Tech News Today 218

Tech News Today Episode 218

Tech News Today 218: Scan My Zebra

GeoHotz settles but Anonymous doesn't, Zebras become scannable, Navy blows things up with lasers, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Jason Howell
  • JasonHowell.net
• Iyaz Akhtar
  • thisoldnerd.finitecomedy.com
• Tim Stevens (@tim_stevens)

Top Stories

• George Hotz, Sony quietly settle PS3 jailbreak lawsuit
  • SCEA and George Hotz reached an ""agreement in principle"" on March 31.
  • Hotz agreed to a ban on publishing code but avoids having to admit any wrongdoing.
  • Hotz's jurisdictional issue is still in the air, odds are it will be done with the settlement.

• New Intel chip heading to tablets
• Intel targets tablets with Atom 'Oak Trail'
  • Shipping 45-nanometer Atom Z670 processor (AKA Oak Trail) to 35 tablet designs from companies including Fujitsu, Lenovo, Evolve III, Motion Computing, Razer, and Viliv. Oak Trail prefers Android, MeeGo and Windows, can support 1080p video decode, faster browsing, HDMI support, longer battery life, home theater sound.---- Intel will also give a sneak peek at Cedar Trail at the Intel Developer's Forum in Beijing Tuesday and Wednesday. Should support Blu-Ray 2.0 and have better power performance.

• Adobe moves to subscription model with Creative Suite 5.5
• Adobe Announces Photoshop Touch SDK, iPad Apps
  • Adobe CS 5.5, subscription pricing, pay per month, 1 year commitment nec for pricing
  • Apps now at 5.5 are Indesign, Dreamwaver, Flash, Premier Pro, AE, Audition, Media Encoder
  • .5 updates expected every year
  • PS = $35/month (normally $699), Design Premium Suite ($1,899 retail) for $95 per month, and CS 5.5 Master Collection ($2,599 retail) for US$129 per month.
  • Money spent on subscriptions can go toward a full purchase at the end of the year, so the increased flexibility is definitely welcome.
  • iPad apps extend Photoshop, also Adobe opens up Photoshop Touch SDK so other devs can make new apps to work with PS

Discussion Stories

• US Navy Close To On-Ship Laser Cannons
  • laser fired a 15-kilowatt beam at an inflatable motorboat a mile away as both ships moved through the sea
  • Previous tests from land, this is from sea
  • “This is an important data point, but I still want the Megawatt death ray.” - Rear Admiral Nevin Carr

• Gartner: Apple will dominate tablet space for years, Android won't drink its milkshake until after 2015
• Gartner’s Tablet Outlook: Rosy Picture For The iPad
• The Netbook Is Down And Out As Acer And Google Back Away
• Gartner Tablet Projections out to 2015
  • iPad to hit 47.1% (down from 83.9% last year)
  • Android 38.6%
  • WebOS projected to grab some marketshare this year and then lose some from 4 to 3% over 4 years
  • Playbook's QNX 5.6 --> 10.0%"

• Apple AirPlay Private Key Exposed
• ShairPort emulates AirPort Express to receive AirPlay streams
  • James Laird reverse engineered the private key that is necessary for Apple's AirPlay using an AirPort Express
  • Published ShairPort, an open-source (Perl/C) replacement
  • AirPlay uses two keys: one public, one private. Laird cracked the private one.
  • Allows for AirPlay devices to stream to unlicensed devices (not just Apple approved ones)"

• BigDoor Seeks to be the AdSense of Gamification
• Real Rewards: For virtual achievements
  • BigDoor: Co-Founder and CEO Keith Smith calls it the equivalent of Google’s AdSense for gamification. Example: A quest over the weekend gave visitors a chance to interact with the new Universal Pictures comedy, “Your Highness,” starring Natalie Portman. In the quests, visitors must interact with the advertiser’s content in order to earn points. A quest is competed after 11 clicks. Points can be typically redeemed for virtual badges (i.e. bragging rights), but in UGO’s case, it is sending out real patches that they hope will become collector’s items. Kiip: Real life rewards for playing mobile games. Things like discounts, free items, etc.

News Fuse

• The Winklevoss twins must accept $65 million dollars in a settlement with Facebook according to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. While that sounds like a seriously comfortable amount of money, the twins are not thrilled with this since they claim Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea of Facebook from them and the company is valued at something like $40 billion.

