Episode 2213 – Twitter Gets a Gnip

Nicole Lee, senior editor at Engadget, is on the show today. She and Tom talk about what Twitter is up to with the back-to-back acquisitions of Cover and Gnip.

Or you can download the MP3 version here.

Headlines[]

Twitter announced today it has agreed to acquire Gnip, a company that filters and sells structured datasets, culled from the so-called Twitter firehose of data. Gnip also packages data from other social networks like Tumblr and Disqus, and sells managed API access to services like Facebook. Twitter intends to continue to make data available to Gnip’s current customers and will leave the team in its location in Boulder, Colorado.

CNET reports Google’s Paul Eremenko told an audience the first Ara developer’s conference today that the first of the modular smartphones will go on sale in January 2015 for around $50. It will come in one color, gray. Hopefully some modular components will be available at that time too to spice up the color AND the functionality. Two more developer’s conferences are scheduled for July and September. Power bus support is coming in May, with system-level functions expected in September.

The Verge reports Google just added a new photo attachment option to Gmail, that lets you bring in photos straight from your Google + library. You can attache whole albums and resize images inline. Of course you have to be storing photos in Google + AND use Gmail for any of this to matter to you.

Ars Technica reports that researchers at Germany’s Security Research Labs were able to bypass the Samsung Galaxy S5’s fingerprint sensor to gain access to a linked PayPal account. Researchers took camera-phone photo of print smudge on a phone’s screen and created a wood glue spoof of the print. It’s a similar method used to defeat the iPhone TouchID in September.

PC World passes along the Toshiba announcement thatthe first 4K laptop, the Satellite P55t will hit US store shelves April 22nd starting at $1500. It’s a 15.6-inch laptop with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, up to 16GB RAM, an AMD Radeon R9 M265X discrete graphics card with 2GB RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. Oh and an Ultra HD 3840-by-2160 display with 282 pixels per inch of resolution.

News From You[]

TVsEgon posted the Boy Genius Report article with exclusive photos of an alleged prototype Amazon phone. The device in the images is covered in a protective shell meant to obscure its design and BGR says it blocked or obscured some other parts of the phto. But what can seen is— a black— square. With a screen. And a headphone jack. BGR reasserts information from sources who say the phone’s big feature will be a 3D display that thanks to multiple cameras that track your eyes, will not require glasses.

AllanAV posted the Reuters story thatGoogle has changed its terms of service for Gmail to alert you that yes, indeed, Google scans your email and analyzes it to make targeted ads, both when they are stored and when they are in transit. Google has been accused of violating federal and state wiretapping laws in the US due to the policy.

And metalfreak submitted the threatpost article on iSEC Partners audit of TrueCrypt. The Open Crypto Audit Project contracted iSEC to examine the software for possible backdoors. The first phase of the audit is done and found fewer than a dozen vulnerabilities, none of which indicated any kind of surreptitious backdoor and none of which were considered immediate exploitation vectors. The first phase included the bootloader and Windows kernerl driver as well as pen testing and code review. The second phase will look at encryption cipher suites, random number generators and key algorithms.