Nicole Lee is on the show today and we’ll talk about what Twitter is up to with the back-to-back acquisitions of Cover and Gnip.

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

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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 guest:  Nicole Lee, senior editor, Engadget

Headlines

Twitter announced today it has agreed to acquire Gnip, a company that filters and sells structured datasets, culled from the so-called Twitter firehose of data. Gnip also packages data from other social networks like Tumblr and Disqus, and sells managed API access to services like Facebook. Twitter intends to continue to make data available to Gnip’s current customers and will leave the team in its location in Boulder, Colorado.

CNET reports Google’s Paul Eremenko told an audience the first Ara developer’s conference today that the first of the modular smartphones will go on sale in January 2015 for around $50. It will come in one color, gray. Hopefully some modular components will be available at that time too to spice up the color AND the functionality. Two more developer’s conferences are scheduled for July and September. Power bus support is coming in May, with system-level functions expected in September.

The Verge reports Google just added a new photo attachment option to Gmail, that lets you bring in photos straight from your Google + library. You can attache whole albums and resize images inline. Of course you have to be storing photos in Google + AND use Gmail for any of this to matter to you.

Ars Technica reports that researchers at Germany’s Security Research Labs were able to bypass the Samsung Galaxy S5’s fingerprint sensor to gain access to a linked PayPal account. Researchers took camera-phone photo of print smudge on a phone’s screen and created a wood glue spoof of the print. It’s a similar method used to defeat the iPhone TouchID in September.

PC World passes along the Toshiba announcement that the first 4K laptop, the Satellite P55t will hit US store shelves April 22nd starting at $1500. It’s a 15.6-inch laptop with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, up to 16GB RAM, an AMD Radeon R9 M265X discrete graphics card with 2GB RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. Oh and an Ultra HD 3840-by-2160 display with 282 pixels per inch of resolution.

News From You

TVsEgon posted the Boy Genius Report article with exclusive photos of an alleged prototype Amazon phone. The device in the images is covered in a protective shell meant to obscure its design and BGR says it blocked or obscured some other parts of the phto. But what can seen is— a black— square. With a screen. And a headphone jack. BGR reasserts information from sources who say the phone’s big feature will be a 3D display that thanks to multiple cameras that track your eyes, will not require glasses.

AllanAV posted the Reuters story that Google has changed its terms of service for Gmail to alert you that yes, indeed, Google scans your email and analyzes it to make targeted ads, both when they are stored and when they are in transit. Google has been accused of violating federal and state wiretapping laws in the US due to the policy.

And metalfreak submitted the threatpost article on iSEC Partners audit of TrueCrypt. The Open Crypto Audit Project contracted iSEC to examine the software for possible backdoors. The first phase of the audit is done and found fewer than a dozen vulnerabilities, none of which indicated any kind of surreptitious backdoor and none of which were considered immediate exploitation vectors. The first phase included the bootloader and Windows kernerl driver as well as pen testing and code review. The second phase will look at encryption cipher suites, random number generators and key algorithms.

Discussion Section Links: Twitter buys Gnip

http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/twitter-acquires-longtime-partner-and-social-data-analytics-provider-gnip/

http://recode.net/2014/04/15/with-gnip-buy-twitter-starts-taking-its-data-business-seriously/

http://recode.net/2014/04/15/twitter-exec-says-its-almost-a-mobile-only-company-these-days/

http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/08/twitter-cover-android/

http://recode.net/2014/04/15/twitter-taps-google-maps-director-daniel-graf-for-product-vp-role/

Pick of the Day: Amazon Cloud Player and Rdio

Wednesday’s guest: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

Andrew Zarian is on the show and we’ll kick around some Heartbleed news to scare the SSL out of you, plus what the governments doing to help patch software. And Jessica Dolcourt helps us decide if Windows Phone’s Cortana will inspire us to ditch Siri or Google Now.

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 guest:  Andrew Zarian of the GFQ Network and Jessica Dolcourt of cnet.com

Headlines

TechCrunch reports Windows Phone 8.1 arrived today for developers as a developer preview. While the OS is not finished, pretty much anybody can get it by signing up for a free Microsoft developer account and starting a project. Of course you voice your warranty and you can’t roll back to Windows Phone 8, so it may not be for everyone. Reviews of the OS came out today too with many people raving about Microsoft’s voice-activated assistant Cortana. That feature is only available in the US.

