2015 Year in Review

universal question in life, why don't men dance? Join you for the first episode on January. You can find The Stuff of Life on iTunes or any other podcast provider. Get in touch with technology with Hope Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strictly. Now we're at the close of two thousand fifteen, so that means it's time to look at some of the big tech stories of the past twelve months and to see what the tech world

has been up to over the last year. Now, in full disclosure, I am recording this on December third, two thousand fifteen, So when I get to the month of December, there's not gonna be anything to talk about because nothing really has happened yet. But there's a ton of stuff to talk about from the previous months. So starting way back in January, first, I'll talk about c e S two thousand fifteen. I attended that last year, as well

as the seven years before that. At any rate, it was all about things like wearables, the Internet of Things, automated systems, and four K displays and eight K displays. Those were all the big, big items that were kind of taking center stage at CES. There were a lot of other devices that were also kind of capturing people's imagination.

I saw a lot of the very various devices meant to allow you to scoot around, whether it was electric skateboards like the hoverboard type stuff, or roller skates even and some other ones. I didn't brave those. I didn't try them because I was pretty convinced i'd be one of the outlying statistics of people capable of falling down on something that is supposed to be impossible to fall off of. IM pretty sure I could. I could prove

them wrong on that one. We also saw more VR headsets on display also a lot of conversion kits that turned phones into VR screens. Augmented reality was still something that we were kind of seeing some products show off, but I don't think anyone has found the perfect implementation of that, with the possible exception of the hollow lens, but that isn't yet available for consumers. Uh We also saw a lot of autonomous vehicles, which I would argue

as another technology that's still in the incubation period. I think we've got a lot of evidence to show that autonomous cars are safer and more reliable than human drivers are on a day to day basis, but still gonna take some time before that is ready for actual street use, at least in widespread fashion. Early in January two thousand fifteen, the White House approved of sanctions against North Korea. Now, this was in response to the two thousand fourteen Sony hack.

Some cybersecurity experts expressed doubts that North Korea was the originator of the attacks, but the government, specifically the FBI and some other agencies said no, this this seems to be the work of hackers out of North Korea. Uh So there was some disagreement there in the cybersecurity industry, but in general it looked like fingers were pointing to North Korea, so the White House approved of sanctions against North Korea. North Korea's reaction was understandably one of um disdain.

I guess is a good word, but whether North Korea was ultimately responsible for the hack or not, that was the expected reaction UM. During his State of the Union address, United States President Barack Obama pledged to expand broadband service to more United States citizens. Also wanted to push for net neutrality and invest in cybersecurity measures, all of which were prevalent on the minds of people. I mean, it's one of those things that especially the Sony hack had

brought into the limelight. Also in January and the wake of the terrible Charlie Hebdo attacks in which journalists and their families were threatened and killed. It was terrible. Anonymous, the activist group announced a essentially a campaign against terrorists and vowed to shut down communication tools and to weed out terrorism using cyber attacks and and cyber strategies. And this would go on throughout the entire year. Uh, it really escalated in November, but it was going on throughout

the whole year. Also in January, Google ended up shelving the Google Glass project. I wasn't really surprised by this. I was a little sad. I'm a huge fan of Google Glass, but I also felt that it wasn't quite right for consumers, and it was incredibly expensive as dollars for a pair of Google Glass. But Google has stressed that it plans to incorporate the technology into future products, both physical and software products, and also that Google Glass

would return at some point once it was ready. So I don't know when that will be, but supposedly it will come back. In January, Bill Gates expressed concern that artificial intelligence could become the biggest threat to humanity. He said this during a Reddit a m a, which has Reddit for ask me anything, Uh, kind of interesting. Speaking of Bill Gates, the company co founded Microsoft introduced Windows ten on January twenty one, and also showed off the

hollow lens headset. That's that augmented reality device I had talked about. I wish I had had a chance to actually experience a hollow lens. I have not done that yet. I really hope to have that experience at some point. I'm intrigued by the idea. I like the possibility of the hollow lens adding a new dimension to computing, at

least some applications. Obviously, it's not ideal for everything. You're not going to use the hollow lens for word processing, I would imagine, but for gaming, for design, for understanding how stuff works, that's something I'm really concerned with. I really think the hollow lens is a potentially useful tool, so I hope I get a chance to use it

