2011 Year In Review

and today we're gonna do it. Yeah, We're going to do an episode about the year of eleven in technology news and kind of to give a roundup of some of the big stories that happened some of them. Some of the stories may not be that huge, but I think are fairly impactful. Um and and also I want to point out we're recording this in early December, which means that isn't over yet, So when we get to December,

things is gonna get crazy. Uh Yeah. As a matter of fact, uh, I think the idea behind this episode was stemmed from our annual predictions and predictions recaps because a lot of this stuff we didn't we didn't even come close to predicting because some of it was pretty darn huge um and other things we didn't get on the nose. But you'll find that those sort of ended up in January and February because those are the things we were talking about in December, and those are the

easy predictions to me. Yeah, it's yeah, the further out you go, the harder it is to predict accurately. I mean, there's there's no shock there right right, Yeah, none of us are, you know, Prometheus or anything. Yeah, so let's start with January of eleven. So my January started off with my annual trek out to the deserts of Las Vegas to cover the Consumer Electronics Show or or the the show formerly known as the Consumer Electronic Show that is so popular now that they think everybody can know

what ce S means. Yeah, so it's just c officially. They asked us to call it there and uh yeah. I went all over the place and got to have a good time hanging out with folks like the Molly Wood and Brian Tom from c NE net, Tom Mari and Leo Laport from uh This Weekend Tech, and um Nicolee who was at c NET and is now at

This Weekend Tech. Uh so yeah, so yeah, a lot of the folks out there, Iz Actar, who at the time was not working for This Week in Tech, but just a couple of weeks months later joined This Weekend Tech, so yeah, a lot of the tech journalists and everything. We just kind of hung out and chatted and everything that made it That made it a very enjoyable event for me. Um And on top of that, I got to see a lot of really cool technology unveiled. Now, some of that we still haven't seen truly rollout in

in wide uh draw distribution today. So for instance, three D television again three D television for the last three years that c S has been a big thing, but we still haven't really seen that breakthrough. In the consumer market. I saw a lot of tablets, lots and lots and lots of tablets, mostly Android tablets, not all of them.

Saw the playbook that's the es Blackberries, which it had been unveiled at the end of but but January was the first time I got to get my hands on one, uh and that one sort of underwhelmed in the market, I think you could say, Uh, the BlackBerry still has said that they are committed to supporting the playbook form factor and they can they plan to continue producing playbooks, So they're not backing down yet, at least publicly. They're not backing down. No idea what's going on behind the

scenes over BlackBerry over at RIM. But that's almost always the case, right uh. But we also saw things like about the role of Zoom, and even saw that Lenovo tablet, the one that that I liked so much from the previous year, where it was it looks like, yeah, the U one where it looks like a notebook computer and then you pop the screen outside out of the case and it becomes a tablet, so it would actually have

two operating systems. Now, originally it had Windows I think it was Windows seven and um Lenox, and then the one they had at CS was Windows seven and Android. But again they kept on holding off on that. We still haven't seen that in the United States. I think they launched a product in China, but not in the US. Also, in our internet connected televisions were everywhere and other appliances

as well. Because this was the idea of the whole tech ecosystem where your entire home is wired up and uses the same sort of operating system so that you have this seamless experience just maneuvering around your home, which is a kind of a neat idea, but something that we've now. I remember the old cartoons that had like the Home of the future. Y, Yeah, it's very much that. That's what that is, except with fewer arms coming out

of the walls and dressing you and things. Weren't as many of those, which for my part, I protest I want more of those, like accordion arms coming out and taking your hat off your head as you walk in the door and storing it in a closet somewhere and then Rosie comes up and goes and it has to go. Yeah. So uh so, yeah, that was c e S back in January. There were some other kind of cool things on display, um, but in general that was those were

the things that we're making the news. There was also the Nintendo brought down the three d S and showed it and sort of closed door meetings and a couple of on screen interviews, but they didn't have like a space on the floor where they were showing it off. But yeah, the three DS was making some news because

it hadn't come out yet. Yea. And in Google news, Um boy, you know, it's funny looking back at some of the stuff, it seems like it didn't even happen in when when Eric Schmidt decided to leave the company, Yeah, well leave a CEO role. Yes, he stepped down as CEO of Google and Larry Page took over. And Larry Page is one of the co founders of Google brand, so he is now the CEO of Google. That happened in January. Um and look how badly that turned out.

I mean, I can't even remember what happened when Google. Now they seem to do it, seems to be doing all right. Our next story is part of one of the more tragic tales of eleven and and it begins really in January. That was when Steve Jobs announced that he was well. He didn't evenally announced, he announced to the Apple in place he was taking a medical leave

of absence. And this would be the last time that Steve Jobs was actively the the CEO of Apple, although he did appear at certain Apple events in eleven and of course, uh you know it was was still very much involved in the day to day business dealings, to the point where people now even now feel like for the next few years, there will still be Steve Job's hand in the in the everyday business dealings because he had a roadmap from the company and and you know,

it's I'm wondering if Steve Jobs this idea of medical leave was the same as most people's idea of going to work every day, because really, from everything I could hear, it sounded to me like he was as involved with the process at Apple as any CEO of any other major company would be on a normal basis. I think, yeah, So at any rate, that was that was when the rumor mill popped up again about his health and knowing

that was a medical leave of absence. And of course that story is goes throughout the year and and we'll touch back on it again in a little while. But then Verizon, this was one of my predictions for announced that was getting the iPhone. However, unlike my prediction, they were getting it in But we didn't know how how long the A T and T contract was. That that

had not been disclosed. There was a lot of people thought it was five years, five year exclusive contract between A T and T and Apple for the United States. We should also add, we know we have a lot of listeners throughout the world, and Apple does appear on other carriers, but in the US it was exclusive a T and T prior to Yeah, that's sorry, no go ahead.

