PTJ 236: Corporate Spies

On this week’s show. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss Google and Twitter’s current wave of privacy-policy changes and data-sharing with advertisers (all taking place before Facebook’s latest flap). Also in the news this week: patent trolls, resolution motion-sensor camera, Russian hackers actually hacking Russians and Iris, the data-sniffing dog. Buffer up and have a listen to Episode 236 of Pop Tech Jam!

Links to Stories in This Week’s Episode

PTJ 235: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Journalist Laura M. Holson is back in the house this week with a discussion of how the cosmetics superstore Sephora is using technology and social interaction to sell beauty products. On the opposite side beauty, though, is the ugly — and last week’s massive global ransomware outbreak even got into fugly territory. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss the attack and the other notable news bits of recent days in this jam-packed episode of Pop Tech Jam.

Links to Stories Mentioned on This Week’s Show

PTJ 234: Winging It

Facebook scrambles to blunt the effects of fake news on the United Kingdom’s upcoming election, John Oliver and his fans have suggestions for the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon’s been busy and could a fried-chicken sandwich be headed for space? El Kaiser and J.D. chew through this week’s headlines and Don Donofrio drops by with an Apple status update. All this and more on Episode 234 of Pop Tech Jam!

Links to Stories in This Week’s News Segment

PTJ 233: Tweet TV

Twitter continues its experiments with live streaming video, Facebook is handing out coupons, there’s a new flavor of Windows 10 coming to town — and also maybe an Apple-branded talking Siri speaker on the way. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss it all on this week’s episode, while throwing a Tech Term and a (Hopefully) Helpful Hint into this week’s mix as well. Join us!

Links to Stories in This Week’s News Segment

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint: Go Dark

Do you long for the days of the WarGames-era VDT with the black screen and green type? Or do you just hate the glare of a bright white display? Are you coping with vision difficulties? If so,  your apps and operating system and some of your programs might include settings that make it easier on your eyes.

For example, If you don’t want to flip your whole operating system around, you can often find a dark or night mode setting in many apps — like Microsoft Edge, Twitter for Android and iOS, the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s own iBooks app, and some apps like Waze and Google Maps might flip to the night mode automatically, depending on the time of day. YouTube’s desktop site just added a dark mode, too.

But if you want things more consistently less glaring, Windows 10 has a Dark Mode available in the Settings app, as well as a High Contrast Mode in the Ease of Access controls. Dark Mode doesn’t make everything dark, mainly just the background of certain apps and system screens, but the High Contrast Mode flips the background and changes the colors of several kinds of screen type to make everything stand out better for those who have trouble discerning different tints. Apple’s System Preferences for macOS has similar controls in the Display area of the Accessibility settings.

And don’t worry — if you get tired of dark mode, you can always come back to the light.