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Luhu is a kitty whose naturally droopy eyes make her look like a sad cat from a 1960s Gig (Girard Goodenow) painting. Read the rest

The standalone Photos app was released to the public during last month's Google I/O conference, finally completing the separation with Google+ as rumors (and facts) had long suggested. While the new Photos app was widely accepted as an improvement in many ways, it also lacked many of the enhanced editing features that had made the old version so useful. Unfortunately, installing the standalone Photos app effectively hid access to the version built into Google+.

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Google+ v5.8 Declares Its Built-In Photos App Is Going Away, Directs Users To The New Photos App was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 It’s been a busy 24 hours for Netflix stock. Yesterday the company announced that its board has approved a 7-for-1 stock split. This announcement immediately sent shares soaring more than 3 percent in after-hours trading, bringing the price over $700 for the first time. Read More

Medium is your one-stop shop for blog posts about... things. Sometimes those are things you want to read about, and sometimes not, but it's a popular site for a wide variety of content. The Android app has been in beta for a few weeks, but today it's ready for public consumption.

The app looks nice enough. It has a card layout and parts of it are somewhat material. It has cool animations and uses pull-to-refresh, but the status bar isn't colored (if that's something you care about).

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The Official Medium App Is Out Of Beta And Live In The Play Store For All was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Spotify wants to own big data about bands. Today it acquired analytics firm Seed Scientific to forge a new Advanced Analytics unit tasked with understanding and improving how artists, listeners, and brands interact with its streaming music service. Seed Scientific formerly served clients including Audi, Unilever, the United Nations, and importantly, Apple’s Beats Music. But with the… Read More

If you have sensitive skin, it’s tempting to put your trust in hypoallergenic jewelry or lotions. But the term may not mean what you think: there’s no legal definition of “hypoallergenic,” so it’s entirely possible those products contain something you’re allergic to.

According to the FDA, the term “means whatever a particular company wants it to mean.” No testing is required, for example, and there’s no list of common allergens that has to be left out. Hypoallergenic pets may produce less dander, but it’s still possible to be allergic to them.

You’re better off checking ingredients (if you know what you’re allergic to, and if you’re looking at a product with a label) and trusting your own experiences. Read more at the link below for more allergy mythbusting.

Making Sense of Allergies | Sense About Science

Photo by ParentingPatch.

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Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker all about health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here.

Superhero movies are nothing new (Superman, Batman, Spiderman...) but they began to snowball in 2000, after the success of X-Men.

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There's much YouTube evidence of wild animals swimming in our man-made swimming pools, as more of our homes encroach on the land they once roamed. (more…)

 Online culture has been obsessed with cats since the Japanese text board 2channel first posted Giko Neko in 1998. Cat cafes have capitalized on this obsession and brought us a cache of cats in real-life locations all over the world. What started as a Japanese phenom has already spawned a couple of cat-themed cafes in Silicon Valley – one in Oakland and another in San Jose. Now San… Read More

 Dropbox said today that it now has more than 400 million registered users — a jump from the last public figure about its user base in May last year. Previously, the company had said it had 300 million users. The company didn’t say how many of them are monthly active users, but it still shows that Dropbox’s registered user base at the very least continues to grow. Read More

A vitamin found in meats and dairy products may be linked to acne, a study published today in Science Translational Medicine suggests. Vitamin B12 alters how the genes of facial bacteria behave — a change that in turn promotes inflammation, which has been linked to pimples in the past. The finding could eventually help create new drugs that can keep acne away. But it’s still very early, so the researchers warn against making any drastic changes to your diet or habits for now.

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Microsoft decided a while back to stop jealously guarding its popular productivity software and create proper apps for Android and iOS. The Office apps first came to Android for tablets only, but a phone preview started a few weeks ago. Now phone support is live for everyone, so go grab your free Word, PowerPoint, and Excel apps.

These are (thankfully) not new listings in the Play Store—the tablet and phone versions of each app are bundled together.

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Microsoft Office Apps Now Officially Available On Android Phones was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Much to Taylor Swift’s chagrin, music streaming subscriptions are getting cheaper and cheaper these days. Now that Google has joined the ranks of the free streaming services, we decided to take a look and see which ones offer the best features. Here are the key differences, and which service is best for which type of user.

