Technogaze

5 Jul 2014

Solar Power in Germany, Cyberbullying setback in NY State, Facebook Experiments on us and Google IO in Detail

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Raena, Mark & Michael looked an an amazing achievement in Germany, where for two brief periods, half of its electricity requirements were derived from solar power. Meanwhile chip maker Adesto is hoping to be at the forefront of the Internet of Things with its new non-volatile memory chips that use up to 100 times less power than flash memory. With such low power requirements these chips could power themselves by harnessing the energy from simple movement.

Depending on your perspective, Free Speech took a battering in New York State, where an individuals right to be protected from Cyberbullying has been removed. This happened after its highest court struck down Anti-cyberbullying laws, introduced in 2010, stating that these laws encroached on First Amendment rights to Free Speech.

Facebook revealed that it conducted a mass mood manipulation experiment on 700,000 unsuspecting users. It promoted negative or positive items in users news feeds to see what impact it had on a users mood. It measured mood by looking at the content of subsequent posts. Some Governments are looking into the legality of this experiment, but by in large the feedback from FB users was – underwhelming.

More tinfoil revelations that the NSA is targeting subversives that search about details on the TOR network or who visit a popular Linux Journal online. TOR was designed to allow internet users anonymous access and ironically was initially sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Bitcoin was legalised in the state of California with the repeal of a law that restricted trading to US Dollars only and in Australia, the ATO is still mulling over the tax status of the currency. Whether it is classified as money or goods will have a profound impact on businesses trading in bitcoin and the delay in classification is potentially increasing risk for these traders.

Jason joined us on the phone to give us a detailed look into Google I/O. Android Wear, the new version of Android designed for wearable devices, was a large focus of the event. Three watches will initially support this new version of Android with a lot of excitement around the Moto 360, the watch with the round screen. Android Auto was announced as a means of integrating a cars display with your Android phone. Using the processing power of the phone and casting the display to the car screen, local gestures on that screen will be sent back to the phone. Minimising the work that the in-car device has to do, will future protect it as people will change their phones more often than they change their cars.

If you wanted an Oculus Rift, but find it hard to justify the cost, then Google Cardboard may be just what you were looking for.