Restart Radio: guitars, cloud kill switches and bots
Ben Skidmore, long-time Restarter and guitar repairman, joined us to talk about how he fell in love with guitars and learned how to repair them. We talked about how musicians often learn to repair, hack and modify their instruments. We speculated that musicians are creative repairers and modifiers of their instruments because their craft involves creativity. Then we talked about a much-discussed tech story, involving the disabling of smart-home devices made by Revolv, a company bought by Google. Revolv devices will become "bricks" on 15th May, when the cloud-based servers they require will be shut down. It is a cautionary tale. Lastly, we talked about bots - and both the infamous Microsoft Twitter-bot, that was turned into a fascist over night, and a "female" bot that Ugo was forced to interact with last week.