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Every Monday morning, a freshly created selection of around 30 tracks arrives for each of Spotify's more than 100 million users. The offering is called Discover Weekly, and it has cracked the code on truly personalized playlist curation at a massive scale. Today Spotify announced that this feature has been used by 40 million users, an audience that has collectively streamed over 5 billion tracks. More importantly, Spotify has reworked its infrastructure so that future innovations can tap the same approach.

"Discover Weekly started as a hack project, and if ten other people had hack ideas we didn’t have the resources to push them out," says Matt Ogle, who helps lead development of music discovery and personalization at Spotify. "The...

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 The UK government has agreed to an independent review of so called “bulk collection” — aka mass surveillance — powers in proposed new surveillance legislation, one of the most controversial elements of the Investigatory Powers bill which is currently before parliament. It’s aiming to get the bill onto the statute books before the end of this year. Read More

 Deliverd, the U.K. startup that sends you restaurant-prepared dishes that you reheat at home or work, is launching a new service today that will enable it to expand to most of the country. Read More

For a man who makes more than his fair share of verbal gaffes, Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt can still come up with the odd zinger when he needs to. Schmidt was speaking to a packed house at Startup Fest in Amsterdam when the audience were asked to raise their hands if they used an iPhone. The majority did, and Schmidt responded: "So much for the Android monopoly in Europe." He went on to admit that he himself used both an iPhone 6S and a Galaxy S7, before making the case for the latter's superiority.

"The Samsung S7 is better: it has a better battery and a better camera," said Schmidt with a smile, telling the laughing audience. "And those of you who are iPhone users? I'm right."

But despite the fact that Schmidt was...

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Most fitness trackers monitor heart rate and the number of steps users take in a day. And while these trackers might be good enough, researchers at the University of California, San Diego think they can provide a better overall view of health. In research released today, they discussed their development of a patch called Chem-Phys that's worn on a user's chest. It monitors electrocardiogram heart signals and a user's levels of lactate, which decreases as we work out. In a trial of the prototype, that data was sent to a user's mobile app and then cross referenced with data gathered by other consumer wearables.

A device that detects body chemicals on the skin isn't particularly new, but what makes this research interesting is how it...

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We may be getting a new way to use Foursquare. The location-based recommendation company today announced Marsbot, an iOS app for the service that aims to provide tips for where to eat and drink in the moment. "Our goal: create a product that tells you where to eat or drink before you think to ask for it," the company said in a blog post. "It would deliver contextually aware, proactive recommendations for awesome food and nightlife spots via the simplest communications channel possible: text."

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 Apple is preparing an SDK that would allow developers much greater access to Siri — and the improved assistant will power a stationary hub device like Amazon’s Echo. A report from The Information tallies with what we’ve heard over the last few weeks; expect an announcement, if not the device itself, at WWDC in June. Read More

By now, everyone knows that sitting all day is damaging your body, so it’s important to move around and stay active. But how you sit between those breaks is just as important. Physiotherapist Joanne Gough has a quick video outlining the ideal sitting posture and how to set up your workspace accordingly.

The video summarizes the salient points of good posture whether you work at a desk, or if you’re sitting with your laptop on a couch. It’s ideal to get an ergonomic office chair, but you also need to use it right. For example, Gough says you need to ensure that you:

• Push your bottom as far back as possible.
• Adjust the seat height so that knees are slightly lower than your hips.
• Use a rolled-up towel or your chair’s lumbar support in the curve of the small of your back.
• Place your keyboard so that your elbows bend at 90 degrees.
• Align the ‘G’ key with your belly button.

Check out the video for a quick four-minute guide on all the do’s and don’ts so that you don’t end up with chronic back pain in the future.

How to Protect Your Posture During Work | YouTube

See sample pages from this book at Wink.

Injection
by Warren Ellis (author), Jordie Bellaire (illustrator) and Declan Shalvey (illustrator)
Image Comics
2015, 120 pages, 6.4 x 10 x 0.4 inches
$7 Buy a copy on Amazon

Science meets folklore. It’s a theme that is pervasive throughout literature, from Frankenstein to Dracula to The Dragon Riders of Pern. And like its predecessors, the first volume of Injection also poses the question, what if these two things aren’t as different as we’d like to believe?

Injection reads like a fairytale brought into the modern century, combining the folklore used by its predecessors with new computers and communication systems. The story jumps backwards and forwards in time, telling the chronicle of five brilliant people with different backgrounds who came together and built an artificial consciousness to “make the 21st century more interesting.” As anyone who has seen The Matrix or Terminator films could tell you, this creation doesn’t do what the team was hoping it would. But instead of being straight science fiction, the novel joins science with the fantastic. The creation begins mimicking folklore, and the solution to defeating it seems to lie just as much in magic as it does in science.

