Show Notes – March 2nd, 2015


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Lyft rewards its drivers for picking you up more often A ridesharing service only helps you out if drivers want to pick you up in the first place, and Lyft clearly knows it — the company just countered Uber’s new perk system with one of its own. Accelerate, as it’s called, puts drivers in one of three s…
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Google Taking Over New TLDs bobo the hobo writes: In the corner of the internet where people care about DNS, there is a bit of an uproar at Google’s application for over a hundred new top-level domains, including .dev, .lol, .app, .blog, .cloud and .search. Their application includes statements such as: “By contrast, our application for the .blog TLD describes a new way of automatically linking new second level domains
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Why Superfish could be the best thing to happen to the PC industry in years The Superfish debacle has been an embarrassment and legal concern to Lenovo, a headache to affected customers and yet another concern for the security community. Now that the dust has had time to settle, we’re beginning to see the good emerge as a result of the ordeal. …
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Robotic Cat for Dementia Patients Breathes, Purrs and Meows JustoCat is a robotic therapy cat developed for people with dementia and mental disabilities. It was created thanks to a collaboration between robotics researchers and healthcare researchers at Mälardalen University in Sweden. JustoCat was designed with the assumption that many individuals have memories of spending time with cats, so they linked this to the ‘reminiscence method’, using memories fr
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KFC Gives Us Edible Coffee Cups To celebrate its 50th anniversary, KFC has unveiled its Scoff-ee cups- coffee cups made out of cookies, sugar paper, and heat resistant white chocolate. Set to debut in the U.K. this summer, the cups are meant to give consumers a waste-free product and a new coffee drinking experience. The concept of edible cups is not new. In fact, Ansel Bakery in New York City and Alfred Coffee and Kitchen in L
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Lonnie Johnson, the rocket scientist and Super Soaker inventor To celebrate Black History Month, Engadget is running a series of profiles honoring African-American pioneers in the world of science and technology. Today we take a look at the life and work of Lonnie Johnson. Lonnie Johnson is not quite a househol…
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Uber data breach compromises IDs of 50,000 drivers An Uber database containing the names and driver’s license numbers of 50,000 current and former drivers was accessed by an outside party in 2014, the company announced today. Uber discovered the breach on September 17, 2014, and an investigation reve…
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Lenovo Vows to Drop “Adware” and “Bloatware” From Its PCs Pledge comes after Lenovo root certificate to spam firm triggered serious security panic
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Google won’t ban adult content on Blogger after all Well that was fast. Google only declared that it would begin cracking down on adult content posted to Blogger a few days ago, but it’s already decided it was a bit hasty in its decision. After coming under fire over the introduction of a retroactive …
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Amazon Wants to 3D Print Your Purchase in the Back of Its Delivery Van Amazon is a keen experimenter, especially when it comes to delivery. Now though, a new patent suggests that it’s thinking of 3D-printing its products as they make their way to you.3Dprint has unearthed a patent which explains that it could print three-dimensional goods on-demand for customers—which it already does—even from the inside if its delivery trucks. In turn, it could get products out fast
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Google just paid a record $25 million for exclusive rights to the ‘.app’ top-level domain Google has just paid a record-breaking $25 million to get exclusive rights to the entire “.app” top-level web domain. The company outbid 11 other bidders, including Amazon, in a heated auction that closed yesterday with the unnamed runner up reportedly offering at least $24.3 million.
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Aereo sells majority of assets at bankruptcy auction with disappointing results Aereo’s assets have been sold at auction for what essentially amounts to pennies on the dollar, allowing a small group of bidders to scoop up the remains at a bargain.
