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2:35 – Dropbox Breach
- Fewer than 100 accounts accessed
- But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs.
5:09 – Tony Blairs Personal Details Hacked…and Leaked
- A member of hacker group TeaMp0isoN (Team Poison) leaked personal information of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, plus the phone numbers and addresses of dozens of members of the government who allegedly supported the war on Iraq, on Friday night.
- TriCk posted the list on Friday night, which included the National Insurance number of Tony Blair, the phone number of 10 Downing Street, plus the alleged phone numbers and addresses of some of Blair’s contacts, including Lord and Lady Irvine and Denis MacShane, Baroness Thornton, the MP for Rotherham. MacShane’s name was misspelled “McShane,” however.
- The information was obtained in Dec. 2010, TriCk posted. “We still have access to the Webmail server, phone numbers may have changed but all the information is 100% legit.”
- Strange – hardly any mainstream media coverage – Telegraph only
8:47 – Bye Bye Lulzsec
- Hacker group LulzSec has announced that after 50 days of hacking companies and organizations, it is finally done. Check out the message from LulzSec below, which was posted on Pastebin. Check out the video as well (embedded below).
LulzSec most recently released a torrent of data from Arizona law enforcement which included hundreds of classified documents including personal emails, names and phone numbers.
- As the post, says the group of six hackers has been “disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could.”
10:30 – Google +1
- Google’s +1 button, the search giant’s challenger to the Facebook Like button, is making its worldwide debut.
- “Today, +1’s will start appearing on Google search pages globally,” Google Product Manager Nick Radicevic announced on Google’sAdSense blog.
- “We’ll be starting off with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr, then expanding quickly to most other Google search sites soon after.”
- In addition to an international rollout on search result pages, Google is expanding its rollout of the +1 button on websites across the world. The company announced partnerships with several publications, including The Telegraph, The Independent, Last.fm, SnapDeal, and El Pais.
13:09 – Google+ Project
- sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project:
- Circles
- It’s through Circles that users select and organize contacts into groups for optimal sharing. I know, I know — not more group management. But the truth is that Google has made the process as pleasant as possible. You simply select people from a list of recommended contacts (populated from your Gmail and/or Google Contacts) and drag them into Circles you designate. The UI for all of this is simple and intuitive — it’s so good, that you might even say it’s kind of fun. It beats the pants off of the method for creating a group within Facebook.
- Sparks
- With Sparks, you enter an interest you have and Google goes out and finds elements on the web that they think you’ll care about. These can be links to blog posts, videos, books — anything that Google searches for. If you find something you like, you can click on an item to add it to your interest list (where it will stay for you to quickly refer to anytime you want). Or you can see what others are liking and talking about globally in the “Featured interests” area.
- Mobile
- “Our goal here is to connect people. And everyone has a camera in their pocket,” Gundotra says as he shows me “Instant Upload”. This feature of Google+ relies on the use of an Android devices to take photos or shoot video. From a new app, you’ll do either of these things and the content will automatically be uploaded to Google+ in the background and stored in a private album (which you can share with one click later). We didn’t want “just” a mobile experience, however, so with Google+ we focused on things (like GPS, cameras, and messaging) to make your pocket computer even more personal.
- Hangouts
- Hangout attempts to solve the social problem of video chat by making it easy for you to let others know that you’re interested in chatting. And if you’re already chatting with a Circle, everyone else in that Circle will get an alert to come hang out. This works for up to 10 people. And seeing it in action is a bit magical. Gundotra starts a Hangout with some co-workers and as they join, conversations start between multiple people. But the Google+ system is smart enough to focus on who is controlling the conversation in any given minute. This makes the conversation easy to watch. It was almost as if an editor is working behind the scenes, cutting between people.
- Even cooler is that you can share a piece of content, like a YouTube clip, and everyone in the Hangout can watch it together while talking about it. It sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s really pretty great.
- Huddle
- It’s essentially a group messaging app that works across Android, iPhone, and SMS to allow you to communicate with the people in certain Circles.
- key to the project is the attempt to unify everything. This is done via the toolbar (which features a drop-down showing you all of your relevant Google+ activity), but also on the mobile apps (again, Android and iPhone), and, of course, on the web. The Google+ site is the main stream on which you’ll find everything. From here, you can easily switch between all of your Circles, share content with any of them, start a Hangout, look up Sparks, etc.
- All of the information flowing through the system does so in real time. As something is shared with you, it appears at the top of your stream. It’s a bit like FriendFeed…and Facebook
- Google is beginning to roll it out today, but it will only be a very limited field trial. You can submit your email address here to be entered into the system and notified as roll-outs continue, but Google says that they have no set time table for a full rollout. Again, this is phase one of what Google hopes to do with Google+, so they’re taking it slow.
- Learning from Buzz and Wave – slow roll out to make sure it works….spread word, tweak, create demand
- Design also looks very un Google – fun, clean and something different
- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/all/1
