There's been little doubt that Whatsapp is one of the most-used cross-platform messenger apps out there, but the company has been rather coy about revealing specific user numbers. Back in April, the Whatsapp CEO did claim his service had a bigger userbase than Twitter's 200 million users and processed 18 billion messages per day (more than Facebook), but now the company's giving more concrete details. According to The Wall Street Journal, Whatsapp has a userbase of over 250 million active users every month, exceeding the 200 million users that Twitter cited on its seventh birthday. While there's no doubt that Whatsapp is one of the most dominant players in the smartphone messaging space, it's an increasingly crowded one — but there's no doubt that it's keeping up with major players like Facebook and Skype, which is a pretty notable achievement for an app that's only four years old.

"Reader is dead," says Mihai Parparita, one of the former Google Reader engineers. You still have 2-3 days to use Google Reader, but the best thing you can do is to export your data.

Google Takeout lets you export some of your Reader data, but not everything: your subscriptions, your notes, starred items, shared items, liked items, the list of followers and the people you were following, the items shared by the people you were following. Mihai Parparita wrote some Python scripts that download everything from your Google Reader accounts, including the entire content of the posts from your subscriptions. You need Python 2.7, some basic command-line skills and a lot of free storage: my backup has more than 5 GB for about 250 feeds (vs 125 MB for the uncompressed Takeout backup).


Here are some tips for running the script in Windows 7/8:

- install Python from here (Python 2.7.5 Windows Installer)
- download Mihai's zip file and extract the files
- open the folder in Windows Explorer and you should see a list of subfolders like "base", "bin", "feed_archive".


- Shift + right-click below the folders and select "open command-line window here".
- copy this code, paste it in the command-line window and press Enter (I assumed that Python's folder is c:\python27):

set PYTHONPATH=%cd%
c:\python27\python reader_archive\reader_archive.py --output=download

- a web page will open in your favorite browser and you'll need to click "Accept", copy the authorization code and paste it in the command-line window.
- wait until the script downloads all the files.

Mihai also started to write a script that lets you browse your archive. It's a work in progress, probably because the script for downloading your data is more important right now.

There's also a script for downloading a feed's archive. "Google Reader has (for the most part) a copy of all blog posts and other feed items published since its launch in late 2005 (assuming that at least one Reader user subscribed to the feed). This makes it an invaluable resource for sites that disappear, can serve as a backup mechanism and enables tools to be created." My post from 2007 provides another way to download the history of a feed. You can also upload your OPML file to this site, which preserves hitorical feed data.

"I don't fault Google for providing only partial data via Takeout. Exporting all 612,599 read items in my account (and a few hundred thousand more from subscriptions, recommendations, etc.) results in almost 4 GB of data. Even if I'm in the 99th percentile for Reader users (I've got the badge to prove it), providing hundreds of megabytes of data per user would not be feasible. I'm actually happy that Takeout support happened at all, since my understanding is that it was all during 20% time," says Mihai Parparita, who spent 5 years working on Google Reader.

If you're curious to know which Reader alternative gets a thumb up from Mihai, his answer is "a toss-up between NewsBlur and Digg Reader."

The Washington Post has revealed four new slides from its trove of top secret PRISM information, appearing to confirm earlier reporting about the US government surveillance program.

Notably, the new slides appear to confirm whistleblower Edward Snowden's claims that PRISM allows the NSA and FBI to perform real-time surveillance of email and instant messaging, though it's still not clear which specific internet service providers allow such surveillance. (As originally reported, PRISM providers include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple.) In notes accompanying the new slides, the Post claims that "depending on the provider, the NSA may receive live notifications when a target logs on or sends an email, text, or voice chat as it happens."

One slide, containing a screenshot of a PRISM web interface, appears to show the scope of the government's record keeping. The screenshot, which The Washington Post dates as of April 5th, shows 117,675 "records." The Post claims that these are "active surveillance targets," but neither the Post nor the content of the slide indicate whether each of these records pertain to unique individuals under active surveillance. The extent of the information held within each record is also unknown.

