Molly Wood is on the show today. We’ll discuss whether the $129 Moto E is a smoking gun, and why Microsoft is backtracking on Kinect Xbox One bundles and the Xbox Live requirement for Netflix.

MP3

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

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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 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:  Molly Wood, columnist for The New York Times. 

Headlines

CNET reports Microsoft announced a new Xbox One without the Kinect bundled will begin selling June 9th for $399 in the US and £350 in the UK. A separate Kinect will become available later, though no timeline was announced. Microsoft also announced that sometime in June, its paid subscription service, Xbox Live Gold will no longer be required for most apps, including Netflix, ESPN, and YouTube. If you do keep paying though, Xbox One owners will get Games with Gold and Deals with Gold features starting in June. 

Ars Technica reports Motorola announced the Motorola E Android smartphone for sale unlocked at $129. The E runs Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat, has a 4.3-inch 960 x 540, 256 PPI display, a 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon 200 processor, 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of storage. Although it does have a microSD card slot that can add up to 32GB.Motorola even promises it will get at least one update to the next version of Android, possibly more. Like the Moto G has swappable rear shells you can buy for $15. One big gap, no front-facing camera. The phone comes to 40 countries in the next few weeks.

9to5 Mac cites “sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development” say Apple will add split-screen multitasking to iOS8 for iPad. It’s described as similar to how Windows 8 can snap multiple apps in the tiled interface on tablets. The iOS feature would let users drag content from one app to another. On the back-end this means iOS developers could share content between apps. Sources do warn that the feature might be pushed back to a later version or canceled altogether. Oh sources.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft is adding advanced rules and a new undo option to Outlook.com.  Users will be able to create multi-condition, multi-action rules, including options for options for time constraints, email tallying, checking read/unread email state and more. Microsoft also simplified undo functions by adding an undo button and allowing CTRL-Z to work wherever you need to undo. The new features start rolling out today and should arrive for all users in the next few weeks.

GigaOm reports LG will begin selling its Lifeband Touch fitness wristband on May 18 in the US for $150, with Asia and Europe releases to follow. The lifeband can track the usual fitness metrics but can’t track your heartbeat. That’s why it’s fortuitous that LG will also start selling its Heart Rate earphones this month exclusively at Best Buy for $180, with additional retailers coming mid-June.

Recode reports 28 CEOs of US Internet Service Providers sent a letter to the US FCC urging the agency not to reclassify their services as Telecommunications. Some have urged the FCC to classify ISPs as telecommunications providers, as they were until 2002, in order to have a firmer legal justification for net neutrality regulations. The ISps say in their letter that doing so, “would impose great costs, allowing unprecedented government micromanagement of all aspects of the Internet economy.”

More elements of the cold war are returning! The Verge reports Russia has rejected a request by the United States to continue to use the International Space Station after 2020. The US wanted to extend joint missions until 2024. The US currently pays Russia $60 million per person to ferry its astronauts to the space station. Russia will also bar the US from buying Russian rocket engines that would be used to launch military satellites from the US.

News From You

Our top story on the subreddit today came from ancientbearwizard who submitted yesterday’s Guardian excerpt from a book by Glenn Greenwald alleging the NSA has been intercepting shipments of routers heading for export. The US spy agency then installs surveillance tools, repackages the device and sends it along. The allegation is based on a leaked June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development.

mranthropology sent us a Wired article that Volkswagen announced it will introduce a 10-speed dual-clutch transmission targeted to arrive in the 2015 Passat. More gears allows the engine to optimize RPMs and save fuel. VW Group Chairman Dr. Martin Winterkorn believes the design can help improve fuel economy across VW’s group model range by 20 percent. That includes not only Jettas and Audi A4s but Bugattis and Porches as well. 

MikePKennedy posted the Verge story about  a European Court of Justice ruling that Google is responsible for content on its servers and must respond to individual requests to remove outdated or irrelevant information originating from third parties. A Spanish resident asked Google to remove links to an article about his house being auctioned after a failure to pay taxes. The individual said the matter had been resolved making the articles outdated. The decision runs counter to a statement made last year by the Advocate General.

tm204 sent us a Rice University posting that Rice chemist James Tour and his colleagues have developed a flexible material that combines qualities of a battery and a supercapcitor without using lithium, which is found in almost all commercial batteries today. It can charge and discharge quickly like a supercapacitor or discharge more slowly like a battery. The capacitor is about a hundreth of an inch thick and flexible like graphene. The researchers hope they can make it even thinner.

