This week Tom shares news about Taylor Swift tackling problems with Apple Music, Sean hits the “undo send” button on that embarrassing email he just sent, and Ray looks at why a branch of the U.S. military is still running Windows XP. That and more on this week’s Deemable Tech!

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THIS WEEK’S RUNDOWN

 

Taylor Swift makes Apple change its mind about paying artists during free trial period of Apple Music

In an abrupt about-face, Apple has changed course and decided to pay artists during the free trial period of Apple Music streaming.

Apple executive Eddie Cue specifically attributed this change of heart to an open letter penned to the company by Taylor Swift, in which she said that she would not be making her album “1989” available on the streaming service because she felt they were not compensating artists fairly. Since Apple’s announcement, several indie labels have announced that they were signing up with Apple Music.

Gmail officially adds “Undo Send” feature

If you’ve ever sent an email and realized that you didn’t attach an attachment — or worse, wrote something you never meant to say to the other person — Gmail added a feature this week that you will love: Undo Send!

Well, maybe “Undo Send” is a bit of a misnomer. What the feature really does is delay sending your message for 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds to give you the chance to change your mind. Just turn on “Undo Send” in your Gmail settings, and the next time you send something you didn’t mean to you can just hit the “undo” button at the top of the page.

The team at Gmail has actually been experimenting with this feature for the past six years (and you could use it before now, if you knew that it existed and knew how their Google Labs section works), but they officially made it part of their mail service this week.

We should note that this appears to only work for personal Gmail accounts at the moment. So if your employer uses Gmail for your work email, you still need to be cautious about what you send for the time being.

Disney and ABC TV cancel plans to offshore IT jobs

Back in October, Disney gave notice to around 250 IT employees that work for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. To make it worse, they thought they were being called in to find out they were getting bonuses.

Actually, no, it gets worse than that, they then found out that they were being “given the opportunity” to work longer if they stuck around and trained their replacements. The controversial part was their replacements were foreigners in the country on H-1B Visas. The purpose of the H-1B visas was to attract IT workers to the US to fill the gaps in tech labor shortages, not to replace American workers with lower wage earning employees.

Some media outlets mentioned it, but it really picked up steam when a few weeks ago, Disney’s ABC Television Group called in about 35 application developers for a meeting, and told them they were being laid off, and they were going to be training their replacements, more foreign employees on H-1B visas.

However, just last week, Disney did a complete about-face, and canceled the layoffs. Of course, no one would speak to the media on the record, but an anonymous source told Computerworld that Disney just “want[s] this to go away — right now.”

A source at Disney also told Computerworld that this change had absolutely nothing to do with the dozens of negative news stories that popped up after the news got out.

You can get Windows 10 for free, but there’s a catch

Since Windows 10 was first announced, Microsoft has released a lot of conflicting statements about who exactly would be able to get it free. From the beginning they’ve been consistent in saying Windows 10 will be a free upgrade to users who have Windows 7 and Windows 8 and 8.1. But for other users, things have been less clear.

First they said that even users without legitimate copies of Windows would be able to upgrade, then they said they wouldn’t. Then this week there was more confusion. It appeared that Microsoft would be giving away a free copy of Windows 10 to any user who agreed to test it. However it now appears that the situation is more complicated than that.

Installing the Windows 10 preview will grant users free access to Windows 10, but only as long as they stay in the preview program. If they leave at any point, their preview copy will eventually expire. In other words, you can get Windows free as long as you agree to beta test new releases of the operating system… forever.

Facebook working on facial recognition software that doesn’t need to see your face

Facebook researchers say they are working on experimental systems that will allow Facebook to recognize users in photos based off their hairstyle and clothing. In other words, it is facial recognition that doesn’t actually need to see your face.

According to the researchers, the new system is accurate 83 percent of the time, far better than current facial recognition systems which need clear, full frontal shots of people’s faces to recognize them. The researchers described the project as “experimental” and “long term” and said that we shouldn’t expect it to be rolled out on the site any time soon.

Good thing, considering the controversies that Facebook’s facial recognition algorithms have caused in the past.

The Navy says Windows XP is worth $9 million

According to Computerworld, the U.S. Navy has about 100,000 computers running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003. Server 2003 expires in July, and all of the others have been expired. To keep their computers running in tip-top shape with security updates, the Navy is paying Microsoft $9.1 million.

If there was ever a computer you wanted to be secure, it would be a computer in the Navy.

And, to be fair to the Navy, Windows XP still has approximately 10-14 percent market share, depending on who’s counting, which, either way, still puts it over Apple’s OS X.

Ebay and Amazon banning confederate flag merchandise

Major online retailers, including Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba are banning and removing Confederate flag merchandise from their inventories in the wake of the tragic shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The man the police have identified as the shooter, Dylann Roof, had posed in several photographs with a Confederate flag. As calls have spread for the flag to be removed from state flags and capitals, retailers have been quick to distance themselves from it publicly.

Actually getting flag merchandise off the shelf may take time, however. As of the time when we recorded this episode, however, some confederate flag merchandise was still available.

Microsoft Office coming to Android

Microsoft released full versions of its Office productivity apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) for the Android operation system this week.

This comes after about month of beta versions of these apps being available for Android users. Microsoft said in a statement that the incorporated a lot of feedback from users of these early versions into the final ones.

These apps won’t work on all Android devices, especially older ones, but they will work on a majority of smartphones and tablets. The Microsoft Office mobile apps are currently free in the Google Play store.

Amazon now paying Kindle Unlimited authors by the page

Amazon has announced that starting on July 1, they will begin paying authors in the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library programs by the number of pages read, rather than simply when their book is downloaded. To keep the system from being gamed by large fonts, Amazon has introduced the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count, or KENPC, which is a formula that will attempt to standardize page counts for all books.
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Photo Credit: “Taylor Swift RED tour 2013” by Jana Beamer is used under CC BY 2.0.