We were left with nothing to remember Sean Birch except dozens of his high school graduation pictures.

Producer Sean Birch is back. So, Ray is under control, no more innuendos and inappropriate jokes. In this episode Ray, Tom and Sean tackle how Facebook helped France but forgot about Lebanon and talk about crappy USB-C cables, Microsoft putting the Zune out to pasture, the new Star Trek TV show and the Chromestick.

By the way, we don’t just have a subreddit page for the fame and the glory. We have it because we want to know what you want us to talk about! We know you’re purusing the tech news all week. Go to our subreddit page, reddit.com/r/deemable, and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down.

And make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review on iTunes and on Stitcher. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

If you have a response or comment for the show, give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

THE RUN DOWN

Facebook Safety Check Helps France, Ignores Beirut

The Washington Post reports that Facebook turned on its ?Safety Check? feature for a man-made disaster last weekend for the first time, for the attacks in Paris. With Safety Check, users who are in an area affected by a disaster who login to Facebook are greeted by a message asking them if they are safe. If they indicate that they are, a status update is then posted to their wall letting their friends and family know.

Facebook said that about 4.1 million users checked in within 24 hours after the attack, about one-third of metropolitan Paris?s population. Safety check has been deployed on five previous occasions, including the earthquake in Nepal in April, Tropical Cyclone Pam in the South Pacific, and Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines. It was originally inspired by the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

Facebook has drawn criticism because it has not deployed the feature for several recent disasters in the Middle East, including for the double suicide bombings in Beirut just a day earlier. Facebook says that it plans to deploy the tool more frequently in the future.

Crappy Cables Be Crappy

One of the dangers of buying something online is that it could be a dud. This is especially a problem if you buy things from some random website. But sometimes even products from Amazon can be lemons, and the reviews ? which are often written by less-than-tech-savvy customers ? don’t always save the day. Well, one very tech savvy customer is doing everything he can to change that.

Gizmodo reports that a Google engineer is buying USB-C cables off Amazon, testing them and reviewing them. Benson Leung is a Chromebook engineer, specifically an engineer on the Chromebook Pixel team, which, no surprise, has a USB-C port on it.

From Benson’s experience, good USB-C cables are hit-or-miss. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter if they name brand or not. He’s found some cables with the wrong wiring, the wrong resisters, or will just completely burn out your charger, USB hubs or your mobile device.

You can follow him and read his reviews on Amazon or on his Google+ page, because? he works for Google? so of course he has a Google+ page.

Microsoft Finally Puts Zune Out of Its Misery

This week marks a sad time for those who love Microsoft?s Zune audio players (don?t laugh, there may be some out there).

PCWorld reports that Microsoft officially shut down all Zune-related services this week, including the Zune Music Pass streaming subscription service, and the Zune marketplace where users could buy MP3s.

Anyone still subscribed to Zune Music Pass was automatically switched to Microsoft?s new Groove Music service. As for the MP3s, if any of them had DRM they sadly might not work after a while because the license can?t be renewed.

It has taken a surprisingly long time for Microsoft to both stop the services and stop using the Zune name. The company stopped making Zune hardware all the way back in 2011. They kept using the brand name for a few years before they switched to using ?Xbox? branding for a lot of things.

Google Answers

Shout out to redditor BHK123 for suggesting our next story. Google?s search app is about to get better at understanding complex questions. According to VentureBeat, a new update to the Google search app allows it to better understand superlatives, ordered items, and dates. As an example, Google suggests the question ?Who was president when the Angels won the world series?? Google will figure out that you?re talking about US Presidents and baseball and combine the two to return the correct answer: George W. Bush.

Chromestick

Fans of ChromeOS rejoice, you are that much closer to being able to have Chrome on almost everything. Ars Technica says that Google and Asus have partnered up to create a 2.6 oz HDMI stick with ChromeOS that can be plugged into any monitor or screen, instantly turning it into a Chromebook. The stick contains 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. It also has a single USB port. The stick will reportedly retail for $85.

Star Trekkin’ Across The Universe

You are all no doubt very excited about the new Star Trek television show that has recently been announced. I know I am. Well The Hollywood Reporter claims that the show will not, as you might expect, be airing regularly on network TV. While the pilot episode will indeed air on CBS, the regular episodes will stream on CBS All Access and will require a $5.99 monthly subscription to view. CBS All Access includes CBS feed, which as of right now includes 85 shows, according to IT World. Some shows do appear to include commercials.

The new Trek show is slated to appear in January 2017.

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

Ardis loves his new Nexus 6P on Google Project Fi.

It’s Sean Birch’s turn to venture through the Pacific Northwest, so he is out of the studio for this week and next. (When’s Ray’s turn? #justsayin.) But Ray and Tom press on none-the-less. The Deemable Duo were joined by long-time listener Ardis Meade who showed us his new phone, the Nexus 6P and told us all about his phone carrier, Google Project Fi. Very interesting stuff if you’re in the market for a new phone or a new carrier. Stick around after the news for that.

By the way, we don’t just have a subreddit page for the fame and the glory. We have it because we want to know what you want us to talk about! We know you’re purusing the tech news all week. Go to our subreddit page, reddit.com/r/deemable, and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down.

And make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review on iTunes and on Stitcher. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

If you have a response or comment for the show, give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

THE RUN DOWN

Turns Out Disney Isn’t That Bad After All

CNN reports that one Star Wars superfan with terminal cancer got to screen the film early. Daniel Fleetwood is a 32-year-old who lives in Spring, Texas and a Star Wars enthusiast who camped out to see new releases of the films and collected Star Wars paraphernalia. He is also dying of spindle cell sarcoma and is not expected to live to see the official release date of the new Star Wars film Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Hashtag  ForceForDaniel promoted by actors Mark Hamill and John Boyega persuaded director J.J. Abrams and Disney studio execs to let Fleetwood view an early edit of the film according to a spokesperson from Disney Studios.

The film will be released to the public on December 18th.

Chrome OS And Android OS To Become One

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is planning to merge ChromeOS and Android OS starting in 2017, with a beta appearing next year. The first Chromebooks came out back in 2011. At the time, the idea that Google would release an OS that wasn?t Android created quite a stir. However Chromebooks soon made inroads thanks to their super-cheap, basic, and lightweight SKUs. Chromebooks have an OS that is essentially the Chrome browser plus a couple of simple add-ons. The Chrome app store has never really taken off, but the OS has delivered on its promises of being lightweight and receiving constant, invisible updates. While Android is also a relatively lightweight OS it works entirely differently from ChromeOS, and its update process is much more laborious. How the two operating systems will merge remains to be seen.

Facebook Kicks More Competition To The Curb

Facebook, and practically all companies on the web, stay in business from ad revenue. The more you are on the website, the more money they make. Yep, that’s right, Facebook is making bank from all those pictures of your kids and stupid quizzes you fill out.

Well, another social media network, Tsu.co, decided to share its revenue with the users. The more that people view your content, the more money you make. And you make money off of inviting people to join Tsu.co. You make money off of the posts that the people you invited posted. If that sounds like a pyramid scheme, it’s because it basically is.

And much like any other new social network that has started since Facebook took dominance, (Instagram, Pinterest, Vine, etc.) Tsu.co is trying to grow by letting its users share posts on Facebook.

This worked, right up until Facebook blocked them. Unlike how Facebook made YouTube videos look like crap on Facebook to make its own video platform stand out, Mashable is reporting that Facebook went with the nuclear option. Users cannot even mention the website on Facebook. If you type Tsu.co into a post or comment, Facebook will not allowed it to be posted.

Facebook says it’s because users posting links to Tsu.co are engaging in spammy behavior and Tsu.co encourages it. I will say after checking out Tsu.co, it doesn’t seem very spammy. It’s mostly the same type of posts I see on almost every social network: cats, muscle-heads, news, cats ? you get it.

Don’t Buy Things From The Guy In The Back Alley

Gizmodo reports that a security research blog claims that in third-party Android stores, popular apps like Candy Crush, Facebook, Google Now, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more are infected with adware that gives itself root access to a user?s device. It appears that hackers are taking popular apps and repacking them with their own malicious Trojans and uploading them to these other stores. Right now the Trojans do nothing but serve up ads, but with root access much nastier things are possible. So far, no Trojanized apps have been found in the official Google Play store. So as always, people, you sideload apps at your own risk. Playing outside the official sandbox is still the #1 way to get your device infected with malware. Be very certain that you trust an app?s maker before you sideload it.

One More Reason To Hate Comcast

If you live in Little Rock, Arkansas; Houma, LaPlace and Shreveport, Louisiana; Chattanooga, Greenville, Johnson City/Gray, Tennessee; or Galax, Virginia you’re about to have one more reason to hate Comcast. DSLReports says that the lucky customers in those cities will no longer have unlimited Internet on Comcast, but instead will have a cap of 300 GB per month starting in December. If you go over, you will be hit with $10 per 50 GB over the limit.

Why is Comcast doing this, you ask? They say it is for ?fairness and providing a more flexible policy to our customers?

According to the email DSLReports obtained, Comcast believes “that 300 GB is more than enough to meet your Internet usage needs.”

All hope is not lost though. You can still get unlimited Internet from Comcast in those markets. All you have to do is pay $35 more each month for unlimited Internet than you were already paying for unlimited Internet.

Teen Stoners Hack CIA Director’s Email. Yeah, It’s That Easy

A pair of teenage hackers who enjoy ?recreational pot smoking? are apparently on a hacking roll, according to Gizmodo. Calling themselves CWA, short for ?Crackas With Attitude,? they hacked CIA director John Brennan?s AOL email account last month. This week they did one better, posting the contact information of 34,000 government employees online, including the phone numbers of FBI agents. So far it appears that all the data leaked is legitimate.

The hackers have been communicating at times with the press, often via disposable Twitter accounts. Asked how he felt about hacking the government, one of them told Gawker, ?since only 13 i am pretty hype about it.? He also said he had no problem with being labeled a ?teen stoner?, saying that he felt that ?it just kinda describes us in away.?

Tom is out of town, and there was an Apple Special Event Wednesday, so Ray and Sean get to talk about Apple without Tom’s skeptical cynicism.

Don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there

If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on the website, make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. And, while you’re there, leave a review. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

What do you think about comics on television? If you have a response or comment for the show, give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

THE RUN DOWN

Apple Watch

Tim Cook opened Wednesday’s announcement by touting the huge success of the Apple Watch, and then didn’t tell us any real numbers, and then touted the new Watch OS 2. There wasn’t much to talk about here, other than there are now 10,000 apps on the Apple Watch.

Apple also figured out that people who don’t have $10,000 to spare still like the color gold. Apple announced two new finishes: gold and rose gold in annonized aluminium. They also announced new leather watch straps from Hermes and a new Product Red model.

Apple TV

Apple also announced their first update to the Apple TV since 2012 at the event. The 4th generation Apple TV will feature major hardware and software updates, a new remote, new apps, and something called Siri (not sure what that is).

While the Apple TV box mostly looks the same as the old one from the outside (besides being a tad bit taller), the inside contains a lot of the same hardware as the iPhone 6 so it looks like it will be much faster than the previous generation.

It will need this extra speed for all of the new apps that are coming from the new Apple TV App Store. For the first time in the device?s history, Apple is letting developers create apps for the Apple TV and what they?re calling the new ?TV OS? operating system. They said these will include universal apps that will work and sync across devices. They made a particularly big deal about games on the Apple TV.

And it looks like those games will utilize a lot of the features of the new Apple TV remote. The new design includes a glass touch surface across the top that you?ll be able to swipe left and right, and up and down, to navigate menus and control game characters and the like. The remote also has a built-in gyroscope and accelerometer.

The biggest thing about the remote, though, is the Siri button.

Yes, in a greatly anticipated move, Apple has added Siri to Apple TV. Press that button, and you?ll be able to ask Siri to search for content across platforms like Netflix, Hulu and iTunes. You can even get really specific – the demo included a search for ?the episode of Modern Family with Edward Norton? that resulted in Siri pulling up the exact episode of that show in which the actor guest starred.

