Aerial photographer Andy Yeung just released Walled City, a look at how Hong Kong's infamous dense and vertical city within a city resonates in buildings that still stand today.
(more…)
The peace and quiet and the camera operator's calm framing of the shot really make it. In a few days this will have gone viral, covered in jaunty music, giant text, and an inane voiceover.
The direction of light is so important in photography. Backlighting is one that can be tricky to handle exposure wise, but make sure a stunning image if you can nail it. Let’s have a look at these 18 images that use backlight effectively.
Spotify made a few moves this week that could put them in a better position to join the stock market. On Thursday, it was revealed that the company added four people to its board of directors. The music streaming startup has brought on former Disney COO Tom Staggs; Padmasree Warrior, a Cisco vet who runs an electric car business; Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s former head… Read More
Google has just added a new Personal tab for results to search. Now if you toss in a term that might not otherwise trigger the personalized search results feature, you can manually move over to the Personal tab and make sure that compatible results appear. Results there can be easily limited to the content of your Google account across the company's various services. Searching for calendar appointments or emails just got a little bit easier.
I just want to send someone a gift card...and on Google Play, that just got a lot harder.
We've talked about how Google was missing the ability to gift content before, and there's a little good news on that front: you can now gift books through Google Play. Now there's a bit of bad news, too: you can't buy Google Play gift cards on the Google Play app anymore. If you want to add credit to your Google Play balance, you'll need to go hunt one down at a brick and mortar store or answer some Google Opinion Rewards.
The ability to buy gift cards on Google Play's app and website has vanished recently, followed shortly by an update of Google Play Support to show that you can't buy the gift cards digitally anymore, you have to buy a physical card, and that you can gift Google Play Books and Google Play Music All Access. We're not sure what prompted the change, but for parents who top off their kids' Google Play accounts through gift cards or those who found Google Play credit to be an easy last-minute gift, you're going to want to head to a retailer that stocks them and grab a few.
So now, you now have to use three different methods to gift three different kinds of Google Play content:
To give a Google Play Book, you have to find the book on the Google Play site or app and tap Gift.
To give a Google Play Music All Access subscription, you have to open the Google Play Music app, open Settings and tap Send gift.
And here is what we now cannot gift through Google Play:
Movies and TV shows
Music albums and individual songs
Magazine and newspaper subscriptions
Apps and games
We can only hope that gifting books is the test balloon before being rolled out to the rest of the content in the Google Play Store, but that's anyone's guess, at this rate. What isn't a guess is how much of a pain removing digital gift cards is going to be.
In 2012, I wrote about a movie called Compliance, a psychological thriller based on a true event in which a sociopath pretending to be a cop called a fast food joint and convinced the manager to do horrific things to a young employee.
A very similar incident happened this month in Devon, England. An unknown man called a store manager and, pretending to be from corporate headquarters, told the manager to close the shop for a special competition. The manager obeyed and asked the only two shoppers in the store at the time to come to the back room and speak to the caller. The shoppers -- a mother (Pamela, 55) and her daughter (Naomi, 24) -- were told they could win £3,000 at a store by performing a series of stunts.
From Devon Live:
They were then taken by the manager into the store room at the back of the shop, where they spoke to the caller.
"He was asking us who were and where we worked and stuff like that, but I obviously didn't want to disclose where I worked so I just said I worked in a café."
The prank caller, who managed to dupe both the staff and Naomi and her mother, then made them carry out a serious of "humiliating and embarrassing" tasks around the store.
The manager and another member of staff were told to tie string around Naomi and Pamela's ears, throw water over them, draw on their faces with pens and make them crawl around the store on their hands and knees.
The mother and daughter were also ridden like horses around the store and told to lick the staff's feet.
Throughout the hoax Naomi and her mother were referred to by the two female members of staff as "ugly and "beast" and in return had to refer to the manager as "beautiful lady."
Eventually the shoppers realized that there was no competition and went to the police. The store, Poundworld, offered them a £200 gift card.
The caller struck again at another store in Bitterne, Southampton, with similar results.
Sean Parker is no stranger when it comes to online piracy.
The American entrepreneur, who co-founded the file-sharing application Napster, brought copyright infringement to the masses at the turn of the last century.
