Anthony Carboni joins us to talk about Amazon buying Twitch and Facebook fighting Clickbait.
Multiple versions (ogg, video etc.) from Archive.org.
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Show Notes
Today’s guest: Anthony Carboni, co-host of We Have Concerns
Patreon link: http://www.patreon.com/wehaveconcerns
Headlines
Facebook announced today it’s altering its news feed algorithm to combat clickbait. Facebook’s algorithms will note when a high number of people click on a link and then come right back to Facebook. They’ll also note if links receive low numbers of comments and likes. Those are signs of clickbait and the Facebook algorithm will not hesitate to demote such links. After enough people have been suckered into clicking to prove its clickbait.
Ars Technica spent the morning collecting all the news outlets whose sources SWORE this time Twitch was really getting bought. By Amazon this time. We know they said it was Google earlier this summer TWICE, but this time the source familiar with the situation were absolutely briefed on the matter. The price is still reportedly around $1 billion. An announcement came at 1 PM in a blog post from Twitch CEO Emmett Shear confirming the deal. He wrote they chose Amazon because they “believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster.” Twitch will remain an independent company owned by Amazon.
According to Engadget, Tivo is releasing a limited edition Roamio OTA DVR where the OTA stands for over the air. The device will cost $49.99 along with a 15 dollar a month subscription for TIVO’s channel guide. Just like the $150 more expensive Roamio that has cablecard slots the OTA has 500 GB of storage, four tuners and can use the separate TiVo Stream device to stream live and pre-recorded videos on other devices. It just doesn’t have cablecard slots. Apparently cable card slots are worth $150.
Reuters passes along a report from Xinhua that China plans to release another operating system of its own by October. The first version would be for desktops, which China has done before with its own distro of Linux, but later would come OS’s for mobile devices. There’s also talk of an app store. Ni Guangnan head of an official OS development alliance established in March, hopes domestically developed software could replace desktop OSs witin two years and mobile OSs within 3-5 years.
The BBC reports on denial of service attacks carried out against most of the popular game networks like Playstation Network, Xbox Live, BattleNet and more. At the same time, John Smedley. president of Sony Online Entertainment had his plane diverted to Phoenix after a bomb threat. No one was hurt. Multiple groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks. The US FBI is investigating.
News From You
spsheridan posted a Geek.com article about for NC State University undergrads developing nail polish that can detect drugs. Ankesh Madan, Stephen Gray, Tasso Von Windheim, and Tyler Confrey-Maloney have developed a polish they call “Undercover Colors.” The polish contains chemicals that react to Rohypnol and GHB and change colors in its presence.
AcidBeaver85 passes along a Venture Beat story that Coin has changed its mind about double-charging long-waiting backers. Coin first announced that the finished product would be delayed until Spring 2015 and that backers who already paid would have to pay again if they participated in a beta. That didn’t go over so well. Coin now says backer that pre-order customers who opt into the Beta program will still receive the non-beta final product without further charge. The Coin beta program is expected to roll out in the fourth quarter.
MacBytes flags us to the The Verge article about LG’s plan to announce at circular smart watch next week. The LG G Watch R — presumably R stands for Round, will comes with a button on the side, unlike LG’s original square smart watch. The round watch will also have a digital step counter, distance meter and compass. The video also seemed to tease that the display would be a perfect circle, without the black bar at the bottom of the Moto 360 teased at Google I/O.
MikePkennedy pointed out the Next Web story that Mozilla will launch a Firefox OS phone in India this week. The CloudFX, developed by Intex Technologies has a 3.5-inch display, 1GHz processor, 2-megapixel rear-facing camera, dual SIM Bluetooth and WiFi. Hindi and Tamil are supported out of the box. Customers can order it from Sanpdeal.com for less than 2000 Rs which is about $33 US.
Discussion Links:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/25/6066295/amazon-reportedly-buying-twitch-for-over-1-billion
http://recode.net/2014/08/25/amazon-will-buy-twitch-for-more-than-1-billion/
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/25/6066509/why-it-makes-sense-for-amazon-to-buy-twitch
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/25/facebook-vs-clickbait/?ncid=rss
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/
Plug of the Day:
Plug of the day: Daily Tech News Show Shirt with Mustafa from thepolarcat.com’s logo now available in white, black and Ash. Look in the podcasts section.
Pick of the Day: Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is a CCG (collectible card game a la Magic: The Gathering) from Blizzard Entertainment featuring characters from the WoW universe. As someone who never played WoW, on it’s face, it didn’t sound that interesting, but, as someone who played a little Magic back in the day, the second I loaded this onto my iPad, I was hooked. You can play your friends or random people in friendly matches, ranked matches or an arena mode where you draft a deck and then play it on the spot. The game is packed with excellent graphics, animations and music; ever-expanding content; and a vast and active community. The game is free to play with in-app purchases (totally not required) and is available for PC, Mac and iPad with Windows 8 and Android tablet support to come in the near future. Too much fun not to pass along.
