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October 8, 2018: AI-inspired music with Jamie Brew, Botnik cofounder

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This week: Jamie Brew, Botnik cofounder, on AI-inspired songs

Above: "Pitchfork-reviewed band names + a recurrent neural network," by Botnik

Botnik pointers:

• Botnik homepage, Twitter account, and YouTube channel

• Botnik's predictive keyboards (make your own!)

• The Songularity: A Pop Album by Humans and Machines (Kickstarter campaign)

• I Have To Get My Car, using a smartphone's built-in predictive text keyboard.

• You Can't Take My Door, using the lyrics from country music's greatest hits

• I Don't Want To Be There, a predictive text song made by rearranging lyrics from The Strokes

• Bored With This Desire To Get Ripped = Morrissey lyrics + Amazon customer reviews of a home workout DVD system

• Shenandoah is an Amphipod: "This aquatic folk song combines Bob Dylan lyrics with transcripts of Sir David Attenborough's 'The Blue Planet.'"

• Soviet Nights: "We combined the Beach Boys with Ronald Reagan speeches to create the greatest Cold War pop song."

• Negatively 4th Street = Bob Dylan lyrics + negative Yelp reviews of restaurants on 4th Street in Manhattan

Pledge here for the October fundraiser!

Recent Tech News

• News broke today (so strange, on a holiday!) about a new home-surveillance device, the Facebook Portal. Weird, since Facebook's most recent major headline was news of the latest hack (50 million accounts) announced on a Friday afternoon a little over a week ago.

• Facebook to offer wide-angle videocall camera that tracks you as you move around your home (BoingBoing, Oct 8): "To celebrate the leaking of 50 million user accounts last week, Facebook is today launching two 'video call machines' that 'automatically zoom in on users and follow them as they move.'"

• It’s the Wrong Time for a Facebook Surveillance Device (Oct 8, Bloomberg): "With the debut of the Portal device and its sibling, the Portal+, the company has apparently decided that now is the right time to persuade Americans to put Facebook microphones, data-harvesting technologies and video cameras inside their homes. To which I say — nope."

• Scott Galloway: "'I'd like a camera in my home controlled by Facebook.' -Nobody, ever"

• Christopher Mims on Facebook's launch (Oct 8, Twitter): "For those of you who never read it or forgot, the 1984 reference you're looking for when talking about Facebook Portal is the 'Telescreen.'"

......and big, big news from Bloomberg. Keep in mind that China makes 75% of mobile devices worldwide and 90% of PCs.

• The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies (Oct 4, Bloomberg BusinessWeek): "The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain. ... Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. ... investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. ... investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China."

• Apple vigorously denied the claims, as did Amazon.

• Mathew Ingram (past Techtonic guest), Oct 5: "It's possible those who are doing the denying at Apple and Amazon weren't even aware of the Chinese hacking investigation." (referring to a TechCrunch article)

....speaking of Amazon......

• Amazon raised its minimum wage for US employees to $15/hour. Guardian: Don't thank Bezos for giving Amazon workers a much-needed raise. "Amazon is a powerful monopoly that undermines small businesses, extracts tax concessions and suppresses producers. ... it is happening not because Amazon is the best player in the market, but because it is the market."

......and more on Google......

Google Exposed User Data, Feared Repercussions of Disclosing to Public (WSJ, Oct 8): again, so strange for this to break on a holiday weekend! "Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage..."

...and finally...

Techtonic community news:

• Our friends at the Reanimation Library need a new home! Listen to the show with founder Andrew Beccone.

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