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Android: Adblock Plus is a great browser extension, and the company has tons of useful other services. Today, it gets one more. The company has announced a new, standalone browser—based on Firefox—that has ad blocking built in.

The app is currently available as a beta for Android (which means the usual routine of joining a Google+ community to get access). By default, the browser blocks all ads, however you can manually enable an option in the settings called Acceptable Ads which Adblock Plus says “encourage(s) better ads by allowing nonintrusive ads to display.” The app is still rolling out in stages, but you can join the beta community at the source link below.

Adblock Browser for Android Beta | Google+ via Business Wire

It's one of LG's most impressive displays of screen technology yet: a 55-inch OLED panel that's just 0.97mm thick and weighs just 1.9kg (4.1 pounds). The panel is so thin that it can be stuck to the wall using a magnetic mat before being peeled off like wallpaper, reports Korean news agency Yonhap. But while the new display is much thinner than LG's flagship OLED TVs, this is most likely because it doesn't incorporate the circuitry that would actually make it function as a TV, with most of the electronics hidden somewhere off-screen.

OLED displays might be the future — but they're tricky to make and expensive too

But while this "wallpaper" display might not be a commercial product, it does signal the continuing ambition of LG Display —...

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For some time now, Google has been working to split off its terrific photo backup and enhancement service from the rest Google+, and it sounds like the fully standalone version of Google Photos is nearly ready. Bloomberg is reporting that the company is making final preparations to unveil the new product, and the upcoming I/O conference keynote seems like a perfect venue for the big reveal.

The existing photo service has long been one of Google+'s biggest draws. It allows for unlimited photo uploads (so long as you don't mind a max width of 2048 pixels) and can automatically apply effects to your shots or turn a sequence of them into a GIF without any effort on your part. Like similar services from Flickr and Amazon, Google also offers...

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Starting today, we’re bringing Tweets to Google Search on mobile devices. So now when you’re searching on the Google app or any browser on your phone or tablet, you can find real-time content from Twitter right in the search results.

Whether you’re interested in the latest from Taylor Swift, news about the #MadMenFinale, or updates on the NBA playoffs, you’ll have access to it directly from Google. Let’s use NASA as an example—just ask the Google app about “NASA Twitter,” and in the search results, you’ll see Tweets from @NASA:

Or if you heard today was Malcolm X’s birthday, you can ask the Google app and see what various people and organizations in the Twitter community are saying about it.

It’s a great way to get real-time info when something is happening. And it’s another way for organizations and people on Twitter to reach a global audience at the most relevant moments.

To start, we’re launching this on Google.com in English in the Google app (on Android and iOS) and on mobile browsers, rolling out gradually. We’re working on bringing it to more languages and to desktop, so stay tuned.

Posted by Ardan Arac, Senior Product Manager

 MixRadio, the radio music service that was transferred from Nokia to Microsoft and then bought by messaging app company Line last year, is finally available for iOS and Android. Read More

 Google launched an experimental Chrome extension today that lets you share the URL from your current browser tab with anybody within earshot. Tone, which is now available in the Chrome Web Store, uses sound to transmit the information and uses the speakers and microphones now typically available on any laptop. Read More

Genetically modified organisms hold a lot of promise for creating hardier crops and faster growing fish, but even supporters are concerned about invasive organisms running wild. If a faster, better, stronger strain of bacteria escaped the lab, how would we stop it? Now, scientists have come up with a new solution: self-destructing DNA.

Published today in Nature Communications, the system would use cutting-edge gene-editing tools to erase DNA as soon as a given organism leaves its designated area, destroying both the cell and its genetic information. The result is a so-called "kill switch," eradicating any experimental or proprietary organisms before they can escape into the wild.

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The Federal Trade Commission has accused four cancer charities of defrauding well-meaning donors for over $187 million. Today, the FTC and law enforcement groups from all 50 states have filed a complaint against the Cancer Fund of America, Cancer Support Services, Children’s Cancer Fund of America, and the Breast Cancer Society. The complaint alleges that these four "sham charities" solicited millions in donations by promising to help pay for hospice care, chemotherapy, and other services for cancer patients. But only a fraction of that money actually went to patients. The rest went to company cars, high salaries, and even a Caribbean cruise.

