on Tech news today the mac turns 30 Facebook turns the tables on Princeton and Sony wants to turn your TV into a makeup mirror all that and more coming up next this is Twi bandwidth for Tech news today is provided by cashfy at c.com [Music] [Applause] it’s Friday January 24th 2014 and this is Tech news today welcome to Tech news today I’m Mike Elgen I’m Saran and I’m Jason Howell Tech news today explores the top Tech news in 30 minutes or less today is the macintosh’s 30th birthday no longer in its late 20s the Apple website homepage is showing an interactive timeline to the history of the Mac plus a video and they added a your first Mac Page where readers are asked to talk about their first experience with the Apple Macintosh joining us today are Harry McCracken the editor at large for time and Andy anako the technology journalist for the Chicago Sun Times and a host of twits Mac break weekly both Harry and Andy are frequent guests on twit welcome to both of you thanks Mike Mike well the Macintosh turns 30 today but so does the IBM portable computer uh the company Dell turns 30 uh what is it about the Mac that is worth remembering where other uh Technologies and companies and products are or not Harry what do you think well um I mean I think those computers are also worth remembering but to me the most interesting thing about the Mac is not that it was really influential in 1984 it’s that it’s continued to be influential ever since there really are not all that many machines from that time and PC history that outlasted the 80s and the Mac is still with us and when you look at Windows systems they’re still knocking off it off in a lot of ways to have that happen for three decades is really um a singular achievement now there there’s a there’s a uh conventional wisdom Andy that the original Mac kind of stole its best ideas from Xerox Park do you think that’s accurate or is that is that a load of baloney yeah from a legal point of view it’s certainly baloney uh they did for for for a couple different reasons first of all the the ideas that were at Xerox Park weren’t necessarily invented in at whole cloth at Xerox Park these were ideas that had been discussed uh in the industry and by researchers for years and years and years before then there’s the uh the Stanford lecture I think that’s called the the the the the greatest demo of all time in which pretty much everything that we came to know in the early 80s and late late early and late late early and late 80s about Computing was demonstrated before it was really practical uh so that so that’s really was where the Macintosh team was already going and the reason why Steve Jobs got that uh got that tour of Xerox Park was for two specific reasons that kind of negate that argument number one that was part of the deal where there was a legal agreement that said in exchange for certain considerations Apple gets a tour of Xerox Park and we get and apple gets to use any cool stuff that they seem to find there uh and the reason why they had to go back a second time was because uh the Mac team had told Steve this is what you need to ask for because we we want to get access to this specific technology that we that we think that they’re working on and they didn’t actually show that stuff although they were legally required to show him basically whatever he wanted to so they had to go back a second time to look at the good stuff so again these were ideas that were already in development by pretty much everybody and also whatever they took from Xerox they had the right to get so that’s not thievery in any way shape or form Andy uh you probably read the Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker a couple years ago three years ago uh called the tweaker about Steve Jobs and the invention of the mouse and how what the relationship was between Xerox Park and the mouse essentially the the article said that uh he didn’t say copy this mouse he said here is a mouse make sure it’s unlike this mouse in every single way I wanted to be cheap I want it to be easy to use I wanted to have one button I wanted it was a longy list of ways in which he wanted to uh upgrade improve and essentially not be the Xerox Mouse do you think that applies to other aspects of the Xerox Park technology that influenced Apple yeah I would say so I I used the Xerox star which is the usual machine that’s cited as the inspiration for all this technology and there is you can see certain basic fundamental DNA just like you can look at m at certain you can look at a squirrel and see that okay the squirrel has an eye here and here and the squirrel has five fingers on the on on the hands and the toes but human beings tend to diverge kind of widely from that uh you know as though someone said wow this five fingers and five toes that’s a great idea but here’s how we would want to do it for our product uh so there’s there’s certainly it’s I think that in general as technology gets developed this is a commonly recurring theme where you will see a designer or developer will see something in real In the Flesh and that will shape their thinking about where they want to take their own thing in their own Direction so it’s