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Steve Harvey announced Miss Colombia as the winner of the 2015 Miss Universe pageant. But Miss Colombia was not the winner of the 2015 Miss Universe pageant. Miss Philippines was. (more…)

As expected, The Force Awakens has achieved a historic opening weekend, toppling box office records like Ewoks knocking over AT-STs. The latest Star Wars movie scored an estimated $238 million from opening weekend tickets in the United States alone, beating the previous highest domestic opening weekend total of $208.8 million, set by Jurassic World earlier this year. It also netted the records for the biggest single day opening, the fastest movie to gross $1 million — taking only one day to achieve that feat — and helped set a new record for the most money ever taken in US movie theaters in a single weekend.

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The IRS could soon call you about debt collection, and it's not a scam: A provision in the emergency budget plan, signed into law by President Barack Obama, allows federal agencies to make robocalls demanding payment of back taxes, as well as student loans and mortgage debts.

The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit's breathless press-release about their raid on a "gang suspected of uploading and distributing tens of thousands of karaoke tracks online" obscures the truth: they busted three middle-aged dudes who loved singing, so they hunted down otherwise unavailable tracks and shared them with other karaoke fans, not making a penny in the process. (more…)

The Omnibus Budget bill that Paul Ryan crammed through Congress last week didn't just harbor a domestic mass surveillance law and a bunch of nonsensical dog-whistles about ACORN and pornography, it was also full of grotesque pork for rich people and pointless government boondoggles. (more…)

We love apps. We talk about them every day here at Android Police, we write biweekly roundups featuring all the cool new apps that are getting released, we choose our top 7 new apps every month, and once in a while we tackle a specific category of apps and show you some interesting choices in it. Apps are an intricate part of what we do here and how we use our devices in general, they're inextricable from our Android usage.

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Android Police's Team Picks: Our Favorite And Most Used Apps In 2015 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Android is many things. A mobile operating system, a tool for smart watches and set-top boxes, any much more. But one of the things it most certainly is not is a desktop OS... at least in its current form. That said, it's also the world's biggest piece of open-source software, so when Jide decided to make what it calls "the world's first true Android PC," they were more than free to do so.

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Jide Remix Mini Android Desktop PC Review: Interesting Software Let Down By Bargain-Bin Hardware was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

As you've probably heard from every possible corner of the known media universe, J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens is finally here — and people like it. While that has to do a lot with the visual style (shot on film!), some great chase sequences (the Millennium Falcon!), and memorable battles (lightsabers!), it primarily has to do with the characters — including Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren, and the cutest robot to ever bleep-bloop through the galaxy, BB-8.

But while you may already have one of the many, many BB-8 toys sitting in your home or office, sometimes that's not enough. You might want BB-8 to be along with you every moment of the day. Like when you get a text message. A voicemail. An email. When somebody calls you. These are the...

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The Omnibus Budget Bill passed this week, and Paul Ryan managed to cram the domestic mass surveillance law CISA into it, but that's just the appetizer in a banquet of corrupt DC horsetrading embodied in 2,000+ pages that indicts the entire US legislative system. (more…)

Facebook today announced that every video you see on its website now plays in HTML5 by default — and across all browsers, a change the company said "best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs." Adobe itself recently acknowledged that it's time to leave Flash behind, and back in July, Facebook's security chief called for the Flash creator to announce an end-of-life date for the technology which, thanks to oft-discovered vulnerabilities, is a constant target of malicious software.

"We decided to initially launch the HTML5 player to only a small set of browsers, and continuously roll out to more browsers, versions, and operating systems as we improved it and fixed small...

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Every Monday Android Police publishes a list of new and notable apps or games to the site. It works out to around a hundred new apps a month, and over a thousand by this time in the year. If you wanted to, you could go back and look through all of them on the roundup page... but you probably don't. And why would you, when we've already done the legwork for you?

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Android Police's Picks For The 20 Best Android Games Of 2015 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Vevo is publishing great Beatles videos on YouTube

Every Monday Android Police publishes a list of new and notable apps or games to the site. It works out to around a hundred new apps a month, and over a thousand by this time in the year. If you wanted to, you could go back and look through all of them on the roundup page... but you probably don't. And why would you, when we've already done the legwork for you?