• Finally. Windows XP is losing marketshare to Windows 7 according to StatCounter. 7 now has a marketshare of 30.84% and XP is down to 32.17%. The trend lines look like Windows 7 will surpass the venerable XP within a month. Somewhere in a dark room crying in the corner is Windows Vista which has experienced a steady decline in users since April 2010 nd never caught it's older brother XP.

• Verizon iPad 2 users are ticked - all over the Apple forums are complaints that iPad 2s are having 3G connectivity issues on the Verizon network. Apple has said it is looking into the matter. Boy Genius is reporting that Apple's upcoming iOS 4.3.2 is slated to fix this issue as well as that FaceTime bug we've been telling you about.

• More Apple news: Rumor has it the iPhone 5 is slated for September production. That would mean that Apple wouldn't be releasing the phone until late this year or possibly next year. All of this is based on a conversation BusinessInsider reports with a supplier of iPhone components and Avian Securities.

• Google has just acquired PushLife, a company that developed music apps for Android and BlackBerry. A lot of sites are speculating that Google will use the technology from PushLife to push music your phone. If you're a PushLife user, you're on notice because the current service will be discontinued since PushLife is getting integrated into Google Canada.

• Another soldier in the war against Apple's restrictive iPad subscription policy has fallen. Bloomberg Business Week's iPad app will join up with Apple, charging $2.99 for a four-issue digital subscription, versus $4.99 at the newsstand. BusinessWeek won't add a lot multimedia frills a la The Daily and Projeckt, just good old standard articles in a stripped down iPad app. And no promises of Android versions either. Bloomberg are simple folk.

• Things are looking good for the Nintendo 3DS but not the best ever. IHS iSuppli forecasts a global installed base of 11.6 million for the device by the end of 2011. Not a small number to be sure, but competition from the iPod, iPhone and Android smartphone and tablets will prevent the 3DS from matching the sales of the Nintendo DS. And iSuppli says the 3DS will never get there. By 2015, they predict 70 million 3DS installed compared to 91 million DS's ata similar point in time.

• Some Texas Comptroller staffers were doing a security scan and found something interesting on a public server. The personal records of some 3.5 million Texans in unencrypted files! The files included names, mailing addresses, Social Security numbers, and possibly dates of birth and drivers license numbers and had been on the server for about a year. texas State Comptroller Susan Combs said there was no indication the information had been misused.

Kickers and Weird Science

• StripeSpotter turns wild zebras into trackable barcodes

Calendar

• 7" tablet HTC Flyer has hit pre-order status in the UK, it's listed at The Carphone Warehouse at £600 ($983), comes with 3G and 32GB of storage.
• 'Anonymous' Plans Sony Boycott On April 16
• Acer's Windows-powered version of the Ic-OH-nia, the W500, is up for pre-order today for $549. The Windows version ships faster than the Honeycomb flavor too, set to head to your door April 15th
• Samsung Galaxy S II to be available May 1st in the UK
• Groklaw, which started in order to counter misinformation in the SCO attacks on Linux, will stop publishing May 16. Pamela Jones announced the decision on her blog saying the crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over and Linux won.
• Star Trek series coming to Netflix Watch Instantly in July [Star Trek, TNG, Voyager, Enterprise and October [DS9]]
• Steve Jobs authorized biography due next year: "iSteve, the Book of Jobs"

Voicemail

• Xander from California - Printing Legos

Email

"HI TNT guys, This is Rodrigo from Puebla, Mexico I was listening to your show where Sarah gave the news about government holding your laptop for a more-than-ideal long time and that people should put their data on the cloud. Well, I think she described a perfect use for Google OS laptops. You will be giving government an empty case and you won’t lose any information. I bet they won’t even bother on taking those kind of laptops… or maybe they could continue been intrusive and also ask for your Google id and password. Love the show Rodrigo Irigoyen"

"Hello,

In the last episode a voice mail from Zack (one of your viewer) expressed the implications that may result from the use of a deduplication scheme on the Amazon cloud. Specifically how deduplication of music files amounts as serving the same files multiple times and how that would makes any storage limitation artificial.

It occurred to me that if Amazon sells watermarked mp3 files these files would probably not get dedulicated automatically. But that just shows how difficult it is to apply real world constraints to digital and cloud based medias.

I love your show. Keep up the good work.

Alexandre Jasmin"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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