Fast forward two decades, during which he also served as Facebook’s first president, Parker is back with another controversial idea.
With his latest project, known as the Screening Room, he wants to pipe the latest blockbusters into homes on the day they’re released. For $50 per movie, people should be able to watch new films on their own screens, instead of going to a movie theater.
The project has been praised by some and criticized by others. Several movie industry insiders are skeptical because they believe movies should be seen on the big screen. Others fear that Screening Room will provide quick, quality content for pirate sites.
Given the Napster connection, Parker and his colleagues are particularly aware of these piracy fears. This is likely one of the reasons why they plan to ship their system with advanced anti-piracy technology.
Over the past several weeks, Screening Room Media, Inc. has submitted no less than eight patent applications related to its plans, all with some sort of anti-piracy angle.
For example, a patent titled “Presenting Sonic Signals to Prevent Digital Content Misuse” describes a technology where acoustic signals are regularly sent to mobile devices, to confirm that the user is near the set-top box and is authorized to play the content.
Similarly, the “Monitoring Nearby Mobile Computing Devices to Prevent Digital Content Misuse” patent, describes a system that detects the number of mobile devices near the client-side device, to make sure that too many people aren’t tuning in.
Screening Room patents
The patents are rather technical and can be applied to a wide variety of systems. It’s clear, however, that the setup Screening Room has in mind will have advanced anti-piracy capabilities.
The general technology outlined in the patents also includes forensic watermarking and a “P2P polluter.” The watermarking technology can be used to detect when pirated content spreads outside of the protected network onto the public Internet.
“At this point, the member’s movie accessing system will be shut off and quarantined. If the abuse or illicit activity is confirmed, the member and the household will be banned from the content distribution network,” the patent reads.
P2P polluter, and more
The P2P polluter will then begin to flood file-sharing networks with corrupted content if a movie leaks to the public.
“Therefore, immediately ‘diluting’ the infringement to a rate that would be extraordinarily frustrating, if not impossible, for further piracy of that copy to take place.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Screening Room’s system also comes with a wide range of other anti-piracy scans built in. Among other things, it regularly scans the Wi-Fi network to see which devices are connected, and Bluetooth is used to check what other devices are near.
All in all, it’s clear that Parker and co. are trying to do whatever they can to prevent content from leaking online.
Whether that’s good enough to convince the movie studios to offer their content alongside a simultaneous theatrical release has yet to be seen. But, with prominent shareholders such as J.J. Abrams, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg, there is plenty support on board already.
Photographer Alessandro Puccinelli is mesmerized by powerful waves. His photo series Intersections captures the fleeting moment when the ocean and the clouds appear to become one. (more…)
Since the early 2000s, copyright trolls have been attempting to squeeze cash from pirating Internet users and fifteen years later the practice is still going strong.
While there’s little doubt that trolls catch some genuine infringers in their nets, the claim that actions are all about protecting copyrights is a shallow one. The aim is to turn piracy into profit and history has shown us that the bigger the operation, the more likely it is they’ll cut corners to cut costs.
The notorious Guardaley trolling operation is a prime example. After snaring the IP addresses of hundreds of thousands of Internet users, the company extracts cash settlements in the United States, Europe and beyond. It’s a project of industrial scale based on intimidation of alleged infringers. But, when those people fight back, the scary trolls suddenly become less so.
The latest case of Guardaley running for the hills comes courtesy of SJD from troll-watching site FightCopyrightTrolls, who reports on an attempt by Guardaley partner Criminal Productions to extract settlement from Zach Bethke, an alleged downloader of the Ryan Reynolds movie, Criminal.
On May 12, Bethke’s lawyer, J. Christopher Lynch, informed Criminal Productions’ lawyer David A. Lowe that Bethke is entirely innocent.
“Neither Mr. Bethke nor his girlfriend copied your client’s movie and they do not know who, if anyone, may have done so,” Lynch wrote.
“Mr. Bethke does not use BitTorrent. Prior to this lawsuit, Mr. Bethke had never heard of your client’s movie and he has no interest in it. If he did have any interest in it, he could have rented it for no marginal cost using his Netflix or Amazon Prime accounts.”
Lynch went on to request that Criminal Productions drop the case. Failing that, he said, things would probably get more complicated. As reported last year, Lynch and Lowe have been regularly locking horns over these cases, with Lynch largely coming out on top.
