The Skype Train is leaving you behind

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The Skype Train is leaving you behind
Number 2815
Broadcast Date JULY 21, 2016
Episode Length 42:58
Hosts Tom Merritt
Guests Chris Ashley

Microsoft’s leaving behind older Skype install as it transitions off P2P and some folks are mad. When is a company allowed to ditch an old platform? Chris Ashley and Tom Merritt discuss.

Guest

Top Stories

Denmark says its postal service accidentally delivered two unencrypted CDs containing the health information of more than 5.2 million Danes was accidentally delivered to the Chinese embassy.
Edward Snowden and Andrew “Bunnie” Huang have developed a device to detect whether a cell phone is making radio transmissions when the owner's think the radios are turned off. The introspection engine is a tiny computer attached to the smartphone through a battery case. It has its own screen and is planned to make a noise of radio is detected and possibly have a kill switch to cut the phone's power. It will be open source for software and hardware. The pair have figured out how to tap into 12 test points in an iPhone 6. The next step is to build a prototype. Snowden and Huang will present their research at the MIT Forbidden Research event Thursday.
Google introduced a feature called Bubble Zoom for people who buy comics from the Play Books store. Google used machine learning to teach algorithms to recognize speech and thought bubbles. Readers tap a bubble to enlarge it and tap or use the volume button to move between bubbles. Bubble Zoom is enabled in Marvel and DC collected volumes to start with more titles and publishers to come. And of course it's only on Android.
Federal authorities announced the arrest of the alleged founder and operator of Kickass Torrents Ukrainian Artem Vaulin in Poland Wednesday. Vaulin is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement and awaits extradition. Vaulin is accused of not responding to DMCA takedown requests. Agents posed as ad buyers to discover a bank account in Estonia. Those records were used to discover that the site was hosted out of Chicago for 3 and a half years, ending in January 2016, which is why it is being pursed by the US Department of Justice.
Submitted by AUtigerfan
Facebook Connectivity Lab announced Thursday that it flew a full-scale version of Aquila, its solar-powered high altitude UAV meant to provide Internet from the air, on June 28th. The Aquila has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 though its body is much smaller. The intended 30-minute test was successful enough to go for 90 minutes. Facebook intends future tests to fly faster, higher, and longer, and above 60,000 feet. The eventual goal is to fly UAVs for three months at a time over remote areas providing coverage over a 30-mile radius in remote areas. Challenges involve battery weight and government approval for the flights.
IDC released its preliminary figures for the wearable market in the 2nd quarter, showing a year-on-year decline for the first time. In Q2 2016, 3.5 million smartwatches were shipped, down 32% from 5.1 million a year ago. The drag on the market is Apple. The number one smartwatch vendor with 47% of the market is down 55% year over year,the only company in the top-5 to decline in shipments. As a comparison the number two vendor, Samsung has 16% of the market and is up 51% year over year. IDC points out that the Apple Watch launched in Q2 2015.
And finally, Ars Technica passes along a report from the Japanese newspaper Nikkei that the last known manufacturer of VCR's, Funai Electric, will cease production at the end of the month. Funai has made VCRs since 1983, selling 15 million units per year at its peak, but cites declining sales and difficulty sourcing parts, as the reason for ending production. The company reported 750,000 units were sold worldwide last year.
Submitted by spsheridan

Discussion

Pick of the Day

Today's pick is more for your curiosity than as a recommendation. Candid is an anonymous chat app that uses natural language processing to move off topic comments into the right location and flag potentially inflammatory items like threats for removal. It creates a personalized feed of posts based on your education, employment, interests and neighborhood. And it uses a one-way hash to encrypt all data before it hits the company's servers. And the app continually randomizes user names. It even awards polite users with badges and even has a hater badge for the consistently negative. The AI can identify rumors which are then verified by a human. So sort of Twitter meets Yik Yak with an AI nanny.
Submitted by Tom

Messages

I roll my eyes every time I hear you & Scott talk about tractors, this has very little to do with "fixing" a tractor. There's almost zero chance that the average farmer has the coding skills or knowledge of the code base to make any productive change to any recent model machinery thru a software fix. What JD doesn't like/want happening is to have customers take tractors to aftermarket shops to have them reprogrammed to increase the horse power & torque. … Also, there are no small dealerships left anymore. JD and Case IH have both been pushing small dealerships to either consolidate or close for years now. They don't want to deal w/small single dealerships.
Sent by Tim in hot and windy Kansas


I doubt that allowing non-certified individuals to work on their machinery will have a major effect on dealers. While there are individuals and shops that may have the skill and ability to modify the software, this isn’t like flashing a ROM on your Android phone. These are incredibly complex machines which are employed by a much smaller user base than a smart phone and probably even smaller than the Linux community. Meaning 3rd party resources of information and trouble shooting which independent shops will need are likely be somewhat hard to come by. So in the end most producers will likely need to go to their certified mechanics anyway. However the possibility of competition might be able to keep repair costs from becoming too extreme.
Sent by Scott in Nebraska


I'm listening to this while sitting in a John Deere tractor in Nebraska, so I'm doing as I'm told and chiming in on the discussion. This might be a little long, but I've been involved with this topic in Farm Bureau and other areas and am excited to see it being discussed outside of our world.

The tractor I'm in is driving itself while spraying herbicide at a rate that adjusts itself automatically due to myriad factors. Though I'm more technologically-inclined than most farmers I know, if I tried to dig in to the software code to change how this sprayer is operating, the most likely result is that I would be left with a $250,000 giant green lawn ornament.

However.

I have an 8-year-old son who's into robotics and Minecraft, and it's quite possible that in 10 or 15 year he will have the ability and motivation to change how our tractors perform. There's a whole generation of future farmers like him that will have the know-how and expectation to be able to tailor technology to their needs. And right now it's technically illegal for them to even get access to the code to figure out how it's working. Making something illegal with the reasoning that "no one knows how to do it correctly anyway" is - to put it lightly - lacking foresight.

I've paid a sizable pile of money for this tractor, and turning it into a lawn ornament should be my concern, not that of the company from which I (supposedly) bought it. If Deere wants to refuse to service an altered tractor, void my warranty, prohibit me from distributing altered code, or refuse to accept an altered tractor as a trade-in, that is fully reasonable. Threatening to prosecute a farmer for repairing a tractor under the same law that was aimed at cd and dvd copying? Not reasonable.

Ultimately, it will be a little difficult to get the farming community to engage on this issue. The technology we have works really, really well, and an abstract discussion about the intersection of intellectual property rights and real property rights doesn't improve our net farm income or soil quality. There aren't currently any tangible impacts from the question of "who owns the tractor", but hopefully we can find workable solutions before any problems arise.
Sent by Zach in Nebraska


Side note the EFF filed suit on behalf of Johns Hopkins computer science researcher Matthew Green and hacker / inventor Andrew "bunnie" Huang, seeking confirmation that the DMCA"s rules against circumventing copy protection is restrictive, over-broad, and a violation of the First Amendment.

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"John Deere Hackt0rz" 		The Skype Train is leaving you behind
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