Engadget posted Google has agreed to buy Titan Aerospace, makers of solar powered drones. You may recall Facebook was in talk with Titan Aerospace a few months ago. Facebook bought a different company called Ascenta. The WSJ says Google intends to use the drones as part of its Project Loon attempt to broadcast the Internet from floating weather balloons.

Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker announced the appointment of Chris Beard to the Mozilla Board and the position of interim CEO. Beard has worked at Mozilla since 2004. He has an MBA from the University of Edibnburgh and worked in senior product and marketing roles at HP and Sun as well as founding the Puffin Group which was acquired by Linuxcare. Beard joined VC firm Greylock in July 2013.

Heart Monitor

Friday we told you Cloudflare had opened a server to be hacked, to see if private keys really could be extracted from a server by exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability. It took 9 hours for someone to do so. Ars Technica reports software engineer Fedor Indutny and Ilkka Mattila at NCSC-FI obtained the keys. As of Saturday, CloudFlare had confirmed four “winners”, the other two being Rubin Xu, a PhD student in the Security group of Cambridge University and security researcher Ben Murphy.

A more worrisome exploitation of Heartbleed came from the Canada Revenue Agency which reported 900 Social Insurance Numbers stolen by someone taking advantage of Heartbleed. The CBC reports the theft was discovered by admins who were patching the CRA’s servers. The agency is still examining the breach to see if data related to businesses had been removed as well. The agency did not describe how the attackers used Heartbleed to gather the numbers. Anyone affected will be provided with free credit protection.

Of course patching the bug is not simple as Akamai has learned the hard way. PC World reports Akamai is reissuing all SSL certificates and security keys used to encrypt connections between its customers websites and visitors. Akamai THOUGHT its customers were less vulnerable to Heartbleed because of custom code related to how the keys were stored. Akamai released that code Friday to help out other researchers. As if to demonstrate the value of open source, researcher Willem Pinckaers found defects in the code Sunday. Akamai’s code left three of six critical values of an RSA key unprotected allowing an attacker to calculate the rest of the key.

Of course maybe all this could have been fixed years ago if the US NSA had let companies know about Heartbleed. Bloomberg reported Friday that two sources told them the NSA knew about Heartbleed for two years. A statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, “Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before 2014 are wrong.”

Of course that doesn’t mean the US government agencies don’t find out about flaws and keep it to themselves sometimes. The New York Times reports the White House response to allegations the NSA knew about Heartbleed was to issue a statement saying there is now a “bias toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities.” The exception of course is when there is “a clear national security or law enforcement need.”

News From You

AllanAV sent in the Ars Technica republication of the Wired UK article on a glow-in-the-dark road that debuted in the Netherlands on a 500 meter stretch of the N329 highway, replacing streetlights. The markings are not merely reflective, but created with photo-luminescent powder integrated into the road paint, developed in conjunction with road construction company Heijmans.

tekkyn00b posted the MacRumors article passing along the StreetInsider story that Jefferies analyst Peter Misek claims Apple wants to raise the price of the iPhone 6 $100 if they can get the carriers to agree. No carrier will likely WANT to raise the price in this world of bargain smartphones but Misek argues “Carriers realize that the iPhone 6 will likely be the only headline-worthy high-end phone launched this year and that they will lose subs if they do not offer it.”

And melchizedek74 pointed us to The Verge article that noticed Comcast’s Netflix speeds have improved dramatically since the two companies agreed to an interconnect contract. Comcast is the 5th fastest streamer at an 2.5Gbps for Netflix streams in March, vs. the average 1.15 Mbps it reported in January.

Discussion Section Links: Windows Phone 8.1 & 

http://www.cnet.com/news/cortana-vs-siri-vs-google-now/

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/windows-phone-8-1-review-a-magnificent-smartphone-platform/

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/14/5612322/windows-phone-8-1-download-features

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/us/politics/obama-lets-nsa-exploit-some-internet-flaws-officials-say.html?_r=0

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/president-s-security-flaw-guidance-seen-hard-to-implement.html 

When the see the lunar eclipse!

http://mashable.com/2014/04/14/what-time-is-the-lunar-eclipse/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link

Pick of the Day: Hitbliss via Mike!