Part of Lynch’s strategy has been to shine light on Guardaley’s often shadowy operations. He previously noted that its investigators were not properly licensed to operate in the U.S. and the company had been found to put forward a fictitious witness, among other things.
In the past, these efforts to bring Guardaley out into the open have resulted in its clients’, which include several film companies, dropping cases. Lynch, it appears, wants that to happen again in Bethke’s case, noting in his letter that it’s “long past due for a judge to question the qualifications” of the company’s so-called technical experts.
In doing so he calls Guardaley’s evidence into account once more, noting inconsistencies in the way alleged infringements were supposedly “observed” by “foreign investigator[s], with a direct financial interest in the matter.”
One of Lynch’s findings is that the “observations” of two piracy investigators overlap each others’ monitoring periods in separate cases, while reportedly monitoring the same torrent hash.
“Both declarations cover the same ‘hash number’ of the movie, i.e. the same soak. This overlap seems impossible if we stick with the fictions of the Complaint and Motion for Expedited Discovery that the declarant ‘observed’ the defendant ‘infringing’,” Lynch notes.
While these are interesting points, the quality of evidence presented by Guardaley and Criminal Productions is really called into question following another revelation. Daniel Macek, an ‘observing’ investigator used in numerous Guardaley cases, apparently has a unique talent.
As seen from the image below, the alleged infringements relating to Mr. Bethke’s case were carried out between June 25 and 28, 2016.
However, the declaration (pdf) filed with the Court on witness Macek’s behalf was signed and dated either June 14 or 16, more than a week before the infringements allegedly took place.
Time-traveler? Lynch thinks not.
“How can a witness sign a declaration that he observed something BEFORE it happened?” he writes.
“Criminal Productions submitted four such Declarations of Mr. Macek that were executed BEFORE the dates of the accompanying typed up list of observations that Mr. Macek swore that he made.
“Unless Daniel Macek is also Marty McFly, it is impossible to execute a declaration claiming to observe something that has yet to happen.”
So what could explain this strange phenomenon? Lynch believes he’s got to the bottom of that one too.
After comparing all four Macek declarations, he found that aside from the case numbers, the dates and signatures were identical. Instead of taking the issue of presenting evidence before the Court seriously, he believes Criminal Productions and partner Guardaley have been taking short cuts.
“From our review, it appears these metaphysical Macek declarations are not just temporally improper, they are also photocopies, including the signatures not separately executed,” he notes.
“We are astonished by your client’s foreign representatives’ apparent lack of respect for our federal judicial system. Use of duplicate signatures from a witness testifying to events that have yet to happen is on the same level of horror as the use of a fictitious witness and ‘his’ initials as a convenience to obtain subpoenas.”
Not entirely unexpectedly, five days later the case against Bethke and other defendants was voluntarily dismissed (pdf), indicating once again that like vampires, trolls do not like the light. Other lawyers defending similar cases globally should take note.
You'll soon no longer be able to buy a OnePlus 3T, but that's not a bad thing.
OnePlus is so, so ready to launch the OnePlus 5. The company has announced that the OnePlus 3T, its latest flagship, has reached the end of its production life, and will only be sold until current stock runs out.
A lot has happened since we launched the OnePlus 3T back in November of last year. We were thrilled by the response our device received both in the media, and by our users around the world. It's been far and away our most successful device yet, and we're incredibly proud of what we've accomplished together. Rest assured that we'll continue to bring more software updates and support to the OnePlus 3 and 3T.
This is the last call to buy the OnePlus 3T before stock runs out. Only a few devices are left in our warehouse, so purchase yours before time runs out at onepl.us/3T
This doesn't mean the end of software or security updates for the OnePlus 3 and 3T, just that, being a small company, OnePlus wants to focus its entire manufacturing line on the OnePlus 5, which is coming in June.
There are nearly 1.5 million applications currently on Google Play and with so many choices, finding new worthwhile apps can be a hassle. As we have the last several months now, today we’ll be showing you a few more Android apps that you should definitely give a shot, as well as some new fun games…
Acer's lineup of Android products mostly consists of low-end hardware with few (if any) unique features. At Computex in Taiwan, the company has announced two more 10-inch tablets. One of them has a quantum dot display, which appears to be a first for any tablet (as far as I can tell), and the other has a focus on productivity.