"The defendants took in millions of dollars in donations meant to help cancer patients, but...

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Layout, an app for making photo collages that Instagram introduced on iOS in March, is now available for Android. The app, which can be downloaded here, arrays your photos in a variety of grids. It's meant to capitalize on the fact that about 1 in 5 Instagram users regularly post collages to their accounts, according to the company.

Where most third-party collage apps present you with a variety of grids and ask you to fill them in with photos, Layout starts by asking you to select a few photos and then suggests a variety of grids for you based on how many photos you picked. It's unclear how popular Layout has been on iOS, but it fits with Facebook's strategy of releasing focused, single-purpose tools for its various services.

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The age of video piracy, in some ways, is over. It's not just that streaming video has become relatively cheap and simple, with even long-time holdouts like HBO expanding into online-only options. It's not just that ISPs finally settled on a fairly standard "six strikes" warning system for pirates. It's that the anonymous piracy ecosystem itself is sometimes more fragile than it seems. According to TorrentFreak, this is exactly what killed one of the internet's most prominent pirate sites, EZTV.

EZTV was (and still is, technically) a methodically organized television piracy service, collecting and distributing BitTorrent trackers for just about any moderately popular TV show. Like most other torrent sites, it's had several false alarms,...

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Do you know what it's like to be filled with hope? To have the world rolled out in front of you, to feel that your future is limitless, to above all, see that world without cynicism? And do you remember a time you lost that feeling?

This is an important mindset to enter before hearing the tale of Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster, whose years-long prediction that Apple will create a television set died last night, as The Wall Street Journal reported Apple had scrapped plans for a 4K TV. "Given how adamant we have been about the reality of an Apple television, it’s hard to accept the reality of no Apple television," Munster wrote in a note today. "Our latest thinking prior to this story was that Apple would launch a television...

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'You kids wouldn't last one day out in the Scorch'

The young survivors of the Maze find themselves in potentially greater problems in the new trailer for Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. Ushered into the W.C.K.D. compound at the end of the first film, things are looking especially bleak for a group of teenagers starting to feel like lab rats in a bizarre experiment. Click below to see first-hand.

Beyond those heavy steel doors, there's desolate apocalyptic landscape to negotiate. As Aiden Gillan’s sinister apparatchik growls, they may be hard pressed to survive even 24 hours outside the relatively safety of the organisation. Except, of course, that these are the same people who subjected them to the lethal labyrinth in the first place.

Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Minho (Ki Hong Lee) must roll the dice and see where they end up. “The course of your lives”, intones Patricia Clarkson’s mysterious Ava Paige, "will determine the course of humanity”. So, no pressure then.

Maze Runner director Wes Ball is back behind (or slightly to the side of) the camera on this one. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials lands in UK cinemas on September 17.

The Pirate Bay has long been associated with Sweden but soon the popular torrent site will stop using a Swedish domain name.

Earlier today the Stockholm District Court ordered the seizure of both thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se, arguing that they were linked to copyright crimes.

Potential appeals aside the domains in question will be handed over to the Swedish Government, but the ruling is unlikely to hamper Pirate Bay’s availability, quite the contrary.

The TPB team informs TF that they have already begun redirecting the .SE address, rotating it to six new domain names.

As of now, the notorious torrent site is available through new GS, LA, VG, AM, MN and GD domain names.

Pirate Bay homepage (.VG didn’t fit the hydra)

This means that all the effort that went into the lawsuit, as well as at least $40,000 in legal costs, have done very little to stop the site.

“Congratulations to Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad. Two years hard work to get us to change two little letters at a cost of $20,000 per letter,” the TPB team tells TF in a comment.

“He could have given us $35,000 and we would have left the domain, thus saving the Swedish tax payer $5,000. All he had to do was ask nicely,” they add.

With six new domains one can argue that The Pirate Bay has become even more resilient. There will undoubtedly be attempts to seize or suspend the new domains, but there are also plenty more domains TPB can register.

And so the Whack-a-Mole continues.