one thing to to look at a mouse and see at a mouse working and another thing to Simply say we want to build us one of those that’s certainly not what the Mac design team did it was one of the subtle breakthroughs of the Mac was recognizing that the average person is not the the average user the average business user is not going to figure out a multitude of buttons and this complicated interaction between The Mouse and the screen you need one button and you also need to force them to use it so that they get over their their hangup that I should be doing everything via the keyboard there are a lot of reasons why the mouse worked on the Mac and it didn’t work on previous computers MH uh Berkeley Steph in the chat room says that keep in mind that Steve Jobs got investment from Xerox and so technically he was paid to steal ideas uh it’s also a good point that you know people talk about Xerox having no vision at least investing in apple to a certain extent was uh somewhat vaguely Visionary um Harry you wrote an interesting article called 20 ways Apple’s Mac changed everything can you give us a few of those ways sure and I triy to focus on ones beyond the the initial uh stuff that people know about like the graphical user interface and the mouse and uh the laser printer um if you look at modern laptops really a huge percentage of the ideas in them originated on the Mac um it was the first portable computer with a pointing device buil in originally a track ball and later a touchpad and that nice wrist rest area um and uh so most of that Evolution happened on the Mac um quick time is a technology that Apple came up with during the time that Steve Jobs wasn’t there and um you know full motion video as we know it today really originated with that and and MPEG 4 is based on some of the QuickTime technology so without that you know YouTube and Netflix might not have happen in the way they did as quickly as they did um Bluetooth is another one uh we think of Bluetooth today as something that’s used primarily with mobile devices and when it first came out more than 10 years ago it was in a few phones and essentially the only thing you could do with them was make them talk to your Mac because Apple supported it Apple was also very aggressive in getting Bluetooth 4.0 or uh low energy out there very very early on both the Mac MacBooks and also the mobile devices uh Harry uh Apple is asking asking people about their first Mac experience can you tell me about yours sure well I um at the time the Mac came out I was still sort of a ts80 holdback so I watched the launch with interest but did not have one and the first time I got my hands on one was I think about three years later when when my mother who worked at Boston University got one from work and I I spent more time on that than she did I used pag maker a lot and and Bolton board systems and so forth um and then I like a lot of people I kind of move away from the Mac for a long time until 2004 um when after a long time of using Windows PCS I came back to it how about you Andy uh tell us about your first uh Mac experience I remember it was a couple of months after the original launch but I was a big Big Apple 2 guy and I was a subscriber to soft talk magazine and bite magazine so obviously I’ve been reading about this in ungodly expensive machine that of course I with my paper root would never ever afford and I finally got to use it for the first time when a computer store that was maybe about a quar mile away from the big Multiplex movie theater where I’d seen all the George Lucas movies that they finally got in Max so I remember on a stiflingly hot day went into the computer store partly for the air conditioning saw the mac and that was the it was for a guy who was spending a kid coming home from straight from school and going right behind his Apple 2E to write code even that blew me away because the things that I noticed was the fact was you’re going to think I’m exaggerating but I was just blown away by oh my God the dots on the screen have corners to them they’re not just like Blobby dots of light and I remember and the the first time you you are moving a physical object on a desk and you’re seeing a concurrent object moving and responding to your actual real world movements that blew me away even the noises that the disc drive was making because one one of my favorite things about the Apple 2 was the fact that I I I really absolutely own the disc drive so I wrote I I wrote like new operating systems to like control the stepper Motors I knew everything every we every grind that those machines made and every like click and every noise it made was giving me information on you know how to break the copy protection on Electronic Arts games let’s pass that but but the the fact that this machine made no noise whatsoever just a giant just just a little when it was had had to read something from dis the entire experience just made me think that I don’t know who I’m going to have to work for kill or lie to to one day own one of these machines but Dash darn it I will own one of these machines someday sounds like something right out of Wayne’s World oh yes you will be mine there there was