Image credit: Ashley Madison

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THE RUN DOWN

Google Launches New Router

Google announced this week that is partnering with networking manufacturer TP-Link to make a new a Wi-Fi router called the OnHub.

In the announcement on their official blog, Google says they want to alleviate the setup headaches and connection problems that many people experience with their wireless routers by introducing a simple, user-friendly device. The OnHub, which looks like a large cylinder with a single light on top, is filled with 13 antennas – 12 for signal, and one that checks the airwaves to make sure there is no wireless congestion in the area. This supposedly will make sure that you?ll always have the fastest connection.

You set up and manage the OnHub by using the Google On Android and iOS app, which Google says will let you prioritize connections for specific devices, and give you easy access to your router password so you can copy and text it to your friends. In a really cool twist, you connect your phone with the router at first by using SOUND.

As for the clean design, Google had this to say: ?Many of us keep our router on the floor and out of sight, where it doesn?t work as well. We replaced unruly cords and blinking lights with internal antennas and subtle, useful lighting, so you?ll be happy placing OnHub out in the open, where your router performs its best.?

The OnHub is available for preorder now (though it apparently is completely sold out). It?s a little pricey for a router at $199.

Google Project Sunroof Tool

According to an article on Vox, Google is working on a new tool called Project Sunroof that will help you figure out if solar power is right for your home. The Project Sunroof tool allows you to enter your address and then uses aerial imagery to calculate how much sunlight your rooftop receives. The tool then uses other information such as your monthly electric bill and whether you want to buy or lease the panels to determine how much going solar could save you.

The tool is still in its early stages. Right now, it doesn?t work for North Florida, where we are located, but you can have fun playing with it for Google?s stomping grounds in California.

And then there was one. Sprint stops offering two-year contracts.

Verizon announced in early August that it would not be offering subsidized phones with two-year contracts to new customers. Existing customers could still get a new phone at a cheaper price, as long as they didn’t change phone plans. This made Verizon the second company to drop the ol’ two year routine. T-Mobile, the company Siri thinks I’m talking about everytime I say “Deemable,” started this trend in 2013 when they became the so-called “unCarrier.”

Now according to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint has jumped on the bandwagon. Sprint is no longer offering subsidized smartphones on two-year contracts, leaving poor old AT&T as the only major carrier that offers subsidized phones.

Now, if you can’t afford to drop $650 for a new iPhone Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile offer a payment plan to buy a phone. At Verizon and T-Mobile, if you have good enough credit, you can pay for the phone in 24 monthly installments. Sprint doesn’t have  a similar purchase plan, but it will let you lease an iPhone starting at $22 per month. No word yet if they will offer the same deal with Android phones.

Google Reveals Real Name Of ?Android M? Version of OS

Okay guys, so as you know Google likes to name each version of its Android operating system out of something sweet, in alphabetical order. The last three versions have been Jellybean, KitKat, and Lollipop, and the next one up is Android M. This week, Google revealed what the ?M? would stand for. Any guesses?

And the answer is?

Google says the new version will be 6.0. Android Lollipop is currently on version 5.1.1.

iPhone 6 Plus Camera-gate

If you have an iPhone 6 Plus, you may have bought it for its significantly better camera. Well, jokes on you! Engadget is reporting that the camera on several of the iPhone 6 Pluses are defective, making the image blurry. If you think you are a victim of this atrocity, you can go to a page on Apple’s website and enter your serial number to find out. If you don’t have an iPhone 6 Plus and your camera lens is blurry, for instance if you have an iPhone 6, 5S, Samsung Galaxy, Nokia 3390, you’re OK, it’s not a defect. Just wipe the lens off

A Dog Joined Twitter

While Ray was worried about robot civil rights last week, a dog joined Twitter! 

Computer science student Henry Conklin thought that his dog, Oliver, was so outspoken that his thoughts needed to be shared with the world. So he created the account @OliverBarkBark. As Conklin says on his blog: rather than transcribe every bark out of his dog?s mouth, he set up a system that ?automatically detected, filtered and published each one of Oliver?s deafening vocalizations.?

