2014-01-29

Jonathan Strickland pops by to talk about Lenovo buying Motorola from Google, the man who lost his $50,000 Twitter account, and how the Air Force’s secret weather controlling array might get shut down. Or maybe it’s an ionosphere observation platform. SURE it is, secret government.

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Show Notes

Thanks to our guest Jonathan Strickland of fwthinking.com

Lenovo to buy Motorola Mobility from Google for close to $3 billion:  How it went down live on DTNS: Reuters natural gas and oil reporter Ernest Scheyeder, posted on Twitter that Lenovo is near to a deal to buy Motorola’s cell phone divisions from Google for close to $3 billion. China Daily reported the same deal although they report a figure of $2 billion. TechCrunch has also confirmed the report from its own sources and Lenovo later held a conference call to discuss the deal.

Twitter unveils new features to tailor search, and Dataminr for News: Twitter posted a tweet today revealing new features to its search allowing you to filter your results by video, news, people you follow and more. Also, Engadget reports Twitter announced Dataminr for News, a tool in partnership with the company Dataminr that alerts journalists of breaking news, along with details on the origin and sources of the news. The Verge reports CNN has used Dataminr tools to produce at least two stories a day.

The US Air Force plans to pull the plug on HAARP: That would be the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Gakona, 15 miles northeast of Glennallen, Alaska. A “cosmic plasma laboratory without walls,” with implications not only for the military but also for basic science and communications, HAARP researches the ionosphere-where solar radiation meets atmosphere.

News From You: 

The GoodDoc posted this story to our subreddit from the Guardian reporting that UK Ministers are looking to save tens of millions of pounds a year by switching to OpenOffice and Google Docs to replace Microsoft Office. The change would be effected by switching to ODF as the standard document format in government.

Kylde, the self-titled janitor of our subreddit (and he does keep the place sparklingly free of spam) posted an Ars Technica link about AMD announcing plans to build ARM-based server CPU’s. An 8-core ARM System-on-a-Chip should begin sampling in March. Codenamed “Seattle,” the processors will be branded Opteron A-series and built on a 28nm process.

jaymz668 sent us the story of Naoki Hiroshima, creator of Cocoyon and a developer for Echofon, who lost his Twitter account @N. Attackers were able to get the last four digits of his credit card from a Paypal customer support agent, then use that and a guess at two more digits to convince a GoDaddy customer support agent to give them control of Hiroshima’s domain names. That gave them access to his email addresses as well. Hiroshimma noticed and changed his Twitter email in time, but then gave in and transferred the twitter handle in order to get his domain names back. Hiroshima says he had been offered US$50,000 at one time for the Twitter handle.

More links from the show:

Flipboard wants to be even more like a magazine

 Nintendo President Satoru Iwata will take a 50-percent pay cut for five months, starting in February. Two directors, including Shigeru Miyamoto will take similar 30-percent cuts and seven member’s of the board will take 20-percent cuts.

Samsung will convert 60 Carphone Warehouse retail stores into Samsung stores in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of Sprint parent SoftBank, and Sprint CEO Dan Hesse recently met with officials from the US Justice Department to discuss Sprint’s potential acquisition of T-Mobile USA.

Two members of Norway’s parliament have nominated Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Facebook earnings released

 

 

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