Good Morning and welcome to today's edition of ICYMI!
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The biggest story of yesterday and why you should care today:
AT&T revealed yesterday that they have plans to deliver DirectTV to users without using satellite dishes or set-top boxes in the home.
The company, which purchased DirectTV last July, intends to deliver the service through devices like your smartphone, tablet, Smart TV, streaming media hardware and your PC.
While full details about how much it will cost or what will be included in the service are vague, they plan to deliver these three new options beginning later this year:
- DirectTV Now: This will largely include what is now on the DirectTV service.
- DirectTV Mobile: A mobile first experience that will deliver digital content to your smartphone no matter who your wireless carrier is.
- DirectTV Preview: Free for anyone using wired or wireless connections and will include content that is currently on DirectTV today. This service will be fully supported by ads.
ARS Technica's Jon Brodkin says that there is still no decision yet whether or not the data you stream using these new services will impact data caps on the various carriers.
Brodkin suggests AT&T is waiting for the FCC to make their decision regarding zero-rating, where your services data does not count against your users data caps, before they finalize many of these details.
Also developing:
In the last 36 hours NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly has returned to Earth after spending 340 days in orbit aboard the International Space Station as part of the NASA Year in Space mission. During that period of time he completed 5,440 orbits, flew through 10,944 sunrises and sunsets and traveled 143,846,525 miles. He also set records for the longest time on orbit for an American astronaut and now holds the US record for time spent in space at 540 days.
This mission was billed as a step towards a Journey to Mars and has allowed the agency to learn more about the long term effects of living and working in a micro gravity environment for an extended period of time.
His photography from ISS has been spectacular and you can see a lot of his work and beautiful images of our planet on his Instagram account.
P.S. He was also the first person to wear Microsoft's HoloLens in space.
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In other tech related news:
With all the commotion about Apple, the FBI and encrypted smartphones it is interesting that the 2015 Turning Award has been awarded to Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie who created public-key cryptography.
According to Amanda Connolly at The Next Web they created the technology 40 years ago:
"Hellman and Diffie are the founding fathers of public-key cryptography, which is the basis of all secure messaging, even today. In 1976, the pair created the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. The method works by using a public key for encrypting and a private key for decrypting."
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The most entertaining tech news:
Virtual Reality owned a big slice of the action at the recently completed Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
However, the big question starting to surface is whether or not the technology is a passing fad like 3D TV.
If it does take off though HTC wants you to be aware of the risks involved:
"It is important to remember that simulated objects, such as furniture, that may be encountered while using the product do not exist in the real world, and injuries may result when interacting with those simulated objects as if they were real, for example, by attempting to sit down on a virtual chair."
By the way, did you also see this huge musical machine that makes music using 2,000 marbles?
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What we published yesterday:
Windows 10 Mobile Build 10586.122 Now Available for Slow and Preview Rings - It appears Microsoft is moving towards a broad release of Windows 10 Mobile to Windows Phone 8.1 devices as it releases the latest Insider build for Slow and Preview Ring testers.
Losing the Browsers Wars a Second Time - Is Microsoft set to lose the browser wars a second time?
How-To: Use Windows Defender for an Offline Scan - Windows Defender Offline will clean up your Windows system with the latest anti-virus and malware definitions while the system is disconnected to the Internet.
Health Mate Gives You a Local View of Your Microsoft Health Data - A new app connects to your Microsoft Health account to provide offline data to review.
