Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. Tech, community, video games, and whatever else is next.

Also available as an MP3 podcast. More info at our Podcast Central page.

July 9, 2018: Less texting, more hugging: Mobile Steam Unit sings songs about tech.

Listen to this show:  Pop-up player!

This week: Mobile Steam Unit, playing songs about tech, recorded recently in Studio B.



Pointers to Mobile Steam Unit:

• Mobile Steam Unit's Bandcamp page

• @MobileSteamUnit on Twitter

• Official website ("We Make Business Music")

• Kanan Indian Restaurant: the video (pitching Kanan Indian Restaurant on a jingle for their voice mail message)

Recent tech news:

• A fitness app exposed sensitive location details for thousands of users including soldiers and secret agents (Business Insider, July 9): mirroring the Strava breach - covered on the Feb. 5 Techtonic episode - the Polar fitness app "had security flaws exposing the location data of its users, according to a joint investigation . . . this included the location details of soldiers and secret agents." Moral of the story: Check your settings. Better yet, delete all surveillance apps from your phone.

• Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail (WSJ, July 2): "Google said a year ago it would stop its computers from scanning the inboxes of Gmail users for information to personalize advertisements, saying it wanted users to 'remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount.' But the internet giant continues to let hundreds of outside software developers scan the inboxes of millions of Gmail users who signed up for email-based services . . . Letting employees read user emails has become 'common practice' for companies that collect this type of data." Solution: Delete your Gmail account. Sign up instead with a trusted email provider like FastMail or ProtonMail. See this helpful list of alternatives to Google products.

• Tim Berners-Lee says the Web has become 'anti-human' (Vanity Fair, July 1): Tim Berners-Lee: "the Web has failed instead of serving humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and [has] failed in many places.” The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has "ended up producing - with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform - a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human."

• Can Facebook clean up its act? (The Guardian, July 7): Security researcher points out a recent "data leak that saw personal information of 120 million users of a popular quiz app (nametests.com) exposed to attackers. He says that issues like that remain common on the site." Privacy activist Aral Balkan says about Facebook: "What we have here is a factory farm for human beings, that has been publicly humiliated for how it treats its livestock, running internal audits to avoid future PR disasters."

• HBO Must Get Bigger and Broader, Says Its New Overseer: John Stankey, Warner Media CEO, speaking about his plans for HBO: “I want more hours of engagement. Why are more hours of engagement important? Because you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow’s world.”

• Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind, by Douglas Rushkoff (Medium, July 5): "It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel . . . Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with."

• Anton Troynikov: "Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union:
- waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality
- promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out
- living five adults to a two room apartment
- being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you"
...read the whole thread.

• Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Use Design to Trick You Into Handing Over Your Data, New Report Warns (Gizmodo, June 28): "A study from the Norwegian Consumer Council dug into the underhanded tactics used by Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to collect user data." Here's the PDF of the study, "Deceived by Design."

- - -

Subscribe to the Techtonic podcast