Why Nielsen numbers may show the death of TV and the streaming sticks are winning the streaming wars.
Today in Tech History – Dec. 9, 2014
In 1906 – Grace Hopper was born. She would rise to the rank of Rear Admiral but be best remembered for popularizing the term “debugging” for hunting down computer errors. She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL.
In 1968 – Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart gave a legendary product demonstration of NLS that would become known as “the mother of all demos.” Among other things it introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.
In 1987 – Microsoft released Windows 2.0 which among other improvements could run the first Windows versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
It’s A Thing- s04e02 – Manual transmissions
Can you drive a stick? You may be coming back in vogue. You may actually be on the cutting edge of nostalgia.
Get the episode here.
Links
“Manual vs. Automatic Transmission | Stick-Shifts Save Gas – Consumer Reports”
“Understanding What’s Really Killing the Manual Transmission”
DTNS 2381 – G, How Fast?
Breki Tomasson joins us to talk about the rise of hacker groups both good and bad. The 1900s had Wobblies and the 1960s had Situationists. Is the 21st century’s version?
Using a Screen Reader? click here
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 guests: Breki Tomasson, founder of the CSICON podcasting network
Headlines
Ars Technica reports Oculus and Samsung began taking orders in the US for the “Innovator Edition” of the head-mounted virtual reality display that pairs with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. Samsung.com is taking the orders for the $200 device as well as $250 bundle that includes a Bluetooth controller. Samsung says it will expand orders to other countries in January with worldwide availability expected later in 2015.
The Verge reports Facebook users can now use keywords to search for specific individual posts, not just for other users and pages. Autocomplete will add keywords when you start typing a person’s name. The search only looks at posts shared with you by people in your network. The features roll out today on desktop and in an updated iOS app soon. After that launch is complete in the US, it will come to Android and other countries. Graph Search is also coming to mobile on iOS first then Android.
The BBC reports Sony’s Playstation Store was offline for a few hours this morning as result of a distributed denial of service attack. The system appears to be back online. The attack was not related to the attack two weeks ago on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s internal network.
Engadget reports New Delhi has banned Uber from operating in the city after a woman alleged one of the company’s drivers raped her. Special Commissioner of Delhi Transport Department, Satish Mathur told Economic Times that the company misled customers by using vehicles with the wrong permits and has never applied for permission to operate in the city. The driver in question was out on bail for sexually assaulting a woman in a cab he was driving in 2011. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the company will do everything to support the victim.
Apple Insider looks over Apple’s Best of 2014 awards. Photo editor Pixelmator got the top nod on the iPad and Elevate – Brain Training took the iPhone honors. Monument Valley took top iPad game and Threes was named best game on iPhone. Beyonce won top artist and Sam Smith won best new artist. Taylor Swift’s “1989” got top album and Iggy Azalea got best song for “Fancy”. Guardians of the Galaxy received best movie and Fargo won TV show of the year. And yes there were best podcast awards. Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History deservedly took the best classic podcast and Serial won best new podcast.
The term 4G got muddled when carriers applied it to fast 3G services like HSPA+. Now according to GigaOm, the GSM Association released a report Monday in advance of setting the official definition of 5G. The report describes two main schools of thought. One would narrowly define 5G as technology that improved wireless speed and latency. A broader competing definition called the “Hyper-connected vision” prioritizes compatibility, coverage area, green technology, and internet of things support alongside speed and latency. The report is just an analysis and even when a definition is agreed upon, history teaches us carriers will ignore it when they feel like it.
PC World reviews the Samsung 850 EVO Solid State Drive with 3D NAND. This is the consumer version of the 850 Pro is less expensive and comes with only a five year warranty. The drive is self-encrypting and ranges from 75 to 150 TeraBytes Written. In other words it’ll last you awhile. The drive sells for $100 for the 120GB, $up to $500 for the 1TB.
Reuters reports mobile transactions on Alipay online payment platform jumped to 54% of all transactions in the first 10 months of the year. Mobile had been 22% of transactions in all of 2013. The increase was driven in part by consumers in rural areas and smaller cities adopting mobile devices as their primary tool for online shopping. Alipay is China’s largest payment service provider owned by Ant Financial and controlled by Alibaba’s executive chairman and founder Jack Ma.
News From You
KAPT_Kipper posted the Kotaku story sharing the sad news that Ralph Baer, designer of the machine that became the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console, died this weekend. He also developed the light gun and the electronic memory game Simon. Baer was 92.
mranthrpology pointed us towards the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory post that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft came out of hibernation Saturday for its 2015 encounter with Pluto. The activation signal took 4 hours and 26 minutes to reach Earth. New Horizons will begin observing the Pluto system on Jan. 15. New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto will occur on July 14.
Metalfreak submitted the PC World article that the International Telecommunications Union announced the approval of a standard for G.fast on Friday. G.fast promises speeds up to 1Gbps over 100 meters using copper wire. IN practice it’s slower but BT demonstrated download speeds of 700 Mbps over 66 meters earlier this year. ITU expects the first rollouts to come before the end of next year.