You?ll also be able to use Siri to search for information while watching content without pausing. A Siri special bar will pop up at the bottom of the screen with the results, which you can then swipe up for more details.

There was no release date for the new Apple TV, but Apple did reveal some prices. A 64 gigabyte version will be 199 dollars, a 32 gig one will be 149 dollars.

iPad Pro

The biggest news of the event (see what I did there?) was the iPad Pro. Coming in with a 12.9″ display, it is the biggest iOS device ever made. There were rumors forever that there would be a pro version of the iPad, and that it would have OS X, the operating system that runs Mac computers. Not surprising, that rumor turned out to be a dud.

Apple announced two accessories for the iPad Pro: the Smart Keyboard and ? the Apple Pencil.

I can tell you everything you need to know about the Smart Keyboard in five words: it’s not a Surface Keyboard. It looks pretty much exactly like a Surface Keyboard. It connects to the iPad very similarly to a Surface Keyboard. It’s a little more expensive than a Surface Keyboard at $169 instead of the Surface Pro Keyboard’s $129.99

Then there’s the Apple Pencil. It’s magical, it’s revolutionary? it’s a freakin’ stylus. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave. Again, Apple Pencil, $99, Surface Pen, $49. #imjustsayin

In all seriousness though, Apple has a habit of “inventing” products that have been around forever, only to make them worlds better than the ones that are already out there on the market. The Apple Pencil does look really incredible, for a stylus.  It detects pressure and angle so it gives you a lot of variation. It’s supposed to last for 12 hours between charges, and it charges by plugging into the lighting connection on the iPad. Time will tell if it lives up to the hype.

Just like the original iPad announcement though, there was not a lot of “Wow this is amazing!” moments in the iPad Pro announcement. It does have a four speaker stereo sound system. So, that should help with how awful sound always is on every tablet device. The huge screen boasts 2732-by-2048 pixels across its 12.9 inches on the diagonal, and it’s the fastest, most powerful Apple product that runs iOS. In fact, Apple claims it is faster than 90% of portable PCs. So, there’s that.

iPhone 6S and 6S Plus

No surprise, Apple announced the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Since we are on the “S” cycle, there wasn’t much new in the outward facing hardware department.

Other than the addition of a new rose gold finish, one of the biggest change was the addition of 3D Touch. This is one of the hardest features to explain. Basically, instead of just tapping, dragging and double tapping, you can tap deeper. And, if you tap deeper, on some menu items you’ll find additional options.

3D Touch is going to be the least used feature of the iPhone 6S.

Another big change to the iPhone 6Ses was the camera. The iPhone 6S has a 12 megapixel camera and can shoot 4K video.

The front-facing camera, known as the FaceTime camera, also got an upgrade. The FaceTime Camera is now a 5 megapixel camera, and it can shoot video in 1080. Also, the FaceTime camera now has TrueTone Flash, by using the screen as a flash bulb. Instead of adding LEDs to the front of the phone, Apple engineered the screen to flash brighter.

And, now you can have moving pictures! with sound! Apple is calling them: Live Photos. when you are looking at a picture that was taken with the Live Photo option turned on, you’ll be able to pressed the photo and it will start moving. Basically, it captures seconds before the photo was taken and afterward so you can be more in the moment. These are not movies according to Apple.

iPhone Upgrade Program

But, I hope you can afford to pay for a new iPhone with cash, because AT&T is the only carrier left that sells iPhones on a two-year contract.

But, Apple did announce a new payment plan to buy an iPhone. Starting at $27 a month, you can buy an iPhone directly from Apple. This works out to 24 payments, so starting out at a total of $649, the same price as buying an iPhone outright.

This would be great, if you could theoretically get a lower priced service plan from the carriers, but we really haven’t seen much of a difference in prices since Sprint and Verizon announced that they were no longer selling iPhones at the two-year contract price.

One Republic Apologizes

And finally, Apple, as it often does, closed out the announcement with a performance from a big name band. Fortunately this time they did not also force feed a new album into our phones. One Republic played a few ditties. They also apologized for all the times you’ve had to listen to “Good Life” while you were shopping at Whole Foods.

Read Deemable Tech’s live blog from the Apple special press event discussing the announcements of the iPad Pro, new Apple TV and the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, and the new accessories, Apple Pencil and Keyboard.

Weaponized drones, Ashley Madison, Facebook’s new virtual assistant and artificial intelligence are all in the news this week.

If you?re listening to Deemable Tech on the website, make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. And, while you?re there, leave a review. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

If you have a response or comment for the show, give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

Make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

THE RUN DOWN

Ashley Madison was nothing but a honeypot

Ashley Madison is still in the news. Gizmodo is reporting that hardly any of the real women on Ashley Madison actually used the site. Salon says that the number of fake female accounts is close to 95% which sounds about right from my experience. Like I’ve mentioned on the show a few times most of the women on the site are bots. By most, I mean, I don’t think I ever spoke to a single real person the entire time I was on the site. So, there were only about 5.5 million female accounts, meaning that there were only about 250 thousand real women on the website.

To make things even worse for Avid Life Media, of those 250 thousand women, a very small number of them actually used the site. Only about 2400 used the chat system and 1,400 used the messaging system. Considering the site also had 31.3 million men, and the site billed itself as a place to find women who wanted to have an affair, that is pretty rough for the company. It looks like they didn’t have the product to sell, so they built bots. Lots of the accounts have email addresses like 100@ashleymadison.com.

Ashley Madison CEO gets the “mutual agreement” boot

So, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that Avid Life Media CEO Noel Biderman, has quit his job as CEO ? “in mutual agreement with the company.”

A company that sold a service so crappy that women barely signed up for it, so the company had to make bots, and the site was so insecure that all of its data was dumped on the Internet. Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t want to keep him around.

That being said, we are happy to say, this is the last time we are going to talk about Ashley Madison, Established Gentlemen or Avid Life Media, hopefully for a long time.

Facebook launches new virtual assistant “M”

Following in the footsteps of Apple?s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft?s Cortana, Facebook unveiled a new virtual assistant this week that they?re calling ?M.?

M will be built into the Facebook Messenger app. Unlike its competitors, M is – at least for the time being – is entirely text based.

As Wired reports, there is another huge difference between M and the other virtual assistants: M will use a hybrid of artificial intelligence and real people to complete tasks.

A team of employees called ?M trainers? will work alongside the software to make sure every question and request is answered. Facebook says M will offer a true personal assistant experience by helping users book restaurants, pick out and deliver gifts and more.

During internal employee testing, one of the most popular requests for M was to call the user?s cable company so they wouldn?t have sit through long wait lines and automated messages.

David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, says they are also looking for a way to partner with businesses that get a lot of requests through M.

Facebook is currently doing a trial run for M with a few hundred users in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Facebook Hits 1 Billion Visitors A Day

Speaking of The Facebook, the Associated Press reported this week that the social media behemoth hit a major milestone as one billion users visited the site in a single day. Facebook hit a billion users back in 2012, but there is a significant difference between having a billion users and having a billion people actually logging onto your site and using it every day. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrated the milestone in a Facebook post, stating that this meant that 1 out of every 7 people on earth had logged onto the site that day.

North Dakota legalizes armed police drones

NPR reports that North Dakota has passed a law legalizing use of drones armed with ?less than lethal? weapons by law enforcement. Less than lethal weapons apparently include  tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, pepper spray and Tasers. The bill?s sponsor, Republican State Senator Becker said that the bill was actually intended to require police to get warrants before using drones for surveillance. In order to pass the bill, however, compromises had to be included. Becker says that he hopes to get the weaponization part of the bill overturned in a future session.

Arrrrrrr-tificial Intelligence Predicts Pirate Attacks

Our next story is about the rapidly growing field of Arrrrrr-tificial intelligence. David Nield at Science Alert reports that the Navy has filed a patent for a computerized system that can predict pirate attacks based on previous intelligence, weather, and other factors. Modern day piracy is a real problem, costing the US maritime industry an estimated $16 billion per year. The Navy?s pirate attack computer model would be able to simulate attacks by large numbers of ?virtual pirates? and generate probability estimates of when and where pirate attacks are most likely to take place.

Uber hires Jeep hackers

Regular listeners will remember that not long ago we talked about the two hackers who were able to take control of a Jeep?s engine and brakes through its uConnect system. The hack made such big headlines that it caused Fiat Chrysler to issue a recall. Well Engadget reports that this week Uber announced that it had hired the men behind the hack, Charlie Miller and Chris Valacek, to work at its Advanced Technology Center in Pennsylvania. Like other tech companies, Uber is known to be exploring the possibilities of autonomous cars. Making sure that your driverless car has robust security to keep it from being remotely controlled by a hacker is probably a smart move.

BEM Twitter Account

Just wanted to share a great Twitter account I just discovered: Bored Elon Musk. This parody account purports to be the downtime thoughts of Musk, the inventor, entrepreneur and cofounder of Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX.

Photo credit: “Don’t Taze Me, Drone!” by Ray Hollister is a derivative work of “Project 365 #121: 010515 Attack Of The Drones!” by Pete used under CC BY 2.0.

If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on the website, make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. And, while you’re there, leave a review. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

If you have a response or comment for the show, give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

Make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

THE RUN DOWN

A is for Alphabet, G is for Google

In our top story this week, tech giant Google announced a major corporate restructuring which included, to everyone’s surprise, a name change. A new holding company has been created called Alphabet. Alphabet is made up of a collection of companies including Google. Google itself is being slimmed down so that just the products and services traditionally associated with it, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Chrome, are part of it. Unrelated projects such as Google’s famous “moonshot” projects, Google Fiber, and its research into self-driving cars will be spun off into their own companies, all under the Alphabet umbrella.

As part of the restructuring, Google’s Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai has been made CEO of the new, slimmer Google, while Larry Page and Sergei Brin are taking control of Alphabet.

For the moment, no branding is changing, so if you want to search something you don’t suddenly have to “Alphabet” it and you won’t be checking “Alphabet Mail” anytime soon on your “Alphabet Phone.” At least, we sure hope not.

You can check out the new company’s website and a letter from its founders at abc.xyz.

Why not Alphabet.com?

You might be asking yourself, why didn’t Google just go with Alphabet.com? Well, it turns out, even the mighty Google can’t just have any domain name they want. The New York Times is reporting that car manufacturer BMW already owns Alphabet.com and they are not interested in selling it.

Alphabet is a subsidiary of BMW that provides vehicle fleet services. Micaela Sandstede, a BMW spokeswoman in Munich. She described the website as a “very active” part of Alphabet?s business. Which is ironic, because the website has been inaccessible ever since the Google Alphabet (or is it Alphabet Google?) announcement, presumably because of the increase in traffic. It makes us feel better knowing that even mega-companies like BMW have issues keeping their website running when they get hit with a ton of traffic.

The article points out that it would only be trademark infringement if it creates confusion with customers… which wouldn’t be an issue if Google and BMW were in entirely different industries, which they were, right up until Google entered the automobile industry with self-driving cars and Android for automobiles.

Android flaw that got patched actually not patched

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago we talked about a major security flaw in Android that allowed a remote attacker to execute code using a vulnerability in Hangouts. Google rushed out a patch for the vulnerability, which has now been codenamed “Stagefright,” and it was just a matter of getting it out to the phones for all the different carriers. Except, according to the BBC, it turns out that the patch doesn’t work – or at least, that it is easy to bypass. Better keep Hangouts disabled for the time being.

How to lose an internship at Facebook

If you figure out a huge flaw in the company you are going to start an internship at, perhaps it’s a good idea to keep it to yourself. According to Boston.com, Aran Khanna created a web-app demonstrating a huge privacy flaw in Facebook Messenger shortly before he was to begin his highly coveted internship at Facebook. Facebook Messenger stored your location automatically and shared it with anyone you chatted with on the app. Khanna’s web-app took that information and placed it onto a map showing where everyone you had chatted with was when they sent the message.

