Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we complain about the universe, we cannot commit to podfading, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:28] Governments using commercial chat systems [00:20:55] A pro tip for you: udm=14 [00:24:09] iOS 19 refresh (talked about before the beta announcement of “iOS 26”) [00:39:44] Outro We’re on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social ! News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero , used with attribution. Thank you to Marius Quabeck and...
Jun 11, 2025•42 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which encryption backdoors rear their ugly heads (party like it’s 1999!), Minority Report is not a manual, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:19] The UK government demands that Apple put a back door in their end to end encryption . Apple are not prepared to do this , not surprisingly, and correctly. We dig into the reasoning behind this sort of decision, and what can be done about it [00:32:49] Stuart is having his life made harde...
Mar 06, 2025•48 min
Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which Jeremy is sadly unwell (get well soon Jezza!) and so we in theory look at the latest news but actually spend three quarters of the show on one topic! This is what happens when there’s no Jeremy to keep us on track. Including: [00:00:00] Intro [00:00:32] Stuart and Jono are old [00:05:25] Project Stargate: a whole bunch of companies club together to potentially invest a load of money in AI technologies. We get into the weeds a bit on w...
Jan 27, 2025•53 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we are back, back again, Bad Voltage is back, tell a friend, and we look back a little at the big things that happened in 2024’s tech world: [00:00:00] Intro [00:02:19] Social Media 2024 [00:26:19] Drones in NY [00:30:28] The UK is over 50% renewable electricity [00:37:27] AR over-taking VR [00:54:16] Outro Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!...
Dec 19, 2024•56 min
Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which there is a particularly excellent shirt, a particularly absent salting of the conversation with, y’know, actual facts and that from Jeremy, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:02:19] CrowdStrike: how half the computers in the world went down (with thanks to abadidea for research) [00:28:41] Reddit might paywall some subreddits and what this means about Reddit, their business model, and Silicon Valley thinking [00:57:14] Outro We’re on Mastodon!...
Aug 12, 2024•59 min
Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we return after an unplanned hiatus, there is a squirrel in your car (not a euphemism), and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:04:16] The US government demands that Bytedance sell TikTok, or do they? There’s lots going on in this case, and it leads into lots of discussion about the purpose of tech regulation as a whole, which may well become a whole other show [00:24:59] Tesla’s US market share falls below 50%; the times they are a...
Jul 11, 2024•54 min
Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we look to the year ahead (well, the 10 months ahead) and predict what will happen in the tech industry and the world in 2024. 2024’s predictions: [00:00:00] Intro [00:02:49] Jeremy: Sundar Pichai will not be CEO by end of 2024 [00:06:55] Jeremy: At least one major streaming service will be shut down, or acquired [00:11:30] Jeremy: Elon Musk Sells X, or X goes public [00:13:42] Jeremy: Bonus [00:17:29] Stuart: Film stu...
Mar 01, 2024•51 min
Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which in traditional Christmas style we look back on our predictions for 2024 and Jono whines about half points. More successfully than usual this year, admittedly. Have a happy holiday season! We’ll be back in the new year. [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:44] Jeremy: Tiktok gets banned in the USA [00:05:59] Jeremy: Hidden Crypto Risks in a Traditional Financial Institution [00:07:17] Jeremy: Netflix gets acquired [00:08:26] Jeremy:...
Dec 14, 2023•57 min
Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which Jeremy is temporarily not present, website hosting issues are acknowledged and briefly discussed, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:16] New York intends to have air taxis by 2025, including bonus London Illustrated News content [00:10:23] Microsoft Teams announce upcoming 3D meetings in VR , including a Lex Friedman/Mark Zuckerberg interview [00:24:32] As Nikki Haley pushes for “algorithm transparency” and banning anonymous accounts , we d...
Nov 18, 2023•47 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we do a bit of a deep dive into the (semi-)recent trend of finding new ways for creators to get paid. Patreon’s been around for a long time (but could be doing better ), and the idea of making a thing and getting paid for the thing has been around for considerably longer, but it’s a relatively new innovation for platforms to encourage payments and share revenue with creators. Or is it? Is this actually new? Is this wha...