There's still a substantial gap of knowledge about how PRISM works

Two of the new slides detail the data collection process, from the initial input of an agency analyst, to data analysis under several previously-reported analysis tools such as Marina (internet data), Mainway (call records), Nucleon (voice data), and Pinwale (video data). As the Post reports, and as one slide indicates, the FBI checks stored communications against its own databases to verify that targeting selectors do not match US citizens — but no such check appears to be performed for live surveillance. Critics of PRISM and other US surveillance programs contend that the government's broad efforts capture "incidental" data belonging to innocent Americans.

There's still a substantial gap of knowledge about PRISM between the public and the US government, and the latest leak provided by The Washington Post doesn't address fundamental concerns, including the allegation that the NSA has "direct access" to the servers of companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (a claim internet companies have strenuously denied). It's also not clear why the Post decided to wait on releasing these particular slides since they only seem to confirm earlier reporting; the Post and The Guardian still possess a broader collection of PRISM slides, and potentially other documents, provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Nvidia Shield was supposed to launch this week, but Nvidia has announced that a third-party mechanical issue will be pushing that release back until sometime in July. The exact date is still yet to be determined.

"During our final QA process, we discovered a mechanical issue that relates to a 3rd party component," the Nvidia statement reads. "We want every Shield to be perfect, so we have elected to shift the launch date to July. We'll update you as soon as we have an exact date."

Last week, Nvidia announced it was knocking $50 off the Android-powered handheld device, bringing the Nvidia Shield's price tag down to $300. In May, we visited the Nvidia campus and got our hands on the Nvidia Shield, which sports a 5-inch 720p display, Tegra 4 chip inside and can stream games from your PC - granted you have a GTX 650 GPU or better in your rig.

Nvidia Shield pushed back to July due to mechanical issue originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gunpoint is the perfect game at the perfect time. At the same moment the industry is heavily promoting console innovation with aurally destructive stage demos, this indie game from reporter Tom Francis and a ragtag crew of volunteers offers a simplistic and quiet respite: an outstanding puzzle game with sharp writing, beautiful music and clever mechanics. As freelance spy-type Richard Conway, players work to investigate a murder - in which he is inadvertently involved - using handy spy skills like long distance leaping and scaling walls.

​Gunpoint oozes creativity, leveraging a simple primary mechanic that is paramount to both completing missions and taking out adversaries. Called "Crosslink," it allows players to view how electricity flows throughout buildings and rewire circuits to Conway's advantage. You can, for example, disconnect the link from a light switch and connect it to a door, making it easy to swing it into an unsuspecting guard's face as he walks by. Endgame puzzles require you to juggle a number of different Crosslink set-ups, triggering an object in one area to give Conway an opening to progress somewhere else. What makes the simple system work is that there are very few limitations - so long as you link the correct colored circuits.

Conway's goals change between missions. One may find him breaking into a building to extract information from secure computer terminals. Another sees him stealing a piece of top secret equipment. Ultimately the goal is an excuse, there only to offer a different way to use Conway's skills and provide a new challenge.

Continue reading Gunpoint review: Indie film noir espionage

Gunpoint review: Indie film noir espionage originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 26 Jun 2013 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news everyone. It looks like we can finally show some result of what we have been doing for the last couple of months, namely our mobile API. We have been running it on our test server for a week, gathered some initial feedback from several awesome mobile developers, and we think it’s now ready to be tested by the general public.

What does it mean to you? It means that there is now technical possibility to use The Old Reader with your favorite RSS app.

You can already try The Old Reader in Feeddler – free version already supports it, and the Pro version should get updated any time soon. Kudos to Che-Bin Liu for being extremely helpful in testing the API and getting Feeddler integrated so fast.