We’ve already talked a lot about the best streaming music subscriptions over the years, and there are a lot of them. However, we want to look at the free ones. The services that allow you to jump right into your music without paying a dime (sorry Taylor). This list is by no means comprehensive, but here are how some of the best free music services stack up to each other.

Spotify: For Picky Desktop Users Who Don’t Mind a Few Ads

Key features:

• Listen to ad-supported music on desktop, web, and tablets
• Phone streaming in shuffle mode

Major downsides:

• No control over play order on phones
• No offline listening
• No high quality audio

Spotify has been the gold standard for music subscriptions for a long time, but its free tier deserves a bit of love, too. Without paying a dime, you can stream music of your choosing from the web or desktop player or even to your tablets. You’ll occasionally get some unskippable ads, but otherwise you’re in control.

When it comes to mobile, it’s a slightly different story. If you’re a free user, you can only listen to your playlists in shuffle mode with a limited number of skips. You also can’t listen to music in offline mode, so if you have an unreliable internet connection on your phone, Spotify might not be for your. Even still, without bringing your own collection, Spotify offers more features for free than any other service.

Google Play: For Music Collectors With Bonus Ad-Supported Radio

Key features:

• Upload your own music
• Buy individual albums and songs to add to your library
• Download your own music for offline playback
• Ad-supported radio stations

Major downsides:

• No music library outside of radio stations
• Mobile ads are atrocious

Google just recently announced a new free tier to its subscription service that allows users to listen to ad-supported radio stations. However, Google has a few other tricks up its sleeve: Play Music has a music locker that allows you to upload up to 50,000 of your own songs. Whether or not you pay for a subscription, you can listen to these songs in any order, on any device, and even download them for offline playback on mobile.

The free tier also lets you listen to Google’s curated radio stations, which are an extension of the Songza service the company acquired last year. Subscribers have been able to listen to these radio stations for a while, but now free users can join the party. Provided they’re willing to endure some ads, of course. As Android Police reports, these are some pretty relentless ads, too. They include banner ads, pop-overs, and even the occasional full-screen video ads. Fortunately, you should only see the ads when you’re using the radio service (if you’re listening to your own music, you won’t see any ads), but when you venture out to something you didn’t pay for or upload yourself, it can get messy. If you want to bring your own MP3s, Play Music is the best in town, but if you all you want is the free stuff, there are probably better options out there.

Pandora: Set It and Forget It Ad-Supported Radio

Key features:

• Ad-supported radio stations
• That’s pretty much it

Major downsides:

• No music library outside radio
• Timeouts stop playing after a while
• Limited skips

When Pandora first started, putting radio on the internet was a revolutionary idea. Today, it’s still a staple of idle background music. While the company hasn’t moved much beyond those basics, it’s also really good at them. If you want to click one button and get a soundtrack for your whole day, Pandora is hard to beat. Its recommendation are top notch and you can train its recommendations with your likes and skips over time.

Pandora doesn’t allow you to save albums, create playlists, or build your own collection. In fact, you can’t choose what you want to listen to much beyond the first song you choose. However, that’s not always necessary. Pandora is designed to replace listening to the actual radio, not to replace your home library. If that’s all you need, Pandora is going to be the easiest service for you.

Rdio: Web-Based Music Collections With a Clever Interface

Key features:

• Ad-supported radio stations on mobile
• Free web streaming of any song
• Use your phone or tablet as a remote for your desktop

Major downsides:

• Radio-only streaming on mobile

Rdio continues to be a bit of a black sheep of the music streaming industry. While it only made an honorable mention in our Hive Five, the free tier of Rdio is still pretty competitive. You can build your personal collection with the web-based player and listen to whatever music you want. Like every other service, this comes at the cost of ads. You can also stream limited radio stations on mobile, Pandora-style, with a limited number of skips.

So far, Rdio doesn’t actually do much that Spotify doesn’t, but its apps are interesting enough to warrant special mention. If you’re listening to music on the web with Rdio, you can use the mobile apps as a remote control for your music. The Rdio apps are also a bit cleaner than Spotify, though you also forego all of Spotify’s apps and plugins. Ultimately, this will probably come down to personal preference, but if you’ve ever been frustrated with Spotify’s apps, Rdio is worth a look.

