CNET’s Iyaz Akhtar is on the show today. We’ll talk about Twitter’s new mute feature, float a few more idea about why Apple might want to by Beats, and discuss FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s latest revision to net neutrality rules.

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

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If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guest:   Iyaz Akhtar of cnet.com and GFQ Network

Headlines

Our top story on the subreddit submitted by spsheridan, tekkyn00b, saxonjf and others reports FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will circulate new Open Internet Guidelines language Monday with new wording to make it clear that allowing paid prioritization should not lead to unfair discrimination against non-paying traffic. Wheeler also will propose an ombudsman position to handle complaints. Comments on paid prioritization and reclassification of the Internet as a telecommunications service will also be specifically sought as well as comments on outside proposals from Mozilla and Professor Tim Wu.

The Next Web reports Twitter added a mute feature to its Android and iOS apps as well as Twitter.com. To mute someone, go to a users profile page, click the gear icon, and choose mute. This allows you to avoid seeing posts from the person in your timeline but you can still communicate by DM with that person if need be. Muted users can still favorite, reply to, and retweet your tweets.

CruxialCIO reports IBM introduced new software-defined storage technology based on methods developed for IBM’s Watson, the cognitive-computing platform. Watson could process 200 million pages of structured and unstructured data using a similar process, according to IBM. A key part of the offering is Elastic Storage which makes it easier to scale access to billions of files. Applications could include genomic data for cancer research, product-design simulations or even travel reservations. Yes that implies curing cancer and booking travel efficiently– are equally complex tasks. The Elastic Storage technology will be available through IBM’s SoftLayer cloud platform later this year.

The Next Web reports LG published a video teaser of its first smartwatch, called the LG G Watch. The watch will be the first powered by Google’s Android Wear platform. It will be water and dust resistant and have a metal body. When it will arrive and how much it will cost are still mysteries. 

News From You

Habichuelacondulce submitted the Mashable story on The Parrot Bebop quadcopter drone. The Bebop has an HD video camera, built-in GPS, image-stabilization AND Oculus Rift compatibility. Oh yeah. A 14-megapixel fisheye lens sends HD video which can be viewed in real time and controlled on a smartphone or tablet. OR an optional Skycontroller extends the range of the drone to 2 km AND an be connected to a Display like say, an Oculus Rift headset. The headset can then control the Bebop’s camera position. The drone and skycontroller will be available sometime in Q4.

spsheridan sent in the Recode story about  a bionic arm with three joints and four fingers that can catch objects in mid-flight, developed by researchers in Switzerland. In a video, the arm catches a bottle and a tennis racket. The robot is trained to catch objects by watching humans. While you and I may imagine playing a game of catch with our robot pals, researchers plan to affix the arm to satellites in order to catch flying space debris. 

habichuelacondulce submitted a Washington Times article that was a little light on details, so we dug up a MassLive.com version, about a woman charged by Springfield, Massachusetts police with violating the state’s wiretapping laws by using her phone to make an audio recording of her arrest. The woman was also charged with disorderly conduct and carrying an open container of alcohol. She denies all the charges. Massachusetts law prohibits the recording of audio without the consent of the person being recorded, although U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of individuals to record video of police at work in a public place.

Discussion Section Links: Mutes & Beats

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/05/12/twitter-introduces-mute-feature-android-iphone-web/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=profeed&utm_reader=feedly

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-12/apple-s-deep-ties-with-iovine-key-driver-of-beats-deal.html

Pick of the Day:  Package Buddy via Luke Pohr

Luke Pohr has today’s pick: “Hi, Tom and Jennie. My Pick of the Day is Package Buddy. Its on Android, and what it does is allow you to keep track of shipments of items that are being shipped to your address. All you do is get the tracking number and select the carrier that your shipment is on. Add that info to the app. The app will search for the tracking info for you. Also update you where your shipment is. This is way more convenient than going through your email every single time. I have used this app for years, still do and its great. And best of all its free!”

