Tech Team Weekly Tech Team Weekly

In an episode which we promise is considerably more entertaining than the subject matter might suggest, the TWW crew take a look at the rise of digital monitoring software within schools and the workplace. We discuss the trade-offs between safety and snooping, the challenges of verifying the success of such tooling, and propose some possibly less alarming ways to help protect children online.

Plus: Sanj finally manages to refuel, Neil shares how he almost lost his job because of Google Analytics, and we get to the bottom of what Gwen would be willing to sacrifice for quicker software updates.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start
01:15 The Stand-Up
06:23 Social Engineering
09:38 This Week's Epic
28:13 News Bytes
34:46 The Wash Up

LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

YouTube: Postman livestream: A Busy Developer's Guide To Testing (Thursday 21st October, 7pm BST)

Black Tech Fest (19th-21st October)

State Of The Browser (30th October)

The Guardian: A boy wrote about his suicide attempt. He didn’t realize his school’s Gaggle software was watching

The 74: New Research: Most Parents and Teachers Have Accepted Student Surveillance As a Safety Tool — But See the Potential For Serious Harm

Gaggle (PDF link): The State of Student Safety 2020/21

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Schools Are Spying on Students – But Students Can Fight Back

Vox: The hidden racism of school discipline, in 7 charts

TechCrunch: Aware raises $60M for tech that monitors internal messaging platforms for legal compliance, sentiment analysis and more

UK Council for Internet Safety

Internet Matters

Peloton Reddit: Update on User Flair

Pen Test Partners: Free BrewDog beer with a side order of shareholder PII?

TechRadar: Tesla’s driver safety scoring system could be a game-changer for car insurance

This week, we've got basically no choice other than to cover everything that's been happening during a chaotic week at Facebook. There's been downtime, whistleblower revelations, and rumours of a reversal of the company's "WFH Forever" policy (which has been denied since we recorded). Meanwhile, Neil battles through a horrible bout of flu in order to have a dig at the Tories.

CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains some discussion of eating disorders.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start
01:26 The Stand-Up
08:25 Social Engineering
13:15 This Week's Epic
34:25 News Bytes
38:04 The Wash Up

LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

Facebook Engineering: More details about the October 4 outage

The Guardian: Facebook and Instagram say issues now fixed after second outage in a week

The Guardian: Facebook aware of Instagram's harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals

TechRadar: Facebook denies end to 'WFH forever' rule in wake of mega outage

The Guardian: "I might delete it": Facebook's problem with younger users

Haystack: Facebook Outage Increased Developer Throughput By 32%

BBC News: Conservative conference: Get off your Pelotons and back to work, says Oliver Dowden

Faced with a tight deadline, the team finally manage to deliver an episode of about the desired length! This week, Gwen, Neil and Sanj are looking at the explosion of new digital players in the 'Buy Now Pay Later' market, looking at the ethics of building features which can generate profit from the vulnerable, and asking whether employers are doing enough to encourage discussions about prudent financial behaviour. There's also discussion about loot boxes and other forms of gambling, during which Gwen gets mad at a fake casino.

There's still enough time for all three hosts to pick scarily similar stories in News Bytes - if you're interested in overpaying for novelty tech, this week is the episode for you (apart from Sanj's story, which could get you arrested if you're a careless Australian).

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start  
00:56 The Stand-Up  
06:10 Social Engineering  
09:54 This Week's Epic  
25:13 News Bytes  
34:12 The Wash Up

LINKS MENTIONED THIS WEEK:

YouTube: #LeadDev - Marco Rogers - Creating a career ladder for engineers

YouTube: Postman - The Busy Developer's Guide to Testing (21st October livestream)

CNBC: British fintechs are jumping into the booming buy now, pay later market

Mastercard: Mastercard reinvents installments to give consumers more payment choices wherever they shop

Money Saving Expert: First-ever financial education textbook lands in schools

Polygon: EA calls its loot boxes "surprise mechanics", says they’re used ethically 

Citizens Advice Bureau

StepChange debt charity

The Guardian: An0m - the inside story of the most daring surveillance sting in history

Stack Overflow: No joke - you can buy our copy/paste keyboard right now

Digital Undivided: supporting Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs

The Independent: Amazon's new Astro robot is a "privacy nightmare"

Twitter: @DimaKrotov - the stranded Roomba

This week, our main story is the debate over whether companies (and employees) should be happy to disclose salaries, in an attempt to drive pay equality, a chat made somewhat harder by Neil's repeated inability to pronounce the word "equality". We get deep into discussion about our experiences with knowing (or not knowing) how our colleagues are paid, companies and countries who we've seen get the balance right, and the challenges of introducing salary negotiations in the job-hunting process.

