Justin Young joins to look over the rumored T-Mobile USA Dish merger. Verizon has OnCue. AT&T is probably about to get DirecTV. Find out why all these mobile carriers want TV solutions and T-Mo/Dish may be the best match of all. MP3 Using a Screen Reader? click here

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Show Notes Today’s guests: Justin Robert Young

Headlines:  The Wall Street Journal reports people familiar with the matter say Dish and T-Mobile USA are having high level talks about a merger. The two companies agree on the form a combined entity would take with Dish’s Charlie Ergen as Chairman and T-Mobile’s John Legere as CEO. The thing the two sides have not agreed about yet is money. Dish owns a lot of unused mobile spectrum and every self-respecting wireless carrier in the US dreams of marrying a video distributor someday. (Except for that jerk Verizon who went and just BOUGHT Oncue from Intel. Dirtbag.) Set the timer on your smartphone, people! Apple will begin selling some models of the Apple watch in retail stores beginning in two weeks, according to Tech Crunch. The watches will also go on sale in seven more countries on June 26th, including Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan and (gasp) Switzerland- the very backyard of many fancy watchmakers. If you ordered an Apple Watch online in May, you should get it within two weeks, unless its the 42mm Space Black Stainless Steel model, which has been slowest to reach customers.

Venture Beat reports that Yahoo announced several product closures including Yahoo Pipes, GeoPlanet, PlaceSpotter and Yahoo Maps. Some Maps functionality used by Search and products like Flickr will be kept running. Several international media properties will close down too, including Yahoo Music in France and Canada and the entire Yahoo home page in the Philippines. Yahoo is also killing support for Yahoo Mail on some older iOS devices. and let me see we have a PRO tip from our producer Jennie: If you work on any of these teams, and your boss wants to meet you in a conference room, start grabbing Kind Bars from the kitchen.

Ars Technica reports that the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY has named 6 games to its new World Video Game Hall of Fame. Pong, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, Doom, and World of Warcraft were chosen by an advisory committee of about two dozen journalists, scholars, and game historians. The goal was to choose games “that have enjoyed popularity over a sustained period and have exerted influence on the video game industry or on popular culture and society in general.” The inductees will be included in playable form at the museum’s eGameRevolution exhibit.

Facebook is rolling out a new Android app that’s designed to use less data and run faster for folks with spotty data connections according to Reuters. Facebook Lite uses less than 1/2 a megabyte of data and supports Facebook’s news feed, status updates, notifications and photos, but doesn’t support videos or advanced location services. Facebook Lite is available in select Asian countries and will soon be made available in parts of Latin America, Africa and Europe.

What do you do when you want to have a nice conversation between just you and 200 of your closest friends? You install Line’s new Android app Popcorn Buzz. As The Next Web tells it, it lets you use your Line Messaging account to send out a link through email, text or social network and any of your Line contacts can join and talk. It’s voice only for now but Line says it’s working on group video chat, interconnectivity with Line Groups and of course an iOS version.

BizTechAfrica reports Zimbabwe’s Dr. Lloyd Muzangwa and Tanzanian engineer George Kahabuka took home the mid-stage prize in the Standard Bank Water 4 Africa challenge for their MAJI 1200 water purification system. The mid-stage prize is given to a system ready for deployment. The MAJI1200 combines UV light with solar energy to make water purification available off the grid and with minimal maintenance. The team will use its $5,000 prize money to build and donate MAJI 1200 units to schools in rural Zimbabwe. A crowdfunding project has been set up at gofundme.com/ohyrac.

New data from IDC shows Xiaomi has risen to the world’s 2nd biggest seller of wearables just behind FitBit. TechCrunch reports that Xiaomi came in with 2.8 million shipments for Q1 2015 at 24.6% of the market ahead of Garmin’s 6.1 percent, Samsung’s 5.1 percent and Jawbone’s 4.4 percent. FitBit still leads the pack at 3.9 million shipments giving it 34.2% market. The data does not include Apple Watch which just started shipping in April.

