Following that, Patrick and Shane discuss the implications of Apples push into the textbook market with the release of iBooks 2, news that was hot off the presses as we went to air.

Finally, we delve into the recent launch of Netflix in Ireland, and what it may mean to other content providers over here.

References:
TJ McIntyre
iBooks 2
Netflix Ireland
Roku Box to launch in Ireland

It’s that time of year, and this week, we give you some tips on what geeky presents to get for friends and family. We also have an interview with snowboarder Travis Rice, who’s behind the film The Art of Flight.

References:
Giant Microbes
Gomboc
Ecosphere
Adidas miCoach
FitBit
David Kushner – Masters of Doom
Robert Harris – The Fear Index
Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst – Trick or Treatment : Alternative Medicine on Trial
Blaze Sega Console
Das Keyboard
Kinesis Advantage

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday December 8^th 2011 on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

In “What’s the Stack?”, we talk to Yardsale about what they’re building their application on. Yardsale allows people to quickly create auctions to sell off that stuff you can’t be bothered to put onto ebay or craigslist.

Following that we talk about the recent release of the Android Open Source Project and how intrepid hackers are using it to get Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich onto a variety of devices.

We also mention some Kinect hacks from Kinect Effect including a quadrocopter autonomously controlled by a Kinect.

Finally we chat briefly about the SOPA act and try to clear up a little what it does and doesn’t do.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday November 24th^th 2011 on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

Shane explores what virtual trainers can and can’t do, looks at the products currently on the market and talks about the future of the area, including the role the Kinect and the forthcoming European alternative to GPS, Galileo will play in exercise technology in the years to come.

References
Adidas miCoach
Nike+
RunKeeper
Kinect Effect
Galileo

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday November 10th^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

We also feature two interviews from conferences that David has attended through the years, one about holes in DNS with Dan Kaminsky at DEFCON 16 and one about identity theft from HOPE.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

Also in our first edition of “What’s The Stack?”, Dave and Patrick talk to Eric Stern of online payment service WePay about what they run their business on.

We also talk about the E-PARASITE Act that is currently being proposed in the US, and it’s implications for content providers on the net.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

Returning this season are interviews with some of the biggest names in technology both in Ireland and abroad, exploring the big issues in digital rights and technology.

New to this season is a section called “What’s the Stack?”, where our roving reporters on location in Silicon Valley, Dave and Patrick, interview some of the hottest and most innovative startup companies, asking them what they are building their products on. It promises to give an insight into what’s going into the biggest new companies in technology in the next few years.

In this episode we play an interview with the Bioware doctors [2:16], Ray Muzeka and Greg Zeschuk who were recently in Galway opening their new European contact centre. In the interview they discuss why they chose Galway as the location for their European hub, their switch from Medicine to Games Development and also talk Mass Effect 3, Star Wars : The Old Republic and give a couple of teasing hints about Dragon Age 3. We got their views on the trend of DLC and  also indie games like Minecraft.

We follow that up by briefly discussing the recent iPhone 4S announcement. Dave and Patrick give their views of their hands on experience with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich [14:50] and tell us what they think about the new features that we’ll see in the Galaxy Nexus phone, scheduled to launch on Vodafone and possibly other networks here in Ireland in the next couple of months.

Galaxy Nexus confirmed for Vodafone – http://forum.vodafone.ie/index.php?/topic/9022-galaxy-nexus/

Bioware announces 400 jobs for Galway – http://empirediaries.com/news/bioware-galway-opens-today

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 20^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

[1:30] Gareth speaks with Aidan Carty and Rob Gallagher about the HackEire competition and the Irish Reporting and Information Security Service (IRISS) Conference. HackEire was set up by HEAnet members, and members of the Irish Cyber Security community. The HackEire competition was won by Team Bitbucket, again.

[8:27] Menglin Li, a Chinese MSc student in the Department of IT at NUIG, joined Shane and David to discuss internet censorship in China.

[18:30] Shane spoke with Craig Barrett while he was in NUIG at “Education for Innovation“. Craig told us that while government should support start-ups, funding them directly is not ideal. Rather, private money should be used to fund companies, and supported the Israeli model, where government guaranteed VC funding to certain start-ups.