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

The Netflix of movie torrents, Popcorn Time, has always been an easy way to stream movies—and now you can do it right from your browser, no extra software required.

The new site, Popcorn In Your Browser, is super easy to use. Head to the home page, search the movie you want to watch, and then select it. The stream will start to buffer and in a few moments the movie will start playing. That’s it.

There are a couple of major differences with the site you should keep in mind, however. The site doesn’t download the torrent to your computer, so if you want to watch the same movie again, it will have to re-buffer the stream. Also, there is no built-in VPN service like what’s included in the desktop software, so if you’re going to use the Popcorn In Your Browser site, it’s probably best to use a VPN of your own if you’d like to keep your activity private.

It’s important to keep in mind that the Popcorn Time brand operates under anonymity, and different apps are run by different teams—so it’s hard to say who specifically is operating the site. As always, use tools like this at your own risk. Check it out at the link below.

Popcorn In Your Browser | via Business Insider

Want to edit Word, Excel, or PowerPoint docs from your Android phone? You can now test them out in the new Office Preview apps.

The apps are optimized for touch and smaller screens, with the ribbon menu at the bottom of the screen instead of the top for thumbs-friendly editing. The Office apps also connect to not just OneDrive, but also SharePoint, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box.

To try the apps out yourself and possibly influence the final version of Office for Android, you have to join the Office for Android community on Google+, then download the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps from Google Play. Microsoft says the permissions could take up to 4 hours to replicate before the apps are available, but I was able to install them and they look pretty nice.

Office for Android Phone Preview Now Available | Office 365

Or maybe he just doesn't understand the tinny voice of his mom on the lowest quality sounding cell phone ever.

One of the the biggest debt collectors in the United States was ordered to pay Maria Guadalupe Mejia $83 million for "maliciously" suing her for a $1000 credit card debt that she didn't owe.

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 Home security and automation starts and ends with the front door. It needs to keep the bad guys out yet let the good guys in without hassle. Either a system gets it right or it doesn’t, and, until now, I had yet to see a system that’s truly impressive. Meet the Vivint Sky Smart Home — a home security and automation system that offers a tantalizing glimpse into the future but… Read More

Following up on its flagship G4 announcement for 2015, LG is now supplementing its lineup as it does every year with more midrange options that can appeal to and target different audiences: a larger phablet with a stylus for a Note-like approach and a smaller less powerful variant of its star player.

Let's start with the G4 Stylus. It comes with a larger 5.7" display than the G4, albeit with a lower 720p resolution that results in a rather average 258ppi.

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LG Expands Its G4 Family Lineup With The Midrange G4 Stylus And G4c — Removable Batteries And MicroSD Slots Abound was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

This adorable orangutan saw zookeepers caring for tiger cubs at the Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina and decided he wanted to try it out too.

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 Spotify and Starbucks just announced a clever deal to promote Spotify Premium while giving Starbuck customers and employees the opportunity to influence the music played at their local Starbucks. This is the latest in a line of high-profile deals Spotify bagged that puts its brand in front of an important consumer demographic. 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.

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Expense IQ - Expense Manager

This week's roundup is brought to you by Expense IQ - Expense Manager from Handy Apps.

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15 New And Notable Android Apps And Live Wallpapers From The Last 2 Weeks (5/5/15 - 5/18/15) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

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Millions of spiders rained from the sky in Australia's Southern Tablelands, literally covering homes with webs as the arachnids invaded. Read the rest

Welcome to Twitter, @POTUS. After six years of talking through @WhiteHouse (and of course his own account @BarackObama), the President of the United States now has an official Twitter account — blue checkmark and everything — dedicated to his job. "Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account," read Obama's inaugural tweet (sent via Twitter for iPhone, according to TweetDeck).

Presumably, the account will pass on to whoever wins next year's election, but for now, it's being framed as a direct line from Obama to your Timeline.

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 Google today announced yet another round of price cuts for its cloud computing platform, as well as a new instance type that will allow businesses to save even more on some of their cloud computing tasks. Read More

 LG revealed the G4, its newest flagship device, in April, and now the 5.5-inch screen device is rolling out for sale across the world. Read More