Tech News Today 230

Tech News Today Episode 230

Tech News Today 230: I Want To Get Fired In Finland

Now VERIZON is down, PSN gets sued, Instagram exposes your location, and more.

Hosts

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

Top Stories

• Verizon Grappling with Major LTE Outage as Exec’s Words Come Back to Bite Her
• Verizon's LTE network takes the night off, leaves a bunch of Thunderbolt users bewildered
• Vzw "aware of an issue with 4G LTE connections" "network engineers are working to resolve quickly" - msg from VZW Twitter
• Updates on VZW Twitter account:
  • Verizon 4G Outage around the U.S. started last night - Verizon said customers should still be able to make calls form 4G LTE phones, but that data may not work or may revert to a slower network. Also, customers won’t be able to activate new LTE devices until the issue is resolved.
  • 2 days ago, VZ VP: ""The surprise… to me is in the speed bumps were very few and far between…""
  • Engadget reports 3G issue specific to Thunderbolt due to a documented issue with 3G provisioning on the Thunderbolt.
  • Last update from VZ through its Twitter "We have determined cause of 4G LTE issue & are working with major vendors to restore connections. Details as they come." Fix for Thunderbolts that can't access 3G: dialing ##778# and hitting send in your dialer. The password is 000000. This will take you to your programming screen. Go to modem settings and then Rev A, change it to enabled and then hit the menu button on your phone and commit the changes. It will tell you to reboot and the problem will be fixed as you will now use the standard Rev A 3G networked used on all other Verizon 3G devices and of course if you have 4G it will use that if its available.

• Apple comments on iPhone location storm, software update soon
• Interview: Apple CEO Steve Jobs on How the iPhone Does and Doesn’t Use Location Information
• Jobs and Apple Execs on Tracking Down the Facts About iPhones and Location
• TomTom user data sold to Dutch police, used to determine ideal locations for speed traps
  • Apple posted a Q&A about location tacking
  • Says it is not tracking your phone, never has, never will
  • Re: logging location: Apple says its not logging, it's maintaing a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers. Helps triangulate you easier using the crowd-sourced database. What was found on the phone was a cache of a subset of that crowdsourced info.
  • Turning off location services doesn't stop data collection: that's a bug.
  • Crowd sourced database for ""improved traffic service in the next couple of years.""" "- Steve Jobs interview: reiterated the crowdsourced Apple statement
  • "We haven’t–as an industry–done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week.”
  • Also said Apple will testify before Congress.

• From Apple: Software Update -- Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:
  • reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
  • ceases backing up this cache, and
  • deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
• In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone. We’re an engineering-driven company. When people accuse us of things, the first thing we want to do is find out the truth. That took a certain amount of time to track all of these things down. And the accusations were coming day by day. By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days. Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.

• Finally: white iPhone 4 arrives April 28 on AT&T and Verizon
• Apple’s Jobs and Schiller On Why Making the White iPhone Was So Darn Tough
  • White iPhone to hit stores Apr. 28
  • Available in Apple stores, online, ATT stores, VZ stores, and select Apple Authorized Resellers
  • Originally announced in June 2010
• Schiller on White iPhone:
  • "There’s a lot more that goes into both the material science of it–how it holds up over time…but also in how it all works with the sensors.”
  • UV protection needed

Discussion Stories

• Nokia to cut thousands of jobs, outsource Symbian OS to Accenture
• 3,000 employees transferred to Accenture to provide Symbian software development and support. 4,000 more jobs to be eliminated in phases. All will be paid through end of 2011. "Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company"
  • “This collaboration demonstrates our ongoing investment to serve our Symbian customers,” said Jo Harlow, executive vice president for Smart Devices, Nokia. “As we move our primary smartphone platform to the Windows Phone platform, the transition of skilled talent to Accenture also shows our commitment to provide our Symbian employees with potential new career opportunities.”

• Yahoo Sells Delicious To YouTube Founders
• Delicious Blog Post on Sale
  • Delicious sold to Chad Hurley & Steve Chen, founders of YouTube thru a co called AVOS
  • Yahoo will run delicious until July 2011
  • Log in to Delicious, you'll have to agree to let Yahoo transfer your bookmarks. Opt-in only. If you don't agree to move, data will be wiped out
  • AVOS will continue Delicious service & will build a Firefox 4.0 extension (it's a ""top priority"" acc'g to Delicious FAQ)

• PSN data leak cost could top $24 billion - Report
• Sony sued for PlayStation Network data breach
• Microsoft Warns of 'Modern Warfare 2' Phishing Attacks
• Security experts: PlayStation Network breach one of largest ever
• Ars readers report credit card fraud, blame Sony
• Forbes estimates $318 lost per account, putting total cost at $24 billion. ---Patrick Seybold explains timing of announcements-- UK launching an inquiry into data breach, US Senator Blumenthal called on Sony to offer full disclosure to any user who's info was compromised. - Suit against Sony: Kristopher Johns, 36, of Birmingham, Ala., in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
  • Accuse Sony of not taking "reasonable care to protect, encrypt, and secure the private and sensitive data of its users."
  • Seeking class action status
  • PSN breach affected over 75M users
• "We learned there was an intrusion April 19th and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until [April 25] to understand the scope of the breach."
• Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and vice president of Barracuda Networks, says the PSN intrusion is "arguably the second largest data breach ever," trailing only 2009's Heartland Payment data breach, which impacted 175,000 merchants and millions of payment card transactions per month.