Important: Beatmaster just flagged us that Gigi B. Sohn, FCC Senior Counsel for External Affairs, will be doing Q&A on Twitter tomorrow at 2pm ET. Follow @GigiBSohnFCC and add #FCCNetNeutrality to your question, leaving almost no more characters for your question. 

Tuesday ‘s guest: Molly Wood–you may have heard of her. 

On the show today I made a passing reference to Tim Wu’s plan to solve the regulation of the Internet by using alternate justification.

After the show I got this email from Sandy1202

Could you explain what this article means on your show? I can’t follow it all.

Here’s a revision of what I wrote back to her.

It’s a legal trick. The court said in January that Section 706 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act was not a sufficient basis for net neutrality regulations.

They said the FCC could do two things. Come up with a new basis for the regulation, or reclassify broadband providers as telecommunications providers, so-called Title II classification.

Internet was classified as telecommunications until 2002, when ISP’s convinced the FCC to reclassify Internet providers as Information providers, similar to cable TV providers. This allowed the ISPs to close their networks to third party competitors.

The ISPs currently lobby very hard against classifying the Internet as telecom again.

So current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler won’t reclassify Internet as telecom because he would face a fight. Instead he’s trying to strike a compromise. Use the rules that were thrown out in court, with the Section 706 justification, but change them to allow commercially reasonable discrimination. This is an attempt to appease ISPs by letting them charge, but still having some rules against discrimination. He hopes by doing this ISPs won’t take him to court, but there will be enough net neutrality regulation to satisfy others.

What Professor Wu suggests is a legal maneuver called arguing in the alternative. The idea is to put the old rules back in place, while still using Section 706 as a primary justification. HOWEVER, in addition you also justify the rules on the basis that the FCC has the authority, which they do, to classify ISPs as telecoms.

What that does is makes it so that if an ISP goes to court, they not only have to convince the court that Section 706 is not a proper basis for regulation but that the FCC doesn’t have authority to regulate them as a telecom. This would be very hard to prove, since the authority to regulate as telecoms is well-proved and Internet has been regulated as a telecom previously and fits the definition under Title II. (defined as “the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received.”)

Taking that rule to court might end up with the court throwing out the Section 706 justification but then LEAVING the telecom justification, resulting in all Internet providers being reclassified as telecom operators which is exactly what they don’t want.

Wu’s proposition is that the ISP’s won’t want to risk a lawsuit in that case, and will happily agree to Section 706 regulation rather than risk the reclassification.

Darren Kitchen is on the show and we’ll talk about Apple buying Beats Electronics and the UN debating the need for autonomous killer robots. also Len Peralta will illustrate the whole shebang. Join us won’t you?

MP3

Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.

Please SUBSCRIBE HERE.

A special thanks to all our Patreon supporters–without you, none of this would be possible.

If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting the show here at the low, low cost of a nickel a day on Patreon. Thank you!

Big thanks to Dan Lueders for the music and Martin Bell for the opening theme!

Big thanks to Mustafa A. from thepolarcat.com for the logo!

Thanks to our mods, Kylde, TomGehrke and scottierowland on the subreddit

Show Notes

Today’s guests:  Darren Kitchen and Len Peralta

Headlines

The Financial Times reports “as early as next week” Apple will announce a deal to acquire Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion. Beats is the leading headphone seller in the US, founded by musician Dr. Dre and record producer Jimmy Iovine. The company recently launched an online music streaming service as well. FT says some details have yet to be agreed on and the talks could still fall apart.” The Next Web reports a video posted to Facebook by actor-singer-songwriter Tyrese Gibson had the caption “Dr Dre ON THE night his deal went public that he did with Apple 3.2 BILLION!!!!” It has since been removed.

TechCrunch reports Apple has hired Ari Partinen, the senior engineer who worked on Nokia’s PureView smartphone camera technology. Partinen confirmed the move on Twitter. Nokia’s PureView technology uses a technique of pixel oversampling to reduce noise in images — enabling lower resolution shots to be produced with high clarity and strong color.