The documentation for the API is available in a separate github repo. It’s not the best piece of docs we’ve ever seen, but it seems to cover the basic use cases. You are welcome to improve it, just send us a pull request with your adjustments. Please note that even though you can use API both via http and https, we highly encourage you to use https for security reasons.

If you find any bugs or feel that something is not working as expected, please feel free to create a github issue or contact us at api@theoldreader.com.

And last, but not least, spread the word. Let the developer of your favorite RSS app know about The Old Reader API, and ask them to get integrated. We would really like to see more and more apps working with the site bringing native mobile experience to the users of all platforms.

(poster generated by The Keep Calm-O-Matic)

Minecraft is one of the most successful independently developed video games of all time, and it is now available for computers, Xbox, and some mobile devices. Perhaps what makes it so powerful is that it allows users to create entire worlds based on their own designs: Players can dig deep into virtual earth to discover caves and mine precious materials, they can build structures that stretch far into the sky, and they can explore a map that is virtually infinite.

Everything in Minecraft is based on 1-cubic-meter blocks that can be stacked according to a three-dimensional grid. Each block is wrapped in a low-res texture that suggests material properties such as stone, wood, gold, or even fire, though the fact that the game is independently produced means that there is much opportunity for modifying these textures and other aspects of the game—opportunities that have certainly been taken advantage of by the game’s hardcore fanbase.

King’s Landing from Game of Thrones by Westeroscraft

There are two main modes of gameplay: survival mode and creative mode. In survival mode, players must fend off hunger, falls, and monsters that lurk in the woods while mining, processing, and placing materials carefully, making it much more of a game with objectives. Creative mode is more of an open sandbox experience, allowing players infinite resources and making them invincible.

These examples of Minecraft architecture could have been made in either mode, though obviously creating these things in survival mode is much more difficult. It is readily apparent just how much this game allows players to experiment, despite the pixilation arising from the grid limitation. Some have even gone so far as to attempt to recreate the entire world of Game of Thrones in Minecraft, an effort which thus far 4,000 users in collaboration have not been able to complete (although their rendition of King’s Landing is awe-inspiring). Be sure to check out the full list at Architizer.

Neo-Charlotte, North Carolina, by Armchair Hacker

Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings by Cornbass

American suburbia by nobodysharp

Tonight we are ending the Release Candidate phase and pushing CM 10.1.0 to general release.

The files will be landing on our servers as they complete the build process. The list of devices will be in line with the devices that have received release candidates to-date. At this time, we do not plan on incorporating devices that did not receive a RC into this release. Also absent from this release are Tegra 2 powered devices and many of the Exynos based Samsung devices. We will provide a status report for these devices later this week.

Next on deck

With the 10.1.0 code finalized, we will return to our M-release cycle and work towards adding additional functionality and features; including the new Privacy Guard feature, which was merged into the nightlies today.

There are many new and exciting things planned for the remainder of the year, just wait and see what we will do next!

-The CyanogenMod Team

HTC CEO Peter Chou won't be leaving his post anytime soon. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Chou said that he would be sticking it out through the company's hard times, saying flatly, "I'm not going to find another job." The position is seemingly a change for Chou, whose job was rumored to be on the line because of a self-imposed goal. The CEO was said to have risked his position on the success of company's newest flagship, the HTC One, reportedly saying that he would resign if the device wasn't a success — but now Chou says that he never made the bold gamble, "There are a lot of rumors that say I would quit, but I never said that."

While the HTC One is undeniably one of the best Android phones on the market, it's faced a number of hurdles just getting there. The phone was delayed due to component shortages, and its delay resulted in the company's lowest quarterly profits ever. It's still too early to call the One either a success or a failure, but HTC itself is struggling regardless: WSJ notes that the company's stock has lost four-fifths of its value in just the past two years. That puts a tough road in front of HTC, and it looks like Chou could be leading the way.

Nintendo of America president and COO Reggie Fils-Aime's house in Animal Crossing: New Leaf is pretty swank: Nintendo museum, storage basement - it even has a bed with a giant disturbing face on it. While he never explicitly says, we're assuming this is an exact replica of Fils-Aime's actual house.