• ICE Uses Seized Domains for Best Anti-Piracy Video Ever
• Example of a seized domain and how the link works
• ICE released the above 76-second public service announcement to YouTube late Tuesday, and began promoting it on 65 of the 120 domains the agency seized in its anti-piracy program

News Fuse

• The FBI’s unprecedented effort to behead the Coreflood botnet appears to be working. According to court documents filed by the Justice Department on Monday to gain an extension for the operation, the number of pings from infected US systems plummeted from 800,000 to 100,000 in about a week. The FBI is also distributing a form to users of infected machines that would give authorities permission to delete Coreflood from their computers.

• RIM is buying Tungle.me! Yay! Wait, what's Tungle.me? It's a web app for social calendars that sync to Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook. Tungle.me is used by 800 universities and more than 150 companies already. It could signal a further move of BlackBerry as a cross-platform service provider.

• Jack Dorsey's Square payment system just got itself an investment from Visa. Square lets users accept person to person payments via credit cards using their smartphone and the Square credit card reader. No word if Visa paid by check or used a Square swipey thing.

• Google is supporting Google by introducing a new Google Docs Android App. It does the basics like create and edit documents, but it also an extra feature. Take a picture of text and the Google Docs app will attempt to read the text, then make it editable. Now, the app can't read all text (like handwriting), but it's still kind of cool.

• Do you happen to have around $100 million sitting around? If you're like me the answer is yes. And we're in luck - News Corp is selling MySpace and looking to get around $100 million for it. A steal for rich people, for as you may recall, In 2005 News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million. Maybe you could turn the the social network around.

• If you wanted to mod Minecraft and have it officially supported, it was going to cost you a little fee. Well, the Minecraft community didn't particularly care for that and let their opinion be heard. The designer of Mincraft "Notch" heard you and posted on his blog that "the cost of the mod api access will be 0 dollars." So you can get your Minecraft source code for free, people.

• Microsoft has sued Barnes & Noble over patent infringement related to the use of Android in the Nook. Today, B&N has officially answered Redmond's legal complaint with some scathing words of their own, saying Microsoft is trying to make Android unusable and unattractive through high license fees and "absurd licensing restrictions." Looks like Barnes and Noble isn't going down without a fight.

• According to a new report from Distimo, the official Google Android market now offers more free apps than Apple's App Store for iPhone. 12,000 more free apps in fact! If you want to compare absolute numbers - both paid and free, Apple still has the largest selection. Which means iOS is still where the money is.

Kickers and Weird Science

• China unveils space station, launching by 2020

Calendar

• On this day in 1981: The first integrated mouse for use with a PC made its debut with the Xerox Star workstation.
• Google has launched Chrome 11, with security fixes, speech to text, text to speech incorporated into HTML5... plus a new, flat, 2D version of the Chrome logo
• Amazon's Ad-Supported Kindle Starts Shipping Today. $25 less than a wifi kindle.. Initial sponsors include General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and Visa.
• Yep, the white iPhone 4 will April 28 on AT&T and Verizon. at the end of 2010 i predicted we'd never see one. i lose.
• Hulu Plus is coming to the Xbox on April 29
• T-Mobile is hosting a "speed challenge" this weekend in Seattle, & will award $1k to anyone who can prove that their iPhone is faster than a Samsung Galaxy S 4G.
• Apple preparing to ship the iPad 2 to 13 more countries
• CrackBerry reports RIM will rename BlackBerry OS 6.1 as BlackBerry 7 OS and launch it at BlackBerry World next week.
• Rogers LTE to reach four cities in 2011, peak at 150Mbps - Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver

Email=

"Hey TNT crew,

Daily watcher of the show, big time fan, and wanted to share this link. Sell promotion, I know, but thought it was important enough to send over. It's rather long winded I guess, but thought that most of it was necessary to explain what's going on.

http://blog.9magnets.com/post/4978627580/instagram-what-the-hell

As a short summary, I checked out an instagram photo I posted today to only realize that the public photo links give a fairly accurate Google map of the photo's location, even when you don't enter in a location or confirm that you want to share with Foursquare in the app. Doesn't ever show the location arrow to give the user some awareness in the status bar.

Maybe this is public knowledge and I'm a dumbass, but I had no idea that I was tweeting my location publicly for the last few months even when I didn't give a location to my Instagram photos. Fairly certain that Instagram added this map recently, but I don't know how recently. Never the less, with Apple's recent locationgate, thought that this was another example of why Apple needs to step to the plate and offer more disclosure of exactly what location data is being used in apps and by the device itself, because this scared the shit out of me and I'm a developer/relatively heavy iOS user.

Hope all is well guys, -Cameron "

"As requested....

When you take morphine

Poems flow forth like Sony

PSN data

-Bregol"

Sponsors

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Production Information

• Edited by: jason
• Notes:

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