The Verge a federal court ruled Google must pay Oracle for the use of the Java API in Android, overturning a lower court decision. Google built its own version of Java but used the Java API to make it easier for programmers to write for Andorid. The district court had ruled the API was “a utilitarian and functional set of symbols.” Oracle appealed the ruling and a Federal Court says the API is Oracle’s property and as such Google has to pay. Lawyer Sara Jeong tweeted the decision is like “getting mad at a screwdriver for looking like a screwdriver.” Supreme Court here we come.

CNET and many Netflix users noticed today that Netflix has raised their prices as promised, $1 a month in the US and £1 a month in the UK and €1 a month in the Eurozone. That means monthly rates for new customers of £6.99 per month €8.99 or $8.99. Exisiting Netflix customers are exempt for the next two years. Netflix also says it will reintroduce the old pricing levels but those plans will only get you standard def and one user per account. 

PCMag reports link shortening service, Bitly announced late Thursday it has been hacked, exposing user email addresses, encrypted passwords, API Keys and OAuth tokens. At this time no accounts appear to have been compromised. The company has secured all paths that led to the compromise and urged all users to reset passwords. 

Reuters reports Xiaomi will release its first tablet soon. Reuters says its sources say the tablet will have a 7.9-inch screen and be called the MiPad.The Chinese smartphone company will hold an event in Beijing May 15 but has not said what it will announce. A 4G sucessor to the Mi3 smartphone widely being referred to as the Mi3S is also a possibility. 

Engadget reports that UK ISPs BT, Sky, Virgin Media and Talk Talk have all signed a deal with the music and movie industry organizations to send out educational missives to alleged pirates starting next year. So if someone thinks you’re infringing copyright and you’re a customer of one of these ISPs, starting next year you might get a letter telling you to stop infringing copyright.

News From You

Our top story on the subreddit comes from spsheridan who posted the GigaOm story about new groups opposing FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s Net Neutrality plan. The latest protest letter comes from more than 50 venture capitalists asking for the commission to reconsider the proposal that would allow commercially reasonable discrimination. Several organizations are planning a May 15 protest, the day of the FCC open meeting where the notice for proposed rulemaking will be voted on. Professor Tim Wu writing in the New Yorker proposed a clever plan where the previous rules could go into effect but if companies sued the FCC again, ISPs would be reclassified as telecommunications services, thus discouraging lawsuits.

One company has already started a direct protest, dillydobbs and Aractor both posted this one.  Ars Technica reports on Neocities.org, a webhosting company that has throttled any connections to its homepage from IP addresses arising inside the FCC, to 28.8Kbps speeds. Neocities creator Kyle Drake wrote “ I’m not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they’ve been wasting instead of doing their jobs.”

KAPT_Kipper submitted the Ars Technica story that Amazon has taken action against the wireless device company Mediabridge Products, that you may remember sent a threatening legal letter to an individual who wrote a negative review of one of their wireless routers. Mediabridge posted an official statement to its Facebook page defending its actions and admitting Amazon has revoked its selling privileges. 

And TheFixxer sent us the CNET article about self-healing plastic developed by researchers at the University of Illinois. Jeffry Moore, who worked on the research team under aerospace engineering professor Scott White said the material is nonliving but repairs itself in a way similar to living organisms. When the plastic is damaged, liquids flow into the gap and form a gel, similar to the way blood coagulates to heal a wound. The technology can regenerate a hole created by a nine-millimeter bullet. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/09/us-xiaomi-tablet-idUSBREA480I920140509

http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/09/isp-warning-letter-uk-downloaders/?ncid=rss_truncated

Discussion Section Links: 

http://recode.net/2014/05/09/what-is-tim-cook-thinking-lets-pretend-we-can-read-his-mind/

http://www.cnet.com/news/beats-boss-jimmy-iovine-to-join-apple-report-says/#ftag=CAD590a51e

http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5698158/what-apple-is-really-buying-with-beats

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27340359

http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/09/beats-apple-confirmed/?ncid=rss_truncated

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27343076

Pick of the Day:  Tonx and Misto box – They send you coffee!

Monday ‘s guest: Iyaz Akhtar of cnet.com and GFQ Network