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We heard at Google I/O about Google's plans to help improve the experience of users on slow connections, especially in parts of the world where even 3G speeds are few and far between. They gave us a peek at how the search interface would change under those circumstances to improve those load times. Now, in select markets, the pages you click on will also be optimized to load much faster.

Google's estimates have you loading the page 4x as fast compared to the unaltered version when on a slow connection, with 80% less data.

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Here's Google Web Light, The New Bare Bones Version Of Websites For Users On Slow Connections was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Why do these little tableaus of neatness delight us so? Read the rest

"Born Like Stars" (2011) by Brent Hoff. (more…)

The past, set into motion. Read the rest

Giving away free apps is sort of Amazon's thing. Each day the company offers up a different piece of software in hopes of attracting Android users away from their default app store. Now Google seems to be dipping its toes in the water and trying out something similar. Instead of a free app of the day, we can download one for the week.

The offer isn't immediately apparent when you first open the Play Store.

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Google Play Offers Its First Free App Of The Week—A PBS App Tucked Away In The Family Section was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

You may remember Google nearly bought the game streaming service Twitch a while back, but then Amazon swooped in and snatched it up when the Google deal fell through. Now Google is announcing a new service that competes directly with Twitch, and it's called (predictably) YouTube Gaming. While it uses the YouTube brand, this will be a standalone service with its own website and app when it launches this summer.

YouTube Gaming will have dedicated pages for more than 25,000 games at launch.

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Google Announces YouTube Gaming To Take On Twitch, Launching This Summer In US And UK was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 The FCC has responded to concerns that PayPal’s updated user agreement, which gives the company the right to robocall and text customers, by informing PayPal that it may be in violation of federal law. One issue, according to the FCC, is that consenting to robocalls cannot be a condition of using PayPal’s service. In addition, customers must provide prior written consent… Read More

Alas, there is no video, but we have something better: farmer Tom Hamilton's wonderful narrative of how border collie Don took off in the vehicle.

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This row, for rapini, is but one among many on The Contorni Matrix, a chart explaining what to do to (and with) unusual vegetables. [via Lifehacker]

 Amol Sarva has been making cool things for most of the past decade. You’ll remember him from devices like the Peek and Halo but his new web company, Knotable, is building cool productivity tools that work right in the browser. Now he and his partner Edward Shenderovich have launched a service called Knotable Note Instantly that allows you to take notes and make task lists right in… Read More

Oculus' pre-E3 gaming showcase was a bigger deal than any of us expected. Oculus didn't just show us the final Rift virtual reality headset for the first time. It revealed that it had partnered with Microsoft to ship every Rift with an Xbox One gamepad. And that if you already own an Xbox One, you can stream its games to the Rift through your PC (they'll appear on a virtual big screen inside it). And that it's also making a new motion controller called the Oculus Touch, which will be selling alongside the Rift.

We'll probably be hearing a lot more about Oculus (and seeing some of the games it just announced) at E3 next week. For now, though, we've put together all the best parts of yesterday's event.

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BlackBerry once dominated smartphone sales in the days before regular people had any interest in them. Then the iPhone happened, and then Android, and then BlackBerry (previously RIM) got stubborn and refused to admit the world was changing. With just a sliver of market share left, the company is now rumored to be developing an Android phone with a slide-out keyboard for release this fall.

The company launched its current smartphone platform, BlackBerry 10, in early 2013.

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BlackBerry Rumored To Release Android-Powered Phone This Fall With A Slide-Out Keyboard was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

A portrait of Her Royal Princess Penelope Pricklepants, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Read the rest

Merchants of Doubt is a new documentary that explores the dark heart of scientific spin doctors. Read the rest

 Earlier today, we got the chance to check out the Oculus Rift consumer virtual reality headset, which has finally been fully revealed to the world. We also get a first look at the Oculus Touch Controllers, unique input devices designed by Oculus themselves to make interacting with a virtual environment much easier. Press wasn’t able to use or even paw the hardware unveiled – but… Read More

Civil asset forfeiture is way for police to confiscate people's property and share the bounty with prosecutors' offices, without the tiresome hassle of due process. Read the rest

The Last.fm app has been effectively abandoned for several years, but today it has finally been updated with a design that won't make your eyes bleed. If that's not a worthwhile improvement, I don't know what is. There are a few other improvements too. Stop spoiling us, Last.fm.