Discussion Links: Sony Playstation hack
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30373686
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/30306319
https://twitter.com/lizardpatrol
Pick of the Day: Name Changer via Paul in New York
Paul from New York was running Plex as his media server and loved it but ran into a tricky problem that led to today’s pick from him: He says, “The PLEX Server wanted my video files to follow a very specific naming convention, and faced with hours of work manually renaming hundreds of files, I began to look for a better solution. Thus my pick-of-the-day suggestion is a wonderful app for the Mac that I found called “Name Changer” from MRR Software:
http://mrrsoftware.com/namechanger/
This very simple piece of software has multiple options for renaming groups of files, from sequential numbering to pattern matching to full “Regular Expression” support in a clean intuitive interface. Although available for free, given the hours of effort it saved me, I was happy to make the $10 suggested donation at the author’s website.
If anyone is faced with a similar task of renaming multiple files, I would highly recommend it.”
Messages:
Monday’s guest: Breki Tomasson
Today in Tech History – Dec. 8, 2014
In 1931 – U.S. Patent No. 1,835,031 for a “concentric conducting system” was awarded to Lloyd Espenschied of Kew Gardens, New York, and Herman A. Affel of Ridgewood, New Jersey, and assigned to the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Coaxial Cable had been patented.
In 1993 – The U.S. secretary of defense declared the GPS system a dual use system that had Initial Operation Capability and opened the Standard Positioning System to civilians, which gave accuracy of nine meters horizontally.
In 2010 – With the second launch of the SpaceX Dragon, SpaceX became the first privately held company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft.
Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
It’s A Thing- s04e01 – The salt controversy
There is a war on salt but no war for common sense and moderation. Why is that?
Get the episode here.
Links
Today in Tech History – Dec. 7, 2014
In 1962 – Ferranti Ltd. switched on the Atlas, the UK’s first supercomputer. It was the most powerful computer in the world at the time and doubled the UK’s scientific computing capability.
In 1963 – The CBS broadcast of the college football game between Army and Navy featured the first use of video instant replay during a sports telecast. Some people got confused and called to complain.
In 1972 – The last Apollo moon mission, Apollo 17 was launched. The crew took the famous Blue Marble picture that now graces desktop background everywhere.
In 1999 – The Recording Industry Association of America sued 6-month-old Napster. The Industry refused to settle, thus insuring that digital music sales would remain low for years to come.
Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
Today in Tech History – Dec. 6, 2014
In 1877 – Thomas Edison tested out his new phonograph invention, by recording the first lines of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He recreated the event in 1927.
In 1957 – Responding to Sputnik, the United States launched the Vanguard TV3. The rocket only made it a little over a meter off the launchpad before it fell back and was destroyed. A fuel leak was thought to have caused the failure.
In 2006 – NASA revealed photographs from the Martian Global Surveyor, of two craters called Terra Sirenum and Centauri Montes which appeared to show the evidence that water existed on the surface Mars, as recently as five years before.
Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
DTNS 2380 – 00000001st Binary Church of Packets
Darren Kitchen joins me to review the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack and look at listener suggestions for TrueCrypt replacements. Plus Len Peralta is here to do his artprov thing.
Using a Screen Reader? click here
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 guests: Darren Kitchen of hak5.org and Len Peralta, artist and author
Headlines
CNET reports that Apple has asked a California court to dismiss an anti-trust case. Apple alleges Marianna Rosen, the last remaining plaintiff in the case, did not purchase any iPods within the required timeframe for the class action suit. Apple claims the iPods were purchased by the law firm of her husband. If the court agrees, Rosen would not be able to collect damages, or show injury, thereby preventing a class action suit. Rosen’s lawyers have the weekend to come up with response. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said, “I am concerned that I don’t have a plaintiff. That’s a problem.” The plaintiff’s lawyers are expected to respond this weekend claiming Ms. Rosen did purchase the iPods.
Ars Technica reports that AT&T’s policy change on throttling customers does not yet apply to LTE customers. AT&T previously throttled its legacy unlimited customers who used more than 3GB of data in a month. But awhile back changed policy to only apply the throttling when the network was congested. It turns out that AT&T cleverly left LTE users out of that new policy. Any LTE user who passes the 5GB mark in a month will be throttled for the remainder, although users can buy more data to add to their unlimited plan. AT&T told Ars the policy will be changed for LTE customers sometime in 2015.
The BBC wraps up the nightmare weeks that have been the last two for Sony Pictures Entertainment. While most of its internal systems are back online, the attackers have leaked stolen data. It’s not inconsequential data either, including movie budgets, payroll data, salary information for 6800 global employees, social security numbers for more than 47,000 employees, health care files, unreleased films, home addresses, and contracts for Sony Pictures employees and freelancers, and more. Sony says it will offer a year of free credit monitoring and fraud protection to current and former employees.
Reuters UK reports that Taiwan has identified 12 smartphone brands that do not conform to privacy standards. The phone makers could face fines or a ban unless they address the issue. No brands were named, but the government is expected to release their findings within weeks. The Taiwanese government got involved after media reports claimed Xiaomi smartphones could send user data to home servers in mainland China without user permission. Xiaomi said its devices “never actively send any private user information without the users’ approval.