The Verge reports that Nest will hold an event on Wednesday June 17th, which would be its first substantial smart home product announcement since Google bought Nest. Tech Crunch previously reported that Nest might be moving into audio, so um, stay tuned.

News From You: Griff72 submitted Yahoo Tech’s Rafe Needleman’s report that the updated Pebble app for Pebble Time is being delayed in Apple’s App Store. Pebble got approval on May 18 but found a minor bug which it fixed and resubmitted on May 22. The updated app has been in review since. The updated Android app is available in Google Play.

habichuelacondulce submitted this Engadget article noting a New York Times report that the US Justice Department issued two memos to the NSA in 2012 allowing the NSA to search US citizens International data traffic without a warrant in order to find foreign hackers or malware. The memos allowed tracking of IP addresses and cybersignatures that could be tied to foreign governments. The memos were obtained in documents provided by Edward Snowden. Discussion Section Links:  

http://www.cnet.com/news/dish-and-t-mobile-said-to-be-in-early-stage-merger-talks/

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/dish-network-in-merger-talks-with-t-mobile-us-1433383285-lMyQjAxMTI1MzA3NDEwMjQwWj

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/possible-disht-mobile-merger-could-be-trouble-for-att-and-verizon/

http://www.cnet.com/news/six-burning-questions-if-t-mobile-dish-network-actually-get-together/

http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/apple-streaming-video-adobe/

 

Pick of the Day: Tuesday on episode 2506 we talked about the Pinterest “buy” button, and Patrick Beja suggested that someone finding a recipe on Pinterest could use this button to add all the ingredients to a shopping list. Well Paul (aka HotBranch) enjoying Juneuary in Montreal, where Mother Nature is off her meds has a suggestion for an app that does just that!

Asparagus – My Recipes is available on Android and can pull down ingredient lists from web pages and categorize them for you. The paid version extends the abilities of the free version, including the ability to scale a recipe up or down. Now, when I find a recipe online that interest me, I share it to Asparagus and voila! It’s on my phone and tablet.’

Messages:  Joe writes: Joe just bought an Amazon Echo and well… He writes ” She arrived 2 weeks ago and I must say, I’m in tech love! She is extremely responsive to my voice. … I most commonly ask her the time, weather, to set alarms, and play music playlists. I sometime ask her to tell me a joke or for other words of encouragement or empathy. She sounds really sincere. I especially like lying in bed and having her read me my tech news casts for the day. The only thing I would have liked to see is the ability for her to recognize that I am speaking to her without having to call out her name before each command. It looks like Jibo can do this but he is nearly $700 more so I think I’ll stick with Alexa…well, at least until we have a fight and break up, but for now, she’s the one for me! =====

Friday’s guest:  Darren Kitchen and Len Peralta

Scott Johnson joins Tom to talk with Dr. Lixia Zhang from UCLA about Named Data Networking (NDN) and how it could possibly solve many Internet problems, like security and net neutrality concerns.

MP3

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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: Scott Johnson and Lixia Zhang

Headlines: 

The Electronic Privacy Information Center honored Apple CEO Tim Cook at an event Monday. Cook gave a speech and a half. TechCrunch reports Cook said Apple rejects the idea that “customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security,” saying morality demands it. He took a swipe at companies that are “gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it,” saying “We think that’s wrong” But saved his strongest rhetoric for the US government saying “weakening encryption, or taking it away, harms good people that are using it for the right reasons. And ultimately, I believe it has a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights and undermines our country’s founding principles.” He even quoted Abraham Lincoln saying “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Venturebeat reports that Skype has fixed a flaw that crashed Skype when you received the characters “http://:” In fact once you GOT that message Skype crashed any time you tried to sign in. The bug appeared on Windows, Android and iOS, but apparently not Skype for Mac or for the Windows tiled interface. In less than 24 hours though Skype fixed the bug so make sure to head to skype.com/download or your mobile phone’s app store and update to the latest version.

TechCrunch reports Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack companies. OpenStack is an open source project that enables users to create their own cloud services, often used in what is called the private cloud. Cisco announced it has purchased private cloud company Piston Cloud Computing. IBM has acquired private cloud service provider Blue Box.

