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“There’re only two users hitting that tower in Montana.”
Welcome to this week’s episode of YATS! It’s Yet Another Tech Show brought to you by contributors of aNewDomain and Tech Page One. Each week we sit down and discuss some of the most interesting and entertaining tech news of the week. In this episode we have producer Mat Lee, Mike Rothman, Larry Press and myself. I go by Ant Pruitt. We’re also joined by guest host Chris Miller. Thanks for joining us this week, now let’s get into the show notes.
Google Plus and Google Chrome now have an updated interface. Larry discusses how he’s not cool with the tighter integration of Blogger with Google+. Well, sorta. Some things he enjoys and others he does not. Comment integration is nice, but yet the fact that he had to opt-out of sending his Blogger posts to Google+ by default was a bad move. Not to mention the hoops he had to jump through to turn the feature off. We also discussed the card interface that’s beginning to take over the Google ecosystem. Chris thinks that we should have a unified UI pushed all at one time. Similar to how Apple does with its iOS updates.
Image Credit: Ant Pruitt
For some strange reason, Mat decided to walk into a Verizon Wireless store. The mission to keep his unlimited data plan was yet another fail. For now he’ll keep his Galaxy Nexus, but his girlfriend was able to get a Galaxy S4. This was a painful visit for Mat as he watched the less techy consumer shop for mobile devices versus hardcore geeks. Not to mention, the sales reps that seemed to know much of nothing about the phones. The Moto X definitely a hot seller, but is it worthy of risking your unlimited? We probably shouldn’t give the sales reps at mobile carrier stores grief. They’re usually not trained to be technical. They’re trained to sell the product.
Ever heard of the Nokia 520? Mike had a proud moment of technolust and purchased this phone for a great price on Amazon. It’s a Windows Phone, but Mike thinks this is a great value in price. Oh by the way, it’s an unsubsidized price!
Image Credit: Ant Pruitt
Dell has gotten back into the tablet market with the announcement of its Venue line of tablets. There’s one that’s set to compete with the Microsoft Surface tablet and the other two are Android tablets. They’re lower resolution displays, but still quite nice. We discuss how this may turn out to be a good move for Dell. Dell is usually after the enterprise market. Have a lightweight mobile computing device that can actually run the Microsoft Office suite is a high demand. Even better, the pricing could be a lot less expensive than its competitor.
Let’s give some props to Lavabit. The company had email transmission encrypted for Edward Snowden Of course the FBI wanted the decryption keys of the transmissions of Snowden’s email account. Lavabit fought this and finally gave in. . .kinda sorta. Lavabit sent the keys as requested, but in four point font. This is a great story for those wanting internet freedom.
Image Credit: The Atlantic Wire
In Bitcoin news, Silk Road was busted as being the largest drug market. The federal government was able to seize about $3.6 million worth of bitcoin currency. Back as the bitcoin currency began to pick up momentum in popularity, we previously discussed how this could be used for illegal or nefarious purposes. This wasn’t your typical PayPal service, you know.
A French police force is moving from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. I believe the main reason is total cost. Over 37,000 workstations were being converted. That’s now 37,000 workstations without licenses fees. We discuss what this could mean for the users. Some are just flat out used to having the Office suite from Microsoft. There are other options such as Libre Office or Google Docs. Mike shares some great points of users that aren’t power users where they’re used to having a repeatable task completed. Such as mail merges. It is also noted that there are other limitations in the free office suite products.
Image Credit: ZDnet
Ok, let’s get something straight. Google isn’t wiretapping you (yet). Google was recently accused of this action. Neither of us don’t think this is an issue. We all understand that scanning our Gmail accounts serve a purpose. It helps with spam protection and other malware messages. It also helps with Android users maximizing the potential of GoogleNow on their mobile device. Sure it’s a little creepy to think about, but it’s not wiretapping and watching our every move or even listening in on our phone calls. The public has to understand that privacy is pretty much gone. Don’t worry about what Google is doing. You should probably worry more about what the NSA is doing.
Image Credit: Mat Lee
To get ready for the fourth quarter of sales, Amazon is hiring approximately 70,000 employees. If you remember in episode 71, we discussed the announcement of the new Kindle Fires with the always-on customer support button. Amazon expecting to get a bunch of request for the new tablets and 27/7 support as well as the typical holiday shopping service.
And finally, a bit of news we couldn’t quite wrap our heads around. Cisco and Facebook has partnered up to offer Facebook users the option to “check in” with Facebook when they use their mobile phone to access the Internet. What? Isn’t this a service already in place with Facebook? Then again, being a non-Facebook user, I wouldn’t know.
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