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I do the same thing!

 The U.K. government’s latest crack down on terrorism is once again focusing on the digital sphere, with Prime Minister David Cameron announcing that major Internet companies have agreed to do more to tackle terrorist and extremist material online — by “introducing stricter filters, increased industry standards and better reporting mechanisms”. Read More

How cats became domesticated

 Kindle has a new update rolling out to its Kindle e-reader device hardware, which includes new features for the latest Kindle, Kindle Voyage and Kindle Paperwhite devices. The update includes the new Word Wise feature that automatically shows definitions to difficult words above the within text on compatible titles, as well as Family Library, which lets you access not only your own books, but… Read More

Creating an original image can sometimes be challenging. One of the best ways to do it is to change up your camera angle or perspective. Getting up high and looking down is one method, another is crawling around in the dirt to get a worm’s eye view. As you can imagine the name comes from approximating the view a worm would have from his angle on the ground.

Being low to the ground will set your images apart because the average person doesn’t see that way, or take photos from down there. It can also mean looking straight up. Here are some worm’s eye view images to give you some ideas:

The post A Collection of Low to the Ground Images by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.

Behold the incredible cuteness of this newborn pangolin (aka scaly anteater) at the Taipei Zoo. Video below. (more…)

 Hot off of their Haxlr8r demo day presentation last week, hardware startup Prynt was nice enough to drop by TechCrunch HQ to show off the latest prototypes of their smartphones cases, which contain built-in printers so you can instantly get a copy of that selfie with your best friends. Read More

Developer Koushik Dutta, Koush for short, is well known around these parts for any number of apps. There's the ClockworkMod ROM Manager. There's AllCast. And if you want to back up specific apps and the data that goes with them, there's Helium (formerly known as Carbon).

Helium scratches a real itch for the platform. If you purchase a new device or wipe an old one, Google can re-install your previous apps, but it usually won't pull down your settings or game saves.

Koush's New Helium Chrome App Lets You Back Up And Restore Android Apps And Data Without Root, Even On Linux And Chrome OS was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

XKCD celebrated the Rosetta comet mission in style, with a 142-frame flipbook that updated in realtime as the Philae lander made contact with 67P (you can browse the frames here).

It’s been almost a year since Hotfile was defeated by the MPAA, but the case hasn’t yet gone away completely.

Earlier this year the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the court to unseal documents regarding the workings of Warner Bros.’ anti-piracy tools.

These documents are part of the counterclaim Hotfile filed, where it accused Warner of repeatedly abusing the DMCA takedown process. In particular, the EFF wants the public to know what mistakes were made and how these came to be.

In September the Court ruled that the sealed documents should indeed be made public, and the first information was released soon after. Among other things the unsealed records showed that Warner Bros. uses “sophisticated robots” to track down infringing content.

This week the MPAA submitted its proposed schedule (pdf) for the release of the other documents. With regards to Warner’s anti-piracy system they propose a wait of at least 18 months before more information is unsealed. By then Warner will have changed its systems significantly so that the information can no longer be used by pirates to circumvent detection.

In the case of Columbia Pictures, however, things are more complicated. The sealed information of the Sony Pictures owned studio would still be beneficial to pirates for decades to come, the court is told.

“Defendants have cited two specific pieces of information regarding Columbia’s enforcement policies that, if revealed to the public, could compromise Columbia’s ability to protect its copyrighted works,” the MPAA’s lawyers write.

In a sworn declaration Sony Pictures’ Vice President Content Protection, Sean Jaquez, explains that the redacted documents describe broad policy decisions regarding online copyright enforcement that are unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

“Columbia intends to continue to implement these confidential copyright enforcement policies indefinitely,” Jaquez writes.

“These confidential enforcement policies will not become less sensitive over time because they reflect broad policy judgments, rather than specific implementation features of Columbia’s anti-piracy enforcement system that are likely to change as technology evolves or time passes,” he adds.

To keep these secrets out of the public eye, the MPAA asks the court to keep the records relating to Columbia Pictures under seal indefinitely. If that’s too much, the information should remain secret for at least ten years.

It’s now up to Judge Williams to decide whether the proposed timeframes are reasonable and whether Columbia can keep its anti-piracy secrets locked up forever.

To be continued.

