The oddly named uBirds is manufacturing while Switzerland burns. Their product, called the Unique, is essentially a smart watch hidden inside your watch band. This way you can strap on your Panerai or RGM and rock out while your band buzzes, not your watch. Creating a “convertible” watch seems to be Switzerland’s Grail Quest. This solution, created by a company based in… Read More
Last night, people in Western Europe, South America, and America's East Coast had front row seats to the super blood moon. It was a rare astronomical event in which a total lunar eclipse happened during the same night as a supermoon. The result was a particularly large and shiny full moon that turned dark red for over an hour.
Google Play Music may be about to catch up on one of Apple Music's best selling points. According to Android Police, Google will announce a $14.99 per month family plan tomorrow that allows six people to stream music from separate accounts. That's identical to Apple Music's family plan, which was introduced when the service launched in June. Of course, there's a lot more that goes into choosing a streaming service than just price, but lowering the price this dramatically can make Google Play Music into a legitimate option for families that otherwise would have written it off. It also gives Google an edge on Spotify, which still charges $5 per additional user. The new plan is expected to be announced tomorrow during Google's event.
If you’ve managed to get your budget under control, to the point where you’re spending less than you earn, that’s great! That’s not being “frugal”, though. That’s just basic budgeting.
Frugality isn’t a concept that all money experts agree on. Depending on who you ask, being frugal can mean spending as little as possible, or simply getting the most value you can out of what you already have. However, most would probably agree that simply spending less than your income isn’t really “frugal.” It’s the bare minimum for having a balanced budget. As personal finance blog Simple Living in Suffolk explains:
I have a sneaking suspicion that being frugal means something different now than what it used to mean. Nowadays, I would venture for most people the definition is “Frugality is not spending more than you earn.” How the hell did we get here? In previous generations not spending more than you earn was the default assumption.
Of course, we’ve also discussed how “Spend less than you earn” isn’t always an achievable goal for some. However, it is a good baseline for financial health. Reaching that milestone doesn’t mean your finances are in the best shape ever. It just means they’re in the black. If you have a balanced budget, but want to save more, frugal living is a good next step.
If you happen to be on the hunt for some expandable memory for your camera or smartphone, you may want to check out this SanDisk Ultra 128GB MicroSD card, which happens to be today's Lightning Deal over on Amazon UK. You can pick up the card for just £38.99.
Keeping a constant data connection is getting easier every day, whether we're in heavily populated areas or in the middle of nowhere. But there are still situations when we're bound to lose service, perhaps during a power outage or while driving through a dead zone. Just because you've lost access to Google's servers, it doesn't mean you should lose all of the powerful capabilities your phone has to offer. Google has just enabled a small set of voice commands for use even when you're completely offline.
Every day humans spend on this planet, it becomes easier to get pizza. First, you had to call for pizza. Now we can order online for pizza. We can use an app to push for pizza. We can use a 3D printer to make pizza. We can order pizza with emoji. Add another one to that list. Now, using Amazon's Dash buttons — small $5 devices designed to place orders for regular household items — we can slap a big white button for pizza.
Inspired by engineer Ted Benson, who hacked his Dash button to track his baby's pooping schedule, fellow engineer Brody Berson hacked his Dash button so that it would order him pizza from Domino's, using an API capable of sending payment to the pizza delivery company. By programming a specific order into his Dash...
Today, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai shared details on a new plan to bring more Indian residents online. He notes that there’s still over a billion of them in his native country that aren’t connected.
The key? India’s train system. And a plan to bring Wi-Fi to its 10 million rail passengers a day. And it’s free (to start). Pichai shared Google’s plans, while… Read More
One UK police officer is arrested for criminal behaviour every day with the Metropolitan London Police accounting for the lion's share.
The majority of police arrests are for sexual offenses.
The Met isn't just a hive of scum and villainy -- they're also pretty bad at their jobs. They lead the UK in unsolved domestic burglaries.