As one of the mystifying things about UH the United States UM and the iPhone is that, uh, you know, the other carriers have it, and T Mobile doesn't in the United States, but they do in Europe. Yeah. Anyway, but then a T T is trying to buy T Mobile. We'll get into that too. Uh. And then something that I thought we should touch on throughout this year, this is not a really a tech story truly, but tech

plays a large part in what is going on. UM. I think in eleven we saw more stories about technology playing a role in various uprisings and disturbances and movements than we have any year prior to agree. And in in January, the Arabs Spring revolutions really start to kick

off when the Tunisian president resigned. UM. That was the first major UH, major event within the Arabs Spring, although that technically began late in the resignation of the Tunisian president was the first major event of and UH, and social networking and mobile phones played a huge part in being and people being able to organize so that they could bring out social change. So that was a big story and that again is one of those that will

continue throughout the year. Yeah. Yeah. As a matter of fact, it really really hit in February with the resignation of the Egyptian president UM and yeah. I you know, people were talking, UH, there were there were groups on Facebook.

I remember that making headlines here in the United States about how there are groups on Facebook where people were having discussions and coordinating activities UM and UH and the egypt And government kept trying to control the flow of information and the access to technology, and that was another example of how you know, that's that's like trying to hold back water that's flowing downhill. I mean it's you can, you can deflects things and you can slow things down,

but ultimately people can get at that technology. It's just it's it's very robust and very fluid. I think that was one of the great stories, though, UH are under underlying questions for things like this, from which is UM related but not it's more of a worldwide question. Is the internet human right at this point? I mean, the the ability to communicate and the ability to share information freely, and that's one of the questions that I you know, I think is going to become more and more prominent

now that so many people are using the Internet. But that's that's one of these things. I mean, it's is it okay for a government to censor this information or not? Um? And you know, as the years worn on and these events have happened, you hear that that question being discussed more openly. Um. Yeah. And then we had some media news. Yeah, yeah, we've got I mean, we'll just glance over these because

it's just kind of interesting. A O. L bought Huffington's Post for million dollars and Arianna Huffington became the editor in chief. We've then saw some folks women Gadgets start to leave and Gadget several of them have gone on to form a new group, a new site called The Verge, and Gadget still exists as well. But yeah, we saw

a shake up and media from that. We also saw in February the Motorola Zoom debut, which was the first Honeycomb Android tablet, Honeycomb being the Android builds specifically designed with tablets in mind. Now, of course, we're having ice Cream Sandwich coming out, which kind of combines the advances of honeycomb with the the technologies of the previous like

gingerbread builds of Androids. So the two point builds of Android and the three point oh builds of Android are going to be combined for the four point oh builds starting with ice cream sandwich. Suddenly, I'm I'm hungry for for breakfast, cereal and frozen confectionery. What is so our

next story is IBM s Watson one on Jeopardy. Yeah, this is this is sort of a twofold thing because in in in an overarching sense for the entire year, IBM is celebrating its hundredth anniversary, which, as Jonathan and I covered in three episodes of tech stuff, Uh, kind of kind of not exactly right, IBM, doesn't. It all

depends on where you're starting point is. Yeah, and IBM traces its starting point to a hundred years ago in in in nineteen eleven, although uh, it's roots really go deeper than that by you know, several decades actually, um, but it's sort of a showcasing. Uh. This would be uh, the massive um networked computer known as Watson, which took

on two very able challenger human challengers, former Jeopardy champions. Yes, that would be Brad Rudder and Ken Jennings and UH and ibms was Watson showed off things like a natural language recognition and UH and and measuring the likelihood of one answer being correct versus another and which you could

see if you watch the show. Yeah, they displayed that for all of us to see, so so you know, it was actually trying to make judgments on what was the most appropriate response based upon whatever the clue was and did quite well. So that was really exciting. We also saw in February that light Peak debut as Thunderbolt, And if you listen to our Predictions wrap up show, you heard that. That's, you know, the light Peak that has debut. The Thunderbolt technology isn't exactly what Intel was

promising with light Peak, but that's supposedly still on its way. Yeah. Moving on into March yees, something that had happened a lot earlier than I thought it would the debut of the iPad two. Yeah, that actually debuted while I was in Austin, Texas for south By Southwest and my wife got in line at the special Apple store that opened

up in downtown Austin and bought an iPad too. That was that was a pop up Apple store that was not an Apple store before, and it ceased to be an Apple store as soon as the event was over. So it's it's back to being whatever it was before or something else, I guess um. Also in March one of the one of another sad story, Paul Barron, who was the inventor of packet switching technology dies. Packet switching

technology we've talked about a lot in this podcast. It's one of the things that makes the Internet so robust and so UH useful, and it's where you the protocol split files up into little packets and send those packets across the network. And the packets don't all necessarily follow the same route from one machine to another. They may

go several different routes. And this optimize a speed so that when you're transmitting large files across a network, UH, you can do so without having to worry about a certain pathway breaking down and then your file only only your file is loaded, because the pathway that that the information had been taking UH is no longer viable. It's

also redundant. It's also redundant and has the ability to send multiple packets of the same information, so if one doesn't make it, another will get there, and UH, all of these chunks of data are reassembled on the other side to form UH the whole file, which is a

very elegant way of dealing with a complex problem. You know, the the computers that join and leave the Internet on a moment by moment basis, files still get where they're supposed to go, and that all is invisible more or less to the user, which is which is really amazing, and it's it's very sad. We had a number of important tech passings this year, which we'll get to later in the episode. So in March we also first heard about a T and T s plan to purchase T

