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But it all works out in the end.

“I placed a camera just above a birds nest in my garden. The nest has been there for 3 weeks, the birds hatched 4 days ago.”

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10 Real-Life Detectives Who Were Better Than Fiction

“Instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.” Read the rest

After being kept in an isolated, filthy cage, for more than 13 years—this creature feels the wild earth and grass beneath his feet and reacts in an amazing way. Read the rest

Google search results as you've come to know them on your phone could soon become the place where you buy your next bedspread. According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, Google plans to begin testing "buy buttons" that live inside the ads it puts above its normal search results. These sponsored results will reportedly take you to a special purchasing page that's still hosted by Google where you can pick what type of product you want, and how soon you want to get it — all without leaving Google itself. Meanwhile, the company will let you store your credit card information to do it all over again at another time.

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If you've ever asked yourself "why there hasn't been a seminal cat simulator that really gets what being a cat is all about?" that question has finally been answered. Developer Will Herring has blessed the earth with My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up At 3AM Every Day, a simulator that puts you at the controls of a feline in the same room as its human tormenter, who happens to be asleep. It's your job to recreate the same chaos that is happening in millions and perhaps billions of households around the world each night.

Unlike trying to understand the motives of a cat, the controls and aim of the game are delightfully simple:

Knock everything over until your owner wakes up.
Use the arrow keys to move and jump.
Press Z to meow and cry...

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Reuters

Belgian regulators have ordered Facebook to stop tracking people who have logged out of the service—and those who never signed up in the first place.

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The major European mobile operators are weighing up a blanket ban on mobile advertising, enforced through ad-blocking software installed at the carrier level, according to the Financial Times.

Such a move would have a potentially calamitous impact on both apps and websites funded by mobile advertising—the vast majority of them, in other words. It would also strike at the heart of Google's business model, which appears to be the point. Ads embedded in feeds (such as those on Twitter and Facebook) would be exempt, the FT says.

The blocking technology itself is developed by an Israeli startup called Shine. The company points to large data drains as one of the reasons mobile ads are bad for carriers and consumers, and seems unrepentant about the effect its software could have on publishers.

"We believe ad blocking is a right, full-stop," Shine's chief marketing officer Roi Carthy told Business Insider. "If the consumer decides to use it, we believe that it should be their right, and they should be able to do it with full integrity... nobody [in business] has a God-given right to exist."

Anonymous sources say the system could be opt-in to begin with or may be limited to certain types of ads. However, a blanket ban is also being considered, which suggests no firm decisions have yet been made.

But for sites who rely on the billions of dollars spent on mobile advertising every year, it's going to set alarm bells ringing. Consumers will no doubt enjoy an ad-free experience on mobile—but how would they feel about their favorite sites shutting down?

Mobile Turf Wars

Given the huge ramifications of such a move, this is not something carriers are going to be able to deploy quietly or without a great deal of regulatory red tape. It may be that they're merely testing the waters in an attempt to get Google to the negotiating table.

All over the world, carriers labor under the impression that running data networks—often highly profitably—should rightfully entitle them to a cut of the activity that takes place on those networks. Europe's are no exception. The FT's Robert Cookson recycles this age-old carrier grievance as established fact:

Many mobile operators are frustrated that digital media companies profit from their high-speed networks without having to invest in the infrastructure behind them. Such irritation was inflamed last month when Google launched Project Fi, its own wireless carrier in the US.

Of course, the carriers are already handsomely paid ... by their actual customers. (Even Google's Project Fi is going to end up paying Sprint and T-Mobile, since it's reselling their bandwidth.) What they'd really like, though, is to get Google and other Internet companies to cough up some extra cash. As ReadWrite's Dan Rowinski noted here last year:

What [carriers] want is the freedom to levy additional fees on service providers—in essence, so they can get paid twice for transmitting the same data. Economists call this "rent seeking," and it's basically the antithesis of competitive, customer-focused behavior.

And to do that, they're willing to consider what's basically a high-tech stickup. Cookson again:

The idea is to specifically target Google, blocking advertising on its websites in an attempt to force the company into giving up a cut of its revenues.

Google argues that it has its own infrastructure to invest in—data centers to power YouTube, Gmail and its other products—and that adverts are crucial in funding the free services users rely on.

As the Wall Street Journal reported last year, Shine is also in discussions with carriers in the US. How close any operator is to applying a block on advertising isn't clear, but Verizon's $4.4 billion purchase of AOL—largely, it seems, for the company's advertising-automation technology—suggests it won't be stamping on online publishers anytime soon.

It doesn't seem likely that legislators would let operators pick and choose the data they display on websites, no matter how unsightly pop-up ads are—but the EU is no friend of Google's dominance of advertising and search either, so it's difficult to predict how the debate will pan out.

