Murdered robots, silent video chat, drones being shot out of the sky, X-ray vision cameras and more Windows 10 news. All the tech news worth talking about this week on Deemable Tech.
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THIS WEEK’S RUNDOWN
Yahoo released Yahoo LiveText. No one is sure why.
Yahoo announced a new app this week called Yahoo Livetext on iOS and Android. With the new app you can chat with people you know, while you look at them on a live video. What makes Livetext different than any other video chat app out there like Skype, Facetime or Google Hangouts is that you cannot hear the person on the other end. Don’t worry, it’s not your phone. Yahoo designed it like that? for some reason. We tried it out.
Windows 10 Updates
Windows 10 has been out for a week now and we’ve learned a few more things about it.
Among other things, it turns out that Windows 10 collects a lot more data on its users than previous version of the operating system did. The main reason for this appears to be Cortana: the nifty digital personal assistant needs a lot more personal data to power her search results and voice recognition. Of course, that isn’t to say that Microsoft isn’t just taking a page from Google and Facebook here.
If you want to stop Windows 10 from gathering up your contacts, calendar details, text and touch input, location data, and a whole lot more and sending it off into the cloud, you will need to let Windows know. This can be done at installation: you’ll need to select ‘custom settings’ instead of ‘express’ and then you will see the personalized settings for what data Windows will collect on you. If you’ve already installed Windows 10, you can also limit the data it is phoning home by signing in with a strictly local account rather than a Microsoft one.
Cortana herself also has settings that you will need to adjust.
Needless to say, you may find Cortana to be less functional if you disable all of these options.
Another surprise in store for those upgrading to Windows 10: Windows Media Center, Microsoft’s free media player which has for years allowed DVD playback in Windows, will disappear. Its replacement is an app in the Windows Store called Windows DVD Player, but this new app isn’t free – it will cost you $14.99. Which is too bad, considering that it doesn’t do any of the cool stuff Media Center used to do, like DVR, image slideshows, and media organization.
DVD playback isn’t the only formerly free feature is holding its hand out for your credit card in Windows 10. Minesweeper and Solitaire, those old Windows standbys, are now full of intrusive ads unless you pay a $9.99 annual fee. That’s not so great.
You know what IS great? VLC media player! It’s still free, it still plays DVDs, and it still works with Windows 10. We’re just saying.
More fun drone news
The Daily Dot is reporting that a Kentucky man blew a drone out of the sky with a shotgun. He claims that his kids told him the drone had passed over the house multiple times before, and he claims that the drone dropped down to close to the ground and was hovering over his back deck where his 16-year-old daughter was sun bathing. He had enough at that point and fired duck shot knocking it out of the sky. When the drone pilot and three of his buddies showed up to collect the drone, the father told them, “If you cross that sidewalk onto my property, there’s going to be another shooting.” Instead of doing that, they waited for the police to arrive and the father was arrested and charged with wanton endangerment and criminal mischief related to his firing the gun.
The drone owner has since released video to WDRB in Louisville showing the drone was almost 200 feet above the ground and it moving when it was shot. The drone operator says he was heading to his friends house to shoot pictures for him at his request and was only passing by.
When you shut down the newsstand, you don’t sell newspapers
Back in October 2014, Spain decided to impose a levy on Google for using snippets of Spanish news articles and linking to news articles in Google News. Google responded by almost immediately removing all Spanish news outlets from Google News.
A report commissioned by the Asociacio?n Espan?ola de Editoriales de Publicaciones Perio?dicas (Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodicals) came out last week showing that Spains little experiment is working? for no one.
The study showed that in the short term, the law will cost publishers about ?10 million or about $10.9 million. The cost will fall especially on smaller news outlets who disproportionately are getting less traffic since Google News went dark in Spain.
Fujifilm camera sees through clothes
Fujifilm has announced a new camera called the X-T1 IR which boasts a 16 megapixel sensor, high speed autofocus, and wifi connectivity. Oh yeah, and according to a new Wired report, it may be able to see through some clothes. That’s right, the “IR” in X-T1 IR stands for ‘infrared’. Infrared photography allows would-be shutterbugs to capture some trippy and dreamlike images and helps specialists like crime-scene techs locate blood spatter. But it can also allow pervs with cameras to get an eyeful, given the right conditions. Specifically, the clothing in question would have to be pretty thin in the first place for these cameras to see through it.
Hopefully dweebs hanging around the girls’ locker room will be priced out of the market: the cameras will start at $1700 when they go on sale in October.
Macs get malware too
Wired is reporting that the first firmware worm for Mac has been developed. The worm dubbed “Thunderstrike 2” is a proof-of-concept. (The original Thunderstrike did the same thing, but required physical access to the computer) The worm can spread from Mac to Mac without it needing to be networked. Even air-gapped Apple computers would be vulnerable to the attack. Since it is a firmware worm, the processor chip would have to be reflashed to eliminate the worm, and since these are Macs we are talking about, this basically means they would have to be thrown away, because who can work on Macs, amirite?
Fortunately, the worm was created by hackers who are discussing their findings at the Black Hat Conference this week in Las Vegas, so manufacturers like Apple will be able to use their research to improve the security of firmware.
The mysterious murder of HitchBot in the city of brotherly love
Our next story is something of an unfolding saga.
A year ago, a team of Canadian researchers created a small robot which they dubbed HitchBot. HitchBot was completely immobile, but it could interact with people. It’s mission was to hitchhike from place to place. In 2014 it successfully hitched all the way across Canada. Later it made a similar journey through Germany and the Netherlands. On July 17th of this year, HitchBot set out for its biggest road trip yet: crossing the US, starting in Massachusetts and hopefully winding up in San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Sadly, the little bot that could had only made it to the city of Philadelphia when tragedy struck.
The precise details aren’t known, but HitchBot was found dismembered, its limbs strewn across the street and its internal wiring damaged or scooped out. Although HitchBot reportedly takes a picture every ten minutes or so of its currently location, no picture was taken of its assailant.
This is where things get a little weird: two Philly-based YouTubers were reportedly the last people who the bot ‘hitched’ a ride with before it was destroyed. They then came forward claiming to have obtained surveillance footage from a nearby camera showing the attacker. The footage they delivered appeared to show one of the YouTubers kicking and stomping on an obscured object and waving what looked like HitchBot’s limbs around. After some initial confusion, the YouTubers said this was a prank and that they in fact had nothing to do with HitchBot’s demise.
There are still some good Samaritans in the City of Brotherly Love. Hackers from a local makerspace offered to rebuild HitchBot. However, the bot’s original creators intend to rebuild it themselves better than before, so that it will be ready for its next big trip. The predicted starting point? Philadelphia.
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