The Ashley Madison Hackpocalypse shows no signs of fading away, Google has brought back its Map Maker tool (now with adult supervision) and the Japanese have sent whiskey into space. J.D. and El Kaiser march through these stories and more in the weekly roundup of geek news.
Technology has changed many aspects of daily life — including how we express ourselves through music, art, photography and more. Laura M. Holson drops by to discuss how people are finding outlets for their creativity with mobile apps. If you want to play along at home, check these out:
• GarageBand is music-making software for OS X and iOS and even if you don’t know the first thing about multitrack recording or writing your own songs, you’ll learn fast with this gem of a program. It’s $5 if it didn’t already come on your device and the help guide can be, well, helpful.
• Paper By FiftyThree is a free drawing, sketching and brainstorming app for the iPad.
• Frontback uses your smartphone’s front and rear cameras to take two images that are then shared as a single photo or video. It’s free for Android and iOS.
• Disney Frozen: Story Theater lets you create your own stories using characters and props from Disney’s unstoppable 2013 animated ice-princes film. (Yeah, good luck getting THAT SONG out of your head now.) The app is $5 for the iOS device of your choice, but that doesn’t mean it’s ad-free, as a disclaimer on the site warns: Before you download this experience, please consider that this app contains advertising for the Walt Disney Family of Companies.
• Buddha Board goes beyond the mobile app and lets you get the Zen with a $35 piece of hardware designed to let you live in the moment.
Well, that Ashley Madison thing sure blew up last week, didn’t it? At last count, there are five lawsuits seeking more than a half-billion dollars filed against the site and its parent company. In further fallout, a $500,000 reward has been offered for information leading to the arrest of the hackers. But in an ironic twist noted by security blogger Brian Krebs, other files posted in the data dump indicate that top dogs from Avid Life Media itself may have hacked a competing website themselves to hijack customer information. Oh, and the Columbia Journalism Review has some thoughts on the journalistic ethics of the whole sordid mess.
Microsoft may not be dominating smartphone sales, but the company is finding new uses for the devices. A Microsoft Research Project called MobileFusion lets people use their phones to scan objects and create high-quality 3D images that can be later used for things like augmented reality video games or 3-D printing. The research team on the project will formally present MobileFusion in early October at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality but you can check out the demo video now:
Comcast has big plans for the next couple of years. The company told the Fierce Cable site that it plans to upgrade its entire cable network with DOCSIS 3.1 technology, which can support maximum data speeds of 10 gigabits per second. No word on pricing for the home crowd yet
In the Department of Just Not Having It, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has threatened to fire — if the person was found to be a Mozilla employee — an anonymous Reddit user posting remarks about feminists and “social justice warriors.” In other company news, Mozilla announced a shift for the Firefox browser last week and has plans to move away from the add-in software created by third-party developers to the more secure extensions model used by Google Chrome.
Twitter has informed Open State Foundation, the Netherlands-based political watchdog group, that it was suspending access to the company’s API for both the Diplotwoops and Politwoops apps. The apps displayed deleted tweets of lawmakers and diplomats for journalists and other to see. While the US version of Polititwoops got the kibosh on May, other companies had been able to use it.
Google has re-opened its community-editing Map Maker tool to 45 more countries after shutting down the utility in May after a bout of user-generated vandalism was uncovered. Two weeks ago, Map Maker, reappeared for six countries. Google has changed the way Map Maker works, and now includes Regional Leads, or people who will moderate edits to maps in their area. Polygon editing is no longer available and Google warns that is you mess around and violate Map Maker’s terms of use, you will not be able to use the software anymore. The Android Police and other sites are reporting that Google is experimenting with adding food photography to its maps for people browsing restaurant possibilities.
In drone news, Sony is working with the Japanese robotics company ZMP and experimenting with an unmanned aerial vehicle that look like tiny airplane, but that can take off and land vertically. The two companies have formed a new company called Aerosense for commercial drone adventures, and have another model that looks more like the traditional buckshot-magnet quadcopter.
And finally, the International Space Station just received a cargo module from Japan with 4.5 tons of supplies — and a batch of Suntory Whiskey products. Now, before you have visions of the astronauts playing quarters in zero gravity or taking some really loopy spacewalks, the booze is there for scientific reasons. The whiskey samples will be studied to see if aging in microgravity has any effect on the mellowing of the liquor’s flavor. All in the name of science, folks.
This week along with a heaping helping of news, we feature a Hopefully Helpful Hint that focuses on the Windows 10 start menu and El Kaiser tells us all about Responsive Web Design.
For those of you about to pop, tech AND jam, we salute you!