Mobile USA for thirty nine billion dollars. Now this would a T and T was the second largest carrier in the United States, Verizon being the largest T Mobile USA behind Sprint, UM and and the struggling unit of the dominant Dewitsch a telecom. I mean T mobile worldwide is if I haven't done the research on it, but it was number one in the world for a while there

and UM probably still is. But in the United States floundering, and they decided Twitch Telecom said, you know, we're we're kind of done with this, we want to get out a T and T agreed to buy it. As of this recording, that is still in limbo. The the federal government has several agencies reviewing the deal and it looks like it might be in jeopardy. But yeah, at least it's gonna have to alter dramatically from what it is right now before it can clear those hurdles, I think,

but it may still go through. Actually, it'll be a fun thing to talk about in our predictions episode. We'll see if we get into some discussion in that. Yeah, and this next story also we follow into our predictions episode. So there was kind of a there were a few companies that sort of seemed to have a comedy of errors all throughout eleven and one of those companies was HP,

I mean, the dominant PC manufacturer. Yeah, So in March of Let's not jump ahead of ourselves, HP announced that it would start to ship all PCs with the ability to duel boot into either Windows or web Os. Yes, webOS being the operating system that was designed by Palm was designed by Palem, which HP acquired. Um, Yeah, and we were all anticipating the Webbos tablet on slot. Yeah, that was gonna be the next it was gonna be It's gonna weigh in against Android and iPhone. It would

be like the real competitor. Uh, you know, whereas the BlackBerry Playbook would really be more for enterprise users, So this would be like the consumer showdown. Well, at this point, HP had said that they were really dedicated to pushing that web Os platform and they were going to push it onto their PC business. And we'll get back into

that in a couple of months in this podcast. Actually uh and then uh, we had a massive earthquake hit Japan in March that caused huge amounts of damage, including damage to nuclear power facility That brought a lot of concern into the picture about whether or not that facility was was breached and whether or not radio activity was leaking into the area. But beyond that, and that, I mean that's huge. Beyond that, we also had massive amounts

of of loss of life, of injury. All of this in incredibly tragic on a tiny scale compared to that, I want to stress this uh nowhere near nowe near is important, but it did affect the tech world because a lot of manufacturing facilities are in Japan, and a lot of the the elements that go into our tech come out of Japan manufacturing it. So bits and pieces that together we are assembled into tech come out of there. Yeah,

specifically memory. Um, there are memory plants in that area, UM which were destroyed in the in the earthquake, and that directly affected um, the computer world for a while, even even you know, in a in a in a corporate way of course. Uh. You know, I don't think pete,

I didn't really hear people complaining about that. I think the the event itself was tragic enough that yeah, I think it mostly probably pushed back plans to debut certain kinds of technology because the supply chain just wasn't there. Moving on, Microsoft debuted Internet Explorer nine, which got pretty good reviews when it came out, and Firefox four came out as well. Of course, Firefox four is not from Microsoft. Yeah, the the long anticipated Firefox four coming out from uh,

from Mozilla. UM. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was waited. We have been waiting quite some time for the next bill of Firefox. I just got it on my computer yesterday because I've been using Chrome. I was just pointing out though you didn't get Firefox for yesterday. Um, I was just pointing out how long we had been waiting in the early part of two thousand eleven for the next level browser to come out, more than say, ten

minutes or so. Um. Well, and then uh hint, we also saw the beginning of another well something what an event that was part of of an overall story that kind of stretched through most of the second half eleven. Uh. So there was a guy named George hots still is a guy named George hots Uh in fact who he was known as a hacker you like to heck hardware and uh. He had videos and things like jailbreaking iPhones

and other devices. He decided to take on the PlayStation three, and he figured out a way to jail break the PlayStation three so you could run other all braking systems on it and you can do other stuff with your place station three. And Sony did not like this at all. In fact, part of the reason why, for the reason why Sonny, if he had done it on his own, Sonny would have probably not cared so much. It was

that he showed people how to do it. He had information on his site showing people how they could also jail break their PlayStation threes and so Sony sued him. Uh and he at first he kind of did a little trip down to South America, supposedly just for spring break, but some people were suggesting that perhaps he was trying

to flee the wrath of Sony. Uh. He did eventually come back and um, this kind of launched this whole um lawsuit about him altering the PlayStation three and uh, Sonny even got permission from a judge to uh to look at the IP addresses of anyone who had ever visited Hots's website in an attempt to try and discourage people from modifying their PlayStation threes. Now, Hots eventually would get out of hots water, and uh, we'll we'll touch on what happened to him in a little bit didn't.

But also in March, we saw Amazon launched the Cloud Player and Cloud Drive products. Yes, that was one of your predictions for the year two, was that everything was gonna a cloudier. Yeah. Yeah. The thing was uh uh, you know, we had been talking for a long time about the possibility that Apple was going to come out with a streaming music service. The Google was looking at coming out with a streaming music service or some other

kind of music service. So Amazon kind of rushed out the door before securing agreements um with a lot of the major music publishers, and I think at the time back in March, we started thinking that they were going to get sued by the music industry and that still

really hasn't happened. Um, but it you know that it's a music locker where you upload your own files, so yeah, and has some limitations on it, like, uh has a five gigabyte limitation for the free account, right unless if you buy an album through Amazon that gets bumped up to twenty gigs. And also any music you buy through Amazon does not count against your locker cap. Yeah, but anything that you upload to that is it does count

against it. And in case you're wondering, it all depends on what bet rate you encode your MP three's But but five gigs is about a thousand songs. Uh. So anyway, that launched, and um, that was that was the first big one of eleven, but a couple of others did launch as well. In April, we saw the first major security breach of the year that would not be the last, this is when my mailbox started filling up with uh,

we we have a security issue. Yeah. Yeah. The Epsilon, which is a company that manages email lists for other companies. So like like if you if you join a program with a company, let's say it's a retailer, so just pick a rock store, a lot of loyalty cards. Yeah yeah, grocery store car right in, department store cards and drug store cards. So you let's say you've you've signed up

for a grocery store card. Just make it simple. You've signed up, You've given your email address, and it's got your name and your address and all that kind of stuff on file, so that you've got your cards, so