What's clear is that the multinational corporations already making millions from consumers are eager to get a bigger slice of the pie any way they can, with mobile advertising likely to be the next battleground.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

Up until today, the only Wear watch with Android 5.1 was LG's newly released Watch Urbane. But if you have an older device, your impatient wait and envy over those lucky Urbane owners might be almost over. According to user Verdes8891 on Reddit, his Asus ZenWatch has just received the new software OTA, bumping it up to Android 5.1.1.

While this update from 5.0.2 might sound small on paper, it is arguably one of the most significant ones in Wear's history.

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Android Wear 5.1.1 Begins Its Rollout To Watches Starting With The Asus ZenWatch was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

When we started designing the world’s first fully self-driving vehicle, our goal was a vehicle that could shoulder the entire burden of driving. Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error (PDF), reclaiming the billions of hours wasted in traffic, or bringing everyday destinations and new opportunities within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car.

Now we’re announcing the next step for our project: this summer, a few of the prototype vehicles we’ve created will leave the test track and hit the familiar roads of Mountain View, Calif., with our safety drivers aboard.

We’ve been running the vehicles through rigorous testing at our test facilities, and ensuring our software and sensors work as they’re supposed to on this new vehicle. The new prototypes will drive with the same software that our existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs uses. That fleet has logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads since we started the project, and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week. So the new prototypes already have lots of experience to draw on—in fact, it’s the equivalent of about 75 years of typical American adult driving experience.
Each prototype’s speed is capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph, and during this next phase of our project we’ll have safety drivers aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow them to take over driving if needed. We’re looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle—e.g., where it should stop if it can’t stop at its exact destination due to construction or congestion. In the coming years, we’d like to run small pilot programs with our prototypes to learn what people would like to do with vehicles like this. If you’d like to follow updates about the project and share your thoughts, please join us on our Google+ page. See you on the road!

Posted by Chris Urmson, Director, Google Self-Driving Car Project

A few years ago Europe witnessed the largest piracy-related busts in history with the raid of the popular movie streaming portal Kino.to.

Police officers in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands raided several residential addresses, data centers and arrested more than a dozen individuals connected to the site.

The operation wiped out the largest unauthorized streaming portal in Europe and was praised as a massive success. However, new research from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that the effect on end users was short-lived and relatively limited.

In a working paper titled “Online Copyright Enforcement, Consumer Behavior, and Market Structure” researchers examined clickstream data for a set of 5,000 German Internet users to see how their legal and illegal consumption habits changed in response to the shutdown.

One of the main conclusions is that the kino.to raid led to a short-lived decrease in piracy, after which piracy levels returned to normal. At the same time, the researchers observed only a small increase in the use of legal services.

“While users of kino.to decreased their levels of piracy consumption by 30% during the four weeks following the intervention, their consumption through licensed movie platforms increased by only 2.5%,” the paper reads.

Based on the above the researchers conclude that if the costs of the raids and prosecution are factored in, the shutdown probably had no positive effect.

“Taken at face value, these results indicate that the intervention mainly converted consumer surplus into deadweight loss. If we were to take the costs of the intervention into account, our results would suggest that the shutdown of kino.to has not had a positive effect on overall welfare,” the researchers write.

Perhaps more worrying is the fact that Kino.to was soon replaced by several new streaming services. This so-called “Hydra” effect means that a landscape which was previously dominated by one site, now consists of several smaller sites that together have roughly the same number of visitors.

The researchers note that Movie2k.to and KinoX.to quickly filled the gap, and that the scattered piracy landscape would make future shutdowns more costly.

“Our analysis shows that the shutdown of kino.to resulted in a much more fragmented structure of the market for unlicensed movie streaming,” the paper reads.

“This potentially makes future law enforcement interventions either more costly – as there would not be a single dominant platform to shutdown anymore – or less effective if only a single website is targeted by the intervention”

One of the policy implications could be to advise against these type of large piracy raids, as they do very little to solve the problem at hand.

However, the researchers note that the results should be interpreted with caution. For example, it doesn’t include any data on offline sales. Similarly, back in 2011 there were relatively few legal options available, so the effects may be different now.

That said, the current findings shed an interesting light on the limited effectiveness of international law enforcement actions directed at piracy sites. Also, it’s the first research paper we know of that provides strong evidence for the frequently mentioned Hydra effect.

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

 Peeple is a small camera and sensor that attaches to the peephole on your front door. When someone knocks, Peeple takes a video and sends a mobile notification. With Peeple, co-founder Chris Chuter says, the front door is no longer a blind spot. Read More

 The action camera category has a clear leader in GoPro, but others like Contour aren’t taking GoPro’s dominance lying down; the Utah-based maker of POV camera has joined forces with iON Cameras, a New Jersey-based maker of similar devices, in a merger that could help both remain competitive in a space where everyone from Sony to HTC is entering the ring. Contour made a return to… Read More

Microsoft first announced its Hyperlapse video technology just a couple of weeks before Instagram launched its own Hyperlapse app on iOS last year. Designed primarily as a way to transform bumpy GoPro videos into smooth works of art, Microsoft Hyperlapse can process any video and create a steady time-lapse. It’s debuting on Android, Windows Phone, and as a desktop Windows app today. The key difference compared to Instagram is that you don’t need to specifically shoot a hyperlapse video for Microsoft’s app to work; even old videos shot years ago can be processed.

