Tech News Today 417

Tech News Today Episode 417

"Auld Yang's Syne"Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar, Jason Howell, Peter Kafka and Ron Richards Recorded: January 17, 2012 Published: January 17, 2012 Duration: 45:23 Transcript Previous episode – Next episode

Contents 1 Tech News Today 417: Auld Yang's Syne 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 417: Auld Yang's Syne

Jerry Yang-ked from Yahoo! The Garage Band of eBooks from Apple? Could Samsung buy RIM?... 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
• Peter Kafka
  • allthingsd.com/conferences/dive-into-media
• Ron Richards
  • about.me/ronxo

Topics

• Jerry Yang Leaves Yahoo
• Yahoo! Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang
  • Jerry Yang has resigned from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company, effective today. he'll no longer be on the board of Yahoo Japan or Alibaba Group.
  • IS Bostock Next? What other board movements are coming?
  • Yahoo will report earnings Jan. 24
  • My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.

• Twitter shutting down for SOPA? That's just 'foolish,' CEO says
• Google will protest SOPA using popular home page
• CloudFlare Builds ‘Stop Censorship’ App, Lets Sites Easily “Black Out” Against SOPA
• Reeling MPAA declares DNS filtering "off the table"
• House to take up SOPA debate again next month
• SOPA protest swells as Google, Scribd, and Wordpress join
• SOPA Rep Blasts Wikipedia Blackout, Says Law To Go Forward In Feb.
  • Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in response to Radar reporter Alex Howard: "That's just silly, Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish." --"not shutting down a service doesn't equal not taking the proper stance on an issue,"
  • Jimmy Wales on Twitter: "We have no indication that SOPA is fully off the table. PIPA is still alive and kicking. We need to send Washington a BIG message."
  • Google will post a link on its home page tomorrow to notify users of Google's opposition (will not replace logo), Scribd, Wordpress, EFF, TwitPic among others joining the protest.
  • As of 4pm PST, anyone who uses CloudFlare can download the “CloudFlare Stop Censorship” app with one click from the CloudFlare App Marketplace. (code also on GitHub as well)
  • Words longer than five characters will be blacked out --- A "Censored" corner badge will appear at the top of your page.
  • Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to go ahead with a vote on PIPA on January 24.
  • Rep. Lamar Smith - Believes debate on SOPA will resume next month. Regarding Wikipedia: "It is ironic that a website dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites. This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts. Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy".
  • "DNS filtering is really off the table," said Paul Brigner, the MPAA's tech policy chief, on Tuesday. His remarks came during a debate on SOPA at the State of the Net conference in Washington DC.

• Research In Motion pushing for sale to Samsung
• RIM To Release 7-Inch And 10-Inch PlayBooks This Year?
• RIM Said To Court Samsung’s Bid After Pushing Microsoft, Nokia Away
  • Sources tell BGR RIM examining license deals, favors a sale, Samsung is the front runner for acquisition.
  • BGR speculates Samsung could integrate BBMand other enterprise functions into Android phones
  • BGR says RIM wants more than $10 billion

Discussion Stories

• [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-to-announce-tools-platform-to-digitally-destroy-textbook-publishing.ars Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing
• Apple's education event is getting seriously over-hyped
  • Apple announcement in New York Jan. 19th at 10 AM Eastern likely to be "garage Band for e-books" according to Ars Technica.
  • Apple is expected to announce support for the ePub 3 standard for iBooks going forward.
  • ePub 3 standard obviates the need for proprietary extensions to include audio and video elements
  • Fortune interviewed Matt MacInnis CEO of INkling who believesthe announcement will be designed to support the textbook industry, not to do an end-run around it.

• Facebook Koobface worm 'hacker gang named'
• The Koobface malware gang - exposed!
  • Facebook and Sophos tracked down the creators of the Koobface worm that infected Facebook
  • A NYTimes article names the five men who are from St. Pertersburg, Russia
  • independent researcher Jan Dromer, and the Sophos's Dirk Kollberg revealed details of the investigation in a report
  • Received texts updating the amount of money they were making, and checked in on FourSquare
  • Facebook announced that it will begin sharing information about the group and how to fight them with security researchers and other Internet companies. It believes public namings can make it harder for such groups to operate and send a message to the criminal underground.
  • Koobface was a false video link that prompted the user to download a flash update which which actuallyw as the malware."

• Developers Get Ready To Tell Facebook About Every “Action” You Take
• Facebook Is Totally Not an Echo Chamber, Says Facebook
  • Liz Gannes at ATD reports Facebook will launch OpenGraph partners
  • This is what the Wednesday evening event will be about
  • May be last press conference before filing for IPO and entering quiet period
  • Read, Listen Watch apps like Washington Post, Spotify and Hulu already out there.
  • Paper called “Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks.” contends Facebook users end up learning lots of stuff from people they barely know
  • So all this deluge of apps sharing will be good...... right?