at some point. At the end of January, the f c C redefined broadband speed, calling it twenty five megabits per second as download speed and three megabits per second upload speed. It was a big increase from the earlier definition, which I believe was ten megabit megabits per second down and one megabit per second up. I got some I s p s in a tizzy Internet service providers because now they could not claim a ten megabit per second

speed as being broadband speed. They could not advertise broadband speed unless it was at twenty five megabits per second or faster, and uh that ended up impacting their business. I'd say it was a positive impact for the consumer, and I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for I s p s in general when it comes to defining broadband speeds. But that's because as of my own personal perspective, maybe if I were running an i SP I'd have a very different opinion. Moving onto February, we

saw more data breach problems UH. An insurance company, a large one called Anthem, disclosed an enormous hacker attack in which millions of people's personal information had been leaked not just direct customers of Anthem, but Anthem also handles insurance from lots of other providers. It's kind of like the back end for a lot of insurance companies, so potentially millions of people had their personal information leaked to hackers

in that attack. Just a few days later, the White House announced the formation of a cyber Threat Intelligence Center or Intelligence Integration Center, which would collect information and organize it and and distribute it in such a way to prevent cyber attacks from being successful or responding to eiber threats, although that also raised some people's flags worrying about how this might end up impacting privacy issues uh February also

saw Twitter announced the new policy to handle trolls, streamlining the internal process for identifying and dealing with online abuse on Twitter, and said that after instituting the change, they saw a five times increase in the number of people being reported for harassment and abuse and they were responding as fast as possible in order taking it seriously, which was great news for people on Twitter. I have friends who have been the victims of harassment on Twitter, and

it's a terrible thing. It's one of those things about the Internet where the distance the Internet provides and the anonymity you can have can create an environment that can be pretty toxic in some cases, it's not always. I mean, it also provides the ability for us to communicate with folks we otherwise can never talk to. So there are great things about this environment, but unfortunately there are some bad things too. So this was Twitter's attempt to counteract

some of the bad. On February twenty six, the FCC reclassified broadband as a utility and past net neutrality rules, which lots of people on the Internet absolutely loved. I s p s were not among them. Uh, And there were some politicians who reacted negatively towards this, largely the ones who who are also let's say influenced by lobbies that represent I sps. We're still seeing those rules being challenged by various affected parties. UM, we're going to continue

to see this shake out over time. But the reclassification means that broadband would providers would no longer be able to charge for prioritized traffic. In other words, they would not be able to set an amount saying, uh, if you create content and you want to go across our networks at a decent speed, you have to pay this amount that was no longer allowed. Uh. They also could not selectively block or throttle traffic from sources. So in other words, you shouldn't have a company like Comcast be

able to throttle content from a company like Netflix. That that would be against the rules based upon this reclassification. In March, a lot of news happened here. On March six, the Dawn Probe entered orbit around Series, which meant that for the first time ever, we had a spacecraft enter the orbit of a dwarf planet, and that was pretty incredible and uh, really exciting stuff. I was very pleased to read the news about that, and the the information

about Series was really fascinating. We also learned in March that Tinder. This will not be the only Tender story in two thousand fifteen. I find Tinder endlessly fascinating. Tinder we found out charges older users more for their premium service than younger users. So if you are a user of a certain age and you want to use Tender premium, your rates will be higher than people younger than you are. Tender's response was that old people tend to have more money,

so that's why I guess. Uh. Later in March, a hacker created a program that connected straight men with other straight men, but it appeared that each of the straight men were in touch with a woman and created a situation in which straight men were essentially flirting with each

other and Uh. The way it worked was the hacker created fake bait profiles of women, and when two men identified that they were interested in that specific woman, his program would link those two men up to each other, but they would each believe they were actually talking to

the bait profile, not to another guy. And when asked about his motivation for this, the hackers said that he had female friends who complained about the types of messages they would receive on Tender, that they thought that they were distasteful and harassing, and he thought, well, this will give guys a taste of their own medicine. Um. Of course this targets all guys, not just the ones who are being jerk faces. UM. At any rate, it was

