If Google can do it, we can too! The title of this episode is this GIF.

This week the guys geek out over Tesla adding an autopilot feature to their electric cars, mourn the death of TigerDirect retail stores, and wonder if they can follow in Google’s footsteps and communicate purely through GIFs. Plus, Ray shares his thoughts on the Cogito smartwatch.

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This Week’s Run Down

Tesla Announces Software Update for Cars Which Adds “Autopilot” Feature

Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference this week at which he announced that late model Teslas will be getting a software update that will give them a new feature called ‘autopilot.’ The autopilot feature will bring ordinary Tesla electric cars that much closer to being self-driving, enabling them to stay in their lane on a well-marked highway without driver intervention. Musk claimed that the autopilot technology would enable to a driver to make it from San Francisco to Seattle without steering.

Musk also announced a feature called Range Assurance which will alert Tesla drivers when the charge in their car is getting too low to make it to the nearest charging station.

$10 Million Target Credit Card Data Breach Settlement Gets Preliminary Approval

You probably remember the massive data breach that hit Target during the 2013 holiday season where tens of millions of credit cards were stolen right out of their systems. A class action lawsuit was filed and now Target is preparing to settle? for $10 million dollars.

If that amount seems low to you, it is because Target is not going to do the usual thing and send five dollars to every customer whose card number was stolen. Instead, card holders can only be reimbursed if they can show that they were actually hurt by the data breach. They need to have had fraudulent charges placed on their card that they were not reimbursed for, that negatively affected their credit score, or show that they spent a lot of time and money resolving the problem, or that it harmed them in some other way.

The proposed settlement is only preliminary, and members of the class action suit have until November 10th to object.

RadioShack Puts Customer Data Up for Sale in Bankruptcy Auction

RadioShack is on the auction block this week as its creditors attempt to sell the company?s assets – this apparently includes a large chunk of customer data, including 65 million customer names and physical addresses and 13 million email addresses. Consumer advocates are concerned, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims it may be illegal under state law. Texas does not allow companies to violate their own privacy policies and signage in RadioShack promises that they will not sell their private mailing list.

AT&T is also opposing the sale of data because they say RadioShack is not entitled to personal information it collects from wireless sales. AT&T wants the data destroyed to keep it from falling into competitors hands.

A bankruptcy court still has to approve the deal.

TigerDirect Closing Retail Stores

Speaking of defunct electronic stores, remember Circuit City… CompUSA… Ultimate Electronics? Well, TigerDirect bought them in the late aughts. Well, now TigerDirect is joining them in the electronic retail store afterlife. Two of the former executives for TigerDirect were recently sentenced to 60 and 80 months in jail for a kickback scheme that cost the company $27 million. Apparently that hurt the company enough that the company decided to close all by two retail stores.

It makes me sad because TigerDirect was a “dot com boom” success story. They actually started as a catalog company, but transitioned into internet sales early. When all of the retail computer stores started dying, TigerDirect was holding strong, and they bought up the stores and their IP and entered the retail market. They did a fantastic job of turning stores like CompUSA and Circuit City, which were known for fancy displays and overpriced electronics, into stores with smart employees, simple displays and prices that competed with the Internet.

TigerDirect is going to continue selling computers, electronics and computer components on its website.

No word yet if NewEgg is planning on buying its stores, but that would be the perfect irony.

Facial Recognition Software Leads To Arrest of Jacksonville Man Who Faked His Own Death

Another thing the internet has ruined: faking your own death. Jacksonville businessman Jose Lantigua had been reported dead in Venezuela two years ago. But when he attempted to apply for a new passport under his new, false identity the US State Department used facial recognition software to match him to his original identity in their database. Federal agents then set up a sting operation and caught him wearing a brown toupee and ?a poorly dyed beard.?

Lantigua is wanted on numerous counts of insurance fraud, since his family attempted to collect on his life insurance policy after his death. The insurance company has long viewed this with suspicion.

Google Responds to Reporter with GIF Instead of “No Comment”

This week, Daily Dot writer Richard Lewis published a story about YouTube reportedly planning to relaunch its livestreaming platform with a focus on computer gaming and esports. This is similar to Twitch, which Google tried to buy last year before it ended up being purchased by Amazon.

Lewis reached out to Google for a comment on the reports, and they apparently responded with something only Google could get away with. Instead of the usual “no comment,” the representative sent Lewis this animated GIF of a little girl shrugging. No text, just the GIF.

Lewis at first assumed that this was a joke, and said that he received a “no comment” response from Google in his story. The same representative sent another message saying that the GIF was, in fact, their official response.

Reviews

Ray shares his thoughts on the Cogito swartwatch this week.

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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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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

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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.

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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.