Tag Archives: Museum of Modern Art

PTJ 98: Amazon Starts Another Fire and Security on The Go

David Perry, now a threat strategist for the international computer-security firm F-Secure, joins us on this week’s episode to discuss the current state of mobile security. Interested in testing out F-Secure’s one-button Freedome app on your Android device or iPhone? Check it out here, as well as a short message about privacy from The Hoff himself.  And a big thanks to Jocelyn Gonzales for recording this segment for us at the Heartland Brewery in Times Square.

El Kaiser takes another listen to Bowers& Wilkins C5 in-ear monitors and admits he got it all wrong the first time around.

In the news, Amazon launches their long rumored smartphone; Google lists which mail providers encrypt messages in transit; The United States government lifts restrictions on just how detailed satellite images can legally be; the U.S. Department of Transportation looks to regulate those navigational smartphone and tablet apps in moving vehicles; Facebook changes its personal-data collection policy; The Museum of Modern Art adds an iPad app to its permanent collection; and the Unicode Standard thousands of new characters, including several hundred new emoji.

PTJ 98 News: Earth, Wind and Fire

That Amazon 3D smartphone first revealed in April by the Boy Genius Report blog has now been officially announced: It’s called the Fire smartphone, and let’s hope it never has an overheating battery problem. As it did with Apple’s original iPhone back in 2007, AT&T has emerged as the exclusive carrier for the phone. Amazon’s innovative new phone was developed at its secret hardware headquarters in Silicon Valley, Lab126, according to a report on the Bloomberg Businessweek site. On the software side of the news, Amazon also released its Prime Music service last week that brings unlimited ad-free music streams to Amazon Prime subscribers.

Speaking of Android, the Ars Technica site has posted a history of Google’s mobile operating system, tracing the evolution of Android 0.5 back in 2007 to the current state of chocolatey KitKat Android 4.4. Google itself is on a campaign for safer email and released a new section of its Transparency Report earlier this month showing which major mail providers encrypt messages in transit.  The company also released an early version of its new End-to-End encryption tool for its Chrome browser that uses OpenPGP to scramble messages until they’re decrypted.

loon

Google’s high-flying effort to bring Wi-Fi to underdeveloped parts of the world is taking off. Project Loon, as it’s called, had successful test runs in places like New Zealand and parts of rural Brazil, as detailed on a Google+ page devoted to the South American endeavor. In addition to calculating wind data and enhancing balloon design to make them more efficient, the project team also had to deal with dramatic temperatures, dripping humidity and scorpions.

skyThe United States government is lifting restrictions on just how detailed satellite images can legally be, and at least one company, DigitalGlobe, will be selling even better snaps from the sky soon, with much sharper pictures taken from oh high. (Please stop scowling at the camera, privacy advocates.)

Back here on Earth, satellite imagery is often used in modern map apps, and the U.S. Department of Transportation would like to regulate those navigational smartphone and tablet apps in moving vehicles.  Congress is expected to debate the proposed legislation, part of the GROW AMERICA Act, over the next few months and to possibly make a decision later this year, but given the recent Congressional track record for getting much of anything done besides creating hot winds, we’ll believe it when we see it.

Meanwhile, another US government agency is looking into that little squabble between Netflix and Verizon over slow download speeds. Verizon is not alone, as Comcast and other ISPs are said to be under scrutiny as well. Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, issued a statement late last week on the matter.

Facebook went and changed its policy on personal-data collection from its users last week. Yes, the privacy advocates were not happy about that, either, with some yelling at the Federal Trade Commission for letting Facebook get away with it. Facebook announced the changes on its company blog and says it will now pull in information about other websites you have browsed and use that data to calculate what ads to serve you. Lifehacker, PC Magazine, VentureBeat and many other sites have already posted instructions on how to opt out of Facebook’s web-history snooping.

The folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also concerned with transparency and how someone’s private data is used by others. They’re working on a new tool dubbed “HTTP with Accountability,” or HTTPA, which will automatically monitor the transmission of private data and allow the data owner to examine how it’s being used. The new protocol will be outlined in a paper presented a security conference in July.

In entertainment news, The Museum of Modern Art has added the first iPad app to its permanent collection. It’s Biopihlia, a musical app with interactive graphics and animations developed in part by Björk Gudmunsdóttir, former Sugarcubes singer-songwriter and swan-dress model. The $13 app is available for Android and iOS.

pennysoloWe here at Pop Tech Jam would like to wish Harrison Ford a speedy recovery from his accident on the set of Star Wars VII last week. Mr. Ford is expected to be off the set for up to 8 weeks while he heals from a broken ankle suffered when a hydraulic door from the Millennium Falcon reportedly fell on him.   The Falcon is still apparently the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, including when its parts pop off.