you scan it and you get discounts and groceries. Epsilon was a company that managed all that data because a lot of these these businesses that we're using these sort of cards or email distribution lists or whatever they were using it for, they aren't experts in data management, so they outsourced that to a company that was an expert, and Epsilon was this company. Unfortunately for everybody, hackers were able to get access into epsilon system and we're able

to steal millions and millions of customer data records. Yes, yeah, I think I I counted that I had somewhere in the neighborhood. I can't remember what it was. It's like eight or twelve somewhere in there. People emailing me and saying, oh, by the way, your loyalty card email got hacked. This wasn't a credit card information, more like personally identifiable marketing stuff like your name and email address, which is you know, plenty for people who want to sell out to spammers. Yeah,

or you can even use it to do identity theft. Uh, It's it's a little bit trickier, but it's definitely one of those things that could play into identity theft. So this was a big story. Uh. And then carrying on the hacker stuff, hackers targeted Sony. Now, Uh, some part of that might have to do with the issue with George Hots and how Sony was coming down on Hots for modifying the PlayStation three others. There are other reasons

why people were uh justifying their actions against Sony. Let's just say that that because whether or not those actions truly well, I don't believe those actions are justifiable at all. I mean, it's it's an illegal action. I don't I don't see any justification for it, but there were people who were trying to create some sort of justification for

why the hackers were doing what they were doing. At anyway, they targeted Sony and they stole data from over seventy million user accounts of the PlayStation network and Sony Online Entertainment. So they hacked into the systems and stole all this data. And part of Sony's response was they brought the PlayStation network down so that they could fix the security vulnerabilities. Adding to this was the concern that Sony waited to

do that, yes, sat on the disclosure. They didn't disclose immediately that This was about a week later when Sony let people know what had happened. And by this time, by the way, yeah, and these were files that could have potentially included things like credit card information, So it was um uh, you know, it was a big deal.

At the time, no one was really sure how deep this attack went and how much information they managed to get and how much of it was encrypted, because as it turned out, some of Sony's practices were not very um secure. They they stored some stuff in plain text, so it was unencrypted and if you just got access to it, you could read it. Yeah, they used the words may have a lot your your credit card information may have been compromised, but we don't think it has.

You may have experienced the desire to strangle us UM so PlayStation network was down for about twenty three days. Uh Now, at that same time that same month, Anonymous, the online group that is, you know, doesn't really have a central leadership. It's kind of amorphous and difficult to define. Butonmous it wasn't he in the matrix morphous? Yeah, yeah,

I know. Kung Fu. Anonymous had also attacked Sony with a distributed denial of service attack earlier in April, but eventually this didn't actually come out until I think late May. But Anonymous made in this official statement as as official as Anonymous can that the group was not behind the attack that compromised the seventy five million records, and so that that was not Anonymous as doing that was someone else. But at the same time they had also targeted Sony.

So Sony was getting hit pretty hard in April, and so we're Sony customers because they suddenly could not access um the data that they you know, the different UH services that they were used to. Yeah, the next the next couple we're going to talk about happened in April.

But it's funny because I think about these and sort of the the other stuff that leaked out as a result of that, Apple suing Samsung for patent infringement, and everybody at the time, everybody you know, quote quote unquote everybody complaining about how Apple was being ridiculous because they were suing for patent infringement for their technology, sort of ignoring that all these companies sue each other all the time and this is nothing new, but let's actually take

out that, you know, Apple really didn't make headlines with this throughout the year because as a result of these these lawsuits, UH, Samsung started to see a lot of resistance in other countries. They're like, there are places throughout Europe that would not carry certain Samsung products because Apple head said that they were infringing on patents and they were they were essentially copies of Apple designs, and as a result, a lot of devices that Samsung creative were

not available in Europe and also Australia until recently. Um As other recording of this podcast, I should say, but other manufacturers have gotten injunctions against Apple in some countries too, so but this this was kind of like the first, this particular. Yeah, the patent the patent wars have been going on for for years, but this was like the first starting off that that it's seemingly endless series of stories about patent wars, Like every week it was another

story about someone suing someone else or something. Yeah, it was a fresh round and the same sort of thing happened once it became clear that Apple iPhones were tracking user information. Even if you didn't have a location service turned on, it had some information about where the user had been, and that raised a lot of red flags. And then of course it came out that yeah, other other devices do this as well. Uh and uh. In most cases, it looks like it really isn't to track you.

It's to try and deliver the best experience that you can get for these location based services that you know, if it had to track down your location um each time, every time you launch something, it would slow things down and it would make the experience less enjoyable. So that and and adding to the fact that if you call an emergency service, let's say you need help from the police or or a paramedic. Um, they're able to find

you that way too. So I mean, it's just it's just one of those things that it made headlines and need to go well. I mean, there's good stuff and bad stuff about this. And now there's actually very recent story that I'm sure we'll touch on at least a little bit that um that kind of plays back into this on a much more disturbing level. But let's let's move on into May. So uh home May opened up

with a lot of big news. We there was the big raid on Osama bin Laden's compound and uh in which Osama himself was was was killed, and it was live tweeted, yes by someone who heard a helicopter. Yeah, he didn't go on he didn't know what was going on, but he live tweeted the event. And that actually cut

a lot of news stories. Was that, you know the fact that we are now in an era where major historical events are going to be like, we're gonna know more about them now because there's so much more access for the general the general citizen of the of the world to have access to technology and get messages out that it's hard to imagine any major world event happening without sort of a citizen journalism UH element going on, whether it was meant to pieces and journalism or not.

