Tech News Today 416

Tech News Today Episode 416

"Blackberry Berry Sad"Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar, Jason Howell, Cali Lewis Recorded: January 16, 2012 Published: January 16, 2012 Duration: 44:29 Transcript Previous episode – Next episode

Contents 1 Tech News Today 416: Blackberry Berry Sad 1.1 Hosts 1.2 Topics 1.3 Discussion Stories 1.4 News Fuse 1.5 Randomizer 1.6 Calendar 2 INCOMING 2.1 Email 3 Sponsors 3.1 GoToMeeting 4 Production Information

Tech News Today 416: Blackberry Berry Sad

Zappos hacked, SOPA on the Ropes, good news and bad news for Linux and secure boot, and more.

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

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@SarahLane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar (@Iyaz)
  • ThisOldNerd.FiniteComedy.com
• Jason Howell (@RayGun01)
  • JasonHowell.net
• Cali Lewis
  • geekbeat.tv

Topics

• Zappos says hacker may have accessed info on 24 million customers
• Zappos and 6PM.com hacked: customer names, addresses, and phone numbers exposed
• Non-US Customers Kept in Dark as Zappos Cleans up After Data Breach
  • 24 million customers told personal info accessed - e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, and the last four digits of consumers' credit card numbers
  • Full cc numbers not stolen -- 6PM.com also affected (affiliated site)
  • even though passwords encrypted, all passwords forced to change
  • Zappos shut down phone lines - International access limited
  • Attack targeted server in Kentucky

• SOPA anti-piracy bill stalls after DNS blow
• Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy
• Momentum shift: SOPA, PIPA opponents now in driver's seat
• Obama: Don’t Worry Internet, I Got Your Back on That SOPA Thing
• Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA
• Googler on how best to black out your site
  • Rep. Darrell Issa said Saturday that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised not to take up a vote on SOPA until a consensus is reached.
  • Friday after TNT recorded SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced that he would be pulling the DNS-blocking provisions from his own bill.
  • six GOP senators who served on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which unanimously approved the legislation last year) wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to postpone a vote on PIPA to give them more time to study the legislation.
  • Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). After reddit members raised $15,000 in 48 hours for his anti-SOPA challenger, Ryan came out with a clear statement of opposition to the legislation.
  • Responding to a petition, White House put up a blog post stating that President Obama will not “support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
  • Pierre Far, a Google employee working in the UK has posted instructions for how to black out your site should you choose that protest method.
  • Webmasters should return a 503 HTTP header for all the URLs participating in the blackout (parts of a site or the whole site). This helps in two ways:

a. It tells us it's not the "real" content on the site and won't be indexed. b. Because of (a), even if we see the same content (e.g. the “site offline” message) on all the URLs, it won't cause duplicate content issues. 2. Googlebot's crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers. This is unavoidable but as long as the blackout is only a transient event, it shouldn't cause any long-term problems and the crawl rate will recover fairly quickly to the pre-blackout rate. How fast depends on the site and it should be on the order of a few days.

• Microsoft mandating Secure Boot on ARM, making Linux installs difficult
• Linux won't be locked out of Windows 8 PCs, but FUD continues
  • ComputerWorld points to Windows 8 Hardware cert. requirements
  • "On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup,"
  • "On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. … Disabling Secure MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems,"
  • And begin spin based on your religious OS beliefs.

Discussion Stories

• Wintel tablet PCs may be priced from US$599-899
• Windows 8 tablets could be priced right out of contention
  • Digitimes reports Microsoft and Intel are holding the line on prices meaning Windows 8 tablets may start at $599
  • if Microsoft drops its Windows 8 and Intel drops its Clover Trail-W prices, it could seriously damage pricing in the PC market
  • if Intel does not reduce its Clover Trail-W platform prices, the vendors are likely to choose ARM solutions from Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instrument's

• iPad 3 Production Begins, Report Says
  • Bloomberg reports that production of the iPad 3began this month and will reach full volumes some time in February
  • Quad-core processor and LTE, better resolution, better graphics processor
  • iPad's better battery can handle the LTE drain better than the iPhone
  • Mass production began at the start of January, with production lines in some of Foxconn's Chinese factories running for 24 hours a day, the report says. Manufacturing will stop temporarily for the Chinese New Year later this month and then restart in February, apparently.
• Even Woz Thinks the Android Bests the iPhone
• The people I recommend the iPhone 4S for are the ones who are already in the Mac world, because it’s so compatible, and people who are just scared of computers altogether and don’t want to use them. The iPhone is the least frightening thing. For that kind of person who is scared of complexity, well, here’s a phone that is simple to use and does what you need it to do,” he says.

News Fuse

• Hackers made the websites of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, several banks and national Israeli airline El Al, unavailable using denial-of-service attacks. No information was compromised and the sites are back up. No one has yet to claim responsibility for the DoS, but "Nightmare," formerly known as "Group-XP" is suspected.