Oct 19, 2023•41 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we revisit an old friend, Room 101, the place where all the things we hate should be banished. At least according to each of us: whether the other two can be so convinced is another thing entirely… [00:04:07] Jono: All videoconferencing except Zoom [00:11:04] Stuart: overly chummy email spam [00:16:16] Jeremy: Influencers [00:19:59] Jono: Marketing Gurus [00:25:07] Stuart: “we are experiencing unusually high call volum...
Aug 26, 2023•52 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which multiple minutes of pre-show work are awkwardly wasted, we haven’t got a sign on the roof, and: [00:01:39] GPTBot is launched to crawl your websites and add their technological distinctiveness to its own model, and there is discussion of robots.txt changes [00:11:08] MDN, the central resource for web documentation, added LLM stuff which caused a lot of pushback (and a Mozilla postmortem ) [00:24:30] Apple announce a ne...
Aug 13, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we discuss ad-supported services and the (potential?) rise of subscriptions. Have ads gone away, or started to? Are social media networks being supported by ads now pivoting to something else? And are Patreon and sponsorships mostly a boon for small creators, or a seed of a shift in the culture of how businesses and services work online? We’re on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social ! Come chat with us and the communi...
Jun 16, 2023•57 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which there is unsceptical intensity, we are all eaten by a T-1000, and we have collected a list of concerns about Large Language Model-based AI, which we’re going to dive into! [00:00:00] Introduction [00:04:30] The “free software” concern: it normalises inhaling information for free and then renting out access to it. Upcoming EU regulation requires LLM creators to declare copyrighted material used in training corpora [00:0...
May 19, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which there’s more smoky back rooms than usual, everyone’s on Orkut, and: [00:01:14] Who likes Microsoft Teams? Microsoft promises it’s made Teams less confusing and resource hungry , while Teams surprisingly now has 270m users to Slack’s 20m . [00:08:21] An “open letter” from tech pioneers calls for a halt on AI development [00:20:31] USA wants to ban TikTok : is this tech, security, or geopolitics? [00:33:25] Google Search...
Mar 31, 2023•42 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we spend a show inventing topics which need a whole other show to talk about, we reminisce about Google Plus, and: [00:01:36] Twitter Blue, Meta Verified: the social networks go premium . Is it going to work? [00:35:45] The FBI recommend that everyone uses an ad-blocker [00:45:16] Salesforce pays Matthew McConaughey $10M/year [00:52:47] LastPass hack, allegedly via a senior developer’s Plex? [00:57:11] Reddit does comm...
Mar 02, 2023•1 hr 2 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we look, as has been threatened a bunch recently, at Mastodon. What’s it all about? Is Mastodon the new Twitter, and is it trying to be? And how far have we got into it? Also, we’re now on Mastodon! @badvoltage@mastodon.social ! Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/ ! News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero , used with attribution. Thank you to Marius Qu...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 8 min
Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which we create predictions for 2023! What will happen over the next twelve months in the world of tech? Here’s what we think… Stuart: the Texas HB20 social media law will come before the US Supreme Court, and the US Supreme Court will uphold it as constitutional Stuart: Global daily Twitter users will drop a minimum of 10% by the end of 2023 Stuart: A song claimed to be composed and performed entirely by AI will get in the ...
Jan 20, 2023•55 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage for the last time in 2022, in which we take a look back at our predictions for this year and review how we did. Surprisingly… not as badly as last year. Although as you may expect there is shameless jockeying for extra points. How did you do by comparison? We’ll see you in 2023! Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/ ! https://community.badvoltage.org/t/3×53-represent...
Dec 23, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we are not necessarily “extremely hardcore”, we aren’t verified (or are we?), we aren’t fleeing the country with a load of money that isn’t ours, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:02:37] Twitter and Musk: much change is afoot in the world of Twitter, as Elon Musk completes his purchase of the social media network and immediately starts changing things and staffing with varying degrees of competence and forethought. We have Opi...