In this case, it wasn't. It was just a guy in his house saying, what the heck is going on? So that was kind of interesting. Also, in May, speaking of what the heck is going on, Microsoft announced that it was going to buy Skype, which was I think it's eight point five billion dollars for Skype. Um. That

was a big deal. In fact, I got a lot of people worried that Skype was going to change dramatically and that all the the stuff they had been relying upon with Skype was going to go away because Microsoft was going to change stuff. So far, we haven't seen that. Um. A lot of other people said yeah. A lot of other people said no, what you're more likely to see is Skype get worked into things like UH tablets and also Xbox. That you would see a lot of of

that functionality UH incorporated into other Microsoft products. Not necessarily the Microsoft would get in the business of of fiddling around with Skype. Yeah. Speaking of other big companies, Google came out with the chromos. Yeah, they officially launched it. Now there had been a developer build for a while, but then we were talking about it about how it was going to be the netbook operating system of choice.

Then netbooks kind of disappeared. Yeah, they don't really exist anymore, uh not, not not like they did back in two thousand nine and two thousand ten. Yeah. Yeah, we had people asking us if we had early released chromebooks. No, No, I wish we did. I haven't actually seen one in the while. I wanted to play with with one, but I never got a chance to. They also unveiled Google Wallet, which was their UM, their near field communications payment service.

Use your phone to uh hold your credit card information, tap it to pay. Yeah, so this was the software side of that, not the hardware side, because there isn't really much of a hardware side. Still a chip, yeah you can get there's like a couple of phones to support it, but even the new phones that Jonathan and I got this year don't support. Now the that's in

the United States. We should point out in other parts of the world that technology has been available for a few years, like in Japan, available for quite some time. But here it's a big market and it's just now coming here. So also in May the Experience play debut. That was the PlayStation phone. It's not called it's a phone that is able to play PlayStation one games. It's a PlayStation phone. All right, don't take don't take away

my award from that last show. Also our friend George Hots Uh, he gets hired by a little company called Facebook. You know whatever whatever happened to them, uh, just still around. Um and the Winklevoss twins speaking of Facebook, and these are the the twins from Harvard who who alleged that they had hired Zuckerberg to work on a project for them. And then zuckerbrook Berg took some of the uh stuff that the Winklevoss Twins had suggested and incorporated into his

own project called the Facebook. Yeah, that would be Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook and an alleged founder, Yes, alleged founder in this particular, he was definitely the founder of Facebook, whether or not, whether or not all the information he came up with. And you know, we did a whole podcast about this, this whole scandal, and I'm not going to pretend to know what happened, but at any rate, the winkle of us Twins had had taken a case

against Facebook. They received a settlement, and then they decided that apparently that the settlement wasn't enough and they wanted to go for more, so they took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. That ultimately would not work out for them, but they haven't given up. No um, And I don't know why he worded it this way, because now I'm hungry for bananas. But LinkedIn, the the business networking site, decided to file for an Internet International

Uh oh, that was great. Initial public offering a stock on I p O and it went, Yeah, the bananas, it went bananas. Yeah. No. LinkedIn stock prices sward when it first went public. Groupons did as well. Groupon also went public in the the coupon service that that basically clues you in that there's some cool deal going off today. You should pick that up. So both LinkedIn and groupon went public and both did incredibly well upon debut, and both have sense um leveled off and actually declined quite

a bit. But yeah, that was that was a big splash. Uh. And then in May we see the emergence of a group called Lull's sec which was similar to the group Anonymous, but but not a splinter group of Anonymous really, although I think there was some association between the two groups beforehand. It wasn't like lull SEC was a specific arm of Anonymous. But this was a group of folks who said that they wanted to use their hacker skills to UH to

really target UM certain sites. And those sites might be government based, might be just an organization or a company, UH, and that they had their own agenda and they were following that and they were very prankish and mischievous, but also very destructive. UH. They would deface sites, they would bring sites down UM and that would cause a whole mess of problems throughout the summer of YEP YEP, and in its preparations for opening its first headquarters on Mars Apple,

UH in June. In June decided to UH announce its UH Spaceship campus. That's not really a real spaceship, but people it's futuristic looking and people call it that. And Cupertino, I would love to visit this place once it's complete, because it it sounds really cool. Yeah. Jobs himself was the one who sort of unveiled this, and he was talking to the officials in Cupertino to make sure to get clearance to build this facility because it's gonna be

enormous and crazy and high tech and apples Apples epcot. Yeah, it might even take off and be able to beam people up. I don't know for sure. If it does, it will do so expensively. We also saw E three in in June, and that's when Nintendo unveiled the we U console, the next generation we console, the first next

generation console from the Big Three. Yes, uh to what debuted at E three, Although I'm sure that the PlayStation and Xbox fans will probably say that this is actually the catchup and this is this is a current generation on the next generation. Yeah, it all depends on how you wear it all that, but anyway, this is the one that has the controller with the the touchscreen interface

embedded in the controller itself. Originally it was going to be a system that would only support one controller, which kind of drove some people nuts, and now it sounds like it's going to support up to two. So you still won't be having groups of people playing all at the same time, but you might have a face off between you and a friend. It did seem a little odd to me. That would only support the one controller when that the original specs anyway, that seemed a little strange,

but um yeah, big news. Also in June, one of the things that you had predicted that news Corps would do, yep, yep, a specific thing you might say, specific Media purchased my Space or what was left of it for a fraction, a small, small fraction of what eighty million dollars that News Corps paid thirty five million, which is again a big markdown, a big markdown, and a reasonably sized lottery.

