Hasta La Gadget!

Comments on the internet: often a haven for trolls and axe-grinders, but comment threads also give rise to some insightful and entertaining commentary. In an effort to encourage the latter and to provide users with an improved experience, YouTube’s rolling out a new commenting system that integrates deeply with Google+. What does that mean, exactly? Much like that other social network’s News Feed, comments in YouTube will be based on relevance, not how recently they were posted. So, comments from people you know, celebrities and video creators, plus positively rated comments will percolate to the top of comment threads according to Big G’s ranking algorithms. Additionally, replies will be nested beneath original comments to better enable conversations. Like Facebook, should you find the idea of automated comment curation unsettling, you can always switch back to the old way of having the most recent comments show up first.

The integration with Google+ also broadens your commenting boundaries; post a comment on YouTube, then share that video on on G+ and comments and replies made on either site will show up in both places. You can also control who gets to read comments you make by choosing which circles will see them, so you can even have private conversations. As for content owners, the system borrows features from many other commenting platforms. To deal with comments at scale, channel admins can build user whitelists and blacklisted words and phrases to make moderation easy. YouTube Product Manager Nundu Janakiram tells us that the comments system has been in the works for over a year, and that these features are only the beginning. His team plans to provide even better tools for users and content creators to let them filter out the noise and increase the quality of comments. Initially, folks will be able to test out the new comments in the discussion tab on any YouTube channel’s home page, after which it’ll roll out to individual videos in the coming months — and we’d be shocked if these G+ enabled comments don’t make their way into many other Google properties eventually, too.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Many cloud-based productivity apps start on the web and eventually make their way to mobile devices. Not CloudOn: it just launched a web version of its previously mobile-only document editor. Mac and Windows users can now run a virtual Office session using a small plugin for either Chrome or Safari. They may have to pay for some functionality, however, as CloudOn is launching a paid CloudOn Pro service at the same time. Subscribers to the new tier get access to Office’s more advanced features, including PowerPoint’s presentation mode and Word’s change tracking. The web app is available for free; those who want to go Pro can pay $30 per year ($3 per month) if they sign up before 2014, or $80 per year ($8 per month) afterwards.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: CloudOn Blog

Source: CloudOn (1), (2)

The call for greater US government transparency just got louder: Dropbox has filed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court brief that endorses petitions to disclose exact national security request numbers. Much like LinkedIn, Dropbox believes that limiting disclosures to broad ranges hurts transparency by implying that smaller firms get as many requests as larger rivals. The ban on exact figures also violates a First Amendment right to publish specific information, according to the cloud storage provider. We likely won’t know the effectiveness of the brief for some time — or ever, if the court proceedings remain a secret — but Dropbox can at least say that it made its case.

Filed under: Storage, Internet

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Source: Dropbox

Twitter is quite the medium. An endless source of looping GIFs, “viral” videos, and, sadly, bad advertising. Most of the latter category is quickly dismissed by the block and report spam features of Twitter, but the occasional spambot elevates its “craft” to a level of surreal bliss which begs attention. “horse_ebooks” is perhaps Twitter’s best example of that phenomenon, offering indecipherable (and delightful) missives that are heavily retweeted and always nonsensical. “How to get the best bargains in satellite,” for instance. Sadly, it looks like we’ve all been had.

What many (ourselves included) thought to be an accidentally hilarious spam account for a low-rent eBook publishing firm is actually a long-running art installation by Jacon Bakkila (a 29-year-old Buzzfeed employee). Bakkila outed the ruse this morning in an exhibit at New York City’s FitzRoy Gallery named “Horse_ebooks 2,” where Bakkila himself and two friends are answering phones all day (from 10AM to 9PM ET) and giving users a verbal taste of the content you’d normally read on…well, the horse_ebooks Twitter account (the phone number is 213-444-0102 if you’d like to call).

It’s unclear if the account will continue from here. It sounds like a no, though, as Bakkila tells The New York Times that, “The goal was not to appropriate the account but to become the account,” referencing the account’s previous Russian owner and its original use (to sell eBooks). Gawker‘s got a walkthrough of the art gallery installation right here, should you wish to dive even deeper into this madness.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Source: Twitter, Synydyne

According to Edward Snowden’s cache of documents, the NSA has been delving deeper into India’s servers than many could have imagined. The Hindu is reporting that, in addition to the usual PRISM snooping, the agency also vacuumed up data on the country’s nuclear, political and space programs. The newspaper says it has a document, entitled “A Week in the Life of PRISM reporting,” which allegedly shows that discussions between high-ranking politicians, nuclear and space scientists were being monitored in “real-time.” The revelation comes a few months after Kapil Sibal, India’s IT chief, denied that any such surveillance was being undertaken. Who knows? Maybe he was spending so much time on his other projects that he missed the clues. For its part, the US has insisted that its hands are clean in India. Back in June, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the US doesn’t look at individual conversations but instead “randomly surveys” data in order to discover communications that are “linked to terrorists.”

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Register

Source: The Hindu