Tag Archives: Facebook

PTJ 100: Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now

As we approached the century mark in episodes J.D. and I considered all the cool things we could do to mark the occasion. Sky divers, bouncy castles, and a Blade Runner marathon were all discussed but in the end we decided to offer up what all of you have come to expect from us: tech news, helpful hints, product reviews and shenanigans. Thank you for sticking with us for these past 100 episodes and we look forward to serving up many, many more!

This week El Kaiser takes a listen to Bowers & Wilkins flagship P7 headphones and J.D. makes using your set top boxes a whole lot easier.

In the news, Facebook experiments with its users; the NSA takes a particularly strong interest in Linux users; protocols for the Internet of Things popping up like weeds;  Python is more popular than Java in schools; and The Beatles film “A Hard Days Night” gets the remastering treatment.

PTJ 100 News: Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge

Oh, Facebook. The revelation of your controversial “emotional contagion” experiment  was weeks ago, but people are still talking about it. (In case you were on vacation, too, this was the one where Facebook deliberately tampered with the feeds of about 700,000 users back in January 2012 and took note of how those people reacted to really negative or really positive postings — but the site never informed the affected users that they were being used as guinea pigs.) The news broke in mid-June when a paper on the study was published and now the editor of that academic journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  has issued an Editorial Expression of Concern over the whole thing.

Facebook, facing a backlash, defended the its actions and said a clause in its terms of service  informs users that their data may be used for research purposes. But, as The Daily Dot, Forbes and others point out, that policy wasn’t added until four months after the experiment took place. Why, yes, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has already filed a complaint against Facebook to the Federal Trade Commission. Regulators in Ireland and the United Kingdom are looking into the matter as well.

This is apparently nothing new on the Facebook campus, as a former data scientist for the company basically told The Wall Street Journal, hey, if you’re a Facebook user, you’ve been experimented on. Andrew Ledvina, on his blog, later clarified some of his statements and said several were taken out of context by the paper.

Tux Also in the Department of Things Under Scrutiny: Linux users. New disclosures about the National Security Agency and its practices claim the NSA is particularly interested in visitors to the Linux Journal site, along with those who frequent the TOR (The Onion Router) and Tails Linux distro site.

If we’re going to have an Internet of Things, we’re gonna need some  protocols and specifications. Wouldn’t you know it, major technology companies are jumping in to create an open-source standard for wirelessly connecting devices.The latest group is called the Open Interconnect Consortium and its founding members include Intel, Samsung, Dell, Wind River, Broadcom and others. However, this is not the first Internet of Things club. The Allseen Alliance, formed last year, counts Qualcomm, Microsoft, Cisco, LG, Panasonic, D-Link, HTC among its 50 or so members. (Will there be a nerd war over IoT standards?)

Interconnected smart homes are starting to go mainstream, though. Box-boxer The Home Depotis now working with Wink, the app and platform that lets you control and monitor your connected thermostat, locks, lights, blinds and other household furnishings from your smartphone.

If you’re getting ready to study computer science at any of the top universities here in the States this fall, odds are you’ll probably be taking a Python course or two. According to the newsletter for the Association for Computing Machinery, Python has now passed Java as the most popular programming language taught in introductory computer-science courses. (If you can’t afford the time or money to go to college, you can take a free Python fundamentals course online at the Codeacademy.) And yes, the name is derived from the British comedy classic, Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

monty

Also in education news, alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dropbox have teamed up on a new email platform called Inbox.  The Inbox announcement comes a few weeks after Google announced its new Gmail API at the I/O conference.

The PC market, once thought on the decline thanks to the rise of tablets and mobile devices, has had a bit of an uptick — or perhaps, less of a slump than expected, According to Gartner Research, PC shipments will only drop 2.9 percent this year, compared to a plummet of 9.5 percent last year. Part of this change is said to be people upgrading from their ancient Windows XP machines at last.

beatlesAnd finally, the latest digital restoration technology is to thank for the restoration and re-release of A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 film staring The Beatles in their youthful prime. The Criterion Collection folks created a 4K scan of the film from its original 35-millimeter negative to work with and added a 5.1 surround sound mix.