Jack Pott. Yeah, and Justin Timberlake was rumored to be one of the investors in this behind he was bringing he was bringing my Space back, but it didn't happen, so uh. And also, I mean, my Space for the longest time was really looked at as one of those social networks where bands could have a pretty good presence because it really supported that sort of um that sort approach. But since other networks have emerged, they've kind of taken

a lot of that away. And plus my spaces interface just never it got so so ridiculous and people created such garish pages that it kind of got a terrible reputation, mostly based off the way that users were behaving. It wasn't the system itself that was the problem. It was that people were It was like, you know, you move into a nice neighborhood and then you suddenly put pink flamingos on your lawn and you never bring the Christmas

decorations down. And I'm looking at Chris okay, anyway, for some of us, we do that Christmas decorations on my pink flamingos. Um. Yes. And then and then as as though, uh as though, uh, the acquisition of my Space, uh was didn't have my Space already any distant second position behind Facebook. Google attached an anchor to my Space thinking it and further with the announcement that they were uh coming out with Google Plus a private beta, um, which

I got into on that first week. Yes, that was crazy. That normally never happens, um which I know that doesn't make any sense that normally never happens anyway, Yeah, I got into the Google Plus private beta and took a look and really liked the features that they had, and especially the circles where you could create different circles for different people and you could publish information to just one set of circles. And leave out the others, or you could follow one set one circle just to see what

those people are up to and ignore everything else. All of those features were really cool and something that Facebook lacked at the time. Yes, um, and Facebook wasn't concerned about it at the time, but yeah, it got It was one of those things where because I think I think part of the there was a huge surge to try and get Google Plus invitations, Yes there was, they were. They were like the most sought after ticket in town. And I think mainly was because the whole exclusive of

anything once. Once Google Plus opened up to the public a little later in the year, Uh, there was an initial run on the site and then it very very quickly tapered off. Yes, however when it when it did launch publicly, it really did sink MySpace even further down the list because it is now in I'm thinking pretty much still in second place Google Plus, so still distant

behind Facebook. Of continuing our hacking stories, lull SEC retrieved customer information from Sony Pictures, so Sony is still under attack here. This is this is a separate attack from the PlayStation attacks that happened earlier in the year. But little Sec is able to retrieve customer information from Sony's pictures Sony Pictures, and also UH joins forces with Anonymous

to create Operation Anti sec meaning anti Security. So the whole purpose of this was kind of to show how companies that had been boasting about their secure measures in place, you know, how much of that was was real versus

being a paper tiger. So in a way, it was almost like a crusade to show how insecure some of your data was despite what what these companies were predicting, and you could argue whether or not that was a you know, a noble effort or you know, Ascribing motives at this point is really difficult, mostly because a lot of the methodologies these groups used tend to fall into sort of this prankish behavior, and so it's, you know, at one point you're like, well, I'm sure there's some

motivations here that are somewhat noble in intention, but the execution is such that it's hard to really say it for sure. Anyway, they were dedicated to targeting governments, banks and revealing holes in security and defacing sites if the they felt that the companies were being negligent in their security, and presumably the purpose of this was to improve security

across the Internet. Whether or not that actually happened as debatable, yes, But then there was you know, while they joined forces with anonymous uh luwle sec basically ticked off a lot of other groups. Yeah, teen Poison was one. There's a whole bunch of different hacker groups that what what the other hacker groups started to say about lull sec was. And they weren't necessarily judging what lull sex actions were.

They were saying, like lull sex, little sex uh members were just script kiddies, Like all they were doing was downloading code from some hacker site and then and then doing a simple like sequel injection into a system to bring it down. But that they weren't themselves designing the

tools that we're doing these things. And so these other hacker groups began to target lull sec, and we're specifically dedicated to trying to discover who the members of lull sec were and to give that information to the United States authorities because they were starting to take an interest in the little sec at this time. And then we had recorded an episode about the next topic earlier before

this happened. Actually because we had a number of listeners who were interested in the virtual currency known as bitcoin, where the computer actually manufacturers the virtual money, and you can mine bitcoins and you can trade things in some circumstances for for bitcoins, and it was some people have made a lot of money. Yeah, it was. It was a digital currency, and the idea was that the idea was that the system was supposed to protect bitcoins from

from hacking. It was supposed to be a very secure way to keep track of Like how do you keep track of digital currency if you've got a medium that allows infinite uh copying? Like if I can if I can take a piece of digital information and copy it an infinite number of times, doesn't that immediately devalue your currency? Because I've got one digital dollar? What if I copy that a million times and I have a million in

digital dollars, my millionaire, Did I just devalue that currency? Yeah? Well, this was the system was designed to to support UH being able to track information about each individual bitcoin. So theoretically it was possible to know how manywhere on the market and how much the value was. And a lot of people did make some money on it and trading

for actual currency. But then in June the market crash, the value of the bitcoin dropped to less than half of what it had been worth, and then it continued to suffer throughout the rest of the year. And I've even seen some reports recently that suggested that perhaps bitcoin was just a social experiment and was never really intended to be a true digital currency, which if that's true, that raises some serious ethical questions, because you know, people

sunk real money into this, this whole system. So if that's a social experiment, it's done by Dr Frankenstein. I have his light by the way and by and picked it up the other just between our podcasts. So we're halfway through the year. Let's get to July. Yeah, thank goodness, because we're forty six minutes into this podcast. We're gonna pick up this pace a little bit, how about that? Alright, Yeah, this was one of my predictions for the year. Spotify

debut in the United States, Ye, that was. That was a pretty popular debut on until they latched on and made a partnership with Facebook, which ticked off some people that you know, didn't want to have to have a Facebook account in order to listen to music. But anyway, Facebook had their awesome announcement, which ended up being Skype integration into Facebook Chat, which is useful but awesome. Yeah,

that was debatable. Oh here's a sad story. NASA had its final Space Shuttle mission with the Atlantis flight, which thankfully took off and landed safely, but that marked the end of the Space Shuttle program. Netflix changed the rates on its plans. This is when Netflix ceased to be a darling in the eyes of many. This was the beginning of a long, awful year half year for Netflix because they announced the change in the pricing for their

plans and that got a lot of members upset. And I think the purpose of this, In fact, I think all of the moves that Netflix has done, the purpose has really been to try and channel people towards the streaming only method because managing hard you know, hard copy media is a big deal. I mean, it takes a lot of money, and it takes a lot of infrastructure. Yeah, I mean the streaming costs are far less than their shipping costs, right, and and warehouse space and I mean personnel.