For a small nation like Ireland to survive against the might of China, Craig told us that Ireland needed to concentrate on doing a few things well, rather than attempt to do many things. He suggested the fields of bio-tech, nano-materials, and medical technologies for assisted living.

He spoke about how Russia has been attempting to create a start-up culture, and finally told us to peruse our passions.

[22:40] Li briefly spoke about his career prospects as a programmer back in China

[25:15] Shane speaks about GoogaSync, a tool to Sync Google products with Symbian phones. David also mentioned Google’s Mobile Sync options.

Jobs:

• Director of IT, University of Limerick
• 50 Galway Jobs announced at Industrial Info Resources
• Cloudium have 25 openings in Limerick and Dublin
• Mobile Travel Technologies have 10 openings in Dublin

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday November 18th^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm

Gareth presents his weekly rant, this time on security theatre.

We talk about Brian Byrne from the NCAD who won the Ireland James Dyson award for his innovative “Flip Ski Boot”

This week, Patrick reviews Trillian, an instant messenger app for Android.

Finally, there are a lot of events going on in Ireland in the next couple of weeks, we talk through the speakers and details. Links to the events can be found below.

Events

The Business Value of Open Source
The Long Debate
Silicon Valley Comes to Ireland
Small Business Can

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday November 4th^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm

Shane talks about the best Symbian applications out there, in our weekly mobile app segment, links to all the applications mentioned can be found below.

In our biweekly jobs segment, we talk about some new jobs in HP for high tech people who also have language skills. A new mobile phone company have set up in Ireland called Just Mobile and they are hiring 25 employees. Just Mobile are an MVNO setting up in the Irish market who have some interesting phones and a couple of quirks, like donating money to charity for every call made and offering top ups in 4, 9, 13 and 18 euro denominations.

Jobs

HP and Just Mobile

Applications

Opera Mobile
Snaptu
OggPlay
Fring
JBak TaskMan
Screen Snap
Frozen Bubble
S-Tris

References

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/16556-3-ireland-hits/

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 28^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

We run through a couple of Irish events, and warn everyone that the Gamer Expo that was scheduled to take place October 29th-31st has been postponed due to fire safety regulations, for more information see their website. The conference is intended to be rescheduled for a later date and all tickets sold will be either refunded or will be valid for the new date. Also, there is a BTW (blogger-twitter-whatever) Meetup in The Church in Dublin today at 7pm. Finally, Patrick brings us his latest app review, this time for the massively popular Angry Birds which saw its release on Android last week.

Next week, we’ll be discussing LTE and WiMax and their impending rollouts in Ireland.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 21^st on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

In his latest weekly segment, Gareth rants about nonsensical version numbers (transcript) and Patrick O’ Doherty returns with another Android app review, this time for Reddit Is Fun.

We also discuss the upcoming GAMER Expo in Dublin, there’ll be LAN gaming, 3D gaming, booth babes, cosplay and vendors displaying all the latest and greatest in gaming gear, including Ovei Gaming Pods. It sounds like it’ll be a good weekend and if you’re lucky, you may just spot IT Freely presenter Shane at the event, along with a cohort of CompSoc members.

As always, you can contact the show at itfreely /at/ ian.ie, our Twitter feed or on Facebook.

Jobs:

Finally, proving that there are still some jobs out there even with this recession we discuss some companies that are hiring in Ireland.

• Otterbox
• Salesforce
• Google Dublin
• Terminalfour

References:

• Music labels lose download case
• Irish ISP wins major legal victory against record labels

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 14^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

Peter Mullan, Media Officer of the Irish National Teachers Association joins us along with Kenny Donaher, IT Administrator in Summerhill College Sligo, one of the first schools to benefit from the planned upgrades. We explore what the upgrades will mean to students and talk about how it will affect the education system as a whole

We talk about Otterbox, an mobile phone case manufacturer who have announced that they are opening their EMEA center of operations in Cork, creating 50 jobs in sales, marketing, finance, graphic design and business intelligence.