The restored film had a limited release in theaters last week and is also available on Blu-ray and DVD. Yes, it’s true, money can’t buy you love — but you can get a lovely restored classic piece of movie (and music) history on Blu-ray disc for less than $40.

PTJ 97: Descent Into Casual Gaming and Tips for Better Throwback Photos

El Kaiser makes a difficult confession: he’s traded in his first person shooters for crushing candy and fuming feathered friends.

Throwback Thursdays on Twitter and Facebook have people digging through their old photo albums but if your old snapshots haven’t held up too well over the years J.D. has tips for how to spruce them up.

In the news the onslaught of the Electronic Entertainment Expo gets underway in Los Angeles; Apple unveils a new headphone standard;  Sony debuts its new PlayStation TV; Amazon integrates Audible audiobook lineup into the Kindle ebook app; Google gets into the satellite game by acquiring of Skybox Imaging; Netflix and Verizon continue their corporate slapfight; and Wired magazine dredges up old Star Trek misfires.

PTJ 97 News: All Ears

If it’s June and the WWDC is over, it must be time for the Electronic Entertainment Expo! The show opened in Los Angeles earlier this week to show off this year’s offerings for the gaming crowd; sites like GameSpot and Kotaku have the latest news. Some early announcements included Sony’s new PlayStation TV, formerly the PlayStation Vita TV, a $99 set-top box for streaming PS4 games to other TV sets around the house.  Sony presented its new console game lineup for this year, as did Microsoft, which formerly put the new lower-priced Xbox One Without the Kinect Controller on sale for $399.

ligthingApple’s Worldwide Developers Conference wrapped up last week, but not before revealing a new standard that uses the company’s own Lighting connector (right) for headphones. The new Lightning module is supposed to provide more bandwidth and control for services like iTunes Radio. By drawing power from the iPhone through the Lightning port, for example, headphone accessory makers could do things like design noise-canceling headphones without the need for an external battery. No announcements have been made concerning the demise of the standard 3.5 mm headphone jack on iOS devices, but some people point out that Apple did just buy Beats Electronics, maker of headphones, so hello, new standards. Others, like the gang over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog argue strongly that Apple will keep the traditional headphone jack because of the massive mount of gear out there that uses the 3.5 mm plug.

The World Cup tournament kicks off this week, and Facebook and Twitter are jumping in with their own social-media fútbol features. Facebool will host a special Trending World Cup section on the Newsfeed page. Meanwhile, Twitter is promoting the official #WorldCup hashtag and encouraging fans to keep up with the news by following the official Twitter accounts like @FIFAWorld Cup and @ussoccer. (Perhaps in all the excitement of the looming soccerpalooza, Facebook accidentally released its new Slingshot messenger app to the public for a short time. Whoops!)

amazonAmazon announced the integration of its Audible audiobook lineup into the Kindle ebook app for Android and iOS. Book lovers can now listen to their audiobooks without having to use a separate app; that Kindle app upgrade is available now. Even if you don’t own the audio version of an ebook, Amazon is also offering “Whispersync for Voice,” for more than 45,000 of its Kindle titles so you can read and listen to a book at the same time. You can find out if one of your ebooks as a companion audio track with Amazon’s Matchmaker tool and then add in an audio-track upgrade for less than four bucks. (Amazon is also muscling in on Paypal’s territory with the launch of a new online payments system.)

Meanwhile, Google, which purchased a drone company in April, has confirmed its acquisition of Skybox Imaging for the low, low price of $500 million dollars in cash. Skybox is a company that makes small, high-resolution imaging satellites.

