essentially Twilight Zone modernised. So it's an anthology series.

Every episode is its own standalone little story. And the general idea is that it's about the dangers of technology, or the possible dangers of technology, or a possible end game of technology. So they're all set in the current or very near future. So sort of existential...

A little bit. Some of them are set in the current or... There's no actual monster, right? Well, the monster is usually people.

The monster is people. So one of them, the premise was that everyone... You would rate every interaction with everyone during your day on your phone. And if you had a higher average rating, you would get cheaper mortgage rates, you would get better seats on aeroplanes, you'd get better car hire.

If you had a lower average rating, then people would rate you down, even if they didn't actually interact with you, just because you had a lower rating. And so it was sort of the end goal of what Facebook is, you know, when you start rating your interactions with people. And there was another one where this kid was getting blackmailed on the internet and forced to do things, which was quite a good one. They're all actually really good.

They usually have a twist at the end, you know, like Twilight Zone usually had a twist at the end, things like that. And is this available on Netflix? It's on Netflix. So Netflix bought it after season two, and then season three was made by Netflix or produced by Netflix.

So the first two seasons were before Netflix money, but the first two seasons are still as high quality. It's a very high quality show. The Netflix money hasn't changed it too, too much. But yeah, it's good.

If you're a fan of the Twilight Zone, you'd probably enjoy this as well. So guys, amongst all of the news inundation going on with Trump and the world, that's all we have time for this week. And thank you for continuing to listen to us. If you've just found us, then welcome.

Welcome to the... Hi. Hi. Tell your friends.

Come on in. It's fine. Take your shoes off. Maybe keep them on.

Don't sit on the couch. Yes. And yes, don't feed the various... Rats.

Yeah. And to those who've been continuing to listen to us, we're coming up on our 80th episode. It's not lost on us. We've been at it for a bit over a year and a bit.

Maybe it's almost two years, I can think, of this form of entertainment. So a big thank you. And we'll continue on as usual to produce more weekly podcasts of The Space Welders. So Steve, if you wanted to connect with The Space Welders and phone them up, how would you go about it?

If you want to catch more Space Welders, push one. And then head over to www.spacewelders.com where you'll find the show notes for this episode and all the past episodes. That'll have links to the stuff we've talked about. Videos, audio, blog posts, comments.

I don't know. Stuff. Smellograms. Yeah.

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Does anyone have a service called boop? Boop. That'd be mine. That's my Snapchat.

So you can boop someone. There it is. We've said it first. We said it first.

No one can do that. No, that's it. It's us. Boop.

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Right. That's twitter.com.spacewelders. There's Mike on Twitter. Just push A.

That's twitter.com.michaelanduskowise. You can follow me on Twitter. I don't have A after you push three. Sure you can.

Yeah, there is. You can follow me on Twitter. Just push Omega. Or go to twitter.com.sashthescepticaldev.

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