Christian Cantrell is on the show to talk about Pebble’s claim to revolutionize the smart watch and be less focused on apps. What would that mean?

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Show Notes

Today’s guest: Christian Cantrell, sci-fi author & tech writer

http://www.livingdigitally.net/  

http://darkmatter.fm

Headlines

A new Raspberry Pi is here! Still $35 but packed with more power. Ars Technica reports the Raspberry Pi 2 looks close to the Model B+ but has 4 USB ports, more GPIO pins, and a microSD slot instead of a regular one. The 2 also runs a 900 MHzquad-core (drool)ARMv7. That means you can run Ubuntu Core and even Windows 10 if you don’t want Raspbian. Microsoft will offer Windows 10 free to Raspberry Pi owners. The 2 is the new Model B. The $20 Model A+ remains available.  

Everquest has broken free of Sony as the company announced it has sold it’s Sony Online Entertainment games division to investment management firm Columbus Nova. The Next Web reports the division has been renamed Daybreak Game Company. The company will continue to produce MMORPGS like Everquest and H1Z1 while embracing the multiplatform world.

The Verge interviewed Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky who said Pebble shipped its 1 millionth watch on December 31st. And as Android Wear grows and Apple Watch arrives, Migicovsky says Pebble has “found a new framework to use as an interaction model on the watch.” He said apps will no longer be the main focus on the platform, saying “it doesn’t look like what is on your smartphone.”

Intel doesn’t want to get left out of the Internet of Things market the way it missed mobile at first. So it’s buying its way in. Reuters reports Intel has agreed to buy German chip maker Lantiq for an undisclosed sum. In addition to chips for networked devices, Lantiq also produces chips for networking connections, mobile broadband and WiFi. The deal is still subject to regulatory approvals and although the terms of sale have not been disclosed price estimates are around $280 million.

The Washington Post reports the US FCC will consider a draft decision this week to intervene against state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that puts legal limits on Internet service operated by cities. The decision is expected to say that laws limiting municipal Internet prices or geography inhibit timely and reasonable deployment of high-speed Internet under section 706 of the Communications Act. The draft decision will be followed by a vote on Feb. 26, the same day as an expected vote on Open Internet Guidelines.

Reuters reports Japan message app company Line is launching online grocery delivery in Thailand, Line’s second biggest market after Japan. Line’s service will be offering products such as water, coffee and instant noodles at up to 50 percent discounts and free delivery for Thai shoppers. The service will compete against similar services from Tesco Lotus, CP Fresh Mart and Tops Supermarket.

In a story from the-next-web The Pirate Bay is back up, after being taking down Dec 9 during a raid on a Swedish data center by local police. The site is back on its original domain with a Phoenix image. The first new torrent added contained an image of a phoenix titled “Like a Phoenix, it rises from the ashes”. While the site is up features like RSS feeds are still down.

TechCrunch reports that Google’s share of the US search market, excluding mobile, dipped below 75% for the first time since July 2008. If mobile is included, Google’s share rises to 78%. Yahoo become the number 2 search engine in the US, increasing its share of the search market to more than 28% of all searches, compared to less than 10% in November 2014. This surge is due mostly to Yahoo becoming the default search engine in Firefox, which also helped.

Gigaom reports that IDC shows tablet sales were down by 3.2% tduring the holiday quarter compared to last year. This was the first time IDC showed year over year decline for worldwide tablet shipments since the market’s inception in 2010, only shipping 76 million tablets in Q4. The rest of the years increases balnced the bad Q4 out with Tablet sales for the entire year increasing by 4.4% over 2013 with 229.6 million units shipped. Apple continues to lead the tablet market with a 28.1% share, followed by Samsung, then Lenovo, ASUS and Amazon. Although only Lenovo managed to grow year over year.

News From You: 

MacBytes sent us the Reuters report that IBM is bringing back annual performance bonuses for its CEO and other top executives, despite 11 straight quarters of lower revenue, 7% drop in 2014 profits and 11% decrease in stock performance. CEO Virginia Rometty will get a $3.6 million annual incentive payout for 2014, on top of a base salary of 1.5 million, which increases to 1.6 million in 2015. She is also slated to received a $5 million award for 2015 and a long-term stock grant worth 13.3 million payable in 2018. She must have met her personal deliverables or Q targets or OKRs or some such thing. IBM did not deliver bonuses in 2013 at the request of executives.

metalfreak submitted the Liliputing.com report that Dell will offer Ubuntu installed on its new XPS 13 and Precision M3800 laptops. The linux option will cut the starting price of the M3800 by a $100 to $1533 . Machines will ship with Ubuntu release 14.04 installed. Unfortunately that means there will be no out of box support for the laptop’s Thunderbolt port although that may be addressed with 14.04.2 maintenance release. If you need something even smaller and cheaper the latest revision to the XPS 13 ultrabook will come in at $1189.

Discussion Section Links:  One Million Pebbles

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/2/7947799/pebble-1-million-smartwatches-sold-new-hardware-coming

http://developer.getpebble.com/blog/2015/01/22/cloudpebble-pebble-emulator/

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/02/apple-watch-retail-plans/?ncid=rss

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/2/7950257/apple-watch-apps-google-uber-foursquare

Pick of the Day: Windscape via Tom Sidla

One of my favorite Apps is Windscape. It’s another weather App, yes, but not like any other I’ve seen. It gathers wind speed data and temps from around the globe and simulates the info with little moving dots. Very cool looking. You can zoom in and out around the globe and see typhoons, storms, polar vortexes, who’s hot and who’s not (literally). It’s $.99, so if you like science and weather, definitely check it out.