Officers convicted of offences
*
PC Keith Wallis was jailed for 12 months for lying about witnessing an altercation in Downing Street involving the former Tory chief whip, Andrew Mitchell.
*
Osman Iqbal was given 7 years of jail time for prostitution, supplying a class-A drug, and money laundering in 2014.
*
Chris Higgs admitted to 16 crimes, including blackmail, fraud, perverting the court of justice, and witness interference, in March 2015.
*
Constable Trevor Jones jailed for 14 months after bombarding vulnerable women with sleazy text and voice messages in June 2015.
This is the least user friendly way to update your apps.
Since it became available I've been using the Google Now Launcher on pretty much every phone. Though it's of course pre-loaded on Nexuses and now Motorola phones, I even go out of my way to install it on my Galaxy Note 5 and Shield Tablet. It's a great launcher — but seriously, why can't Google just communicate when it's going to dramatically change in function and appearance through an app update?
David Stojcevski, 32, was sentenced to 30 days in Michigan's Macomb County jail for failing to pay a traffic fine. He was addicted to drugs but the jail refused to treat him so he died. Reason reports that over the "next 17 days of his incarceration in a brightly lit cell — where he was denied clothing — he lost 50 pounds, suffered convulsions, and eventually began to hallucinate. He died in agony, from a combination of obvious, untreated drug withdrawal and galling neglect." Jailers were able to see him on a security monitor the entire time, but they simply allowed him to suffer and die.
Stojcevski’s parents are suing the county. A lawyer for Macomb county said the suit “lacks legal merit,” and the county has no plans to settle.
The KARMA POLICE program is detailed in newly released Snowden docs published on The Intercept; it began as a project to identify every listener to every Internet radio station (to find people listening to jihadi radio) and grew into an ambitious plan to identify every Web user and catalog their activities from porn habits to Skype contacts.
The program began in 2007/8 and it mined BLACK HOLE, which is GCHQ's repository for all the data sucked up by its fiber taps (which it calls "probes"). It attempted to map IP addresses to peoples' identities, and cross reference users' identities on various systems and in various locations, collecting them into "a web browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet."
Part of this was accomplished by looking at a users' cookies -- if you log into Google on your phone and your laptop, GCHQ use its surveillance views into that cookie to connect all the traffic from your laptop and phone with a single identity. The agency exploited cookies from a wide variety of popular websites that put like/share buttons, beacons, and other assets on a many other sites. The targeted cookies came from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit, the BBC, Amazon, Wordpress, Yahoo, and others.
KARMA POLICE drew on a frankly bewildering array of other programs, which sucked up data from a variety of sources. These programs were given exotic codenames by GCHQ: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, MEMORY HOLE, MARBLED GECKO, INFINITE MONKEYS, etc. These logged different kinds of Internet events -- search queries, Google Maps searches, and BBS/message-board posts.
The UK spy agency had an extraordinary view into the world's Internet traffic thanks to the number of oceanic fiber links that make landfall in the UK.
Like the NSA, GCHQ relied on secret interpretations of the laws on spying to paper over its activities, so that it could tell its governmental overseers that all its activities were lawful. It amassed records on people from all over the world, including Britons, and routinely allows its spying partners to search its databases. The US NSA, as well as spy agencies from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have access to its data on British citizens and people from all over the world.
In March, the existence of this loophole was quietly acknowledged by the U.K. parliamentary committee’s surveillance review, which stated in a section of its report that “special protection and additional safeguards” did not apply to metadata swept up using external warrants and that domestic British metadata could therefore be lawfully “returned as a result of searches” conducted by GCHQ.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCHQ appears to have readily exploited this obscure legal technicality. Secret policy guidance papers issued to the agency’s analysts instruct them that they can sift through huge troves of indiscriminately collected metadata records to spy on anyone regardless of their nationality. The guidance makes clear that there is no exemption or extra privacy protection for British people or citizens from countries that are members of the Five Eyes, a surveillance alliance that the U.K. is part of alongside the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
“If you are searching a purely Events only database such as MUTANT BROTH, the issue of location does not occur,” states one internal GCHQ policy document, which is marked with a “last modified” date of July 2012. The document adds that analysts are free to search the databases for British metadata “without further authorization” by inputing a U.K. “selector,” meaning a unique identifier such as a person’s email or IP address, username, or phone number.