about as much much elegance and dignity to my reaction as it was to Wayne and GS well you can find Harry McCracken on this technology technologized blog at time.com and Andy anco on his Celestial waste of bandwidth blog at an noco.com it’s spelled just like it sounds thanks for joining us guys thanks Mike thanks Mike well uh Sarah uh there’s a little war that broke out between Princeton University and Facebook what’s going on with that yeah so Princeton published a paper last week that said that Facebook was bound to lose 80% of its users in just the next few years and a lot of people said that’s crazy yesterday Facebook ended up striking back a little bit of a tongue and cheek but it’s based on the same type of research that Princeton used initially the social giant said in a mock study that Princeton will also lose all of its students by 2021 uh the if you’re not familiar with the story yet uh what Princeton what the what the study did was compared Facebook almost like a disease and not in the way that it’s bad for you but in the way that it spreads virally among users you’ve got a core number of users and all of a sudden it’s an epidemic but that eventually the the users who had spread it in the first place and up moving on or dying or that sort of thing and so it’s the kind of disease that eventually dies out almost like an organic disease now uh what it also said is that Facebook has all already reached the peak of its popularity and has entered a declined phase so maybe even take the the comparison to being sick out of it that was the point of the Princeton study now what’s interesting though about it is is that it’s based on a decline of searches in Google for the word Facebook now you might say that’s crazy how could you predict anything just based on Google searches but it’s the same method that if you use for Myspace and you kind of turn it into a a graph a curve you do see quite a drop off so this is a little bit of prediction and a little bit of hey we actually can point this to another social network that eventually failed even though it was extremely popular at one point well Facebook uh uh data science scientist Mike develin said okay well I’m going to use the same methodology uh for Prin and it turns out that by 2018 you will have half of your enrollment and by 2021 no students at all so it’s a little silly but Google actually got bit by a similar uh flaw in reasoning when they uh they publish uh predictions about the flu season based on Google searches and recently I think a couple years ago or last year they uh they predicted a huge flu season because everybody was searching for flu and it didn’t happen the Assumption there was that when people start getting symptoms they go to Google and search for for the symptoms or they search for information about the flu turns out that the media was having one of its uh ridiculous overhyping uh Trends and they all jump they all pile on to in a in a war with readers to to scare and alarm everybody and that’s all it was it was a it was a a spike in media generated hype about the flu that had nothing to do with an actual flu virus so this is a similar thing you can’t know about the world by studying Google searches what you can know is how people are being influenced or manipulated in some way or another to go search for one thing or another yeah exactly I mean the searches are happening but it’s not necessarily the most obvious reason that’s right that’s right I mean uh you know Justin Bieber isn’t the biggest superstar in the world maybe he is but just he’s in the news for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you might associate with those uh with that spike in in searches uh the Princeton study was was flawed essent because just because past social networks look like in some superficial way like a virus in the way that they rise and then fall the difference is that viruses don’t have human intelligence and Facebook will always adapt with reason with with with experimentation uh in ways that are sort of Beyond biology to try to counter any sort of uh decline that is happening or may happen uh in the future uh and so that you know in the Facebook study itself though or the Facebook uh sort of humorous tongue-and-cheek response itself was kind of flawed because in fact every previous number one social network has declined and and and universities don’t really like 200 whatever it is 268 year old universities tend to be less likely to decline than social networks uh do so it’s it’s all you know and again they weren’t truly serious they was they were trying to point out uh the flaws but I do think that Facebook uh countered this in part because they feel vulnerable they actually do fear uh a serious decline well they also have even Facebook itself has said uh it was back in October acknowledged that they were declining among the younger set the teenage Facebook users because there’s just if you’re getting onto a social network for the first time all of a sudden uh you are legally allowed to have a Facebook account but you have other options that is a real thing now it’s probably not so doomsday as the Princeton study wants you to believe but the the