Microsoft is using a software algorithm to stabilize footage, and that means it’s using image processing rather than using gyroscopic or accelerometer data from a phone like...

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Amazon likes to offer freebies every now and then on its Appstore. Aside from the daily gratis app or game, it runs regular huge promotions where it usually discounts over $100 worth of software to the awesome price of nada. Nil. Zilch. That's the case today with a mega deal lasting until May 16th 11:59PM PST.

The offer includes more than thirty apps and games, which total over $110 in their regular listing price. Most notable among the games are Game Of Thrones, Sorcery!

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[Deal Alert] $110 Worth Of Games And Apps Are Free Today On The Amazon Appstore, Including Game Of Thrones, Sorcery! 3, And Bike Race Pro was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

One of the most amazing things you can do with Wolfram Alpha is ask it what planes are overhead. If you're on your phone, it will pull your location, then cross reference that with a database of flights, including their altitude, angle, and even their flight number and aircraft type. But in many ways, Stephen Wolfram's latest search tool is more impressive. It's designed to identify anything in a picture. You just upload a photo, and get a computer-generated guess just a few seconds later.

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Today the House of Representatives passed the USA Freedom Act, a measure to end the NSA's bulk collection of metadata. The bill received broad support in the House, with 338 votes for the bill and 88 against, but will now face a tougher road in the Senate.

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It's the time of year when all of the television networks announce their upcoming schedules, which means we're getting our first looks at a slew of new shows. Today it's time for CBS to make a splash, and they've released the first looks for both Supergirl and the upcoming Limitless TV show.

The Supergirl trailer seems devoted as much to defending itself from early criticisms as it does to actually setting up the show. Calista Flockhart's character goes on an extended speech about how the name "Supergirl" — instead of "Superwoman" — shouldn't be taken as a pejorative. "So if you perceive 'Supergirl' as anything less than excellent, then isn't the real problem you?" she asks Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist), Supergirl's civilian alter ego....

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 Google quietly rolled out a new login screen for Gmail this week, and not everyone is happy with the update. Where before, Gmail users would enter their username and password on the same page, the new login flow separates this process. Now, you’ll first enter your username, then be directed to a second page where you enter your password. Some complain that this change slows them down,… Read More

 Amazon announced this morning the launch of a new advertising platform for mobile app developers who distribute their Android apps by way of Amazon’s Appstore or even Google Play. Called “Advertise Your App with Amazon,” the new program allows developers to promote their app across Amazon’s network of Fire tablet wakescreens, as well as via mobile placements on the… Read More

“The contrast between the administration's response to the deaths of these Western — and white — civilians and those of the many hundreds of non-Western civilians who have died in the administration's lethal force program is stark and glaring.” Read the rest

Having won a majority in the UK general election, David Cameron has pledged to end the "tolerance" of the UK government, where "as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone." Read the rest

Microsoft started dropping the Windows Phone brand back in September, and now we have its official replacement. The software maker has revealed today that the equivalent to Windows Phone for the Windows 10 era is simply "Windows 10 Mobile." If you’ve been paying attention to Microsoft’s mobile efforts over the years, then you’ll know that’s a straight return to the Windows Mobile days. Microsoft used a variety of names for Windows Mobile, including Windows Mobile 2003, Windows Mobile 5, and Windows Mobile 6 before switching to Windows Phone for version 7.

While the new name isn’t simply Windows Mobile, thanks to the 10 numbering, it’s still a return to the old days of Windows Mobile especially if Microsoft does choose to ship a Windows...

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Citizen scientists are playing an increasingly important role in experiments, but there may be a place where certain experiments are less than welcome: Wyoming.

A new law passed earlier this year criminalizes the collection of data on "open land" if the collector doesn't receive permission in advance and eventually shares that data with the government. As Slate points out, the move sounds like a modest proposal until almost any of those terms — "collection," "data," or "open land" — are defined. And although other states have passed similar laws, Wyoming's seems especially broad: photographs are specifically covered by the law, while the land could mean any place outside of a town or city.

One example: under the law, collection of data...

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While Microsoft has not yet revealed an exact date for the Windows 10 launch (other than summer), the software giant is revealing all the editions today that will be made available when the operating system is finalized. Windows 10 Home is what Microsoft calls the "consumer-focused desktop edition." It’s the edition that will ship on most home PCs and laptops, and it includes all of the main Windows 10 features like the new Microsoft Edge browser, Windows Hello face-recognition, and built-in universal apps. To compliment the home desktop version, Microsoft also has a Windows 10 Pro edition. This will be the equivalent to Windows 8 Pro, with the ability for businesses to connect up to domains and take advantage of Windows Update for...

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