This week Tom and Ray were left by themselves to hold down the fort. In Sean’s absence they talked about Google’s unsurprising announcement that the next version of Android will be “M” and the surprise announcement that Android is getting HBO Now… sometime later. Ray and Tom also talked about a text message that will make iPhones crash, presidential 404 pages, Jony Ive’s new promotion and, on a more serious note, Ross Ulbrich’s sentence to life in prison for his involvement in Silk Road.

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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

Android to get HBO Now… later

At the Google I/O conference this week, Google VP Sundar Pichai announced that HBO Now is coming to Android devices. While a specific date has not been announced, Pichai mentioned that it would be available in time for season 2 of True Detective, which debuts on June 21st. HBO Now will be available as an app and will be compatible with the Chromecast.

Apple was believed to have a window of exclusivity with regards to the HBO Now service; it is clear that that window is now coming to a close.

Reddit User PeanutButterShutter commented, “There is a God and his name is Google.”

Apple is trying to look at things a little closer

Apple has filed a patent for a built-in telephoto camera for a possible future iPhone. Instead of adding lenses to the existing camera, the patent proposes a solution that would add an additional camera to the device. So you would have a regular camera and a telephoto camera. The telephoto camera would have a much narrower field of view, but also a much higher magnification factor.

Of course, just because Apple has filed for a patent doesn’t mean that we will ever see it come to fruition in an Apple product. Apple has an incredible amount of patents that have never seen the light of day as a real product. Apple currently has a patent for bayonet-style camera lens attachments for the iPhone and iPad, a patent for an iPhone with interchangeable lenses and even an iPhone with multiple camera sensors and beam splitters to separate the blue, red and green light spectrum.

Google announces Android M

Surprising absolutely no one, Google also announced at Google I/O that the next iteration of its Android operating system will be coming out this year and that it will be code-named ‘M’, in keeping with the alphabetical theme of previous releases. What is not known is what delicious, sugary treat ‘M’ will stand for. Android ‘K’ turned out to stand for Kit Kat and the current version of the system, ‘L’, is Lollipop. The word on the street is that ‘M’ will stand for Macadamia Nut Cookie, but we hasten to add that this is pure speculation.

Oh, you want ‘substance’ to your news reports? Fine. While previous releases have focused on upgrades to the system’s design, performance and battery life, ‘M’ promises a focus on the basics: stability and usability. Google also says that M will give users the ability to grant permissions to apps on a case-by-case basis. Interestingly, this ability was present in earlier versions of the Android OS but was intended for developer use only and was eventually disabled. iOS users have enjoyed so-called ‘granular permissions’ for years.

This is one case where we are glad to see Google taking a page from Apple’s playbook.

Jony Ive becomes Apple Chief Design Officer.

Jony Ive is stepping down? or is it stepping up? Let’s call it stepping away from ? the day to day routine at Apple. Jony Ive as you may know has been the Senior Vice President of Design at Apple for quite some time. Jony is the man behind most of the iconic designs that have come out of Cupertino. Jony is now the Chief Design Officer at Apple. Which is safe to assume means that he will have less to do with the day to day management. Richard Howarth is taking over as vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye is the new vice president of User Interface Design, two departments that Ive was overseeing at the same time. Now Ive can focus on overseeing design, and potentially spend more time at home with the family.

Silk Road Founder Gets Life

Ross Ulbrich, founder and operator of the notorious dark net drug market The Silk Road, was sentenced this week to life in prison. Ulbricht, alias The Dread Pirate Roberts, was tried and found guilty narcotics conspiracy and other charges earlier in the year. The minimum possible sentence that he faced was twenty years, a term that he and his lawyers had pleaded for.

During the sentencing hearing the court heard several accounts of people who had become hooked on drugs or even overdosed on drugs obtained through the Silk Road. Ulbricht’s failed attempts to order hits on other members of the Silk Road community probably did not help his case either.

His life sentence comes without the possibility of parole. Barring a successful appeal, Ulbricht will die behind bars.

The text message that will reboot your iPhone

This next story sounds like it must be an urban legend, but it is not: there is a text message that, if you send it to a friend with an iPhone, may cause their phone to reboot.

OK, you are probably waiting breathlessly for us to tell you what the message is, but here is the thing, we can’t tell you, because it is gibberish: it involves a lot of special characters from other language character sets. The first two words are in English, however, and they are ‘effective. Power’. So we can call this the ‘effective. Power’ bug.

From what we are hearing, the ‘effective. Power’ bug happens when an iPhone attempts to display a shortened version of this message in the notifications. The iPhone will then reset if your phone is locked. Otherwise your phone’s screen will go black. That is the only effect, it is basically harmless. You can clear it out by asking Siri to read unread messages, and then using Siri to reply to the person that sent the offending text.

Early reports indicated that turning off text message notifications would disable the bug but some users are reporting that it still works even with notifications disabled.

While Apple is working on an iOS fix, as of this recording one has not yet been released. However, something else really interesting has happened. Tonight as we were attempting to test and verify this bug, we found that we could not send each other the message! It simply will not go through. It would appear that some carriers have wised up to this trick and may be blocking messages carrying the dangerous string of characters.

Regardless, be a cool friend and don’t spam your friends with the “effective. Power” text.

404 Candidate Not Found

As candidates throw their hats in the ring for the 2016 presidential election, The Atlantic has identified one key issue that no one has looked at: whose campaign website has the best 404 page. The 404 page is the page you see when you try to reach a page on a website that is broken or that no longer exists. The majority of the internet’s websites produce uninspired 404 pages with stock text, but a few, like Twitter’s famous ‘fail whale’, are memorable classics. If you think about it, this is exactly what America wants in its chief executive: the ability to remain cool in a crisis, maybe crack a joke or two. And being unable to find the web page you need? That is definitely a crisis. So, Ray, with your permission I thought we would visit a handful of the announced candidates’ campaign sites and 404 it up.

• Bernie Sander’s 404 page.
• Carly Fiorona’s 404 page.
• Hillary Clinton’s 404 page.
• Lindsey Graham’s 404 page.
• Marco Rubio’s 404 page.
• Mike Huckabee’s 404 page.

?

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