Scott Johnson is on the show and we’ll talk about why the PC market is not as doomed like everybody says. It’s doomed in a different way.

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

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Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke, sebgonz and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest:  Scott Johnson, co-host of The Morning Stream, The Instance, Current Geek and more! Chief Frogpantser.

Headlines

Yesterday we had an Apple invitation, today we have the reemergence of people familiar with the matter. Gigaom passes along the news that The Wall Street Journal’s sources say Apple had wanted to supersize the iPad with a 12.9 inch display this December, but those plans have now been pushed back so Apple’s suppliers can cope with demand for the iPhone 6 Plus. So yes. The iPad Apple never announced is now said by anonymous people not to be happening because reasons.

PC Mag reports that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said ads are coming. Speaking at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, Spiegel said ads would show up in the Snapchat stories feature, between shared photos and videos. Spiegel said ads won’t be too disruptive to users, and at this point the ads would not be targeted. This would be Snapchat’s first source of revenue.

Yesterday Carl Icahn told Tim Cook on Twitter he was going to send an open letter he believed Tim would find interesting. Today Icahn’s letter says he believes Apple is undervalued and therefore should accelerate its stock buyback program. That would turn some of Apple’s cash into some of Carl Icahn’s cash. Interesting!

Ars Technica reports Microsoft wants to reassure you its serious about hardware so its safe to buy a Surface. A new package bundles a Surface Pro 3, docking station and Type Cover keyboard for a savings of $150. There’s also a 3-year warranty option that covers accidental damage and speeds up hardware replacement. Microsoft also announced Surface Pro 3 is now Energy Star compliant and it will provide more info on driver and firmware updates.

Reuters reports Google will ask the US Supreme Court to rule on whether APIs can be copyrighted. Oracle is suing Google for incorporating parts of 37 Java APIs in Android. It’s not a patent lawsuit. It’s a copyright one. A San Francisco federal judge familiar with coding ruled Oracle could not claim copyright protection of parts of Java. A US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington overturned the decision. The case is not only about direct copying. The main issue is whether Google is guilty of infringement for writing its own different code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.

Sony announced its Xperia Z3 smartphone will launch in the United State on Verizon Wireless in slightly updated form as the Xperia Z3v. The new version will still have a 5.2-inch display, a Snapdragon 801 processor, and the ability to stream PlayStation 4 games within your home. But it will have soft plastic sides, instead of rounded metal, and the battery will be larger and use Qi wireless charging. The phone will be available October 23rd for $199.99, and only in black and white. Verizon will also begin offering Sony’s SmartWatch 3 later this month.

What will we get if everybody has gigabit Internet? PC World reports Pew Research Center asked more than 1400 experts that question. The most common theme in the answers was that it would change basic human interactions. Online interactons would feel more real including vivid telepresence and holograms some of which will disrupt the education models we use now. Wearable health monitoring could become more widely accepted.

Skype today announced Skype 7 for OSX today and a preview version for Windows. The Next Web reports that the latest desktop version of the app resembles the mobile version with a stronger focus on text chat and improved inline photo support. This version will also make it easier to text and share images while on a video chat, and include icons for file sharing that display the file type.

The Verge reports that Lenovo announced the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, which is 17% thinner and 15% lighter than the Yoga 2 Pro. The 3 features a watchband hinge to improve ‘flipping’ and is powered by Intel’s Core M-70 processor,with up to 8GB of Ram and 256 GB of flash storage. Battery life is advertised at 9 hours. The Yoga 3 Pro will cost $1,349 at Lenovo’s online store and Best Buy and come in three colors, silver orange and gold. Lenovo ALSO announced the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro with a built-in projector, which lets you beam 16:9 high res images (including movies) directly to a wall or screen. It has a recommended retail price of $499.

News From You

tm204 pointed out Imgur announced Project GIFV. GIFs uploaded to Imgur will be converted on the fly to MP4 video format. The conversion reduces file size, improves quality but still looks and behaves like an animated GIF.For instance a 50 MB animated GIF becomes 3.4 MB after conversion. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification for GIFV to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year.

ancrod2 didn’t want us to miss that Belkin explained why its routers stopped working earlier this week. Belkin told Techrunch that a cloud service associated with router operations caused a false denial of service. It took Belkin about 15 hours to fix the issue. Belkin did not specify what service it was.