ReCode reports Apple’s Beats has voluntarily recalled the Beats Pill XL speakers after 8 reports of overheating. Beats has sold more than 200,000 of the speakers since November 2013. The speakers can be identified by a lowercase b on the speaker grill and the words beats pill XL on the handle. Apple urges owners to go to apple.com/support/beats-pillxl-recall/ for details on how to return the speakers and get $325.

PCMag.com reports that AMD announced its 6th generation Processors codenamed Carizzo in A8, A10, and FX-Series models. The A8 and A10 APUs feature 10 compute cores (four CPU cores plus six GPU cores) and the FX-Series APUs feature a total of 12 compute cores (four CPU and four GPU).The chip’s use Heterogeneous System Architecture (or HSA) design shares workloads and system memory between the CPU and GPU rather than have the CPU direct everything. The A8 and A10 processors get R6 graphics, and the FX-Series R7. When paired with a discrete graphics card the R6 or R7 APUs will work in conjunction with the discrete GPU to boost graphics performance. Look for laptops with A-Series APUs this month.

News From You:

metalfreak sent us this story from Ars Technica. At long last Microsoft is bringing SSH aka Secure Shell to Windows and PowerShell. Until now Windows lacked any native SSH client/server, however the Windows PowerShell Team has announced that Microsoft will work with and contribute to OpenSSH, the standard for SSH implantation in Unix, to add that functionality to Windows. This will let Unix/Linux and Windows machines securely access each other. The Linux-Windows war is over.

starfuryzeta submitted the Engadget article that the US State of Virginia has marked 70 miles of highway in the northern part of the state as the “Virginia Automated Corridors.” This allows companies who have received approval for their cars to do public road testing of self-driving cars. Nokia’s HERE mapping division will develop 3D maps for the test roads.

doorsrio submitted the TechCrunch report that augmented reality device Magic Leap has launched a development platform. Chief Creative Officer Graeme Devine announced it on stage at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference. A developer’s section of the website has been launched where folks can sign up for the SDK, which is coming soon. CEO Rony Abovitz also said the company is out of the R&D phase and transitioning to a real product. Oh and they had author Neal Stephenson on stage to help convince you this is the real world arrival of the Metaverse.

Discussion Section Links:  

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-of-names

http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~lixia/

http://named-data.net/

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2602109/lan-wan/ucla-cisco-more-join-forces-to-replace-tcpip.html

Pick of the Day:

Devulu, genius from the west:

Here is another one for you, and today it’s a Chrome extension.

If you’re like me and use Google chrome with many extensions – each for a different purpose – and want to manage them easily, then SimpleExtManager is here to the rescue.

Features include:
– basic function to enable/disable, access options and uninstall extensions via popup
– customize the popup
– ability to create extension groups
– enable/disable extension groups via popup and right-click menu

Nothing much, but sure saves a lot of time, and is way better than the Chrome extensions page.

Messages: 

mikem.exe+yt writes in:

Hey Tom. Finally getting around to episode 2497 (Run, Spotify, Run) where you had a conversation with Lamarr Wislon about how YouTube would rather you watch videos from their recommended list instead of subscribing to a creator and binge-watching all of their uploads in order.

They make it pretty difficult to binge-watch a single creator. I find myself manually adding videos to the Watch Later list, then moving them from there into a new playlist, then playing that playlist.

Well, after enough of that every day (I watch a lot of youtube), I decided to write a little script that does all that for me. You can specify a user and it will automatically add any new videos as they’re released to the end of the associated playlist in your account.

If there’s anyone in your audience who would benefit from this, have them send me an email and I’ll get them set up. mikem.exe+yt at gmail.com

David says Hello from hot and rainy Florida: 

The New Broadwell cpus are an interesting shift for Intel. They are for most part uninteresting for workstations and high end gaming. The CPU performance is lower than the current Haswell CPUs because they run at a lower clock speed. For other users they are very important because they offer very good graphics performance and much better OpenCL performance than the Haswell CPUs.
As more of programs make use of OpenCL I expect to see more computing power shifting to the GPU and OpenCL from your traditional CPU. Of course when Silverlake comes out and we get a die shrink the clock speed should come up.