kind of an amusing story. Also in March, we saw the launch of two different broadcast services too that we're supposed to be using Twitter as a means of of linking profiles, uh, mere Cat and Periscope. Now, between the two, Periscope did much better, but that's because Periscope was actually being backed by Twitter. Mayor Cat was using Twitter to link accounts to the Twitter service, so that if you're using Mercat, the idea was that it could broadcast the

fact that you are online to your Twitter followers. And then Twitter ended up blocking that app, um because they had their own They had Periscope, and they had that power. So Twitter is like, well, we're doing our own broadcast app that allows people to stream video live from their phone to their followers, and we don't really want the competition. So guess what, you don't get to play in our yard. And that was a big blow to mere Cat. Periscope is still one of those things that UM, I think

is fairly popular, but not overwhelmingly popular. We like to do it here at How Stuff Works. If you have not followed How Stuff Works on periscope, if you have periscope, you might want to consider following How Stuff Works because we do periscope pretty frequently. Uh and you'll see it from all sorts of different shows, like Stuff They Don't Want You To Know does a periscope every week. Stuff to Blow Your Mind also does a periscope every week.

I'll be doing periscopes pretty frequently on How Stuff Works. Lauren vogelba on my former co host, She also periscopes regularly for How Stuff Works, So check us out. It's kind of fun and we like to respond to people. You know, you can send questions in real time and we can respond to you. That's a lot of fun. Moving on to April, that's when Apple officially put the

Apple Watch on sale. You can pre order and buy them, and it started at around three dollars for your basic Apple Watch model, so pretty expensive, particularly when you consider the fact that it's not useful unless you also have an iPhone Um. This is kind of typical with smart watches. Most of them require another device to pair with and

that's where they get their data. So, for example the Pebble, it pairs via Bluetooth to a smartphone and then you get notifications on your smartphone and then gets sent to your Pebble Watch, and then that's what gives you the notification. Same sort of thing with the Apple Watch, except of course it only works with the iPhone. It does not work with other devices. Early reviews the Apple Watch where

a little mixed. A lot of them said that there was a pretty high learning curve um and not everybody thought it was terribly useful. And again, like if you're talking about you want just the Apple Watch and you don't have an iPhone, you're looking at almost a thousand dollars to get the watch plus a current iPhone UH to be able to use the thing. So little bit of a steep road. But for Apple fanatics, obviously it was something that was greeted with glee. People couldn't wait

to get there. Well, I was gonna say get their hands on it, but I guess get them on their wrists would be more accurate. Also in April, HBO launched HBO Now, which finally allowed people who did not have HBO on their cable plan to get access to HBO content. This is something people have been asking for for a few years now, the idea of, you know, I want to have an experience where I can subscribe to the specific channels I want and I don't have to get

everything else. Uh. It turns out that we're gonna have to do that ala carte channel by channel, or at least that's what it looks like right now, and HBO is one of those that you can do this with. You can subscribe to HBO now, you don't have to have HBO on your cable subscription, and you can get

access to HBO content. So uh. This has also led some people to say, perhaps this is the beginning of the end of the cable industry, the cable television industry, which would be really interesting if that's the case, because HBO played a big role in the beginning of the cable industry. If you listen to the episodes we did about the HBO story, you can hear about how important HBO was when cable was just growing. Also, in April, Comcast and Time Warner ended up calling it quits on

their move for a merger. This relieved a lot of people who said that if Comcast and Time Warner were to merge into one company, then even the illusion of competition would be erased in the cable company and I s P world, there are a lot of places where Time Warner is the only choice for your cable, Comcast is the only choice for your cable. This merger would

have made the company even bigger. And while Comcast kept saying that it would promote competition, a lot of critics said, I can't possibly see how that would happen to us. It looks like you would essentially just dominate eight the entire landscape. And if you listen to the Comcast story episodes, you know comcasts history is essentially one of acquisitions. It's a company that bought other companies, and that's how it grew.

Year over year. It added customers, not by improving their their offerings necessarily, although you know, obviously I'm sure the company tried to do that. Year over year two, it largely added customers by buying up other networks and then incorporating those networks into Comcast. But this one did not work out, and so they abandoned it, largely because they were facing some pretty stiff opposition in the general public.

