Molly Wood is on the show along with Justin Robert Young and we’ll talk about what we expect to happen at Apple’s WWDC and what we WISH would happen. Also thoughts on Ballmer buying the Clippers, and a little update on TrueCrypt. And Len Peralta is here to draw it all! You can’t miss this one.

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Show Notes

Today’s guests: Molly Wood, columnist for The New York Times, Justin Robert Young, co-host of Night Attack and Weird Things podcasts, & Len Peralta of the arts!

Headlines:

Engadget reports more details on the unannounced Samsung virtual reality headset. Engadget’s sources now say the headset is a collaboration between Samsung and Oculus VR. Oculus handles the software giving Samsung early access to the mobile dev kit while Samsung does the hardware and gives Oculus early access to next-gen OLED screens.

As ordered by the EU, Google has implemented a solution for removing URLs from its index for Europeans that wish to be forgotten, as is their right. Just attach a copy of a valid photo ID, name, email, country whose law applies, and a list of every URL to be removed. Then explain why the link is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, excessive in relation to the purpose,” and you’re soon forgotten!

Ars Technica reports Google will close its Fort Worth, TX factory which makes Moto X smartphones. Mark Randall, Motorola’s senior vice president for supply chain and operations, told the Wall Street Journal that poor sales of the Moto X prevented the company from achieving economies of scale and also blamed labor and shipping costs. Motorola is in the process of being sold to Lenovo by Google. That deal should close later this year.

Steve Gibson continues to follow the TrueCrypt story at GRC.com and has a page collecting all the developments as they happen. Among the significant events, the Open Crypto Audit Project will proceed with phase II of its security audit of the whole-disk encryption software, despite the developers abandoning the project. Phase II will analyze the entire way encryption is implemented in TrueCrypt. Also Steven Barnhart posted on Twitter that he received emails from a TrueCrypt developer indicating there is no longer interest from the developers, there was not government pressure, and feels a fork of the code would be harmful. Those emails have been submitted to Ars Technica for vetting.

The Next Web reports WeChat has added an option to the Chinese version of its app, allowing verified official accounts to set up e-commerce stores in the app. WeChat’s Chinese app, is expected to rake in $1.1 billion in revenue this year on in-game purchases, flash sales and other transactions it operates itself. WeChat owner TenCent would like to create a place where users can talk, play games and shop without leaving the app. 

It looks like your writing an 2 billion dollar offer sheet to buy an NBA franchise, would you like help? Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer mercifully ended a nine month hiatus as a public figure, resurfacing to buy the Los Angeles Clippers from Shelly Sterling, wife of embattled racist Donald Sterling. The sale is pending a Tuesday vote by NBA owners, who have plenty of reason to “get on their feet” with excitement, the 2 billion dollar tag represents the most an NBA team has ever sold for. Despite previous attempts to move a franchise to Seattle, Ballmer has indicated he plans to keep Blake Griffin setting blue screens of death for Chris Paul in LA. Hat tip to Kylde who submitted this one on the subreddit.

News From You

metalfreak posted today’s top vote getter on the subreddit. US House Representative Bob Latta of Ohio introduced a bill late Wednesday that would block the FCC from reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. The FCC does not prefer to take that route but is investigating it as an option as part of its notice for proposed rulemaking regarding the open Internet. Block Communications, Buckeye Cablevision, the National Telecommunicatiosn Cooperative, American Cable Association, AT&T, the NCTA and Time Warner Cable are 7 of Latta’s top 5 donors in the current campaign finance cycle.

KAPT_Kipper submitted the BuzzFeed reports that Amazon will add a streaming music service to its Amazon Prime membership sometime this summer in either June or July. The service would restrict its contents to music more than six months old. Because BuzzFeed can’t help its listicle ways, it cited Five Music Industry Sources who told it about the forthcoming service. 

And Shaun_McGee posted the Ars Technica story about Elon Musk unveiling the Dragon V2 space capsule last night at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The capsule is designed to carry up to seven crew members to the International Space Station. The capsule is reusable and supposedly able to land “with the precision of a helicopter.” Musk hopes to be ready to transport crew by 2016. NASA has a deadline of 2017.

Plug of the day: The Tinker’s Packs is an online store that sells books and other cool stuff for the charity Worldbuilders. Worldbuilders started in 2008 on Pat’s blog to raise money for Heifer International. Heifer doesn’t just hand out bags of rice, Heifer gives a family a goat and teaches them how to take care of it. Then that family has a continual source of milk for their children. They can sell the extra milk to make money. When the goat has babies, they give those babies to other members of their community, sharing the gift.

Discussion Section Links: What to Expect at WWDC on Monday

http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/what-to-expect-at-wwdc-2014/?ncid=rss_truncated

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/05/what-to-expect-from-apples-wwdc-keynote-on-monday/

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/30/what-to-expect-at-apples-wwdc-2014/?ncid=rss

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/apple-wwdc-preview/

http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/30/apple-streams-wwdc-platform-state-of-the-union-design-awards-to-developers-for-the-first-time/?ncid=rss

Pick of the day:  Tom picks Booking.com

Monday’s Guest: Iyaz Akhtar, of CNET.com and The Guys From Queens Network. 