=====

Thursday’s guest:  Justin Robert Young

Veronica Belmont is on and we’ll talk about Google and Facebook’s new tools to protect your privacy and how Millennials get their political news from Facebook. Is this going to make the echo chamber worse?

MP3

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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: Veronica Belmont

Headlines: 

Tery Myerson wrote on the Windows blog today that Windows 10 will become available as a free upgrade to existing Windows 7 and Windows 8 users starting July 29. The upgrade is only for PCs and tablets with no announcement for phones or other platforms. Myerson asks users to reserve the free Windows 10 upgrade now by looking for a Windows icon in the system tray and following the prompts. VentureBeat reports to see the reservation icon you must have installed Windows update KB3035583.

The Verge reports Google launched a new privacy and security site at myaccount.google.com. It has tools that walk you through checking your settings including what information is shared with which Google services, what permissions apps have, and what devices you’ve authorized to access your account. It also links off to and consolidates other services like downloading copies of your data and designating a trustee to handle your account.

The Next Web reports Facebook announced the ability to list an OpenPGP key on your Facebook profile. This sllows Facebook to sign notification emails with its own key and send them securely. Key management is only available for the desktop, though Facebook hopes to add mobile support int he future.

Eurogamer reports that Lego has launched a Minecraft-style game called Lego Worlds developed by TT Games and available from Steam Early Access for $14.99. The game will feature familiar lego game elements as well as procedurally-generated worlds, “discoveries and unlocks”, ridable creatures, vehicles and a day/night cycle. The main differences from Minecraft appear to be a focus on creativity rather than survival, and the ability to change vast chunks of the terrain at will.

It’s Computex time which means Asus announced more ZenPad tablets than we could possibly tell you about here. Anandtech does a good job of boiling down the announcement, breaking down the ZenPad 8 and the ZenPad S8. The 8 has LTE, a 1280 x 800 screen and a1.2GHZ Silvermont Atom processor. The S8 has a 2.33 GHz Silvermont Atom processor, a 2048 x 1536 screen and a USB Type C connector. It also suports a 1024 pressure level stylus Thery also have interchangable back plates one of which has a built in battery and another with 6 speakers that can deliver 5.1 DTS surround sound. From your tablet cover. Asus also announced a phone called Selfie with front and rear 13-megapixel cameras and the Zen Watch 2 which has a power button that looks like Apple’s ‘digital crown’ in 49-mm or 45-mm versions. None of these products have price or release dates yet.

Reuters reports BlackBerry and Ryan Seacrest-backed Typo have settled their dispute over Typo’s Blackberry-like keyboard case for phones and tablets. The settlement is that Typo won’t sell the cases for phones anymore but they can sell them for devices with screens larger than 7.9-inches.

Nvidia has unleashed its latest flagship GPU the GTX 980 Ti according to the Verge. The GTX 980 Ti sports 22 SM units, 2,816 Stream Processing Units, 6GB of VRAM with a clock frequency of 1000Mhz and texture filtering rate of 176 gigatexels per sec. The card achieved 4K performance well over 30fps on Battlefield 4 and Shadow of Mordor with max settings. The GPU is future-proofed with support for DirectX 12 and Nvidia’s new Virtual Reality API, GameWorks VR. The GTX 980 Ti will retail for $649.99. (A bit cheaper than the $1,000 Titan X)

TechCrunch is reporting that GoPro has announced the Hero+LCD. The camera targets YouTubers with an LCD touchscreen, 1080p 60fps recording, and WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Hero+LCD will release June 7th for $299.

Reuters reports Intel has agreed to buy FPGA chip maker Altera for $16.7 billion. Intel will be able to bundle its chips with Altera’s programable chips which are often used to do things like speed up Web searches.