Netflix and Verizon have been having a corporate slapfight about poor-quality video streaming and who’s to blame for it. Each side has been bashing the other and Netflix went so far as to send messages to its subscribers sticking Verizon for the problems. Verizon fired back with a cease-and-desist letter telling Netflix to knock it off and accused the video company of pulling a PR stunt. On its monthly ISP Speed Index blog post, Netflix notes that Verizon FiOS and DSL service have actually gotten a bit slower in the first month of their very special friendship. Money can’t buy love, Netflix, but maybe you can get a better rental price.

amtComputer scientists have been arguing for the past few days whether a computer program has actually beaten the Turing Test. The Turing Test was introduced by computer pioneer and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing (left) in a 1950 academic paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” The test challenges a computer’s ability to show intelligent behavior equivalent or indistinguishable from that of a human being. In the recent Turing Test 2014 competition over at the Royal Society in London, a computer program named Eugene Goostman convinced 10 out of 30 judges that it was a real live person. To pass the test, the computer must fool human judges 30 percent of the time, which led some to say the program had passed. Other said the computer flunked the test by using advantageous factors like claiming to be a teenage non-native English speaker — which could account for some odd responses to questions.

stVAnd finally, Wired points out that this week marks the 25th anniversary of what’s arguably the worst film in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. For those who have blocked it out after years of therapy, the film was directed by Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner. It featured a storyline in which Kirk and crew up against Spock’s half-brother Sybock, who jacks the Enterprise to go find God. The film currently averages a one-star rating on the Rotten Tomatoes site, but thankfully, the franchise’s shields were strong enough to deflect the damage and move on. To be fair, just about every long-term series has an enormous clunker or two back down the road, Case in point: A  certain galaxy far, far away suffered not only The Phantom Menace, but The Star Wars Holiday Special as well.

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint: Throwback Throwdown

You’ve heard of the Facebook tradition of Throwback Thursday, right? That ol’ #TBT? If not, Throwback Thursday is the day you upload an old picture of yourself on your profile page to illustrate the passage of time (and your hairstyle history). The practice has sent a lot of people back to ancient photo albums, slide carousels and snapshot shoeboxes to dig out some of their less-embarrassing  pics to post.

As you may have noticed, however, old photos and slides often fade over time, or the color distorts to odd casts — especially if the original media hasn’t exactly been stored in archival conditions in the first place. Sure, maybe you can pass off the weirdness as an Instagram filter, but maybe you’d rather accept the challenge, clean up the photo and return it to a more reasonable representation of the original scene.

If you’ve got image-editing software on your computer, you can do your own color correction, fix blemishes and sharpen up those old snaps with relative ease. And really, who doesn’t have image-editing software on their computers these days?

For example, Windows users can grab Windows Photo Gallery (shown above) for free and Mac users have that copy of iPhoto that came with their computers. Cost-free, cross-platform options like Google’s Picasa (shown below) or the open-source GIMP also await.

TBTart

Beyond those are the programs you pay for, like the industry-standard Adobe Photoshop, the home-user edition, Adobe Photoshop Elements, or any of the other third-party picture programs around for Windows or OS X. So you have the software if you want it.

[While there are also mobile scanning and image-editing apps out there, too, let’s focus on desktop solutions here. Let’s also assume you’ve used the scanning feature on your multifunction printer to convert that old analog media into a convenient set of pixels.]

Once you have scanned your old photos or 35mm slides and a good resolution on a freshly cleaned scanner bed, take a close look. If the colors are faded, the prints are ripped or cracked, or the slides have a weird pink cast, fire up your image editor and get to work:

If you’re rocking the full Adobe Photoshop, Adobe has a tutorial video that shows how to restore a damaged print. Also on the Adobe site: and Colin Smith’s No Stupid Questions show has some tips on touch-ups and working with channels in RGB files.

The Digital Camera World site has a photo-restoration guide as well. Those with the Adobe Photoshop Elements software designed for the home crowd can also find plenty of picture-restoration info around the Web and a tour of the more helpful Guided Edits tools in the latest version of the program.

If retouching (without quite knowing what you are doing yet) makes you nervous, make duplicates of your scanned photos and spend some time experimenting with your program’s color and repair tools. Many programs also include a “revert to original” option in there for your peace of mind.