He tweeted about his app and posted it on Reddit and Medium, and a few days later, Facebook asked him to disable it, and then let him know that his internship was also disabled.

According to Khanna, he wasn’t fired from his internship because of the app, but because of the way he described Facebook?s user data collection. Khanna says the Medium post wasn’t in line with the high ethical standards expected of interns.

Drones make bears nervous

Drones seem like an ideal method for wildlife biologists to study the habits of wild animals such as bears, but it appears that there is a catch. NPR reports that a new study shows that the presence of drones make bears nervous, elevating their heart rates by as much as 400%. Mark Ditmer, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, flew a drone near bears that had been previously implanted with heart rate monitors to study their hibernation states. Although the bears appeared outwardly unphased, all of them showed elevated heart rates when buzzed by the drone.

Meet the world?s biggest hard drive

Samsung has unveiled a new device with the catchy name of PM1633a. According to The Verge, it’s a 2.5 inch solid state drive, and it packs a whopping 16 terabytes of storage space, making it essentially the biggest hard drive ever. Samsung has not announced a price tag, but they plan to sell servers with up to 48 of these drives installed, which they are calling JBOF. One JBOF should hold about 768 TB. JBOF stands for Just a Bunch Of Flash. Before you ask, the next step up after terabyte is petabyte.

Still No Apple TV

Apple TV, the long delayed, rumored, mystical device and service is further delayed. Bloomberg is reporting that negotiations between Apple and the big TV networks are holding up the works. According to Bloomberg, Apple was to announce a new live  streaming TV service at its Sept. 9 press event, but instead Buzzfeed News says Apple is only announcing a beefed up Apple TV set-top box.

eSports Drug Testing

Top-ranked Counter Strike: Global Offensive player Cory “Semphis” Friesen admitted in an interview last month that he and his competitive eSports team “were all on Adderall” during a recent tournament. According to NPR news, at least one eSports league has decided that it is not okay with that. The Electronic Sports League, which sponsored the $250,000 tournament Friesen and his team took part in, has announced a ban on drugs and alcohol during its tournaments and will be instituting random drug testing during its tournaments going forward. The League says the substances banned include those prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency. The first random drug testing at a League event will occur at ESL One in Cologne later this month.

LOL is OOS (Out of Style)

You may have seen an article from the New Yorker back in April about how we express laughter online – appropriately known as e-laughter – and the increase in the use of “hehe.”

This piqued the interest of the he research team at Facebook, who decided to look into how users showed amusement. They did so by analyzing posts and comments from last week of May. Don’t worry – they only looked at ones that had “at least one string of characters that matched laughter” and they left out private messages.

So what did their study find? Well, among other things, the form of e-laughter that is used more than any other is “haha” – which they found is used over 50% of the time. In second place are emoji, followed by “hehe” in third. And it last place… our dear friend “LOL.”

The first text speak that many of us learned is now used only about 2 percent of the time.

Mic.com has a great breakdown of all of Facebook’s findings, including which phrases are most popular among different age groups and states.

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

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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.

If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on the website, make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. And, while you’re there, leave a review. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

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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.

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there

So much for Windows 10 fun. Now Ray has to reinstall Windows 8.1 just so he can upgrade it to 10, so he can reinstall Windows 10!

Killer robots, self-aware robots, cars, guns and Android phones getting hacked into and the death of another Google product? Yeah, that sounds like a typical Deemable Tech episode.

If you?re listening to Deemable Tech on the website, make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. And, while you?re there, leave a review. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

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THIS WEEK?S RUNDOWN

Windows 10 is released.

Our top story this week is the long-awaited release of Microsoft?s Windows 10. In an unprecedented move, Microsoft has made the new Windows available as a free upgrade to anyone who had Windows 7, 8 or 8.1. The upgrade became available to download for most of those folks starting on Wednesday.

With Windows 10, Microsoft hopes to reunite its fractured userbase, many of whom are still stuck way back on Windows XP. Windows 10 will feature continuous upgrades and may be the last major windows version for the foreseeable future. To lure back customers scared off by the controversial Windows 8, Windows 10 brings back the Start Button and does away with the charms menu.

Other new features include the integration of Microsoft?s Siri-like virtual assistant Cortana, the brand new Edge web browser, virtual desktops, and Mission Control, which gives you an overview of all the apps you have running.

Ray Hollister has bravely volunteered to install Windows the 10th on the dual boot partition of his MacBook, so let?s dive right in.

The beauty of Windows 10 is that you can’t install Windows 10 as a fresh, clean install. Except you can. But you can’t.

Forbes – Windows 10 Updating, Reinstalling And Activation Guide: Essential Advice To Avoid Problems

The Verge – How to get Windows 10 on your Mac

CEO of Mozilla Firefox complains in an open letter that Windows 10 upgrade resets default web browser

Mozilla CEO Chris Beard is one person who is less than pleased with Windows 10. It appears that when you do an upgrade with ?Express Settings? that it will default your browser to Microsoft?s Edge browser, even if you had Firefox selected by default before. Even worse, in Windows 10 the default browser is now buried down in the settings control panel, meaning that it is difficult to find for non-technical users. Microsoft defends the changes as making the upgrade ?simple and cohesive? for users and says that they may make ?improvements? in the future.

Facebook builds an Internet drone

The BBC is reporting that Facebook has built a drone, with the wingspan of a Boeing 737 that will fly as high as 90,000 feet and for up to 90 days at a time to provide wireless Internet access at up to 10 Gigabits per second.

The drone will communicate via a laser beam that can hit a target the size of a dime more than 10 miles away. The lasers will connect the drones together and to the ground.

This is part of Facebook’s Internet.org project to bring Internet access to the developing world. No word on whether this will be like Internet.org’s last launch which only included access to a few sites, which caused a bit of a backlash since the access gave an unfair advantage to those sites.

Facebook will be testing the drones later this year in the United States.

Google+ dies a slow and painful death

Google?s ill-fated Facebook competitor, Google+, courted a lot of controversy in 2013 when Google started requiring users to create a Google+ profile to comment on YouTube. This week on the official Google blog, the search giant announced that they would be hitting the ?undo? button on that policy. They said that a Google account would be all you need to share content, create contacts, comment on YouTube, and more, across all of Google. This change will reportedly be rolled out ?in the coming months.? This announcement comes on the heels of Google splitting Google+ in two, with Google Photos becoming its own stand-alone service and app.

Killer Robots

I posted this on our Facebook page, facebook.com/Deemable, but it bears repeating. As a general rule, everyone here at Deemable Tech is anti-killer robots.

Unless, as I said, the uprising has already happened, in which case, let me rephrase that: How may we serve you, robot masters?

I bring this all up because Elon Musk (you know, Iron Man, the guy who brought you PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, the Hyperloop, and who plans to die on Mars) and Steve Wozniak, (the reason why you have a computer at your desk, smartphone in your pocket and ultimately why you’re listening to this podcast) and Stephen Hawking (who you’ll know as the guy who played poker with Data, Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.) and have joined a letter calling for the banning of autonomous weapons.

We talked about a weaponized drone last week that had a gun attached to it, well imagine an autonomous drone with a gun. The icons aren’t as concerned about them throwing a revolution and killing humanity as they are concerned about another cold war arms race where every country tries to build bigger, better faster killing machines. But considering a robot recently demonstrated self awareness, perhaps they should be concerned about a robot uprising too.

Hacking Smart Rifles

Speaking of things that shouldn’t be connected to the Internet, like killer robots. As much as I love my connected light bulbs, switches and thermostat, The Internet of things is not necessarily a good thing. Not everything should be connected to the Internet. Case in point, smart guns. In case you didn’t know, TrackingPoint makes an smart rifle that almost anyone can use to hit a bullseye up to a mile away. The gun, which sells for $13,000, has a computer screen for a scope where you can enter wind speed, ammunition weight and distance. The computer calculates the correct aim and after you pull the trigger, it waits until you have the shot lined up perfectly before firing the gun.

The Mirror is reporting that a couple of married hackers have hacked the gun wirelessly to shoot 2.5 feet away from the intended target. They also managed to get it to disable the firing pin, making the gun unable to fire.

Android hack

Speaking of hacks, NPR is reporting that the security firm Zimperium says there’s a “gaping hole” in Android that would allow hackers to take over your phone, and all they need is your phone number.

The app Hangouts automatically processes videos when they are received by text message. So, all a hacker has to do is send a video with malware inside it and send it to your phone. Since Hangouts instantly processes the videos, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Google has released a patch and manufacturers have been notified, but we’ll see how long it takes for them to get the update sent out to users.

Fiat Chrysler follow-up

Last week we reported that if you had a Jeep Cherokee with Fiat Chrysler?s ?uConnect? system, hackers could remotely take control of your vehicle and destroy everyone that you hold dear. It turns out that this was a source of some concern to Chrysler Fiat, as they have issued an official recall for 1.4 million vehicles to patch the issue. Affected models include certain Dodge Rams, Dodge Vipers, Dodge Chargers, Dodge Challengers, Chrysler 200s and 300s, and of course Jeep Grand Cherokees, all model year 2013 or later. If you are driving one of those vehicles you should check to see if your specific model is affected. The recall does not actually require the vehicles to be taken to the dealer: affected owners will receive a USB device which can be used to load the patch into their uConnect systems.

Wired – This Gadget Hacks GM Cars to Locate, Unlock, and Start Them

This week Ray, Tom and Sean discuss the train wreck that was Amazon’s Prime Day, the loss of Nintendo’s Saturo Iwata and New Horizon’s historic visit to Pluto.

If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on our website, make sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher. And, while you’re there, leave a review. The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

If you have a response or comment for the show, give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

Make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there. We’re also looking for a new admin to help manage and moderate our subreddit page. Submit a text post to our subreddit explaining why you would make a great admin.

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

New Horizons flies by Pluto

Space has been in the news this week. The spacecraft New Horizons, which launched in 2006, ventured closer to the dwarf planet Pluto than any other man-made object has ever been, 7,800 miles from the surface of Pluto. And the best part is, it took pictures! New Horizons has already sent back a handful of high resolution images of Pluto and its moons and more are expected to follow. New Horizons? journey is not over yet, as it is scheduled to continue on out into the largely unexplored Kuiper Belt.

#PrimeDayFail

Amazon held their much-hyped Prime Day event this week to celebrate their 20th anniversary.

Described as a summertime Black Friday for customers with Amazon Prime accounts, the company promised great deals on hot items all throughout the day on Wednesday. And depending on who you are and what you were looking to buy, this was true.

It was certainly a success for Amazon, who reported that sales were up 80 percent on Prime Day. They also most likely saw a jump in Amazon Prime subscriptions, since you had to be a member to get the deals.

The overwhelming reaction on social media, though, was ?meh.? Disgruntled shoppers quickly took to Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #primedayfail to voice their complaints about what they saw as Amazon?s failure to deliver on all of their hype. Reactions ranged from disappoint with the selection of sale items (some described it as being like a bad garage sale full of weird stuff), underwhelming prices, and frustration over limited quantities for items they actually wanted.

Gizmodo’s List of Prime Day Fails

Nintendo President & CEO Saturo Iwata

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata passed Saturday July 11th at the age of 55 after an almost year-long struggle with cancer.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Iwata-san, early in his career he helped develop or worked on the Mario, Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, Super Smash Bros., Animal Crossing and Kirby series.

Iwata was promoted to president of Nintendo in 2003 and became CEO of Nintendo of America in 2013. Iwata took over Nintendo when it was struggling from poor sales of the GameCube, and brought the highly successful Wii and Nintendo DS to market. He was uniquely the first Nintendo president that was not related to the Yamauchi family since its founding.

Iwata was a very charismatic business leader that reached out to the community. He started an interview series on the Nintendo website called “Iwata Asks” where he discussed games with the developers and gave gamers a behind-the-scene view of the process.