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Microsoft made an Android keyboard especially for Excel Because we do spreadsheets on the move. Because we simply need numpad. Because we didn’t buy a Surface. Microsoft has launched a new keyboard on Android, expressly made for Excel, with the main keyboard being truncated to make space for an unassuming…
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Facebook Puts Users On Suicide Watch Mark Wilson writes A few months ago Twitter was criticized for teaming up with suicide prevention charity Samaritans to automatically monitor for key words and phrases that could indicate that someone was struggling to cope with life. Despite the privacy concerns that surrounded Samaritans Radar, Facebook has decided that it is going to launch a similar program in a bid to prevent suicides. Workin
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Pebble’s color watch is the fastest Kickstarter project to hit $1 million (updated) If you followed the Kickstarter launch of Pebble Time, you probably noticed that the smartwatch got funding very quickly. It met its $500,000 goal in just 17 minutes, and hit the magical $1 million mark in about half an hour. But are any of those rec…
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10 Networking Terms You Probably Never Knew, And What They Mean We live in an interconnected, super-networked world. New technologies constantly appear on the market and, unless you constantly read networking, computing or hacker news, you may find terminologies floating around that you don’t understand. Here we’ll explore 10 common networking terms, what they mean and where you are likely to encounter them. WLAN A Wireless Local Area Network links two or more
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How To Beat Internet Trolls at Their Own Game There’s a certain subset of people on the Internet who like messing with people just for the sake of doing it. We call them trolls. In many cases, a little trolling can be funny and and kind of entertaining. In some cases, it goes too far, and leads to real world repercussions. So, what are you to do when faced with an Internet troll? It’s a topic we’ve covered before at MakeUseOf when we talked a
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Five Best Weather Web Sites Whether you’re heading out around town or you’re planning a long-distance trip, you probably want to know what the weather will be like when you get where you’re going—or later that day. A good, reliable weather site or service can tell you, in useful, accurate terms, and this week we’re looking at five of the best, based on your nominations. Earlier in the week we asked you to tell us which weat
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This Japanese Robot Feeds You Tomatoes While You Run Okay, it’s not exactly a robot—but I bet it’s still the craziest thing you’ve seen all day. Japanese juice and ketchup company Kagome built a freaking wearable tomato dispenser for a runner at the Japan Marathon this weekend. The video pretty much speaks for itself:What’s really going on here? Believe it or not, it’s a PR stunt to promote tomatoes over bananas. Dole Japan has sponsored the Japan M
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rainydayscoffeeandbooks:In Barnes and Nobles in Union Square,… rainydayscoffeeandbooks:In Barnes and Nobles in Union Square, NYC
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Your Phone’s Battery Use Lets Spies Track Your Movements Spies and cops can use your smartphone to track your movements. That’s no mystery—most smartphones come with a GPS chip that makes it pretty damned simple. So if you don’t want to be tracked, you just turn off the GPS feature, right? Unfortunately, there is another way prying eyes can follow your movements: through your Android phone’s battery. A team of security researchers from Stanford and the
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Health-care tax error affects 800000 – The Seattle Times USA TODAYHealth-care tax error affects 800000The Seattle TimesThe mistake could prove to be a hardship, especially for the low-income workers who qualified for subsidized insurance policies and may be counting on tax refunds — but now must wait weeks to file their returns…. By ROBERT PEAR. The New York Times.Health-portal error to affect 800000 filersNew woes for HealthCare.gov: Wrong tax info s
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Revenge porn shitweasel pleads guilty, admits he hacked victims’ accounts Michael from Muckrock writes, “After months of legal wrangling, Hunter Moore, who ran ‘revenge porn’ website Isanyoneup, has agreed to a plea deal that will see him serve a minimum of two years and up to seven years in jail, as well as up to $500,000 in fines.” Read the rest
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A History of Internet Spying, Part 2 How long have intelligence agencies been keeping tabs on the internet, and what role did these agencies play in creating the internet we use today? For the most part, these kinds of questions have been relegated to comments sections on random blogs and the occasional tweet from researchers. We’re hoping to remedy that in whatever small way we can, starting with a look at the 1960s and 70s. This i
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Lenovo Laptop Owners Beware: Your Device May Have Preinstalled Malware Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo has admitted that laptops shipped to stores and consumers in late 2014 had malware preinstalled. You might want to read that again. A major manufacturer with $38.70 billion sales in 2014 alone, has been selling computers that are actively invading their user’s privacy, enabling man in the middle attacks and basically

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