Vivian Gabb, 59, of London, was in the middle of buying a house and somehow a criminal learned of the details, impersonated her solicitor, and emailed her with instructions to wire the money to the "bank." After she lost the money she went back and looked at the email and noticed that the email address the scammer used was missing an "s" in "partners." She lost £50,000, her life savings.

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Apple may have named the next version of Mac OS X after El Capitan, but Google has tackled the 3,000-foot granite monolith in person. The search giant has added Yosemite Valley's El Capitan to its list of Street View conquests, partnering with legendary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold, and Tommy Caldwell to capture mapping data thousands of feet up in the air. The variety of images produced by the project is phenomenal, and includes 360-degree panoramas of climbers midway up the wall and taking a rest at night, as well as a Street View route to click through of the climb up the Nose of El Capitan.

Alex Honnold takes on El Capitan's Texas Flake. (Google)

"Climbing is all about flirting with the impossible and pushing the...

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There are a few big changes to the Google Play Music app in v6.0, but there are changes coming to your wearable too. There's a new Android Wear companion app in there (v2.0), and with it comes real download management for music synced to the watch. Finally!

Before today's update, it was an all or nothing deal. You'd either sync your offline music to your connected watch, or you wouldn't. Now there's a new menu in the app settings that lets you view progress of music downloads on Android Wear, and remove individual items (or stop them from syncing over).

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Google Play Music 6.0 Adds Option For Managing Android Wear Music Syncing was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Unlocking geo-restricted digital content is an activity carried out by millions every day, but the practice is frowned upon by entertainment industry companies.

The large amounts of time, effort and financial planning that go into complex licensing agreements can be undone in an instant by a user of a VPN or ‘smart’ DNS service, opening up services like Netflix and breaking down barriers to U.S-based products such as Hulu.

In April, media companies SKY, TVNZ, Lightbox and MediaWorks told several Kiwi ISPs that if they didn’t stop providing geo-unblocking services to their subscribers, legal action wouldn’t be far ahead.

Within days and following claims of breaches of the Copyright Act, Unlimited Internet pulled its VPN service. However, CallPlus and Bypass Network Services stood firm and stated that they weren’t going to be bullied.

Now, just two months later, both providers have caved in to the demands of the media companies. The news was revealed in the briefest of announcements posted to the NZX by Sky TV this morning.

“The legal proceedings against ‘Global Mode’ service providers have been settled. As a result, from 1 September 2015, the ‘Global Mode’ service will not be available to any person for use in New Zealand,” the statement reads.

The news will come as a blow to users of the ‘Global Mode’ service who will now have to find alternatives if they wish to continue accessing geo-locked content. While that will be extremely easy, Global Mode was a free product so it’s likely that additional costs could be on the horizon.

InternetNZ, the non-profit group that oversees the Internet in New Zealand, says it is “deeply disappointed” by the news.

“Global Mode was a great example of Internet-based innovation that challenged traditional content distribution models. It was by no means clear that the service was illegal, and we were keen to see the matter go before the courts to provide users and the industry with clarity,” said InternetNZ Chief Executive Jordan Carter.

“Withdrawing the service and settling before court seems a worse outcome for all concerned. The media companies have said that they wanted to clarify their own legal rights over content – a settlement doesn’t achieve this, and leaves us all none the wiser.”

Noting that both Internet users and innovation have “taken a back seat to entrenched old media interests”, the InternetNZ chief called for a revised look at local copyright legislation.

“This outcome makes it ever more important that we review New Zealand copyright law, to ensure that the interests of consumers and creators are appropriately balanced.”

Those looking for the all-important details on why the companies backed down will be disappointed. The details of the settlement between the providers and entertainment companies are confidential. Submissions will be made to the court but they will not be for public consumption.

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

Wikileaks has published a new cache of secret communications, and the documents come with explosive allegations about US surveillance of French government affairs. According to Wikileaks, the documents are the result of sustained NSA surveillance of the French elected officials, including the country's last three Presidents. That claim is backed up by an apparent list of NSA targets, including the names and phone numbers of more than fifteen French ministers and advisors, including the president. The dump also includes intercepts from conversations between various French officials, including intelligence summaries.