And finally, the Unicode Standard is getting an update to Version 7.0 and bringing with it a whole bunch of new characters — 2,834 of them to be exact. Unicode 7.0.0 supersedes all previous versions of the standard and now includes things like currently symbols used in Russia and Azerbaijan and 23 new lesser-used and historic scripts for written languages around the world. It also includes about 250 new Emoji, those little cartoony pictographic symbols common in text messages. The new Emoji include several hand gestures including 1F596 – RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS, also known as the Vulcan salute, and 1F595 – REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED, a more offensive gesture commonly referred to as the One Finger Salute. Can’t imagine who might find use for that sort of thing in a text message…

Sorry Johnny T and the NFL, New York City Is PTJ Territory

Let me just set the record straight: Super Bowl 48 (I don’t do Roman Numerals) is NOT in New York City. The Giants and Jets abandoned us decades ago for Northern New Jersey and THAT is where the game will be played.  No dome.  No warm weather climate.  Just a New Jersey swamp.  I, of course, have christened this event the “Swamp Bowl”.  Let Bill Lumbergh break it down for us:

FCjE0MV

[BTW: I really dislike that whole blue shirt, white collar look. It’s so indecisive.  Pick a color and stick with it, dangit. ]

Now don’t go thinking I’m hating on the Garden State because I’m not.  Personally, I think New Jerseyans should be offended. The NFL’s massive marketing machine has gone out of its way and are pulling out all the stops to brand this as a New York event. Why all the heat for Jersey?  It has to sting a little if you live on the paying side of the George Washington Bridge.  Of course the game’s proximity to my beloved Big Apple ensures this side of bridge will be overrun with people looking for the sights, sounds, and experiences only the greatest city on the planet can offer.

This week on the show I discuss some of my favorite apps designed to help tourists get around and enjoy their time in New York City.

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority offers an app gallery at their  website with a variety of free and paid apps that will help you get around using mass transit.

If you need more practical tips for your trip to New York City, take a peep at this video from a puppet with almost as much attitude as El Kaiser:

 

A Night at the Museum

Love museums, but don’t have the time or money to travel? Or are you planning a trip to one and want to get the lay of the land before you plunge in? To the Web! While they don’t replace the feeling of seeing a work of fine art or an historical object up close, museum sites can tell you more than just the current exhibitions and the visiting hours. Many have educational sections that highlight works in the collection so you can see and learn from the comfort of the Internet. In many cases, you can also find an official mobile app to help guide your way around the collections when you do get there. (The museums mentioned below are just a sampling of what’s out there, but museums in major cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Toyko await as well, so fire up your search engine.)

Art & Design
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a jam-packed Web site, where you can browse highlights from its holdings or search for specific items. The MetMedia section of the museum’s site hosts videos, audio podcasts, interactive quizzes and a kids section. The MetShare page has links to the Met’s various social media and mobile efforts, including its contributions to YouTube, Flickr, iTunes U, plus its Twitter and FourSquare feeds. If you use the Google Goggles app on your iPhone or Android handset when you visit the museum in person, you can take a picture of an object and have the app recognize it and taker you to a page of information about it on the Museum’s Web site. The Met has created specific apps for special exhibitions, like its Guitar Heroes show a few years back or its standing Arms & Armor collection.

The Web site for The Museum of Modern Art here in New York has a collection-search feature, a dedicated online collection with objects that may not even be on regular view in the physical galleries and, (as shown below), mobile apps for iOS and Android. If you visit in person, there’s also free WiFi inside the museum itself.

MOMA

The Art Institute of Chicago has a nicely designed site you can use to search the 54,000 items in the museum’s collection, a multimedia finder, several iOS and Android apps and a feature that lets you make your own collection out of its holdings.

You can also take an online tour of the Louvre, the famous art museum in Paris and home of the Mona Lisa, shown below. The museum has a free iPad app as well.

MONA

If you like design, check out the site for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which has videos and other information about its collections. The V&A has assorted iOS and Android apps devoted to specific art and design topics as well. (Also in London: The Design Museum, with its own free iPad app.)

