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Every year at South by Southwest Interactive, there's a small competition to be the "it" app of the show. Although such buzz has dubious long-term value (cf Highlight), it's still a fun game to play. This year, the app everybody assumed would take the mantle is Meerkat, the live video streaming service that piggybacks off of Twitter so you can automatically have a ready-made social group within the app. And just as SXSW is getting started, Twitter is cutting off Meerkat's automatic access to that social graph, Buzzfeed reports.

"We are limiting their access to Twitter’s social graph, consistent with our internal policy," a Twitter spokesperson told Buzzfeed. "Their users will still be able to distribute videos on Twitter and log in with...

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I'm walking through Midtown Manhattan, likely one of the most RF-saturated plots of real estate on the planet. During a workday, AT&T LTE isn't fast around here — I don't think any network is — but after years of tweaking and building out, it's consistent and reliable, at least. It gets the job done.

Then, the nightmare: the "LTE" symbol in my iPhone's status bar is replaced by three arcs, signifying that I've glommed onto Wi-Fi somewhere.

Everything stops loading. My phone, just moments ago a glorious node on the information superhighway and my irreplaceable connection to the world around me, has been reduced to a voice calling box no more advanced than a Motorola DynaTAC circa 1985. Tweets won't load; the dream of snapping and...

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We spotted some references to 360-degree videos in a YouTube APK Teardown last month, and now it's live. Google has highlighted several channels that have already published the first 360-degree videos, which are essentially moving Photospheres. They work on desktop Chrome and in the Android app. Check out the playlist below.

The first few videos with support for 360-degree views come from the likes of Red Bull and the TomorrowWorld music festival. You can load the videos up on Android, and pan around simply by moving the device.

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[Mind Blown] YouTube Now Supports 360-Degree Videos, And You Can Watch Them On Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

All large restaurants are required to provide nutrition information for their menu, which you can find on their web sites. But some go the extra mile, providing calculators so you can know exactly what you're eating, right down to the sides and toppings.

Chipotle's calculator is a perfect translation of its simple-but-customizable menu: just check off the boxes for what you put on your burrito. The result: not only a total for the calories and nutrients for the whole enchilada (so to speak) but also an itemized list of the numbers for each component. Subway takes a similar approach, but without itemizing: choose a sandwich, hit the "customize yours" button, and the nutrition info will update with the options you've checked.

McDonald's Meal Builder has a clunkier interface, but it can add up the nutrition information for a whole meal: burger, fries, and an apple pie, let's say. You can remove toppings (that's how I know I'd save 90 calories by holding the Big Mac sauce, not that any human would ever do that), but there's no way to add extras. Not every fast-food restaurant has a detailed nutrition calculator, but if you'd just like to add up the components of your meal, try the Fast Food Nutrition website, which has cobbled together calculators for most of the major burger joints.

In the pizza world, Domino's Cal-O-Meter does a great job of calculating calories, but doesn't give the rest of the info like carbs, protein, and so on. It can take multiple meal items into account, but its major flaw is giving calories per slice. So my double-cheese pineapple pizza looks like it's 435 calories, but if I eat three slices I'll actually break 1300.

Did we miss your favorite restaurant's calculator? Tell us in the comments!

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

Google rolled Chrome v42 out to the beta channel a few days ago with website notifications, but there's another interesting feature hiding in there. Sharing has been improved in a neat way—it will automatically include a screenshot when you share to a number of apps.

 

This will work when sharing through Gmail, Hangouts and other apps. So you get the URL and a screenshot of your device, but there's no way to turn this off.

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Chrome v42 Automatically Includes A Screenshot When You Share A Webpage was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Today Twitter officially announced its January acquisition of livestreaming app Periscope. According to several sources, it will be launched as a separate app from Twitter with the ability to watch both live and previously broadcasted mobile video streams. That lack of ephemerality is the first of many differences between Periscope and Meerkat, the livestreaming app that recently launched… Read More

Microsoft is planning to bring its Cortana digital assistant to iOS and Android as a standalone app. While the software maker has previously confirmed Cortana would come to additional operating systems, Reuters reports that the standalone app will be available on phones and tablets running iOS and Android. Microsoft is currently building Cortana into Windows 10, which is set to debut later this year, and it’s likely that the digital assistant will make its way on to Android and iOS alongside its PC expansion.