- That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Herzfeld. The former Macintosh wizard now works at Google — though he loves the company, he had previously felt constrained because its design standards didn’t allow for individual creativity. But with [Google+], he had a go-ahead to flex his creative muscles. “It wasn’t a given that anyone would like what I was doing, but they did,” he says.
- Photos up to 2048*2048 won’t count towards your free 1gB of Picasa storage – neither do 15 min videos – http://lifehacker.com/5817483/picasa-now-offering-virtually-unlimited-storage-brings-google%252B-tagging
- Not all photographers happy
- http://photofocus.com/2011/07/06/google-plus-read-the-fine-print-before-you-sign-up/
- Concern over Terms of Service and what it allows Google to do
34:14 – Google Swiffy
- Google Labs just launched Swiffy, a new web-based tool that allows developers to easily convert Adobe Flash animation SWF files into HTML5. This will allow developers to make Flash ads and basic ActionScript interactions accessible to users on devices that don’t support Flash, like the iPhone and iPad.
- Swiffy is very similar to a tool that Adobe released earlier this year called Wallaby. The main difference is that Swiffy is web-based, whereas Wallaby is a client that runs on a Mac or PC. Additionally, Wallaby’s code is designed to be edited and reused, whereas Swiffy’s code is optimized and compressed in such a way that makes editing difficult.
- The Swiffy demo page shows off the power of the tool. In addition to converting basic banner ad animations, click-event interactions can also be converted to HTML5. To be clear, this won’t convert videos, complex animations or games, but the tool meets its desired goal quite adequately.
35:31 – Google Redesign
- The new Google experience that we’ve begun working toward is founded on three key design principles: focus, elasticity and effortlessness.
Focus: Whether you’re searching, emailing or looking for a map, the only thing you should be concerned about is getting what you want. Our job is to provide the tools and features that will get you there quickly and easily. With the design changes in the coming weeks and months, we’re bringing forward the stuff that matters to you and getting all the other clutter out of your way. Even simple changes, like using bolder colors for actionable buttons or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.
Elasticity: In the early days, there was pretty much just one way to use Google: on a desktop computer with an average-sized monitor. Over a decade later, all it takes is a look around one’s home or office at the various mobile devices, tablets, high-resolution monitors and TVs to see a plethora of ways to access the web. The new design will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. We aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.
Effortlessness: Our design philosophy is to combine power with simplicity. We want to keep our look simple and clean, but behind the seemingly simple design, use new technologies like HTML5, WebGL and the latest, fastest browsers to make sure you have all the power of the web behind you.
- And a big black bar at the top of the screen
39:06 – Google Web Fonts
- Now have 180 free open source fonts that you can use on your website
40:25 – Google Update Calendar and Maps
- A couple of new features but the first of many updates to focus on design
- Will we start to see a more unified look and feel alongside the Google+ rollout?
43:20 – Picasa and Blogger brands to be replaced
- Picasa to become Google Photos
- Blogger to become Google Blogger
43:41 – Google Realtime Search disappears
- Googles realtime search has gone offline – reason?
- Google’s agreement with Twitter to carry its results has expired, taking with it much of the content that was in the service with it.
- Google also stressed that went Google Realtime Search relaunches — something it says will happen but with no set time frame — it will include content from a variety of sources and not just be solely devoted to Google+ material.
- There were multiple sources for Google realtime but mostly twitter
- Still, as said, Twitter was the by far the most dominant content within the service. It’s unclear why the agreement was allowed to expire. Twitter sent me this:
Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.
- For its part, Google said:
Twitter has been a valuable partner for nearly two years, and we remain open to exploring other collaborations in the future.
- I’d say we have a bit of a standoff.
46:46 – Facebooks Awesome Announcement
- They’ve hit 750 million users
- Group Messaging
- Rolling out today, group message everyone in a group
- 1 to 1 Video chat
- Your chatting to friend, click on video icon and start a video conversation
- Done via skype
- New design!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- If browser is wide enough your buddy list will be displayed in a sidebar
51:22 – Spotify coming to US
- Confirmed it’s coming
- Sign up to be one of the first
- They just aren’t sure when
52:08 – Huff Po launches UK edition
- Huffington Post launches UK edition
- Will it be as successful as US version?
- Lots of kickback over the free journalism that takes place
- Guardian don’t like it either
- Editorially, HuffPo feels like a very traditional kind of threat and certainly doesn’t feel like the future. Its formula relies on a fluency of established online skills (though admittedly ones traditional news organisations are still mystifyingly slow to deploy) such as comprehensive aggregation of news around a key story, live blogging and the obligatory social media bells and whistles. HuffPo’s UK launch is one very much for the news junkies. HuffPo’s cluttered design looks more dated than ever – moreDrudge than Flipboard. None of that seems groundbreaking, so what is the HuffPo’s killer proposition?
54:51 – Intereactive UK Broadband Map
- The first interactive map of broadband across the UK has been launched today.
Ofcom, the independent regulator for the UK communications industries, has created the map with data sourced from communications providers to visualise broadband infrastructure across the UK.
- The map allows users to zoom and shows information on the average sync speed (Mbit/s), percentage getting less than 2Mbit/, superfast broadband availability and broadband take up for that specific authority. The colour coded map also ranks areas for the best and worst (slowest) broadband, with one (green) the highest and five (red) the lowest.

