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Access to information is at the heart of Google’s mission. Unfortunately, today, the mobile web isn't living up to the expectations people have for getting the information they need, particularly when it comes to speed. In fact, data shows that people abandon websites after just three seconds if the content doesn't load quickly—which is bad not just for people trying to get what they want online, but for the publishers who want those readers to enjoy the content they've created for them. That's why, last October, we joined others across the industry on the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP for short), an open source initiative to make the mobile web as fast as possible.

In just over four months, AMP has come a long way, with hundreds of publishers, scores of technology companies and ad-tech businesses all taking part in this joint mission to improve the mobile web for everyone. And starting today, we’ll make it easy to find AMP webpages in relevant mobile search results, giving you a lightning-fast reading experience for top stories.

Now when you search for a story or topic on Google from a mobile device, webpages created using AMP will appear when relevant in the Top Stories section of the search results page. Any story you choose to read will load blazingly fast—and it’s easy to scroll through the article without it taking forever to load or jumping all around as you read. It’s also easy to quickly flip through the search results just by swiping from one full-page AMP story to the next.

AMP is great for browsing the web on mobile devices, because webpages built with AMP load an average of four times faster and use 10 times less data than equivalent non-AMP pages. In many cases, they’ll load instantly. It's how reading on the mobile web should be—fast, responsive and fun.
While helping people find fast AMP content through Google Search is a significant step, there’s still a lot of work ahead for the open source AMP Project. Still, it’s been thrilling to see how the industry has come together to work on this common goal of making the mobile web great for everyone. And given the potential AMP holds for other types of content, we’re excited about what the future holds.

Posted by David Besbris, VP Engineering, Search https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AstzXdmDwhg/Vs5OXT22dWI/AAAAAAAAR4Q/bQLXTpG9MZg/s1600/AMP%2Bhero.jpg David Besbris VP Engineering Search

Gmail for Android is making it a bit easier to add some flair to your email text and quickly respond to calendar invites with a single tap. Today, a new update for the app will add support for rich text formatting — bold, italics, underlined / colored text, etc. — so you'll have extra tools at your disposal to get a point across, add emphasis to your text, or craft the signature you've always wanted right inside the app. And separately, calendar invites "from both Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange" will now display a one-tap option to respond and view your schedule for the requested time slot.

The small-but-useful update should be available from the Google Play Store sometime today.

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Just because you have the money for something in your account—or the space in your budget to make the monthly payments—doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good idea to buy it.

The difference between “can” and “should,” aside from preventing possible dinosaur-related disasters, is key to setting up a financial plan that’s sustainable over the long run. As personal finance site Wealth Redesigned explains, your financial well being is determined largely by the habits you form. Rather than approaching a purchase or a financial decision from the perspective of whether or not you can, ask yourself if you should:

Making larger purchasing decisions with a buffer mindset can be tricky. It’s not a question of “can I afford it?” because if they wanted to, these people could probably write the check or line up the financing. It’s a question of “should I afford it?” What will taking that big vacation, upgrading to a nicer car or remodeling a bathroom do to the bigger financial picture?

By running your purchases through the filter of “should,” you can gain a better perspective on your overall finances. Sure, you could buy a new laptop with your tax refund even though your old one works okay, but you’d probably be a lot happier in the long run if you put that money towards your credit card debt.

Should I afford it? | Wealth Redesigned via Rockstar Finance

Photo by Thirteen of Clubs.

After more than a year in development, Facebook's expanded Like button "reactions" are now coming to a News Feed near you. For the first time, you'll be able to react to friends' posts with something other than a gesture of pure positivity. Long press on the Like button and you'll now see "love," "haha," "wow," "sad," and "angry," and posts will now show the mix of reactions they've received. And while there's no "dislike" button, as some users have long requested, Facebook says that the new mix of reactions has proven popular with users during testing in Spain and Ireland. It's launching today on iOS, Android, and the web.

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 Google has some big plans when it comes to making the web faster on your mobile phone. The company just added AMP-enabled pages in its mobile search results. And one of the first companies supporting the new Instant Article-like format is an important one — Automattic’s WordPress. Read More

Windows 10's new Spotlight feature usually shows you neat photographs and fun facts when you first start your computer. Now, it’s started showing ads. Here’s how to turn it off.