Discussion Links: PC Life!

https://gigaom.com/2014/10/09/pcs-are-making-a-comeback-in-europe-and-the-u-s-analysts-say/

http://www.electronista.com/articles/14/10/08/market.still.slumping.overall.but.name.brands.see.growth.in.third.quarter/

https://gigaom.com/2013/11/07/think-the-pc-market-is-generally-scary-these-days-wait-until-you-see-the-uks-figures/

https://gigaom.com/2014/07/07/despite-slowing-growth-tablet-sales-expected-to-overtake-pcs-next-year/

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/10/08/surging-mac-sales-put-apple-among-top-five-global-pc-vendors-for-first-time-idc-says

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2869019

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25187214

Pick of the Day:  Telegram Instant Messaging via Dean aka ​DRAiNO

Telegram is a very lightweight instant messenger app that not only supports copy and pasting images and uploading of documents, but it is very secure (since it uses the MTProto protocol) and it simply requires only a mobile phone number and a unique code given to you via SMS for each device you set it up on. What’s even more awesome is that it integrates with your contacts on mobile platforms.

It is available for almost every phone/tablet platform (iOS/Android/Windows) as well as a very stable (yet unofficial) desktop application.

 

Tomorrow’s guest: Lamarr Wilson, 

Justin Robert Young is on the show and we’ll talk about Facebook’s alleged anonymity app, and Apple’s invite for the Oct. 16 announcement. How much parsing does it really need?

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke, sebgonz and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest: Justin Robert Young, co-host of Night Attack.tv

Headlines:

Tech Crunch reports that Apple sent out an invitation to an event on October 16th at Apple’s Town Hall theater in Cupertino, California. The invitation features a rainbow outline of the top of the Apple logo and the words “It’s been way too long.” Possible devices and software that COULD be announced on that date? Perhaps, a thinner iPad Air. Maybe a a retina display desktop iMac. Possibly the public version of OS X Yosemite. Or, maybe it’s just a barbecue.

JuRY: You know what I dislike, Tom? Cramming. You know when somebody unauthorized charges on your cell phone bill. Reuters reports that AT&T has agreed to pay $105 million to settle allegations of such things. The US Federal Trade Commission has been investigating consumer complaints about charges for ring tones, horoscopes, love tips and other things they never asked for. $25 million goes to penalties and fees and $80 million to consumer refunds. So if you were wrongly billed for a love tip that showed up as a generic “usage charge” you deserve a little something back. Besides love.

Bloomberg reports Symantec is considering breaking itself into two companies, which is all the rage these days. One of the resultant companies would sell security software the other data storage. Symantec bought storage company Veritas in 2005 and has been fighting off pressure to break up ever since. A split Symantec would be ripe for acquisition according to wall street analysts who may or may not have been salivating.

TechCrunch reports Facebook’s Josh Miller took to Twitter to respond to a NYTimes report that he’s leading a team working on an anonymous forum app. Miller acknowledge he’s working on soemthing but assured it’s not just a ripoff of Secret or IRC. Miller wrote “Identity isn’t a product goal. Focus should be on what human desire you want to enable, not anonymity as the focal point.” and “Can encourage positive use cases through product design.” In other words he wants to make a Secret type app without the damaging gossip aspect? Godspeed Josh Miller.

Google recently improved its sitelink subsection in search results for some websites. Now some search-related websites, like Vimeo, now get their own little search box just for their site. Torrentfreak points out that The Pirate Bay is one of these sites. Google has been under pressure to remove sites like The Pirate Bay. So expect that to become the next bone of contention with the MPAA. Oddly Bing doesn’t get it’s own search box in its sitelink section.

Apple Insider reports on a recent survey that show US teenagers still think iPhones and iPads are ‘pretty tope’ (that’s a tight+dope=cool) but are not yet OMFG about the Apple Watch. The survey conducted by Piper Jaffrey polled 7,200 teens; Only 16 percent of those surveyed said they would drop some cheddar on an Apple Watch. That’s down from 17% this past spring. However the survey also revealed that 67 percent owned an iPhone and 73 percent said they planned to buy one as their next phone. No reports on whether the pollsters asked teenagers if they had ever seen a real watch in the wild.