He famously said at the Game Developers Conference in 2005, “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”

There have been tons of memorials to Iwata on the Internet since his passing, one of my favorites was Mashable’s “5 games you can play to honor late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata”

Hacking Team Gets Hacked

Secretive cybersecurity firm Hacking Team has long courted controversy for selling advanced cyber surveillance tools to governments with a less-than-spotless record on human rights. Well, two weeks ago they were hacked. Massively. An unknown hacker going by the pseudonym of Phineas Fisher broke into the company?s systems and dumped over 400 GB of the company?s data, including invoices, code for software, and software exploits it had paid for known as ?zero day exploits?, and posted it using the company?s own Twitter feed. Most controversially, the documents show that Hacking Team was doing business with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and the UAE, many of whom have been criticized by international human rights organizations for their aggressive surveillance of citizens, activists and journalists both domestically and overseas. Even Sudan, with whom Hacking Team had denied connections, was shown to be a recent client. These countries didn?t just use Hacking Team?s software, they often called upon Hacking Team?s specialized services to go after specific ?high value targets?, including journalists.

At this time Hacking Team has officially requested that its clients immediately cease use of all of its tools and software. This is slightly odd as leaked documents show that the company claims to have the ability to shut its own software down remotely.

The Hacking Team dump has also had some consequences for the larger software industry. The company had purchased a number of what are called ?zero-day exploits?, which are unpatched, undiscovered software vulnerabilities that can be used by hackers to infiltrate software or systems. Three major zero-day exploits were discovered for Flash, which Adobe had not known about and has been scrambling to patch. The fact that this company had access to loopholes in such a major, widespread piece of software is reason for concern.

Also, it is just one more reason that everyone should stop using Flash.

Firefox Axes Flash

Speaking of Flash. Computerworld is reporting that partly as a result of these new and really bad vulnerabilities, Mozilla Firefox has taken the unusual step of blocking Flash until it is completely patched. Alex Stamos, the chief of security for Facebook, has called on Adobe to announce an end-of-life date for Flash.

Here’s Ray’s iPhone rebooting thanks to the “effective. Power” bug. Seriously, don’t be that guy.

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.

If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on our website, would you subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher? And, while you’re there, would you leave a review and say a few nice things about us? The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

Make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there. We’re also looking for a new admin to help manage and moderate our subreddit page. Submit a text post to our subreddit explaining why you would make a great admin.

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.

?

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

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This week Microsoft clarified who exactly free Windows 10 upgrades would be free for, Blizzard cracked down on World of Warcraft cheaters, and Apple abandoned plans to make TVs. Plus, Ray, Tom and Sean share websites through sound, discuss driver-less semi-trucks and a whole lot more. That’s this week on Deemable Tech!

If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on our website, would you subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher? And, while you’re there, would you leave a review and say a few nice things about us? The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

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Make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

Microsoft backtracks on free Windows 10 upgrades for pirated copies

In an update to a story we brought you back in March, Microsoft is clarifying their initial offer of free upgrades to Windows 10 to everyone currently running Windows 7 or 8.1, including those with pirated copies.

Almost immediately after Windows chief Tyler Myerson was reported to have said even pirated copies of Windows would get the upgrade, Microsoft began releasing vague clarifications about the upgrade still being free to pirates for a trial period before they would have to pay. Now, Microsoft says there will be no free upgrade – pirates will just have to pay. The company is planning some ?very attractive? offers to those with cracked copies of their operating systems, but no real details have been released.

Over 100,000 World of Warcraft cheaters detected and banned

Activision Blizzard, the company that makes the uber-popular massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft, fights an ongoing battle against cheaters. One of the major forms cheating in the game takes is the use of bots, software tools that automate tedious tasks like leveling up, collecting gold, and improving skills. This week, Blizzard dropped the hammer, banning what was reportedly over 100,000 players using such bots. The bans were not permanent, instead lasting for six months. It is estimated that they affected about 1.7% of World of Warcraft?s user base.

In a statement, Activision Blizzard said “We’ve recently taken action against a large number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as ‘bots’. We?re committed to providing an equal and fair playing field for everyone in World of Warcraft, and will continue to take action against those found in violation of our Terms of Use. Cheating of any form will not be tolerated.”

Apple Has Abandoned Apple TV

Remember those rumors that Apple was going to release an actual TV? Ray is pretty sure he even predicted that we would have already seen it by now in one of our prediction shows. Yeah, well according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Apple was working on a 4K television set about a year ago. And many years ago, they were even considering a laser television set. But, as many research and development projects go, the Apple TV set has gone the way of the Microsoft Courier Tablet and the Palm Folio. It is never going to be released.

Apparently Apple realized that there is no way to make a new TV that isn’t better than all of the other TVs that are already on the market. Because, just like printers, the best TV is a dumb TV. Now if we could only convince the other TV ? and printer manufacturers ? of that, the world would be a better place.

Google experiments with using sound to share URLs with new ?Google Tone? Chrome extension

Google released a cool new experimental extension for their Chrome browser called Tone this week. This add-on lets you share URLs people nearby using SOUND.

To use it, Tone must be installed on at least two computers that are within earshot of each other, and each computer must have their volume turned up. This extension works on all operating systems. Open the tab you want to share, click the small megaphone shaped button on your Chrome toolbar, and your computer will play a series of beeps. A Chrome notification will pop up on the nearby computers with a link.

The extension was apparently developed in a single afternoon, according to Alex Kaufman and Boris Smus at the Google Research blog.

“Tone grew out of the idea that while digital communication methods like email and chat have made it infinitely easier, cheaper and faster to share things with people across the globe, they’ve actually made it more complicated to share things with the people standing right next to you,” Kauffmann and Smus write. “Tone aims to make sharing digital things with nearby people as easy as talking to them.”

Woman sues her employer for installing an app on her phone that tracks her 24/7

A California woman claims to have been fired from the firm Intermex after uninstalling an app on her smartphone which her employer was using to track her movements 24/7, including during her off time. Myrna Arias said she her boss had bragged to her that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she had installed the app on her phone. She was required to keep her phone powered up at all times. She said that when she uninstalled the app she was ‘scolded’. She is now suing Intermex for violating her privacy, wrongful termination, and $500,000.

Apple quietly launches new MacBook Pro, 5K iMac and Lightning Dock

In other Apple news, even Apple understands that not every product launch requires U2 to perform and shove an album down your throat. This week Apple quietly announced a new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. It has the new “Force Touch” trackpad, like it?s 12- and 13- inch MacBook cousins. No surprise it also has more storage, longer battery life and better graphics.

Apple also released a new 27-inch iMac with a Retina 5K display, and reduced the price to $1,999. So, if you like the desktop, and you don?t want to pay a boatload on a Mac Pro, Apple finally has a good option for you.

The best news, was probably the smallest news, Apple finally released a lightning port dock that is compatible with the iPhone 6. So, if you like the nice, uncluttered look for your night stand,  and you have the iPhone 6, now you can go back to your functional minimalistic life.

Nintendo of America hires Bowser

News from Nintendo this week that Bowser, Mario?s mortal enemy (and sometimes go-karting buddy), has gone straight and entered the corporate world.

Oh wait! Sorry… wrong Bowser.

Nintendo of America announced that Doug Bowser has been hired as their new vice president of sales. In a press release, Nintendo said that Bowser shares no relation to the video game character (full name King Bowser Koopa) and ?brings decades of experience, not fire breath, to the new role.?

Bowser formerly worked as an executive at video game maker Electronic Arts. He’ll apparently be relocating for the job, and will of course bring his children Larry, Morton Jr., Wendy O., Iggy, Roy, Lemmy and Ludwig von Koopa with him.

That awkward moment when you search Google maps for the n-word, and it shows you the White House

The Washington Post ran a story this week that searching Google Maps for the phrase ?n-word king? would bring up the White House as the result. It will even zoom the map in automatically! This glitch appears to be the result of user edits submitted through Google Map Maker. Google has suspended map maker indefinitely. Remember kids, algorithms aren?t racist? but the human beings they model? Definitely.

As of press time Google had removed the unfortunate map label.

Self-Driving Trucks Roll Out!

As you may have already heard, Freightliner, manufacturer of semi-truck cabs, is rolling out its first semi-autonomous truck, the shiny and futuristic Freightliner Inspiration. So how autonomous is the Freightliner Inspiration? It still requires a driver, however the vehicle is able to stay in its own lane, keep a safe braking distance from other vehicles, and slow or stop based on traffic conditions. Driver intervention is needed for merging, local roads and docking duties, and the vehicle is programmed to transfer control to the driver if there is a situation that it cannot handle.

In an article for Medium, writer Scott Stanten predicted that the fully self-driving truck could have an outsized impact on small towns. Fully autonomous trucks will have no need for truck stops, which are often a staple of small town economies. Trucks without drivers will have no need for all nite diners, coffee shops, and many other staples of the interstate support system. Of course, autonomous trucks can?t fall asleep behind the wheel, run off the road and kill people.

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If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

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This week Tom brings the joyous news that Nintendoland is coming! Ray wants fast passes to the Mario Kart ride. But none of the guys want to ride on a Boeing 787 after Ray tells the guys that some of the planes are turning off… in mid air. Not good. Oculus finally announces a consumer model of the Oculus Rift. People are breaking/not breaking their Microsoft Surface 3 tablets. Twitter broke MS-DOS games, and Tesla just brought the future one step closer to today. All that on this week’s episode.

But first, could we ask a favor of you? If you’re listening to Deemable Tech on our website, would you subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher? And, while you’re there, would you leave a review and say a few nice things about us? The more subscribers we have and reviews we get, the more people will find our show.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

Make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

Nintendo Theme Park

Who is up for Mario Kart in real life? Nintendo announced during an earnings call this week that it is partnering with Universal Parks and Resorts which runs the Universal Studios theme parks to create Nintendo-themed rides and attractions. Nintendo has not announced specific details on which of its properties it would adapt, but it seems like a safe bet that it will leverage long lasting and popular characters and games like Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong. In fact, Universal executive Tom Schroder said pretty much exactly that in a press release: “The immersive experiences will include major attractions at Universal?s theme parks and will feature Nintendo?s most famous characters and games.”

Have you tried turning your plane off and on again?

The FAA sent out a warning on May 1st that Boeing 787s may have some computer problems that could cause your terrible, terrible death. Mashable reports that the administration discovered the computers in 787s have a “software counter” that periodically shuts down all electrical systems, which results in “loss of control of the airplane.” Now, I’m not an aviation expert, but I think that is a bad thing. Am I right in assuming that guys?

Boeing is working out a software update that will eliminate the problem, but until then, they have issued a work around. If you work in the IT industry or have ever worked technical support you are probably familiar with it:

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Yes folks, it’s the I.T. Crowd fix.

Call Roy and Moss or your plane will crash to the ground.

Oculus announces “Q1 2016” release for Rift

In other news that is sure to have gamers everywhere jumping for joy, Oculus announced this week that the first commercial release of their hotly anticipated virtual reality headset the Oculus Rift will be in early 2016.

The company also released promotional images of the sleek final consumer product after several years of prototypes.

Oculus first made a splash at the E3 gaming expo in 2012, followed by a very successful Kickstarter campaign. They also kicked off a virtual reality race, with other big companies like Sony and Valve and HTC working on releasing their own VR products.

How low can you go?

One of the most interesting tablets to come out, other than the iPad, has definitely been the Microsoft Surface. Sure, it’s had its share of troubles. It came out with Windows RT, which was this weird, stripped down version of Windows. It had two interfaces, the desktop and the “tablet” UI which really confused people. But, it was an incredible design that really changed the market, making it a serious contender for a laptop replacement. One of its signature features was the coveted kickstand that can hold the tablet in one of three positions. Well, now the Verge is reporting that Redditors have discovered a secret fourth position for the Surface 3 kickstand. Apparently, if you keep pressing the kickstand back after the third position it will break away and fold all the way back.

Microsoft said in a statement that the kickstand “contains a safety mechanism unique to Surface 3 to help protect the device, but the mechanism is not designed for use as a fourth kickstand position.”