Here's the changelog for v2.0.

Last.fm is a service that tracks what you listen to (scrobbling) and presents recommendations, tour dates, and so on.

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Last.fm App Gets A Long Overdue Redesign In v2.0 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Music streaming service 8tracks has been profitable since 2012, but wants to move faster. For its new round of funding, the company chose to secure a $2.5 million debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. As a reminder, 8tracks is a library of modern mixtapes, as anyone can create and listen to user-generated playlists based on genres and moods. The company recently moved into direct… Read More

 After years of user growth struggles, Twitter just announced that its CEO Dick Costolo will be stepping down July 1st, though he’ll remain on the board. Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey will be the interim CEO. A conference call with investors has been set for 2:15pm PST today to discuss the situation. Read More

Twitter has been overhauling Direct Messages over the past several months, and today it's announcing an enormous change: plans to lift the classic 140-character limit. Starting in July, DMs will seemingly be able to run as long as you'd like, turning it into much more of a typical instant message and group chat service.

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After months of trouble with a hostile takeover as the climax, popular TV-torrent distribution group EZTV called it quits last month.

In the ten years since its founding the group had built up a reputation of quality and consistency, but today it is no longer active.

Instead, EZTV’s domain is now run by an outsider who pretends that nothing has changed. On the site’s homepage people still see the latest TV-torrents.

Initially these torrents were imported from other groups, but recently a person pretending to be EZTV’s Novaking announced that they had started releasing their own torrents again.

“We have a great news for you. [eztv] has started releasing torrents again. No more nested/unneeded files/folders you have complained about. The same quality like before.”

While unsuspecting users might fall for the impersonation, people in the know have cut their ties with the site. The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, for example, are warning their users to look our for fake files and have disabled or suspended the official EZTV account.

But it’s not only the torrent experts who have seen through the facade, Google has too.

For many years the EZTV.it domain (later EZTV.ch) was the top listed result when searching for the term EZTV using Google. This is no surprise, considering that there are hundreds of thousands of backlinks to the site.

Interestingly, however, the “official” domain has now been completely stripped from the top results. Even several pages down the EZTV.ch domain doesn’t appear.

It’s worth noting that the main EZTV.ch domain was removed following a takedown notice from Lionsgate. However, usually other pages on the same domain quickly take its place, as happened to ExtraTorrent and others.

The absence of the EZTV domain is remarkable and stands out when comparing it to other search engines.

For example, roughly a week ago both Bing and DuckDuckGo continued to place EZTV.ch on top. Today, both search engines still show the domain among the top results, although no longer in first place.

With the site no longer being the top result in Google and elsewhere, search traffic to EZTV is minimal.

Whether the site’s total traffic will also go down in the long run has yet to be seen. For now the site is still among the most popular torrent sites on the Internet, and many users either don’t know or don’t care who runs the show.

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

Windows/OS X: Disconnect, makers of our favorite privacy tools, unveiled a new desktop app designed to protect your computer from malware, adware, and spyware. There are two tiers: A free version that protects your browsing, and a premium version that encrypts your traffic using Disconnect’s VPN.

The free version of Disconnect for the desktop will block adware, browser-based trackers, malware sites, and more (Disconnect calls this whole category “malvertising,”) before it even loads on your computer or in your browser, for every internet-connected application you have. It also allows you to search the web privately, and see how the websites you whitelist and use collect and use your information. You can see how your activity is tracked in real time, and you can even look at a time graph to see which sites have the most trackers, whitelist the ones you want to support, and block the ones you don’t.

The premium version takes all of that and rolls it into a VPN that encrypts all of your data, keeps you safe from sidejacking and other attacks when you’re on public Wi-Fi, and keeps anyone else who might be looking from snooping on your data. It’ll set you back $5/mo or $50/year. You’ll also be able to choose your exit servers to get around pesky geographic restrictions on content overseas.

If you’re interested in trying out either the free version or the paid one, hit the link below to read more.

Disconnect

At this year’s Tony Awards, Kelli O’Hara had only 47 seconds to change from one elaborate costume to another during The King and I’s musical montage. (more…)

How is creativity related to schizophrenia and autism? Psychology professor Scott Barry Kaufman looks at a scientific paper suggesting that "creativity and psychosis share genetic roots" in the context of his own research on how different forms of creativity might relate to the schizophrenia spectrum and the autism spectrum. Read the rest