Picks
Ian
Aupeo
- Europe’s Pandora?
- Web, iPhone and Android
- Great mix of stations and a good way to discover new music
- Free and paid options – free is ad supported and they can be loud!
- Sign up and if you hand over personal data you get premium access – 7 days

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Shownotes
2:24 – Apple loosens grip on subscription terms
- Apple has lifted the conditions on in-app pricing.
- Significantly, these have now been replaced by a term that says publishers can include content that consumers have paid for elsewhere. So if a newspaper subscribers has paid the paper directly for a year’s online and in-app access, then Apple won’t take a piece of that payment because it was processed outside the App Store. The same applies for services including Spotify, or Netflix.
- Previous terms had insisted that in-app subscriptions were to be the same price or cheaper than subscriptions elsewhere, and also that external subscriptions had to be made available within the app.
- It means publishers can choose whatever price point they like for subscriptions wherever they are, and won’t have to include what might be irrelevant external subscription offers in the Apple apps.
- Apple blinked
4:11 – Apple antes up in Lodsys developer lawsuits
- Apple has made its move in support of theseven small app developers sued by Lodsys over in-app purchases in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas on May 31, filing a motion to intervene in the proceedings on June 9 according toFOSSpatents’ Florian Mueller. If granted, Apple would be added to the Lodsys suit as a defendant and counterclaim plaintiff.
- Mueller believes that even though Lodsys may oppose Apple’s motion to intervene, the Mac maker is likely to be admitted as a defendant, in which case it has already submitted its answer to Lodsys’ complaint of infringement, and its counterclaim. Apple also cites a number of other precedent-setting similar cases where tech companies were allowed to intervene in patent disputes, which back up and strengthen its motion. If Apple joins as a defendant, Mueller thinks it’s very likely it will take on any legal costs incurred by its developer partners.
6:48 – iTunes in the Cloud not until 2012 for the UK
- The music storage part of the iCloud, due to launch in the US around September time, will not be coming to the UK until at least quarter one of 2012.
- A spokesman for the Performing Right Society (PRS), which ensures that composers, songwriters and music publishers are paid for their work, told The Telegraph, that negotiations with Apple about ensuring rights in the UK had started but were at a “very early stage”.
- “The licensing team at the PRS have started talks with Apple, but are a long way off from any deals being signed…It is very much the early stages of the negotiations and is similar to the launch of iTunes – which began in the US and took a while to roll out to other countries,” they said.
- A music executive at one of the major record labels, who wished to remain unnamed, said: “Tentative talks have begun between the major labels and Apple in the UK. However, all talks are at the really early stages and no one expects to see the cloud music service live on this side of the pond until 2012.”
- Mark Mulligan, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, said: “Apple’s cloud music service will not launch in the UK until at least quarter one of 2012. These types of negotiations take a long time… For one thing the UK arms of all the major record labels are biding their time and waiting to see how the service affects download sales in the US before they sign up to anything.”
- Quicky – Final Cut Pro X, Compressor 5 Motion 4 available on Mac App store from Tuesday 21st as well as 3TB Time Capsule and updated Airport Extreme
13:14 – Nokia and Apple Settle
- Nokia and Apple have agreed a technology licensing agreement that ends the long-running legal dispute between the two firms.
- “The agreement will result in settlement of all patent litigation between the companies,” Nokia said. Nokia sued Apple for patent infringements in 2009 and extended the action in December last year. Apple had countersued, accusing Nokia of infringing its patents.
- Nokia said Apple had agreed a one-off payment, the value of which was not disclosed, and ongoing royalties to use its technologies. Apple said the deal covered both companies’ patents.
15:30 – Google Search Updates
- Google Search on the Desktop
- We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, “Can I speak for this?”—it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we’ve added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box.
- English only initially, beta version of Chrome soon
- Search by image
- Next to the microphone on images.google.com, you’ll also see a little camera for the new Search by Image feature. If you click the camera, you can upload any picture or plug in an image URL from the web and ask Google to figure out what it is. Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks—the search [mountain path] probably isn’t going to tell you where you were, but computer vision may just do the trick. Search by Image is rolling out now globally in 40 languages. We’re also releasing Chrome and Firefox extensions that enable you to search any image on the web by right-clicking.
- Google Instant: Instant Pages
- Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches. Let’s say you’re searching for information about the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, so you search for [dc folklife festival]. As you scan the results deciding which one to choose, Google is already prerendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly.
- Next beta version of Chrome will have this feature
- It’s the borg!
- Sorry officer, I have no idea why my computer was downloading THAT page.
23:11 – iCann greenlights expansion of web domains
- Icann has decided to allow the number of internet “domains” to expand enormously in one of the biggest changes ever to the internet’s method of naming sites.
- New website suffixes should start appearing late in 2012 and could be categorised by subjects including industry, geography and ethnicity and include Arabic, Chinese and other scripts.
- A special meeting of Icann’s board approved a plan to expand the number of possible internet domain name endings from the current 22 – such as “.com”, “.org” and “.net” (which are separate of the country-specific domain endings such as “.uk”) – to allow domains “in any language or script”, according to Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive of Icann.
- Icann will receive applications for new domain names for 90 days from 12 January 2012. The fee is $185,000, and the form for application is 360 pages long. It will also begin an awareness campaign pointing out that it has introduced the new scheme.
26:08 – Mobile phone firms develop wave and pay system
- Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile announced plans on Thursday for a joint venture that would allow shoppers to pay for goods and services with their phones rather than cash or cards.
- Consumers will be able to pay for sandwiches, drinks and train tickets by placing their phones close to a reader similar to the Oyster card system on the London Underground. In the future the technology might even allow you to unlock your front door and start your car.
- Kevin Russell, chief executive of 3, the UK’s smallest operator, hit out at his larger rivals for leaving 3 out of the project. “We would want and expect to be a part at the heart of a cross-industry development like this and are more than a little concerned that, as a core competitor, we have not yet been invited to be part of this joint venture,” he said.
- Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere said the service would be open to all retailers, banks, ticketing companies, advertisers and other mobile companies, including 3, Tesco and Virgin Mobile.
