January 2025 TEC News & Events
NEW Amateur Radio Operators Club & Study Sessions | Best of TEC Talks | Privacy PIE: Celebrating the...FCC?! | Right to Repair - Bring Us Your Busted Tech!
New year means new TEC events, workshops, meetups and more! In addition to fan favorites Privacy PIE and our Right to Repair workshop, we're launching a free HAM operators license study meetup and gathering signups for a TEC Trip to Iron Mountain data center. We took December off from podcast recording (except our awesome holiday episode), but we've got some great guests and episodes coming up in February so stay tuned!
NEW!!! Join the TEC Amateur Radio Club & Study Group Meetup
Interested in getting your HAM operators' license and/or leveling up to Extra? Keep "meaning to" study for the test? Join the TEC Amateur TEC Amateur Radio Club & Study Group and get some external accountability (and the actual license!).
We'll meet twice a month for two-hour dedicated study sessions at the Advanced Cyber Systems Lab, located at Gateway Community College. The first cohort will work towards its FCC's Amateur Radio Service Technician Class license exam.
Sign up here. A minimum of five people is required for this meetup to take place. Once we have enough attendees you will be emailed the day/time of the sessions.
We'll be using HamStudy as our general guide. This will be fun, but its not purely social - the goal is to be ready to sit for the exam!
Please note to become a license HAM operator you must:
- Have a valid Taxpayer Identification Number (such as a social security number)
- Have a valid mailing address
- Pass a written exam
Amateur radio licensing is managed by the Federal Communications Commision (FCC). Being licensed means that your name is listed in the FCC Universal Licensing System with an associated ham radio callsign.
We promise our sessions will be way more fun than this actual HAM class that happened during WWII. For one thing, we'll have snax and women will be allowed, too.
January 2025 Right to Repair Workshop
TEC invites you to our monthly Right to Repair Workshop on Tuesday, January 14, at 7 p.m. This FREE hour-and-a-half workshop is at the GateWay Community College Washington Campus in the Advanced Cyber Systems Lab (ACSL) - home to the only Right to Repair Hub in the Phoenix Valley!
Mustafa Uygur, owner of MicroFix and an experienced teacher and technologist with two decades of experience, will lead the session. In addition to being an engaging and excellent guide, he's also very funny.
Location and parking information can be found here.
We have all the tools you'll need (but not replacement parts) so bring your phone, computer or tablet and any questions. Remember: We teach you how to fix your own tech β we do not fix it for you.
January 2025 Privacy PIE
Three Cheers for the Privacy Protecting FCC!
Join us at the Advanced Cyber Systems Lab on Tuesday, January 21 at 6 p.m. to learn about the best privacy protecting friend you never knew you had!
Just like Clark Kent, the Federal Communications Commission hides behind its painfully boring, stodgy and bureaucratic exterior whilst valiantly fighting (and winning!) raging privacy battles against massive anti-privacy foes.
The FCC's PRIVACY & DATA PROTECTION TASK FORCE is basically the Avengers of Privacy. The court filings, administrative notices and procedures are boring, but the stories behind taking on anti-privacy corporate interests is exciting (no, but really though!).
ICYMI TEC TALKS EPISODES
We took December off for the holidays but are back in the studio this month recording even better TEC Talks episodes. We have some incredible guests lined up for our "What Does a [Technologist] Do?" short episodes and will explore a lot of compelling tech and society topics in our longform episodes. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, catch up on some of our favorite episodes from last year!
What Does a Front End Software Engineer Do? Featuring David Koontz
In our What Does a [Technologist] Do? episodes we ask a professional technologist with real life experience five questions about what their actual day-to-day looks like. The questions are always the same, but the answers are often surprising and wildly different than what we expect.
Sam Stone Discusses How Tech Policy and Legislation Gets Made
In this longform discussion, national political consultant and co-host of the Breaking Battlegrounds podcast Sam Stone tells us why lawmakers from municipal government to Congress donβt seem to grasp what tech is, what it does, or how to regulate, govern or legislate it. Warning: This is a nerdy, nuts-and-bolts discussion of tech policy and governance, not a political debate episode.
Eric Miller Discusses His Extraordinary Experience Doing ALL the Tech Things
We chatted with Eric Miller about his experience working in tech. Eric is the co-owner and principal of Phoenix Analysis and Design Technologies, a Chair Emeritus of the Arizona Tech Council and a regularly contributing columnist for the Phoenix Business Journal. A bastion of the local Arizona tech community, we were so excited he sat down with us to chat. The conversation did not disappoint.
Unhappy Programmers?
Inspired by a Fireship video discussing the 2024 Stack Overflow survey that said 80 percent of programmers were unhappy, TEC called in a few of its own programmers to discuss.
HTTPS: Holiday TEC Talks Podcast Special
The rules were simple:
- Money was no object
- It could be ANYTHING - from the military catalogue, NASA, or just Best Buy - - - It had to exist in real life and incorporate some kind of computing power.
The Answers. Were. Awesome.
Be on the show!
If you're an experienced technologist (or a tech-adjacent SME) and would like to be on the show, contact us or email contact@techedcollab.org. Interviews for day-in-the-life segments can be done remotely and generally take about 30 minutes. Longform interviews and discussion topics are also welcome.
January 2025 TEC Article Club
The Technology for Autonomous Weapons Exists. What Now?
In a phenomenal piece for Undark, reporter Sarah Scoles deep dives into the technological advancements and ethical and human implications of autonomous weaponry. Combining meticulous, deeply researched reporting with unparalleled narrative nonfiction skillz, Scoles examines both the technological challenges and triumphs of modern weaponry while giving every argument about its use and plausibility fair due.
As both proxy and direct wars continue rage at the dawn of 2025 with very little sign of abating, the technical, political, ethical and human implications of AI weaponry is no longer a theoretical dorm-room debate; it's the world we live in now. That's worth learning about and you can't get much of a better guide than Scoles. If you've been waiting for piece to talk about, this one is it.
Author: Sarah Scoles
Date Published: November 26, 2024
Publication: Undark
Undark is a nonprofit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society.
Long and Ugly Link:
https://undark.org/2024/11/26/unleashed-autonomous-weapons/?src=longreads
Length: 4,857 words
To participate in this discussion, just join the async discussion on the TEC Reads channel on our Discord server.
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