The Kicker

 According to former Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, today the last day you can (legally) watch the video of him singing ‘Space Oddity’ aboard the International Space Station. The first music video shot in space was filmed in 2013 near the end of Commander Hadfield’s tenure on the ISS  and his license of the David Bowie song expires today. Although Hadfield says he’s working with Bowie’s people to extend the rights, it’s worth watching again, for the weightless guitar solo, and to honor Hadfield for proving that astronauts don’t just have to be stoic scientific ciphers; they can also take the time to be creative in space. If you’re listening to this podcast on Wednesday, never fear, Hadfield’s original song “Jewel in the Night” is still available.

Discussion Section Links: Ground Control to Moto E

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/05/motorolas-moto-e-runs-kitkat-resists-scratches-costs-129-unlocked/

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/12/htc-sensation-4g-official-1-2ghz-dual-core-qhd-display-and-th/

http://www.cnet.com/news/new-399-xbox-one-without-kinect/

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/05/head-of-xbox-says-plans-to-decouple-kinect-from-xbox-one-began-in-april/

http://gigaom.com/2014/05/13/microsoft-wants-to-boost-xbox-video-streaming-by-making-it-free/

http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-choices

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. I’ve first checked it out when i heard Steve Gibson recommend it in 2011 (see Security Now, Ep. 305) and have been using it ever since. I’m not fully in the Tin Foil Hat Brigade but I also don’t necessarily want to have everything I do on the web tracked and sold. There wasn’t a lot of middle ground between being not caring and locking things down so much as to make some sites unusable. Ghostery is exactly the compromise I was looking for.

Plug of the Day: It’s a Thing, a podcast about things that are becoming  ‘ a thing’ with Tom Merritt and Molly Wood.

Wednesday ‘s guest:  Dr. Kiki Sanford, host of This Week in Science

CNET’s Iyaz Akhtar is on the show today. We’ll talk about Twitter’s new mute feature, float a few more idea about why Apple might want to by Beats, and discuss FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s latest revision to net neutrality rules.

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 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:   Iyaz Akhtar of cnet.com and GFQ Network

Headlines

Our top story on the subreddit submitted by spsheridan, tekkyn00b, saxonjf and others reports FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will circulate new Open Internet Guidelines language Monday with new wording to make it clear that allowing paid prioritization should not lead to unfair discrimination against non-paying traffic. Wheeler also will propose an ombudsman position to handle complaints. Comments on paid prioritization and reclassification of the Internet as a telecommunications service will also be specifically sought as well as comments on outside proposals from Mozilla and Professor Tim Wu.

The Next Web reports Twitter added a mute feature to its Android and iOS apps as well as Twitter.com. To mute someone, go to a users profile page, click the gear icon, and choose mute. This allows you to avoid seeing posts from the person in your timeline but you can still communicate by DM with that person if need be. Muted users can still favorite, reply to, and retweet your tweets.

CruxialCIO reports IBM introduced new software-defined storage technology based on methods developed for IBM’s Watson, the cognitive-computing platform. Watson could process 200 million pages of structured and unstructured data using a similar process, according to IBM. A key part of the offering is Elastic Storage which makes it easier to scale access to billions of files. Applications could include genomic data for cancer research, product-design simulations or even travel reservations. Yes that implies curing cancer and booking travel efficiently– are equally complex tasks. The Elastic Storage technology will be available through IBM’s SoftLayer cloud platform later this year.

The Next Web reports LG published a video teaser of its first smartwatch, called the LG G Watch. The watch will be the first powered by Google’s Android Wear platform. It will be water and dust resistant and have a metal body. When it will arrive and how much it will cost are still mysteries. 