News Fuse

• We've heard Storage Spaces will give Windows 8 more flexible disk space & simpler, powerful storage management. Now the answer to preventing and detecting corruption, and assuring that damage to one file does not spread to others is in a new file system called ReFS (from "Resilient File System"). ReFS will still use the NTFS API and handling of caching and security, but the lower-level parts of the driver that dictate how data is laid out on disk, have changed.

• And the Patent Wars continue....Apple has filed suit in Dusseldorf Regional Court against Samsung to ban the sales of Samsung’s Galaxy S II and Galaxy S Plus, along with eight other smartphones. Meanwhile Samsung wants details on Apple's deal with Qualcomm. At issue is whether when Apple purchases chips from Qualcomm they also receive patent protection.

• Max Payne 3 - the sequel to Rockstar’s popular franchise - has officially moved from a March release to an actual May 15 release date.It’s the 3rd straight year that Rockstar has launched a game in that mid-May timeframe, so not a huge surprise. In 2010 it was Red Dead Redemption; last year, L.A. Noire. No word on how the Max Payne delay will affect the release of Grand Theft Auto V, if at all.

• Remember when we said nobody talks about AMD anymore? Strike that. DigiTimes is reporting that AMD's upcoming Trinity APUs will hit shelves in "Ultrathin" laptops and run between $100-200 less than comparable Intel Ultrabooks. The lower price isn't historically anything new for AMD, but if performance can keep up, they might be onto something.

• Scott Forstall is Apple's 'CEO-in-waiting' says new book

• Google OpenStreetMap reps have tracked some serious vandalism, like moved and deleted items and reversed one-way street directions to a Google IP address in India. A Google spokesperson informs The Verge that two contractors at fault are off their projects. The vandal's IP addresses match those that were discovered last week by Mocality, the Kenyan firm that caught Google Kenya staff in the act of stealing its customers.

• Sprint's HTC EVO 3D is getting a new firmware update that wipes the infamous Carrier IQ software, which makes good on the promise Sprint made back in December to start disabling it across their device lineup. HTC has confirmed it's working with Sprint on releases that will remove Carrier IQ and provide security enhancements and bug fixes beginning this month.

• A group of disgruntled Netflix investors has filed a class action lawsuit against the movie rental company for allegedly withholding information. The lawsuit, was filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System on behalf of all investors. The suit claims senior management didn’t tell investors that many of its streaming content contracts would soon need to be renegotiated at a much higher cost, and accuses executives of selling stock at artificially high prices.

• According to NokiaWP, leaked photos of a few new Sony phones include one of a phone running Windows Phone 7. The phone still carries the old Sony Ericsson brand, so it must date back to before Sony bought out Ericsson's stake of the company in October. CNET notes Sony hasn't had a Windows-based phone since early 2010 with the Sony Ericsson Aspen which ran Windows Mobile.

Randomizer

• Scientists: Mars rocks fell in Africa last July

Calendar

• [ihttp://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/16/itunes-match-launches-in-19-new-countries-latin-america-baltics-netherlands/ Tunes Match has launched in 19 New Countries, focusing on Latin America, Baltics, and the Netherlands. Total countries offering iTunes Match is up to 37. The Latin American countries seeing iTunes Match debut today already had the iTunes in the Cloud functionality.]
• Several of the world's largest ISPs including ATT, Comcast, and Time Warner, and websites including FB, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Bing announced they'll permanently enable IPv6 -- the next-generation Internet Protocol -- on their products and services starting June 6, 2012.
• Twitter CEO Dick Costolo might think it's foolish, but the SOPA blackout is still on for tomorrow. College students, cut&paste from Wikipedia while you still can

INCOMING

Email

"Hey TNT Crew,

I’m just writing in response to the Windows 8 Secure Boot controversy.

When the iPad was released, I didn’t see dozens of stories saying, “iPad gets locked down so it can’t run Linux, it’s an outrage”, people just accepted that. For some reason though when the same choice comes up and Microsoft makes the same decision as Apple, Microsoft gets dozens of stories written about how bad they are. Double standards in reporting much? (not talking about your show, you generally present very balanced views, I’m talking about lots of the tech blogs here).

If we’re talking about choice here, why shouldn’t there be a choice available where I can buy a tablet for a kid or for my Mum and know that no matter what they do, no matter what deep, dark control panel they might end up in, they absolutely cannot disable a feature which protects the boot loader from Malware? Why should I not be allowed to have that choice, just because 1% of the community wants to use the tablet for something it wasn’t designed to do?

If they want to run Linux on a tablet, either buy an Android Tablet (which is Linux to begin with), or buy one of the countless x86 based tablets that I’m sure will be available for Windows 8 which they can modify to their heart’s content! Everybody wins then!

Andrew"

Sponsors

GoToMeeting

• ad times: :35-:45 and 17:27-18:29

Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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