Daily Tech Headlines – June 24, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – June 24, 2016 | |
| Number | 12 |
| Broadcast Date | JUNE 24, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 9:34 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Apple stops making Thunderbolt displays, YouTube jumps into live streaming, Let’s Encrypt comes under trademark assault.
Headlines
- Apple announced it is discontinuing its Thunderbolt Display. Apple will sell out current stock through their stores. The company pointed users to 3rd party monitors going forward, as no replacement model has been announced. Ars Technica previously reported on rumors that Apple would release 5k monitors driven by an external GPU later this year.
- In a blog post yesterday, YouTube announced live streaming is coming to their mobile app. The live stream will feature comments overlayed on the video stream and users will be able to search live video. The feature has rolled out to select creators attending VidCon, with wider availability coming "soon." Youtube also announced a Creator Hub with a benefits program and a promise to have actual people respond by email to Creator support questions within one business day.
- Uber is testing a new version of its app that presents a dynamically priced fare when users put in a destination. If surge pricing is in effect text under the fare will note ‘increased demand’. Previously Uber displayed a lightning bolt on the amount fares were multiplied by. Uber began upfront pricing in UberPool and has been testing it for UberX in five Indian cities and six in the US since April. Uber expects to roll out the changes to the rest of the world over the next few months.
- Popular Mechanics reports a team of three psychologists and computer scientists, led by Jean-François Bonnefon at the University of Toulouse Capitole in France, just published a study of people’s attitudes towards self-driving cars in the journal Science. They conducted surveys using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform between June and November 2015 paying 25 cents for each survey of a US resident. Here’s what they found. The large majority feel a self-driving car should sacrifice its passenger for the greater good. However when asked to choose between buying a care that chose the greater good vs buying a car programmed to protect the passenger at all costs, respondents preferred the car that protected the passenger. You can test your own reactions to these and other moral dilemmas at moralmachine.mit.edu.
- Revisions to Privacy Shield, an agreement on data transfer between the EU and the US, was sent for review to European member states Thursday night. A vote is expected in early July. The previous safe harbor system was struck down by a European court over concerns with US surveillance practices. The new revision provides more detail on the conditions under which US intelligence services collect and safeguard data.
- Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch it is rolling out location feeds powered by Foursquare’s location database in most places and Yelp’s in countries without strong Foursquare data. Tap a location in a tweet’s details and you’ll get a location feed with a map and a tab for ‘media’ meaning photos and videos. It’s coming to iOS first with more platforms to follow.
- Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land reports that Google's RankBrain, a machine learning system, now processes every search query, up from less than 15% last year. While RankBrain processes all queries, Sullivan reports that this doesn't mean it effects all search results, rather it learns from searches to refine unique or hard to understand queries into meaningful results. Sullivan noticed a remark about RankBrain in Steven Levy’s Backchannel story about machine learning efforts at Google.
- At VidCon Facebook announced new features coming to Facebook Live. Coming later this summer, two-person remote broadcasts will let people in two locations talk to each other on the same stream. Streamers can also preschedule broadcasts and viewers can hang out in a waiting room. And you can go live directly from the MSQRD app while wearing a puppy face or fake makeup or a robot head or some such thing.
- Let’s Encrypt, the organization dedicated to providing simple free website encryption posted Thursday that security firm Comodo has filed three trademark applications for use of the term Let’s Encrypt for services in California. The applications were filed after the Internet Security Research Group began using the name Let’s Encrypt publicly in November 2014. ISRG says that since March of this year it has asked repeatedly for Comodo to abandon the trademark applications.
- Oculus updated its hardware-specific runtime Friday and removed the DRM code that prevented games from working with other headsets like the HTC Vive. The change was not mentioned in its update notes. The developer of Revive, which enables other headsets, noticed the change and posted a note on the project’s Github page. Revive now no longer disables game DRM to provide compatibility. Oculus confirmed to Ars Technica that it "will not use hardware checks as part of DRM on PC in the future.”
- Wired’s Kim Zetter reports two security researchers discovered a way to circumvent DRM in Chrome to download streaming video from sites like Netflix and Amazon. David Livshits from the Cyber Security Research Center at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Alexandra Mikityuk with Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, alerted Google to the problem on May 24th. The exploit takes advantage of a vulnerability in the Widevine EME/CDM module that lets you copy data after it is decrypted but before it is sent to the player for streaming. The researchers will demonstrate the bug but will not release details until Google has had 90 days to issue a patch. Google says the problem is not exclusive to Chrome, but any browser based on the open source Chromium code.
- A Cambridge, UK man finished the fully operational Mega Processor, a 16-bit, hand soldered 2 meter tall CPU. James Newman started building the Mega Processor in 2013, with the goal of clocking it at 20kHz, capable of 0.02 MIPS. Newman wanted to show how computers work by blowing machines back up to a viewable scale. The final machine cost £40,000, and includes 40,000 transistors, 10,000 LED, and over a million solder joints.
- As reported by the Indian Express, HP and Apple received top marks on identifying and preventing forced labor in their supply chains, according to a new study by KnowTheChain.org. Of the twenty companies included in the study, 18 have demonstrated public commitment to ending forced labor in their supply chains, however the study noted that few have processes in place to actually implement said goals. Notably, camera maker Canon was ranked in the bottom 3, the company is among 6 in the report that do not have a publicly available supply chain code of conduct.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – June 23, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – June 24, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – June 27, 2016" |