The artwork is classically rendered graphic novel illustration, reminding me of the Hellboy series, or Sandman. What strikes me as the most interesting part of the pictures is the range of color used in them; the palette moves from dark greys and greens to brilliant oranges and reds, and some of the scenes are done in such a surreal manner you feel as though you’ve been transported to another plane altogether (which, truth be told, might just be the case). Each character is distinct in design and memorable in execution, and the different storylines interweave with each other during the telling of the tale. My favorite character remains the somewhat crazy scientist, Maria Kilbride, whose story is simultaneously dark and hopeful.

Injection proved an interesting and beautiful read, although in complete honesty I was often confused by the story. The arc is clearly designed to be resolved over several books, so I imagine this confusion was intentional, but I could have done with more background either visually or in the actual wording to get a better sense of the story they were telling. However, I still eagerly await the next installment. – Julia Pillard

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT)is the most aggressive private anti-piracy group currently operating in the UK.

In recent years the organization has been responsible for investigating dozens of alleged pirates and has secured many convictions, largely on behalf of its movie and TV industry partners.

Now, however, FACT faces a somewhat uncertain future after the Motion Picture Association, the movie industry outfit that supplies FACT with half of its funding, decided to pull its support for the anti-piracy group.

The MPA, which represents the interests of Disney, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros, has recently advised FACT that it intends to terminate its 30-year long relationship by not renewing its membership when it expires in six months’ time.

Speaking with Screen Daily, MPA Europe president Stan McCoy explained that local funding for FACT had been withdrawn in favor of financing larger regional hubs with a wider remit.

The relevant regional office dealing with the UK is the MPA’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) in Brussels which aims to provide “a nimble local presence and a direct relationship with local law enforcement.”

McCoy acknowledged FACT’s efforts over the last three decades but said that the changing nature of piracy, including the shift away from physical to online infringement, requires “a more flexible approach” than the one currently in place.

“We live in a world now where a piracy website can have its nexus in Sweden one day, then move in a few months to Eastern Europe, then to Thailand, or it can operate in all three of those jurisdictions at once,” McCoy said.

For FACT the withdrawal of the MPA and by extension the major studios is a massive blow. The MPA currently provides FACT with around 50% of its funding, leaving the balance to made up a range of partners including the UK Cinema Association, the Film Distributors’ Association, the Premier League, and broadcasters including ITV.

FACT confirmed that its MPA funding is being withdrawn and is said to be considering its options. In the meantime, however, it’s unlikely that the UK will become a care-free piracy zone. The MPA says it intends to continue its work protecting copyright in the UK which will include the pursuit of more site-blocking injunctions and increased cooperation with the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

That being said, it will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. FACT provided “boots on the ground” for the studios in the UK and undertook investigations against pirates that in some cases the police were reluctant to take on and in others carry through to a prosecution. Abandoning that local touch could be risky strategy for the MPA, but only time will tell.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Conrad Hafen -- who is fighting a contested election this year -- put deputy public defender Zohra Bakhtary in handcuffs and made her sit with the criminals in the dock while he sentenced her client, who was unrepresented for the duration of the event. (more…)

A tumblr that does exactly what the title suggests: Guns replaced with Selfie Sticks. (more…)

When a team of "vested up and gunned up" U.S. Marshals in Tennessee apprehended Tracy Hinson and began interrogating her about selling 10 Xanax tablets in 2012, she gave them answers that made it clear they had the wrong woman. The marshal in charge told Hinton he needed to make a call.

"After he went and made a call, he came back and told me that he had to do what the paper said he had to. He asked if I ever lived in Mt. Pleasant, and I said no," said Hinson. "They took me to the Dyer County Jail and I was fully processed there, and that included being shackled and strip searched. They said they were holding me until Lawrence County could come and pick me up that night."

From State Gazette:

Unfortunately for Hinson, officials from Lawrence County didn't arrive until late on Saturday, a full day after being arrested. During the time of being incarcerated, a frightened Hinson said she tried to think of how she was in the predicament, but she simply could come up with nothing.

...

Once Hinson arrived at the Lawrence County Jail, with a $5,000 bond, her husband Kenny was not far behind and was able to arrange for her to be bonded out of jail at 11:40 p.m. on Saturday night. The cost was $536 for the bail bondsman, something Hinson hopes at the very least to recoup, along with an apology from the law enforcement agency.