Once you get the hang of it, you can make all your old pictures look a little bit better and there’s a bonus to all this: Aside from wowing your Facebook friends with your past history of synthetic fabrics, big hair, shoulder pads and other fashion choices of your era, you now have handy electronic copies of your fragile old analog media that you can store more easily and back up regularly. And remember, it’ll be much easier to eventually convert those files into holograms for your grandkids to laugh at if you’ve already got the pictures digitized.

PTJ 94: How Soon Is (Google) Now, Fellow Netizen?

El Kaiser looks at the Tech Term “netizen” and explains how the once innocuous mashup of “Internet” and “citizen” has come to represent a responsibility all of us should not take lightly.

In her (Hopefully) Helpful Hint segment J.D. takes a look at Google Now, the interactive virtual assistant from the “Big G” and tells us how it is slowly evolving and trying to stand out when compared to Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.

In the news  AT&T has sealed the deal to buy DirectTV;  YouTube rumored to be buying the videogame-streaming company Twitch;  FBI arrests over 90 suspected cyber-criminals;  Verizon continued rolling out its zippier XLTE service across the country;   and Facebook is testing an Ask button on user profiles allowing a user to inquire about  the relationship status of your online acquaintance.

PTJ 94 News: The Urge to Merge

Spring is in the air and plenty of companies seem to be in a spending mood. For starters, AT&T has sealed the deal to buy DirectTV for close to $49 billion dollars. (AT&T can walk away from the agreement the National Football League decides to take its NFL Sunday Ticket package elsewhere.) Yes, opponents of the pending Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal and telecom mergers in general are also speaking out about this one, too.

Although neither party is talking yet, Variety reports that YouTube, owned by Google, has crafted a deal to buy the videogame-streaming company Twitch for one billion dollars. While it had the checkbook out, Google also bought a company called Divide for an undisclosed purchase price. And while it’s not a done deal, the Re/Code site reports that Twitter may be considering an acquisition of SoundCloud.

On to fighting crime: Manhattan US Attorney and the FBI Assistant Director-in–Charge announced more than 90 arrests and law-enforcement actions in a massive global cyber-law enforcement operation. Meanwhile, the United States Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment of five members of Unit 61398 of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on hacking charges.  (In a probably unrelated incident, China has banned the use of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system on its own government computers.)

Although the Asian market may have just gotten a bit smaller with the news, Microsoft announced some new hardware this week. Going against the trend of smaller tablets, the company unveiled a bigger version of its Windows-based Surface Pro tablet. The Surface Pro 3 has a 12-inch diagonal high-def screen and a bunch of other laptop-like features.

In happier news back home, Verizon is revving up the 4G LTE networks for some of its customers down south in Alabama. The new technology, called XLTE offers more wireless capacity and improved performance for wireless data customers; Verizon has been steadily adding XLTE service in many other markets around the country, including New York City. (If you’re burning your battery down uploading all those photos on the superfast network here in the Big Apple, be sure to visit one of AT&T’s mobile charging stations around town — all five boroughs get some love.)

streetcharge

In addition to thinking up new rules for Net Neutrality, the Federal Communications Commission does enforce other laws relating to telecommunications. The FCC Enforcement Bureau has come down on Sprint with a $7.5 million spanking for its failure to respect the Do Not Call List.

And finally, in case you were wondering if a certain friend is single or in a relationship, Facebook is testing an Ask button on user profiles that lets you send a gentle inquiry as to the relationship status of your acquaintance. So let’s see if Facebook’s statistics for blocks and unfriending go up in the next few weeks — or perhaps the arrival of the Step Off reply button.

PTJ 89: Amazon Just Might Have Your Number

J.D. tells us how we can make a correction on a Google Map and  Pedro hopes The Big Apple finally gets its recommended daily allowance of Google Fiber. In the news, Amazon is said to be working on its own line of smartphones;  Facebook is ripping out the messaging functionality from its smartphone apps; Google purchases Titan Aerospace out from under Facebook; Samsung’s Galaxy S5 makes its official debut; Windows Phone 8.1 is getting raves; and a Linux distribution that leaves no trace on the host computer.