Tour Reggie Fils-Aime's house in Animal Crossing: New Leaf originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 22 Jun 2013 00:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Breaking news from hamburger stationary

I’m considering setting up some kind of newsletter service in my Animal Crossing: New Leaf town to deliver Tiny Cartridge articles, kind of like how our Twitter and Facebook auto-post stuff from the site. Not really, but that’s the dream.

@ErrorJustin sent this note to Mint, who Nookipedia tells me is a snooty, squirrel villager. I wonder what she thinks of the news. I wonder if anyone playing New Leaf cares, or if we’re all too busy having fun with our cute portable game to worry about whatever’s going on with next-generation home consoles.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Xbox One, upcoming games

In 2008 NASA decided to send one of the heights of modern art — The Beatles' 1969 track "Across the Universe" — into the cosmos. And for 2013, one of the pillars of internet folk art is preparing for takeoff: An animated GIF is about to be sent into space for the first time ever. The message will be beamed over a giant radio dish in California tomorrow as part of the inaugural transmission of Lone Signal, a project that's hoping to communicate with extraterrestrials. The GIF will be sent toward Gliese 526, a potentially habitable solar system 17.6 light years away. It should arrive there around 2031.

---

The GIF features a balding man scratching his ear and has been titled "Humans watching Digital Art." Lone Signal specifically invited the GIF's creator, conceptual artist Kim Asendorf, to contribute a message for the satellite's debut transmission. If you're disappointed with what may be aliens' first impression of Earth, you have reason both for concern and relief — for a nominal cost, Lone Signal will soon allow anyone to send their message of choice out toward the stars.

Using tactics that included luring diplomats into fake internet cafes, The Guardian reports that British intelligence spied on major world leaders during the 2009 G20 summit in London. The revelation is based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who fueled earlier leaks about the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US National Security Agency (NSA) through The Guardian and The Washington Post.

The G20 summit in London included President Obama as well as 20 other heads of state and governing bodies. During the summit, the GCHQ reportedly monitored the foreign politicians' computers and phone calls, and had direct permission to do so from high-level officials in then-PM Gordon Brown's administration.

---

GCHQ wanted an edge in negotiations

The intent of the alleged spying was to gain an edge in negotiations against other countries, including Turkey and South Africa, according to The Guardian. The GCHQ managed to tap into phones and computers by establishing internet cafes with built-in key logging and email intercepting software, as well as by hacking delegates' BlackBerrys to monitor messages and phone calls. The British intelligence agency was apparently able to read the attendees' emails even before the attendees themselves accessed them.

The key logging reportedly may also have provided the GCHQ with online login details — such as usernames and passwords — that were used by foreign leaders. The NSA, which shares information with the GCHQ, was allegedly gathering information during the summit as well, attempting to intercept and decrypt phone calls made by then-President Dmitry Medvedev. The GCHQ is said to be involved with the US PRISM program as well.

The operation was 'very successful'

By the time the G20 delegates' financial leaders met in London five months later for a separate meeting, the GCHQ had apparently improved the surveillance technology enough to create a live map of telephone activity, which it projected onto a large wall in one of its offices, reports The Guardian. The leaked documents note that the effort was "very successful" in allowing them to see delegates' activity. This program is said to have only run for six months, though it's unclear if a newer technology has replaced it. Britain will be hosting heads of state once again for the G8 summit tomorrow.

Link

Neymar laughs at your pressure! With all eyes on him in the Confederations Cup opening match between host nation Brazil and Japan, it took Neymar all of three minutes to score a fantastic goal with a blast from outside the box.

With that goal, 21-year-old Neymar not only excited the home fans, but also Barcelona, who recently paid €57 million for his services. Just another day in the life of the most hyped young footballer on the planet.

Here's David Luiz really enjoying the celebration...

