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Show Notes
Show Notes
Today’s guests: Scott Johnson
Headlines:
Facebook announced a new tool called Instant Articles that it hopes will encourage publishers to host their articles on Facebook. The new product reduces the average load time of an article and incorporates interactive features like the ability to zoom in and explore high resolution images by tilting the phone, and the ability to like and comment on individual parts of an article in-line. Publishers can either sell ads themselves and keep all the money or let Facebook do it and share revenue. Tracking can be done through ComScore and other analytics tools. Facebook is working with nine launch partners for Instant Articles: The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.
CNET reports the Blu-Ray Disc association announced finalization of the Ultra HD Blu-ray format. The format supports 4K video at 3840 x 2160 resolution and 60 fps as well as an unspecified immersive object-based sound format. Players of the new format are backwards compatible with existing blu-ray discs. The association will begin licensing Ultra HD Blu-ray products this summer and players should hit the market by the end of the year.
Last July, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said “We will streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes.” Today Microsoft announced the new versions of the Windows 10 OS. Windows 10 Home will ship on consumer devices. Windows 10 Pro is meant for businesses who need to manage devices. Windows 10 Mobile is for phones and smaller tablets. Windows 10 Enterprise is for medium and large businesses with volume license. And Windows 10 eductaion meant for schools. Oh and Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise which again is for large customers with volume licenses. Oh and versions of both Enterprise Os’s for embedded devices like ATMs and handheld terminals. OH and the Windows IoT Core. But that’s it.
Attention, people of the Internet, it is now EVEN easier to order a pizza. Domino’s announced that its customers will soon be able to order by tweeting the emoji for pizza.You just need to have a Domino’s Pizza Profile with a designated “Easy Order” pizza type and your Twitter handle. Then you can tweet #EasyOrder to @Dominos or just the emoji. Either way, you’ll soon get a direct message confirming the order. The hashtag works today and the emoji method becomes available next Wednesday, May 20th.
In January of 2015 when asked by CNBC about rumors that Verizon or Yahoo might acquire AOL, CEO Tim Armstrong dismissed the idea saying “We have a lot of partners coming in to talk to us, but AOL has a unique vision, a unique strategy and we’ve stayed on strategy.” TechCrunch reported that yesterday, Verizon announced it was acquiring AOL for 4.4 billion dollars. When asked about rumors that AOL might sell or spin off its content publications, Armstrong told TechCrunch, which is owned by AOL, that AOL was “going to be in the content business” and that specifically “Tech Crunch is not getting sold off and that there will be editorial independence.”
The Verge reports the announcement that the Nintendo World Championship will be held for the first time in 25 years on June14th at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, two days before the kick-off of E3. Qualifying rounds will begin at Best Buys in major cities across the US. Nintendo will release more details soon.
Remember a year ago when the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Google needed to respect the “right to be forgotten” and remove “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” if requested by an individual? Remember when Google said that they shouldn’t be the decision maker as to what is inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant? Well the BBC is reporting that in some cases, Google declined to remove requested links, and more than 183 people complained to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office which is in talks with Google about 48 cases it believes Google did not get “quite right.” Google has said that it received more than 250,000 requests to remove about 920,000 links, of which 41.3% have been removed from its european search results.
News From You:
This story has been bubbling up on the subreddit since last weekend and hometownrival’s submission today got the most votes. Myrna Arias former employee of California money transfer firm Intermex says she was fired a few weeks after being scolded for deleting a work app from her work phone. Arias claims she was told to leave her phone on at all times. The app, Xora StreetSmart is meant to track employees working away from the office.
snake655 posted the Ars Technica report on findings from DDoS-protection firm Incapsula. Over the pat four months the company has recorded attacks from 40,269 IP addresses belonging to 1,600 ISPs using compromised home and office routers. Almost all the devices used vendor-provided logins. While these kinds of infections are not new the scale is growing impressive. Users should update firmware, change default passwords to something strong and turn off remote access unless specifically necessary.
tglass1976 suggested the Ars Technica story about a critical bug in Xen, KVM and native QEMU virtual machine platforms that are commonly used by cloud service providers. If attackers gain root access to one virtual machine the exploit allows them to gain access to the OS other VMs run on and therefore gain access to all VMs on the system. The vulnerability exists in QEMU’s virtual floppy disk controller meaning it can affect Linux, Windows, and OS X thus depriving fanboys the ability to point and laugh at the OSs they don’t like. Patches are available and no evidence of an exploit in the wild has appeared yet.
Discussion Section Links:
Pick of the Day:
Michael from stormy Madison, WI wrote in with a pick for an app called “Zombies, Run!” He says:
I’ve found it to be one of the best ways to engage me for a daily workout routine.
It’s a fitness tracker / AR game / audio drama for iOS and Android.
You play Runner 5, a new scout for a post-apocalyptic village, and you are sent on various missions to recover goods, check on supply cache, and more. Basically jobs which have you have to run.
Workouts can be set for 30 min or 1 hour, each mission has 4 or 5, ~1 minute audio clips that tell an ongoing story. As you run you collect supplies which can be used to upgrade your town, fortifying it for Zombie attacks.
The App itself supports playlists and external play, where it will pause the music (or podcasts) to play the story clips. After a run, the app can sync and post your mission results to Facebook and/or Twitter, which include distance run, mission time, and the normal social game / AR game updates.
I’m part way through Season 1 and I look forward to it as I bike to work. It is really helping me reach my fitness goals.
The App is 3.99 initially, which gets you all of the Season 1 story, other season can be purchased with season passes.
Messages:
Kevin commented on the YouTube video:
Turkey charges a staggering tax on cell phones, and you can only bring in 1 phone a year (per passport – might be 2, it’s been a while). however if you leave the country with it and don’t return with it, they rebate the tax. also they can shut down phones that are not registered from the network after a few week (even if you use a Turkish simm) so you need to register your phone if you will be there for a while.
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Thursday’s guest host: Justin Robert Young