the younger set that you would like to be on Facebook so that you’ve got a Facebook customer for life might not be there anymore that’s right younger people aren’t just leaving they’re leaving to go to simpler more single-purpose uh sites that specifically don’t have their parents and grandparents and everybody else that they know and maybe uh people in their 20s their co-workers aren’t on there think a sites like Snapchat and so on and that’s why Facebook is working hard to create Facebook versions of almost all of those sites they’re creating their messenger uh uh Standalone they created their messenger Standalone app to capture the people who are going to like WhatsApp type of uh applications they created poke to counter Snapchat they see people going to to Instagram so they just bought Instagram and um Zuckerberg has promised that there are going to be a lot more stal lo apps apps in the future they’re also working behind the scenes to create Google like algorithm magic for serving up super um relevant ads so far their ads are super not relevant uh I think uh and you know Google’s aren’t perfect either but both those companies are headed for a world where they both have lots and lots of services lots and lots of products they’re all linked together with social they all Harvest your personal data and apply that personal data harvested everywhere to each and every one of their little apps and so yeah I don’t see them uh behaving like a virus and I don’t see them going away anytime soon they’re working hard to prevent their decline I think having a suite of Standalone apps is a is is the right idea for Facebook I mean there are probably some people out there who say you know Facebook owns Instagram therefore I don’t use Instagram but there are a lot of people who say you know Facebook has a whole I’m not going to buy into that whole thing but I like Instagram well Facebook still gets all that ad Revenue same company that’s right they don’t care and and and users don’t really care who owns what I think if they like Instagram they like Instagram and who cares that Facebook owns it or doesn’t own it doesn’t matter people just want the service that feels right to them well Sony may turn your TV into a mirror for putting on makeup and no I’m not making this up the company’s P company has a patent for a TV set that was published recently that uh actually turns the TV into a Bonafide makeup mirror the idea is that you push a button and the TV goes into makeup mode the camera turns on but it reverses the image so you actually have a literally a mirror image that’s presented through video but instead of showing the background of your house or wherever it is the TV is it turns it all white it it identifies the difference between the person the user and the environment and it turns the environment White and the white light is is very important and in the whole point of this of this patent and this technology because most people uh who put on makeup don’t have the kind of light that enables them to know what colors they’re using uh when they step outside into into the true uh uh Bright Lights of of the Sun or wherever it is they’re going to be so this TV will use the TV’s uh uh brightness and Technology to provide the right true colors uh so people can can put up a makeup makeup it’s not clear whether they want to turn TVs into places to put on makeup or they want to turn mirrors into TVs for example you can imagine this in the bathroom instead of a mirror you’d have a TV screen and it’s a mirror when you want a mirror and then it turns into a screen when you want some I I always want it to be a mirror in the bathroom that’s just something I need it to always be however part of it could maybe be a television I like the idea of it being able to say hey uh give this quadrant uh you know some real estate for CNN or whatever I I will say it’s true that in the wrong light uh makeup application I should know a thing or two about this can be disastrous so I like the idea of this putting makeup aside though for a second because it’s like this just isn’t the sort of Technology that’s going to appeal to a lot a lot of folks a lot of people don’t wear makeup men and women but the idea that it could sort of turn into the future of what uh a web video might look like is interesting for a couple reasons because it’ll make everybody look better but it’s going to make the environments all look pretty much the same and then it turns into well we live in an age we’re here on twit we have a lot of remote hosts is everyone going to kind of look like they’re in the same sort of weird little uh uh Angelic closet I mean I guess if the lighting looks great maybe we don’t care everyone will look like one of those apple promotional videos right talking in the white room we won’t we won’t have to care so much about well my narrow window is the lighting good in here all sort of be worked out for us we all start saying aluminium for instance I think they’ patented that as well it’s excellent technology well Google’s uh been uh been spanked in court again what’s going on there yeah so a German court has ordered Google to block sex pictures involving Formula 