They were also seeing opposition from special interest groups from other companies, and it was pretty clear there was gonna be a really hard sell for them to be able to merge, so they ultimately decided to quit finishing out the news for April. A computer glitch in a digital slot machine convinced a woman she had one forty one million dollars. It turned out to just be a glitch, a mistake. I can't imagine what this must have felt like.

So the woman ended up suing the casino, saying she was owed the money she was told she had one. Imagine you're playing a video slot machine and you get a message saying, hey, you just won forty one million dollars. I think you'd be pretty disappointed to go to the cashier and find out, Nope, that's the computer error. You aren't owed any money, or maybe you're owed a couple

of bucks. I think it was two dollars sixty three cents. Ultimately, for this person, the lawsuit was decided in favor of the casino, and the judge said, here's the thing, and the rules for the game are laid out. They're displayed on the device or on the machine or they show up on the screen and explains what the rules are.

And included in those rules was the fact that the maximum payout of this machine was ten thousand dollars us that you could not win more than that, and based upon the results of that spin of the slot machine, the woman would not have one a jackpot in the first place. It was just a computer glitch. And that you cannot expect a casino to change the rules of a game while a game is being played. That would be unfair to one party or the other, or both.

And so ultimately the judge said, you can't hold a casino responsible for the malfunction of a screen. It's an unfortunate experience, but it's not one that will result in forty one million dollars going to you, Sad Trombone. In May two fifteen, the big story was there was another data security breach, and this time it hit the I R S. By August, the U. S Government said that as many as three thirty four thousand taxpayer accounts had

been compromised. Now in May, when they first announced the discovery of the breach, they thought it was closer to a hundred thousand. So it got worse as time went on and as the investigation continued, the hackers had actually used a program called get Transcript. That's the program I r S had implemented, which was meant to allow users to get a look at their tax transactions over time. So the hackers took advantage of vulnerabilities and to get

transcript program to get personal information from taxpayers. It's pretty ugly, but that's really the only story out of May. So moving on into June, June and July, these are two months with lots and lots of stories, so I'll try and breathe through these as quickly as possible. First of all, in June, Apple had its Worldwide Developers Conference, one of the big events Apple holds every year, and at that conference they unveiled OS ten dot eleven, also known as

El Capitan. They also announced Apple Music, which was a It is a streaming music service competes with other streaming music services, everything from Google Play and Amazon Music and Pandora and Spotify, all those sort of things over and read it. There was a bit of a brewjaha when Reddit ended up essentially removing a few subreddits because they were all centered around harassment, harassing different groups and read it said that while it strives to be a platform

for free expression, it will not tolerate harassment. That actually caused a bit of a stir. It was also announced in June that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo would be stepping down from the position and Jack Dorsey, the co founder of Twitter, would be stepping in as the interim CEO. By October this would change, Dorsey would be named the new per minute CEO of Twitter, and so he is. Also in June, Verizon completed its acquisition of A o L, which was a four point four billion dollar deal, so

A o L is now a property of Verizon. Also in June e three happened the big news there. Bethesda, the company that creates games like Fallout and Skyrim, held its first ever press conference and blew people away with the the real pit Boy that you could order, as well as a Fallout shelter which went which became available that day at least for iOS devices. It was a big hit. Microsoft showed off the hollow lens and that

got a big reaction. They also announced that the Xbox One would get backwards compatibility with a selection of Xbox three sixty titles. That was a big hit as well. Another big hit was Star Wars battle Front. Excuse me, noll mm hmmm. Another big hit with Star Wars Battlefront. Uh. It got a great reaction from the crowd when it was announced. It has since come out and I think see mainly positive reviews, but there are certainly some criticisms

