Michael Wolf Joins to chat about Gmail’s assault on a Fresno man, the 30-year-old Mac, and the untold story of Nest.

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Show Notes

Gmail, G+, Hangout outage Google’s Gmail had a complete outage earlier today starting just after 2 PM Eastern time and finally getting a green light on Google’s Apps Status Board at just around 3:30 PM Eastern. The problem seemed to affect Google+ and 8 other apps according to the status board. It comes along with a very strange email bug. SearchEngineLand noted Also Google’s ESite Reliability Engineering team sat down for an AMA right as the outage happened, which was convenient for people wanting to know what was going on. Monday that a Gmail link in search was pre-filling a user’s name in the compose window when clicked. Yesterday, David S. Peck of Fresno, California began receiving thousands of blank emails. TechCrunch reports when you search Gmail on Google, and click the email sub link, a compose window comes up with Mr. Peck’s email pre-filled. Peck is a Business Marketing professional with experience in banking.

Qualcomm acquires HP’s old Palm patents: USA Today reports that Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has acquired about 2,400 patents from Hewlett-Packard that were once owned by Palm. No word on how much Qualcomm paid or what their intentions are. LG bought WEbOS from HP last year. That means there’s very little left of Palm at HP.

News From You:

guyfromtrinidad pointed out an Engadget story about the Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, introducing new guidelines that guarantee a user’s right to uninstall software preinstalled on phones, aka Bloatware. Certain apps are exempt from the requirement such as WiFi, Settings and App Stores. The rules go into effect in April.

KAPT_Kipper spotted this Mashable story about developer Steven Hickson bypassing Snapchat’s new security feature which was meant to protect the service from bots. The new feature requires a user to spot the SnapChat logo when signing up. Hickson says he wrote a program to identify the logo automatically. It took him about 30 minutes to write it and he made it available on GitHub.

habichuelacondulce submitted this Time story about UK TV show Top Gear pitting a Mercedes driven by The Stig against a Google StreetView car in a race. The Streetview car claims it wasn’t racing at all but just mapping the track. Sure Streetview.

And stephenater sent us this Wired article about the first Internet.org hackathon. Developers were asked to test their apps on a simulated Indonesian and Nigerian networks running at 2G speeds. Internet.org is the consortium established last year by Facebook, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Opera, Qualcomm, and MediaTek to bring the Internet to the two thirds of the planet that isn’t already online. Developers from Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, AccuWeather, Huffington Post, and even nonprofit Water.org learned how to make their apps work for the majority of the world’s citizens.

More links from the show: 

CNET reports Samsung made money last quarter, but made less money than the quarter before for the first time since 2011:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57617714-94/samsung-q4-operating-profit-misses-analyst-expectations/

EP&T reports IHS has released numbers showing Apple spent the most on semiconductors last year at $30.3 billion while Samsung drafted along right behind them at $22.2 billion:

http://www.ept.ca/news/apple-samsung-lord-over-oem-field-once-again/1002875822/?&er=NA

Facebook makes some predictions about the researchers at Princeton who made some predictions about Facebook:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57617715-93/facebook-pokes-holes-in-princeton-research-with-parody/

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet very kindly ended our weeks with a Windows rumor. Looks like March 11th is shaping up to be the Windows 8.1 release date according to Mary Jo’s sources:

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-windows-8-1-update-1-rumored-release-target-is-march-11-7000025559/

Jason Hiner joins the show to talk about Lenovo buying the last of IBM’s PC business and where 3D printing meets the Internet of things. Also don’t text while walking.

MP3

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

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

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

Apple to release two new iPhones in 2014: The Wall Street Journal reports Apple plans to release two new iPhones this year. Shocker, we know. Each of the two would have a bigger display than the iPhone 5S, estimated to be 4.5 inches and 5 inches respectively. Both phones would have the same aluminum design as the %S, meaning no plastic phone like the 5C. The smaller is allegedly in production while the bigger is in preliminary development.

Lenovo agrees to buy IBM server unit for $2.3 billion in cash and stock:  Ars Technica reports Lenovo agreed to buy IBM’s x86-based server unit for $2.3 billion in cash and stock. IBM will keep it’s high-end server and mainframe unit but all its x86-based businesses are now gone. IDC reported in August that IBM held the top spot in server market share, and about 3/4 of that was IBM’s x86 unit. That means Lenovo will quickly reach parity with Dell and likely come close to HP in the server market.

News From You:

clemro passed along a Phys.org story about a Virginia Tech research team that developed a battery that runs on sugar, maltodextrin to be exact, with an energy density an order of magnitude greater than other sugar-based batteries. A sugar-based battery would be cheaper, refillable, and biodegradable.  Sweet!

dmmacs passes along an iO9 retelling of an LA Times story, about a man named Mike Seay. Seay’s daughter died in a car accident last year. He recently received an absolutely awful piece of junk mail from Office Max, addressed to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed in Car Crash.” Office Max told the LA Times the letter is a result of a mailing list rented through a third-party provider” and offered its apologies to Seay. OfficeMax is investigating why the information was aggregated in that way.

Tahras pointed us to Cory Doctorow’s post on Boing Boing about library audiobooks going DRM-free. Overdrive, which is a main supplier of digital material for libraries has announced it’s retiring its DRM’ed Windows media format for audiobooks and replacing it with unrestricted MP3s.

More links from the show:

Walking while texting is dangerous. Science says so: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2014/01/22/texting-walking-hazards/4647357/

TIVO says they’re ‘not out of the hardware business’, despite layoffs:  http://mashable.com/2014/01/23/tivo-hardware-not-dead/

9to5 Mac reports a new Apple TV set-top box is well into testing and could be introduced in the first half of this year. 

http://9to5mac.com/2014/01/23/new-apple-tv-set-top-box-likely-coming-soon-appgame-store-possible/

Neiman Marcus announced 1.1 million customer credit and debit cards may have been compromised by malicious software

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/01/23/neiman-marcus-11-million-cards/4796647/

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board said that the statute upon which the NSA’s phone record collection program was based “does not provide an adequate basis to support this program.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/independent-review-board-says-nsa-phone-data-program-is-illegal-and-should-end/2014/01/22/4cebd470-83dd-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html

Long days and pleasant nights, DTNS’ers!

Molly Wood and Peter Wells join to talk abotut he great Chinese website blackout, T-Mobile USA becoming a bank, and more.

MP3

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

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

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