Tuesday’s guest: Molly Wood
Hello. Unfortuantely I have had to unsubscribe to the audio feed. The downloads from archive,org are painfully slow. Over half an hour to download one show. I am in Switzerland and have a fantastic Internet connection, all other shows I listen to download perfectly. I wonder if my ISP throttles archive.org or if it is archive.org itself being the problem?
I will attempt to keep up to date with the show by Youtube but that is not very practical for myself.
Thank you for a great show!
Frank.
I’m still working on it. It’s not slow for all users but it’s definitely an archive.org issue. This has happened in the past with archive and it usually passes. Apologies.
Nothing to apologise for. There are other ways to get the show so I am happy enough. Thanks.
The podcast is not downloading the audio feed to downcast, icatcher or overcast in the US
We were having trouble with that but I am under the impression its fixed. Have you tried in the last hour?
No luck for me using downcast in the uk. How am I supposed to walk the dog without dtns 🙁
It is not fixed. It’s downloading a very small file that’s not playable.
Is the source archive.org or soundcloud?
Soundcloud.com
I can’t replicate that. When I click the MP3 link that goes to soundcloud I get the full file.
Well, I know it’s from soundcloud for three reasons:
1) The feedburner link downloads from soundcloud because this is what BeyondPod app is telling me.
Episode URL: http://soundcloud.com/tom-merritt/dtns20140825/download.mp3
2) When I click on the MP3 link in the description, I choose ES Downloader to download the file, and the download link starts off from soundcloud.com That also results in a download.mp3 file of only 41.34 KB being downloaded.
3) And finally, it you type this URL in Firefox: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyTechNewsShow you will see that the download link is exactly what I mentioned above. Downloading it from that page via right click, Save Link As downloads a html file. Clickcing on it takes me to soundcloud.com It looks like you are maybe not putting the direct URL to the file. I see that as far back as 6 to 8 shows before that you had the file stored on archive.org. I am not sure why you chose soundcloud.com for this episode.
I never doubted you were clicking the soundcloud link. As I said I am using the Soundcloud link too but I get the whole episode. Not sure why you aren’t. Was today’s episode better?
+1 with download problems of this episode.
The version received via the Feedburner link was corrupt.
Have tried downloading from archive.org a few times, but each time the file isn’t complete, and seems to cut out around 10-11 mins.
I’m not sure how to download from Soundcloud – can’t see a link, but I guess you may have to sign up to the SC service to get it.
– Richard
The soundcloud link is the one in the post above marked MP3. That *used* to be an archive.org link but is not anymore. So you don’t have to know anything except how to click.
Thanks Tom.
I was just hoping to download the episode so I could listen tomorrow on my commute.
Will have another go in the morning – it’s well past bedtime! 🙂
– Richard
@acedtect The reply link doesn’t show up above.
Today’s show downloaded just fine. I however see that the file is coming from amazon, so it doesn’t surprise me that there isn’t a problem because the problem seems to be with soundcloud.
I get two differently formatted pages in Firefox for this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyTechNewsShow (if clicked on from the link here I get a better formatted page; if typed or pasted in the address bar, I get a bare bones looking page.
For the better formatted one, did you do the right click and save link as procedure for the “Play Now” link and also the “MP3” link or the “download.mp3” link on the bare bones looking page?
If you simply changed where the file is being stored to amazon or archive.org, I believe everything will be instantly fixed.
Here’s the archive.org link that originally existed to the episode in question https://archive.org/details/DTNS20140825
Well, I would have preferred for the source to be fixed–changed actually–so that BeyondPod could play the episode because I am constantly rewinding 10 sec. to hear a word I missed or to make sure I heard something correctly. I don’t know of any other android mp3 player app where I can setup a custom number of seconds to rewind as well as forward.
Anyhow, I was able to workaround this by downloading the episode from archive.org, saving it to the folder BeyondPod uses, and then renaming the file to download.mp3 since there is no way manually link a file to a podcast show.
Like I have already said, the problem is with the soundcloud link. Clicking on it in Firefox should play it and not take me to SoundCloud’s page. Right clicking on it should save the mp3 file, not an html file. The way SoundCloud is handling one’s retrieval of the file is what’s causing the problem.
P.S. Love the show Tom. Have been listening on and off from since your CNET days, then TWIT, and now here.
Still no joy with downcast in the uk. However today’s show works fine. Hey-ho. The direct mp3 link works fine it’s just the podcatcher sub that doesn’t.