PTJ 89 News: Heads or Tails

Merely having its own tablet and TV set-top box is clearly not enough to keep up with Google and Apple: Amazon is said to be working on its own line of smartphones now as well. According to the Boy Genius Report site and a few other sources, the flagship Amazon touchscreen phone will run a modified version of Android and sport a glasses-free 3D interface that can quickly whisk you to Amazon’s various online store departments. (And of course, the Web, where you can check out the True Detective/Family Circus mashup, Time is a Flat Circus.)

So much for the all-in-one approach: Facebook is ripping out the messaging functionality from its smartphone apps and forcing users who want to exchange messages within the service to download its separate Messenger app. Facebook claims the division of services makes messaging better and faster, but privacy advocates suggest a visit into the app’s settings to turn off location stamps and other potential annoyances like those Chat Head things.

dronesHas there been a bit of upstreaming with the drones? According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has now slipped in and purchased Titan Aerospace, the drone maker of Facebook was flirting with earlier this year. However, The Social Network is paying $20 million for Ascenta, a company based in the United Kingdom that also makes unmanned solar-powered vehicles.

In mobile news, Samsung’s Galaxy S5 smartphone went on sale last week and seems to have sold a few units, even though Samsung has not released official sales figures yet.  T-Mobile continues to stomp the data-plan paradigm and says it’s going to stop charging penalty fees for customers who go over their monthly limits. The company’s CEO also threw down the virtual gauntlet with an online petition and challenged its national-carrier rivals AT&T, Sprint and Verizon to lay off the overcharges as well.

Windows Phone 8.1 is getting some good reviews, including one from the Ars Technica site that calls it “a magnificent smartphone platform.” The new mobile OS can apparently accept passes designed for Apple’s Passbook app and the new Cortana assistant got special raves.

The Netflix company blog reports that Comcast customers here in the States are seeing streaming speeds up to 65 percent faster here in March than in January. (Guess that special deal paid off.)

Hopefully, everyone has their servers patched and their passwords changed after the Heartbleed bug hit the headlines last week. The National Journal notes that while the bug was publicized on April 7th, the Google engineer and the Finnish security team at Codenomicon actually uncovered the flaw earlier in March. Google fixed its own servers and told a few other companies about the gaping security hole, but didn’t tell the US government.

Last week’s revelation of the Heartbleed bug sent a lot of people scrambling to change their passwords and shore up security — and for good reason. A new report from the Pew Research Center says 18 percent of adults using the Internet now say they’ve had important personal information stolen and 21 percent say they’ve had an mail or account with a social networking site compromised. (Remember when an occasional AOL email spoofing used to be the worst thing that ever happened?)

Talk about facetime: The FBI plans to have its state-of-the-art face recognition database up and running by this summer with more than 52 million photos on file — including those of people who have never committed a crime and have no reason to be in a law-enforcement database. Through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation requested documents regarding the FBI’s biometric database, Next Generation Identification, and published its findings. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is also keeping tabs on the NGI.

And finally, if privacy and security are on your mind, check out Tails. It’s the operating system Edward Snowden used in his work with the NSA. The Tails system is a Linux distribution that can run on almost any computer from a USB stick, SD card or DVD, where it leaves no trace on the host computer. Tails can offer anonymity to its users —unless of course, there’s a camera and face-recognition software nearby.

PTJ 87: Say It Ain’t So, Oculus VR

J.D. tells us where we can find the trendiest trends and a tanned, rested and ready Kaiser has confession to make. In the news, tech sites get foolish on the first day of April; Facebook buys Oculus Rift and breaks the heart of millions of gamers; Apple appears to be almost ready to crank out the iPhone 6; the FCC frees up even more radio frequencies; Stephen Colbert catches all kinds of heat; and settlement checks and credits from the e-book pricing case have begun making their way to customers.