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Android Police's Picks For The 20 Best Android Apps Of 2015 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

There's a new Android ad on YouTube, and it's pretty good. The premise, according to Google, is that we're all "wonderfully unique" just like fingerprints. The ad shows finger-puppet people being individuals and coming together to have fun. Aw, how sweet.

It's a fun, quirky ad, but it's not even clear at first what it's an ad for. The Android logo pops up at the very end. It's just weird enough that people will probably pay attention.

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New Android Ad Gets Two Thumbs Up, Plus Some More Fingers Dressed Like People was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

TCM Remembers 2015 - YouTube:

This morning, Congress passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, attached as the 14th rider to an omnibus budget bill. The bill is expected to be signed into law by the president later today.

Intended to ease sharing of information between corporations and the government, the bill had drawn controversy since its introduction last year. The Center for Democracy and Technology said it risked creating "a backdoor wiretap," while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) called it "a surveillance bill by another name." Earlier this week, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) called the bill "an important first step to address a significant drain on our economy and threat to our national security."

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Since 2013, I've been reading in the Times of India's RSS feed about the Vyapam scandal that has shaken the state of Madhya Pradesh to the very highest levels, but I never understood exactly how insane and massive the scandal was until I read Aman Sethi's cogent, comprehensive A-to-Z in today's Guardian. (more…)

A lot of wildlife photography competitions focus on animals looking majestic or human or weird. But not many pay credit to them looking funny. Enter, the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, which is all about animals looking, well, comedic. This is the first year the competition has run, with the judges sending out requests a few months ago for images that are "funny, creative, dynamic, and interesting [...] as well as technically proficient." This sounds pretty dull, but listen, there's this picture of a hippo running away from some birds just below and believe me, it is amazing.

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“Elliot likes to tear up cardboard boxes.”

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The Effects of a Year in Ketosis by James McCarter from Quantified Self on Vimeo.

At the most recent Quantified Self conference, geneticist Jim McCarter t talked about the effects of going on a ketogenic diet for a year.

In this fascinating short talk by geneticist Jim McCarter, we see detailed data about the effects of a ketogenic diet: lower blood pressure, better cholesterol numbers, and vastly improved daily well being. Jim also describes the mid-course adjustments he made to reduce side effects such as including muscle cramps and increased sensitivity to cold.

Jim begins: “When I tell my friends I’ve given up sugar and starch and get 80% of my calories from fat, the first question I get is: Why?”

Image: Wikipedia

15 Best TV Shows of 2015

Rudy Rucker is one of my favorite authors of all time. So it's no surprise that the books he read in 2015 and recommend on his blog sound interesting to me: Purity by Jonathan Franzen, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Inherent Vice and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Peripheral by William Gibson, All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland, Sandman Slim Series by Richard Kadrey, Genius at Play: the Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts, Jean-Michel Basquiat by Leonhard Emmerling, A Palazzo in The Stars by Paul Di Filippo, and The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne.

Facewatch is a private-public system that shopkeepers and the police use to keep track of "persons of interest," a list that includes anyone a shopkeeper doesn't like and registers with the system. (more…)

America's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it easy to censor the Internet: under the statute, you can make virtually anything disappear by claiming, without evidence, that it infringes your copyright, and there are almost no penalties for abuse. (more…)

 Adobe unveiled a new social graphics app today called Adobe Post, which now joins an expanding suite of applications aimed at encouraging mobile creativity, including Adobe Slate, Adobe Voice, and several others. However, unlike many apps in Adobe’s lineup, Post is not only targeted at professionals, but instead wants to make it easy for anyone to turn their photos and text into… Read More

 Apple announced a series of changes to its leadership team this morning, including, most notably, the promotion of Jeff Williams to COO, a role that had not been filled since Tim Cook became Apple CEO in 2011. Williams, who joined Apple in 1998, was named VP of Operations in 2004 and currently oversees the Apple Watch program. In addition, Apple says it’s expanding VP of Worldwide… Read More

Homelessness in America dwindled away after WWII, when the GI Bill and generous social programs seemed to finally get on top of a problem that had been with the country since its inception; but starting with Reagan's mass de-institutionalizations and cuts to social services, homelessness has only grown, a phenomenon America answered by criminalizing being alive, and pretending not to notice homeless people in encampments at the edge of more and more US cities. (more…)