So it might work once, twice or maybe even a few times, but it’s probably going to ruin your Surface 3.

The lesson here is, don’t play too rough with your toys. Just like a Slinky, once you bend it out of shape, you can’t bend it back, no matter what happened in Toy Story.

MS-DOS games on Twitter update

Last week we told you how you can embed and play classic MS-DOS games in tweets. Sadly, it looks like Twitter has put a stop to that.

It was discovered last week that Twitter users could embed these games from the Internet Archive?s site into tweets using Twitter?s Cards widget (that?s the system that allows videos, images and other media to be displayed in-line in the Twitter stream). But it turns out that embedding interactive media, specifically games, is against the terms of service for Twitter Cards.

You can, however, still play the MS-DOS games at the Internet Archive?s site, archive.org.

Powerwall

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the maker of powerful electric sports cars recently announced that his company will begin manufacturing batteries for homes. This week Elon Musk announced that demand for their ?Powerwall? batteries was ?crazy off the hook?. He said they have received over 38,000 reservations, a level of demand which could take them up to a year to fulfill. Orders included over 2,500 from companies for their commercial-ready Powerpack.

The Powerwall batteries are designed for a 24-hour charge-and-discharge cycle, which would be ideal in combination with a solar power system that could charge them during the day letting them run the house at night. The batteries are designed to be mounted on the wall and a 7kWh unit starts at $3,000.

Note from Ray: The Powerwall is apparently not nearly as bad as the Power Glove.

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there

Anyone who’s ever owned an iPod knows that stainless steel scratches.

This week, Google launched a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO). The new phone service uses Sprint, T0Mobile and Wi-Fi, but it only has one phone, the Nexus 6. There’s a few Apple Watch ‘scandals’ ramping up: tattoo-gate, scratch-gate and tap-gate. Microsoft has a new “edge”ier web browser, a man shoots up his Dell and the robots are coming to steal your car.

If you haven?t subscribed to Deemable Tech yet, get on it! Subscribe to Deemable Tech in iTunes, on Stitcheror subscribe to the show in another podcast reader. Make sure to leave a review on iTunes and Stitcher. The more reviews posted, the higher Deemable Tech will be listed, and the more listeners will see the show.

And make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

You can now embed playable MS-DOS games inside tweets

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive added roughly 2,400 MS-DOS games to their digital archive that are playable through your web browser on their site, Archive.org. But if you?re too scared to leave Twitter to check this out, never fear. The folks at Wired discovered this week that you can embed the games inside of tweets and play them right from those tweets.

So, you can now get your Oregon Trail, Sim City or Wolfenstein 3D fix from Twitter. Or, you can try out other classic games like the adaptation of the 1991 Hulk Hogan cinematic masterpiece Suburban Commando (just kidding, you should never do that).

Google announces cellular data network, which is actually two networks.

Google has officially announced its long-rumored cellular data network: its name is ProjectFi. As anticipated it is an MVNO network, which means that Google is ?renting? time on someone else?s network like many other small cellular companies. The differences is that Google is renting not from one other network, but two: Sprint & T-mobile, as well as WiFi. When you are on a ProjectFi connection your phone will seamlessly switch to whichever one of those networks is strongest. ProjectFi?s offers a very straightforward billing structure which will be appealing to some. It also will let you ?bank? unused minutes each month. And it offers promises of more innovations to come. The catch? Right now it is only offered for a single phone: the Nexus 6, and there is no LTE high speed service.

Robot car movers

The robots are coming to steal your car, or just move it out of the way. Gizmodo shared a story that researchers in Europe have created AVERT, the Autonomous Vehicle Emergency Recovery Tool. It is a system of robots that look like something out of Battle Bots. They are flat pieces of steel with rotors on the ends of them. Eight of them work together to pick up your cars tires and wheel it away. They only lift the car about an inch off the ground, but that’s all they need to move it out of the way. The idea is that the robots can easily move a car parked in a tight spot if there is a bomb in a nearby car. They could also be used to move an illegally parked car or a car that is blocking emergency services. Or, when the robots become sentient, they will likely start a car robbing career.

Man puts 8 bullets in his Dell desktop, tells police it was worth the ticket.

Police say that at 7 PM on a Monday, Lucas Hinch, the owner of a homeopathic herb store in Colorado Springs, Colorado, took his Dell XPS 410 out into an alley behind the store and unloaded eight bullets into it with a 9mm pistol. Hinch was ticketed for discharging a gun within city limits.

Lynch told the Los Angeles Times, which interviewed him, that the machine kept giving him the blue screen of death and that he had ?had enough.? He said that the shooting was ?definitely premeditated? and that he had no regrets. He reportedly told officers he did not know he was breaking the law in discharging his weapon.

Microsoft unveils Edge browser

During the opening keynote of their Microsoft Build developers conference this week, Microsoft unveiled the successor to their Internet Explorer browser (which they recently announced was ending).

The new browser, now called Edge (formerly Project Spartan), is said to be faster and more modern and will be a universal app across all Windows devices. Features will include, among others, extensions like you find for Chrome and Firefox, integration of Microsoft?s Cortana virtual assistant to help you search for things, reading mode (which removes everything from a page except for the text), and an annotation tool (which lets you draw on a webpage, take a picture of it and share that picture).

The new browser will not be in the initial release of Windows 10 this year, but will be included in a later update. Windows 10 will be shipped with Internet Explorer 11 for legacy compatibility, so you will have one last chance to use everyone?s favorite browser before it goes softly into that good night.

Tired of remember your passwords? Try swallowing them instead?

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Paypal?s global head of developer advocacy, Jonathan Leblanc, said that passwords might soon be available as ?embeddable, injectable and ingestible devices.? Mr. Leblanc said that in the near future thin silicon chips might be embedded under our skin or capsules might detect glucose levels to verify that someone is who they say they are.

The Wall Street Journal notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

Google files patent for laptop with no spacebar.

Google already kicked the CAPS-LOCK key to the curb with its Chromebooks and now it appears it may be preparing to do the same thing to the spacebar. In a patent filed this week the company outlines a design where the spacebar is replaced by an extended trackpad. Sensors would determine whether the user wants the top of the trackpad to be treated as a spacebar or a mouse. Google told Quartz, who broke the story, that some patents get turned into products and some don?t, so only time will tell whether we will see a spacebar-free Chromebook.

Apple Watch – Tattoo-gate

Reports are coming in on Twitter and Reddit that people with tattoos on their wrists may have difficulty using their new Apple watches. iMore.com looked into it and confirmed the reports. The heart sensor detects pulse by flashing an LED light on your skin and senses the reflection. The problem is when you have a tattoo the reflection is distorted by the ink. Your mileage may vary, but for some folks it is really annoying. The Apple Watch uses the heart sensor to detect if you are wearing the watch, so when it doesn’t sense your heart rate, it forces you to re-enter your pin number.

Apple Watch – Scratch-gate

If you don’t like scratches, you probably shouldn’t get the stainless steel Apple watch. A lot of folks are reporting on social media that their steel Apple watches are already scratched up. 9to5Mac.com has an easy fix. Just buff it, like every other stainless steel watch in existence. Or, get the aluminum model, which is actually harder than the steel version.

Apple Watch – Tap-gate

Now for the first, actual, real problem with the Apple watch. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has found a major defect in the taptic engine in the watches. The taptic engine is the feature that causes the watch to vibrate or tap the wearer. It was a pretty groundbreaking feature because it models sounds so a tweet “feels” like a tweet, and a tap feels like a tap. Two companies built the taptic engines, but one of the suppliers has produced faulty engines. The Verge says that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber received an Apple Watch that had a taptic engine that didn’t work.

OUTRO

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback@deemable.com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there

I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, I’m Sean Birch and this is Deemable Tech. Thanks for listening.

This week, Comcast can’t keep itself out of the news. First, Comcast announces that it is bringing the fastest Interwebs in the country to Jacksonville (WOOT!) and other cities in Florida. Then, the FCC and the Justice Department rain on Comcast’s parade and lets it know they are not going to let it merge with Time Warner Cable. In other news, a paranoid dad flew a drone to school with his daughter, and two guys took the iPhone/Android fight way too far.

The Deemable Tech Podcast is brought to you by A Small Orange, Homegrown Hosting. A refreshingly different approach to web hosting. On the web at asmallorange.com.

If you haven?t subscribed to Deemable Tech yet, get on it! Subscribe to Deemable Tech in iTunes, on Stitcheror subscribe to the show in another podcast reader. Make sure to leave a review on iTunes and Stitcher. The more reviews posted, the higher Deemable Tech will be listed, and the more listeners will see the show.

And make sure to share Deemable Tech on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

Comcast Gigabit Pro

People in Jacksonville and some other towns in Florida are going to be pretty excited next month. In a story Jessica Palombo contributed to Deemable.com, Comcast is bringing the fastest fiber optic Internet service in the country to a few cities in Florida, including our own fair town. The service, which is called Gigabit Pro, will actually have 2 Gbps download and upload speeds ? more than twice the speed of Google Fiber.

However, Comcast would not give a price for the new service. The next fastest service from Comcast is Extreme 505, which runs up to 505 Mbps up and down, and costs over $400 a month with taxes and fees.

Comcast Drops Its Bid to Merge With Time Warner Cable

Speaking of Comcast, earlier this week it was looking pretty  looked bad for its merger with Time Warner Cable. According to Bloomberg, the Justice Department’s antitrust department was going to recommend blocking the merger. And, the FCC was not negotiating the terms of the deal with Comcast, which made it look even less likely that it was going to go through.

But now, ?people with knowledge of the matter? have told Bloomberg that Comcast is backing out of the merger. There was supposed to be a board meeting Thursday. And an official  announcement will probably come Friday.

As the Verge pointed out in an editorial, throughout this whole process, Comcast has never answered this simple question: Why not compete?

Verizon to offer custom pay TV packages, let customers choose monthly programming bundles

And while we?re on the subject of Internet and TV providers, in move that is one small step closer to a la carte cable TV, Verizon recently announced that they are rolling out a new pay TV service that will let customers choose from channel bundles that they change monthly.

These Verizon FiOS ?Custom TV? packages will start at 65 dollars a month for broadband service, 36 fixed basic cable channels, and two genre-based channel packs that customers can swap or unsubscribe from after a month. You can also add packs for an extra 10 dollars. Verizon has seven of these packs to choose from, including sports and children?s programming.

Verizon says they are going after customers who want something in between giant, fully loaded cable packages and cheaper basic packages offered by their competitors.

After “Drone Dad” follows his daughter to school, DJI Phantom 2 grounded

Tennessee father Chris Early?s daughter decided she wanted to walk to the school bus by herself so he did what any tech-inclined father would do: he followed her with a drone.

The drone was a model known as a DJI Phantom 2 which has a high def video camera mounted on it. Early followed his daughter with the drone. A local news station caught wind of this and the story went nationwide. Chris Early has been called ?overprotective?, ?the world?s most embarrassing father? and ‘drone dad’. As a result of all the attention he says he has grounded the drone for now.

One World Trade Center Elevator Shows 515 Years Of New York City

One World Trade Center has added an elevator that displays 515 years of New York City history in 50 seconds.

The New York Times covered this story, but I wrote an article about it for Deemable.com.

While they haven?t developed time travel, the engineers and designers behind the elevators that takes guests to the observatory at the very top of One World Trade Center in New York City have come pretty close. When you board the elevators, you will see a panoramic view of New York City rising out of the underground in the 1500s all the way up through time to the 102nd floor today.

The elevator uses nine 75-inch screens to create the illusion that it is a glass-walled elevator traveling through time.

Along the way, you’ll see the arrival of the Europeans, the Revolution and the rise of the skyscrapers. Inevitably, as time travels through the late-1900s, one of the Twin Towers enters your sight and just as quickly fades away as the 2000s begin. It is a touching, beautiful memorial to the history of the site. You can see The New York Times video of the elevator on our website at Deemable.com

YouTube celebrates 10 year anniversary

This week marks the 10 year anniversary of the first video being uploaded to YouTube.