TechCrunch passes along that a  Wall Street Journal’s source says Apple will reveal its new streaming music service next week at WWDC and it will cost $10 a month for unlimited listening. It will not have an ad-supported tier though there may be some free tracks available. New channels will come to iTunes radio too hosted by Dr. Dre and other talented recruited from places like BBC1.

News From You:

habichuelacondulce submitted the Guardian writeup of the fact that the US Patriot Act section 215 dealing with bulk surveillance was allowed to expire Sunday night meaning such data collection must be stopped int he US for the time being. The USA Freedom Act is expected to be revived and passed later this week to allow a more limited form of data collection to be allowed. The Freedom Act does not allow the NSA to collect records in bulk and includes rules on transparency.

tm204 flagged the CBC writeup about the woman who dropped off an original Apple computer for recycling at Milpitas’ California’s “Clean Bay Area.” She said she cleaned out her garage after her husband died and didn’t want a receipt and did not leave a name. Only 200 of the first Apple’s were made. Clean Bay Area sold the computer to a private collection for $200,000 and is seeking the woman to split the money with her.

KAPT_Kipper submitted the Engadget report that passes along info from Nikkei that Nintendo’s forthcoming NX console could use Android as the operating system. Nintendo has said it will not discuss NX until 2016.

Discussion Section Links:  

http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/1/8699719/pew-survey-politics-news-source-facebook-millenials

http://www.journalism.org/2015/06/01/millennials-political-news/

 

Pick of the Day:

Randy writes:

Since telling you what the weather is like seems like the thing to do, it’s humid here in Michigan! I have another YouTube channel that I’d like to suggest as a pick The Ben Heck Show is great for makers and maker-curious (like myself) to learn and get ideas. I’ve always described it as “The New Yankee Workshop for geeks”. I started watching around the time he made automatic light-sensing glasses that will flip his sunglasses down. More recently, he made a portable Dreamcast, made a DIY PIC32 dev board, and did a tabletop CNC tutorial. He’s been doing this for 4 years, so there’s a ton of back-catalogue to watch as well as a new episode every week.

Thank you for all you do and keep up the great work!

Messages: 

Drew writes in:

On Friday’s show, the subject of using VPNs to fool geofencing restrictions came up again, and Darren mentioned his dream of living in a world where so many people use VPNs that there’s really no telling where anyone is physically located, because the IP addresses are all obfuscated.

This made me think of an analogy with area codes, now that we all have cell phones. Not all that long ago, it was very practical to reverse-lookup a caller’s area code and be very confident in their physical location. With the prevalence of cell phones, and the ability to keep your phone number when you move or change carriers, and synchronized address books that keep any of us from knowing more than a handful of numbers….area codes mean very little these days.

I think that Randall Munroe summed it up most succinctly:

https://xkcd.com/1129/

As always, love the show…

Allan P. wrote about Google’s Project Jaquard:

In the early 1800s, Joseph Jacquard basically invented punched cards as a way of programming a machine. He designed a loom which could automatically and repeatably produce very complex patterns in fabric. The pattern was stored on a loop of cards; at each “clock cycle” of the weaving process, the machine would lift (or not lift) colored threads based on the pattern of holes in the next card in the chain.

Jacquard inspired both Babbage and (much later) Hollerith. I think Jacquard is the perfect name for a Google project which combines technology and woven cloth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom

In a slightly belated reaction to the Tesla Powerwall Alex wrote:

I used to design and oversee production of diesel tanks, systems support and enclosures for large commercial generators (think about the size of a truck trailer when enclosed and a 18 cylinder engine with several thousand gallons of diesel underneath it).
One of the big consumers of these systems was data centers. Facebook, Google, NSA, etc would buy these by the dozens and have grids of them around their data centers. If there was a brownout or blackout, these generators would kick on and keep the data centers at least partially operational until the grid came back up.
If Elon can prove the concept of these batteries, develop the technology further, and scale it, this could be a huge market for them. Currently a tank (empty) and enclosure with support systems could run around half of a million dollars and the generator could run twice that.

=====

Tuesday’s guest: Patrick Beja