Investor Carl Icahn took to Twitter today to write “”Tmrw we’ll be sending an open letter to @tim_cook. Believe it will be interesting” Yes Mr. Icahn, requets for Apple to give more cash to its stockholders is always very intersting… to the stockholders.

HTC unveils the Desire Eye

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/8/6945967/htc-desire-eye-selfie-phone-announcement

 

 

 

 

News From You:

Attention aspiring coders! KAPT_Kipper submittted the Engadget report that GitHub has launched a new Student Developer Pack that gives students free access to fifteen tools for writing code, including Stripe, the Unreal Engine and a GitHub micro account with five private repositories. It’s available to students 13 and up who are enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study, and who can verify their students status. You can find it at education.github.com/pack

sleep-d-prived passes along a must-read Wired write-up about two men who discovered a bug in in a popular video poker game, won hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas and Pennsylania, overused the hack, were arrested and charged in federal court for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and even after the charges were dropped are still being hounded by the IRS for back taxes on the seized winnings. Oh, and it also destroyed their friendship. So maybe just go see a show and have a nice steak, eh?

metalfreak noted the Wired story that security researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson released a software patch for USB drives that demonstrates one method of addressing the vulnerability known as BadUSB. The patch disables boot mode preventing firmware updates for USB 3.0 firmware distributed by Phison. In addition Caudill suggests painting the inside walls of the drive with epoxy to prevent pin-shorting. Phison is the kind of controller BadUSB was demonstrated on at Black Hat by Karsten Nohl which was replicated by Caudill and Wilson.

Discussion Links: Invitesies

http://9to5mac.com/2014/10/08/its-been-way-too-long-apple-sends-out-invites-for-thursday-october-16th-ipad-mac-event/#more-345803

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4852132/history-of-apple-event-invitations-and-hints

https://plus.google.com/103207773865797007066/posts/Ctu4NVQqKN6 

Pick of the Day:  Ghostery via Loren Lang

Ghostery is a web privacy tool that is available as a browser add-on (for most major browsers, anyway) and an iOS app. It blocks all sorts of trackers, beacons and cookies from over 1900 sources and you can choose to allow or disallow any or all of them with individual granularity as well as whitelisting sites to allow everything from them. You can also choose to allow an item once and then automatically go back to blocking it which is extremely useful when blocking something breaks a site in some way.

Tomorrow’s guest:  Scott Johnson, co-host of The Morning Stream

Patrick Beja is on and we’ll talk about Nobel prize winning LEDs and Google’s new definition of news.

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest: Patrick Beja, host of Le Rendez-vous Tech

Headlines

The 2014 Nobel Prize for physics was announced Tuesday, going to Isamu Akasaki, professor at Meijo University and Nagoya University; Hiroshi Amano, professor at Nagoya University; and Shuji Nakamura, professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara for their workd on Blue LEDs. An efficient way to grow usable sizes of Gallium Nitride crystals paved the way for Blue LED and thus white light LEDs either by combining with green and red LEDs or by exciting phosphors. CNET reports Akasaki and Amano worked together on the technology at Nagoya University, while Nakamura worked at Nichia Chemical Corporation. It took more than a decade of work to produce practical blue-LED designs in the 1990s.

TechCrunch reports Facebook has officially launched its “Audience Network” which allows any advertiser to buy ads —and any third-party app to host them— while Facebook uses its data to target the ads to the right people. This increases the number of ads Facebook can sell and puts them in direct competition with Google’s AdMob, Yahoo’s Flurry, and Twitter’s MoPub. It’s also a reason for many people to investigate how to turn off Ad tracking in iOS and Android.

CNET reports AT&T has warned 1600 customers in Vermont of a data breach. AT&T claims an employee violated the company’s privacy policy in August, obtaining customer data like social security numbers and driver’s license numbers. The employee in question is no longer employed by AT&T, law enforcement was contacted and customers are advised to place a fraud alert on their accounts.