We also mention the warning ComReg issued to Three Ireland, due to the mobile phone operator providing incorrect subscriber numbers since 2006. As a result ComReg have not been able to provide a complete key statistics report this quarter.

Patrick sends us a review of the Android application KeePassDroid, in what will be a weekly segment and Gareth kicks off our rants section by venting about ACS:Law.

We announce the first of our competitions; correct answers win some amazing, as yet unannounced, prizes. Answers to itfreely /AT/ ian.ie .

In next weeks show we’ll have a segment discussing jobs and job prospects in this down economy.

Events

• This Sat Oct 9th the .NET community  are hosting DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper, a 2 tracks 12 talk developer event. Free to attend but registration is required. On from 9:30-5:30 in the Digital hub. Register at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper.com
• On Sun 10th, The Irish Ubuntu Locolasition team are hosting a launch party for the latest release of Ubuntu, 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. An all day event, from 1PM – 10PM.
• The NUI Galway Graduate Jobs Fair will be held in the Bailey Allen Hall, on Monday, 11 October from 12.30-4pm
• Next Tuesday the 12th, Microsoft are hosting a cloud event in the Burlington Hotel, discussing their Azure offering. The morning session includes four business talks aimed at architects and managers, and the afternoon will host three techincal talks, aimed at developers.
• That evening (Tues the 12th) The Science gallery Dublin are hosting their monthly xCake iPhone dev night. Free to attend, and on from 6PM-8PM
• On Wed morning, Oct 13th, Hertz Europe’s VP of IT will be speaking at the Aviva stadium on the costsaving of desktop virtualisation. IT’s part of a larger event called Closer to the Cloud which HP and VMWare will also be speaking at. The event will also be held in Cork the week after, on Wednesday the 20th of October, at the Vertigo Hospitality Suite in the Cork County Hall building. Both events kick off at 8:45.
• On Wed Evening October 13th Python Ireland are hosting talks in the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. Talks start at 7PM.
• The week after, on Wed the 20th, Eurocloud are hosting a 10 talk free event called Developing in the cloud at the national college of ireland.  Represenataives from Microsoft, IBM and Facebook will be speaking. It’s an afternnon event, on from 2PM-6:30. Registration is required on eurocloud.ie

References:

• Government press release Re: schools 100Mb broadband programme
• ComReg Publication 10/75 Re: Hutchinson 3G Ireland
• Government press release Re: Otterbox announce 50 jobs in Cork

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Thursday October 7^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 4:00pm.

We also mention Steve Jobs’ recent attack on flash, and Shantanu Narayen’s (Adobe CEO) response.

We also briefly touch on Plink, a company we previously mentioned, and their recent buyout, by Google.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday May 12^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Put on your tinfoil hats everyone, the powers that be are meeting in secret to break the Internet. The Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is being threshed out behind closed doors and could change the way ISP’s work.

We also chat about the Digital Economy Bill that’s currently being rushed through the UK house of Parliament without debate. Seriously guys, stop doing these things in private!

We break off onto a tangent about ownership of songs and multimedia, and come up with the solution to the problem of piracy.

We finish by discussing Sonys plan to disable the ability to install Linux on the PS3, April Fools joke or just a really stupid idea? We ask the question, how long before hackers get around the restriction?

This week we talk to Sacha De’Angeli (twitter), an American Chemical Engineer who is working on a project to create an affordable Arduino based Scanning Tunnelling Electron Microscope. This project, he hopes, will enable those who do not have large financial backing to carry out scientific research in the field of nanotechnology.

Sacha talks to us about his motivations for the project, what he hopes to achieve, and his thoughts on open source hardware.

The project is still young (they have yet to obtain usable results) but it’s potential is vast. Commoditisation of the high end lab equipment market could accelerate scientific discovery, and maybe the next big nanotechnology breakthrough will come from someone in a Los Altos garage.

Update: Sacha mailed me after the show to modify one of his responses. The following is the mail he sent to me.