The U.S. Marshal's Office in Jackson issued the following statement: "The West Tennessee U.S. Marshals arrested a woman on an outstanding warrant out of Lawrence County. During transport, the U.S. Marshals discovered the arrest was made due to a clerical error made by the local agency (Lawrence County). The person was misidentified and all charges were dismissed."

 “This is Pebble Core,” Eric Migicovsky says with a smile. “It’s our first non-watch product. The simplest way to explain it is that it’s a computer that fits on your keychain. It’s a tiny Android computer without a screen. It has 3D, GPS, Wi-Fi, a little bit of memory and both Android and JavaScript apps run on Pebble’s JavaScript framework.”… Read More

 Partially confirming earlier reports, Twitter announced this morning plans that will begin to distance it from its strict adherence to the rule that tweets can only contain 140 characters. The company says that, among other changes designed to welcome new users to its service, it will no longer count media attachments and @names in replies toward your 140 allowed characters. However, links… Read More

 Google’s AdWords is getting a makeover. The search giant announced today that they have made several updates to make its advertising tools more suitable for mobile. With an emphasis on location-related mobile searches, a category that Google says is growing 50% faster than other searches, the company is introducing new local search ads across Google.com and Google Maps. If a customer… Read More

Simone Giertz is a 25-year old inventor from Stockholm, Sweden, best known for charming the internet with her "shitty robots," as she calls them. Except they're not shitty at all, because they've fulfilled their purpose in delighting anyone with a pair of eyes and a heart full of childlike wonder. One of the robots she made is the wake-up machine, an alarm clock that wakes people up by slapping them in the face with a rubber arm. Another one is the hair-washing robot, which uses the same severed hand from the wake-up machine, just resourcefully put to use in a different way.

You'll find GIFs of Giertz's inventions in pretty much every corner of the internet, usually without context. But does a robot that spoon-feeds you cereal while you...

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Comixology is launching a subscription service that will offer readers "thousands" of digital comics for $5.99 a month. Called Comixology Unlimited, the service will feature work from a variety of major indie presses, including Image Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and Fantagraphics Books. That means readers in the US will get access to high-profile work like Saga and The Walking Dead, although they won't see anything from Marvel or DC Comics. They'll be able to read them through the web, or through Comixology's mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Amazon's Fire Tablet. As with Comixology's other material, mobile users can still read the comics offline, although they won't permanently own them.

There have already been some experiments with...

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Three years after Pebble started selling its original Kickstarter-funded smartwatch, the Redwood City, California-based startup is rolling out a successor. The new Pebble 2 has some aesthetic improvements, but the most notable new feature is the Pebble 2's ability to track heart rate. In fact, the Pebble Time 2, another new smartwatch, will also feature heart rate sensors, and Pebble says they'll be included on all future Pebble watches.

Pebble says it decided to include heart rate tracking because the company believes fitness tracking has become the third pillar of smartwatch functionality, alongside notifications and basic communications. But it's also an acknowledgement on the part of Pebble that it will need to keep innovating on...

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Dolores Park is a symbol of the clash between of the Mission District's low-income, non-white traditional residents and the flood of gentrifying tech world. (more…)

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Games

AirAttack 2

Android Police coverage: Air Attack 2 Mixes Retro Shoot-Em-Up Gameplay With Fantastic 3D Graphics And A Great Free-To-Play Model

Air Attack was one of the best games of the early Android boom back in 2011, combining old-school shoot-em-up gameplay with 3D graphics and mobile controls.

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26 New And Notable Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (5/10/16 - 5/23/16) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

For many years Australia has been labeled a hotbed of Internet piracy. Faced with high prices, a dearth of choice, and legal products arriving months after their debut elsewhere, millions of Aussies have turned unofficial sources.

As a result, Australia has found itself in the spotlight of both local and international rightsholders who claim that their industry is hemorrhaging millions due to people downloading via torrent, streaming and other file-sharing services.

While the latter mechanisms are more difficult to police, those obtaining media via torrents are relatively easy to track so with this in mind, rightsholders have been placing local Internet service providers under pressure to cooperate in a so-called three-strikes anti-piracy scheme.

In the early days cooperation was not forthcoming so in order to force compliance, movie companies decided to sue ISP iiNet. That action failed in 2012, leaving entertainment companies to re-build bridges and deal with matters on a friendly basis. Years of on/off negotiations ensued, more recently with government involvement.