- The trio said they would inject significant capital into the project and would each own one third of the equity. The service is expected to go live early next year, subject to regulatory clearance.
29:36 – O2 will not sell the Playbook
- Blackberry Playbook which launched on Jun 16th won’t be sold by O2 in the UK
- The telco emailed interested punters that RIM’s 7in, QNX OS-based slate will not be available after all, saying it had issues with the “end to end customer experience” offered by the gadget
31:17 – HP Touchpad Pricing and Launch
- HP wants £399 for the 16GB model, £479 for the 32GB version – exactly what Apple is asking for the equivalent iPads 2s.
- Both are driven by a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, and sport 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 and a 1.3Mp webcam too. 9.7” screen
- The 240 x 190 x 14mm gadget weighs 740g and ships in July.
32:16 – Sky Go Launches July 4th
- Sky Player and Sky Mobile TV, the two services for watching Sky away from your telly are being combined to form Sky Go — and it’s free to all Sky customers.
- Sky Player lets you watch Sky online, and Sky Mobile TV lets you watch on your phone. With the introduction of Sky Go there’ll be just one service for your phone, tablet, laptop and computer, which is free to all Sky subscribers.
- Sky Go will show live programmes and catch-up TV from across the board of Sky channels. That includes all five Sky Sports channels, ESPN, Sky News, Sky Movies, Sky News, Sky 1, Sky Atlantic, Sky Arts, MTV, Disney, GOLD, Nickelodeon, NatGeo, History, Eden and ESPN.
- On your computer or laptop you can choose from 30 channels to watch on the go. Tablets and smart phones are limited to slightly fewer stations, but can get all the Sky Sports channels, ESPN and Sky News. More channels will be added to the phone and tablet line-up over time.
- You can register two devices to watch Sky Go, whether it’s your laptop in bed or your phone on the bus. Sadly you won’t be able to watch when you’re on holiday, as rights issues prevent overseas streaming.
- Sky Player and Sky Sports on the iPhone were previously subscription options so great to have these free for Sky subscribers
- In August, Sky Go will become available to non-Sky TV customers for a monthly subscription price ranging from £15 to £40. Sky Player will remain available on Xbox Live and Freeview service Fetch TV, but will rebrand as just ‘Sky’.
35:46 – PR firm busted
- Redner Group stated:
- Too many went too far with their reviews…we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom,” the company tweeted. “Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews…that’s completely different,” another tweet read.
- That was on companies official twitter feed…but has since been removed and an apology tweeted out as well
- Everyone kind of expects it…but still not good to see
- Currently, Duke Nukem Forever has a Metacritic score of 49 on the Xbox 360
40:26 – Dropbox Left User Accounts Unlocked for 4 Hours Sunday
- Yesterday we made a code update at 1:54pm Pacific time that introduced a bug affecting our authentication mechanism. We discovered this at 5:41pm and a fix was live at 5:46pm. A very small number of users (much less than 1 percent) logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions.
- We’re conducting a thorough investigation of related activity to understand whether any accounts were improperly accessed. If we identify any specific instances of unusual activity, we’ll immediately notify the account owner. If you’re concerned about any activity that has occurred in your account, you can contact us at support@dropbox.com.
- This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.
- If you were affected then you will have been e-mailed as review is complete
- Worried – check your event log – https://www.dropbox.com/events
- For those who are seeking a service similiar to Dropbox, but with more security, Wuala and SpiderOak encrypt data on users’ devices, not on a central server.
43:01 – WordPress.org Password reset
- Noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavory.
- To use the forums, trac, or commit to a plugin or theme, you’ll need to reset your password to a new one. (Same for bbPress.org and BuddyPress.org.)
44:25 – Lulzsec and Anonymous Declare Open War Against All Governments and Fat Cats
- Lulzsec and Anonymoushave just declared full open war against all governments, banks and big corporations in the world. They are calling all hackers in the world to unite. Their objective is to fully expose all corruption and dark secrets
- This is getting tiring…..and dangerous. Real change ala wikileaks is powerful but hacking user accounts and throwing them online for individuals to be damaged…is childish
- Trying to be characters like robin hood?
- Net may be closing in – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/21/lulzsec-hacker-group-who-belongs
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13859868 – 19 year old arrested in UK
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/22/ryan-cleary-charged-lulzsec-hacking
- Charged with 5 offences of computer hacking
51:05 – Microsoft launches Kinect SDK for Windows
- Embraces hacking community by launching official SDK for Kinect on Windows
- This will allow users to create games, UIs, and apps with Kinect’s 3D sensing technology including 3D scanning, audio tracking, and the creation of 3D wireframes in real time.
The three major features include, Raw sensor streams, Skeletal tracking, Advanced audio capabilities
52:41 – Popcap bought for $1 billion
- Huge news in the gaming world: PopCap Games, the company behind such hits as Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled, is in the process of being acquired — and we’re hearing from multiple sources that the price is over $1 billion.
54:29 – iOS Apps
- Bungie Mobile
- http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/14/bungie-releases-free-ios-app/
- Free app from Bungie
- Track your Halo stats
- Login with Bungie ID and enable blue flames!
- Discovr Apps and Music
- http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/discovr-launches-awesome-tool-to-find-and-discover-new-apps-think-interactive-graphs/
- Great apps for discovering new apps and music
- Graphically shows related apps or music, then details more on the app or artist
- Both £0.59 but very nicely written
- Order & Chaos
- http://toucharcade.com/2011/04/27/order-chaos-online-goes-worldwide-lets-take-over-the-arcadian-forest-server/
- Gameloft MMO – rip off of WOW
- Monthly sub but at the moment it’s £0.59 for 3 months gameplay
- Pretty amazing to have this running on iPhone/iPad
- Exfm
- Great music discovery app out today
- Get the chrome plugin to understand what it’s about
- Follow friends, industry leaders, music blogs etc
- Great way of finding new music
- Free!
59:02 – Lytro Light Field Cameras
- Introducing a light field camera this year
- Amazing demo – take a photo and in post you can change what is in focus
- Light field means capturing all the light moving in all the directions in the view of the camera
- A real step change in photography…
1:04:47 – Facebook – Spartan and iPad App
- Project Spartan is the codename for a new platform Facebook is on verge of launching. It’s entirely HTML5-based and the aim is to reach some 100 million users in a key place: mobile. More specifically, the initial target is both surprising and awesome: mobile Safari.
- Yes, Facebook is about to launch a mobile platform aimed squarely at working on the iPhone (and iPad). But it won’t be distributed through the App Store as a native application, it will be entirely HTML5-based and work in Safari. Why? Because it’s the one area of the device that Facebook will be able to control (or mostly control).
- Facebook iPad app