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

 BlackBerry is rolling out a number of new enterprise-focused features and partnerships today, which is a sign that CEO John Chen is on the right track when it comes to effecting a workable turnaround for the beleaguered Canadian tech firm. Part of that is a new feature for BBM which should prove popular with enterprise users of the mobile messaging solution: BBM Meetings. The Meetings feature… Read More

 Facebook has a new update to its privacy policies, as well as its terms and conditions for users. This time around, it’s continuing its trend of trying to lessen the impact of these changes by introducing a new Privacy Basics feature that essentially acts as an introductory tutorial to the privacy controls it puts in the hands of users on the site. Privacy Basics includes a FAQ about… Read More

 A few weeks ago I managed to get my hands on Google’s new app, Inbox. So far I love it, but it is not quite ready to be my go-to email app for a few reasons. But first, let’s start off with the good. The UI is faster and smoother than the standard Gmail app. It is also more one hand friendly, a feature that will be needed if you are rocking the Nexus 6 monstrosity. Read More

Each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning. By David McRaney Read the rest

Zen is both a practice and a philosophy. The word itself, translated as "meditative state," suggests focus, calm, and simplicity. That makes Zen-themed images perfect for your desktop background when you're getting into the zone.

Remember, we're now requesting your participation in the Wallpaper Wednesday series! You'll find a selection here, but post your favorites for this week's topic in the discussions below. Stick to our format as best you can, including a title, the image, resolution, and a link. Happy wallpapering!

Zen Garden

Download This Wallpaper (1148x718) | Japanese Wallpapers

Tea

Download This Wallpaper (2967x1853) | Miscellaneous Hi

Between Sky and Sea

Download This Wallpaper (1600x1200, 2560x1600) | deviantArt

Zen Attitude

Download This Wallpaper (1600x1200) | Wallpaper Here

Zen (Dual Monitor)

Download This Wallpaper (3840x1200) | deviantArt

Flowers

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1200) | HD Wallsource

Enso ("Circle") Wallpaper Pack

Download These Wallpapers (1920x1080) | deviantArt

Meditating Cat

Download This Wallpaper (1920x1080) | The Paper Wall

Title photo from HD Wallsource.

Many of us have been told that writing things down can help us learn more effectively, but learning and remembering aren't always the same thing. Your notes can actually act like a crutch, and when they're gone, you might find you don't remember anything at all.

A recent study from Michelle Eskritt and Sierra Ma at Mount St. Vincent University—published in the journal Memory & Cognition—suggests that when you take notes, your brain can intentionally forget because it knows that you've written the information down and stored it elsewhere. During the study, participants were asked to play the memory game Concentration over and over. The catch was that one group was allowed to take notes during the game. Halfway through the game, however, that same group got their notes taken away. When it was all done, the group that was not allowed to use notes performed significantly better.

Human memory isn't always that great, but when your brain knows it doesn't need to memorize something, it won't. So the next time your studying or taking notes, be sure to take the time and really go over the information.

Intentional forgetting: Note-taking as a naturalistic example | The Journal Memory & Cognition via Wired Brain Watch

Photo by Jacob Botter.

A few more shots of Cap and co...

Following the trailer that Marvel had to rush out ahead of schedule following its leaking online a couple of weeks ago, an extended promo for Avengers: Age Of Ultron has now arrived, featuring a few – though you may want to stop blinking lest you miss some of them – new shots.

Yes, you can take the "extended" label with a healthy pinch of salt as there’s not a lot that’s fresh to be found here: some extra line readings, a shot of Iron Man in action, a little more from the Hulk vs. Hulkbuster scene and a moment where Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is shown a graphic of Loki’s staff among them.

For the three people who don’t yet know, Age Of Ultron finds Tony Stark trying his hand at creating an international peacekeeping force of droids controlled by the self-aware A.I., Ultron. While his idea is to supplement the Avengers and let his super-powered comrades enjoy some much-needed time off, he ends up causing them more trouble than anticipated. And that’s before two new powered types - Wanda 'Scarlet Witch' Maximoff and Pietro "Quicksilver” Maximoff show up...

The film, which once more boasts Joss Whedon’s writing and directorial touch, stars Johansson, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, Chris Hemsworth, Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders back together again alongside an array of new and old friends including James Spader (as Ultron, via performance capture), Paul Bettany, Don Cheadle, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Andy Serkis and Thomas Kretschmann. It’ll be out in the UK on April 24 next year.

We all live across multiple screens as our gaze hops from our phones to our laptops and to our tablets. How do you keep yourself in order when your digital life is sprawled about like paperwork in a messy office? Pushbullet is working towards an answer.

In its simplest form Pushbullet acts as a relay between your desktop and phone, so you can receive text messages and other notifications on your desktop—or push data to your phone. Of course, this sort of functionality is baked in to some newer operating systems, but Pushbullet is aiming to bridge any device and OS.

It began as a side project from Ryan Oldenburg in 2012, and launched the following year to a welcome reception from Android users who were looking for better ways to relay information between devices. We caught up with Ryan to learn more about why the project started and what he has in mind for its future.