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Anonymous users from NYPD's IP block have made questionable edits to the Wikipedia entries on high-profile police brutality victims including Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Read the rest

The Mouse House will let it go on

In what could easily compete for Least Shocking News Announcement Of The Year, Disney has made plans to work on a sequel to Frozen official, signalling that the studio isn’t finished exploring the world of Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, Olaf and Sven. You may commence your tirade of “saw that coming!” remarks in 3…2…1… 

John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios and DisneyToon Studios, joined Disney chief Bob Iger to confirm what had long been suspected at a shareholders meeting in San Francisco, with the first film’s co-directors Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee and producer Peter Del Vecho shouldering the task of following up the company’s biggest smash and marketing monolith, with more than $1.2 billion in the bank to date.

This is a marked change from what the directors told Buzzfeed recently. “It’s been in the press that we are doing it, and we would ask each other, ‘Are we?’” Buck said. “They’d have a date and they’d have a cast and it was like, OK…” “It all comes down to the story,” Lee adds. “Like with the short, it was so daunting until we found the story. Then it was all of the things it usually is and we were thinking of every emotion and moment and feeling. I think that’s all we can do. Until we find our way into what’s next, emotionally, it will feel too big. We don’t really know what it’s like to stop for a minute and think about what we want to do next.” Sneaky blighters, the both of them.

 The pair has already re-visited Arendelle for the new short Frozen Fever, which will debut in UK cinemas in front of Cinderella on March 27.

 The real Tony Stark AKA Robert Downey Jr. in conjunction with EnablingTheFuture delivered a real bionic prosthesis to a young fan, Alex, who was born without most of his right arm. The project, led by Albert Manero, aims to make low-cost 3D-printed arms for the disabled and Alex’s looks so much like a real Iron Man arm that even Stark was jealous. It’s wonderful to see these sorts… Read More

8 of History's Greatest Cat Ladies 

26 Discworld Quotes About Life, The Universe, And Everything

Terry Pratchett, a treasure of a writer, a gem of a human being, and a credit to our species, has died, far too soon, at the age of 66. Read the rest

This short documentary is from a three-part series, "Japan's Disposable Workers." Read the rest

 In a report published today, the U.K. parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has called for a new single act of Parliament to govern how domestic spy agencies operate with the aim of improving transparency and public trust. It dubs its report “an important first step towards greater transparency”. Read More

Online security is on everybody's minds these days, so we want to give you updates about various ways Google keeps you safe online. Today, on the web’s birthday, we’re highlighting recent improvements to Safe Browsing, technology that protects more than 1.1 billion people all over the world. -Ed.

As the web continues to evolve, it’s important that user protections develop in lockstep so that people stay safe online. Our Safe Browsing technology may not be quite as old as the web—which celebrates its 26th birthday today—but ever since Safe Browsing launched nearly eight years ago, it’s continually adapted to protect web users, everywhere.
Safe Browsing gives users—both on Google and across on the web—information they need to steer clear of danger. The dangerous sites detected by Safe Browsing generally fall into two categories: sites that attack users intentionally with either malware, phishing, or unwanted software that is deceptive or hard to uninstall, or sites that attack users unintentionally because they have been compromised, often without the site’s owner realizing this has happened.

Once we detect these sites, Safe Browsing warns people about them in a variety of ways. You’ve probably come across a warning like this in Chrome, Firefox or Safari; it’s powered by Safe Browsing:
Today, Safe Browsing shows people more than 5 million warnings per day for all sorts of malicious sites and unwanted software, and discovers more than 50,000 malware sites and more than 90,000 phishing sites every month. If you’re interested, you can see information about the dangerous sites that are detected by this technology anytime in our Safe Browsing Transparency Report.

We also use Safe Browsing technology to warn website owners or operators about issues with their sites so they can quickly fix them. We provide basic site maintenance tips, as well as specific Safe Browsing notifications in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Often site owners don’t realize there are issues with their sites until they get these notifications.