Picks
Chris
SlideIT
- Android Keyboard. Like HTC sense.
- Drag your fingers over the keys rather than pressing individual ones. Magically your words appear. Clever stuff.
- Trial – or buy full versoin £3.99
Ian
Reeder for Mac
- Reeder for Mac – £5.99 from Mac App Store
- The best feed reader for Mac
- Great Google reader integration
- Fast and it looks great too

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Shownotes
2:30 – Sony Hacked
- Down since Wednesday evening – 5 days and counting
- Initially no word on what is causing this issue
- Eventually admitted it was an external intrusion and because of it Sony themselves had closed the network down – hack on the PS Network/Qriocity
- Second update on Sunday morning – having to rebuild network and increase security
- Monday headlines in Wall Street Journal – Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely
- http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/25/22402/
- Then it got a whole load worse
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/04/26/psnqriocity-service-update/
- Due to the hack Sony have:
- 1) Temporarily turned off PlayStation Network and Qriocity services;
2) Engaged an outside, recognized security firm to conduct a full and complete investigation into what happened; and
3) Quickly taken steps to enhance security and strengthen our network infrastructure by re-building our system to provide you with greater protection of your personal information.
- Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state/province, zip or postal code), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity passwords and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence that credit card data was taken at this time, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, to be on the safe side we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may also have been obtained.
- Biggest ID theft yet? 71 million users worldwide, around 3 million in the UK
- What started off as embarrassing to the Sony brand and gaming network has taken a very serious and sinister turn
- But never mind – Sony hope to have the network back up and running in a week
- Further update
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/04/28/playstation-network-and-qriocity-outage-faq/
- Credit card data was encrypted
- They didn’t store the CVC (three digit number) at all
- Search your email for mail from “DoNotReply@ac.playstation.net”, subject “Wallet Funding”, to find which credit cards you’ve used on PSN. Those emails will show the first 4 and last 4 digits of any card you’ve used for PSN purchases.
- Passwords were in cleartext though – doh!!!!!!!!! Update – One other point to clarify is from this weekend’s press conference. While the passwords that were stored were not “encrypted,” they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function. There is a difference between these two types of security measures which is why we said the passwords had not been encrypted. But I want to be very clear that the passwords were not stored in our database in cleartext form. For a description of the difference between encryption and hashing, follow this link.