The Iconia Tab 10
The more interesting of the two is the Iconia Tab 10, with a model number of A3-A40.
Google Photos does a lot of smart things with your photos and hides plenty of cool and cute easter eggs. One of these just came to our attention — it may be new or it may have been there for months/years. Either way, we hadn't seen it before today so we thought we'd share it with you.
If you take a lot of pics of cats, which you probably do if you have cats and you love keeping the meowmories of every ridiculous thing they do, then Google Photos will make a video out of them.
Sony’s mammoth 13-inch Digital Paper tablet, essentially a huge Kindle you can write on, is still a pretty rare sight, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it. So I’m glad the company is doubling down on this unique device type and making some significant improvements with a new model. Read More
While a number of exciting features are in store for Google Photos in the coming months, the service is currently rolling out a simple, but very useful addition. With Archive, you can remove images from the main Photos tab without deleting them from your library.
The online giant is calling it the "all new Fire 7," which is perhaps more a marketing thing than actual hard truth when it comes to the tablet in question. It is new, and it is improved, but marketing hype is still marketing hype.
So, let's actually break down what is new and whether this latest budget tablet is worth your time.
There are subtle differences in the hardware on the all new Fire 7, but ones that will make for a solid improvement in user experience. The first of these is that it now supports the microSDXC standard which means you can now expand your internal storage by up to 256GB based on currently available cards.
The next important improvement is the inclusion of dual-band Wi-Fi, which means you're now able to use the Fire 7 on the 5GHz band. Traditionally these give you better speeds over your local network, and it's a notable upgrade over the single-band available in the old model.
Amazon has also an improved 7-inch IPS display in the new Fire 7, though just how good that is will have to wait until we actually see one.
Then there's a little thing called Alexa. Amazon's AI platform continues to grow, and following its inclusion on the most recent Fire TV products, Alexa is now on the basic Fire tablet, too. Holding the home button launches Alexa and from there you can ask questions and control your connected home devices just as you can with an Echo.
Is it worth getting one?
Absolutely. We've long recommended the Fire 7 as a cheap tablet that's actually worth buying and that hasn't changed with the new one. The improvements that have been made strengthen an already great product for $50.
Alexa is probably only going to excite you if you're already getting into that ecosystem, but if you are, it's yet another piece of tech you can use to turn on your lights and much more besides.
If you already have a Fire 7, it's not necessarily worth ditching it just to grab the latest one. If it's working just fine still, keep hold of it for now. Then again, $50 is almost an impulse buy, which is part of what makes the Fire 7 so good in the first place.
The famed Yosemite Firefall (previously) is a rare phenomenon when the setting sun hits Horsetail Fall with its dying light. Rogelio Bernal Andreo just took it to next level, capturing the even more rare moonlight firefall. (more…)
The latest stunning video from artistic collaborators in the dark sky movement is Kaibab Elegy by Harun Mehmedinovic, shot at the Grand Canyon. At about a minute in, there's a rare and hypnotic full cloud inversion worth the wait. (more…)
For four years, photographer Louis-Marie Preau would lie motionless underwater for hours at a time to get this perfect shot of a Eurasian beaver carrying a branch back to its lodge. (more…)
Popcorn. Snuggles. Sniffles. Families share a lot of stuff—and now we’re making it even easier to share and stay connected with each other by giving you more to do with your family group on Google. You can already share music and other entertainment with the Google Play Music family plan and Google Play Family Library. Now whether it's a new TV show on your DVR, the soccer practice schedule, this week’s to-do list, or family photos from over the weekend, here’s a look at how families can do more with YouTube TV, Google Calendar, Keep and Photos.
YouTube TV: Up to six household members get their own cloud DVR that never runs out of storage space, all for $35 a month. Stream live TV from ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and popular cable networks. Learn more.
Google Calendar: A shared family calendar makes it easy for your whole family to keep track of group activities like picnics, movie nights and reunions—all in one place. Learn more.
Google Keep: Capture and share ideas with features like reminders, shared lists, and notes in Keep that help your whole family stay in the loop. Learn more.
