January 20, 2019 - Episode 518 - Show Notes

January 20, 2019 - Episode 518

Sunday Jan 20, 2019 (01:12:06)

Description

This week, your privacy is guaranteed again, your security is at risk again, and NBCUniversal wants your money again.

Participants

Scott Ertz

Host

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Avram Piltch

Host

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

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Legality of biometric phone unlock gets a ruling in your favor

Since the beginning of fingerprint unlocking of phones, but brought into prominence by Apple's Touch ID, there has been a battle over whether or not law enforcement has the right to compel you to unlock your device using biometrics. It has long been ruled that unlocking a device via PIN was a violation of the 5th Amendment because it requires a person to divulge private and confidential information, which is tantamount to testimony.

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Extra Life

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Fallout 76 has a private loot room that will disable your account

In videogames, it is not unusual for developers to create a locked or hidden area of the game in which the visual assets of the game can be spawned and rendered before being moved from the hidden area to the public area of the game. The most public instance of this was in a version of Grand Theft Auto which featured the visual aspects sitting in the clouds. The most recent public example of this is in already controversial Fallout 76, which contains a hidden "developer room" with every available asset in the game, including some that have not been released into the game yet. It also features an NPC named Wooby.

News From the Tubes

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One of the largest security leaks in history was just revealed

If 2018 was the year of security breaches, then 2019 is not shaping up to make us more comfortable with our online security. In fact, we are starting 2019 with the largest leak of security information in history. Dubbed "Collection #1," this leak contains 773 million unique email addresses and over 21 million passwords, with a combined collection of 1.16 billion unique account credentials and 2.7 billion total credentials, collected from various sources.

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NBC planning to release its own streaming service in the next year

The list of contenders in the video streaming market is about to get a little larger, as NBCUniversal has announced that they will be entering the fray. The new service will be similar to the current offering from NBC, including the ability to login with your cable or satellite subscription account and get access to the service for free. Unlike the current offering, however, non-subscribers will be able to access the service, as well. This is obviously an attempt to court the cord-cutter community, which is growing slowly, but steadily.

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