I mean there's a lot of money that has to go into keeping a physical infrastructure going as opposed to a digital infrastructure. Unfortunately they handled this one badly. Yeah, and and users kind of flipped out, and they would continue to flip out through the rest of the year for other reasons. We'll get into those two. Uh FBI rolled out a massive rate to start trying to catch people who belong to anonymous. So that was the government striking back at the hackers. And this war continues. UH

and macOS ten Lion debut. Yes. Yes, And initially they made headlines for a couple of reasons. One relied mostly on digital distribution, although Apple did start making a physical copy available for people who didn't have the connection worthy of trying to download such a large operating system. Um. Also because it was less expensive for a massive operating system. However, in the long run, UH people haven't been adopting it nearly as as much as Apple and a lot of

other people I think thought they would. UM. I think there are several reasons for that, probably the not the least of which is there's a lot of software that's not compatible. They took out some of the compatibility because this is the first, uh well not the first, but it's sixty four bit only and it's until only snow Leopard was as well, but it took the compatibility with the U power PC version versions of the software out for for this version of the operating system, and UH,

I think that has damaged that somewhat. Um August Big News Google said yeah, we'd like to buy Motorola Mobility yep. So they did yep. So that was that was huge, and that also raised questions of was Motorola Mobility going to become the exclusive Android handset developer. That of course has not panned out so far. Also in August, Steve Jobs officially resigned as the Apple CEO and recommended Tim Cook, the Chief operating Officer, as his replacement, and the Board

of Directors agreed. UH. Jobs did stay on as the chairman of the Board of Directors UH in August, although sadly, of course, that story changes a little bit and just a couple of months too. UM. At this point, the HP debacle hits another interesting moment. So remember back in March they said they were going to produce PCs that could dual Boot and Windows and webbos. Well, in August they said, you know what, We're not going to develop webo s anymore, and we're actually going to get out

of the PC business too. Yeah. See this is July and August or when the car, the tech car start squirreling all over the road and and at some points leaves the road entirely. Yeah. Usually August is a really slow month in tech news, and it was crazy this year was Steve Jobs resigning and Google, the Google Motorola thing and HP thing. I mean, it was just it felt like it was just gonna continue and things got crazy the all over the place. In Libya, Gaddafi was overthrown,

the Arab spring was continuing there. And also in August, that's when we saw the London riots where the people who were who were actually rioting, we're using smartphones, particularly Blackberries and black gray Messenger to kind of coordinate attacks. And they were also using things like Facebook and Twitter, um, and they were concentrating on rating businesses and that that went on for almost a week. Um. It was pretty scary stuff happening over in London. Moving on into September,

ihone prototype, Yeah, this was I remember. I remember the day this happened, or the day after it happened. I was in New York at the time, and a friend of mine said, visiting a buddy and he said, Hey, did you hear about the the guy who stole that stole? You know, a guy had an iPhone prototype stolen in a bar. I'm like yeah, then then it happened like

a year ago. Heays, no, no, it happened again. I'm like what And sure enough, uh, prototype for the iPhone for S was stolen out of from an employee at a bar. So apparently we learned a couple of things. Uh, if you are an Apple employee, you might need to curb your drinking. Uh. And also, if you are a tech reporter, you might need to start hanging out the bars over in San Francisco. Um. And then we also that was the same month where Netflix took another step

to completely alienate itself from all users. Okay, we're really sorry, but what we're gonna do instead is split ourselves into two companies. Instead of making two different plans or whatever, We're just gonna come become two different companies. They'll be Netflix, which does digital distribution, and they'll be Quickster, which does

DVD only distribution. That will solve the problem, right, because now you'll just have to have an account at both of these companies in order to have the same service you could have through one company before. That's improvement, right. Actually, most people I think we're complaining about the name quick stir well. I think a lot of people were also just they did not like the idea of having to maintain two separate accounts for something that they originally just

had one. But again, Netflix was trying to find a way to offload the physical media and concentrate on digital distribution, and they just did it in kind of a ham fisted way. Uh. Then Google got hungry. Yeah, they got zagatt or zag it. Yes, I was hoping you would know the pronunciation. I've heard it both ways. Um. Yes, the the famous restaurant guide um writer and publisher. Um. Yeah. They they gobbled them right up and found it a tasty,

tasty treat um. Which is kind of different for Google because, uh, you know, this is an opportunity for them to publish content, which is not ben google strong suit in the past, and in fact has raised questions from other other apps and companies like Yelp, saying like are you are you just going to push us out of the picture entirely

and just put your content front and center. In fact, Google's had quite a few antitrust hearings throughout the year that relate to that, to like how it ranks pages and whether or not it specifically tries to de emphasize competitor pages. Of course, you know, this is really Yahoo's strong suit. They're the ones in content and you know they've got a grip on it because they're a massive company that's well, that has a firm sense of direction

and great leadership. Well, you know, that was also the month that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was asked to hit the pavement. Yeah, and she was not quiet about it either. Uh. Yeah, that was one of those work I hear, one of those big events that ended up causing quite a stir. Another one was HP gave the boot to its CEO Leo And I don't even know is it a Potiker

appo taker. I thought it was Apothecar. It might be Apothecar anyway, Yeah, Leo, he gets the boot and Meg Whitman becomes the interim CEO for HP, and that's CEO of eBay. Yeah, this political candidate, this guy really crazy because this is where we started hearing the conflicting reports about is HP really not going to support webo s anymore? Is it really getting out of the PC business? And to be honest, I don't think there's been a firm answer out of the company since then. Well, it goes