Late last year it looked almost certain that a “three strikes” style scheme would be implemented, with pirates being monitored by copyright holders and notified of their behavior via escalating ISP warning notices, with legal action being the final step. But earlier this year it was revealed the whole project was in peril, entirely on the issue of costs.

Now it’s been officially confirmed that the project has been shelved. In a joint letter to the Australian Media and Communications Authority, the Communications Alliance and Foxtel (on behalf of rightsholders) state that it had “not proved possible to reach agreement on how to apportion all of the costs” for the scheme.

In all the years of intermittent discussion on “three strikes” costs have always been an issue. Agreement has been reached in other regions, the US for example, but Australia appears to have a unique set of problems.

According to a CNET report, Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton says that while agreement had been reached on who would foot the bill in the majority of areas, “the sticking point was processing costs.”

These costs are reportedly associated with preparing the notices, contacting alleged pirates and dealing with the inevitable flood of telephone calls from unhappy customers. These type of costs are entirely associated with actions the ISPs would be required to carry out themselves, which suggests that the providers have continued to stand their ground, much as they have for many years.

Earlier this year Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke bemoaned the manual warning system under discussion, complaining that the labor-intense mechanism would churn out notices at a cost of $16 to $20 each. “You might as well give people a DVD,” he said. But even with automation the ISPs are predicting extremely high costs.

“It is possible to largely automate it, but that’s quite an expensive undertaking,” says John Stanton. “We’ve had ISPs run a ruler over how much it would cost…and it was in the multiple millions.”

So what now for the Aussie downloading problem? Well, it appears that for at least a year not much will happen. With copyright trolls seemingly running for the hills it will be up to legal alternatives to try and persuade consumers they’re a more attractive proposition. They won’t have to go that alone, however.

“We are going to be mounting a massive campaign to reinforce the fact (to the public) that piracy is not a victimless crime and we have to continue to provide content in a timely way and at affordable prices,” Graham Burke said.

And of course the specter of site blocking is still on the horizon and possibly just months away. The music industry may have temporarily suspended its case against KickassTorrents but other cases involving The Pirate Bay are running full steam ahead and will almost certainly conclude before the end of the year. The Kickass case will conclude shortly after.

As for three-strikes, that will be subject to a review in April 2017 but given that agreement over costs hasn’t been reached in close to a decade, another year seems unlikely to make much of a difference.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

The head of security at the TSA has been removed from his position as frustration mounts over growing lines in airports. Kelly Hoggan had been the agency's assistant administrator for security operations since 2013, during which time a report from Homeland Security found that the TSA failed to spot 95 percent of concealed weapons and explosives.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced the removal of Hoggan in a tweet, noting that he had been paid more than $90,000 in awards and bonuses in the space of 13 months. Hoggan's removal followed a hearing on May 12th by the committee, in which the TSA was accused of "mismanagement."

"It's a huge bureaucracy."

Security lines at airports around the US have been growing...

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When you put a case on your phone, you usually give up the ability to add on more accessories — be it a new camera lens, a card reader, or extra storage. So OtterBox is trying to change that. It's unveiling a new iPhone case today called the Universe, which protects a phone and allows its owner to clip on up to two accessories at the same time.

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The migraines started when I was 12. Back then, I used to get persistent, mind-splitting headaches two or three times a month. The throbbing pain in my head, usually behind my left eye, often came with nausea, sometimes with vomiting, and always with extreme sensitivity to sound and light. I couldn’t do anything but swallow an Advil and lie down in my room in the dark. I missed a lot of childhood dance classes that way.

The migraines went away when I was 16 or so — until eight months ago, when they returned stronger and more frequent, almost every other day. Painkillers like ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and aspirin often didn’t work; to the point that if I went to bed with a migraine I was 100 percent sure I would wake up with one.

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 Terms and conditions suck, as we’ve said before. They are designed to be impenetrably unreadable to convince app users not to bother. The ‘Click here to AGREE’ button might as well have a giant cartoon arrow winking away on it. Read More

 There have been many attempts to update keyboards for the digital era and speed up typing by rethinking the antique Qwerty layout. Problem is you’re going up against muscle memory, and resistance to change the habit of a lifetime. And that’s a very hard nut to crack. But a Swiss startup reckons they have done it with their Wrio keyboard. Read More

 This story has been going on for years, but it looks like France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale des finances) wants more proofs. According to Le Monde and Le Parisien, Google’s office in Paris is being raided right now. According to the DGF, Google should be paying more taxes in France as the company has been doing more than just tax-optimization strategies. Google… Read More