Tips site How-To Geek discovered that Windows Spotlight—which normally rotates between a selection of photographs—was being used to display an ad for Ubisoft’s Rise of the Tomb Raider. Understandably, most people probably don’t want to be hit in the face with a full-screen ad for a video game before they even unlock their computer. If you want to make sure you’re not hit with these ads, follow these steps to disable Windows Spotlight:

1. Open the Start Menu and search for “Lock Screen Settings.”
2. Under “Background,” select either Picture or Slideshow, instead of Windows Spotlight.
3. Scroll down to “Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen” and this toggle.

Apparently the “and more” is where Microsoft hid the advertisements. If you like the Windows Spotlight feature and just don’t want to see ads, How-To Geek points out that you can select a drop-down menu when you see the ad and provide feedback saying you don’t want to see more content like this. It’s yet to be seen if this will remove all ads, or just ads for video games, but it’s worth a shot if you really like Windows Spotlight.

How to Disable Ads on Your Windows 10 Lock Screen | How-To Geek

 BlackBerry is not the smartphone powerhouse it used to be, but it’s been making a concerted effort to hold on to its position as a go-to place for enterprise customers, specifically in highly secure environments. As part of that strategy, today the company announced that it has acquired Encription Ltd, a cybersecurity consultancy that delivers services globally but operates “from… Read More

Getting cargo to the International Space Station is expensive and difficult — that's a huge part of why there's been so much buzz over commercial space flight operations like SpaceX. So if I were an astronaut living on board the ISS, I'd like to think I would pick my personal possessions very carefully, because I imagine the habitat is cramped and it might be a long time before I could get anything sent up again.

Maybe that's just not how astronauts roll, though, because here's a video of (presumably) NASA's Scott Kelly floating around the ISS in a gigantic gorilla suit, set to the Benny Hill theme.

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Apple's iPod shuffle holds a special place in my heart; I've never found another music player so perfect for the gym and outdoor activities. Everything about the shuffle — its clip-on design, dead simple controls, and cheap price — meant you could take it anywhere and not really worry about anything. Mine endured accidental trips through the washer, countless sweat baths, and even in those worst-case scenarios, you'd be out less than $100. But the shuffle has lost just about all relevance with the advent of subscription music services. If you're still plugging one into iTunes, you're an outlier.

But what if another company reinvented the tiny, dead simple music player for the Spotify age? What if it only played songs from Spotify?...

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 Spotify announced today on their news blog that they have selected Google Cloud Platform as an infrastructure partner for their popular music streaming service. Up until now, it appears Spotify has been managing that hardware burden themselves via multiple providers and data centers (including Amazon Web Services for whom they were an AWS case study). However the music company feels the… Read More

Over the years, Amazon has challenged the traditional brick-and-mortar model, redefined the books landscape, and gone all-in with original programming. Now, the retail giant is foraying headfirst into fashion.

Amazon has released 1,800 products, ranging from women’s clothing and bags to children’s clothing to men’s tailored apparel, spanning over seven private labels. Amazon owns the labels Society New York, Lark and Ro, Scout and Ro, Franklin and Freeman, Franklin Tailored, James and Erin, and North Eleven, WWD reports.

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Toward the end of last year Google began testing a way to make webpages load faster when you're on a mobile device. How fast? Instantly, ideally. Or at least no more than a second or two. Google calls these quickly-loading sites Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Google has now started to mark these sites in search results. When you see a green circle with a lightning bolt adjacent to the word AMP, you're in for what should be a satisfying tap.

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Google Begins Marking AMP-Enabled Sites With A Green Circle And A Lightning Bolt was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Thirty years ago, 66 chimpanzees who had been used (and horribly mistreated) by the New York Blood Center for hepatitis research were abandoned on remote islands off Africa’s Ivory Coast. One of the chimps, named Ponso, was 10 when he was abandoned on an island with 19 other chimps. Within nine months, 11 of the chimps died, mainly from starvation. They were moved to another island, but most of the chimps died, leaving only Ponso, his mate and their two babies. A man in a village would occasionally drop by to give them chimps bread and bananas, their only source of food.