- Hacker forums are spreading news that the hackers have 2.2 million credit card details alongside names and addresses – http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/hackers-claim-to-have-playstation-users-card-data/
- Also claim that the hackers want to sell the database for upwards of $100,000 and also offered it back to Sony
- True or false? Sony deny it.
- Geohot’s thoughts – http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-news.html
- Sony execs probably haughtily chuckled at the idea of threat modeling. Traditionally the trust boundary for a web service exists between the server and the client. But Sony believes they own the client too, so if they just put a trust boundary between the consumer and the client(can’t trust those pesky consumers), everything is good. Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server? This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client. It’s the same reason MW2 was covered in cheaters, Activision even admitted to the mistake of trusting Sony’s client. Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you. Notice it’s only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted. Because other companies aren’t crazy.
- http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/05/01/some-playstation-network-and-qriocity-services-to-be-available-this-week/
- Latest update – some services to resume this week, full service – this month
- Added automated software monitoring and configuration management to help defend against new attacks
- Enhanced levels of data protection and encryption
- Enhanced ability to detect software intrusions within the network, unauthorized access and unusual activity patterns
- Implementation of additional firewalls
- Welcome back program
- Each territory will be offering selected PlayStation entertainment content for free download. Specific details of this content will be announced in each region soon.
- All existing PlayStation Network customers will be provided with 30 days free membership in the PlayStation Plus premium service. Current members of PlayStation Plus will receive 30 days free service.
- Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity subscribers (in countries where the service is available) will receive 30 days free service.
- PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai said that up to ten million customer’s account details could have been compromised
- Worse – there was an earlier breech
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/may/03/sony-data-breach-online-entertainment
- The crisis at Sony deepened on Tuesday as it admitted that an extra 25m customers who played games on its Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) PC games network have had their personal details stolen – and that they were taken before the theft of 77m peoples’ details on the PlayStation Network (PSN).
The electronics giant said the names, addresses, emails, birth dates, phone numbers and other information from PC games customers were stolen from its servers as well as an “outdated database” from 2007 which contained details of around 23,400 people outside the US. That includes 10,700 direct debit records for customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, Sony said.
The dataset was stolen on 16 and 17 April, before the PSN break-in, which occurred from 17 to 19 April. Sony said that it had not previously thought that the data was copied by the hackers who broke into its systems.
- Lost faith in Sony.
- Upside of a poor console is that I hadn’t used my newer credit card with them – cc details not lost – achievement unlocked
13:02 – Sony Android Tablets
- The S1, sports a 9.4-inch screen. The other is the S2; it bears a novel dual-screen design. The device’s two 5.5-inch screens can be used separately or together; they can also be folded onto one another to create a compact and highly portable package.
- Both tablets are WiFi and 3G/4G compatible and integrate with PlayStation Suite, Sony’s new Android-friendly platform that allows users to download and play PlayStation games.
Sony says the S1 in particular “uses infrared technology and works as a universal remote control for a variety of AV devices … turning on TVs, changing the channel and adjusting the volume.” The tablets can also take advantage of DLNA functionality to “project” content to other, larger screens and speakers.
- Most notable that it’s not Windows
14:12 – iPhone Privacy Fears
- Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised.
- The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.
- For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010
- To view the data yourself – http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
- Nice Mac app that visualises your data
- Ian – don’t see the issue really although it would have been good to:
- Know about it
- Switch it off if I want to
- Saying that – vis is cool, love it to be honest and I blog, RunKeeper, Flickr and Fitbit anyway – it’s mostly all out there allready
- Similar data captured on Android
- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983704576277101723453610.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEADSecond
- Similar data captured and sent to Google on Android devices
- One big difference – it’s an opt in so if you feel uncomfortable switch it off
- That’s the right way to do it
- Good technical explanation of what is being captured and why – http://alexlevinson.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/3-new-thoughts-on-mobile-location/
- Data is being sent to Apple but only on radio device locations, not where you have been
- Apple eventually responds officially – http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27location_qa.html
- Treating this seriously – Jobs, Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall do interviews – http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110427/qa-jobs-and-apple-execs-on-tracking-down-the-facts-about-iphones-and-location/
- Also admit bugs and and changes to come
- Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:
- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
- ceases backing up this cache, and
- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
- In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
- Out today – iOS 4.3.3 improves the way iPhones and iPads handle the location tracking database stored on-device by making is smaller and encrypted. The location database will be no longer backed up to iTunes and it will be deleted entirely when Location Services are turned off.
23:54 – The White iPhone
- Available on April 28th
- Same price as black iPhone – same features, nothings changed, well almost – 0.2mm thicker (maybe) – http://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/28/white-iphone-4-slightly-thicker-than-black-iphone-4/
- 9 months after black iPhone
- “It was challenging,” Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller said during a joint interview with CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday. “It’s not as simple as making something white. There’s a lot more that goes into both the material science of it–how it holds up over time…but also in how it all works with the sensors.”
Schiller said that it turned out there were a lot of unexpected interactions between the color of the device and various internal components. Also, like fair-skinned humans, white iPhones need a little more UV protection from the sun.
- Stopgap as iPhone 5 is in the Autumn this year?
25:31 – New iMacs
- Sandy bridge
- 2 thunderbolt ports on 27”
- Facetime HD – 720p camera in widescreen
- New AMD graphics up to 2GB of ram
- Can drive 2 external displays (27” only) so you could have 3 screens
- Up to 16gb of RAM
- Powerful machines…at a powerful price
30:49 – Digital Magazine Tipping Point
- Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher, has reached a deal with Apple Inc. to make all its iPad editions free for print subscribers, marking a break in the impasse between publishers and Apple and lending support to Time’s contention that it’s business-as-usual after the ouster of its chief executive.
- Starting Monday, subscribers to Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune magazines will be able to access the iPad editions via the apps, which will be able to authenticate them as subscribers. Time Inc.’s People magazine already had such an arrangement, but readers of most publications have had to pay separately for the iPad version regardless of their subscriber status.