Recent developments
Since its earliest days, Safe Browsing has been widely available, and free—for users, site owners, and other companies—to use and integrate into their own products. In the early days, we focused on detecting dangerous sites and then showing people warnings:


But, just as attacks become more sophisticated, we’ve made sure our own technologies have kept up. Over the years, we’ve built Safe Browsing into other Google products to help protect people in more places:

• Safe Browsing API: We already make Safe Browsing data available for free to developers. This week we’re adding information about sites that host unwanted software, allowing developers to better protect their users as well.
• Chrome: Before people visit a site delivering unwanted software, or try to download some of it, we show them a clear warning.
• Google Analytics: We recently integrated Safe Browsing notifications into Google Analytics, so site owners can quickly take action to protect their users if there are issues with their websites. Previously, we’d only provided these warnings via our Webmaster Tools service.
• Ads: We’ve also recently begun to identify ads that target people with unwanted software.

As the web grows up, Safe Browsing technology will, too. We’re looking forward to protecting the web, and its users, for many birthdays to come.

Posted by Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Safe Browsing Team

Tired of staring at a white screen every time you open a blank tab in Chrome? Google has released a new extension that replaces Chrome's utilitarian new tab screen with classic works of art. The extension can either be set to give you a new artwork each day or a new artwork each time you open a tab, all displayed in a way that covers the entirety of the screen. The results are really nice — at least, so long as you're into the art that Chrome's showing you. That'll include works from van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, and a pretty wide variety of other artists. They're sourced from a number of different museums, all brought together by Google's Cultural Institute, which is something of an online history and art museum. As Engadget points out,...

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Beloved fantasy author Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66, according to a message from his publishers. Best known for the Discworld novels, Pratchett wrote more than 70 books, blending fantasy elements with cutting and human satire. Pratchett was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Alzheimer's Disease in 2007, and had struggled publicly with the disease for years while continuing to write and publish. "The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds," said Larry Finlay, who worked with Pratchett at Finlay Publishers. "My sympathies go out to Terry's wife Lyn, their daughter Rhianna, to his close friend Rob Wilkins, and to all closest to him." The family has set up a page for donations in Pratchett's memory, raising funds...

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Michael Geist writes, "Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is fast-tracking a bill that eviscerates privacy protections within the public sector that represents the most significant reduction in public sector privacy protection in Canadian history -- he' blocking the Privacy Commissioner of Canada from appearing as a witness at the committee studying the bill." Read the rest

 In a move that will bring a nostalgic smile to some British kids (and teachers) of the 80s, the BBC has announced that it is to produce a new educational mini-computer — codenamed the ‘Micro Bit’, a play on the broadcaster’s original ‘BBC Micro‘ computer — and will give away 1 million devices to British school kids aged 11. It will be distributed… Read More

The Myakka Pines Golf Course in Englewood, Florida is home to massive alligators. This one is apparently 12 to 13 feet long. Read the rest

 Steam now boasts more than 1,000 gaming titles for Linux, and therefore, SteamOS. Everything from indie games to AAA titles are available from the service. Best yet, even more titles are regularly popping up, with 14 games launching this week alone. Read More

Eyefi is releasing a new Wi-Fi-enabled SD card today that's meant to make transferring RAW photos from a card to a computer more convenient for photographers. The new card is called the Mobi Pro, and it'll be the first in Eyefi's Mobi line that's capable of handling RAW files and connecting to local Wi-Fi networks. Earlier Eyefi cards were also capable of those feats, but Eyefi is now bringing those abilities to the Mobi line, which is supposed to be easier to set up than its other cards.

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An inquiry by the UK government into the bulk interception of communications data has cleared the country's spy agencies of wrong-doing. The report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said that the UK's spies "do not seek to circumvent the law," and that their activities do not constitute "blanket surveillance" or "indiscriminate surveillance." However, the report condemns the legal framework surrounding digital surveillance in the UK, saying it is "unnecessarily complicated and – crucially – lacks transparency."

"The current, overly complicated, legislation."

The inquiry by the ISC was launched in 2013 after leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of online surveillance by both the US and UK. "In...

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