Show Notes – April 13th, 2015

GOP bill would invalidate FCC’s net neutrality rules – http://www.computerworld.com/article/2909220/gop-bill-would-invalidate-fccs-net-neutrality-rules.html

June 2014 report from the ACLU on stingrays: https://www.aclunc.org/sites/default/files/StingRays_The_Most_Common_Surveillance_Tool_the_Govt_Won%27t_Tell_You_About_0.pdf

anti-patriot act coalition website: https://fight215.org/

imsi catcher detector put up on github: https://prism-break.org/en/projects/android-imsi-catcher-detector-aimsicd/

other links:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/crypto-privacy-village-heading-tribeca-film-festival

funding of nypd surveilance: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/13/documents-suggest-uae-funding-nypd-intelligence-operations/

recent eff case on imsi catchers: https://www.eff.org/cases/us-marshals-airborne-imsi-catchers

eff’s 2014 round up on stingrays: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/2014-review-stingrays-go-mainstream

podcast patent win: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-busts-podcasting-patent-invalidating-key-claims-patent-office

 

Florida 8th-grader’s prank on teacher leads to felony arrest – http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/04/13/florida-8th-grader-plays-prank-on-teacher-gets-arrested/

The PC market is shrinking again as companies stop upgrading It’s not a good time to be a PC maker… especially if you cater to the corporate crowd. Both Gartner and IDC estimate that the computer market shrank between 5.2 to 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2015, in part because many companies stopped upg…

They Drove Cross-Country In An Autonomous Minivan Without GPS. In 1995. (Think Delphi’s cross-country voyage in an autonomous Audi SQ5 is impressive? Try doing it with 90s tech, without GPS navigation, and in a salvaged Pontiac minivan. That’s what Carnegie Mellon research scientist Dean Pomerleau and then-Ph.D. student Todd Jochem did in 1995. Here’s the story of their journey as it appeared on Robotics Trends. — PG)For the past several years, self-driving cars have

Facebook remains the most used social network among teens A couple of years ago, pundits predicted the beginning of the end for dominant social network Facebook. The reason? Teens were ditching the service in favor of other social media solutions like Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

Popcorn Time for non-jailbroken iOS devices lands today Popcorn Time, the popular piece of software that allows users to stream movies illegally, is coming to Apple’s closed ecosystem. On Wednesday, those behind the Popcorn-Time.se fork will release an installer that’ll allow iOS users to install the app on non-jailbroken devices.

Celebrate a Decade of the Doctor with the Doctor Who BitTorrent Bundle The BBC has just made the groundbreaking decision to release Doctor Who on BitTorrent as a legal download. This is fantastic news for fans worldwide and will hopefully pave the way for more legal BBC content via BitTorrent in the future. In fact, this is surely a win for everybody involved. BitTorrent Wins While BitTorrent is commonly known for the illegal content available to download, it is tryi

Digital Shadow Exposes What Facebook Really Knows About You How much can people discover about you over social media? It began as a mere marketing stunt, but Digital Shadow remains a very useful (and potentially scary) application. Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs is a sci-fi game that works on a smart premise: that our lives can be laid out to a hacker and used against us. Our family, our friends, our interests, our personalities: they build up a digital trail, leavi

Pixel OFF Turns Off Pixels to Save Battery on AMOLED Displays Android: Phones with AMOLED displays have a unique, battery-saving trait: the fewer pixels are activated, the less power they consume. Pixel OFF helps you take advantage of this by only activating a mesh of pixels.The app can disable a grid of pixels of varying density, depending on how much battery you want to save. Your phone will look mostly the same, if a bit darker. However, because your disp

Your Keyboard Could Tell If You Have Parkinson’s An everyday technology is becoming the central figure in how scientists understand and diagnose Parkinson’s—the keyboard. Researchers at MIT are working on a method that would create keyboards that could actually tell whether you have this unfortunately common neuron impairment.It’s all mechanical—no apps or special software required. All the information is hidden in the precise ways we all strike