32:14 – Push Pop Press
- Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.
- First book is Our Choice from Al Gore – £2.99
- Gore approached them in late 2009 – The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.
- Gore’s book, which goes live in the App Store on Thursday morning, is in part a demonstration of the capabilities of Push Pop Press.
- Much better take on an interactive book/magazine than Wired for example
- Navigation is very easy – you know where you are at all times
- Photo’s are geotagged so you can see where they were taken – extra context
- Very fast despite all the animations – impressive – best attempt so far at adigital magazine that suits a tablet format
35:26 – Spotify Updates
- The European music service is rolling out new versions of its desktop and mobile apps today, which will allow all users (even those pesky ad-supported freeloaders) to sync Spotify desktop tracks with mobile devices, be they iPods, iPhones or Androids.
- Spotify intends to compete directly with iTunes, Spotify is also introducing its own music store, or “download service”, in which users can buy a range of MP3 “bundles” at 10 songs for roughly 8 pounds. Or 100 songs for 50 pounds. (Roughly the equivalent of $13 and $82, respectively.)
- So, not only will Spotify be offering its more than 10 million registered users a music store, it wants its music player to become the default mobile app on its listeners’ devices. To encourage this adoption, Spotify has enabled desktop-to-mobile sync-ing over WiFi. (Something iTunes, cough, doesn’t offer.)
37:17 – Tom Tom sells your data
- The company confessed that they’d been giving data to Dutch police who used it to target drivers.
- TomTom chief executive Harold Goddijn said the company sold the anonymous data believing it would be used to improve safety or relieve traffic bottlenecks.
- “We never foresaw this kind of use and many of our clients are not happy about it.”
- “We make this information available to local governments and authorities. It helps them to better understand where congestion takes place, where to build new roads and how to make roads safer.
- “We are now aware that the police have used traffic information that you have helped to create to place speed cameras at dangerous locations where the average speed is higher than the legally allowed speed limit. We are aware a lot of our customers do not like the idea and we will look at if we should allow this type of usage.”
- In an update today TomTom CEO Harold Goodijn stresses that the tracking of its devices is voluntary and that customers can choose not to allow it. He also says the data is provided anonymously, and is valuable information the company uses to improve the guidance of its devices, by identifying problem areas and routing customers around them.
39:11 – Amazon Cloud Outage
- EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) had a bumpy few days
- Problems took down Foursquare, Quora, Redit and many others
- Amazon was fairly quiet during this outage
- Can you really blame amazon? What’s the fallback for these services?
- Highights need for redundancy – http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment.html
- Also shows everything isn’t right for the cloud – https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=65649&tstart=0
- Life of our patients is at stake – I am desperately asking you to contact
- We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home.
We were unable to see their ECG signals since 21st of April
- Not restored. Not heard from Amazon
People out there – please take a look at our volumes!
This not just some social network website issue, but a serious threat to peoples lives!
- Don’t be that guy – great post from SmugMug on how they survived the outage – http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
- Amazon eventually post long explanation – http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/
- Make commitment to improve comms, speed up recovery and make it easier to use multiple availability zones
44:24 – DropBox Growth and Security Issues
- 25 million users
- 200 million files are saved daily to the service
- However, concerns are growing around Dropbox security – http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/19/dropbox-under-fire-for-security-concerns/
- Recently changed T&C’s to say that they will hand over your data to US government if asked, removing Dropbox encryption before doing so
- http://dereknewton.com/2011/04/dropbox-authentication-static-host-ids/
- config.db file (stores Dropbox client and security details) is portable, not tied to the system and so could be taken and used on another computer
- if used on another compute it would sync that persons Dropbox folder without notifying original user or prompting for any passwords or usernames
- So many app’s have built in Dropbox syncing as an option so hard to move away if your concerned
- Box.net is an alternative although I’ve no idea if it works in the same way
- Wuala from Lacie is another alternative – http://www.wuala.com/
50:24 – 30% of Youtube videos now in WebM
- Google have announced that all new video’s uploaded to YouTube are being transcoded to WebM
- They’ve also transitioned 30% of it’s whole library to WebM
- Sounds low but that 30% account for 99% of the views on YouTube
- WebM was the open source video format that Google has backed
- Bit confusing – if it’s open source why have Google just announced a WebM community cross-licence initiative – http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/04/introducing-webm-community-cross.html
- Is this to protect future users from patent threat?
53:05 – Google Docs and Talk Android Apps
- With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors.
- The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app
- The Docs app also allows you to upload content from your phone and open documents directly from Gmail. You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap
- Also does OCR – take a photo with text on it and it will try and convert to editable text
- Doesn’t work with handwriting or some fonts but Google expects it to get better over time
56:07 – Delicious Acquired
- Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube, have acquired the Delicious bookmarking service from Yahoo for an undisclosed price and added it to their new internet company Avos.
- aim is to “continue to provide the same great service users love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s ‘tastiest’ content.”
- Whats next – who knows
58:01 – Twitter break Osama Death
- News of Obama addressing the nation
- Keith Urban, ex bush staffer breaks the news
- Retweeted thousands of times
- Finally confirmed
- Turns out the attack was tweeted by @ReallyVirtual
1:03:16 – Nintendo admit disappointing 3DS sales
- Sold 3.6 million in March but had predicted 4 million…and probably wanted a whole load more so they could boast on it’s success
- CEO Satoru Iwata – The value of 3D images without the need for special glasses is hard to be understood through the existing media. However, we have found that people cannot feel it just by trying out a device, rather, some might even misestimate it when experiencing the images in an improper fashion.
- It is now clear that the combination of these new features is not necessarily easy-to-understand by just saying one word to those without experience… We have found that not all Nintendo 3DS users enjoy this software. There seems to be more than a few consumers who have Nintendo 3DS hardware but don’t know about this software and possibly haven’t had a chance to get interested in it.
- Mobile phones eating into Nintendo’s core market
1:05:47 – Darren Gibson quits twitter after 2 hours
- First Coleen Rooney joins twitter and gets abused
- Then Wayne Rooney joins and starts to defend her – gets 200,000 followers in 2 days
- Cue Darren Gibson joining twitter…before shutting the account down – why?
- @dgibbo28 your performance on saturday was one of the worst I’ve ever seen of any utd player. scared of the ball much?’
@dgibbo28 hasn’t tweeted yet. Seems somewhat fitting after the countless anonymous performances we’ve seen from the ‘footballer’
@dgibbo28 my mate thought you were about 33 years old in the heart of midfield! Movement like pirlo!!
@dgibbo28 team do all hard work keeping possession then u hit row Z every fuckin time!!
@dgibbo28 the biggest compliment i can give you is that you are better than Carrick
- Bless

