Alpha Geek Radio: DTNS 2215 – Love in the Time of Instagram

Andrea Smith joins us to talk about Facebook’s new Nearby Friends feature, and how social networks like Instagram and Twitter are leading to marriage.

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Today’s guest: Andrea Smith, technology journalist and executive producer and host of CE Week TV

Headlines

Facebook announced a new feature called Nearby Friends, that shares your general location with others and vice versa. The feature is opt-in, and both friends have to approve before locations will be shared. You can control what level of friends see your location too and choose to temporarily share precise locations with individuals. Notifications will use logic to take into account people you are always nearby so you don’t get barraged with notifications for every co-worker or family member. You can also turn it off anytime. Facebook will roll the feature out slowly in the US over the next several weeks.
The Next Web reports Twitter is beta-testing a new post format that features a prominent app download button. The format leverages both promoted Tweets and Twitter cards to make the so-called "rich native ad unit". Twitter also announced advertisers can now set up campaigns on ad.twitter.com that run across the entire Twitter Publisher Network, not just Twitter itself. That includes thousands of apps and more than 1 billion devices covered by the Twitter-owned MoPub ad exchange.
Reuters reports Nokia has suspended sales of the Lumia 2520 tablet in parts of Europe, in order to fix a fault in the charger. The plastic cover of certain AC-300 chargers run the risk of coming loose exposing internal components that could cause an electric shock. Consumers in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Russia, Switzerland and UK are strongly advised to suspend use of the charger until further notice as are users of the travel charger. No incidents related to the fault have been reported.
The BBC reports Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of German company Axel Springer wrote an open letter to Google in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. Dopfner writes that he and his company fear Google and asks if they plan to create a superstate where anti-trust and privacy laws don’t apply. He also called the compromise Google reached with the European Commission, similar to extortion, and compared technology platforms to biological viruses. The column comes in response to a column in the same paper by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt mentioned Axel Springer and Google had “walked down the aisle” and signed a multi-year advertising deal.
The Verge reports SD-card maker EyeFi is launching a service to backup all photos you take to the cloud whether you take them with a phone or a camera. Eye-Fi Cloud offers unlimited photo uploads for $49 per year, and works with all of the company’s existing WiFi-enabled Eye-Fi Mobi cards. New customers will get 90 days of free cloud backup. Apps are available for Android and iOS. The service does not work with desktops or laptops or the company's older X2 Pro cards.
VentureBeat reports Tactus will partner Taiwanese device manufacturer Wistron to create its touchscreen with buttons that appear and disappear as needed. Tactus showed off the morphing keyboard technology at CES. It works by using a small reservoir of liquid to raise buttons on a screen and then smooth them away without affecting screen resolution.The company says it will release an iPad Mini accessory similar to a screen protector later this year and a full tablet afterwards, likely early 2015.

News From You

Kylde posted the Ars Technica story that the Heartbleed bug has been found to affect OpenVPN. Fredrik Strömberg, the operator of a Sweden-based VPN service, sucessfully extracted encryption keys from a test server multiple times. A slight bit of good news here, Strömberg notes the exploits aren’t as easy to develop as attacks against Web servers because OpenVPN encrypts traffic inside of an OpenVPN-specific container. Strömberg, like the OpenVPN officials, said the risk to users of the OpenVPN Connect Clients is minimal.
KAPT_Kipper posted the 9to5 Mac story that Apple will build Shazam's song-recognition capability into iOS according to Bloomberg. The assumption is it would then link to iTunes Radio and the Music store.
And Richardya posted the ReCode's sources say Yahoo is aiming to convince Apple to change its default search from Google to Yahoo on the Safari browser. Yahoo has developed a pitch including slides and mockups but has yet to pitch it to Apple execs. Google reportedly pays Apple $1 billion a year for the Safari search, while Bing powers Siri.

Discussion Section Links: Love and Friends in the Digital Age

Pick of the Day: ProCam2 app via Brian Gnuse

Friday’s guests: Darren Kitchen of hak5.org and Len Peralta of the arts.

Episode: http://archive.org/download/DTNS20140417/DTNS20140417.mp3