Hey David,

I finally came up with a good answer for your last question concerning the drug implications of my chemical explorations (hours and hours too late, of course):
The truth is that people like me have much more to fear from society than society has to fear from us basement chemistry tinkerers.

The irrational fear that everyone with a chemistry set is making methamphetamines or bombs has caused a lot of unfounded raids and arrests. This stifles innovation and experimentation. Every time I mention that I have a chemistry lab in my house to anyone, that person immediately jokes about drugs or bombs, and that’s a little scary considering my country’s raid first, ask questions later mentality for chemistry. Hence the tagline I use on my website: Chemistry is Not a Crime.

In my case not only do I not know how to make meth, I honestly have no desire to make pharmaceuticals. Or explosives – both are way too dangerous, not to mention illegal. Turning $1.50 of household chemicals into $30 worth of nanoparticles sounds more than lucrative enough to me, and it has a much lower legal cost.

Anyhow – I really wish I had said all of that instead of what I actually said. Cheers!

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 24^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

This week Gareth, Shane and Dave talk with Damien Mulley (homepage, twitter) about the upcoming Irish blog awards, social media fact checking and online marketing.

“Irish blogging is not dead”, claimed Mully, “twitter has improved and [is encouraging] blogging”, by removing the flippant posts and encouraging more thought out updates on blogs. He also suggested that the number of new Irish blogs and bloggers may be due to an increase in unemployment.

We moved onto the idea that blogging is a echo chamber of opinion, not fact checked news. Recent research shows that less than 5% of outbound links from Twitter link to News Sites (with ~60% linking to Social and Entertainment sites). We quizzed Damien on the accuracy of information on Twitter, as he claimed he used twitter as his main news source. [9:37] Damien proposed that the Wikipedia model of self-correction will in time become dominant, driven by a heightened criticism of any source, commercial or otherwise.

And finally, we moved to Marketing. [21:42] When it comes to online marketing, is it possible to advertise online without Google? [23:42] When does a company using twitter to promote their product become a spammer? [26:26] And can you imagine your customers working to be marketed to? Valve have pulled it off with a recent Alternate Reality Game to launch their latest game, Portal 2.

So is all marketing an evil mind control mechanism, or with creative tact can it be a constructive way to reach out to customers, and maybe gain some new ones? Leave you thoughts

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Friday March 19^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 14:00pm.

This week we talk about the common hurdles facing coders, and offer some views about how to overcome these issues.

Patrick, Shane and Dave are joined by Charlie Von Metzradt (homepage, twitter) – a sys-admin and Coder with Demonware (homepage, wikipedia), and Gareth – a manager/sys-admin with HEAnet (homepage, wikipedia).

We first threw our conversational lasso over the topic of frameworks, how they can be a useful tool to get off the ground quickly, but are sometimes a hindrance when it comes to scaling up your application. Shane spoke about how OpenCV has saved him about a man year of coding in his college Final Year Project, but has added some overhead. Patrick and Gareth spoke about Ruby on Rails is a great platform for rapid deployment, but very quickly its idealist abstraction layers result in unmanageable overhead, requiring a complete rewrite of some libraries or modules.

[15:26] Next we moved onto managing client expectations, with David explaining that clients might think that in a feature freeze to fix bugs no work is being performed. Charlie suggested that the client should be given a login to the bugtracker to show that work is being done.

[18:54] Finally we moved onto the topic of developer/system administrator relations, inspired by the recent Shot of Jaq episode, Developing the Devop. If you haven’t heard of Jono and Aq’s latest Internet media adventure yet, then you should check it out.

With Charlie mediating these two groups at his place of work, he spoke about how developers often fail to write coherent logging tools, leading to admin frustration. Gareth suggested that developers package their code and test the unpacking on a testing server before an admin moves it to production. This way a developer will see any potential problems and will familiarise themselves with an admin workflow.

Patrick mentions Capistrano, a deployment tool. Charlie also mentioned a tool called CheckInstall which will create a RPM or Deb when making from source, to keep track of the files modified by the make and easily uninstall the application you’ve just compiled.

