Go outside? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what goes on out there? You’re way better off staying in the safety and comfort of your own home. And thanks to the power of the Internet, you too can enjoy the best of what the outside world has offer without having to wade through all of its undesirable byproducts.
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Hey, remember Twitter #Music? Yes, that Twitter #Music. Well, the jam-focused service is getting a little better on iOS thanks to the latest update. Today’s changes aren’t as major as the discovery features and additional languages the app gained last month, but #Music power users will most likely still appreciate the new features. To be more specific, the app squeezes some new features into the #NowPlaying feed, allowing you to favorite, retweet and reply to tracks shared by others. Best of all, now you won’t have to stop and switch between Twitter apps to share how you feel when someone’s listening to Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop.”
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software, Mobile, Apple
Via: The Next Web
Source: App Store
Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.
Let’s over-generalize the nerd archetype for a moment: unhealthy, eats fast food, drinks sugary sodas, sits on his (or her) butt playing video games, a misanthrope with nothing better to do than troll Reddit and pirate some leet warez. Antisocial, anti-nature, probably works in IT while angrily commenting on tech blogs behind the shield of anonymity.
We all know that’s not accurate, but there is always truth in the construct others give us. Appease me, won’t you?
Credit where it’s due: eBay recognized that the online auction train wouldn’t keep chugging along at a breakneck rate, so it’s snapping up complementary companies in order to better bolster its portfolio. A few years, PayPal; today, Decide. The three-year old company was engineered to give overwhelmed consumers a way to more easily see what products were worthwhile and which weren’t — from there, it helped to find the best deal, completing the process.
eBay’s evidently hoping that Decide’s predictive analytics will “help over 25 million eBay sellers make smarter decisions and be more successful,” while the Decide team will be headed to eBay’s Seattle offices. As these things tend to go, Decide’s services, website and mobile apps will no longer be available after September 30th, which is pretty awful news for those of you who dug it. For those curious, paying members will be reimbursed for their subscriptions, but you’re on your own for any tissues required to sop up the tears.
Filed under: Internet
Via: GeekWire
Source: Decide (1), (2)
Following in the footsteps of Facebook — which revealed its first Global Government Requests Report just a few weeks ago — Yahoo is finishing out the week by publishing data of its own. The firm’s first “global law enforcement transparency report” covers governmental requests for user data from January 1st through June 30th of this year, and the outfit plans to put out subsequent reports every six months. Of note, Yahoo claims that it’s including “national security requests within the scope of [its] aggregate statistics,” and for the paranoid in attendance, you may be relieved to know that said requests comprise “less than one one-hundredth of one percent (<.01%)” of Yahoo’s global userbase. Feel free to dig in at the links below, but sadly, you won’t find anything other than high-level macro figures. (As an aside, that logo.)
Filed under: Internet
Via: Tumblr (Yahoo)
Source: Yahoo Transparency Report
With more and more video content being consumed every day on things like the Apple TV, PS3 and Xbox 360, having an exceptional recommendations system is becoming an essential part of the viewing experience. Microsoft knows how important this is, and today it announced it’s reached a multi-year deal with Tel-Aviv-based firm Jinni to enhance entertainment discovery on the Xbox platform. The newly minted agreement will see Jenni’s own engine, dubbed Entertainment Genome, vastly improve Xbox recommendations by utilizing its “deep knowledge of every show and movie in the Xbox Video catalog.” It’s worth noting Jenni has plenty of experience in the insight field, having previously been pegged by Time Warner and Vudu to power their intelligent search efforts. For its part, Xbox General Manager, Dave Alles, says there’s excitement to combine Jenni’s taste-and-mood engine with Microsoft’s Conversational Understanding, which he hopes can make “finding something to watch on Xbox as fun as watching it.”
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Internet, HD, Microsoft
Source: Jinni
You know who seems like someone well equipped to dictate what shows up on a news site? That weird guy in your Facebook feed who is way, way too vocal about his political beliefs. Blatant sarcasm aside, Bing News has overhauled its web portal in order to accomplish two primary goals: look less like Google News, and surface stories that are trending. Naturally, the new look is built for touch — you did buy a touchscreen-enabled laptop, didn’t you? — and it’ll “automatically adapt to fit your browser width.” Furthermore, “the latest buzz” from social channels will be highlighted, leaving news that actually matters to languish somewhere in the abyss. But hey, the next Casey Anthony trial is totally the most important thing ever, right?
Filed under: Internet, Microsoft
Source: Bing
As reporters at the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica dig deeper into the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, new and disturbing revelations continue to be made. Two programs, dubbed Bullrun (NSA) and Edgehill (GCHQ), have just come to light, that focus on circumventing or breaking the security and encryption tools used across the internet. The effort dwarfs the $20 million Prism program that simply gobbled up data. Under the auspices of “Sigint (signals intelligence) enabling” in a recent budget request, the NSA was allocated roughly $255 million dollars this year alone to fund its anti-encryption program.
The agencies’ efforts are multi-tiered, and start with a strong cracking tool. Not much detail about the methods or software are known, but a leaked memo indicates that the NSA successfully unlocked “vast amounts” of data in 2010. By then it was already collecting massive quantities of data from taps on internet pipelines, but much of it was safely protected by industry standard encryption protocols. Once that wall fell, what was once simply a torrent of scrambled ones and zeros, became a font of “exploitable” information. HTTPS, VoIP and SSL are all confirmed to have been compromised through Bullrun, though, it appears that some solutions to the NSA’s “problem” are less elegant than others. In some cases a super computer and simple brute force are necessary to peel back the layers of encryption.
Filed under: Internet
Source: New York TImes, Guardian, ProPublica
All-you-can-eat subscriptions work well for digital magazines, music and videos; why shouldn’t they work for e-books? Oyster certainly thinks they should, as it just launched a flat-rate book service for iPhone users. Members pay $10 per month for unfettered access to about 100,000 books from HarperCollins, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt and smaller publishers. The unlimited-use model also facilitates a Goodreads-like social component that shows what friends are reading at any given moment. Bookworms can request an invitation today. Oyster hasn’t said if or when the service will go without invitations, but it hopes to release an iPad app in the near future.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile
Via: Pando Daily
Source: Oyster
The line between native and web apps has been blurring more and more with the advent of HTML 5, and now Google’s taking things even further with what it’s calling a “new breed of Chrome apps.” These new apps, while built with web technologies and the Chrome browser, appear and act like native apps. In fact, Google is rolling out a Chrome app launcher for Windows to allow users to launch these new apps directly from their desktop. Windows and Chrome OS users will get first crack at using these apps, with Mac and Linux folks getting them a bit later.
To give these apps a native feel, Google has given devs a whole host of new tools. Apps work offline, can save data locally or in the cloud, provide desktop notifications and can connect with any device hooked into your computer via USB or Bluetooth — meaning games can be designed to use external controllers. And, apps won’t look tied to the browser as they won’t be saddled with tabs, buttons, text boxes or any other browser-esque visual cues. The idea is to create Chrome apps that are nigh indistinguishable from their locally installed counterparts. For now, there are over 50 such apps available in the Chrome Web Store, with offerings including games, basic photo editing and task tracking apps, among others. However, we have a sneaking suspicion that Google’s going to ensure that number grows exponentially in the near future.
Source: Google Chrome blog
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