On April 23 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted a 19 second clip of elephants at the zoo titled “Me at the zoo.”  In it, Karim discusses the elephants’ “really, really, really long trunks” and, well, that’s all. Pretty tame compared to what you can find on YouTube today.

About a year after this video was posted, Google acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion.

According to reports, YouTube will mark the anniversary with a month-long celebration starting next week.

Skycure Hack Can Use Wifi To Disable iOS Devices

A research firm called Skycure reported that it has developed a hack based around a bug in iOS that could allow it to disable all nearby iOS devices using a wifi router. The wifi router has to be configured in a specific way. It will then cause any device connected to it to keep crashing and rebooting in an endless loop. It can be combined with another hack that forces iOS devices to connect to that network. Essentially the only way to escape the endless cycle of rebooting would be to get out of range of the router.

Skycure has not publicly released technical specifications for the bug it used to create the hack to give Apple time to patch it.

Argument Over Which Smartphone Is Better Turns Deadly

Police in Tulsa, OK apprehended a man staggering around a parking lot late at night cut up and covered in blood. The man reported to them that he had been in a fight with his roommate over which smartphone was better – the iPhone or the new Samsung Galaxy. iPhone versus Android fights can get heated, but most stop short of physical conflict. The man reported that he and his roommate had been drinking and wound up stabbing each other with broken beer bottles. Both were admitted to the hospital and are expected to make a full recovery. No word on whether either man was arrested or whether either had his mind changed about his preferred choice of phone.

How many tabs does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?

Redditor Peanut Butter Shudder suggested an answer to Ray’s question. Last week during Shower Thoughts, Ray said he didn’t know how many tabs he had ever opened in his life. Peanut Butter Shudder mentioned Tab for a Cause on our reddit page (reddit.com/r/deemable) Tab for a Cause apparently tracks how many tabs you open and it has a bit of slacktivism built into it. If you install the browser extension, you’ll raise money for charities simply by browsing the internet. Heck, why not?

Who had the best segue?

Vote! Send us an email to feedback at deemable dot com or leave us a voicemail at 1-888-972-9868.

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Photo credit: iPhone vs Android by nrkbeta.no is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.

While they haven’t developed time travel, the engineers and designers behind the elevators that takes guests to the observatory at the very top of One World Trade Center in New York City have come pretty close. When you board the elevators, you will see a panoramic view of New York City rising out of the underground in the 1500s all the way up through time to the 102nd floor today.

The elevator uses nine 75-inch screens to create the illusion that it is a glass-walled elevator traveling through time.

Along the way, you’ll see the arrival of the Europeans, the Revolution and the rise of the skyscrapers. Inevitably, as time travels through the late-1900s, one of the Twin Towers enters your sight and just as quickly fades away as the 2000s begin. It is a touching, beautiful memorial to the history of the site.

Via New York Times, HT to Sploid. 

Hey folks! We are not doing a normal podcast this week because of One Spark. Fortunately, there wasn’t much news in the tech world this week anyway. Basically everyone is sitting on their hands waiting for the Apple Watch to come out. But, if you have a Mac or an iOS device, Ray does have some news for you that you’ll want to hear, especially if you have an iPhone on Sprint. Enjoy this incredibly short, “all Ray” episode of Deemable Tech.

This week the guys are elated about the death of Internet Explorer, the low, low price of free to upgrade to Windows 10, (even if you never paid for Windows 7 or 8) and Mario, Zelda and the gang are finally coming to mobile phones, but not the way you want them to.

If you haven’t subscribed to Deemable Tech yet, get on it! Subscribe to Deemable Tech in iTunes, on Stitcher or subscribe to the show in another podcast reader. Make sure to leave us a review in iTunes and Stitcher. The more reviews we have the higher we’ll be listed, and the more listeners will see our show.

And make sure to share us on the forums, Facebook, Twitter and all over the interwebs.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

This Week’s Run Down

Windows 10 is free for everybody!

So, you may have heard of the latest version of Windows that Microsoft is working on releasing later this summer. If you haven’t, it’s called Windows 10. If you’re wondering why it’s called Windows 10 instead of… you know… Windows 9, it’s because of a little coding shortcut where programmers referred to Windows 95 and Windows 98 as – you guessed it – “Windows 9.”

Well, it turns out that Windows 10 is going to be FREE for everyone, well almost everyone.

Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s Windows chief to Reuters “We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10”

So that means, as long as you have a computer running Windows 7 or Window 8 or 8.1 you can install 10 on your computer, at no charge, even if you stole the version that’s on your computer right now.

The Death of Internet Explorer

Microsoft confirmed this week that Internet Explorer will not be the primary web browser in Windows 10. Yes, the venerable Internet Explorer, which has been a part of Windows since Windows 95, is being put out to pasture. It will still ship with the next version of Microsoft’s operating system for backwards compatibility reasons, but a new browser with the codename Project Spartan will be Microsoft’s flagship browser. Project Spartan’s real name has not been released yet but Microsoft says that it will not use the Internet Explorer branding.

Nintendo to develop mobile games

After years of speculation, Nintendo is moving into the mobile game market. They announced this week that they have partnered with Japanese mobile game giant DeNA to “develop and operate new game apps based on Nintendo’s intellectual property, including its iconic game characters, for smart devices.”

They were quick to point out that their primary focus will still be their game consoles like the Wii U and 3DS, and that these new mobile apps are intended to complement, not replace, those systems. In the same announcement, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that a new console codenamed NX is development.

Unfortunately for those of us hoping this means we’ll be able to play classic Mario or Zelda games on our devices, Iwata also said that Nintendo’s plans do not include direct ports of console games. He cited differences between dedicated controllers and touchscreens as the reason.

—-

If you have a comment, contact us at feedback at deemable.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-888-972-9868.

Help us decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story. Or vote other stories up or down. reddit.com/r/Deemable

Photo Credit: Internet Explorer, a web developers menace by Jorgen Kesseler is used under CC BY-SA 2.0.

What happens when you realize you skipped an episode number? Just keep on rollin. This week on Deemable Tech we are talking about… the Apple big announcement. Apple finally announced all the details on the Apple Watch. Apple also announced a new MacBook, ResearchKit and HBO Now.

An incoming call notification on the Apple Watch Edition. Image credit: Apple

This Week’s Run Down

Macbook

Apple announced a new laptop, called…the MacBook.

It’s thinner than the MacBook Air, but it is also less powerful than the MacBook Air and has less battery life than the MacBook Air, and it’s more expensive than the MacBook Air. So, it’s basically, just like the MacBook Air was to the original MacBook when the MacBook Air came out.

It has a 480p FaceTime Camera, but it does have a retina display though, which gives it an advantage over the MacBook Air.

The craziest part is that, except for the headphone jack, the new MacBook only has one port, USB-C. Everything goes through the USB-C port – power, display, thumb drives, accessories, everything. To do almost anything you will have to buy an adapter, which costs $79 a piece.

As a result a lot of people will not be buying this laptop, especially DJs.

The new MacBook is available in silver, Space Grey and… gold, for some reason.

The new MacBook has a new trackpad called a “Force Touch” trackpad. It does not have a physical button, but it is pressure sensitive, and gives haptic feedback when you click it. The Force Touch trackpad opens up new ways to interact with the computer such as “Gradually add pressure to the trackpad to vary the speed with which you fast-forward through a QuickTime movie or zoom in on a location in Maps.”

Apple TV – HBO Now

Apple also announced a partnership with HBO to bring unbundled HBO to cable-cutters. For $14.99 a month you can watch Game of Thrones without a cable subscription, but only on an iOS device. HBO Now is available on iPhone, iPad and the Apple TV.

ResearchKit

In one of the most surprising announcements, Apple revealed ResearchKit. ResearchKit is an open source software development kit that medical researchers can use to easily create apps for studies. The idea is that these apps will utilize the sensors in iPhones to “track movement, take measurements and record information – functions that are perfect for medical studies.” iPhone owners would be able to download these apps to participate in research and provide information regardless of where they are. Since iPhones are the most widely used smartphones, it is hoped that this will lead to larger sample sizes and more frequent data, thus creating a truer representation of the population.

Apple Watch

Preorders started on the 10th.

The watch will go on sale for reals on April 24th.

Three Versions

There are a whole bunch of combinations of watch bands and cases. Way too many to describe them all. If I did, I am pretty sure Tom would kill me.

Apple Watch Sport

• Aluminum Silver or Aluminum Space Gray Case
• Fluoroelastomer watch band
• $349 and $399

Apple Watch

• Stainless Steel Case or Stainless Steel Space Gray Case
• Fluoroelastomer ($549/$599), Classic Leather Buckle ($649/$699), Modern Leather Buckle (38mm $749), Leather Loop (Smartcase-esque – 42mm $699), Milanese Loop ($649/$699), Steel Link Bracelet ($949/$999), Space Black Steel Link ($1,049/$1,099)
• $549 up to $1099

Apple Watch Edition

• 18K Gold
• Priced from “Geez Louise” to “Hoo boy!”
  • Otherwise known as $10,000 to $17,000

Mashable – My Apple Watch Nightmare

Ray Hollister reviews the BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer on Deemable Tech

This week Ray, Tom and Sean talk about how Hilary Clinton used her personal email address the entire time she worked at the State Department. They discussed the announcement of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, (which included the announcement of SamsungPay which is the implementation of LoopPay into the Samsung phones which Ray insisted two weeks ago would not happen!) They also talked about the death of Google+ and Google starting its own wireless carrier. Then, Ray shared his review of the BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer. If you’re just here for the video, make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom.

#74 Ray Likes His Crow Breaded With A Light, Crispy Panko Crust

RUN DOWN

Samsung Galaxy S6 & S6 Edge

This week was the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain and Samsung used the opportunity to take the wraps off the next iteration of its flagship phone, the Samsung Galaxy S6? and the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. That?s right, the S6 will come in two formats – a standard rectangular shape and a more curvy version with a display that wraps around the edge and which can display alerts by lighting up.

Regardless of what you think about Samsung?s latest gimmick, both phones are aimed squarely at the premium smartphone market. Samsung has ditched the removable plastic cases of previous Galaxy S?s for a phone that is completely encased in aluminum and Gorilla Glass, similar to the iPhone. The phone boasts an almost ridiculous Quad HD (2560 x 1440) Super AMOLED. Why would anyone need that kind of resolution on a 5.1 inch screen? Virtual Reality! You can strap your S6 into the latest version of Samsung?s Gear VR for a super-high-res virtual reality experience. Since the screen will be literally centimeters from your face, it has to look good.

Not all of Samsung?s longtime users are excited about the S6. The premium case materials means that the newest Galaxy phones no longer allow for a removable battery or an expandable SD memory card, two longstanding features of the Galaxy line.

Samsung Pay, formerly known as Loop Pay, with its magnetic card swiping technology, is built right into the phone.

Google announced that Google+, its one-time ambitious attempt to take on Facebook and Twitter, is going under the knife.

Google+ Divests

The Verge is reporting that the Google+ social network is getting split up into Streams, Photos and Hangouts. It is also getting a new lead: Bradley Horowitz, a long time VP, is taking over from David Besbris. Besbris had held his position less than a year after Vic Gundotra was let go with little fanfare.

Google+ was originally pitched to be Google?s answer to rivals like Facebook and Twitter. In 2012 it took the controversial step of forcibly assigning every Google user across all of its services a Google+ account. Despite this, Google+ never reached the critical mass of user activity needed to take on the big guys. Google has since backed away from their one-size-fits-all approach.

Google execs are now calling the social network side of the product ?Streams? and considering them to be separate from Photos, home of the ridiculous Auto-Awesome feature, and Hangouts, Google?s free and easy-to-use chat and videoconferencing system.

How to Auto-Awesome your photos manually – AndroidCentral.

While Google has not officially announced the death of ?Streams? as a product, some experts are predicting it could be on the chopping block soon.