I've seen. I I played in the beta and thought it was really It captured the feeling of Star Wars really well, but the gameplay left something to be desired, at least for me. But then I haven't played all the game modes either. I only played the couple that were available in the beta, so perhaps I would change my mind if I played the full game. But there are a lot of other things that came out of E three, uh. Final Fantasy Seven's getting a remake, the PlayStation,

made a great presentation. Their conference was really well received, and in general it's like it was a pretty good year for E three, despite the fact that there were no huge announcements of new types of where with the exception of the hollow lens functionality where you could play Minecraft on a physical table and you could actually look at a representation of Minecraft as if it were sitting

in front of you. Also in June, DARPA had its Robotics Challenge, which was super cool and involved teams that have worked on robot designs both from a software and

hardware perspective. Some teams were using robots that were built by other companies or organizations, but they were the ones who developed the software for them, and the challenge was to complete a series of tasks that would be similar to what you would encounter in the wake of a nuclear reactor disaster, like what happened in Fukushima, Japan, after

the nuclear reactor there had to melt down. The robots had to do things like drive a vehicle, get out, go through a door, climb some stairs, cut a hole in the wall, and some other tasks as well. Ultimately, the team that won was Team kist K A I S T, which completed all eight tasks in forty four minutes eight seconds. So it wasn't exactly speedy, but it was very impressive because it is difficult to build a

robot that is capable of doing lots of different things. Typically, we design robots to do a specific task and that makes it easier to design. You just have to consider what things need to happen in order for this task to be completed as efficiently as possible. But when you have to design a robot that does multiple tasks, that's hard, especially if you're trying to make it do all these tasks as well as it possibly can and not kind

of just bumble its way through. It's pretty tough. And if you watch videos from that DARPA challenge, you'll see lots of examples of robots falling over, which is both kind of funny and sad at the same time, but it really demonstrates how hard this field is. It's a very challenging field. In July two, thift well, on July eight, we had a real nasty trio of tech failure stories hit. At the same time, United Airlines had to halt flights for more than an hour due to an issue with

quote degraded network connectivity for various applications end quote. In other words, it pretty much looked like it was a router failure, which Cisco immediately got on the job trying to fix. On that same day, the New York Stock Exchange suffered technical issues that caused halt trading to halt for more than three hours and The Wall Street Journal's website went offline only eight so all three of these

things are happening. This actually led some people to question if perhaps they were connected in some way, and maybe it was indicative of a cyber attack. It looks like it was just coincidence that all three of these things hit on the aim day, but it definitely created some nervous laughter in various offices wonder who's next. Also in July, the FCC approved a T and T S merger with Direct TV, which was a forty eight point five billion dollar deal. You could say that two thousand fifteen was

a year of attempted and successful mergers and acquisitions. A lot of big companies UH actually made deals, and a few like Comcast and Time Warner that I talked about earlier, attempted to but failed. UH. It was a big year for that. The FCC said that the reason they approved the merger was that they felt it would lead to stronger broadband and video bundles that could improve competition with established cable companies. If that's in fact the case, I'm

in favor of it. I'm a little skeptical, but I would like to see more competition in that space for reason that I've already talked about. Also in July, Amazon held its first Prime Day, which is kind of like a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales event catered specifically to Prime customers. Clearly this was a move to get more Prime subscriptions going and it worked really well. So now Amazon is going to do it every single year. No big surprise there. In sad news. In July, Nintendo

president Satoro Iwata passed away at age fifty five. He passed away on July eleven. He was very much a beloved figure at Nintendo, not just as a president, but as a game developer, and he had shown great passion for video games. He actually said that he considered himself first and foremost a gamer, So his passing shock not just Nintendo, but the video game world in general. Also in July, Reddit CEO Ellen Powell stepped down. She was replaced by Reddit founder Steve huff and It's also a

former ceo Reddit. Her departure followed a controversial decision to fire Victoria Taylor, who was the coordinator of the Asked Me Anything feature at redditum Full details of exactly what happened were never released, but it appeared, at least in some reports, that Victoria Taylor was resisting certain changes that read it was hoping to implement in the A M A world, and as a result she was let go. That seems to be what happened based upon certain reports.

