Digital assistants talking gooder, EU legislating worser, long copyright worstest, cryptocurrencies downing, and spaceships fartherest. These stories and more as the Geeks critique each others’ communication skills and discuss the ability to excel in various areas including programming through nature versus nurture.
Everyone knows that copyright is critically important to artists. It rewards them for their creativity, and because of that reward, our culture grows. Our current copyright system does a terrible job for artists in the digital age. We need lots of reform to make it work for them, and for the public.
The European Union is updating its 2001 Copyright Directive, with a key committee vote coming up on June 20 or 21; on GDPR day, a rogue MEP jammed a mass censorship proposal into the draft that is literally the worst idea anyone in Europe ever had about the internet, ever.
The 2018 selloff in cryptocurrencies deepened, wiping out about $42 billion of market value over the weekend and extending this year’s slump in Bitcoin to more than 50 percent.
At least five cryptocurrencies have recently been hit with an attack that used to be more theoretical than actual, all in the last month. In each case, attackers have been able to amass enough computing power to compromise these smaller networks, rearrange their transactions and abscond with millions of dollars in an effort that’s perhaps the crypto equivalent of a bank heist.
Fellow software engineer Kyle Bahr joins me for a good metaphoric description of Block Chain Tech. Why does Bitcoin burn so much power and are all crypto currencies like that? Also a look at what other neat things are being done using bitcoin technology. And how smart contracts work. Learn a bit about initial coin offerings (ICO) and get a good general understanding of crypto currencies without any math nor too many complex terms.
Wells Fargo & Co. customers hoping to use their credit cards to buy Bitcoin will have to look elsewhere.
Following Apple’s widely publicized mid-March removal of the Mac app Calendar 2 for running a cryptocurrency mining tool in the background, the App Store’s Review Guidelines have been updated to explicitly ban on-device mining — across any type of app, and all of Apple’s platforms.
The spacecraft will now begin preparations for a New Year’s flyby encounter with the farthest planetary encounter in history. The spacecraft is currently traveling more than 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from Earth through the icy band of debris surrounding the solar system beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, and it will spend the upcoming months preparing for its encounter with a small Kuiper Belt object, nicknamed Ultima Thule.
Recorded 2018-06-11