Google Wireless

According to Mashable, Google?s latest crazy plan is to become a wireless carrier.

Google revealed this week at Mobile World Congress that it plans to get into the wireless carrier business, offering mobile voice and data service to customers. Google says that it will do this on a small scale, buying wholesale access from Sprint and T-Mobile?s networks and selling them to customers. Google says it wants to ?push the needle? when it comes to features offered to mobile customers, for instance allowing users to seamlessly transition between wifi and cellular connections.

Google was careful to emphasize that it does not intend to compete with AT&T and Verizon and that they have been informed of its plans.

BIG STORY

Hillary Clinton used a personal email account the entire time she was US Secretary of State

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/us/politics/hillary-clintons-use-of-private-email-at-state-department-raises-flags.html

Clinton apparently set up an email account one week prior to President Obama’s inauguration, and she did not use an official @state.gov email address.

For comparison, according to NBC News, Former secretary of State Condelezza Rice did not use personal email while she was in office, but she rarely used email at all. Clinton aides have also said that, Colin Powell did regularly use a personal e-mail account while Secretary of State.

A Powell aide confirmed that information, saying, “General Powell used a personal email account during his tenure as Secretary of State. He was not aware of any restrictions nor does he recall being made aware of any over the four years he served at State.”

According to the Washington Post, “Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have operated in violation of what the White House said Tuesday was ?very specific guidance? that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business.”

Hillary Clinton said on Twitter :

I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.

? Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 5, 2015

REVIEWS

BACtrack MobileBreathalyzer Review

Last year Ray received the BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer, which, unsurprisingly, tracks your BAC or your blood alcohol content. In other words, it’s a mobile Breathalyzer.

It is a really great product. (Disclaimer, BACtrack did provide a sample unit for review.) The BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer connects with your Smartphone via Bluetooth.

It’s pretty comfortable to hold in your hand, and it is very easy to use. You just turn it on, open the BACtrack app and pair it with your phone via bluetooth and follow the on screen instructions.

It keeps track of your blood alcohol level over time while you are drinking, and it calculates how long it will take for you to be sober. In addition to a number calculation of your BAC, it give you an idea of where you should be feeling. It will say things like “You are experiencing slight alcohol intoxication.”

The strangest feature of the device is that it let’s you post your blood alcohol level on social media. I personally never use that feature, but I can definitely see it going horribly, horribly wrong. I can only imagine the legal implications but it could possibly have too. But, it would help to explain all of those wacky drunk pictures.

If you are a frequent drinker, this breathalyzer has a great feature that will let you track when and where you drank. You can choose what you share otherwise it always stays private.

The BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer cost $99 now. It was $149 when I reviewed it. I feel like it was worth $149, but I think that $99 is the perfect price point for the features it has.

Now, there are other breathalyzers that BACtrack makes that are cheaper. They have a model that uses a different sensor that only costs $49, and they have keychain models that do not connect to your smartphone that are $29.

Personally, I like the model that uses the same technology that the police use to check blood alcohol level, because if I am trusting something to check if I am below the legal limit or not, I want to be absolutely certain it is right!

That being said, this is in no way an endorsement to drive while intoxicated. It’s never safe to drink under the influence of alcohol, and you can be arrested for DUI even if you’re under the legal limit.

The thing that surprised me most about using the backtrack mobile breathalyzer was that I am apparently a cheap date. I was drunk long before the device said I was a legally drunk. Or, at least I felt like I was drunk.

It was crazy to me that at .02, I felt that I could not drive a car, but I was still legal to drive.

Check out the video of the review below:

UNCUT!

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler pushed FCC to vote 3-2 in favor of Net Neutrality.

This week Ray, Tom and Sean talk about how the FCC has finally decided to step up to the plate and defend Net Neutrality, and the rest of the big stories in the tech world. Reddit is finally banning stolen pornography. Apple is holding a super secret press event in March. (SPOILER: It’s the Apple Watch announcement.) Pebble is Kickstarting another smartwatch. Three patients voluntarily had their arms amputated to receive bionic prosthetics. Google bought mobile payment company Softcard. And, we are one step closer to Skynet becoming self-aware, an artificial intelligence played 49 Atari games without instructions, beating the records of human players in 29 of the games.

Thank you to our Redditors who have been helping us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. Deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

Deemable Tech Episode #73 Freedom Is Just A Four-Letter Word

Subscribe to Deemable Tech in iTunes, on Stitcher or subscribe to the show in another podcast reader. Make sure to leave us a review in iTunes and Stitcher. The more reviews we have the higher we?ll be listed, and the more listeners will see our show.

This Week’s Run Down

Reddit bans revenge porn.

Gizmodo reports that Reddit ? has outlawed porn. Wait, no. Reddit has prohibited unwanted porn. No, that’s not right either. Reddit has banned involuntary pornography. Reddit announced that that it is no longer allowing pictures or videos to be posted to the site without the permission of the subjects.

In a statement on its website reddit said:

No matter who you are, if a photograph, video, or digital image of you in a state of nudity, sexual excitement, or engaged in any act of sexual conduct, is posted or linked to on reddit without your permission, it is prohibited on reddit.

To take the photos or videos down however, you will have to report the offense to reddit. This change in policy is considered to be a direct response to the incident known as “The Fappening,” where a cache of leaked celebrity nudes was leaked online and posted to reddit.

Apple’s Not Super-Secret Press Event

The Verge is reporting that Apple sent out press invitations to a super secret event on March 9th. No one has any idea what it is about. Nah, just kidding, it’s the Apple Watch announcement. The tagline is even “Spring Forward,” an obvious time reference.

At the event, we are almost certain to find out what features actually ended up in the watch ? that will likely only run for 4 hours before the battery dies. The Verge is saying that there have been rumors of a new Macbook air and there may be an update on Beats Music.

Pebble Get Another Kickstart

Speaking of watches, Pebble has decided to rock the crowdfunding universe again. Pebble announced Tuesday it was launching another smartwatch. This one, dubbed the Pebble Time, has a color e-ink display, a microphone for dictation and voice activation, and it’s thinner than the original Pebble and more contoured to fit the wrist.

The microphone only works with Android actions right now, but Pebble is working on getting it to work with iOS soon.

Three Men Undergo Voluntary Amputations To Receive Bionic Arms

Gizmodo is reporting that three men with irreparable nerve damage have had their arms amputated and replaced with prosthetics controlled directly through their nervous systems. The procedure was performed by Oskar Aszmann at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria.

The prosthetic is powered and controlled by a small piece of healthy leg muscle that has been grafted into the patients? arm.

What is perhaps most notable is that the three patients all volunteered to have their arms amputated to undergo this procedure. While their whole arms were previously useless due to the nerve damage, they were intact.

Google Buys Mobile Payment Competitor Softcard

PachydermMcGurts submitted this next story on our sub-reddit page.

Google looks like it is doubling-down on mobile payments. According to a report from DigitalTrends.com, Google has purchased competitor Softcard. On February 23rd Google made the announcement that it had bought the wallet app company Softcard which was formerly named Isis, just like the terrorist group.

Isis started in 2009 as a joint effort by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to get a foothold in the mobile payments industry. Unfortunately, in 2011, the terrorist group then known as the Islamic State in Iraq began fighting in Syria, and started being referred to as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS for short. The group apparently now just want to be called the Islamic State, but it was called ISIS long enough in the media to completely destroy the value, if it had any, of the company’s name.

Isis, the digital wallet app company, announced in September 2014 that it was changing its name to Softcard.

Google bought Softcard and work out a deal with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, that all new Android phones will have Google Wallet pre-installed on them.

In a very ?Google? way, instead of consolidating the two services into one service. it’s going to keep the two services separate, and wait for this, add a new service.

Rumor has it that Google is going to announce Android Pay at the Google I/O next conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKdvnhBFvXY

Artificial Intelligence Masters Atari Games

DeepMind Technologies, a tech startup that Google purchased last year, is working on artificial intelligence that will develop human-like problem solving skills. To do so, they needed to put it through exercises that have simple rules and clear standards for failure, yet still present a challenge for most people. They decided that old Atari 2600 games were perfect for this.

DeepMind made the AI play through 49 different Atari 2600 games without giving it instructions for how the various games were played. When it completed the games correctly and got a high score, the AI was rewarded. It eventually beat previous AI records for 43 of the games, and even exceeded the skills of master human players for 29 of them.

A DeepMind Vice President told Bloomberg that this represents “the first time anyone has built a single learning system that learns directly from experience and manage a wide range of challenging tasks,” and that their ultimate goal will be to use this for smart, general purpose tools.

THE BIG STORY

FCC Defends Net Neutrality

The Verge put together a great aggregation of reactions to Net Neutrality from around the net. It’s no surprise, the ISPs are NOT happy.

The FCC voted today, 3-2, to classify broadband internet as a public utility under Title II. This means that, for now at least, the FCC has the ability to regulate broadband internet and enforce net neutrality.

Verizon and Comcast released statements stating that they were disappointed with the ruling, while AT&T issued a more ominous statement hinting that the FCC might be overruled by congress or the courts.

Some Republican lawmakers have threatened legislative action to overrule the FCC. The FCC vote did fall along party lines, with the three Democrat board members voting for net neutrality and the two Republicans voting against.

Tech companies were almost uniformly ecstatic, with Netflix, Kickstarter, Microsoft and Tumblr all chiming in.

At the heart of the new classification are rules banning the blocking or throttling of traffic, as well as paid prioritization, and a requirement that ISPs disclose network management practices.

—–

Next week we are going to be tossing in some app and gadget reviews like we’ve been promising. If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback at deemable.com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there.

Photo credit: “Tom Wheeler – Caricature” by DonkeyHotey is used under CC BY 2.0.

Ellen writes, How do I download videos from my iPhone to my PC? When I try to email them to myself it shrinks the video. I’ve been told to just connect my phone to my computer and download them that way, but how?

Here’s what you need to do Ellen. Fire up your computer, grab the charging cable for your iPhone and plug one end into your iPhone and the other end into your computer. Only one end will fit the iPhone, and the other end is the obvious end you’ll plug into the PC.

With this easy to follow guide, you too can plug your iPhone into your computer.

If this is the first time you have plugged your iPhone into your computer, you’ll see a pop up indicating that the software for the device is being installed.

Without the device driver software, the two pieces of hardware cannot communicate.

Right after you plug in your iPhone, (or after the driver software is done installing) you’ll get a notification on your phone that asks if you should trust this computer. Tap Trust.

Trust is an important part of any relationship, especially the one between a smartphone and a computer.

You may see a similar window appear on your computer. Click Continue.

Trust is a two-way street.

Then, if you’re using a Windows PC, you should get a pop up window on the computer that basically is asking “What do you want to do with this?” It will literally say “AutoPlay” and give you options to choose from. Click “Import Pictures and Videos.”

So, uh, what do you wanna do with this here thing, eh?

All of your pictures and videos will be selected. You can make changes to how and where they are imported by clicking Import Settings.

Import pictures and videos? That sounds exactly like what I wanted to do!

On the Import Settings Menu, you can choose to send the images and videos to different folders, change the file name of the photos and videos, and other options. Click OK to keep your changes.

Lots of choices. Where do you want what to go? Don’t feel like making choices? Afraid of succumbing to analysis paralysis? Just click Cancel, and get out of there.

Once you’ve chosen which videos and pictures you want to import, then click Import. Your images and videos will begin to transfer to your computer. Depending on how many pictures you have, this may happen quickly, or it may take a while.

You’ll watch your life flash before your eyes ? if you took a picture of every moment of your life.

You’ll see a checkbox that says, “erase after importing.” We recommend not checking it. If there is a problem transferring the video, then the video is gone. It’s best to wait until you you?ve confirmed that the video is transferred, and then delete it from your iPhone manually.

Finally! The pictures and videos are on the computer!

Another window will open up showing all of your pictures and videos that you just imported.

If for some reason you don’t get a pop-up, click the Start button and select “Computer.”

Then, you’ll right-click the iPhone icon, and select “Import Pictures and Videos.” From there, you’ll do everything else the same as we said before.