After months of speculation, Android M has an official snack nickname in Google’s pantheon of tasty versions! Android 6.0, the next version of Google’s mobile operating system, will be called Marshmallow and the software development kit is now available for those who want to build apps for it. Ever so busy, Google also just built a standalone website for its Hangouts videochat service, too.
Amazon was not the only company with a PR team in overdrive lately. The social media team at the dating app Tinder took offense to a Vanity Fair article lamenting the rise of hookup apps in general and went on a long Twitter rant against the magazine and the author of the article. During the tweetstorm, the Tinder Twitter complained the writer did not contact the company for comment and accused Vanity Fair of one-side journalism. Others noted the article wasn’t specifically about Tinder, but dating apps in general, and said the company behaved like a hurt teenage girl lashing out and seemed surprised that journalists do things differently than PR people. Salon wondered if the whole thing was “a sincerely epic case of butthurt or just a clever attention-getting ruse.”
In other online hookup news, the National Security Agency and AT&T apparently had quite a partnership in sharing customer data. As revealed in the latest document dump from Edward Snowden and reported by The New York Times and ProPublica, AT&T gave the NSA access to billions of emails crossing its domestic networks, as well as a massive amount of cellphone calling records.
As for government agencies, there are new reports out that the hack on the Internal Revenue Service was larger than originally thought. New evidence points to the hack starting several months earlier than first noted as well. So, instead of 100,000 people having their personal details swiped, it’s more than 300,000.
The same sort of malvertising campaign that infested Yahoo’s ad network seems to have spread to other sites around the Web. The Malwarebytes security team reports they’ve now seen poison adverts on aol.com, weather.com, Weather Underground, The Drudge Report and other well-traveled domains.
Comcast is said to have new video platform called Watchable waiting in the wings. According to the Business Insider site, the telecom giant has formed partnerships with digital publishers like Vox, Buzzfeed, The Onion, Mic, Vice, Refinery29 and other sites to package content for streaming on the service. (BuzzFeed, for its part, announced this week that it was getting a 200 million dollar investment from Comcast family member NBC Universal to put toward its video efforts.) The new Comcast service, if it exists, could also compete with Verizon’s upcoming Go90 mobile video service.
Facebook is revamping its blog-like Notes feature to make it more appealing to users who have forgotten than Notes exists. Some have observed that the wide-margined new Notes templates make them look like articles on Medium. (Does anyone remember actually using Facebook Notes outside of those viral “15 Things” lists?)
Boston Dynamics recently released a video (below) that showed off Atlas, its humanoid robot with a stomp through the woods in such a manner that The Washington Post likened it to “a drunk Iron Man.” For those who have forgotten, Boston Dynamics is owned by Google, which is testing Atlas as an experimental bipedal rescue machine. Try to ignore the fact that it looks like, well, a Cylon.
Apple’s Siri assistant can do more than just set calendar appointments and look up baseball scores. The program was credited with saving the life of a teenage boy in Tennessee when he was pinned under his truck after the tire jack collapsed. While he was shifting around trying to get out from under the 5,000-pound Dodge Dakota, he heard the familiar Siri bleep coming from his back pocket and was able to get the app to call 911 for help with a life-saving butt-dial.
And finally, it’s not just shotgun owners and other privacy minded people who are annoyed by unmanned drones buzzing around overhead. Bears in the woods do not like drones either. Researchers at the University of Minnesota put health-tracking monitors on six black bears and recorded the ursine reaction to 17 drone flights. The heart rates of all the bears increased when the drones were within 21 years overhead — which indicates stress. The 15-page paper titled “Bears Show a Physiological but Limited BehavioralResponse to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” was published online in the journal Current Biology and concludes that more research is needed to see if the bears would get used to the drones over time. The study, in one convenient image:
Wildlife researchers do use drones in their work to observe animals from a distance, and Canada even has what the BBC calls a “goose-bothering drone” designed to scare off pesky Canadian geese in Ottawa by blasting recordings of predatory birds. And why yes, that drone is called the GooseBuster. Who ya gonna call?
The return of the Start menu was one of the things that made many a Windows 8 Haters stop griping about Microsoft and take a look at Windows 10. Yes, a variation of that handy little button is back, baby, hanging out in the lower-left corner of the screen. But if you’re used to the text-based list of items like in Windows 7, Vista and XP, this new-fangled Windows 10 Start menu looks and acts a little bit different.
How different? For one thing, it takes up more space when you pop it open, because Microsoft has shrunk down the old Windows 8 Start screen (the one with the little colored self-updating live tiles) and stuffed it into the Start menu. You can tap or click a tile to open its app, like Weather, Photos or Mail. You can ditch or resize the tiles within the Start menu as you see fit. So that’s nice.