Authorization is “not needed for individuals in the U.K.,” another GCHQ document explains, because metadata has been judged “less intrusive than communications content.” All the spies are required to do to mine the metadata troves is write a short “justification” or “reason” for each search they conduct and then click a button on their computer screen.
Grace Brett, 104, is part of a guerrilla crochet group called the Souter Stormers who yarn bombed landmarks in Selkirk, Ettrickbridge and Yarrow, Scotland. The installation was tied to an arts festival in the area. Video below.
“I liked seeing my work showing with everyone else and thought the town looked lovely," Brett said.
Her daughter Daphne, 74, added "She thinks it is funny to be called a street artist.”
Twitch announced today at its first ever TwitchCon conference that it's launching an improved suite of apps for Sony's PlayStation platforms. PlayStation 4 users have been able to record directly to Twitch's game-streaming platform using the console's share features, as well as watch other PS4 content. But there hasn't yet been an app that lets you watch any Twitch channel regardless of platform and enjoy the full features of the desktop website or mobile app. Twitch is launching its new PS4 app alongside versions for the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation Vita handheld, and the PlayStation TV micro-console this fall.
The launch of a PlayStation 4 app that mimics the web-based Twitch.tv is long overdue considering competing platforms like...
Fall in the northern hemisphere can be very colorful and bright. Red is everywhere, look around you. Using this color in composition can be tricky. Here are 27 images that do it successfully:
The British government has been running a web surveillance program far more intrusive than anything attempted by the NSA, according to Snowden documents published this morning at The Intercept. Dubbed "Karma Police," the GCHQ program pulls web data from intercontinental data cables landing at Cornwall, giving it ongoing access to as much as a quarter of global web traffic since 2009.
The data collected is officially classified as metadata, but it contains full records of sites visited, usernames, and even passwords. Unlike equivalent NSA programs, which require FISA court approval of specific queries to the database, there appears to be no meaningful judicial oversight of Karma Police, giving the GCHQ a free hand in picking through the...
A report from Bloomberg this morning suggests that US antitrust regulators are looking into whether Google has engaged in anticompetitive practices with its Android operating system. It seems a preposterous question to ask, but might Android constitute an actual monopoly?
Google doesn’t make any phones, and it doesn’t force Android on anyone — phone makers choose to ship devices with that software on board. Google also isn’t fully in control of Android, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of Android smartphones being sold in China without Google’s apps or blessing. Android is famed as the open-source alternative to Apple’s closed iOS, and the two are locked in a healthy and balanced competition in the United States, with Google’s...
Facebook's Internet.org initiative — through which the social networking giant provides a set of essential internet-based services for free — came under criticism last year over net neutrality concerns. Those in opposition of the initiative said that the services included with Internet.org would gain an unfair advantage over competing services that would not be accessible for free. Facebook has addressed those issues shortly thereafter, stating that Free Basics will be an open platform, and that anyone can make their service available for free.
Vodafone is brining Wi-Fi Calling to Samsung hardware later this year. The company will launch the feature on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge this autumn, allowing owners to place calls using a Wi-Fi connection. Should you find yourself often located inside a building (be it an office or your home) with poor signal, this may be the ideal solution for you.
As part of their Q2 Fiscal 2016 results, BlackBerry also took the time today make their plans to launch the BlackBerry Priv, which will run Android with BlackBerry security, official. Although the information lacks specifics surrounding the actual launch of the device, the confirmation of its existence was needed given all the leaks recently.
For more than a decade, the UK movie industry makes a big deal out of announcing that audiences at the latest blockbuster movies will be surveilled by bored teenagers who get to LARP Buffalo Bill with greasy night-vision goggles that they'll use to catch camming pirates.
