Virginia Gives Cloud Voting the Finger

Mikeal Rogers, JavaScript community organizer extraordinaire and developer evangelist at DigitalOcean, joins the Geeks to talk about Virtual Private Servers, gritty details of the Cloud, and more geeky news in this episode of GeekSpeak.

FaceBook Supports Voting

Today, Facebook is encouraging its legions of users to declare civic enthusiasm to their friends, with a prominent “I’m A Voter” botton at the top of the newsfeed. Large-scale, experimental research shows that simply clicking the button, and sharing your voting intention, could do more to increase voter turnout than any other partisan rant or news story you may share today. With a Single Message delivered electronically on Election Day,” researcher James Fowler explained to TechCrunch, “Facebook caused an extra third of a million people to vote. To put that number in context, remember that the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election was won by a margin of just 537 votes in Florida.”

Police can demand a suspect unlock a phone with a fingerprint

“But passcodes need not be divulged as per the Fifth Amendment, court says.”

What We Can Learn From The Adobe E-Reader Mess

“Earlier this month we wrote about potential malicious behavior in Adobe’s e-reader software, “Digital Editions.” There were several independent reports claiming that Adobe’s software was sending back to Adobe–in the clear–a list of books read in the software. There were also independent reports that the program was sending back lists of books on an attached e-reader, even if those books had never been opened in ADE itself – in other words, collecting information not just about the book you are reading now, but your electronic library.”

Apple Pay goes offline at CVS, Rite Aid

“This week, Rite Aid began pulling Apple Pay support from NFC-compatible sales kiosks, and over the weekend, CVS followed suit. According to a leaked document posted by Slashgear, Rite Aid made the decision due to its involvement with a competing still-in-testing mobile payment platform called CurrentC, which CVS is also affiliated with.”

Followup on Twitpic going away

You can go to archive.org to get them though. Be sure to donate while you’re there!

GamerGate Debate Meets Colbert

“If anyone was still unaware of GamerGate by this point, Stephen Colbert provided a one-night crash course through an editorial segment and an interview with critic Anita Sarkeesian.”