Venturebeat reports Nvidia is launching its Maxwell based mobile GPUs for laptops, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M and 970M. Maxwell chips can deliver twice the performance per watt of power consumed compared to the previous generation of chips. The chips can render 4K, have multiframe aliasing, Voxel Global Illumination and twice the energy efficiency of the previous generation. The chips are available in many laptops starting today.

Engadget reports Samsung announced its operating profit for Q3 will be down $3.6-$4 billion, which would be the fourth straight quarter of declines. analysts believe Samsung is feeling a squeeze on its phones at the high end by new iPhones and at the low end by Xiaomi and Lenovo.

Josh Ong of The Next Web writes about a company called ‘Highfive, run by two former Google employees, trying to fix the dreaded ‘conference call. First the hardware: a $799 device that includes a wide angle 1080p video camera, microphone array and HDMI and internet connections. It sits on top of a tv or mounts to a wall. If you’re running late to the meeting, you can start the call on your smart device and then ‘send’ it to the Highfive device when you arrive. The device also supports wireless screensharing, and allows up to 10 people (or rooms) on a call. The service is free for any company that buys at least one device, and a pro plan ($10/AU/mo.) with added features is coming soon. Now if they can just work on the pain of scheduling conference calls…

News From You

KAPT_Kipper flagged us to Buzzfeed story about a DEA Special Agent who appropriated the identity of a woman named Sondra Arquiett and created a fake Facebook page in her name in order to communicate with suspected criminals. Arquiett was arrested in 2010; DEA agents alleged she was part of a drug ring, but a judge sentenced her to probation. However one agent used photos from Arquiet’s seized cell phone–including images of her underage son– to populate the fake account. Arquiett sued the agent for violating her privacy and placing her in danger. The Justice Department claims via a filing the agent had the right to do so. Privacy advocates are, to say the least, concerned.

habichuelcondulce points us to the Verge write up of a Buzzfeed investigation which used an Android app called “iBeacon detector” to find 13 beacon bluetooth transmitters inside New York City phone booths. Turns out there were about 500 of them total. Beacons can send alerts and can be used to collect anonymized data like location, time of data app usage and more when coordinated with an app. New York didn’t seek public approval before letting outdoor ad company Titan install them. After Buzzfeed published their report, the city asked Titan to take the beacons down. Titan maintains the beacons were only being used for research and maintenance purposes.

Beacons don’t worry you? Not scared of the DEA? Well how about this article blackandwhitefield submitted from The Digital Reader.com. A hacker recently noticed that Adobe’s e-publishing software seemed to be sending a large amount of data to Adobe’s servers. Apparently Adobe’s Digital Editions 4 is gathering data on which ebooks that have been opened within the app, which pages were read, and in what order. The app also scanned the computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on the hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers. Bonus: All of the data is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text.

Discussion Link: Google News +

http://searchengineland.com/googles-news-listings-beyond-traditional-205213

Pick of the Day: Sight via Sachin Bahal

First off I wanted to say, I’m addicted to the Daily Tech News Show, it is now one of my favourite podcasts to listen to. My pick of the day is the app called Sight. It is an awesome app, it works almost like Pocket or Instapaper but all you have to do is take a screenshot of the article you are reading and boom, you can read it later on. The developer just recently updated the app, so it take advantage of iOS 8’s extensions, so you can still save stuff to read it later (and offline). Did I mention that it is a free app? because it is. The only downside is that it is available for iOS only but you can view your saved stuff on their web interface.

Tomorrow’s guest: Justin Robert Young, co-host of Night Attack.tv

Allison Sheridan and I talk about HP splitting into two. Giving up on what made it famous, or history repeating itself? Or neither. Join us to find out.

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the headlines music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest: Allison Sheridan, host of the Nosilla cast at podfeet.com

Headlines

HP announced today it will split itself into two companies by the end of October next year. Hewlett-Packard Enterprises will keep the bulk of the company with enterprise level IT offerings like cloud storage, servers and big data. Meg Whitman will be CEO. The other company will be called HP Inc. It gets the personal systems and printing business, which means all the desktops and laptops and lucrative printer ink sales, and have current EVP of the division Dion Weisler as its CEO. Whitman will also server as Chairman of the board for HP Inc. Separate from the split, Ars Technica reports HP said its current round of layoffs will total 55,000.

