This week Ray Hollister, Tom Braun, Kevin Clark, and Aaron Edelson we introduced a new segment of the show that we’re calling “The Deemable Dozen”, the top twelve tech news stories in under 12 minutes, and then talked about how Gizmodo reporter Mat Honan’s digital life was destroyed, and then we did the Two Step Verification, baby. (You’ll have to listen to understand.)

…all that and more on this episode of Deemable Tech.

Deemable Tech – Episode 10 – The Two Step Verification, Baby

The Deemable Dozen:

1. Sprint reduces iPhone 4S to $149.99 and Apple prices matches.
2. 3 guys try to buy cheap iPads off Craigslist and get robbed instead.
3. Google Nexus Q production postponed, but you’ll get it for if you already placed a pre-order.
4. Before Apple went nuclear on Samsung, Apple offered Samsung a licensing agreement: $30 for every smartphone and $40 for every tablet.
5. Google Listen is dead! Long live all the other podcast apps in Google Play!
6. Microsoft asks everyone to stop calling it Metro; call it Windows 8.
7. Square and Starbucks partnered up,  and ordered Orange Mocha Frappuccinos for everyone!
8. Everyone else in the mobile payments industry except for Square or Starbucks (including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, Google, Intuit, ISIS, PayPal and several banks) joined the Mobile Payments Committee of the Electronics Transactions Association.
9. OUYA ended its Kickstarter campaign 8.65 million over their goal! Now OUYA has started accepting preorders.
10. Apollo 13 was really saved by a hippy at MIT?
11. WikiLeaks is under attack.
12. Mat Honan got hacked.

Links we mentioned on today’s show:

• http://www.androidcentral.com/5-better-podcast-options-android-now-google-listen-dead
• http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/
• http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=1056283&answer=185839

Bumper Music

• Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling (8-Bit)
• The Beatles – I Am The Walrus (8-Bit Remix)

I’ve never understood why people hate the rock band Creed so much. While I’m not a huge fan, I’ve always found their music at least palatable. However, from all of the Creed hate I read on the interwebs, it would seem that I am not in the majority. There are over five million pages of search results for the phrase “I hate Creed” and several Facebook pages and groups dedicated to the hatred of all things Creed. Now, apparently even wild life hates Creed.

Earlier this week, a Norwegian boy used Creed to fend off a pack of wild wolves. On his way home from school, a pack of four hungry, but clearly  musically snobbish wolves approached young Walter Eikrem. Thinking on his toes, Walter grabbed the nearest weapon he could find to fight off the beasts: his Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 phone that was blasting Creed’s “Overcome” in his earbuds. He yanked the headset out of the phone and turned the phone up as loud as the little tiny speaker could go. He yelled and waved his arms while Scott Stapp‘s vocals screamed from the little white Android phone. Seeing, and most importantly, hearing all of this, the wolves just turned around and left.

Now, did the wolves really just hate the sound of Creed’s first single in seven years, or is there something more sinister afoot here?  Wind-Up Records, Creed’s label, just happens to be owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which just happens to be owned by Sony,  which just happens to own half of Sony Ericsson, which just happens to be the company that makes the Xperia X8! (OK, when I started that rant, I didn’t realize how many layers were involved. I even skipped Sony Corporation of America.) The Xperia X8 was featured prominently in every story about this young boy’s little convenient miracle. Perhaps, this was all an elaborate setup to create a viral story to promote two of Sony’s interests. I would like to believe that just the wolves were agents working for Sony, (maybe they were prototypes of Sony’s new attack AIBO) and Walter is innocent in all of this, but honestly, even in Norway, what kid is going to admit that he listens to Creed? This whole story smells of a conspiracy, or I’ve been watching too many TV mysteries and I haven’t had enough sleep lately.

Source: Der Spiegel, via Gizmodo

Image mashup by Ray Hollister. Scott Sapp image by kindofadraag via Flickr. Wolf image by Steve Gregory via Flickr.