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Show Notes
Today’s guest: Justin Robert Young, co-host of Night Attack.tv
Headlines:
Tech Crunch reports that Apple sent out an invitation to an event on October 16th at Apple’s Town Hall theater in Cupertino, California. The invitation features a rainbow outline of the top of the Apple logo and the words “It’s been way too long.” Possible devices and software that COULD be announced on that date? Perhaps, a thinner iPad Air. Maybe a a retina display desktop iMac. Possibly the public version of OS X Yosemite. Or, maybe it’s just a barbecue.
JuRY: You know what I dislike, Tom? Cramming. You know when somebody unauthorized charges on your cell phone bill. Reuters reports that AT&T has agreed to pay $105 million to settle allegations of such things. The US Federal Trade Commission has been investigating consumer complaints about charges for ring tones, horoscopes, love tips and other things they never asked for. $25 million goes to penalties and fees and $80 million to consumer refunds. So if you were wrongly billed for a love tip that showed up as a generic “usage charge” you deserve a little something back. Besides love.
Bloomberg reports Symantec is considering breaking itself into two companies, which is all the rage these days. One of the resultant companies would sell security software the other data storage. Symantec bought storage company Veritas in 2005 and has been fighting off pressure to break up ever since. A split Symantec would be ripe for acquisition according to wall street analysts who may or may not have been salivating.
TechCrunch reports Facebook’s Josh Miller took to Twitter to respond to a NYTimes report that he’s leading a team working on an anonymous forum app. Miller acknowledge he’s working on soemthing but assured it’s not just a ripoff of Secret or IRC. Miller wrote “Identity isn’t a product goal. Focus should be on what human desire you want to enable, not anonymity as the focal point.” and “Can encourage positive use cases through product design.” In other words he wants to make a Secret type app without the damaging gossip aspect? Godspeed Josh Miller.
Google recently improved its sitelink subsection in search results for some websites. Now some search-related websites, like Vimeo, now get their own little search box just for their site. Torrentfreak points out that The Pirate Bay is one of these sites. Google has been under pressure to remove sites like The Pirate Bay. So expect that to become the next bone of contention with the MPAA. Oddly Bing doesn’t get it’s own search box in its sitelink section.
Apple Insider reports on a recent survey that show US teenagers still think iPhones and iPads are ‘pretty tope’ (that’s a tight+dope=cool) but are not yet OMFG about the Apple Watch. The survey conducted by Piper Jaffrey polled 7,200 teens; Only 16 percent of those surveyed said they would drop some cheddar on an Apple Watch. That’s down from 17% this past spring. However the survey also revealed that 67 percent owned an iPhone and 73 percent said they planned to buy one as their next phone. No reports on whether the pollsters asked teenagers if they had ever seen a real watch in the wild.
Investor Carl Icahn took to Twitter today to write “”Tmrw we’ll be sending an open letter to @tim_cook. Believe it will be interesting” Yes Mr. Icahn, requets for Apple to give more cash to its stockholders is always very intersting… to the stockholders.
HTC unveils the Desire Eye
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/8/6945967/htc-desire-eye-selfie-phone-announcement
News From You:
Attention aspiring coders! KAPT_Kipper submittted the Engadget report that GitHub has launched a new Student Developer Pack that gives students free access to fifteen tools for writing code, including Stripe, the Unreal Engine and a GitHub micro account with five private repositories. It’s available to students 13 and up who are enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study, and who can verify their students status. You can find it at education.github.com/pack
sleep-d-prived passes along a must-read Wired write-up about two men who discovered a bug in in a popular video poker game, won hundreds of thousands of dollars in Las Vegas and Pennsylania, overused the hack, were arrested and charged in federal court for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and even after the charges were dropped are still being hounded by the IRS for back taxes on the seized winnings. Oh, and it also destroyed their friendship. So maybe just go see a show and have a nice steak, eh?
metalfreak noted the Wired story that security researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson released a software patch for USB drives that demonstrates one method of addressing the vulnerability known as BadUSB. The patch disables boot mode preventing firmware updates for USB 3.0 firmware distributed by Phison. In addition Caudill suggests painting the inside walls of the drive with epoxy to prevent pin-shorting. Phison is the kind of controller BadUSB was demonstrated on at Black Hat by Karsten Nohl which was replicated by Caudill and Wilson.
Discussion Links: Invitesies
http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4852132/history-of-apple-event-invitations-and-hints
https://plus.google.com/103207773865797007066/posts/Ctu4NVQqKN6
Pick of the Day: Ghostery via Loren Lang
Ghostery is a web privacy tool that is available as a browser add-on (for most major browsers, anyway) and an iOS app. It blocks all sorts of trackers, beacons and cookies from over 1900 sources and you can choose to allow or disallow any or all of them with individual granularity as well as whitelisting sites to allow everything from them. You can also choose to allow an item once and then automatically go back to blocking it which is extremely useful when blocking something breaks a site in some way.
Tomorrow’s guest: Scott Johnson, co-host of The Morning Stream