With the impending release of a new Bond and Hunger Games movie, the studios have once again sent out their spokesbots to tell us about their high-tech war on camming.
But Big Content will keep on playing alcoholic dad, insisting that their problems are caused by us, punishing the people who pay for movies because they can't reach the people who don't, looking for their keys under the lightpost because it's too dark where they dropped them.
Kieron Sharp, director general of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), said: "The bigger the film and the more anticipated it is, the higher-risk it is. We have staff on extra alert for that. James Bond is a big risk and we will be working with cinema operators and the distributors making sure we will keep that as tight as possible. We really don't want to see that recorded.
"They [cinema staff] are on alert to really drill down on who is in the auditorium and who might possibly be recording. They still do the sweeps around the auditoriums with the night vision glasses regardless of the film. But sometimes extra security is put in place for things like Bond."
Rightscorp is the publicly traded extortion racket that tries to force/bribe ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet unless those customers pay "settlements" for unproven allegations of copyright infringement.
Cox, a major ISP, is locked in a legal battle with Rightscorp, who represent a bunch of music publishers -- companies that control the rights to musical compositions.
Cox's lawyers have come up with a really interesting legal tactic. They say that Rightscorp only represents the composers in the songs they're suing over; they do not represent the performers. That means that when Rightscorp joined Bittorrent swarms to download the "evidence" they used to attack Cox, they were committing mass-scale copyright infringement against the recording artists in those songs.
Cox lawyers don't stop there! Anticipating that Rightscorp will say that the company's downloading was fair use, they argue that this means that Rightscorp acknowledges that in some cases, Bittorrent downloading is fair use. If so, they should have taken that into account when they started threatening Cox's subscribers.
The Cox motion is a thing of beauty, a wonderfully constructed argument that hoists the highest petard it's ever been my privilege to witness.
“Rightscorp either committed massive infringements of the sound recording copyrights or must have relied on the fair use doctrine. If the latter, that fact is an admission that activity over BitTorrent may constitute fair use, but there is no evidence that Rightscorp considered the possibility of fair use in generating millions of notices of claimed infringement,” Cox lawyers add.
Cox goes on to highlight that Rightscorp targets elderly and disabled consumers, instructing its employees to disregard protests from alleged infringers.
“When a consumer denies infringement, the phone script instructs the enforcer to state that the consumer must obtain a police report, and that the police may ‘take your device and hold it for ~5 days to investigate the matter’.”
Finally, Cox highlights that the copyright holders have failed to directly address the alleged damage downloaders are causing. Instead of sending takedown notices to torrent sites asking them to remove infringing content, Rightscorp relies on these torrents to conduct its business.
Today at Oculus VR’s second annual developer conference in Hollywood, Samsung senior vice president Peter Koo just announced the first consumer version of the Gear VR headset.
The new version will hit the market in November—in time for the holiday shopping season. The device boasts various improvements, including a better touchpad and a more comfortable design that weighs 22% less.
The goggles will also support all of Samsung’s latest flagship phones—including the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and the Note 5.
“Late last year, Oculus and Samsung joined forces to launch Gear VR innovator edition,” Koo said, explaining that the previous Innovator Edition of the goggles was "launched for enthusiasts and developers…[it] was not about the hardware; it was about you being able to push the boundaries of VR.”
The new model, however, was "designed to take it mainstream,” he said. "Virtual reality for everyone."
To make sure it gets into as many hands as possible, Samsung priced the device at $99, which is far less than the unsubsidized cost of the smartphone required to use it.
Google has built a new technology to power its voice search, which the company says will make it even faster and more accurate. The new technology uses Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and sequence discriminative training techniques.
There are lots of ways to use your phone to fill a room with sound, from using wireless speakers to throwing your phone in a bowl. But every once in a while we all find ourselves in a situation where none of those options are at our fingertips. A new company called AmpMe wants to solve this problem with an app of the same name. The app syncs streamed music across any number of mobile devices to create a "giant, distributed speaker that surrounds the users." And it's a pretty clever idea, even if the current execution is a little sloppy.