• Facebook and Google faced obscenity charges today in the Delhi High Court. The government argued the sites should be accountable for content ruled offensive by the Indian government. Both companies argued that they cannot control the information that appears on their sites, while Google further argued that it cannot control websites searched by users. Google's lawyer Neraj Kishan Kaul said, "There are serious constitutional issues of freedom of speech." Microsoft and Yahoo are set to join the case and the trial will resume Thursday.

• According to AllThingsD's sources, Facebook will likely go public in the third week of May. If that time table is correct, the company must file with the SEC within the next month because an SEC review takes several months. The company's valuation has been estimated to be $100 billion and Facebook may be looking to raise another $10 billion.

• Bad news for LightSquared - a memo by the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee says that LightSquared's LTE network will cause interference with GPS equipment and that LightSquared's proposed fixes will not work. Further tests will no longer be conducted. LightSquared responded by claiming the tests are not accurate and the government is biased in favor of the GPS industry.

• Samsung announced its Bada OS will be merged into Intel's Tizen, the successor to MeeGo. All of those operating systems are based on Linux, so developers won't have to relearn anything because Tizen is backwards compatible with Bada. Samsung hasn't announced which devices will be Tizen-powered.

• During an interview at CES, Skype VP of products Rick Osterloh said that Skype for Windows Phone is "coming out soon." Microsoft bought Skype back in October and announced plans to integrate Skype in many products including Xbox and Windows Phone. The Verge's sources say deep integration of Skype and Windows Phone is not expected until "Apollo" lands later this year.

• Hulu will launch a new original show called "Battleground" on February 14th. It will be the company's first original scripted program and second original. It's a comedy that chronicles the life of a political candidate. "Battleground" will be available on Hulu's free and plus versions.

• Facebook and Politico are working together on "sentiment analysis reports" to show what the U.S.really thinks about the presidential candidates. Facebook will provide all messages and comments that contain a presidential candidate's name - including private ones - to Politico to make the report. The companies assure that the process is automated and no Facebook employees will read any posts.

• On to Patent Wars! Nokia sold off 450 video and wireless patents and applications to Sisvel International, but will retain a license to use the tech covered. Nokia believes some of the patents are essential for standards like 3G and LTE. Switching gears - the ITC issued an initial ruling on Friday that Motorola did not infringe on three of Apple's patents. A final ruling is scheduled for Friday.

• ITC gives Motorola the early win in patent fight with Apple

Randomizer

• iPhone, iPad owners see glass half full while BlackBerry users are down in the dumps - Gazelle’s poll, 52% of iPhone users and 58% of iPad users are always optimistic about their future while 28% of Android smartphone users and 36% of Android tablet users share the same outlook.

Calendar

• Starting today, you can get the Nokia Lumia 710 on T-Mobile for free at Walmart. Otherwise it's $49.95 with a new agreement.

• Facebook announced a January 18th event in San Francisco and invites have started rolling out to the press. What's it about? We don't know yet, but it's being held at 25 Lusk which is a not-that-huge restaurant and bar.

• Boing Boing will go dark on Jan 18 to fight SOPA... as will....Wikipedia
• Wikipedia founder @jimmy_wales says the site will go offline for 24 hours on Wednesday to protest #SOPA the anti piracy bill - affects only English Wikipedia
• Reddit as well, 12 hours.

INCOMING

Email

"Hi all,

I just watched episode 413 and I would like to give some input on your comments about Intel chips in android phones and I just wanted to point out that android apps are coded in java so as long as Intel provides a jvm (JAVA virtual machine) the android applications will run. Remember the apps are not compiled to the chip but to java byte code that is independent of the machine code.

Just my two cents.

Richard in Denver."

"After your segment on ViaSat on the calendar segment on Friday I went to their website to check it out because my dsl only goes up to 3.0 Mbps down. Their $50 package a month you talked about only allows for 7.5 GB a month! And the prices and allowed amounts go up from there. That just doesn't seem usable to me. I actually thought about looking into it but I guess I won't now. Here is a link to the page, there is a table in the middle about half way down with the pricing: http://www.viasat.com/news/announcing-exedesm-viasat-12-mbps-high-speed-broadband-service-for-50

Love watching your show!

Thanks,

Matt Murphy"

"Hey TNT Crew, I just watched episode 415 and you were talking about the guy whose iPhone interrupted the symphony. Sarah commented that she thought that Apple should find a way to make the silent switch affect the alarm as well. I, for one, am glad that this is not the case, as I use my iPhone for my morning alarm. I turn it to silent when I go to bed, as I don't want emails and text messages to wake me up in the middle of the night. But I definitely want my alarm to wake me up for work. Just my two cents.

Love the show, and keep up the good work, Patrick"

Sponsors

GoToMeeting

• ad times: :35-:44 and 18:26-19:58

Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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