Conklin?s system consists of a Raspberry Pi – a type of microcomputer that is promoted for teaching basic computer science in schools – a microphone, and a Wi-Fi dongle. The computer starts recording when it hears a loud sound that matches a library of barks Conklin created. The system then tweets out a random string of ?barks,? ?woofs? and ?ruffs.?

Conklin says he hopes to replace this with a bark-to-text translator he says will be ?more accurate to Oliver?s actual voice.?

Boston Dynamics Unleashes Walking Robots

Robots: threat or menace? No matter what you think about our future robotic overlords, one thing is clear: they are getting better all the time. Gizmodo reports that cutting edge robotics company Boston Dynamics released a video this week showing off two of its robots. Spot, a quadrupedal robot, features a robotic arm that allows it to open doors. A bipedal robot named Atlas is shown walking over uneven surfaces, including a bed of rocks. Atlas is also shown navigating through a forest outdoors. Essentially, the only thing stopping it from running the Boston Marathon is the fact that the model is not yet wireless and must remain hooked up to a power source at all times.

The company reports that they are working on this.

Ashley Madison, Established Men

Hacker group, Impact Team, announced last month that it had gained access to Avid Life Media’s user database. ALM is the parent company of Ashley Madison, the dating website for married people who want to have an affair, and Established Men, the dating website for rich men to find young, beautiful women.

Impact Team demanded that Avid Life Media take down AshleyMadison.com and EstablishedMen.com, and last week, one month later, Impact Team published the data on the deepweb.

This is the second major hack of a dating website of ill repute. Back in May, AdultFriendFinder was hacked. CNN Money says that customers’ email addresses, usernames, passwords, birthdays and zip codes, were included in that hack.

The data in this hack is just as extensive, and more so. The data includes most recent communications, last four digits of member credit card numbers, and more.

Roughly 10 GB of data in the dump. Almost 23 GB uncompressed. It’s not available on the “regular” web; it was posted to the deepweb. If you don’t know what that is, or how to get on it? educate yourself, we are not going to get into that. We have the data, but we haven’t had enough time to dig into it before this episode was recorded.

CNN Money is reporting that almost 7,000 email American and Canadian government email addresses are in the data dump,

Obviously, this is causing a lot of marital fall outs. The Daily Mail is reporting that lawyers are saying this is going to be “Christmas in September” as spouses find out that their partner was registered or paying to be on the site in the next few weeks. Other lawyers are calling it “Legal Black Friday.”

CNN Money also pointed out one disturbing fact: “The website’s users were worldwide, and there are 79 countries where homosexuality is illegal. In Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the punishment is death.”

Josh Duggar Had Paid Account

One of the first widely known names to be exposed in the Ashley Madison data dump is reality TV star and conservative value promoter Josh Duggar, of TLC?s 19 Kids and Counting fame. Gawker reports that Duggar had not just one AshMad account but two, one linked to his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the other to an address in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Both accounts were ?paid accounts?, which included the $250 purchase of an ?affair guarantee? from the website.

Duggar drew controversy in May when it was reported that he had molested several girls as a teenager, including his own sisters. His family claimed that he had since reformed.

Josh Duggar has been married to his wife Anna for seven years and they have four children.

Ritch Workman

Closer to home, FloridaPolitics.com confirmed that Florida State Representative Ritch Workman was a paying Ashley Madison member. Workman did admit that he had an account on the site, and regretted it. He said it was when he was single, but he still wishes he had never joined the site.

Disney Unveils Plans for Star Wars Lands

Ever since Disney bought Star Wars, speculation has been rampant that the company would introduce Star Wars-themed attractions to its famous theme parks. Well this week Ars Technica reported that the company made it official, announcing massive, fourteen acre Star Wars expansions to California?s Disneyland and Florida?s Disney World. There are few details yet but Disney says guests will be able to fly around in the Millennium Falcon and visit the Mos Eisley space cantina. The attractions will reportedly be staffed by ?local inhabitants? of the Star Wars universe.

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.

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.

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.