Tuesday’s guest: Nicole Lee, Engadget

We chat with students from Greenville High School in Illinois about tech topics on their mind like Internet sovereignty, piracy and Heartbleed.

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 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: The students of Greenville High (Go GHS Comets!)  

Headlines

The Verge reports CloudFlare has announced the Heartbleed vulnerability may not leak the private keys of servers after all, reducing the severity of the bug greatly. Theoretically an attacker could exploit the heartbleed problem to extract the keys to a servers security and then impersonate it. Cloudflare has been unable to do so in testing for two weeks leading them to suggest it may be very hard if not impossible. To further test the theory, Cloudfare set up an intentionally vulnerable server at https://www.cloudflarechallenge.com/heartbleed and invited all comers to try stealing its keys.

That’s good news for owners of certain network routers from Cisco and Juniper Networks as those routers have been identified as using the version of OPenSSL that contains the Heartbleed vulnerability. Both companies are investigating their product libraries and making lists of affected devices, as well as working on patches.

Tax day in the US will be a bit more fun for residents. On April 15 in the US, Google will allow anyone over the age of 18 the privilege of plunking down $1500 to purchase a pair of the Explorer edition of Google Glass for a limited time. To get in on the action you can sign up for a reminder at http://www.google.com/glass/start/how-to-get-one/

TechCrunch reports that in addition to 15 new ad units announced yesterday, Twitter is also adding Web notifications to desktop users. The feature was noticed by Michel Wester of Holland as a disabled option in one of his test accounts. Twitter users can real-time notifications from mobile apps for things like posts that mention your name and such, but on the desktop they need to use third-party software.

Reuters reports patent buyer or depending in your view of things, patent troll, Intellectual Ventures has convinced Microsoft and Sony to invest in its latest round of fundraising. Apple and Intel declined. Intellectual Ventures buys patents and then makes money re-licensing them.

News From You: 

MikePKennedy posted the story that Facebook has announced plans to penalize Facebook Page operators that try to bait users into liking their page and sharing content. Facebook says it will pull or demote these kinds of posts from commercial pages: Like-baiting posts that frequently beg for likes and Spammy posts that contain, “only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads.”

habichuelacondulce submitted the CNET report that the Internet advertisng Bureau announced Thursday that Internet advertising generated $42.8 billion in revenue in 2013. That’s a 17% increase over 2012 but bigger news than that is the fact that broadcast TV advertising generated $40.1 billion. That means Internet advertising surpassed broadcast TV advertising for the first time. Though they have a ways to go to catch all TV advertising. And Internet advertising sells a combo of print-like as well as TV-like ads. In fact, search ads generated $18.4 billion, Display ads generated $12.8 billion, and digital video $2.8 billion.

SkyJedi and Galcyon both submitted this story. Engadget reports Amazon is purchasing popular digital comic book seller Comixology. The service has Web and mobile app access to libraries of digital comics from most major and many smaller publishers. It’s guided view technology attempts to make frame by frame reading of comics smooth and easy. Amazon currently sells single issues and graphic novels on Kindle. Amazon expects to find ways to make Comixology and Kindle work better together, but Amazon will retain the Comixology branding and continue to support existing apps.

And HobbitfromPA sent in the Ars Technica story about the Solar Impulse 2. Its a solar-powered plane with the wingspan of a 747 and a weight of 2300 kilograms, about that of an average automobile. It cruises at a maximum speed of 140 kilometers an hour and slows down at night when it runs off batteries. Team head Bertrand Piccard and engineer André Borschberg will start test flights in the next few weeks with the goal of a flight around the world next March.

Discussion Section Links: Thoughts from Greenville

Monday’s guest: Andrew Zarian

A technical error cut this amazing bit out of our News from You show Thursday. We give it to you now in it’s full Jon Strickland glory. Thanks Jon!

Listen here for Jon Strickland!)

