Mark Starling is out on vacation, but I’m going to keep the tech news going. Tune in next week for the next time I’m live with the First News 570 crew. This week, we’re talking about Google’s acquisition of wearable computing company, North, how corporate America is boycotting Facebook, and a quick round up of this year’s World Wide Developer Conference. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
We still don’t have a lot of content for 4K connections, and now 8K connections are coming right around the corner. After three years of negotiations, the major tech players and TV manufactures have agreed on a new format, H.266 Versatile Video Coding, to stream content using half the bandwidth we currently use. The new codec will allow people with slow connections to stream HD, 4K, and higher content depth. Like everything else, let’s see what the pr0n industry implements.
GOOGLE CANCELS PLANS FOR CHINESE DATA CONSTRAINING PRODUCT
El Goog has canceled a new product named Isolated Region which was designed to restrict data flowing in and out of China. The former Don’t Be Evil Company was working on this project specifically for the Chinese market and it marks the second it has shutdown a controversial project for China after working on the DragonFly project, a censored search engine for that market. I’m not one for telling enterprises what to do or where to pursue profits, but it’s hard to operate under the mission of, “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible,” when you’re consciously building products that constrain people from hearing outside voices.
IN YOU CAN’T DO THAT NEWS: IT GUYS BUSTED FOR WEED PAYMENTS
So, this one tickled me. As many states and cities begin decriminalizing the sale of marijuana, a legal gray area has appeared which federal laws prohibit the transacted of marijuana sales using the banking system. As has been tradition, most weed transactions are carried out using cash, but many more people are eschewing cash for the convenience of electronic payments. Unfortunately, it’s illegal for dispensaries and consumers to use credit cards and checks for payment. Two IT professionals committed wire fraud by masking weed transactions as dog toys, carbonated drinks, and other less high inducing products. The federal laws should really catch up because the large stashes or cash many dispensaries carry are magnets for robbers and thieves. Some dispensaries report getting robbed on a constant basis.