Yahoo Screen supports Chromecast, but only for ‘Community’ If you needed one more way to watch Community now that
DHS seeks bids for access to license-plate tracking systems The Department of Homeland Security wants access to data about when and where suspects have traveled, and it could get that information from a license-plate tracking system. According to The Washington Post, the DHS first sought a private company tha…
Your Keyboard Could Tell If You Have Parkinson’s An everyday technology is becoming the central figure in how scientists understand and diagnose Parkinson’s—the keyboard. Researchers at MIT are working on a method that would create keyboards that could actually tell whether you have this unfortunately common neuron impairment.It’s all mechanical—no apps or special software required. All the information is hidden in the precise ways we all strike
Inside Morgellons, the Internet’s Disease Joni Mitchell was hospitalized this week, but the songwriter has been sick for years. She has described her debilitating illness as “a slow, unpredictable killer–a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year.” Yet doctors have described this same illness as an internet meme, a delusion spread online. Mitchell is talking about Morgellons disease, a condition
Hulu’s GIF library offers visuals for your reaction tweets Websites like Giphy and others are useful for supplying a GIF to get your point across. Hulu is looking to help too, so long as your thoughts/feelings/hot takes can be summed up with an image from one of the TV shows streamed there. The company launc…
Periscope update keeps viewers from showing up at your house Twitter’s video-streaming app Periscope may have buried Meerkat’s hopes of being the go-to way to show the world your office refrigerator. But until today, it had a rather scary privacy issue. When a broadcaster shared their location, instead of that…
What It’s Like to Work For Putin’s Internet Troll Army The Guardian has a doozy of a report on Russia’s secret troll army: hundreds of bloggers and commentators paid to flood the internet with pro-Kremlin posts. Two former employees gave the paper a rare glimpse inside the troll army’s headquarters. The bloggers and commentators work in 12-hour shifts inside a St. Petersburg office building, where the work environment is described as “humourless and d
Affordable Electric Cars Are Coming Soon, Study Says For many of us, purchasing an electric vehicle is still a pie in the sky dream. But that might be changing soon, if a new peer-reviewed study is correct that the cost of electric car batteries is falling much more quickly than we assumed. Lithium ion batteries make up anywhere between a quarter and half the cost of electric cars today. By systematically reviewing over 80 cost estimates published b
Georgia wants EV owners to pay for saving the planet Climate change is still a real, looming threat, so you’d think that getting people using electric cars would be a vital project to safeguard the future. Unfortunately, the state of Georgia is so broke that it’s not only pulling its electric vehicle s…
The Solarbike is a very real thing Here’s an electric bike that doesn’t need plugging in.. or swapping out batteries. As the name suggests, the Solarbike has solar cells built into both sides of the party typical bicycle wheels, using cells (and a design) that’s apparently “shadow opt…
Reinvigorate your inner nerd at this retro-computing exhibit Modern computer interfaces are swiftly being reduced to glossy touchscreen slabs, distancing us from the inner workings of devices we use every day. Kimon Keramidas, director of the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, is offeri…
Monkeys Can’t Stop Eating India’s Delicious Fiber Optic Cables Right now, India’s in the middle of launching a massive, $18 billion plan to finally bring the country’s shoddy internet up to speed. There’s just one little problem: Adorable monkeys just can’t stop eating its delicious, delicious data cables. Specifically, its the 3,000 year-old holy city of Varanasi that’s having the hardest time getting an internet overhaul, since its many temples are home to
Will a “Programming Boot Camp” Help Me Get a Coding Job? Dear Lifehacker, I’m interested in getting a job as a programmer, but I don’t have any formal training. I heard boot camps can get me into a job in just a couple of months. They seem intense and expensive, though. Are they worth it?Signed,Could-be CoderDear Coder,You’re definitely not alone in your interest in coding as a career. Programming is one of the highest paying and most in-demand careers
Google wants no-cost international roaming for its phone service Google may not have grand ambitions for its upcoming cellular network, but the company could still have a few clever tricks up its sleeve. The Telegraph claims that Google is talking to wireless giant Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of Three (and soon O…

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