Tom’s on assignment today, so he called his most trusted fill-in host – YOU!  We’ve got listener thoughts on the Amazon Fire, Facebook and Oculus, the Adobe Creative Cloud, and a genuine Molly Wood Heartbleed rant. Plus Jon Strickland has some thoughts about the (much) bigger picture.

News From You The Third

MP3

Video version with still photo and audio.

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

Headlines:

BlackBerry CEO John Chen told Reuters, “If I cannot make money on handsets, I will not be in the handset business,” which lead headline writers to declare BlackBerry would dump handsets. So Chen wrote a blog post Thursday that said “I want to assure you that I have no intention of selling off or abandoning this business any time soon,” referring to the devices business. So what gives? Pretty easy if you think about it. Chen said he won’t stop making devices soon but if he can’t make money off it eventually he’ll get out of the business. Stop SAYING REASONABLE THINGS JOHN CHEN, IT CONFUSES US!

Does hearing more about the Heartbleed vulnerability make your brain bleed? Lastpass to the rescue! The passwords storage and checker won points for fixing the vulnerability on their own site quickly and for the solid practice of encrypting traffic on another level. Now Lastpass users have a handy tool to help them decide if and when to change passwords due to heartbleed. The security checkler function in lastpass wills can all stored passwords and highlight any servers that have not patched OpenSSL 1.01 PLUS whether they’ve updated their security certificate. It’s all summarized in an action entry that either says wait, or Go update.

TechCrunch reports Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group has released a Module Developers Kit (MDK) for Project Ara, its forthcoming modular smartphone. That means hardware developers can start working on modules that would fit into the Google-made endoskeleton. Without independent companies making lots of modules, Project Ara won’t be very interesting, so go et ‘em developers.

TechCrunch also reports Facebook is taking the messaging capability out of the standard Facebook app. That means you’ll need to download the Facebook Messenger app if you want to chat with friends on the service on your mobile device. People who already downlaoded the Messenger app might not notice since the messenger tab automatically detects the messenger app and links to it if it’s there. Facebook will roll the change out slowly, starting in Europe and notify users several times before the messaging tabs actually disappears. The change doesn’t affect users of Facebook’s Paper app.

Remember Comcast submitted their 180-page filing on why a merger with Time Warner Cable would be good? Among the many reasons Comcast pointed out they don’t compete with TWC because they have no overlapping markets. CNET reports, Senator Al Franken found that interesting. During a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the merger, Senator Franken pointed out Comcast cited competition with Time Warner Cable as a reason to approve Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal in 2010. The hearing does not have any direct influence over approval of the merger.

The Dropbox-owned mailbox app is now available for Android. Engadget reports it even has some features not found int he iOS version., including a new auto-swipe feature that teaches the app which emails you archive and defer until later and acts appropriately when it sees them. The company also showed off a preview of mailbox for the desktop.

Dropbox also made the news with the addition of Dr. Condoleeza Rice to its board of Directors. PC Magazine reports that Dropbox CEO Drew Houston made the announcement along with the news that Sujay Jaswa and Dennis Woodside have been named CFO and COO, respectively. Rice has been Provost of Stanford University, served on the board of several companies like HP and Charles Schwab, and is likely best known for serving as US Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. Rice was also National Security Advisor from 2002 until 2005. That is an advisory White House position with no authority over any departent.

News From You!

Toby Pinder on Heartbleed and the long tail of the internet

KTLA’s Rich DeMuro on Dropbox updates

Justin Crowell on the Adobe Creative Cloud

Dave from Allen, TX on Amazon Fire

David Brodbeck on media portability across devices

Rich from Lovely Cleveland on chips!

Richard Ya on Facebook and Oculus

Molly Wood has a Heartbleed rant (and also an article in the New York Times about it!)

Daemon on airlines using Twitter for customer service

Guillaume on Chromium OS

Patrick Beja on Windows 8.1

Kencade Babb on universal search

And Jon Strickland of Thinking, co-host of TechStuff, and HowStuffWorks writer leaves us with some thoughts on the bigger picture.