Tom Sidla, Pipe Dream Plumbing, Inc.

Tomorrow’s guest: Patrick Beja

After Wednesday’s show Robert Heron, Jennie and Tom kept talking about TVs and more. The conversation was captured on the YouTube video but we thought it was good enough to give the audio listeners a version as well. Happy bonus weekend content.

MP3

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

Darren Kitchen is on the show and we’ll talk about transparency in light of Google’s new commitments to privacy and Reddit’s new transparency report. Plus Len Peralta tries to illustrate transparency. Will you be able to see what he draws?!?

MP3

Using a Screen Reader? click here

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

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

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

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here or giving 5 cents 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: Darren Kitchen of hak5.org and Len Peralta, artist!

Check out Len’s show art this week, it’s pretty hilariously awesome.

http://lenperaltastore.com/products/im-not-touching-you-print

Headlines

The NY Times reports Verizon announced Friday it will soon allow wireless users to completely opt out of its supercookie tracking program. Previously customers could opt out of the tracking being USED by anyone but the tracking still happened. This allowed clever third parties to figure out how to track users anyway. Expanding the optout to remove the number called a “UIDH” will be available “soon.”

CNET reports on a recent upgrade to China’s Internet filtering system to make it harder to circumvent with VPN and providing more scope to block unwanted material. A senior official confirmed that popular VPN Astrill has been disrupted.

Bloomberg reports AOL is firing 150 employees and closing TUAW and Joystiq, folding content from the sites into Engadget. Most of the job cuts come from the sales division. A source told Bloomberg AOL is automating its digital ad sales and simplifying its portfolio. TechCrunch reports Parentdish in the UK and MyDaily, also in the UK, are going to become a part of Huffington Post’s UK site. AOL reports Q4 earnings on Feb. 11. TUAW’s last day as TUAW is Feb. 2.

Rap artist Jay-Z has tabled a bid to purchased a Swedish company called Aspiro for $56 million US dollars. Aspiro runs the WiMP and Tidal music streamign services. CNET reports WiMP is popular in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland with 25 million songs, 75,000 music videos, and half a million subscribers. Tidal is a streaming service in the US and UK that focuses on high quality audio in the lossless FLAC format. Shake it off? Oh hell no. Jay-Z’s the new Sinatra, he can make it anywhere, yeah they love him everywhere.

Alameda is not just for nuclear wessels anymore. CNET reports that what seems to be a Tesla Model X was caught on camera, during testing at the former Alameda Naval Air Station near San Francisco. The video shows a car slightly more angular but similar to the Model X concept unveiled in 2012. The Model X is Telsa’s take on an all-electric SUV. The video was caught on an iPhone 5 and uploaded to YouTube.

Engadget reports that British Telecom, known as BT, says faster broadband is coming to the UK. BT has been testing G.fast a technology that uses a wider frequency band to increase performance on copper wire. Two pilot programs will begin this summer in Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire) and Gosforth (Newcastle) with speeds of a few hundred megabits per second which will be increased to 500 mbps over time to around 4,000 homes and businesses. Delivering those speeds to most of the UK, however will take about a decade.

Engadget reports starting today, Google Now will support cards with data from more than 40 third-party apps. For example apps like Pandora can push a card recommending a playlist or if you land at an airport a Lyft card might quote you a fare for a ride. The feature does not share data with the third-parties and works only on Android and only with selected apps.

The Verge reports Google is moving another program from research to regular old corporate division. Project Tango, the 3D-sensing and scanning technology is leaving the Advanced Technology and Projects group, aka ATAP, and into Google proper, though reporting to whom is not yet announced. Google said the same thing it did about Google Glass, namely it will keep iterating and building new devices and this is a step towards a final consumer product. But for some reason none of the headlines seeem to say Project Tango is dead. Hmm.

News From You: 

goofball_jones pointed out the VentureBeat article about Reddit’s first transparency report. Reddit revealed that it received 55 requests for user info in 2014, all from government agencies and all but 5 from the US. It provided some information in response to 32 of the requests. 218 requests were made to remove content and 68 of those requests were granted, all on copyright grounds. Last month Reddit had 3.2 million logged in users.

spsheridan submitted the Huffington Post article that Google has agreed to changes regarding user policy as the result of discussion with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office. The changes, which will apply to all Google users globally, will make its privacy policy easier to read and to find and give users more control over what information is shared. It will also do more to make employees, third parties, and users aware of privacy issues. While Google agreed to changes, ICO enforcement head Steve Eckersley said the investigation found no substantial damage and distress to consumers.

Discussion Section Links: Transparency

https://gigaom.com/2015/01/30/google-promises-better-privacy-information-to-settle-uk-case/

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2015/01/google-to-change-privacy-policy-after-ico-investigation/

http://www.zdnet.com/article/reddit-hands-over-user-data-in-over-half-of-government-requests/

https://www.redditstatic.com/transparency/2014.pdf

http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/28/dropbox-transparency-covers-non-us-requests/?

Pick of the Day: Off to be the Wizard via Big Jim

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1612184715/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1612184715&linkCode=as2&tag=subbrcom-20&linkId=4SXHRD34CRSYUQND\

Monday’s guest: Christian Cantrell