The source of the documents is still unclear. Notably, the organization has not named prominent NSA whistleblower Edward...

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 Dropbox today released a redesign for its Android application designed to streamline the process of sharing files and uploading folders. The new Android app, which will roll out in the next couple of days, is a redesign of the user interface that’s a little more seamless compared to its previous versions. The new app also includes a new spot for the company’s search function,… Read More

Need some music right now to make whatever you’re doing better? Even if you’re not already a Google Play Music subscriber, we’ve got you covered. Google Play Music now has a free, ad-supported version in the U.S., giving you a new way to find just the right music—and giving artists another way to earn revenue. In less time than it takes you to read this sentence, you could be exercising with Drop-a-Beat Workout, cooling off with Poolside Chic, or spending quality time with Songs To Raise Your Kids To.

At any moment in your day, Google Play Music has whatever you need music for—from working, to working out, to working it on the dance floor—and gives you curated radio stations to make whatever you’re doing better. Our team of music experts, including the folks who created Songza, crafts each station song by song so you don’t have to. If you’re looking for something specific, you can browse our curated stations by genre, mood, decade or activity, or you can search for your favorite artist, album or song to instantly create a station of similar music.

We hope you’ll enjoy it so much that you’ll consider subscribing to Google Play Music to play without ads, take your music offline, create your own playlists, and listen to any of the 30 million songs in our library on any device and as much as you’d like. You’ll also get ad-free, offline and background features for music videos on YouTube. And with or without a subscription, you can store and play up to 50,000 songs from your own collection for free.

To help you get started, check out the top 10 most popular activities on Google Play Music, each of which offers several radio stations to choose from based on what you like:

1. Brand New Music
2. Driving
3. Working Out
4. Boosting Your Energy
5. Having Friends Over
6. Having Fun at Work
7. Entering Beast Mode
8. Waking Up Happy
9. Unwinding
10. Bedtime

The new free, ad-supported version of Google Play Music is launching first in the U.S. It’s available on the web today, and is rolling out this week to Android and iOS. And while you’re checking it all out, we’ll be catching up on our Blogged 50.

Posted by Elias Roman, Product Manager

 Often when we think of the wearable tech category, we imagine consumer-focused general purpose devices like Fitbit’s range or the Apple Watch. Google has unveiled a new niche device that’s designed to do serious work in a specific setting, however, with a health-focused wristband that provides constant patient information for participants in medical studies and clinical field… Read More

Verizon has successfully completed its acquisition of AOL. It's been a little over one month since Verizon announced its $4.4 billion purchase of the company, but the deal has apparently sailed right along and is already closed. In May, Verizon said that buying AOL would mark "a significant step in building digital and video platforms to drive future growth."

AOL's fast-growing advertising business is widely viewed as the thing that hooked Verizon on the big acquisition. But the deal has also stirred uncertainty; Verizon's long-term plans for popular AOL media brands like The Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch remain unclear. It's been rumored that the company could spin off or sell the media business and focus AOL's ad...

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Before bits and pieces of Google+ departed from Google's web toolbar earlier this month, the bar's notification panel began labeling notifications according to their origin. G+ notifications for example got a Google+ icon, while notifications about a user's photo library got the Google Photos badge.

Tonight it looks like Google is rolling out another change to the panel, adding a settings button which allows users to filter out G+, Photos, or YouTube notifications individually.

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'Google Notifications' Panel Gets Filtering Options was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 The U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the judicial oversight body which handles complaints relating to domestic intelligence agencies, has ruled that GCHQ acted unlawfully in the handling of intercepted communications data in another case brought by civil liberties groups, including Liberty, Privacy International and Amnesty International. Read More

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Featured App

Passport Photo ID Studio

This week's roundup is brought to you by Passport Photo ID Studio from Handy Apps.

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24 New And Notable Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (6/9/15 - 6/22/15) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 The NSA and its British counterpart the GCHQ have put extensive effort into hacking popular security software products to “track users and infiltrate networks,” according to the latest round of Snowden docs unearthed today by The Intercept. Read More