 

Steve Gibson is on the show to talk about the strange disappearance of TrueCrypt and what your best options might be for whole disk encryption.

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 guests:  Steve Gibson, of Gibson Research Corporation and Security Now!

Headlines

Apple, Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine took the stage together at the Code Conference last night in the wake of the announcement that Apple has agreed to purchase Beats Electronics and Beats Music. Cue said, “Music is dying in the way that we’ve known it,” referring to declining digital sales in the face of rising streaming services. Iovine thinks the music business is “desperately insecure” and Silicon Valley is “slightly over-confident.” Cue thinks Iovine and Dr. Dre are the men for the job. While Beats hardware is nice Cue made it clear that the deal is “about music.” Apple expects the deal to close after regulatory approval sometime in September. Cue also stoked excitement for Monday’s WWDC keynote saying, “we’ve got the best product pipeline that I’ve seen in my 25.”

BloombergBusinessWeek reports that Laszlo Block, Google’s SVP for people operations posted to Google’s blog about the company’s diversity statistics. 30 percent of Google workers are women and 39 percent are racial or ethnic minorities. The majority of nonwhite Google employees are of Asian descent. This puts Google close to the middle among tech companies that disclose these sorts of statistics. More companies are feeling pressure to reveal diversity statistics. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has said that Facebook plans to reveal theirs eventually.

GigaOm reports on YouTube expanding its video quality report to include regions in the United States. The report, previously released in Canada, gives stats on the streaming quality of YouTube on your ISP and compares it to other ISPs in your region. 

The Verge has a story on a report from security consulting group iSight Partners that claims a phony news agency called NewsOnAir has been building ties with senior US military and diplomatic officials as well as US and Israeli defense contractors. The group would make social network connections and use fake names over services like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and LinkedIn. The aim of the site was to present fake login pages to steal credentials. The group’s central domain was registered in Tehran. 

BBC reports Turkey’s Constitutional Court has ruled a block on YouTube violated freedom of expression laws and have ordered ISPs in Turkey to lift the block. Lower courts have previously ordered the block lifted but the government did not respond, claiming offending material still existed on YouTube.

BBC also reports London’s transport authority has announced it does not believe Uber’s car service breaks laws by using an app to determine charges.The authority referred the matter to the High Court to issue a binding ruling on the matter. The Taxi Drivers claim the app is equivalent to a meter which private drivers are not allowed to use. The drivers plan a demonstration for June 11.

News From You

Our top story on the SubReddit today was submitted by Nova461. Developers of TrueCrypt are redirecting traffic from their website to a sourceforge page claiming the software may have security vulnerabilities and due to the end of support for Windows XP, they will no longer develop TrueCrypt. The developers posted instructions for using alternative disk encryption on Windows and OSX.

Kylde submitted the Ars Technica story that a group at Brigham Young University has created an app for Google Glass to help the deaf to view an ASL interpreter in dark situations, like a planetarium, without bothering other attendees. The project is called Signglasses. The full results of the group’s research will be published in June at the Interaction Design and Children conference.

KAPT_Kipper passed along the Ars story about researchers at Japanese Telecom NTT publishing a paper that includes a description of a working 115-bit optical Random Access Memory device made of photonic crystals. The crystals can store light in a high-energy state and emit it after a high-energy pulse, thus optical bits. Granted they’ve only achieved 105 optical bits so far. That can be increqased, the bad news is the energy usage. 28-bit memory takes about 150 micro-watts to store which will be hell on your battery life. But if that can be figured out fiber optic singals wouldn’t have to be converted to electronic ones to be useful. Fiber to your RAM!

And SkyJedi & HarryLeeSmith let us know that Ars Technica reports that the Linux Foundations’ Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was formed in response to Heartbleed, has raised enough to fund a security audit of OpenSSL’s code base as well salaries for two full-time developers. OpenSSH and Network Time Protocol will also receive support for developers and infrastructure.

Discussion Section Links: 

http://steve.grc.com/2014/05/28/whither-truecrypt/

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/05/truecrypt-is-not-secure-official-sourceforge-page-abruptly-warns/

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/05/true-goodbye-using-truecrypt-is-not-secure/

http://steve.grc.com/2014/05/29/an-imagined-letter-from-the-truecrypt-developers/

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green

http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/29/truecrypt_analysis/

https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/replace_truecrypt/

 

Pick of the day:  Lastpass via Alex in drizzly Nottinghamshire, UK

I know you’ve mentioned it on the show before, but it’s not on the picks page (yet), so I thought I’d mention a recent feature that’s been introduced to LastPass that meant that I finally purchased the premium version – and has turned out to be the best £8 / $12 (annual) I’ve spent on an app. (Of course, the best general $1 per month I spend is being a patron for DTNS!)

The killer feature for me is password completion in android apps, including Chrome for website logins. I recently got a Nexus 7 and setting it up with all my apps took no time at all because I first installed the LastPass app which filled in all my logins as I went. The mobile app used to have its own browser so I had to choose between password completion or the functionality of Chrome – but now I can have both.

It’s only on Android for now it seems and it works by pretending to be an accessibility aid – popping up on screen when a prompt is detected which works well about 95% of the time.

Friday’s Guests: Molly Wood and Justin Robert Young!