But there's more! We'll also be talking about a secret new privacy-shattering setting in Chrome which is enabled by default, and bemoaning the lack of accessibility options in some modern games (and championing others which lead the way). You'll also hear what we've all been up to this week, including a top quality J-Lo story from Sanj, unexpectedly relevant election news from Neil, and Gwen basically doing everything under the sun. Plus there's an awful lot of Diablo II discussion for a podcast which isn't from the year 2000.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start  
02:02 The Stand-Up  
14:43 Social Engineering  
21:46 This Week's Epic  
44:00 News Bytes  
52:22 Competition Time  
53:09 The Wash-Up

LINKS DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:

Incident.io

Ministry of Testing: Test.Bash() 2021

YouTube: Neil's Continuous Quality with Postman session

Jamie Tanna: Providing a Public Salary History page

GOV.UK: Equality Act 2010

Blind social network

YouTube: Kevin Goldsmith: How does Salary Work? (LeadDev 2019)

The Verge: Apple keeps shutting down employee-run survyes on pay equity - and labour lawyers say it's illegal

The Register: Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition

IGN: Deathloop's Lack of Accessibility Options Is Disappointing Players

Tweet thread from Courtney Craven (Can I Play That) outlining Deathloop's issues

On this week's episode, we focus on some of the bad habits that we've seen when using communication platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, and how we can help to adapt and prevent lost productivity. Plus one of us has job news, one of us is preparing for a return to the office, and another of us has automated their way to some prime cinema tickets!  

Additionally we've got another Amazon voucher to give away, courtesy of the meal delivery service CookMyGrub.com!

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start
01:28 The Stand-Up
07:22 Social Engineering
13:22 This Week's Epic
24:48 News Bytes
43:24 Competition Time
47:34 The Wash-Up    

STORIES DISCUSSED THIS WEEK:  

Technically: Vacation isn’t the answer to employee burnout

Wired: We finally know the true toll of all those bad Slacks

No Hello

Neil Studd: My Communications Readme

TechRepublic: How to make a developer relations team work for your company

BBC News: Sir Clive Sinclair: Tireless inventor ahead of his time

Dick Smith's 1978 iceberg prank

InfoQ: Travis CI Vulnerability Potentially Leaked Customer Secrets

BBC News: Microsoft's passwordless plans lets users switch to app-based login

GitHub: Fortran MVC web platform

On this week's episode, we look at the controversy behind an issue whereby planning applications were mistakenly modified in production by a junior engineer who thought that they were working in a test environment. We'll discuss whether we should lock-down our production environments more, whether we should protect our staff against being able to make critical mistakes on real data, and our general thoughts on testing in production.  

Plus there's plenty of our usual life updates in The Stand-Up, where you can find out the result of Gwen's driving test, Neil's week one experiences with his Peloton, and Sanj rolling up his sleeves to work on some (awesome) new graphics for the show, and adding automation to our website! 

Plus, courtesy of the kind folks at CookMyGrub.com we've got another opportunity to win a £20 Amazon voucher - tune in to find out how!

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Start
01:44 The Stand-Up
14:39 Social Engineering
22:56 This Week's Epic
35:14 News Bytes
45:48 Competition Time
50:12 The Wash-Up    

STORIES FEATURED THIS WEEK:  

ShlinkedIn

Glean blog: How we discuss engineering improvements at Glean

Sky News: 'Your proposal is whack': Council worker mistakenly rejects planning applications with sarcastic comments - but decisions are legally binding

Statement from Swale Council

Reddit thread: "Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job"

LondonTechWatch: The August 2021 London Venture Capital Funding Report

London Tech Week

Mayor of London: Technology Design Lab

OWASP Top Ten

Wired: One Woman's Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia