Tech News Today 290

Tech News Today Episode 290

Tech News Today 290: Social Cockroaches

Apple buying Hulu, Google getting games, we find out what lurks in the heart of the MacBook Air, and more.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Stephen Johnson
  • newbrewthursday.com

Top Stories

• Verizon Posts Solid Earnings, Buoyed by 2.3 Million iPhone 4 Sales
• Verizon has best quarter since 2008, thanks largely to iPhones and LTE
  • Verizon announced its quarterly numbers today, beat expectations - according to Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg it was "one of Verizon's best quarters since the 2008 economic downturn"
  • Revenue of $27.5 Billion, earnings per share of 57 cents
  • Verizon also shuffled some execs: COO Lowell McAdam will become CEO starting August 1st. Current CEO Ivan Seidenberg will remain Chairman
  • McAdam was head of Verizon Wireless until last Sept.
  • Vz activated 2.3 million iPhone 4 in the quarter (compare with AT&T's 3.6M iPhones, but that also includes the 3GS).
  • Vz activated 1.2M LTE devices
  • churn level was 0.89%, lowest in 3 years.
  • added 2.2M wireless lines,
  • added 189k net new FiOS Internet, 184k net new FiOS TV connections (totals are 4.5M FiOS internet, 3.8M FiOS TV)

• Apple Said to Consider Making Bid for Hulu
• Don’t Hold Your Breath on That Apple Hulu Deal
  • Bloomberg reports that Apple is in "early talks that may lead to an offer for Hulu" according to "two people with knowledge of the auction"
  • Apple has $76.2B in cash and securities, Hulu is thought to be valued at around $2B [Apple just paid for $2.6B for its part of the Nortel Patent purchase]
  • Peter Kafka at AllThingsD tried to put perspective to the whole thing
  • Apple has met with the bankers marketing Hulu, but no one Kafka's talked to believes that Apple is a serious candidate to buy Hulu.
  • Companies linked to the Hulu sale so far: Yahoo (wanted exclusive rights to content), Microsoft (said to drop out of talks), Google, Verizon, AT&T and Amazon. "

• Spotify May Have 70,000 Paid Subscribers a Week After U.S. Launch
• Spotify Gained 70,000 U.S. Subscribers in First Week: Sources
  • Billboard Editor Bill Werde heard from his sources that Spotify in one week has amassed 70k paid subscribers in the US
  • Spotify has 1.6M subscribers in 2 years for its European service
  • Extrapolated numbers for the U.S . - if the rate of growth continued in one year in the US Spotify would have 3M paying customers acc'g to Silicon Alley Insider (that's just crazy)
  • Context: Rhapsody has 800k paying customers, Napster has 761,000 paying subscribers. But they are years old.
  • When contacted by Billboard, a Spotify spokesperson said "The launch of Spotify in the US has exceeded our expectations in both the response to invitations for the free service as well as subscriptions. We aren't going to discuss numbers at this stage but we are excited to be here and confident that Americans will love Spotify as much as they already do in Europe."

Discussion Stories

• Google+ Games Stream confirmed
• Soon-to-Debut Google+ Games Will Hit Facebook Where it Hurts: The Pocketbook
  • Slashgear says that Google has inadvertently confirmed its "Google+ Games stream" with a post on Google's help pages
  • A screen cap of the help page includes the line ”If you’re looking for updates shared from games, check out your Games stream”
  • The mention of the Game stream is now gone.

• More than 800 Android apps are leaking personal data
  • Security firm Dasient checked 10k Android apps found hat more than 8% of apps are transmitting personal user data to unauthorized computers
  • 11 apps sent texts to entire contacts list
  • Other apps transmit the IMEI (specific to) and IMSI (specific to subscriber) numbers
  • Dasient CTO Neil Daswani says the amount of infected apps has doubled in the last 2 years

• Teardown of Apple's new MacBook Air finds SSDs are replaceable
• Sandy Bridge's GPU makes room for Thunderbolt in new MacBook Air
• New Mac mini gets iFixit teardown treatment, leaves space for 2nd hard drive
  • iFixit found that SSDs of the latest MBA are not soldered on to the logic board so you can upgrade if you so desire (This was true of the last MBA model as well)
  • RAM still is soldered to the board - so if you wanted one of these things, you'll still have to pay Apple an extra $200 for 2GB more of RAM
  • What's new is Bluetooth 4.0 in the MBA as well as mac mini, mac mini also has a second port for another hard drive. You'll have to figure out how to attach that SATA cable.
  • ALSO Graphics come from an on-die Intel HD 3000 IGP, so no more NVIDIA 320M controller with integrated graphics. Instead there's an Intel platform controller hub labelled E78296 01PB10 / E116A746 SLJ4K. Ifixit thinks it's Thunderbolt's controller.