But like I said, a full disclosure of exactly what happened has never really been made, at least not that I could find. All right, let's go back to Tinder. I told you I was going to talk about it a couple of times throughout the year. So in July

the service announced verified accounts for celebrities. So when you see a profile for Leonardo DiCaprio in your area, you can look for that little verification sign to make sure it's actually Leonardo DiCaprio and not just some guy named Vinnie who's hoping he his passing resemblance to Leonardo will get him somewhere. So yea, I being a married guy, I mean, I've been married for more than eighteen years now,

I find this tender stuff to be really amusing. And I gotta be honest, I am so glad I am not in the dating world, because I also think I'd be terrified if no one ever swiped right on me. Also in July, it was revealed that the website Ashley Madison, which is dedicated to helping married people find people folks who who will have an affair with them, it had

been hacked. I'm sure you heard this story. It was in all the news outlets for a long time, probably because of the salacious content here, and a lot of that information was released online. It was dumped into various sites where it was quickly propagated, and it embarrassed customers and the company alike. It also revealed some interesting data. A lot of people combed through this to get a

better look at what it represented. It appears that an overwhelming majority of the accounts on Ashley Madison belonged to men. Uh that a good number of the accounts belonging to women actually are dummy accounts and were perhaps used to act as essentially bait to lure men to use the service. You know, doesn't do the men much good if there's no one there on the service for them to connect

with and have their affair. I guess the hacker or hackers chose the name the Impact Team and said that they had targeted a l M, which is the parent company that owns Ashley Madison and other related sites because of unethical practices. Largely they want about if you wanted to delete your account of Ashley Madison, you had to pay nineteen dollars for the privilege of having your information deleted, and even then there was no guarantee that it was

actually deleted. So that was the reason the hacker gave for targeting Ashley Madison. And this was a story that for at least a couple of weeks was in the headlines just because you kept getting names of people who were uh found within the database. And it was an ugly affair. And I can't believe I just used that pun. It was totally unintentional. I really do promise. I didn't mean to. As the words were coming out of my mouth,

I was regretting it anyway. Last story July, uh f c A, which is the parent company of brands like Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler, had a massive recall of one point four million cars over concerns about how hackers could get remote access to vehicles through their connectivity features. On July twenty one, senators introduced the Secure Pity and Privacy in Your Car Act which was meant to help curtail uh, the sort of incidents. It was supposed to create security standards for

new vehicles in the connected age. Uh. This was a

very sobering moment. It was certainly something we were expecting to happen because we knew that there were researchers, security researchers who are going to unveil something about hacking cars at various security conferences like def Con and you know, other black hat style conferences, to say this is a growing concern and if companies aren't going to address it, we will go public with it so that consumers are aware of the potential danger they face by having a

connected car. And UH, honestly, I feel conflicted about this approach, but if a company is not taking steps to fix those problems for the products getting to the hand of consumers, something does have to happen. I mean, it's it's not worth putting people's lives in danger to sell a few more vehicles. But this was a big deal, a recall of one point four million cars across Jeep dodging Chrysler brands.

Moving on to August, only a couple of stories, but one of them was huge August was when Google restructured and became Alphabet so technically, and I did a podcast where I described this. It was a really weird situation where Google formed a wholly owned subsidiary called Alphabet, then reorganized so that Alphabet became the parent company and Google was a subsidiary of Alphabet. There are other subsidiaries of

Alphabet as well. And the idea is that these various new companies that formerly were departments under Google will be able to experiment and grow independently of Google. They will no longer depend upon Google to grow, and it's supposed to streamline those those different groups so that they can function better without having to depend upon uh companies that they don't have any other influence with. So we'll see

how that pans out over time. Also more Tender news in August, after five months as CEO, Chris Payne stepped down and co founder Shaan Rad was reinstated as CEO. Ultimately, Tender said they was very diplomatic. They said that Chris Payne was not a good long term fit for CEO. Moving on to September, the Recording Industry Association of America or r i a A reported that streaming music generated a third of all music revenue for the first half

of two thousand fifteen. That's huge. It marks an incredible shift from the to the way you know, we listen to music. It's used to be that you would buy albums or buy singles, you know, from the days of vinyl albums, two tapes, to c D s and then digital albums. Now we're using streaming services a lot more, enough for it to make up a third of the revenue.

So while the music industry might not like the streaming model, it looks like that's the way the consumer wants to listen to music, or at least a growing number of consumers, so that's really interesting. Apple held its annual press event in September that was focused on products like the iPhone.