Where did the idea for the app come from? Were you trying to solve a problem you'd experienced, or did the inspiration come from somewhere else?

Ryan Oldenburg: I got started on Pushbullet because of the pain I felt trying to send stuff between my phone and computer. I'd literally end up emailing myself links and files just to get them from one to the other. I know almost everyone still does, too, which is funny in a depressing kind of way. Pushbullet started as an easier and faster way to move links and files between devices.

The way Pushbullet could actually achieve this hit me when Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) came out. Jelly Bean added support for rich notifications, which let you see content within a notification, and even have buttons. When I saw that this let me read my email (and even archive them) without opening the Gmail app, it became obvious to me that the notification tray was now the most useful part of my phone.

Near the same time, I'd tried Google's Chrome to Phone extension and thought it was really cool. The extension lets you instantly send a webpage into the notification tray on your phone. Google abandoned the project as just a tech demo, but I knew there was a huge amount of potential to the concept of instant transfers combined with a notification for super easy access.

After making link and file transfers between devices dead simple, I realized that the system for sharing information between devices that we'd built had a ton of other potential uses. The first feature we added next enabled people to see and dismiss notifications from their phone while on their computer.

Being able to see and dismiss my phone's notifications on my computer came 100 percent out of personal desire. Not having to grab my phone all the time while working at my computer is both incredibly convenient and also essentially "how things should work." The fact that I got an email isn't meant for just my phone—it's meant for me. I should see this notification on all of my digital devices and should only need to dismiss it once, too. This seems obvious, but before we built it, this didn't exist.

After you came up with the idea, what was the next step?

Getting started building.

I started working on Pushbullet as a side project while working full time at Hipmunk. First I decided on the functionality I'd need to have in the first version to prove that I wasn't the only one that would want this app (I started with simple link transfers), and then I got to work over the holidays building the Android app, website, and backend.

How did you choose which platforms to target and which to ignore or wait on?

I started on Android because I'd been an Android developer for a few years, which made this choice an easy one.

What was your biggest roadblock and how did you overcome it?

My biggest roadblock was probably just getting all of the pieces working together and into a shippable state. This was difficult since, as I said, Pushbullet started as a side project. It's not easy to work full time and then spend all of your free time on a side project. I think a countdown starts when you begin a side project: you need to get your first release out in time or you'll run out of steam.

For me, while I was confident on Android, I hadn't built a backend nor a website in years. And when I had, it was on top of an existing system. Getting everything working from nothing, including the front-end design, the database, servers, the authentication system, the sign-up email—even deciding the app name and colors—it all adds up fast and can get overwhelming for one person.

What was launch like for you?

Pushbullet's launch was actually quite successful. I think we got lucky in that, but I'm certainly not complaining.

I released Pushbullet on a Sunday so I'd be off of work and able to focus on whatever happened.

Launching consisted of just submitting the launch blog post to Reddit's Android community and to Hacker News. Both of the submissions are linked to at the bottom of the post.

While Hacker News was somewhat receptive, Reddit's Android community reacted extremely enthusiastically, which was awesome. Based on their feedback, I rushed out a Chrome extension to Pushbullet the next week.

From there, Pushbullet hit 15,000 users in just those two weeks. You can imagine how excited I was, and we've basically been at it since.

How do you handle user requests and criticisms effectively?

Handling user requests and criticism well for us is largely about seeing the feedback and being seen responding to it. We get a lot of our feedback in public, so we respond in public as well.

This includes the Android subreddit and our own subreddit, our Google+ page and beta community, as well as the comments on our blog posts and any posts written by the media about us.

We read all of these posts and the comments on them, and try to reply to a large amount of them every time. As a result, we've earned a reputation for being responsive and accessible. This reputation has earned us a lot of good will and made people more willing to give us feedback. This is a great benefit considering how critical great feedback is to continuing to grow.

Now, how do you split time between developing new features and managing existing ones?

I believe there are few things more annoying than software that isn't reliable. This means we focus on squishing bugs as soon as we hear about them.

It does take time, but by staying on top of them so the bug list never gets out of control, it really doesn't take that much time. It's also how Pushbullet has earned it's status as one of the best reviewed and most reliable apps out there.

Developing new features is what we spend most of our time working on. New features, however, isn't quite how I'd describe it. I consider most of what we work on to be "missing features"—meaning things that we should obviously add but just haven't been able to build yet.

Our focus on filling the gaps in our functionality instead of "new tricks" means we've avoided losing focus and our app just "getting bigger." Instead, Pushbullet is always actually getting better.