• Widespread NFC adoption still 'four years away'
• Gartner: 141 million to use mobile payments in 2011
  • Gartner Group says US Market not ready for NFC
  • "We believe mass market adoption of NFC payments is at least four years away." citing that customers would have to get used to paying with their phones
  • Gartner says that money transfers and prepaid top-ups will drive mobile-payment business in developing markets [Africa, Eastern Europe, Middle East]

News Fuse

• The New York-based law firm of Bursor & Fisher has filed 11 arbitration cases against AT&T with the goal of blocking the acquisition of T-Mobile. Bursor & Fisher say the deal violates the Clayton Antitrust Act, and that same act gives private parties the ability to challenge a proposed merger if they are adversely affected. The firm has set up a site at FightTheMerger.com with an explanation of its case and hopes to get lots more people to file cases.
• Oracle and Google are still locked in a legal battle over Java patents. Apparently a hearing held on Thursday was less than civil - the presiding judge said, "You're both asking for the moon and you should be more reasonable." Oracle had also been asking to depose Larry Page about his role in the alleged patent infringing - and guess what? Wish granted. An order issued yesterday gave Oracle permission to depose Page for two hours.
• Oracle can question Google's Larry Page in patent dispute

• Steve Jobs once said that at Apple there was a saying, "Isn't it funny? A ship that leaks form the top." Well, he's going to love this - the LG Display CEO Young Soo Kwon told everyone that Apple will be putting LG's Retina Displays into the next iPad. Kwon decided to spill the beans after LG Display's less-than stellar second-quarter report. Apple currently uses LG's displays for its iPhone 4 and according to Kwon, more smartphones will get that display too.

• It's time for your daily TNT hacking update: Yesterday, we reported that Anonymous had obtained NATO data, but used discretion in not releasing the data. Today, a person purporting to be a part of Anonymous claimed that Anonymous will eventually release the data because Anonymous always releases everything. Also, the AnonPlus social network has been hacked by a group calling itself "AKINCILAR" - that's the name of a town in Turkey, so this hack could be retaliation for Anonymous hacking into Turkish government sites.
• Hackers break into ‘AnonPlus’ social network
• Lodsys has amended its ongoing complaint against iOS app devs, removing Vietnamese Wulven Games, but adding five new companies, Just some small names like Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Atari, Take-Two Interactive and oh yeah, ROVIO. Now those birds have a reason to be angry.
• That Xbox Kinect is a great idea - control your games with movement without a controller! I wonder how no one thought of this before Microsoft. Wait, Impulse Technology says it actually patented technology that tracks user movements to play video games and is now suing Microsoft over the Xbox Kinect. Impulse is also suing Sega, Konami and EA (which is also being sued by Lodsys).
• Sony is battling a total of 55 class action lawsuits as a result of the PSN security breach, which exposed the personal details of tens of millions of customers. One is from a major insurance company, Zurich American, which is telling courts it shouldn't have to pay Sony to help it cover the costs of said suits. Sony estimates the attacks cost them $200 million.
• Jammie Thomas is back in the news, and no, sadly her case of copyright infringement is not over. But at least she's done with District court. Judge Mike Davis just ruled that the original judgment of $1.5 million should be lowered to $54,000. The Judge called the amount "wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable" and ruled it unconstitutional. Next stop, Appeals court!

Randomizer

• The UK Would Deprive Us Our Manimals

Calendar

• 26 years ago on Saturday, the world was introduced to the A1000, or you may know it as the Commodore Amiga 1000
• The AT&T Nexus S hits Best Buy this Sunday - $100 with contract
• T-Mobile will get the HTC Wildfire S, an Android phone with a somewhat reasonable 3.2-inch screen, on August 3rd. It'll cost you around $80
• Sony will discontinue the 8mm video format as of September.
• The Microsoft-Skype acquisition is scheduled to close by October according to Skype's CEO.
• 20th Century Fox movies are coming to Android devices starting in October - you'll have to buy a physical version of the movie, but then you'll get a digital copy for Android as well.

Email

"Here's a story for you:

Last weekend our cable provider Suddenlink brought out their own Tivos for use on their cable network and when they did, all the existing TiVos on the network lost their CableCard pairings. So now we can no longer get our premium channels. Service technicians are working on a solution. No mention of the problem on their website.

Dick Eades"

"Hey tnt crew,

I was just watching the skype advertising section of TNT 289 and wanted to point out that microsoft already has display ads on Windows Live Messenger. Small banner ads are displayed along the bottom of the application, weather chatting or video calling. The ads are non intrusive and small.

Just wanted to point that out for you american folk. Keep up the good work

- Jonathan, Cyprus (that's a country)"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

This area is for use by TWiT staff only. Please do not add or edit any content within this section.