It also announced the iPad Pro, the large tablet that measures like twelve point nine inches, and they also introduced a new stylus device called the Pencil, And that's probably what would have made Steve Jobs pull his hair out in frustration, because he famously dismissed the idea of a

stylus when he launched the iPad. Apple also announced a new generation of the Apple TV set top box with Sirie integration one that is not without its problems, as I am led to understand from a friend of mine who owns one of these um The iPhone also got an update with the six S and the six S Plus, and they also introduced a new interface called three D

touch UH. In September, John McAfee, the founder of the McAfee anti virus program and the all around eccentric dude some people might say eccentric as being exceedingly kind, he announced his intention to run for president. McAfee has a reputation for let's say, questionable behavior and has a pretty weird past. We did an episode about him this year on tech Stuff, so if you want, you can hunt down the John McAfee story on tech Stuff to hear

more about this guy's life. On September, news broke that Volkswagen had been using what has been called a defeat device to rig emissions to staying for its diesel vehicles. We also did an episode about this on tech Stuff. So this device essentially turned on some emissions equipment, some protocols in Volkswagens so that when you are are actually doing an emissions test, the emissions are well below the

limits that are are placed there. However, when you get into regular driving conditions, the defeat devices switched off and your vehicle starts to pollute a lot more, but the performance goes way up. And once this was discovered, it was the beginning of a real pr nightmare for Volkswagen

that is continuing to this day. Also in September, Elon Musk or Elon Musk appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and suggested that we could tear a form Mars if we just detonated some nuclear bombs at the polls, kind of like melting all that Ason, possibly creating an atmosphere, and I don't know what else, because I honestly I think if we did do that, we would raise such enormous dust clouds in Mars' atmosphere that you wouldn't be

able to do any useful terraforming for quite a long time. In the first place, I don't think it would necessarily work. I'm not the only one who thinks that, but what do I know. I'm not an expert. Speaking of Elon Musk and Tesla, Tesla launched the Model X SUV in September. That's an suv capable of going from zero to sixty miles per hour in four point eight seconds, unless you cough up the cash for the priceier performance model that can go zero to sixty and three point two seconds.

It also has a top speed of a hundred fifty five miles per hour. That's wicked fast. So the price for a Signature Series Model X SUV is a hundred thirty thousand dollars. The standard model is slightly less expensive, still well out of my price range. However, in October, the film Steve Jobs, which was written by Aaron Sorkin, debuts.

It would go on to earn only eighteen million dollars domestically if you if you factor in all the theaters worldwide, it's still a little less than twenty four million dollars, and that makes it a flop. Reportedly, it had a budget of thirty million, so it made less than it cost to make. A lot of people in the tech industry seemed to be happy about this. They criticized the movie, saying that it was not a realistic portrayal of Steve Jobs.

On October five, People That's p e E p l E disappeared before it could even launch, so people in case You're not familiar, UH was an app that was supposed to allow people to rate one another, kind of like Yelp for people. So if I had an interaction with you and I thought you were being a little strappy, Kevin Free would say I could give you a negative reading on people and warn others of your strappiness. You could do the same for me, saying this man is

bald and unpleasant. And it got a lot of people worried that the negativity that you can encounter online could spill over into our personal lives even more than it already is. So by October five, it was supposed to launch a November of this year, but by October most traces of it disappeared. The website was gone, It's Facebook and Twitter accounts disappeared. The Instagram account was switched to private, So it looks like people, after facing some public criticism

and ridicule, maybe gone. Also in October, Amazon announced it would stop selling Apple TV and Chrome Cast on its site, instead fun people to buy stuff like Fire TV and become Amazon Prime members. You might say that's a little bit of self interest or a lot. It's a lot of self interest. Edward Snowden joined Twitter in October. He's the whistleblower who revealed the n s A practices. Um quickly became very popular on Twitter. People wanted to hear

more about his perspective on cybersecurity and privacy issues. Facebook was rumored to be adding a dislike button in October, but instead introduced reactions. These are sort of emoticons that allow users to react to a status update beyond just the thumbs up. Because sometimes you see status updates that wererant a different reaction, you don't necessarily want to like that status update, and so this would give you a few more options without it becoming a tool that you

could abuse and make people feel badly about it. At least that's the theory. Also, the New Horizon in his probe explored Pluto, and that was pretty awesome. We started getting some really cool information about Pluto. In October, NASA announced the probe had found evidence of exposed water ice on the surface of Pluto. Also, we got some incredible images of Pluto stuff I didn't think I would ever live to see, so I was really exciting. Tesla was

