Episode 2222 – XP-loitable

Rafe Needleman, editorial director, Yahoo Tech, joins Tom to talk about why you shouldn’t use any version of Internet Explorer for awhile, and how far off we are from Google’s self-driving car becoming available for everyone.



Or you can download the MP3 version here.

Headlines

 * Our top story on the subreddit today was submitted by both tekkyn00b and jaymz668. Ars Technica is among those reporting that attackers are actively exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 11. There is no fix yet, so all users are advised to use an alternate browser. If that isn’t possible for some reason, users should install Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit. FireEye wrote that disabling Adobe Flash neutralizes the attack. Disabling vector markup language support also mitigates the attack.


 * Google’s Director of the Self-Driving Car project, Chris Urmson, made a blog post today about theproject’s emphasis on city street driving. The self-driving car has logged 700,000 autonomous miles, but most of that is highway driving. City driving is much more complicated. New advances enable the car to read stop signs, recognize other objects like buses and pedestrians, and even tell when a bicyclist is indicating a lane change.


 * Ars Technica reports that AOL is now urging all its customers to change passwords after an investigation into hacks reported last week. Turns out the breach affects at least two percent of accounts, with attackers getting email addresses, encrypted passwords, security question answers and other contact info.


 * Recode has the story that Alibaba’s pre-IPO quiet period is not as quiet as you might have expected. The company invested $1.22 billion in video site YouKu Tudou today giving it an 18.5% stake in the popular video-sharing company. Alibaby also set up a joint venture with China’s leading mobile browser, UCWeb, to build a new mobile search engine called Shenma, in order to take on Baidu on mobile. Services like AliPay, Taobao and Tmall will be integrated into Shenma.

News From You

 * Spsheridan pointed us to the Skype blog post announcing that Skype group video calling is now free for all on Windows, Mac and Xbox One, with all platforms, including mobile, to get it free in the future. Existing paying users will be informed of the change, everybody else can just fire it up anytime they want.


 * KAPT_Kipper pointed us to the TorrentFreak article about Netflix posting a job for a software engineer experienced in peer-to-peer. Ars Technica spotted the ad which describes a focus on researching the possibility to allow users to stream videos via peer-to-peer technology. Netflix has pondered what would happen to peering agreements with it if ISP users were uploading as much as they downloaded.


 * the_corley submitted the GigaOm story that Comcast has agreed to sell operations serving 1.4 million of its subscribers to Charter Communications and create a spinoff company to serve 2.5 million customers that would be part-owned by charter. The point would be to reduce the combined number of subscribers of a merged Comcast and TWC to less than 30% of the market by getting rid of 3.9 million subs. The FCC has tried to enforce a 30% subscriber market cap, though the courts wouldn’t allow it. COmcast is trying to follow the rule anyway as a way to win approval for the merger.


 * sebgonz posted the LA Times article about the discovery Saturday of the legendary ET Atari cartridges dumped in a landfill in Alamogordo, new Mexico. The excavation was done as part of a documentary being made to show on Microsoft’s Xbox game consoles later this year. No report yet if any of the cartridges were playable.


 * metalfreak submitted the liliputing article abouta new HP Slatebook running Android on a Tegra Chip. HP has not officially launched the device, but Notebook Italia discovered a promotional video on the HP website that describes it. The device will have a 14-inch HD display, 2 GB of RAM and 16GB storage, with microSD, HDMI, 3 USB ports and Beats Audio. No price or launch date was mentioned in the video.


 * And lifedownloaded pointed out the Reuters report that Chinese authorities have ordered several television shows removed from Chinese video sites. The shows were shown with copyright approval from their makers, so this is not a piracy issue. Four shows, The Big Bang Theory, The Practice, The Good Wife and NCIS, were ordered removed from Youkou Tudou Sohu and Tencent. Last week a directive from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television tightened the process for getting approval to put TV and short films online. It is not clear why these four shows were targeted, although state TV broadcaster China Central TV recently acquired the rights for Big Bang Theory.

Discussion Section Links

 * https://www.yahoo.com/tech/5-things-to-know-about-googles-self-driving-cars-84125852129.html
 * http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-latest-chapter-for-self-driving-car.html
 * http://gigaom.com/2014/04/28/google-car-gets-much-better-at-city-driving/
 * https://www.yahoo.com/tech/new-security-flaw-affects-all-versions-of-internet-84085229159.html
 * http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27184188

Pick of the Day

 * Tadpole bluetooth speaker from iFrogz