Facebook officially owns WhatsApp. TechCrunch reports that the deal closed for 4.5 billion dollars and 177.7 million shares of Facebook stock, plus 45.9 million in restricted stock for WhatsApp employees. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum will join Facebook’s board, and receive a salary of $1, plus almost 25 million units of Facebook stock.

GigaOm reports Redbox Instant will shut down tomorrow, October 7th. The streaming video service jointly operated by Verizon and Redboxhas’t been able to sign up new users in three months. Information on refunds will be emailed and posted on the Redbox Instant website October 10

ZDNet reports GT Advanced, the company that sells sapphire to Apple, has filed for bankruptcy. The company suffered a massive drop in share price after the latest iPhone did not use their material in its display glass. Apple still uses sapphire in its rear camera lens and Touch ID fingerprint sensors and the forthcoming Apple Watch will use sapphire in its display.

Reuters reports Samsung will spend $14.7 billion on a new chip facility in Pyeongtaek, 75km south of Seoul. Its Samsung’s biggest investment yet in a single plant. Samsung is the world’s top memory chip maker and chip-making is the only steady profit generator in the company. Profits from Samsung’s semiconductor division may be larger than its handset division for the first time in more than three years.

 

 

News From You

motang passed along a Times of India report that Skype will stop delivering calls on landline and mobile phones in India starting November 10th. Skype calls outside of India will still be connected. If you are outside India you will be able to use Skype to call a number inside India as well. Skype did not give a reason for the change but India has a law preventing internet-based phone calls originating from India. Companies like Skype usually reroute the calls internationally to circumvent the law.

spsheridan submitted the CultofMac story that T-Mobile CEO John Legere responded to questions about bent iPhone 6’s while speaking at GeekWire Summit 2014. In his usually sweary manner, Legere called bendgate Horse Manure and said anybody who bends an iPhone is an idiot. Going 12 straight words without cursing Legere said, “The demand for these devices in the last few weeks is unbelievable.” Not Un-effing-believable? That almost sounds disappointing John.

Sunbun sent us The Verge report with the latest info on Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to turn your entire living room/den/basement into an interactive gaming environment. Yes IllumiRoom is back and it has a new name and new capabilities. Now call Room Alive, the latest concept demo uses video projectors to map the room, and the Kinect sensor to track your movement, allowing you to interact with games on the walls of your room. Right now the system is still too expensive to live out in the wild, but Microsoft really believes it will get cheaper soon. Hang in there. Someday soon you’ll be banging your shin against the coffee table while playing Halo not just Kinect’s balloon game.

MikePKennedy writes in to let us know that the US Navy is building ‘swarm boats‘, automated small patrols ships to help protect large naval vessels while they resupply in port, to prevent incidents like the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Wired Magazine describes the technology as autopilot on steroids, allowing a human operator to control the small craft with a laptop. A swarm boat could also be used to deploy Navy Seals on a beach and then go back to sea and await instructions.

spsheridan and KAPT_Kipper submitted stories about Facebook’s hidden friend-to-friend payments system coming to light. Cult of Mac. Stanford student Andrew Aude found code in Facebook’s Messenger app referring to the kinds of data you’d need to handle in a payments system. Looks like you’d need to add a credit card and pin to make it work if and when a payment system goes live in Facebook Messenger.

 

Discussion Links: HP Splits

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1809455#.VDLWRildXA4

https://gigaom.com/2014/10/06/its-official-hp-is-better-not-together-company-to-split-into-enteprise-and-pcprinter-businesses/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/business/hewlett-packard-announces-breakup-plan.html?_r=0

http://recode.net/2014/10/06/after-the-split-what-will-the-two-new-hps-be-worth/

http://recode.net/2014/10/06/hps-meg-whitman-splitting-up-is-the-right-thing-to-do/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/06/hps-paper-jam-another-white-flag-for-the-old-computer-age/

Pick of the Day: CodeReddit via Omni-mono

Fully functional Reddit rendered as a programming language. (Python, PhP and others).

Important for developers allowing Reddit browsing in a more discrete fashion, all of course, on company time.

Tomorrow’s guest: Patrick Beja