I've noticed you tend to release new features as you develop them, rather than doing sporadic but larger revisions to the app. Are fast iterations something you prioritize?

Iterating on ideas and getting things out fast is a sort of classic piece of advice given these days. I believe it is definitely correct as well. Though many people believe the reason to do so lies in being able to quickly respond to feedback and improve the product, I'd say the reasoning for us is a bit more complex:

First, it feels good to have a real momentum behind you. It keeps us pushing forward and keeps our users excited to hear about the next update too, because they know it's coming.

It also means we avoid having those really scary launches where everything has changed and you just sort of pray it goes alright. These can be seriously demotivating.

Not getting locked into a giant release also means we can respond to feedback or fix bugs fast. Not "fast" as in weeks or months—I mean fast as in hours or days, depending on what we're talking about.

When it comes down to it, our experience as developers has taught us that releasing often is simply better for our motivation and energy. When things slow down, basically everything gets worse.

What do you picture Pushbullet being like a few years from now?

Everyone is only going to have more devices in their lives over the next few years. Phones, tablets, and computers continue to become more ubiquitous. This means Pushbullet's opportunity to save people time and enable unique and convenient functionality only gets more exciting going forward.

What advice would you give to others that want to take on a similar project?

Pushbullet has grown into a quite large piece of software that, in many ways, seems deceptively simple. If I'd started working on it with both the ambition to build what it is today and the stubbornness to require that all our current features were included very first version, however, Pushbullet wouldn't exist. So many great ideas never make it out into the world because the person working on it doesn't get the project to a release before stopping.

If you're really excited about a project, the best way to make it to the finish line is to keep it simple at first. There is always some single element you can distill your app or service down to. Get that most basic value-add released and feel what the real world thinks of it as soon as you can. It's great to grow from there.

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Every other Wednesday, Behind the App gives an inside look at how some of our favorite apps came to be—from idea to launch (and beyond). Have someone you'd like to see featured? Email Andy.

One of Gravity's most impressive feats was its attempt to replicate the silence of space and only present sounds that astronauts might actually hear. But if Gravity still wasn't silent enough for you, a new version of the film that's being presented on an upcoming Blu-ray release might just work. The Film Stage reports that a "Silent Space Version" of Gravity will rip out the film's score to create what Warner Bros. is calling "a surprising cinematic experiment."

There should still be plenty of sound between the dialog and the destruction whizzing by the astronauts, but the score-free version of the movie ought to create a striking result nonetheless. For as much as people have enjoyed the film's score, it also, to some extent, detracts...

Continue reading…

After spending months on revisions, YouTube confirmed today that it will launch a paid subscription service that lets users stream high-quality, ad-free music and music videos. The service, which launches next week in invite-only beta, is to be called YouTube Music Key. "Artists and fans have made YouTube the biggest music service in the world," says Christophe Muller, YouTube’s director of global music partnerships. "We want to continue to make YouTube the best place for artists and fans to connect."

Continue reading…

The world will never be the same

Some promos for sequels like to lay the groundwork so that newcomers can figure out the basic elements. This first teaser for The Divergent Series: Insurgent (yes, that’s really what they’re calling it) instead takes a surreal moment from the story out of context and runs – well, runs, jumps and clings to a rope attached to a floating chunk of a building – with it. 

In case you’re feeling a little lost after that odd first look, allow us to fill in the basics. Insurgent, based on Veronica Roth’s second novel, finds Shailene Woodley’s heroine Tris on the run in future Chicago as she and Four (Theo James) evade the power-hungry Erudite leader Jeanine (Kate Winslet). They’ll have to track down what Tris’s family gave their lives to protect, and Tris must face up to her choices as she unlocks the truth about the past and the future of their world. So, you know, just an average day for her since she embraced her Divergent destiny. {Divergent: Insurgent Character Posters}

With Robert Schwentke directing this time out, and Octavia Spencer, Jai Courtney, Ray Stevenson, Zoë Kravitz, Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Maggie Q, Mekhi Phifer and Naomi Watts all aboard, The Divergent Series: Insurgent lands on March 20 next year.

Ever since 2013, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation started shaming email providers that did not encrypt their customers' email, more and more mail providers have turned on STARTTLS, which protects email in transit from snooping, without requiring users to take any additional steps. Read the rest

 Tailio wants to turn your bog-standard cat litter box into something smart enough to keep tabs on your pet’s health, by adding Wi-Fi plus various sensors and linking the device to a notification app. Read More

Kevin Kelly says: "The Nakasendo is an old road in Japan that connects Kyoto to Tokyo. It was once a major foot highway, but today small sections retain some of its historical feel.

Read the rest