The Techdirt Podcast: 2017 Round-Up
from the lots-happened dept
Happy new year, podcast listeners! We'll be back with our regular weekly episodes starting next Tuesday, but this week it's time to look back at 2017 and highlight some of the most interesting episodes that you might have missed.
First, we head all the way back to last January and our second episode of the year: the CES 2017 post-mortem, our second look at the most interesting things from the Consumer Electronics Show. Mike is getting ready to head back to CES again this month, so we'll have another installment in this now-regular feature coming very soon:
It will surprise nobody that, later that month, politics took center stage for a few episodes. We had a discussion about how people can change government, and then dug into some details with a look at the new FCC, and the dangers ahead for net neutrality (it is no great miracle that many of our warnings were correct):
Fast-forward to March, and you may remember the massive Amazon Web Services outage that crippled huge portions of the internet and turned out to have been caused by a single typo. This prompted an episode all about how we got to this dangerously delicate situation online, and what to do about it:
Also in March, we took a look at another form of utter dependency on monolithic corporations that threatens the future of technology — DRM, and the threat it represents to the very concept of ownership:
We kicked off the month of May with a discussion about the surveillance state, followed by a closer look at the history of the crypto-wars:
After that, it was our most popular episode of the year by a wide margin, in which we sat down with Cory Doctorow to discuss his compelling new book Walkaway, among many other things:
May was also a time of widespread viral mourning for the supposedly "dead" MP3 file format. Somewhat irritated by the misinformation and misunderstandings, we dedicated an episode to putting that idea to rest as best we could:
Fast-forward again to August, and we celebrated Techdirt's 20th birthday with an episode all about the history of the blog:
In October, politics and copyright converged in the legal mess around Donald Trump's appearances on the Howard Stern show, and we were joined by Cathy Gellis to discuss what the situation really was:
Finally, almost a full year after our initial conversation about the new FCC, we were joined by former agency chair Tom Wheeler himself to discuss just what was happening under Ajit Pai's purview:
And that's a wrap on the highlights of 2017! Of course, there were plenty more episodes, so be sure to check out the full list and subscribe for more using the links below. We'll be back with a brand new episode next week!
Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