News From You

Habichuelacondulce submitted the Mashable story on The Parrot Bebop quadcopter drone. The Bebop has an HD video camera, built-in GPS, image-stabilization AND Oculus Rift compatibility. Oh yeah. A 14-megapixel fisheye lens sends HD video which can be viewed in real time and controlled on a smartphone or tablet. OR an optional Skycontroller extends the range of the drone to 2 km AND an be connected to a Display like say, an Oculus Rift headset. The headset can then control the Bebop’s camera position. The drone and skycontroller will be available sometime in Q4.

spsheridan sent in the Recode story about  a bionic arm with three joints and four fingers that can catch objects in mid-flight, developed by researchers in Switzerland. In a video, the arm catches a bottle and a tennis racket. The robot is trained to catch objects by watching humans. While you and I may imagine playing a game of catch with our robot pals, researchers plan to affix the arm to satellites in order to catch flying space debris. 

habichuelacondulce submitted a Washington Times article that was a little light on details, so we dug up a MassLive.com version, about a woman charged by Springfield, Massachusetts police with violating the state’s wiretapping laws by using her phone to make an audio recording of her arrest. The woman was also charged with disorderly conduct and carrying an open container of alcohol. She denies all the charges. Massachusetts law prohibits the recording of audio without the consent of the person being recorded, although U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of individuals to record video of police at work in a public place.

Discussion Section Links: Mutes & Beats

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/05/12/twitter-introduces-mute-feature-android-iphone-web/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=profeed&utm_reader=feedly

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-12/apple-s-deep-ties-with-iovine-key-driver-of-beats-deal.html

Pick of the Day:  Package Buddy via Luke Pohr

Luke Pohr has today’s pick: “Hi, Tom and Jennie. My Pick of the Day is Package Buddy. Its on Android, and what it does is allow you to keep track of shipments of items that are being shipped to your address. All you do is get the tracking number and select the carrier that your shipment is on. Add that info to the app. The app will search for the tracking info for you. Also update you where your shipment is. This is way more convenient than going through your email every single time. I have used this app for years, still do and its great. And best of all its free!”

Important: Beatmaster just flagged us that Gigi B. Sohn, FCC Senior Counsel for External Affairs, will be doing Q&A on Twitter tomorrow at 2pm ET. Follow @GigiBSohnFCC and add #FCCNetNeutrality to your question, leaving almost no more characters for your question. 

Tuesday ‘s guest: Molly Wood–you may have heard of her. 

On the show today I made a passing reference to Tim Wu’s plan to solve the regulation of the Internet by using alternate justification.

After the show I got this email from Sandy1202

Could you explain what this article means on your show? I can’t follow it all.

Here’s a revision of what I wrote back to her.

It’s a legal trick. The court said in January that Section 706 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act was not a sufficient basis for net neutrality regulations.

They said the FCC could do two things. Come up with a new basis for the regulation, or reclassify broadband providers as telecommunications providers, so-called Title II classification.

Internet was classified as telecommunications until 2002, when ISP’s convinced the FCC to reclassify Internet providers as Information providers, similar to cable TV providers. This allowed the ISPs to close their networks to third party competitors.

The ISPs currently lobby very hard against classifying the Internet as telecom again.

So current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler won’t reclassify Internet as telecom because he would face a fight. Instead he’s trying to strike a compromise. Use the rules that were thrown out in court, with the Section 706 justification, but change them to allow commercially reasonable discrimination. This is an attempt to appease ISPs by letting them charge, but still having some rules against discrimination. He hopes by doing this ISPs won’t take him to court, but there will be enough net neutrality regulation to satisfy others.

What Professor Wu suggests is a legal maneuver called arguing in the alternative. The idea is to put the old rules back in place, while still using Section 706 as a primary justification. HOWEVER, in addition you also justify the rules on the basis that the FCC has the authority, which they do, to classify ISPs as telecoms.

What that does is makes it so that if an ISP goes to court, they not only have to convince the court that Section 706 is not a proper basis for regulation but that the FCC doesn’t have authority to regulate them as a telecom. This would be very hard to prove, since the authority to regulate as telecoms is well-proved and Internet has been regulated as a telecom previously and fits the definition under Title II. (defined as “the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received.”)

Taking that rule to court might end up with the court throwing out the Section 706 justification but then LEAVING the telecom justification, resulting in all Internet providers being reclassified as telecom operators which is exactly what they don’t want.

Wu’s proposition is that the ISP’s won’t want to risk a lawsuit in that case, and will happily agree to Section 706 regulation rather than risk the reclassification.