So, leave your thoughts below; what middle ground have you found works between Developers and Sys-Admins? How have you best managed a paying client? And at what point have you found a framework to be more hassle than help?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We also mention possible side channel attacks on a cloud services, including a paper by Thomas Ristenpart which was published at ACM CCS ‘09 titled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds (PDF).

We also interview Jon Åslund, an Engineer at Spotify. Spotify is a cloud based music service, and Jon spoke about some of the engineering challenges in creating the system.

So, are the benefits of always accessible data and acquiring resources according to demand, justified when considering possible vulnerabilities? Let us know what you think?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

As a result, a service called Please Rob Me has emerged – showing potentially empty houses, advertising their emptiness. It is based upon people sharing their location then mentioning that they are leaving home.

We talk about where the line lie, and our personal views on the privacy of our locations’. Stalking, kidnap, advertising, crowd control, traffic control and tin-foil hats are all mentioned.

We also reference:

• A paper by Dr. Sjaak Nouwt: Reasonable Expectations of Geo-Privacy?
• Real Time Rome: An MIT project in conjunction with Telecom Italia to track population movements around a Madona Concert and the World Cup

Finally we wrap up, mentioning two upcoming events:

• This Saturday Skynet are hosting Matt Zimmerman, ex-CTO of Canonical. More info on the Skynet and Ubuntu wiki’s.
• The Irish Blog awards have released their long-list, the event will be hosted on March 27^th

So, are we stupid to be giving away so much information, or is it a useful technological progression? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 24^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We discuss mobile devices and their operating systems, including The Notion Ink Adam Tablet, Google’s Android Licensing, Microsofts new Mobile OS, smartphone market share and Flash on the iPhone. We also speak with Andrew Tanenbaum about micro-kernels in phones (full interview).

Do you have any thoughts on Android, Apple, Adam or anything else not necessarily beginning with A in this rapidly moving mobile device market? Let us know!

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 17^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Michele also spoke about online privacy, how we protect out mum’s from spam, and what Google might really be up to with it’s Public DNS offerings. We also spoke about the proposal to extend the DNS protocol.

So, will Google’s products ever cease to innovate and push the boundaries, or are they merely addicted to snooping? Let us know what you think.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

So, to give us a primer on all things semantic we spoke with John Breslin (homepage, twitter, foaf), founder of the SIOC project (homepage, wikipedia). John told us that Natural Language Processing and extra markup are used to derive meaning from data on the internet. He also spoke about how the Semantic Web will affect both the “average-Joe” user and Web developers.

Our next topic of conversation was ComReg’s announcement that Eircom must reduce the line rental fee charged to other operators from €8.41 to €0.77. We spoke with Peter Evan’s, Product Director of BT Ireland who welcomed the news. Peter spoke about how the market will now be open to true competition, and how we may see new Local ISP’s set up to cater to rural needs. We also discuss the future of broadband here, mentioning that dial up in Ireland (17%) is still more common than the European average (11%) and Magnet’s 50Mbps Fiber to the home offerings.

Christine Heffernan, Acting Head of Corporate Affairs of Vodafone Ireland also sent us a statement in which she said that “[this decision] will lead to more robust competition in the provision of fixed communications services as it will facilitate operators such as Vodafone to offer compelling differentiated products, lower prices, and improved product quality and choice to customers.”

Finally, we had a quick mention of the iPad, and how it’s interesting to see Apple designing their own chips, but we want to see magazines on the device before we buy one.

So, what do you think? Have you moved back to Eircom recently due to high charges? Would a €92 a year saving make you think about moving away from them again? Have you dabbled with Semantic Web technologies? We want to hear from you, leave a comment below.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Darragh Doyle (homepage, twitter) of boards.ie joined us for the discussion. We first spoke of boards.ie’s recent attack, and then moved onto an interview with Marie McGonagle, who was involved in the reformation of the Defamation Act.

