With its website offline, The New York Times begins posting articles on Facebook

With its website offline, The New York Times begins posting articles on Facebook instead

The news cycle doesn’t stop for unscheduled downtime. With its website inaccessible due to “an internal issue,” The New York Times began posting content to Facebook today, beginning with an article on Egypt. “Egypt Declares State of Emergency as Scores Are Killed in Crackdown” is perhaps the first NYT article to debut in full on a social media site before popping up on any of the news org’s own online properties. The news giant is directing its nine million Twitter followers to Facebook for the afternoon’s top stories, which now also include “Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. Sentenced to 2.5 Years” and “Hopes of Arab Spring Dashed by Region’s Turmoil.” For “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” head over to Facebook.

Update: As of 2PM, it appears that the Times is back online, though the most recent site update was nearly three hours before, at 11:07AM ET.

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Source: NYT (Twitter)

Twitter experiments with trending TV box on some users’ timelines

Twitter experiments with TV trending box

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.

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Source: TechCrunch, ASG (Twitter)

Evernote starts rate-limiting third-party apps, hopes for minimal impact

Evernote starts ratelimiting thirdparty apps, hopes for minimal impact

With over 50 million note-taking users, Evernote has a lot of traffic on its hands — enough so that the company is now rate-limiting third-party software that relies on its API. As of today, new apps can only sync a certain amount of information with Evernote in a given hour. While the caps aren’t clearly defined and are likely to change, Evernote will start throttling all existing apps on November 1st. This isn’t necessarily the prelude to a Twitter-style crackdown on third-party clients, however. As many apps sync their data sparingly, Evernote doesn’t foresee many companies running into the API limit. It primarily anticipates problems with apps that sync everything, and it’s offering to chat with affected developers to minimize trouble. Evernote’s promises aren’t guaranteed to reassure app designers, but they suggest that end users might not notice the difference.

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Via: The Register

Source: Evernote Techblog

Philips Hue susceptible to hack, vulnerable to blackouts (video)

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.

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Via: Ars Technica, The Register

Source: Nitesh Dhanjani

Gmail to kill old compose interface, roll out pop-up design to everyone

DNP Gmail compose

It’s time to bid the old Gmail compose farewell, now that the service is sunsetting the antiquated interface completely. We can’t say we didn’t see it coming when pop-up compose became the default option, but we’ll bet that doesn’t make things easier for those who’ve been dreading this moment. If you’ve been holding on to the old ways, expect your account to make the switch in the next few days as the permanent change rolls out. There’s really nothing you can do about it short of abandoning Gmail, but at least you can expand that teensy window whenever you need a bigger space to work with. As for those who’ve been using the new compose from the very beginning: carry on, Google’s non-wayward sons.

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Source: Gmail (Google+)

Apple reportedly acquires video discovery service Matcha.tv

Apple reportedly acquires video discovery service Matchatv

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.

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Source: VentureBeat, AllThingsD, Matcha.tv

Microsoft’s YouTube app for Windows Phone returns, adds uploads

Microsoft's YouTube app returns on Windows Phone, adds uploads

At Google’s request, Microsoft pulled its YouTube app for Windows Phone 7.x and 8 back in May, but now it’s returned. Apparently ready to display the ads Google is so insistent on, v3.2.0.0 is available for download, and also brings the ability to upload videos directly to the service. If you’re not seeing it on your device yet you can grab it and get all the new details at the link below.

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Via: The Verge, WPCentral

Source: Windows Phone Store

Getty Museum makes 4,600 high-res images free to download with Open Content Program

Getty Museum makes 4,600 highres images free to download with Open Content Program

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.]

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Via: The Verge

Source: Getty

Amazon aims to unify push notifications across app platforms with SNS service

Amazon aims to unify push notifications across app platforms with SNS service

Calling all app developers: Amazon just launched a new tool that you’ll no doubt want to take a peek at. The company’s Web Services (AWS) division has just introduced Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) with Mobile Push, which is described as a “fully managed, cross-platform push notification service in the cloud.” The real kicker, of course, is this nugget: “With one simple API, application developers can easily send notifications to Apple iOS, Google Android and Kindle Fire devices.” Amazon’s allowing all AWS customers to use the service for free so long as the reach remains under one million users, but even if you exceed that, you’ll only be asked to pay $1 for each additional million.

Devs who have historically had to build and maintain different push architectures for separate platforms will likely fawn over such a universal approach, and while it’s certainly not the first of its kind, it’s the first to be backed by a stalwart such as Amazon. Hit up the outfit’s SNS portal to get started, but please, don’t take this as a green flag to up your spamming efforts — we all know how that turned out for Farmville.

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Source: Amazon

Box for Android update brings navigation drawer, retooled widget, account switching and more (video)

Box for Android update

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.

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Source: Box, Google Play