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.

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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.?

The dog days of summer have arrived. June 21st marked the first official day of summer, when the Earth’s semi-axis in the Northern Hemisphere reached its maximum incline tilt of 23° 26′ towards the sun – the Summer Solstice. With the basketball season over now, the only thing to keep us sports fans occupied is baseball, beer, and barbecues – but hey, I’m not complaining about that. So take a break from counting down the minutes until your weekend starts and let’s reflect on what’s happened over the last month in the tech world.

The Downfall of Research in Motion

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! The former king of the smartphone industry, RIM, is dying at a rapid rate… and employees and stockholders alike are making it known to the world. Yesterday, a high-level RIM employee sent an anonymous open letter to the RIM Senior Management Team that ripped the company apart. RIM, on the defensive, responded by issuing its own statement to the public concerning the letter. In the end though, Research in Motion is freefalling and investors are clamoring for a top-down restructuring of the company, but really, can anyone save BlackBerry?

The Future of Apple

OS X Lion is nearing a public launch for July, after Apple “seeded the golden master version of OS X Lion to developers” earlier today. “OS X Lion brings many innovations from iOS including home screens (called Launchpad in Lion), autosaving, full screen application interfaces, and auto resume in apps. This is in addition to native support for the Mac App Store, Mission Control, an all new email client, built-in FaceTime, and interface and feature  improvements through out the operating system. Lion also includes AirDrop file sharing, multi-user remote computer access, and Find my Mac (through iCloud).” – Source: 9to5Mac

Apple has done significantly well this quarter, and it is estimated that users of the iOS platform alone generates roughly $150 of revenue a year per account (not including the cost of the actual iOS device). The iPhone, however, has a ton of competition these days and the biggest threat may be the Samsung Galaxy S II – the follow-up to one of the most popular Android phones, the Galaxy S.

“LulzSec” Hackers: Attacking the Internet

After hacking the CIA, PBS, and numerous other web sites, it looks like LulzSec’s run of terror has finally come to an end. The group announced on multiple web sites that it would be disbanding on Monday, but did not provide any particular reason for the decision. For 50 days LulzSec hacked and terrorized corporations and governments for the sake of humor, and hopefully this is the last we hear of their exploits.

Photo by DrCrawford via DeviantArt

Apparently no one is safe from the wrath of LulzSecurity, the notorious rogue hacker group who claimed the recent high-profile attacks on Sony Pictures Website and Nintendo’s servers. Now, their targets are set on the U.S. Government after hacking into the Senate’s website and even going as far as taking down the CIA’s site, which was restored shortly afterward.

The group is apparently motivated by hacktivist culture and fueled by the amount of amusement – or “lulz” – that they can generate by causing mayhem on the internet. To bring down the Central Intelligence Agency’s website on Wednesday, LulzSecurity used a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack which uses computers to flood the targeted site with so much traffic that it causes it to go offline. It is suggested that LulzSec probably did not steal any sensitive information from the breach on the government websites and while this is reassuring, it doesn’t bode well for those who were among one of the 26,000 e-mail addresses and passwords that the group recently leaked.

Mashable mentions, “One thing separates LulzSec from many other similar groups, however: Its members are actively communicating with users, and they love the attention. And with a high-profile site being attacked almost daily in the past several weeks, we’re sure we’ll hear more about LulzSec in future.” LulzSec is active on the social media site Twitter and has even created a telephone hotline service which invites users to request potential targets for the group to attack in the future.

Although LulzSec may be amusing themselves for the time being, the CIA has surely taken notice of the group and will likely be the ones having the last laugh.

Photo by Stan Schroeder via Mashable

Earlier this week, it was revealed to the public that the downloadable al-Qaeda magazine, Inspire, was infiltrated by the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters and British MI6 intelligence hackers in 2010. The mission, called “Operation Cupcake”, replaced a lethal tutorial on ?How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom? with an encrypted, heart-attack inducing recipe for “The Best Cupcakes in America,” which came from the Ellen DeGeneres talkshow website.

The 67-page al-Qaeda magazine originally contained articles such as ?What to expect in Jihad,” and articles written by Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri. As mentioned before, the al-Qaeda tutorial also included a recipe showing how to make a deadly pipe bomb with sugar, match heads, and a miniature lightbulb attached to a timer – all ingredients that could be easily found in the home. As the first English-language Jihadist online magazine, the purpose of the propaganda was to attract and recruit al-Qaeda supporters throughout the Arabian Peninsula and even “lone-wolf” terrorists in the US and UK.

As humorous as the mission sounds, “Operation Cupcake” was a failure in several ways. The Inspire, run by the extremist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, was reissued with the correct bomb recipe only two weeks later, had four additional editions that followed, and the intelligence agencies missed a golden opportunity to alter the ingredients subtly so that al-Qaeda may not have realized that the magazine was on the radar. In response to the operation, user “Symbiote” commented online, “Why not replace the bomb recipes with harmless things that look like they could be bombs, but have no chance of working? Or perhaps require large quantities of strange ingredients, to help trace where the people using the recipe are… MI6 (if this was them) should be better than this.” A similar Pentagon operation was blocked by the CIA last year because they believed that it would have exposed sources of valuable information… and they were right.

Even though today is National Doughtnut Day, if you’re at least looking to make some delicious Mojito and Rocky Road cupcakes, you know to search for “The Best Cupcakes in America” by Main Street Cupcakes.

Photo by Zack Whittaker via ZDNet