1 boss Max Mosley because although Google had not taken the pictures the Court ruled it was responsible as a distributor of those images the pictures were taken from a video that was filmed by the News of the World no longer in print tabloid and then uploaded to the web back in 2008 this block follows a French case that ended up with Google also being ordered to remove links to those same pictures Google says it will appeal the latest ruling now the Google’s argument is well we don’t police content we don’t want to start policing content that’s all we would do if that was the sort of job that we that we had to do though the company says it has deleted one uh over 100 links to to this Mosley incident um and just can’t keep up because it’s not in the business of doing this sort of thing the court says quote the court is of the opinion that the baned pictures of the plaintiff severely violate his private sphere as they show him active in sexual practices okay well that’s a very gray area right because this is somebody that you could you could say is more in the public eye than the average person but what if the average person has the same issue and ends up not being able to get a job for this reason this is sets a precedent that is is I mean again this is country specific this is you know limited to Europe at this point but what are the implications you know if I say well hold on a second that’s my private sphere I don’t like what’s on what’s on the internet and Google should be able to take these links down well then what happens that’s exactly right and and Google is a little disingenuous about this in fact they do they do uh check for and and change what’s uh displayed and what’s linked to child pornography they go after that on YouTube for example if we were to violate their their their terms of service by just showing somebody else’s content they would remove this video which will be posted on YouTube they do that automatically and they have you know the assumpt you know the process is that they take it down first and ask questions later and you have to appeal and it’s this big painful process so in fact they do this the other point to be considered is that this is a global problem for Google because every single region every single country has its own sensitivities there are certain sensitivities in Muslim countries where you know Google or YouTube or some other Google pro property is being blocked or brought down or they’re dragged into court because they’re displaying something that it goes after the particular sensitivities of that country in Germany for example there and this is a you know the accusation here was that uh was that Max Mosley was at at a Nazi themed uh orgy with prostitutes he said yeah it was an orgy with prostitutes but it wasn’t Nazi themed and in Germany they’re very sensitive about anything relating to Nazi thing you know in the United States there’s all kinds of hate speech and and groups and and they’re free to have swastikas and all that kind of thing in Germany you can’t show and to in France to a certain extent you can’t show sasas you can’t show Nazi themed things and so every every country has its sensitivities uh Google used to sensor censor uh content who knows maybe they still do for the Chinese Communist party which used to there was a you know five years ago if you search for tianan square in the United States and searched for it in China it in China it was all tourist like walking around in the peaceful tanaman Square in the United States it was all tanks and things like that so the fact is that they are in the business of automatically detecting what’s in pictures what what are on the other side of links and they have reasons sometimes they’re Google’s reasons sometimes they’re somebody else’s reasons but if Google wants to be an international player in a world in which uh people have legal systems where they can bring them to court they’re going to be doing this they don’t want to do it I know they don’t want to do it but they’re going to do it so I I think I think this this whole process is here to stay for them well we’ll see what happens with Google’s appeal uh I’m sure the company is is is not being disingenuous when it says that it will but yeah it’s I I think you’re right particularly in the countries in question the fact that there was a part of the story that ends up not being true or at least claim to not be true makes it a very different story that’s right yeah that’s right well don’t you hate smartphone bloatware that you can’t delete I certainly do yes uh and so does the South Korean government apparently uh any pre-installed software on phones must now be deletable by users according to new guidelines that actually go into effect in April the rules affect phones made by Samsung and LG two of the world’s biggest brands I don’t think this is going to apply to smartphones that are sold abroad I don’t think this going to apply to our Samsung phones that we buy I think this is just for the nation of Korea and it also covers telecoms but should it be should should there be you know should com should governments ban carriers and handset makers from putting bloatware