Video via 101gg

Related coverage on Yahoo! Sports:
• Slideshow: Confederations Cup from A to Z
• FIFA president Sepp Blatter booed at Confederations Cup opening ceremony
• Lionel Messi passes Maradona on Argentina's all-time scoring list

A 1-0 loss at home to San Lorenzo sealed Independiente's relegation to the second division for the first time in the club's history. With 16 Primera Division titles (the most recent coming in 2002) and a record seven Copa Libertadores trophies, the demotion is especially painful for Independiente, even if it was three years in the making.

When the final whistle sounded, fans at the Estadio Libertadores de America were already singing through tears, showing their support to the equally devastated players as they walked off the pitch. Showing that true love doesn't shut up and go home when things go wrong.

Smash Bros. got introduced for the Wii U and for the 3DS on Tuesday, during Nintendo's E3 direct and we had the chance to see the Villager from Animal Crossing, the Wii Fit Trainer and Mega Man among others. People liked them a lot and they can't get away without some Internet attention.

Especially the Villager got a lot of it, thanks to his emotionless face, which in a brawler game converts him immediaely into a complete sociopath look-alike. He'll get his mail first, then introduce the true face of destruction to Mario & Co.

---

Kirby will also be a playable character, but how would he look like after eating up these new characters?

In the broadcasted trailer we had Mega Man as a surprise, special new challenger. But that doesn't mean there won't be others.

---

sources: doodlecrackstar, radcroc, mistoroboto, pyrosammi, bull-heck, phantomdoodler, viridi-ogames, ironicjetpack, datmcguire, batatonia

To contact the author of this post, write to gergovas@kotaku.com

تقديم: يوسف النفجان | عبدالله الثاني | يزيد الغريبي

نستضيف في هذه الحلقة مؤسس موقع عالم آبل يزيد الغريبي للحديث بشكل مفصل عن مؤتمر آبل في WWDC 2013، والكشف عن تحديث نظام ماك أو إس “مافريكس”، وأجهزة ماك برو وماكبوك إير، وبالطبع نظام iOS 7 الجديد كلياً في توجهه التصميمي وميزاته. بعد ذلك نتحدث قليلا عن بلايستيشن 4 وضربة سوني القوية للإكسبوكس الجديد من مايكروسوفت، وحجب فايبر في السعودية، وتفعيل معلومات المرور لمدينة الرياض في خرائط جوجل. أيضا نجيب على أسئلتكم التي وصلتنا، والمزيد!

• اضغط هنا لمتابعتنا ومراجعتنا على آيتونز أو اضغط هنا لمتابعتنا عن طريق أي برنامج يدعم خلاصات الـRSS

 

• 0:00:23 – مؤتمر آبل

• 1:24:22 – الأخبار

• 1:46:50 – الأخبار المحلية

• 2:00:00 – أسئلة المستمعين

 

• طريقة إهداء أو بيع الألعاب المستعملة في البلايستيشن 4

• StrongVPN

• TunnelBear

New consoles means comics about consoles that were new 17 years ago

If you’re an actor on set with hundreds of production staff scattering around constantly being yelled direction and with the added the pressure of deadlines and expectations of nailing that first take, it’s no wonder it can get a little overwhelming and stressful at times. That’s why even some of the biggest names break character and blow off some steam. Sometimes you make so many mistakes or things go do badly wrong that you just have to laugh at the absudiry of the situation.Even Hollywood with all its millions needs a bit of respite from it all.

In these rarely seen photos take on the set of some of the most popular films over the past few decades, thats exactly what happens.

No matter how focused you are, how serious the scene – occasionally you can’t help but get a case of the giggles.

KILL BILL

STAR WARS

Game Of Thrones

Pulp Fiction

Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire

James Bond: Skyfall

Les Miserables

The Godfather

Leon: The Professional

The Royal Tenenbaums

Fight Club

The Dark Knight Rises

Via Redditor Join_You_In_The_Sun

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