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Show Notes
Today’s guest: Jill Duffy, writer and senior analyst at pcmag.com
Check out Jill’s great article on Fitness Trackers at Prevention Magazine
Also! It’s almost the one year anniversary of DTNS and Friday’s resident artprov artist Len Peralta is doing something special to mark the occasion. He’s drawing a poster called “In This Together” and you have a chance to be drawn into the print. There are only 50 slots left available. If you want to get drawn into this piece of DTNS history, go to Len’s Patreon page: patreon.com/len and pledge at the $2.50 level or higher. Len will draw you into the print + you’ll also get a copy of it as well. Once again, that URL is patreon.com/len
Headlines:
Engadget reports Corning has created Gorilla Glass 4. The company examined hundreds of broken devices and smashed a LOT of phones to find out that damage from sharp contact accounted for 70% of field failures. Gorilla Glass 4 is designed to stay intact 80 percent of the time when dropped from a meter above a rough surface (3.3. feet). Corning said it is already sending test samples to its customers.
TechCrunch reports Dropbox has updated its Carousel app for iOS and Android. Carousel combines photos from your device with photos stored in Dropbox to make an easy interface for viewing all of them. The Carousel feature lets you easily spin through photos to view them and a messaging feature lets you instantly send photos and videos to friends. The new app with a cleaner interface launches on iPad today, Android tablets soon and adds a web version as well.
ReCode passes along details from Sandvine’s latest report on North American broadband usage during primetime. If you’ve been saying Netflix takes up about a third of download bandwidth, you can keep saying that. YouTube stays at number 2 with 14.04% and Amazon has risen to 2.58%. This bandwidth usage so it’s not number of streams but it’s a fair approximation. BitTorrent still takes up 25.49% of the upload. So many Linux ISOs.
Ars Technica reports Mozilla has not renewed Google as the default search engine for the Firefox browser worldwide. Mozilla has struck regional deals. Baidu becomes default in China, Yandex in Russia and Yahoo powered by Bing in the US. Mozilla told MarketingLand’s Danny Sullivan that Google remains default in Europe and it will continue to exist as an alternate option.
Gigaom reports that The Washington Post has launched a version of its news app exclusive to Amazon Fire owners. Fire users will get the app free for six months. An additional six months will cost $1. The new app will come to other devices next year but cost $3.99/month. The new app includes ‘Pinch View’ which allows users to swipe through an edition as if they were flipping magazine pages and updates twice a day at 5am and 5pm eastern with breaking news and other updates added in between.
Reuters reports Alibaba founder Jack Ma said the Chinese company will set up an international version of its Taobao ecommerce site in multiple languages including English and Chinese. Alibaba has a wholesale international site called Aliexpress but not one for consumers to sell to each other.
The Verge reports Uber hired Harriet Pearson, former privacy chief at IBM, to conduct a review of Uber’s privacy practices and make recommendations. In addition US Senator Al Franken posted a public letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick taking him to task for the companies attitude toward privacy and asking 8 questions which the Senator expect responses to by December 15th.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports a corporate advocacy group called the Ad Hoc Telecommunications USers Committee has visited the US FCC commissioners three times this year. Representatives of the group included Nicholas Lewis of UPS, Lawrence Chattoo of Bank of America, Carl Holshouser of Visa and James Carroll from Ford Motor. FCC filings show the topic of the meetings was “Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet” and terminating access monopolies. In a separate comment filed with the FCC the same group urged the FCC to classify broadband under Title II. Ford and Visa spokespeople told Bloomberg their representatives did not advocate for Title II.
The Verge reports Google has a new system called Contributor that lets users pay partner sites $1 to $3 a month in order to remove Google AdSense ads from the site. Mashable, The Onion, Science Daily, Imgur, WikiHow, and Urban Dictionary have been announced as partners in the new program.
News From You:
starfuryzeta sent the GigaOm report that the US FTC and the State of Florida announced court complaints against dozens of individuals and companies that allegedly run PC Cleaner scams. The scams trick users into installing malware and then charge them for the removal of it which then leads to further scams. The FTC obtained an injunction on their operations and an order for asset seizures though no criminal charges were filed.
KAPT_Kipper pointed out the TechCrunch story that free open source anti-surveillance tool called Detekt has been released by Berlin-based security researcher Claudio Guarnieri at resistsurveillance.org. The tool scans Windows machines for surveillance spyware used to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world.” The tool only tells you if it can find surveillance software not guarantee none exists. The software was developed in partnership with the EFF, Digitale Gesellschaft, Privacy International and Amnesty International.
KAPT_Kipper pointed out the TechCrunch story that free open source anti-surveillance tool called Detekt has been released by Berlin-based security researcher Claudio Guarnieri at resistsurveillance.org. The tool scans Windows machines for surveillance spyware used to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world.” The tool only tells you if it can find surveillance software not guarantee none exists. The software was developed in partnership with the EFF, Digitale Gesellschaft, Privacy International and Amnesty International.
habichuelacondulce passed along the Consumerist report about a graphic designer in Tennessee who was moving an hour away. He called his cable company and was told he could move his business class broadband service to his new location. But the installer never showed up! The man called his cable company again and was told his new address wasn’t served by the company and he owed $2,789 in early termination fees. Anyone want to guess the cable company? Veronica? Anyone? A local news station got involved and–you guessed it–Comcast, confirmed the early termination fee, but then said there were extenuating circumstances in the case and the fee would be waived. Good job, WSMV Nashville. Next up, a monkey that goes bananas for basketball!
Discussion Section: Fitness Trackers
Pick of the Day: Bomgar via Greg Harris
Check out Bomgar.com for the best in enterprise remote desktop support for nearly every platform. It’s simple, intuitive, comprehensive, and full featured. It’s available for hosted or managed and can be virtual or appliance based.
Friday’s guests: Darren Kitchen and Len Peralta