back and forth. Yeah, most our most recent news again in early December, is that they're not getting out of the PC even right, But I'm not even gonna We were going to find out about webOS and then they said, um, actually we'll get back to Yeah, so t is not over yet. So we don't know how this is always going to end. We just know that it's been a mess. Yeah. It's one of those things where you when you look back on the year, you really start to see how

messed up some of these companies were. I think is going to be even worse in a way. But we'll get into that in our Prediction show. Uh. Facebook and Spotify form their partnership in September. That was the thing that ended up taking off a lot of Spotify users and uh Amazon announced its new line of kindles, including the Kindle fire Tablet, which got people really excited. People were very fired up. Huh about the Kindles and the

fire tablet. Well, yeah, that's because the fire tablet was you know, is a more affordable competition to the iPad, another similarly priced tablets, although it does has some severe limitations as well. You know, camera, no GPS, no cellular capability. No, but if you don't care, if you don't care, if you just want a tablet device, then it might be exactly what you want. You also didn't mention the smart lists and subscriptions that Facebook added, which bring it more

in line with Google Plus. Yes, that's true. Facebook did make some moves to kind of being more like Google Plus and kind of take some of the wind out of Google's sales. Yeah, yeah, which is funny because Google now has Google Music, which also sort of com you know, puts them in competition with Apple for their big news in October. Yeah. Apple sort of started off October with

some happy news. You know, i Cloud, the long anticipated cloud service launched, not streaming music, but you do have the iTunes Match service, which will you don't have to upload stuff like you do with the Amazon and Google services. Where you upload your music, it will say, well, okay, we see that you have this, so we will make it available to you because we have it in our catalog for you know, a year, not not a terrible large price to pay. Also the iPhone for US which launched,

but not an iPhone five. Yeah, the iPhone for Us. When it first came out, I think there was the kind of an underwhelming response, but that changed very quickly once it hits store shells. Which is pretty much true of every Apple product ever, is that an Apple product comes out and everyone says like, it's okay, but it's not. It's not exactly at least since the first iPhone, like it's okay, but it's not exactly what I was hoping for. And then when it hits sore shells, I gotta have it.

And then iOS five of course was released, and that's available for many things, and and added some functionality that wasn't there in some of the devices too, along with Siri um you know, which is has been pretty popular. And that's about the only really good news we had for October, because we had a lot of sad things. Yeah. The House of Representatives introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, which we did a podcast on just recently, so I don't think we need to go over that again.

But anyway, that's it's some people suggest that it could quote unquote break the internet. Serious legal ramifications for for a lot of websites and a lot of users. Um. And then we have some really sad news of various various passings in the technology field. Of course, the one that probably got the most foot the most coverage was Steve Jobs passing away. He passed away the week after they introduced their iPhone Forest and the I Cloud and um.

His passing left a huge hole in the tech industry, and there was the for the entire week following there was nothing but but coverage of his passing. But even it even sort of brought the the many many wars between the operating systems to a halt for about a week while everybody said, now you know, he really was kind of a visionary, and he was. He was unique. That also saw Dennis Ritchie pass away in October twenty eleven. Death. Ritchie was the guy created the C programming language. UM,

so yeah, he was. His passing was a big deal for people who were into the whole programming side. Also John for many of the rest of us who never really knew who he was but relied on on on programs that are built on what he developed. Also John McCarthy, another programmer he passed away. He's the guy who coined the term artificial intelligence, and he invented the Lisp programming language. Lisp is a programming language that's used in a lot of AI. Uh techniques. I love a technology, So he was.

He was one of the forefathers of the whole AI movement that we're still you know, developing even today. Moving on into November, that's when Google Music launched officially officially uh. And they even shed the beta title yep, and which was shocking, right, I mean Google's Google's keeping those beta

shorter and shorter. They also discontinued or announced the the discontinuation of several products um, which they've been doing on and off throughout twenty eleven, things like Google Buzz and Google Waves, many of which are still somewhat supported right now but are going to go away soon. Yeah. Google Notebook is gone. Yeah. And then the Federal Trade Commission brought complaints against Facebook about user privacy and have put a a new restriction on them. They have to undergo

a twenty year period of privacy audits. Yes, because they

settled that. Part of the reason why is because it was announced, um, actually not announced, but heavily speculated again that Facebook would have an initial offering of stock again all of its own um, which people are projecting will be as of again this recording many many billions of dollars into Facebook's coffers um and so a lot of people were saying that the reason why Facebook was eager to get this off the off the radar is so that they can say, look, no, no, no problems here,

go ahead and buy our stock. So, uh, we'll see if that actually happens. But yeah, and we're now over an hour. This is the longest podcast ever officially we have we have bypassed, we've gone beyond the Steve Jobs podcast, and we normally would continue into December, but it's just the beginning of December, so we don't know what's happened yet.

So here's quickly a rundown on what has happened. Steve Balmer, Uh was picked up by the scruff of the neck by Bill Gates and set outside of Microsoft and told no, no, no, And so now Microsoft is looking for an interimc You know that happened? Okay, Um, what else happened in December? Santa got a Google Android phone and likes it, but doesn't like it as much as he would have an iPhone for us. Um Amazon acquired Yahoo. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah,

I remember when that happened. Tomorrow, Um, yeah, very well. Have Yahoo may very well get bought by the end of the year. You know what, Chris, I think we're gonna have to hold off and we're just gonna have to make some predictions for and hopefully if those predictions also spill over into late eleven, the listeners will count them. Okay, all right, sounds good to me. We're wrapping this up. Guys. Thank you for sticking with us for this epic podcast

of epic epic nous. He was a lot busier in then. I think we anticipate Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a lot more happened in twenty eleven. And we, of course than not cover every single text story because if we had,

it would have been five or six episodes. But yeah, if you guys have any questions, if you have any suggestions for topics you would like us to cover in the future, let's no it's goes an email that addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter that handle is tech Stuff h S. W and Chris and I will tall to do again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising

and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you