Picks of the Day:

Vudu recommended by Tony Vahl

Gooseberry project by metalfreak

Run Zombies Run! by Sean Palladino

 

 

Jason Hiner is on the show today, we’ll chat a bit about Heartbleed, Windows XP and dig into whether 3D printing belongs in the home or the factory.

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 guest:  Jason Hiner, editor-in-chief of Tech Republic

Headlines

As we discussed yesterday, the Heartbleed vulnerability affects around 18% of SSL 1.01 servers that implemented TLS-Heartbeat. SysAdmins have been scrambling to patch their systems and issue new security certificates. The simple advice is to wait for confirmation of a fix from vulnerable websites before logging in. If you don’t want to wait, GRC’s Steve Gibson recommends using ssllabs.com to check if a site’s server has had their SSL version upgraded to 1.01g and the security certificate was reissued AFTER the update. Matthew Green has an excellent discussion at cryptographicengineering.com of the code error itself, if you’re interested in how the bug happened in the first place.

Reuters reports that 70% of the market in China still uses Windows XP, which received it’s last security patch yesterday. Microsoft has partnered with Lenovo and Tencent to provide continuing support. Tencent will provide permanent XP support free of charge with two 24-hour hotlines. tm204 posted a Netcraft survey to our subreddit showing 6,000 websites still running on Windopws XP including 14 hosted by US governments. If that sounds bad, it’s nothing compared to the 500,000 or so websites hosted on Windows 2000 which stopped being supported in July 2010. There are even 50,000 sites running Windows NT4 which ended support December 31, 2004.

The Verge passed along Amazon’s claim to have tripled its streams over the past year, making its instant video site the third largest behind Netflix and YouTube, passing up Hulu, according to numbers from video-delivery firm Qwilt.

The Economic Times reports Facebook now has more than 100 million active users in India, the second country in which the social network has reached that milestone. The first was its home country of the US. 84 million of that 100 access the site from their mobile devices. Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico round out the top 5 countries for Facebook, in that order.

News From You: 

Google would like all you XP users out there to have a new PC. MikePKennedy posted the Android Central story about Google taking $100 off Chromebooks when purchased through the Chromebooks for Business program. If you’re really attached to Windows apps, Google is offering $200 off Chromebooks for Business with VMWare’s DaaS virtualization suite, and 25% off Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition.

tekkyn00b posted a different Android Central story. This one is about Comcast considering their own mobile phone service, using WiFi as the main delivery, with cellular data leased as a backup. Sound familiar? Google was rumored to be meeting with Verizon about the same sort of plan. The Information reported the story originally with sources saying Comcast would like to create a nationwide network, though implementation is still far off.

habichuelcondulce submitted the Reuters report that Intel will shut its assembly and test operation in Costa Rica, eliminating 1,500 jobs. Intel spokesman Chuck Malloy said Intel will move assembly and testing from its site in Heredia, Costa Rica to existing sites in China, Malaysia and Vietnam, over the next 6 months. Intel’s R&D efforts will continue in Costa Rica, employing some 1,000 people. Intel announced in January it would reduce its worldwide workforce by 107,000 this year.

Draconos passed along the Verge report about Sesame Street launching its own streaming video service. Sesame Go is browser-based but US-only and works on Mac, Windows and mobile devices. For $4 a month or $30 a year, you can watch hundreds of Sesame Street episodes as well as the animated series Pinky Dinky Doo.

tm204 posted the ScienceDaily report about a study published in Materials Today describing computer logic units built using slime molds. The work by Andrew Adamatzky of the University of West England, and Theresa Schubert of Bauhaus University, exploited the interconnected tubes of slime molds to process information. To make the tubes work the way they wanted to, they fed tubes oat flakes where they wanted to grow them and salted areas where they didn’t want tubes. Using dyes with magnetic nanoparticles and tiny fluorescent beads, allowed them to use the slime mold network as a biological “lab-on-a-chip” device. “The slime mold based gates are non-electronic, simple and inexpensive,” according tot he study.

Discussion Section Links: 3-D Printing’s Missing Link

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-missing-link-in-3d-printing-user-friendly-software/

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/m3d/the-micro-the-first-truly-consumer-3d-printer 

Pick of the Day:  SSL Labs

Thursday’s guest: YOU!