Darren Kitchen joins for a robot roundup. Google wants to help make surgical bots and a robotic exoskeleton invades India. Plus Len Peralta illustrates it all. Will he draw a robot? Who can say?
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Show Notes
Today’s Guests: Darren Kitchen of hak5.org & Len Peralta of the arts
Check out Len’s awesome Robot Art! http://lenperaltastore.com/products/name-dtns-3-27-15-print
Headlines
Ars Technica reports that gaming company Valve plans to offer an early Developer Edition of the VIVE virtual reality headset for free to qualified developers, at least free initially. Valve hopes to get a sign up site up an running next week for all developers “big and small.” Kits are expected to ship later in the spring in order to get the development hardware out widely ahead of a planned 2015 consumer launch.
Chat utility Slack notified users today of unauthorized access to its user database over a four day period in February. User names, email addresses, Skype IDs, phone numbers and passwords hashed with bcrypt were stored there. No financial information was compromised. Slack urged all users to enable newly-launched two-factor authentication.
Re/Code reports HTC Design Chief Jonah Becker has left the company. Jonah’s predecessor Scott Croyle left HTC last April. Both Becker and Croyle worked at the design firm One & Co when it was acquired by HTC. Jonah’s role will be taken over by Daniel Hundt. HTC co-founder Cher Wang also took over as CEO last week from Peter Chou.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told Fortune Magazine that he plans to donate his fortune to charity, after he’s paid for his nephew’s college education. Fortune estimated Cook’s net worth, based on his holdings of Apple stock, at about $120 million. He also holds restricted stock worth $665 million if it were to be fully vested. Cook told Fortune he is trying to develop a more systematic approach to philanthropy that goes beyond writing checks.
The LG Watch Urbane LTE will go on sale in South Korea on March 27th. Users can place and receive calls through the watch without being tethered to a smartphone. The watch will cost 650,000 KRW ($590) with a contract available for KRW (Korean Won) 10,000 ($9) a month, which includes 50 minutes, 250 SMS and 250MB of data. No word on when the rest of the world will get the smartwatch.
BizTechAfrica reports Phase3 Telecom has started deploying aerial fiber optic infrastructure along high voltage transmission lines from Kano, Nigeria to Gazaoua in Niger Republic. Niger republic is landlocked and the deployment will connect it to the undersea fiber optic connection in Lagos. Niger has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in West Africa.
News From You
KAPT_Kipper pointed out the CNET story computer engineering major Viet Tran and electrical engineering major Seth Robertson of George Mason University have developed a prototype handheld fire extinguisher that uses sound to douse flames. Low frequencies in the 30-60 hertz range disrupt oxygen enough to suffocate the flames. The prototype has a sound frequency generator, a small amplifier, and a collimator made out of a cardboard tube with a hole at the end, to focus the waves in a specific direction.It works on small controlled fires already and they hope to develop it further.
PossiblyGeek shares this story from CSO reporting security vendor Cylance has uncovered security flaws with 277 InnGate routers in 29 countries. The routers are often used in hotels and convention centers for visitors to use. The flaw called CVE-2015-0932 allows remote access “through an unauthenticated rsync daemon running on TCP 873. Once the attacker has connected to the rsync daemon, they are then able to read and write to the file system of the Linux based operating system without restriction,”. InnGate routers are manufactured by Singapore based ANTLabs for use in the hospitality industry and corporate guest networks.
GuyfromTrinidad sent the Engadget report that Nigeria’s Consumer Protection Council has “adopted a strategy of criminial prosecution” against telecom executives if they don’t improve service. Mobile phone adoption has risen so high in the past 4 years that network congestion and dropped calls have become common. The CPC could not find a single operator that achieved the connection promised in their consumer service agreements. Tanzania and Zimbabwe regulators have taken similar action.
tgossa sent us this post from Engadget covering Toshiba and Intel’s 3D NAND announcements. These new NAND designs allow chips to be stacked in layers to increase data capacity. Toshiba said it created the first 48 layer NAND that has produced a 16GB chip with boosted speeds and reliability. Engineering samples were made available and shipping products are expected in a year or so
Concurrently Intel and partner Micro revealed a new 32-layer NAND chip that will ship inside SSDs next year as well. So what do all these tiny NAND chips mean? Micron said the new chips allow a gum-stick sized M.2 PCIe SSD with 3.5 TB and and 2.5-inch SSD with 10TB of storage.
Discussion Links: Robot Doctors
Pick of the Day:
Jacob: Open source Brackets from Adobe. It’s a great application for writing code in tons of languages, it supports extensions, tabs, and more. It’s built using HTML5, so even lowly front-end developers like me can dig in and modify stuff! His favorite extension is Brackets Git
Bryan: Notepad++ has pretty close to the same feature set as Sublime, including a rich plugin ecosystem, but is free as in beer. It’s hard to ignore this advantage in an editor since you can install it without worries on other machines you happen to be using or working on.
Message of the Day
Heath from beautiful Austin suggests a solution to the problem of describing a voice activation in a podcast that could trigger that voice activation for someone listenong to said podcast on said device. He calls it, a “Siri call”
He writes: “Much like a duck call, or other animal call, is used to get the attention of an animal, by hunters and photographers, a Siri call is used by iPhone users to get the attention of their digital assistant. So rather than saying “iPhone users say hey Siri for hands free use.” You could say “iPhone users say the Siri call for hands free use.”
This name also references my favorite show growing up “Boy Meets World”. On the show a character (Eric) would call to his mentor (Mr. Feeny) in a funny way and it was called the Feeny call.”
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Tom,
In reference to DTNS 2458 – There is No King of the Jungle
I was in the same boat as you, except I was the primary Prime owner and I shared with my wife. She is a non-geek ‘regular’ person, so she didn’t understand why I could stream video and she couldn’t even tho she ‘had’ Prime. Now, I don’t believe in people sharing their ‘real’ primary accounts with ANYONE, but ‘dummy’ accounts are fine. So here’s what I decided to do:
1. NOT renew my Prime subscription at expiration
2. Create a new (shared) Amazon account with our family Gmail account (that we already had created years ago to not have to buy Android apps/subscriptions multiple times)
3. Sign up for Prime with the new Amazon account (as a bonus, we got 30 days free again)
4. Share Prime from the new account with my wife’s and my own ‘real’ accounts
5. Delete the credit card used to purchase Prime from the new account
Bingo! We still both have Prime Shipping on our individual real ‘shopping’ accounts and we use the new shared ‘streaming’ account when we want to stream Prime Video. Now, I don’t have to sign in and out of Amazon on the family-shared HTPC all the time when someone wants to stream; it just stays logged into the new account (step 5 very important here). It works out great!
Just a small tip. 🙂
I Love DTNS!
small ($1/mo) DTNS Patreon Supporter 🙂
Keep up the great work!
2WYCE (pronounced twice)
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Monday’s guest: Molly Wood!