Google Photos: Send photos and videos to your family group in a few taps, whether you're on a weekend adventure or spending the afternoon at home. Learn more.
YouTube TV is available today in select markets. Family offerings for Google Calendar, Google Keep, and Google Photos will begin rolling out today.* You can get started by creating a family group with up to six members of your household. Now your family can share some of your favorite Google products, together.
*Family features for Google Calendar, Google Keep and Google Photos are available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Apps sometimes can misbehave. If it happens to you, here's something to try.
Update May 2017: This post has been updated to be in line with newer versions of Android.
Every Android smartphone has an application manager that you can get to through the settings menu. It's usually in the top level somewhere, though it can vary a little by phone. But once you get to it, you're at the heart of the matter. This is where you can see every application that's installed on your phone or tablet. And it's a handy place to clean things up a bit should they go wonky. Here's what's up:
Clearing the app cache
As you use applications, they start storing files for reference later. These files are stored in an app "cache." For instance: When you're using the Android Central app, it'll save images and other pieces of the stories you've read so that they don't have to be downloaded each and every single time the app needs them. This saves you time and data.
But maybe you want to clear an app's cached data, either to regain some used space or to try to fix a misbehaving app. This is where you can do it. Just tap into the app, and then tap the "Clear cache" button.
The next time you use the app it will download everything it needs from the internet like it did the first time you used it. Clearing cached data does not clear other data like logins or saved games.
This often fixes things, especially when an app pulls its content from a website that always changing and adding more content. If this doesn't work, move to the next step.
Clear app data — or resetting an app
Clearing app data is a little more drastic. You're wiping the cache, but also clearing any and all settings that go along with that app. You're basically starting that app over, from scratch, and it'll behave as it did the first time you installed it. This is generally a last resort type of thing. If you clear app data on, say, the Facebook app, you'll need to log back in. If you clear data on a game you've been playing, you'll be back at the beginning, as if you'd never played it. (And let's hope that game is properly saving your place to the cloud.)
Next, open the app and sign in or do anything else you need to get started using it. With no "old" data in place — either stored settings or cached — you're essentially running the app for the first time again. See if your problem is resolved and if so you're golden.
One nice thing to do if this fixes any weirdness with an app is let the developer know. It's mighty hard to keep track of versions and data conversion and everything else about making and publishing a great app and they'll appreciate the heads up if you found a bug that affects everyone.
When to clear cache or data ...
So when should you clear an app's cache manually? Chances are you'll never need to. But should an app start to "feel" sluggish or otherwise start misbehaving, this is where I'd start. Clear the cache.
And should an app really go haywire — or if you just want to start it from scratch — you can go all out and clear its data and start over from the beginning. Just tap the "clear data" button. You'll get a warning asking if that's really what you want to do. Confirm that, and you've reset the app to scratch.
If you travel a lot, especially internationally, a new worry being added to the pile is the threat of being forced to unlock your phone for a customs agent. 1Password has a handy solution for this in the form of Travel Mode, which temporarily deauthorizes a device to access your passwords and accounts. Read More
Android Pay is a solid service, but if there’s one thing that’s terrible about it, it’s the lack of supported banks. Google has done a lot to expand the reach of the service to more banks and credit unions, but a lot of users still lack the option. Now we’re getting a huge shortcut for that thanks to PayPal support.
Spotify made a few moves this week that could put them in a better position to join the stock market. On Thursday, it was revealed that the company added four people to its board of directors. The music streaming startup has brought on former Disney COO Tom Staggs; Padmasree Warrior, a Cisco vet who runs an electric car business; Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s former head… Read More
Sean Parker is no stranger when it comes to online piracy. 
Since the early 2000s, copyright trolls have been attempting to squeeze cash from pirating Internet users and fifteen years later the practice is still going strong.
Sony’s mammoth 13-inch Digital Paper tablet, essentially a huge Kindle you can write on, is still a pretty rare sight, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it. So I’m glad the company is doubling down on this unique device type and making some significant improvements with a new model. Read More
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.
If you travel a lot, especially internationally, a new worry being added to the pile is the threat of being forced to unlock your phone for a customs agent. 1Password has a handy solution for this in the form of Travel Mode, which temporarily deauthorizes a device to access your passwords and accounts. Read More
