DaveMason.com
ComputerTalk with Dave Mason
The official archive of all available ComputerTalk with Dave Mason radio shows. Spend some time with Dave. Listen to a full show or explore clips by topic.
3,475 unique clips. Each clip appears in one section. Historical conversations, not current advice. Full episodes remain available separately by date.
1414 clips, strongest first.
Dr. Dave explains how malicious prompts exploit uncertainty and embarrassment: a person who does not understand an unexpected update request may click through simply to keep moving. His rule is to resist the pressure, decline the installation and take time to check what is actually being requested.
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Dr. Dave’s 2011 Ubuntu experiment leads him to praise Linux for combining the customization he valued in Windows with much of the reliability, speed and efficiency he associated with Mac OS X.
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The new iPhone has arrived and first-generation owners feel pushed into second-class status. Aaron Vronko begins with the overlooked option to keep using a working phone, then explores selling it, using Wi-Fi calling and installing the new software; Dr. Dave calls the approach making lemonade from instant obsolescence.
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Prompted by Evil Steve to define the term for listeners, Dr. Dave explains that a document contains not only visible typing but hidden information about creators, edits and collaboration. A person who does not realize that history exists, he warns, can be betrayed by the metadata behind the page.
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MobileMe's launch problems and repeated free extensions give Dr. Dave a case study in Apple's “embarrassment of riches”: enormous demand repeatedly collides with immature capacity, activation or service processes. He still calls the underlying products good, but warns that a devoted fan base can forgive the final glaring weaknesses only so many times.
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Dr. Dave explains that a planned Gmail upgrade caused an outage because actual demand consumed more spare capacity than engineers expected, calling it an example of even sophisticated teams underestimating how heavily a service is used.
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In their first days with new Palm phones, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve praise the company’s long focus on reaching appointments, calls and tasks with fewer taps while still making the device feel polished and solid.
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An early Facebook worm shows how attackers follow people into popular services and turn a legitimate sharing feature into a delivery mechanism. Dr. Dave sympathizes with administrators who must stop abuse without removing the reasons people use the site, then emphasizes that security and privacy depend partly on user behavior and exposure as well as software defenses.
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After years of telling listeners not to buy software at launch, Dr. Dave says his daily beta and release-candidate experience is strong enough to break his own rule for Windows 7. Evil Steve recognizes that Dr. Dave has never said this before, especially about Microsoft.
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After Amazon remotely removed copies of Orwell books from Kindle devices, Dr. Dave reads Jeff Bezos's unusually blunt apology calling the response thoughtless and out of line with the company's principles, then questions what “illegally sold” meant.
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Dr. Dave acknowledges the Internet’s power but objects to a computer that loses its usefulness without a connection; he and Evil Steve then puncture the fashionable word “cloud” by joking that perhaps it should simply be called “the fog.”
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The show closes with a dramatic online claim that Steve Jobs had suffered a major heart attack. Dr. Dave says it was false, notes its rapid removal and possible market consequences and uses it to complete his opening warning: valuable information is abundant, but a believable headline still has to be researched before it is repeated as truth.
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Dr. Dave captures the defining deception of fake antivirus software in a memorable line: the infection presents itself as the cure, then demands payment from the person it has already harmed.
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Dr. Dave says the irony of hard-drive SMART monitoring is that a warning may arrive only when the drive and its data are already gone. He connects that experience with Google's large server-farm study, which challenged common assumptions about both SMART prediction and the role of temperature or drive age.
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Dot-mobi CTO James Pearce explains that mobile pages use familiar web technology but must respect a different situation: a small screen, few buttons and a user who needs clear, crisp navigation while moving. Dr. Dave is impressed that the organization provides free tools and testing to make the then-new medium easier to build.
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A reported account takeover illustrates a durable weakness: answers intended to prove identity can sometimes be found in the same public social profiles an attacker is examining.
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Asked to explain a smartphone without assuming technical knowledge, Palm’s Phil McClendon describes integrating the phone, contacts, camera, calendar, email and messages so a user can act from wherever an idea begins. Dr. Dave prompts the explanation because experts often take the practical meaning of integration for granted.
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Access representative Lefty Schlesinger says hardware does not matter when software makes features inaccessible; Dr. Dave answers that hardware is the plate while software is the meal that must deliver flavor and freshness.
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An Ameriprise laptop containing hundreds of thousands of records gives Dr. Dave a concrete example of how portable computers change the risk around business information. He challenges both the disputed valuations and the idea that so much sensitive data could leave an office unencrypted, noting that a tiny flash drive makes the same problem even harder to control.
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Dr. Dave welcomes reports that Windows Vista was becoming fast and stable but rejects Steve Ballmer’s suggestion that it could end traditional virus and worm attacks. Security is a moving target, he says, and a system designed around known attacks cannot eliminate the unknown attack vectors that will be used next.
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Running a business from a Land Cruiser exposes a policy problem rather than a broken device: Paul says his BlackBerry can make calls in Belize but data is unavailable and inexpensive internet calling services are blocked. Only on the final day does he learn that the repeated Skype failure was not his equipment at all, giving the expedition another honest real-world technology result.
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Frank divides wireless into personal, local and wide area networks, from Bluetooth through Wi-Fi to cellular coverage. Continuing across the break, he and Dr. Dave agree that users should not need to care which technology is underneath as long as the device chooses the best performance and cost and simply works.
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Browse by year, then month, to find the episodes from that month.
442 proposed broadcast dates, plus 2 undated entries. Dates are based on archive filenames and may be approximate. Some broadcasts survive as separate parts or incomplete recordings.