Marie spoke about new aspects of the law, and how old aspects have changed. She told us about warrant’s and what powers the Garda have under this new Act, where they can search and for what reasons. She spoke of the safe harbor of “Innocent Publication”, where an ISP or forum host does not have to act on content posted to it’s forum until they are alerted of it’s existence. Finally, she spoke of legal services that may be available to those who’s Freedom of expression is being infringed, specifically mentioning Digital Rights Ireland. Due to time constraints we could only include an excerpt of the full interview.

After the interview we had discussion with Darragh about Defamation and Freedom of Expression online. Boards.ie were also named as a defendant in a libel case in 2006, launched by MCD. Darragh mentioned how legal cases against online communities can have a chilling effect on discussion in those communities.

So, do you use a blog, or host a forum? Have you been thinking about the new laws and the effect they may have on your online presence or community? Drop us a comment and let us know.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday January 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We discussed his project, We Predict It, a tool to track and predict trends on Twitter. As We Predict It is powered by tweets (and so by proxy, humans), we also discuss Mahalo, the “Human Powered Search” and ask if Google should be worried.

We brought up the Gawker iTablet Scavenger hunt, where a blog are offering $100,000 in exchange for an hour with a rumoured Apple product. Apple have a team of lawyers and time has shown that they are not afraid to use them, this being no exception.

Our last story was about the recent attack on Gmail China, and whether suspecting the Chinese government is just a bit too tinfoil-hat-y.

So, what do you think? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio and text of this show are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We also had an interview with Ronan Skehill (Homepage, Twitter, LinkedIn) of PinPoints (Webpage, Twitter), a GPS link service that is device agnostic, converting links to the format your device supports, be it Blackberry Maps, Nokia Maps, &c. Nokia demo’d PinPoints at their CES ovi stand and we discussed the future potential of the service.

We also did our first live video stream. The show is recorded weekly from 19:00-18:00 GMT and from now on you will be able to watch the show being recorded live, and comment in a chatroom, give us feedback as we rant, &c. Below you’ll find the video from uStream; this is probably better viewed live, but it’s good to have the unedited show up too.

The audio and text of this podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

• High school teacher in the US fired for running SETI@home.
• Somali pirates set up a Stock Exchange.
• Dane challenges copyright law.
• Upcoming talks at the 26^th Chaos Communications Congress (26c3). Keep an eye on the GSM talks.
• Irish fabless chip Firm DecaWave sign €250,000 deal with LG for Ultra-WideBand (UWB) chips.
• Plink (an Irish firm, not an application by Simon Tatham) win the second Android Developers Challenge (ADC2) with art scanning application, PlinkArt.
• Last week in an interview with the Economist Roger Faxon (CEO of EMI) mentioned that physical sales still account for 80% of recorded music sales.

The audio and text of this podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Our first topic was embed systems, as Travis is a respected speaker in this field. We spoke about the Brazilian power outtages and how smart power grids in other countries would be susceptible to attack too. We mentioned hacks to get access to the chips, like timing attacks (Travis has written a tool called GoodFET to enable hobbyists to start debugging chips) and using a camera flash.

We spoke very briefly about EU banking data being shared with the US department of justice.

And finally we discussed recent developments in Quantum computing, a historical paper by Feynman, Simulating physics with computers, that laid down much of the Quantum computing groundwork, and Quantum Tunneling and what it means for chip manufacturers.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We also had a great interview with Hugh Nowlan (homepage, twitter) who was team captain for the winning team in last weeks HackEire, a capture the flag contest hosted by the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service (IRISS) (not the IRC client).

The interview on it’s own is also available.

Links:

• Ars Technica: Spain and Finland’s Broadband schemes
• Three Ireland’s National Broadband Scheme page
• Google Chrome OS press event

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Topics covered were:

• Google’s new protocol, SPDY.
• Microsoft bans 1 million modded Xbox 360’s.
• Microsoft launch new Xbox Social service, including Facebook, Twitter and last.fm support.
• Microsoft alegedly patent SUDO.
• Ozdok botnet taken down.
• The BBC hire a botnet for tech show.
• Dr. Dennis Jennings of ICANN/NSFnet to talk in UCD.
• Google launches Go, a new systems language.
• Some Ruby, Arch Linux and Emacs bashing