For a lot of people, the Start menu was where you went every day to, well, get started — by opening your programs. The Windows 10 Start menu has a variation of the old All Programs menu found in previous editions, except now it’s a vertical list of little app tiles. Links to the File Explorer, system Settings and logout/shutdown button are all here in the new Start menu, too. And as with previous versions of Windows, you can pin your favorite and most-used items to the Start menu so they are always nearby. You can even combine pinned apps into a group.
Windows 10 brings along some new things as well. For one, Cortana is hanging out down there at the bottom of the screen, waiting for you to ask her stuff. Think the Windows 10 Start menu is too small and you miss the expansive Start screen of Windows 8? You can go back to the Windows 8 days when Start takes up the whole screen by changing your settings. You have options.
No matter if you’re coming from Windows 8 or an earlier version of Windows, elements of the Start menu will look vaguely familiar. For those who avoided Windows 8 and clung to XP or Windows 7, popping open the Start menu in Windows 10 can feel just like coming home again — albeit to a slightly bigger, colorful redecorated house that talks back to you.
Pixar Animation Studios not only makes great movies, it shares the love with its technology. Last spring, the company put out a free, non-commercial version of RenderMan, the same software it uses to the render animation and visual effects on its own films. This week, Pixar announced it was releasing its Universal Scene Description software as an open-source project by the summer of 2016. It’s the same software the pros use, so why is the company being so generous? Laura M. Holson drops by Pop Tech Jam HQ to discuss.
J.D. and El Kaiser also tear into the week’s tech headlines, including Google’s sudden corporate makeover, new plans from Verizon Wireless, Facebook’s new laugh study and the importance of eating your greens, even on an international space station.
A new report by Adobe and PageFair estimates that ad-blocking software will cause a $22 billion dollar loss of revenue for advertisers this year, and that could affect jobs. Advertisers worry that ad-squashing software is even starting to stifle those expensive video ads everyone’s rolling out. Many users counter those arguments by pointing out that online ads can stalk and collect data on the user, hog bandwidth and are often infected with malware. So that’s why they use software like Adblock Plus — and will do so on mobile platforms as more blocker apps arrive.
While most of the crew was enjoying delicious space salad, two cosmonauts from the Russian Federation Space Agency went on a five-hour spacewalk to install new equipment, clean the windows and inspect the exterior of the station.
Since it’s mid-August, the Applesauce rumor mill is beginning to grind faster ahead of the traditional September Apple Product Announcement and Media Lovefest. The 9to5Mac is among those guessing that the event will be on Wednesday, September 9th. The blogs are expecting Apple to reveal this year’s iPhone model with Force Touch feedback, iOS 9 and a new iOS-based Apple TV. The mythical, larger 12.9-inch iPad has also been rumored for fall.
And finally, Facebook just published a study about how the world expresses laughter online and found that the once-dominant chatroom standard LOL has become passé, giving way to chortling emojis, hehe and haha. Nelson Muntz, your time is now.
Blasting a nosy quadcopter out of the sky is a dream for some, but a Kentucky man was arrested in late July for shooting down a neighbor’s unmanned drone. The shooter claimed the drone was hovering low over his property, but the owner of the drone said he wasn’t spying. The Federal Aviation Administration is siding with the drone owner in this case, saying that the agency is responsible for the safety and management of US airspace from the ground up, and that shooting down the drone and causing it to crash endangers others. Another lawyer looking at the case told the Ars Technica site, “There is no defined aerial trespass law. You do not own the airspace over your own property.” (So is the concept of airspace rights just a real-estate scam? Confused.)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear the oral arguments in the lawsuits that sprang up from telecom providers over the new Net Neutrality rules later this year. Mark your calendar for December 4.
Sony has just announced two new Xperia smartphones, the C5 Ultra and the M5, and these are aimed at connoisseurs of the digital self portrait. The phones are part of Sony’s PROselfie line of handsets. The Xperia C5 Ultra has a 6-inch display with twin 13-megapixel cameras front and back, while the Xperia M5 has a 5-inch display, a 13-megapixel camera in the front, a 21-megapixel camera on the back, and is said to be waterproof. Both phones run the Android operating system and are expected to arrive in stores this month.
And finally, the fall Hammacher Schlemmer catalog is out now and the company’s exclusive $70 Selfie Toaster is still available — in case you want to start your holiday shopping before Labor Day. After all, a toaster that “uses custom heating inserts crafted from a submitted headshot photograph” to burn someone’s likeness into a piece of bread just may be the perfect gift for the person who has everything.
The independent audio magazine devoted to mashing up pop culture, technology and more. J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado are your hosts. It's an Internet Radio revolution!