Picks
Chris
Portal 2 Free DLC
- DLC – new test chambers for players, leaderboards, challenge mode for single and multiplayer modes, and more.
- Free on steam and as it will be free on PS3, for first time it will be free on 360 too
Ian
Planetary
- Visual music player for the ipad
- lovely – artists are stars, albums are planets, tracks are moons
- very nice way of browsing music collection
Terra
- browser with tabs for ipad
- nice app – fast
- incognito mode and can appear as ie7, firefox etx
- more features than safari

Dropbox is a brilliant and extremely useful online storage service. Online storage services aren’t anything new and what makes Dropbox special is it’s ease of use, speed and how it seamlessly integrates with your host operating system.

Basic account registration is free and you get an instant 2GB storage. Invite your friends and every friend that joins earns you (and your friend) an extra 250MB up to a maximum of 3GB in addition to your initial 2GB.

Pro 50 account provides 50GB storage and costs $9.99 per month or $99 annually. Pro 100 account provides 100GB storage at a cost of $19.99 monthly or $199 annually.

The service can be used as a simple online storage tool via a web browser, to upload files from one computer and then access those files via a browser from another computer. But Dropbox is much more than that – it can be used to share files/folders with other people, keep your data synchronised between multiple computers and easily create online photo albums.

The best way to use it is to install it on your computer, where it seamlessly integrates with Finder/Explorer. Once installed, it can be used just like a regular folder and you can add sub-folders and files to it. When a file is added, it instantly starts to synchronise with the online service, freeing the user to carry on working on other tasks. This is a brilliant tool for users with multiple computers, who want to keep certain data files synched. Store such files in your Dropbox folder and you don’t have to concern yourself with uploading files from one computer and then downloading to another. It all happens automatically without any user intervention.

Files added to the special Public sub-folder can be shared with others – just right-click on the file, copy the public URL and send the link to whoever you want to share the file with.

If you’re working on a project, create a shared folder for storing documents and invite collaborators to share this folder. Uploaded changes are instantly visible to other project members. As soon as one collaborator modifies the contents of the shared folder, the changes are automatically pushed to other collaborators’ Dropbox folders instantly, brilliant! Accidentally deleted files can be easily recovered.

Another really nice feature is that any images added to the special Photos folder are automatically created in to simple photo albums, with public URLs available for sending to friends and families.

Have a look at the tour for full details and explanation of the service. There is also a screencast available which clearly shows all the major features.