Oddity Central has more:

Sadly, Ponso’s entire family died by the end of 2013, leaving the grief-stricken chimp to a life of isolation on the uninhabited island. Given the traumatic experiences he has faced on account of humans, 40-year-old Ponso’s ability to immediately trust and embrace humans is nothing short of remarkable. When Estelle Raballand, director of the Chimpanzee Conservation Center, visited him recently, he was so happy that he actually laughed and wrapped her in a tight hug.

Unfortunately, his joy was short-lived as he had no choice but to return to his life of solitude after his human visitors left. The Humane Society of the United States is currently trying to raise money for Ponso and other chimps abandoned on remote African islands and a group called SOS Ponso has started a crowdfuning campaign that has already surpassed its €20,000 goal. They plan to use this money to provide food and urgent veterinary care for the world’s loneliest chimp.

The New York Blood Center announced last May that it would no longer pay to care for the chimpanzees it had experimented on.

USB Type-C cables are great because they’re reversible and support the latest, fastest USB spec, but some cables are so poorly made they can ruin your expensive hardware. Here are a few tips for buying ones that are safe.

http://lifehacker.com/psa-some-usb-c...

Googler Benson Leung and The Verge’s Dieter Bohn both reported earlier this month that bad cable ruined their laptops. As we mentioned in our PSA, take special care to read reviews—including Leung’s in-depth ones—before you buy.

Laptop Magazine offers more tips that can reassure you. The first is to look at the plug itself:

“A good cable uses a deep-draw extrusion method that produces a Type C plug that is a single piece of metal and does not have a visible seam on one side of the plug,” said Tim North, a senior product manager at Monoprice (which recently had a cable approved by Leung). A folded and stamped connector, North explained, is usually made of zinc tin alloy which is easily broken and may not handle the cable’s power requirements.

Additionally, you can find a list of certified cables from USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), which sets the standards for USB Type-C in this oft-updated PDF.

For even more on the potential damage from poor cables and other things you can do to protect your laptop, check out the link below.

How to Buy USB Type-C Cables That Won’t Fry Your Gadgets | Laptop Magazine

A UN panel on aviation is recommending a total ban on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries as cargo on passenger aircraft, Reuters reported Tuesday. The same group rejected a ban on battery shipments last October, but reversed course earlier this year after pilots and airplane manufacturers said they were a fire risk.

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used in rechargeable consumer products like cellphones and laptops. The batteries can still be transported in cargo planes, but starting April 1st they will be prohibited from commercial aircraft. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) said the ban will be in place until a new fire-resistant packaging standard is designed to transport the batteries, which is not expected until...

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 eero was supposed to go out late last year to those who bought the system during pre-launch but a manufacturing hiccup pushed the ship date to the here and now. But the startup has toiled away for well over a year to hopefully solve the agonizing pain of waiting for the next episode of your favorite Netflix show to load – It does this with a step-by-step Wifi mesh network kit you can… Read 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.

Featured App

Internet Radio - PlayTime

This week's roundup is brought to you by Playtime Internet Radio from HandyApps.

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11 New And Notable Android Apps From The Last 2 Weeks (2/10/16 - 2/22/16) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Following a series of High Court orders obtained since 2012, six of the UK’s major ISPs are required to block access to dozens of the world’s most popular ‘pirate’ sites.

Over the past several years the number of blocked domains has expanded to roughly 1,000, with popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents being the main targets.

While it’s hard to stamp out piracy completely, the measures were supposed make it harder for UK Internet subscribers to access these sites.

However, a recent review of current blocking practices shows that several ISPs including Virgin Media, BT, EE and TalkTalk are failing. It turns out that many subscribers don’t have to jump through technological hoops to circumvent the blockades, as many popular pirate sites are freely accessible on their regular connections.

With the help from several subscribers, TorrentFreak was able to confirm that the HTTPS versions of most blocked websites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, RARBG and Torrentz, are still freely accessible.

While regular connections are still blocked, many pirate sites have added a secure HTTPS variant which appears to be hard to block for many providers.

Blocked?

Some sites even force users to use the HTTPS enabled domain and as a result UK traffic has been picking up again. For example, KickassTorrents is currently among the 300 most visited websites in the UK, even though it’s supposed to be blocked.