The app works simply enough. One person in a group gets to be the "host," and when she starts a listening session the app provides a four-digit code. Anyone who wants to add their phone or tablet to the...
Musicians, it’s time to stop hating streaming services, and here’s why. Troy Carter, one of the world’s most powerful artist managers (John Legend, Meghan Trainor, and previously Lady Gaga) just busted some myths with four reasons streaming is the future of music, not the end. Streaming Will Earn Artists A Lot With Enough Users – Royalty payouts from streaming might… Read More
Mobile phones use to be for calling. At least until the smartphone came around. As the demand for smartphones skyrocketed, manufacturers have raced to improve and offer new features into our devices. With that has brought the ability to do more and more on our phones, and in turn has killed the need for a lot of other products. Here are ten things our smartphones have contributed to either completely killing or taking sizable bites out of. Leave a comment below and let us know what your smarthphone has replaced in your life and what things future smartphones may help replace or kill.
Cameras
Pretty much all Smartphones come with a camera built in, and they continuously keep getting better and better. With many smartphones coming packed with high megapixel sensors, they have replaced the need for stand-alone pocket cameras and have even began to hurt the sales of high-end SLR equipment. The smartphones of today come with cameras more than adequate for most people nowadays.
GPS Devices
In 2000 the personal mobile GPS devices became more widespread and popular, and prices on them began to fall. Although the option of GPS units in vehicles has helped, the inclusion of GPS and services such as Google Maps and Apple Maps on our phones has made mobile GPS units a very niche product.
Books
While for many the act of reading from a physical book is sacred and therapeutic, e-book apps and e-readers such as the Kindle have become a more practical way to get your reading fix. The ability to store and carry multiple books in one device have helped tablets, phones and e-readers take a big bite out of the need for physical books and magazines.
Wallets
Mobile banking and services such as Apple Pay and Android Pay are fueling a revolution of people who no longer have a need for a physical wallet. With more and more merchants jumping on board, and the development of e-currencies such as Bitcoin that run on mobile phones, the wallet is slowly being replaced.
Remotes & Switches
More and more phones come with built-in IR blasters these days. With that comes the ability to control our TVs and other devices. With smart connected technology being built into more and more things, our phones have become a way to control lights such as the Philips Hue, air conditioners, garage doors and much more.
Video Games
While for true gamers, nothing can replace the joy of playing your favourite game on a big screen tv or computer monitor. The improvement in both CPU and GPU speeds on our smartphones has meant a better mobile game experience. Many video game studios have chosen to focus on mobile gaming and more fun and impressive games are coming to market. Gaming on your phone has become the new time killer and replaced console gaming for many.
Cable TV
With cord cutting become the new trend, many of us choose to watch and stream our favourite movies and tv shows on platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. The ease of doing this on our phone or tablet while laying in bed or sitting on the couch has replaced the need for a big screen tv and cable boxes. In-expensive devices such as the Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV have all made streaming to your TV easier and further killed cable tv subscriptions.
Music Players
In the 80's you weren't cool if you didn't have a Walkman. In the late 90s that turned into portable CD players, and in 2001 the iPod became all the rage. Most people now store or stream their music on their smartphones making the stand alone music players a niche gadget.
Watches / Clocks
Most of us now rely strictly on our phones to know what time it is. Rather than an alarm clock on our nightstand, many of us use our smartphones to wake us up. They tend to be the first thing we reach for in the morning to check the time. Smartphones offer an accurate time that gets pulled directly from the network they connect to, requiring no adjustments for daylight savings time. As of late we've seen the rise of smartwatches such as the Apple Watch and Android Wear based devices that bring smartphone functions to our wrists.