Nov 20, 2022•53 min
Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, and special guest Adam Lorimer present Bad Voltage, in which reality is virtual, metas are connected, and: Meta, nee Facebook, had their Meta Connect conference where they announced their upcoming plans, recent hardware and software releases, and the like. We have some interest in VR generally, as evidenced by Jono always having a prediction about it at Christmas, and so we’d like to dig a bit more into what’s going on over there, some of the upcoming hardware, and ...
Oct 24, 2022•53 min
Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, and special guest Erica Brescia present Bad Voltage, in which a generation of hypochondriacs is created, we are made to do research, and: [00:01:51] VC/WeWork/Flow [00:20:28] AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans [00:28:14] New smart watches [00:38:22] Notkia [00:39:52] OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay [00:42:47] Outro Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herok...
Sep 15, 2022•47 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the roflcopter is created, Soli is forgotten, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:02:04] Chorizo space prank [00:04:04] Floppotron 3.0 [00:10:47] Doom running on $15 smart lamp , and in Doom [00:16:22] SCaLE 19X [00:19:59] Who’s liable for AI-generated lies? [00:28:48] Amazon Slashing Private-Label Selection [00:31:29] Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuums [00:36:56] Apple expecting to ship 1.5mill VR/AR units in 2023 [00:38...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which everyone’s middle name is Elaine, there is discussion of the nature of business in the modern age, and: [00:02:45] We look at Brave , a privacy-focused web browser. They’ve got some interesting technical choices, but more importantly we want to look at the question of their business model. How do Brave propose to remain sustainable? How are they making money now? And once they get the cash… what are they doing with it?...
Jul 21, 2022•58 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Victorian Tumblr is a thing, you should probably check out Lethality , Jono’s band’s latest, and: [00:00:00] Intro [00:04:11] USB Type-C EVERYTHING [00:17:33] Firefox and Google are arguing about extension APIs that ad blockers use [00:34:00] Spotify comes for audiobooks [00:57:15] Outro Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/ ! https://community.badvoltage.o...
Jun 24, 2022•59 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which those of the team not currently having fun on a beach in Spain dig into the latest tech news, including (but not limited to): [00:08:26] Github start requiring two-factor authentication for contributors [00:16:21] This show was edited live on Twitch by our audio producer, Marius Quabeck of NerdZoom Media , and you can watch him do that and see what misery we put him through every fortnight [00:25:05] ...
May 19, 2022•1 hr
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which Times Square is a much better example, it is Stuart’s turn to seemingly sound like he recorded this at the bottom of a coal mine (sorry about that), and: [00:01:50] Elon Musk is buying Twitter. We have thoughts, and quite a few of them. There’s a question as to whether it’ll even happen, there are questions about what he plans to do, and there are questions (many, many questions) about what Twitter will look like after...
Apr 29, 2022•49 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Alan Pope present Bad Voltage, in which intelligence is artificial, snaps are un-ned, and art is what you make it: [00:04:00] popey’s latest tool is unsnap , which helps you “quickly and easily migrate from using snap for applications to flatpak”, and we’ll get into how it works and why it exists [] AI-generated artwork. Aza Raskin made a very cool AI-generated video for Zia Cora’s song “submarines”, where he put together a list of text querie...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr
Stuart Langridge, Jeremy Garcia, and special guest star Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which we in theory want to talk about loads of news but actually we spend all our discussion time on one topic: [00:02:00] Jorge is into Flatpak. And there’s quite a lot to talk about here. This is very much about the Linux desktop, distribution of applications, and how things have changed; stuff has certainly happened since the last time we looked at this, and it’s worth getting into. Let’s talk about w...
Mar 24, 2022•53 min
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia return, after a couple of months of trials and tribulations, to reveal our predictions for (the rest of) 2022! Prepare to find out What Comes Next in our roles as Cassandras: [00:06:20] Jono: VR bonanza: Apple will release their VR headset this year, and PSVR2 will be released, both purchasable by real people. Both will experience critical acclaim (although we won’t have good sales figures) Tesla won’t release a phone, Neuralink will launch in beta...
Mar 03, 2022•1 hr 8 min