The HTTPS issue is not new and it appears that many ISPs don’t have a countermeasure in place. According to our information, only Sky is structurally blocking secure versions of various pirate sites.

The precise technical explanation for the issue is unclear, but since HTTPS connections can strip HTTP headers it may be harder to detect that a blocked site is being accessed.

In theory ISPs could also block the site’s IP-addresses, but since many use shared IPs from CloudFlare this would also take down other unrelated websites.

Whatever the reason, most UK Internet subscribers are now getting a taste of a free and uncensored Internet once again.

The HTTPS issue is refreshing as blocking problems are usually the result of overblocking. For example, TorrentFreak has been blocked in the past by Sky, and the same ISP also restricted access to several other sites because they shared a CloudFlare IP-address with The Pirate Bay.

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

Google is shutting down a service that allowed web users to compare offers for car insurance, credit cards, and mortgages, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The site, called Google Compare, launched in March 2015, and is currently available in the US and the UK. The site aimed to simplify financial services for consumers, with Google taking a commission on referrals or in some cases selling products directly to users.

But the site apparently didn't live up to Google's expectations, as explained in an email to partners on Monday. "Despite people turning to Google for financial services information, the Google Compare service itself hasn’t driven the success we hoped for," reads the email, which was obtained and...

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Sometimes, it seems like the tech world is inexorably bending towards a future full of curved devices. At MWC in Barcelona, we saw yet another prototype display, this time from English firm FlexEnable. Now, this isn't a working device of any kind — it's essentially just a screen running a demo — and neither is FlexEnable a consumer electronics company. But the firm says its technology is ready to go, and it's apparently in talks with unnamed hardware partners who want to make this sort of device a reality. How long until we see fully-fledged wristbands like this on the market? Eighteen months is the optimistic guess from FlexEnable's Paul Cain.

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 Skype Qik, Microsoft’s attempt at spinning off video messaging into a simplified mobile application, is shutting down. The app was first introduced in fall 2014 to serve a different audience than the larger, more fully-featured, Skype application. Instead of offering real-time chat, screen sharing and audio and video calling, Qik was designed only for asynchronous video messaging. The… Read More

Adobe opted to make Lightroom free a while back, and now it's adding a few new features that might make you more likely to take advantage of the app. Lightroom v2.0 includes some new tools and a dedicated camera with RAW support. The RAW support won't work on all phones, but it'll be pretty handy on the ones that do.

Here's the full changelog for Lightroom v2.0.

Lightroom v2.0 Available With Built-In Camera, New Tools, And More was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Last year, Google marked its return to public exhibition at Mobile World Congress, but with a whole new twist: it wasn't really exhibiting any of its own or any of its partner's products, it was all just in the name of fun. You see, at trade shows like MWC, business is the predominant subject of conversation, and while quite a few consumer product announcements may occur, they're often secondary to the whole issue of "things which cause money to change hands." MWC isn't open to the public, either, and so attendees are largely in the mobile business in one form or another, or members of the media.

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Google's Amazing Android Exhibit At MWC - A Photo Tour (With Smoothies) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Microsoft announced a deal to bundle its Android apps on Cyanogen OS last year. The deal includes deep integration of Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant, allowing it to replace Google Now functionality. We’ve heard a lot about this partnership, but Cyanogen is now demonstrating exactly how these apps integrate further than normal Android ones.

Cortana is voice-activated on Cyanogen, just like it is on Windows Phone, and it allows you to access additional commands like "take a selfie" or "turn on airplane mode" that wouldn’t work on iOS and Android. These are fairly basic additions, but it’s easy to imagine even deeper integration in the browser and elsewhere for Cortana on Cyanogen in the future.

Microsoft is demonstrating some of...

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LG's G5 was only introduced yesterday, but I'm already convinced it is the most polished and complete smartphone that the Korean company has yet built. Unlike its forebears, the G5 grew smaller rather than larger, and LG added features judiciously rather than gratuitously. This could only be possible with the introduction of the plug-in G5 modules that LG calls its Friends. Those extras have freed the Korean company from its perpetual obsession with cramming everything into a single device and, simultaneously, given it the halo of being perceived as a true innovator.

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