If you are using a Mac it starts out the same: plug the iPhone in and tell it to trust the computer.

Then, you’ll need to open the application Image Capture or iPhoto. We prefer Image Capture because you can choose where the video is stored on your hard drive.

Just open the Launchpad, and find Image Capture. (Start typing in Image Capture. It will be the only thing that comes up.) You could use iPhoto, but trust me, you don’t want to.

Once Image Capture is open, at the bottom of the window, you can select which folder to import them to.

You can choose the obvious places like Pictures or Documents, or you can decide to save them where ever you want to.

You could even choose to import your pictures and videos to iPhoto, but no one really knows why you would want to do that.

Then, you can click the “Import All” button or select the individual video and click “Import.”

Alright, this week is your last week to jump ship. If you don’t like hearing tech news, you need to unsubscribe from this show now. Otherwise, you’re gonna be stuck listening to us talk about the latest tech news and listen to us review apps and gadgets! After this week, we won’t remind you any more. You can always just go subscribe to Ask Deemable Tech if you want to hear us answer tech questions though. We’ll always be there for you.

If you do like hearing about the latest happenings in the tech world, and haven’t subscribed to Deemable Tech yet, get on it! And make sure to share us on the forums, Facebook, Twitter ? all over the interwebs.

And help us decide what stories we talk about on the show. Go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. reddit.com/r/Deemable or Deemable.com/reddit either way, it will take you to the same place.

Everything in the news this week was pretty shocking.

This Weeks Run Down

Apparently the FAA thinks it is 1967

This Sunday, the FAA finally released its proposal for regulations on unmanned commercial aircraft, a.k.a. drones. The proposed requirements, are surprisingly ? or unsurprisingly, depending on who you ask ? arcane and draconian.

The drones must be under 55 pounds or 25 kilograms. They can only be operated in daylight, and within the operator’s line of sight! They have to fly under 500 feet, no faster than 100 mph (Which those two aren’t unreasonable) But, they also can NEVER fly over anyone except for the people flying the drone.

This pretty much shoots down any plans that Amazon had for Prime Air since delivering packages with a drone, kinda requires the drone to be out of sight for it to be useful. And it would almost certainly have to fly over some people to get to my porch.

Some drone startups aren’t too concerned though. Drones could possibly be used for some commercial purposes, like a farmer surveying his field from the sky.

Lenovo got caught with its hand in the cookie jar

The Next Web is reporting that Lenovo has been installing adware on laptops. The adware, called Superfish, inserts third-party ads into your Google Searches and other websites, even those running with secure encryption, just like the kind of malware that doesn’t intentionally come with your new computer.

Once users started complaining about the ads Lenovo was quick to roll back the program and to post directions on its website about how to uninstall it.

Lenovo said,

Superfish was previously included on some consumer notebook products shipped in a short window between September and December to help customers potentially discover interesting products while shopping.  However, user feedback was not positive.

Unfortunately security researchers have discovered that simply uninstalling the software is not enough. Superfish also include a ?root certificate’ that allows any program that gains access to it to perform what are known as ?man in the middle’ attacks, potentially compromising the security of sensitive user information like banking passwords.

Lenovo initially denied the security vulnerability, but is now saying that it will release new software that will completely remove Superfish and any security certificates related to it.

In the meantime, laptops with Superfish installed are currently available from stores such as Best Buy. Caveat emptor.

After the story broke, a developer put together a website that lets Lenovo laptop owners find out if they are affected by the program, and Lenovo’s current instructions include how to uninstall the basic Superfish program.

LoopPay sold out to Samsung.

In an announcement Wednesday, LoopPay, the company that makes the electronic wallet/phone case for the iPhone, let everyone know that they have been bought by Samsung. They will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics America, Inc.

They haven’t said anything about incorporating the LoopPay Digital wallet platform into Samsung devices. However, it seems to support the rumors that the next Galaxy phone will probably have LoopPay built into it.

Ray recently reviewed the LoopPay CardCase on a previous episode of Deemable Tech.

Apple iCar?

Wired is reporting that according to a lawsuit filed by electric-car battery manufacturer A123 Systems, Apple has been poaching engineers for its own large-scale car battery division. The lawsuit alleges that an A123 engineer has been helping Apple woo senior-level engineers over to their company. This is adding fuel to rumors that Apple is working on its own electric car.

Other things hinting at this: Apple has over 600 employees that used to work in the automotive industry, including 46 that were formerly with Tesla. Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Bloomberg earlier this month that Apple has been offering $250,000 signing bonuses to entice Tesla employees to leave.

Also, a mysterious van registered to Apple has been spotted driving around San Francisco with an array of equipment including cameras mounted on top. People are speculating that this could be for a self-driving car or a street-mapping system.

In another interview with Bloomberg, former GM CEO Dan Akerson said Apple should stay away from making cars. Akerson said “They’d better think carefully if they want to get into the hard-core manufacturing. We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.?

Sounds a lot like Steve Balmer’s advice to Apple many years ago about getting into making phones.

Cable Companies Behaving Badly

A Time Warner Cable customer reported to Ars Technica today that she received a letter from the company in which her first name had been changed to, well, a word we can’t say on this podcast. It starts with a ‘c.’

The letter read, ?Dear C*#! Martinez? and then went tried to convince the customer not to cancel her cable.

The other major US cable company, Comcast, has been in the news several times in the past few months for similar cases. Comcast customers have reported receiving notices from the company in which their names were changed to things like  “dummy,” “whore” and “super bitch.” Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced last year that they plan to merge, pending Federal approval. However, both companies are notorious for their poor customer service and stories like these will not help their case.

Time Warner Cable stated that the name change was due to the actions of a third-party vendor. It apologized to Mrs. Martinez and offered her a free year of cable.

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Photo credit: “Blog OMG!” by Mike Licht is used under CC BY 2.0.

If you missed last week’s episode, we have rebooted the Deemable Tech podcast. From now on, we are not answering tech questions on this show. But, we are answering them on our spin-off show, Ask Deemable Tech. So, if that’s what you love, go subscribe to that podcast. It’s called Ask Deemable Tech – search for it on iTunes.

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This Week’s Run Down

Season 3 of House of Cards leaks out early

Season 3 of the critically acclaimed Netflix original show House of Cards is scheduled to come out on Feb. 27th, but fans got an accidental sneak peek on Tuesday when the first ten episodes appeared on the streaming TV service early. Netflix quickly pulled it, but those who were already streaming an episode were able to continue to do so as long as they did not stop until the episode ended. Netflix kept a good sense of humor about it, tweeting ?This is Washington. There is always a leak.? Fans can binge on the twisted schemes of the conniving Frank Underwood starting February 27th.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/11/8021935/house-of-cards-season-three-is-on-netflix-right-now

Jeb Bush accidentally doxes thousands of Floridians

In his words, “In the spirit of transparency,” presidential candidate Jeb Bush released emails from when he was governor of Florida. Unfortunately, the sensitive information like Social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers and Credit Card numbers were not redacted from the emails. So, his team basically just accidentally doxed thousands of Floridians.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/10/8013531/jeb-bush-florida-email-dump-privacy

Jeb Bush’s CTO resigns over controversial tweets

Chief Technical Officer for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign resigned Tuesday after it came out in the media that Ethan Czahor posted several sexist and racist jokes on Twitter several years ago. He did delete them before starting to work for Bush, but the backlash was apparently too intense.

Kristy Campbell, a spokeswoman for Bush says, “While Ethan has apologized for regrettable and insensitive comments, they do not reflect the views of Gov. Bush or his organization and it is appropriate for him to step aside. We wish him the best.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/new-tech-adviser-jeb-bush-potential-campaign-resignsm-article-1.2110482

Will.i.am Puls ?Smart watch? Beta Reviews

http://gizmodo.com/will-i-ams-puls-smartwatch-so-bad-im-actually-kind-of-1685130042

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/15/will-i-ams-plan-to-bring-fashion-and-technology-together-with-the-creation-of-i-am/

Snapchat selfie leads to first degree murder charge

A Pennsylvania 16-year-old has been charged with first degree murder after posting a selfie on Snapchat with the dead victim.

Snapchat messages delete themselves after a short period of time, but the person who received the picture saved it before it deleted itself.

http://triblive.com/news/westmoreland/7729452-74/police-morton-photo#axzz3Qh0xyVti

Facebook makes plans for the afterlife

Facebook has announced new features that allow users to designate a very special Facebook Friend to administer their profile after they die. Before when a Facebook user died there were only two options for their account: permanent deletion or ?memorialization?. Memorialized accounts were frozen in time and could not be accessed, even by immediate family members.

Facebook?s new features will let the ?legacy contact? have SOME control over the memorialized profile. Among other things they will be able to post at the top of the deceased timeline, according to Facebook, ?to announce a memorial service or share a special message.? They can also approve or deny friend requests and update profile pictures.

What they cannot do is access the deceased? private messages. Some secrets, it seems, you take to the grave.

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/02/adding-a-legacy-contact/

 http://news.wjct.org/post/facebook-virtual-you-planning-your-digital-afterlife

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If you have a comment, contact us at feedback at deemable.com or leave us a voicemail at 1-888-972-9868.

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It’s always good to make sure you have the latest version of iOS that your Apple device can run. iOS updates include bug fixes and security fixes that keep your smartphone and tablet running fresh and safe. Here’s how to update your iPhone to the latest version, iOS 8.1.3.

Image credit: John Britton / Flickr

Q: Here’s a question about a lower-tech gadget. I have a Panasonic cordless telephone with a digital answering machine. Over the years, it has collected several messages that I’d like to archive. I don’t see any inputs or outputs for doing this. Is there a way to permanently store the messages on this answering machine digitally?

A: Your question would be a lot easier to answer if your phone wasn’t cordless. If your phone had a cord on it, you would only have to buy a mini recorder control from RadioShack to connect it directly to your computer or recorder so that you could record from it. But, there are three different ways that you can extract the voicemails from the answering machine.

The Caveman Way (or The Obvious Way)

Since it is cordless, you’ll have to transfer the messages wirelessly, using the oldest form of wireless communication: sound. Hold a the microphone of a recorder up to speaker of your answering machine. Press Record on the recorder, and press Play on the answering machine. Ta da! You have a mildly listenable digital recording.

The MacGyver Way (or The Hacker Way)

If you’re feeling a little handy, there is a another method that will give you a higher quality recording. (Disclaimer: This will destroy your answering machine. It will never function in the way it was intended to function again. You could also lose all of your voicemails in the process. Proceed with caution. Also, you may want to try recording them “The Caveman Way” first, just in case.)

First, you’ll need to get a speaker cable with a ? inch plug on one side and two bare wires on the other end. You need it to be long enough to reach from your answering machine to the back of your computer or to your recorder.

Once you have the wire, you’ll need to open the answering machine case. It usually only takes a few screws to open the case.

Now, look for the speaker. You may be able to see where the speaker before you open the case. It’s where the sound is coming out of the case.

Now that you have the case open, and you have found the speaker, you should see two wires connected to the speaker. Cut or remove them from the speaker.

Splice the wires from the answering machine together with the speaker cable. Never spliced wires before? Check out the previous link for a guide from Instructables.

Finally, plug the ? plug into the microphone port on your computer or recording device.

Now, if you are recording on your computer, fire up recording software like Audacity or GarageBand and press record. If you’re using a recording device, just press record. Then, press Play on the answering machine.

If you did everything right, you should be getting a digital recording of your voicemails that sounds better than anything you could have recorded “The Caveman Way.”

If you didn’t do everything right, then you have a useless pile of plastic and circuit board. Sorry about that!

The Safer Way (or The Nerdy Way)

Since your answering machine is a digital machine, it likely has a remote access feature. Find the manual for your answering machine, (Yeah, right. You can look up the manual for your answering machine on Panasonic’s website.) and find the instructions on how to access your answering machine remotely.

Once you know how to access it remotely, use a service like Google Voice to record the call.