The New York Times reports the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled Friday that data collection programs conducted by the UK’s GCHQ and the US NSA do not violate the country’s human rights laws and that safeguards in place protect people’s online privacy sufficiently. Privacy groups that brought the case, including Amnesty International, said they would appeal the British court’s decision at the European Court of Human Justice.
Hola Cortana! The Next Web reports that Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant is coming to Windows Phone Preview users in Spain, France, Germany and Italy. Additional languages will be part of an update that is rolling out to Windows Phone Devs. Alpha Cortana will be missing some features, like flight data, and transit data in smaller cities. Fortunately European football data will be included in the update.
Its handy that we’ll be able to ask Cortana in German things like “How much money do telecommunications companies give Chanellor Merkel. Because the Local reports the Chancellor, speaking at a Vodafone-hosted conference in Berlin called Digitising Europe, called for a splitting of services on the Internet, “one for free internet, and the other for special services.” She added, “An innovation-friendly internet means that there is a guaranteed reliability for special services. These can only develop when predictable quality standards are available”.
The New York Times reports NASA’s Orion spacecraft passed its first flight test Friday. The unmanned capsule carrying test equipment launched Friday morning at 7:05 AM Eastern time from Cape Canaveral Florid, made two orbits and successfully splashed down about four and half hours later at 8:29 AM Pacific Time in the Pacific Ocean, 600 miles southwest of San Diego. The test is the first step towards a manned Orion mission in 2021 and eventually missions to an asteroid and Mars.
News From You
Inge_Aning posted the PC World article about a conference on privacy and cybercrime held in Washington, DC Thursday. During one discussion, Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit said he believes privacy is overvalued, and just used to hide disreputable conduct. Posner thinks it’s fine for the NSA to copy all data in worldwide networks. He said “If someone drained my cell phone, they would find a picture of my cat, some phone numbers, some email addresses, some email text. What’s the big deal? Other people must have really exciting stuff. Do they narrate their adulteries, or something like that?” — Judge Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Michael Dreeben, deputy solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice expressed their support for the notion of privacy.
MikePkennedy sent the Engadget summary of tests that show solid state drives could last a lot longer than you think. TechReport.com forced six drives — including Kingston’s HyperX 3K, Samsung’s 840 Pro and Intel’s 335 series — to continuously write and rewrite 10GB of small and large files. Four of them failed at the petabyte mark, well past specified limits while the Samsung and Kingston models passed two petabytes and were still going. Essentially, those drives could write data until the parts themselves disintegrated.
Hurmoth (and Starfuryzeta) both sent in the Ars Technica report that US Senator Ron Wyden introduced a bill would prohibit law enforcement from subverting encryption on electronic devices. The Secure Data Act would prevent US government agencies from equiring any “backdoors” be placed in US software or hardware.
Discussion Links: Sony hack week
http://fusion.net/story/31469/sony-pictures-hack-was-a-long-time-coming-say-former-employees/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30345227
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/12/sony-pictures-malware-tied-to-seoul-shamoon-cyber-attacks/
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/4/7337407/sony-pictures-hackers-stole-47000-social-security-numbers-including-stallone
http://laist.com/2014/12/04/all_the_crazy_things_leaked_in_sony.php
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/12/05/was-sony-pictures-hack-inside-job/
Pick of the Day: Slice.com via Frederik “The Belgian” from (currently rainy) San Jose & Garrett
Frederik says: On Tuesday’s podcast, Justin asked whether the day’s pick, Junecloud, could scan your inbox the way TripIt does and automatically add packages to track. I’ve never used Junecloud, but my go-to package-tracking app of choice, Slice, does just that. In my experience it does a fairly good job of it (though it occasionally creates duplicates, especially for eBay orders that generate emails from both eBay and PayPal). It also does a fairly good job of finding a photo for each item you’ve ordered, letting you easily scan all your orders in a more visual way. There’s both an Android and iOS app, in addition to the website. You can find it all at slice.com.
Garret says: I am currently using slice.com which is pretty good. My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t pick up amazon tracking numbers because amazon doesn’t send those in email, only a link to their tracking page. Slice is still able to key off of the estimated delivery date in the confirmation email so it does a pretty good job. I used to use https://www.packagetrackr.com/ I don’t remember why I left. Just another example if people want to try it.
Monday’s guest: Breki Tomasson
Today in Tech History – Dec. 5, 2014
In 1766 – James Christie held his first sale on Pall Mall in London. Christie’s still operates auctions today and is much more civilized than EBAY.
In 1901 – At 2156 Tripp Avenue in Chicago, Elias and Flora welcomed their new baby boy into the world. They had no idea at the time that Mickey Mouse had also come into the world along with their son, Walt Disney.
In 1901 – Physicist Werner Heisenberg was born. We may not know both his precise position and precise momentum at the same time, but we are certain he was born in Wurzburg, Germany.
Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.