Landline Phones
The smartphone has essentially also killed the landline phone. With everyone having a smartphone in their pocket, payphones are now becoming relics in the wild. With texting and image sharing, it's now easier to relay messages without the need to call anyone. For many of us, the phone part of our smartphones has become the least important aspect. The new era of communicating using different platforms can all be done via smartphones.
Though they're not full virtual reality, 360-degree videos are at the vanguard of the VR revolution: They give a taste of what the technology can do, they're relatively easy to make, and can be viewed in Web browsers and on smartphones without the need for an expensive headset.
YouTube has a channel dedicated to these clips and now Facebook is joining the party (a move Mark Zuckerberg promised back in March at F8). From today, these 360-degree videos are rolling out into the News Feed.
The format is exactly what it sounds like: As a 360 movie plays, you can rotate your point-of-view to peer in any direction, whether that's by moving your head inside a Samsung Gear VR headset or clicking and dragging in a Web browser. On a smartphone, you swipe on screen or physically move the device, so holding it above your head shows the view above.
As VR aficionados will want to note, these videos differ from "full" virtual reality in a couple of key ways. There's no depth perception (you feel like you're in a video sphere rather than an actual world) and you can't control the action or the position of the camera. Still, it's a gentle introduction to the world of VR, and much more straightforward for both content creators and publishers.
Hence tools like the Sphericam 2. With a camera costing around a thousand dollars and a Facebook or YouTube account, anyone can now make and publish a 360-degree video, which isn't something you could say about full VR experiences.
The Facebook Angle
Facebook will be hoping this low barrier to entry will encourage users to get uploading 360 footage, though it's signed up some professionals to get the feature launched. Clips from the likes of Disney and Discovery are going to be uploaded today to show off the advantages of the technology.
And it's a versatile format too, one that works equally effectively whether you're watching a behind-the-scenes Star Wars documentary or a movie from your great-aunt's birthday party. The camera captures the action in all directions and viewers can turn wherever they like.
"We're focused on building experiences that help publishers and creators reach, grow, and engage their audiences in new and immersive ways," said Facebook's Nick Grudin in a blog post. "There's a whole world of publishers and storytellers who are at the cutting edge of innovating with this immersive and interactive medium. If you’re a publisher developing 360 videos, we hope you will share your creations with your global audience on Facebook."
As well as ensuring there's lots more content ready to go when the Oculus Rift headset debuts next year, it also gives Facebook parity with YouTube in the ongoing battle for dominance of the video market.
The feature will roll out over the next few days on the Web and on Android, and will appear in the "coming months" on iOS, Facebook says. It will give the public at large their first proper taste of VR video, as well as content creators the opportunity to show off their talents just before the full VR experiences become available to consumers.
Smartwatches are bulky - there's no getting around that. Even Apple, the very embodiment of tech's obsession with downsizing the z-axis of your products at all costs, can't make a thin smartwatch. Today, Pebble has decided that it can make a thin smartwatch, and that this watch can be round* (*with a massive, enormous bezel) and apparently that most of the company's claim to fame in smartwatches - battery life - really isn't super important after all.
The oddly named uBirds is manufacturing while Switzerland burns. Their product, called the Unique, is essentially a smart watch hidden inside your watch band. This way you can strap on your Panerai or RGM and rock out while your band buzzes, not your watch. Creating a “convertible” watch seems to be Switzerland’s Grail Quest. This solution, created by a company based in… Read More
Today, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai shared details on a new plan to bring more Indian residents online. He notes that there’s still over a billion of them in his native country that aren’t connected.
The key? India’s train system. And a plan to bring Wi-Fi to its 10 million rail passengers a day. And it’s free (to start). Pichai shared Google’s plans, while… Read More
Musicians, it’s time to stop hating streaming services, and here’s why. Troy Carter, one of the world’s most powerful artist managers (John Legend, Meghan Trainor, and previously Lady Gaga) just busted some myths with four reasons streaming is the future of music, not the end. Streaming Will Earn Artists A Lot With Enough Users – Royalty payouts from streaming might… Read More