History
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, which claims to be the world’s largest museum and research complex with 19 separate museums, a national zoo and 137 million artifacts in its holdings has a one-stop search page where you can comb through 8.1 million catalog of digital records, the Smithsonian libraries, its archives and even Smithsonian Folkways, the record label that specializes American music. The Smithsonian Institution is all over most forms of social media, has its own virtual world and has apps for iOS and Android, along with a mobile Website for other phone platforms.

buckfountainThe Library of Congress site has its own digital collections, where you can see digitalized images of things like early baseball cards, examine archived newspapers and hear more than 10,000 old 78rpm discs from 1900 to 1925 that were converted to MP3 as part of the National Jukebox Project. In the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog area, you can see and download digital copies of about a million images in the Library’s picture archive, including the poster for Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain from the WPA collection that’s shown here. As for mobile apps, you can get the daily Congressional Record or a virtual tour of the Library of Congress for iPhone or iPad, and interactive book of Aesop’s Fables for Android or iOS.

Across the pond, The British Library, which also rounds up the knowledge of the world, has many wonderful online galleries, including a Magna Carta section where you can see the Great Charter (shown below) up close. The site even offers a highlights slideshow tour and various virtual exhibitions. The Library has a handful of inexpensive mobile apps for Android and IOS devices that highlight some of the gems in its collections.

magna

The British Museum, also in London, has blogs and videos that highlight parts of its extensive collection, and you can even search the museum’s database and check out the Rosetta Stone and other well-known historical objects. You can find apps for special exhibits, like the Android and iOS app for its Pompeii and Herculaneum show; these costs about $3 or $4. There’s also an learning section for kids and an online shop with a place to order prints of artwork in the Museum.

In fact, most museum sites include a link to their online stores, so as in the real world, you can leave through the gift shop and pick up a few souvenirs.

Episode 40 News: Robocops and Robbers

Hate unauthorized robocalls on your cellphone that eat into your monthly minutes? The Federal Communications Commission has issued citations to two big political robocall companies accused of spewing audio spam to mobile numbers in 2011 and 2012. The firms could face up to $4.8 million in fines for this particular investigation. FCC rules and the Communications Act ban robocalls to mobile phones unless the recipient has given permission to be contacted by the company doing the calling or unless the call is part of an emergency information system. (Dirty tricks are an unfortunate part of politics and it appears there was even a cyberattack on the online election system last fall. )

picardSamsung finally whipped the veil off its Galaxy S4 smartphone last week and the fancy new model should be on sale by the end of April. The Android-based Galaxy S4 is bringing Samsung a lot of attention for its hardware design, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some Google executives are getting worried about that because it may mean Samsung wants to horn in on mobile-search revenue. Samsung has been tinkering around with its own mobile operating system as well.

Google itself it keeping busy and is said to be working on a new note-taking app called Google Keep that works a bit like the popular Evernote service and uses its own Google Drive cloud storage system. Some sources are also saying the company will soon be unifying its multiple messaging services — which include Google Talk, Hangout, Voice, Messenger, Chat for Drive collaboration, and the Google Talk for G+ — into one fresh new service called Babble that can go up against Apple’s iMessage service and BlackBerry Messenger. Google’s recent decision to kill off Google Reader has proven to be good news for the Feedly RSS service. The Los Angeles Times and others have reported that Feedly gained half-a-million users after Google announced it was dumping Reader and robbing the faithful of their favorite RSS software.

Electronic Arts says that customers who buy and register SimCity 5 before March 26 can choose a free game from a selection of EA digital downloads including Mass Effect 3, Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled 3. Since SimCity 5 arrived in early March, many players have blamed the “always online” requirement for causing bugs, in-game glitches, crashes and long waits to even get on to play the game. Electronic Arts is also investigating a security issue with Origin, its online distribution system. Security researchers have experimented with exploiting a loophole in the way Origin handles links to games users have downloaded and installed, and they’ve been able to make it run code that compromised a target machine. (On a happier note, visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art can now see SimCity 2000 on display, along with several other classic games in the Applied Design exhibit.)

Microsoft would like you to update your Windows 7 machine to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 if you haven’t already done so. If not, Microsoft will start doing it for you this week as part of Windows Update. Microsoft has also stamped an end of mainstream-support date of July 8th, 2014 for its Windows Phone 8 software, which has started speculation that Windows Phone 9 may be on the way soon. And over in Cupertino, Apple released iOS 6.1.3 this week to fix a pesky flaw that knowledgeable intruders can use to blow by the lock screen.

And finally, Verizon could be to changing up the way it charges its customers for channel subscriptions on its FiOS TV service. The company would like to charge subscribers just for the channels they actually watch. This move could potentially weed out little-watched channels from the lineup, change how Verizon pays networks for their shows and make for more stable pricing. It could also make room for newer, more interesting channels. (Yo, Disney, how about a 24-hour Star Wars channel?)