on phones that you can well they’re not Banning the carriers right they’re saying the customer should have the option to go back to some sort of a stock model I mean in the case let’s let’s call the Android operating system you know just just as an example so okay if I live in South Korea I get a new phone that’s made by either Samsung or LG and I say okay that’s it’s this uh personalized experience of Android but I just want the regular Android then I have the option to take out all the bells and whistles I I think I want that option I I I think that’s a good thing for the customer I want the option too should governments be the ones who are enforcing that I’m not so sure and speaking of bloatware I’d like to see the option to remove BL Weare on you know other other devices like laptops and I certainly like the option to remove some of the Apple uh products or icons that you can’t currently uh remove well if the government isn’t going to do it the carriers certainly aren’t going to I mean their blet Weare is on there for a reason they want to differentiate themselves from other manufacturers Jason I mean I know on All About Android you you cover the idea of of different uh uh models of Android all the time yeah absolutely I I don’t know how I feel about a government coming in and saying you have to do this as far as this is concerned because I think at least here in the US it’s a free market and you know if enough people really have a problem with this then they don’t buy the phones that have the bloatware and then that’s a signal to the companies to not put it on there are we there no because most people are probably going to put up with it and some people actually like it some people actually like the extra features and services that end up coming with a Samsung or an LG or or whatever you know they end up loading on the phone people use it personally I don’t but I have a choice I bought a Nexus and an Nexus doesn’t have that in the case of Android you do have choices if you don’t want that so I’m not sure how I feel about a government coming in and saying this is what you have to do in ruling that it has to be said also that um that the uh the law is more of a guideline it’s not really clear how uh strongly they’ll enforce it and it also doesn’t apply to Wi-Fi apps uh NFC apps customer service center apps and uh and the App Store App itself uh again those are all Exempted from this ruling well Sarah everybody talks about linkbait headlines like BuzzFeed and upth worthy but it sounds like somebody’s finally doing something yeah if you’re tired of those linkbait headlines that say something like this woman got a Macintosh and what she does next will Amaze you you might like this browser plugin it claims to automatically transform those viral headlines into what they actually mean so it works by finding words that are linkbait words like oh I don’t know Incredible or amazing or fascinating and then changes those words to make them more accurate for example the word incredible is then changed to painfully or inary all right I’m not the biggest BuzzFeed hater in the world I will say they seem to know what I want there was a article yesterday about 26 cats that were uh photographed in mid sneeze can’t say I didn’t enjoy it but yes in general we’ve gotten to the point where linkbait headlines have gone too far so it’s called down worthy it’s na the plugin great name you going to install it great name um I think I probably will should try it for a while uh and you know everybody picks on buzzworthy I mean sorry up Upworthy and good Buzz buzzworthy yeah they’re going to merge that would be a great name buzzworthy and it’s probably true some of that stuff is is buzzworthy but everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon now even slate is using Upworthy like headlines everybody’s using headlines they don’t give you the information they tease you and want you to you know and and I fall for it all the time too if somebody gives me the information about what the story is about I’m like eh but if it’s like you’ll never believe what’s happening and they don’t tell you I’m like well could be really good and I I I find myself falling for it all the time well that’s the thing and sometimes it is really good but it was manipulative at the same time yeah it was do you remember there was a I don’t know this was last year I think there was a plugin that allowed any baby photos in your newsfeed on Facebook to be replaced with something else like a car or a cat or same idea you know it’s like take charge of your internet experience don’t let them tell you what you want and and I I hope that the chat room will come up with a show title today that is either Upworthy or down worthy come on Blow us away you can do it give us a buzz buzz buz yes buzzworthy that’s our our show send send email to us at TNT twit.tv call us at 260 TNT show and leave a message and check out our subreddit at technew today. rd.com and our Tech newws Google+ community don’t forget to subscribe to Tech Newsday at twit.tv TNT thank you so much for joining us today happy birthday birthday Apple Macintosh and we’ll see you Monday [Music] [Applause] [Music]