Wise Guys on WHO Radio - July 25, 2015
In the news this week
- Amazon surprised everyone by turning a profit. The stock price jumped as a result...but who wants to compete with a gargantuan market leader that barely ever turns a profit?
- YouTube's boss wants the company to adopt a subscription model, at least as an option for users who don't want to see ads. If it's under $5 a month, I imagine they may be able to get 5% (certainly no more than 10%) of their users to go with the subscriptions.
- A reminder for this coming week: Windows 10 is being released on July 29th
Security update
Chrysler is recalling 1.4 million vehicles over the possibility of remote hacking. Those vehicles need a software fix to make them fully secure. The odds of any vehicle being commandeered remotely and harm coming to the passengers is small, but once you become aware of a security bug, you need to fix it promptly.
Politics of technology
Third-party custody of police videos is a good idea. The tragic case of Sandra Bland and the questions surrounding the reliability of the dashcam video evidence of her arrest just renews the importance of this need.
Whatever you think of him as a Senator or Presidential candidate, Sen. Lindsey Graham has done a great job of putting himself on the inside of the joke as Donald Trump, behaving like a clown, has taken aim at Graham. "How to destroy your cell phone" is clever work.
Jargon alert
"Time-lapse mining" is the mass assembly of photos collected from the Internet to produce time-lapse videos of recognizable landmarks.