Hasta La Gadget!

Twitter has already signaled its love of TV by negotiating deals for branded video, but it’s not satisfied yet: the company has started limited testing of a timeline box for trending TV shows. The feature provides both the details of a given show as well as a list of associated Twitter accounts. Thankfully, the box isn’t a permanent fixture; while it will appear on its own, users can close and scroll past the box to return to their personal feeds. The company isn’t commenting on the test or the likelihood of a wider rollout, but the popularity of Twitter as a live TV companion suggests that the trending TV box could be here to stay.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

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Source: TechCrunch, ASG (Twitter)

Oh, Philips. Why’d you have to make it so easy for ne’er-do-wells to go full Aiden Pearce on Hue smart light users? A recent study by researcher Nitesh Dhanjani reveals that Hue’s control portal — known as the bridge — uses a shoddy authentication system when communicating with smartphones and computers. That system uses the bridge’s MAC address, which is easy to detect. As such it’s also easy to hack the device and cause a blackout.

In Dhanjani’s demo video below, he introduces malware into the bridge through a compromised website. This lets him find the right MAC address and take control, turning the lights off again and again, ad infinitum, regardless of the switch’s status. Sure, there’s no immediate threat of widescale blackouts — smart lighting has yet to be adopted en masse, after all — but this is a security issue companies need to address, especially since lighting plays such a critical safety role.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: Ars Technica, The Register

Source: Nitesh Dhanjani

It’s time to add another entry on our “Apple television rumors” timeline, as reports tonight indicate the company has acquired the team behind the second screen web / iPad app Matcha.tv. VentureBeat initially posted news of the acquisition at a price of between $1 and $1.5 million, which would appear to explain the aggregator’s sudden disappearance back in May. If you weren’t familiar with it before now, Matcha.tv was one of a number of efforts seeking to enable content discovery from mobile devices. By the time it closed its doors, it included TV listings of what’s on cable / satellite, queues for online streaming from services like Netflix and Hulu, personalized recommendations and social network tie-ins. CEO Guy Piekarz told TechCrunch in May that the company has a “plan to provide something better in the future.” We’ll wait and see if speculation leans towards an IR blaster tie-in for the iPhone similar to the Galaxy S 4 and HTC One, controls for an integrated living room TV experience or something else entirely.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD, Apple

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Source: VentureBeat, AllThingsD, Matcha.tv

Journalists and news consumers alike may be familiar with the Getty name — Mark Getty founded his namesake stock photography company in the 1990s, and Getty Images is responsible for distributing thousands of photographs every day. But many Southern Californians best know the family for its contributions to the J. Paul Getty Museum, which houses an enormous collection of art at two locations in Los Angeles. It’s that latter institution that’s making waves today, opening up its digital collection for anyone to view, download, modify and publish, free of charge. The Open Content Program enables access to 4,600 (and counting) high-res images, such as the photograph posted above. The organization’s only requirement is that artwork be accompanied by an attribution line, such as the one published below.

[Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.]

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Verge

Source: Getty

If you’re one of the Box faithful who also happens to wield an Android device, you’re about to snatch up a number of new features in the latest app update. The outfit has taken advantage of the navigation drawer that Google officially announced back at I/O — the one that we’ve seen in a number of recent software updates (Gmail comes to mind). You’ll also encounter a reconfigured updates feed with document previews for keeping track of file changes between you and your fellow collaborators. The Box app’s home screen widget has been redesigned to allow resizing and scrolling within its confines. Other tweaks include revamped folder sorting / viewing, prompts to download updated files after a period of offline use and the ability to switch between user accounts. A quick look at the new features awaits in the video clip that lies just beyond the break.

Filed under: Storage, Internet, Mobile

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Source: Box, Google Play