back in the headlines. It gave an overnight update that allowed Tesla vehicles autonomous capabilities, it is limited. You cannot use this to just take you from point A to point B with never touching the steering wheel or the accelerator or the break. It's not intended to be that. It's more like a really sophisticated driver assist system, not

a fully autonomous vehicle. That being said, there are a lot of people who did videos of themselves behind the wheel of a Tesla in autonomous mode not touching any of the controls, which is remarkably day dress. As Tesla has said, don't do that, but hey, you know you can't. I guess, I guess if you give people a toy, they're gonna play with it. Also in October, Consumer Reports revised its previous rating for the Tesla Model s Now. Originally, they said the Tesla Model s was so good it

broke their ratings scale. They said it was it was just remarkable how its performance was above and beyond every other vehicle on the road. They revised that and said while the performance was still incredible, they were not reliable. In other words, when they're working, they work great, but they don't always work. So they pulled the recommendation rating from the car as a result of these reliability issues, and on October fifteen, we finally had Back to the

few Future Day. That's the date that Marty McFly and Doc Brown visit in Back to the Future Too, and as part of that celebration, Nike announced that it would be releasing self lacing shoes, which are also featured in Back to the Future Too. Didn't get a whole lot of other things that are in Back to the Future Too, which I'm fine with. I don't need to see Jaw's nineteen Also, we saw that Yahoo announced its video streaming service, which had picked up Community after it had been canceled

on broadcast television. The streaming service lost forty two million dollars in the third quarter of largely due to the expense of producing high end shows like Community. Uh. They had not figured out how to monetize it, so things were looking pretty grim for that Yahoo's streaming service, and The Wall Street Journal reported that chrome os is living on borrowed time, that in it will end up being holded into Android, and that by you will no longer

be able to buy a Chromebook anywhere. They won't be on sale anymore. Finally, November and I say finally because remember it as December three as I record this, so I don't really have any December news. On Black Friday, which is the day after Thanksgiving here in the United States, there was about just shy of a billion dollars nine

five million dollars in sales from smartphones and tablets. Not of the smartphones and tablets, but rather people were using their mobile devices to do shopping, with iOS users spending the most money. Apparently, mobile shopping had increased by from the previous year, so it looks like more and more

people are using their mobile devices for their shopping needs. Ah. It's pretty interesting to me, and it's again another implication that the Internet is changing wildly, that that are noble devices are becoming our our primary means of interacting with the Internet these days. It's not true for me, but it's certainly the the prevalent uh theme that I'm seeing in every other you know, demographic, just not bald guys

who host tech stuff. And finally, it's rumored that the next iPhone will no longer have a three point five millimeter headphone jack. Instead, you will have to use either Bluetooth or a lightning connector to connect your your headset to your phone. Now, that means that if you're using a hard wired headset, you will not be able to do so while also charging the phone. You will have

to do one or the other. And it also means that if you want a hard wired headset, you're gonna have to rely on a proprietary connector for headphones, which really limits where you can get your headphones at least until other manufacturers are able to produce lightning connector headsets, and that tends to upset consumers. I know that I go crazy when I buy something that has its own proprietary connector, because it means that if I lose that cable,

that's it. I have to buy a replacement. In some places, you can't even get replacement cables, at least not easily. I'm thinking largely of h certain products from a company that rhymes with Pony, but at any rate, that's tough.

Like I would much prefer to have UH universal connectors because I've got tons of like many in micro USB cables, for example, I would much rather have those, even if they don't perform as well as lightning, because if I lose one, I've still got replacements but that's the problem. I guess, all right. So that wraps up the year

in review. Our next episode will be our predictions for two thousand sixteen, my favorite time of year when I put on my prognosticator hat and I make wildly inaccurate predictions. So I hope you guys enjoy those next episodes. I hope that your two thousand fifteen was a good one. I hope two thousand sixteen is even better. And guys, if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Send me a message. I'd love to

hear from you. My email address is tex Stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop me aliance on Twitter, Tumbler or Facebook to handle it. All three of those is text stuff hs W and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and bathands of other topics. Is it stuck works dot com.