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PayPal, the eBay-owned online payments platform that made up some 40% of its $16 billion in revenues in 2013, has turned on a redesigned website -- it's biggest attempt yet at putting a contemporary, simplified face on one of the older services on the web (founded: 1998); and to introduce users to some of the newer features it's hoping will take off, such as mobile and physical store payments. Read More

Faced with a Pirate Bay website that simply refused to die, in 2010 Hollywood-linked anti-piracy group BREIN decided to take a different approach to the problem. If The Pirate Bay wouldn’t disconnect itself from the Internet, BREIN would force ISPs to disconnect their customers from the site instead.

The initial action, against Ziggo, the Netherlands’ largest ISP, soon encompassed another. XS4ALL decided the case was too important to stay out of and joined its rival to fight against BREIN. The case took many twists and turns, with victory first for the ISPs, then for BREIN. Refusing to give in, the ISPs fought back and in January The Court of The Hague delivered a huge blow.

That ruling, which deemed that ISPs did not have to block their subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay, threw BREIN’s whole strategy into turmoil. With no ruling against Ziggo and XS4ALL, BREIN would be unable to get any kind of victory against KPN, UPC and Tele2, the other ISPs the anti-piracy group had unfinished legal business with.

Things soon started to unravel. Within days UPC said it had lifted its Pirate Bay blockade and KPN and Tele2 quickly followed. Agreement with BREIN had been reached in private, with most other details unavailable.

Now, in a fresh announcement, it’s clear that BREIN will back away from all legal action against ISPs pending the Supreme Court ruling it seeks against Ziggo and XS4ALL.

“BREIN has laid the case against the other providers to rest in anticipation of the outcome at the Supreme Court,” said BREIN lawyer Joris van Manen. “The ISPs have a golden rule that they will only block under judicial coercion. BREIN, however, is reasonable.”

While the ISPs will be breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of around 18 months respite from legal action, they aren’t the only ones in the clear. BREIN says that it will also end hostilities against Pirate Bay proxies. These services, including Kuiken.co and one operated by the Pirate Party, worked hard to circumvent the now-defunct ISP blockades but were attacked for their actions.

“We’re not Don Quixote,” van Manen told Webwereld. “If there is no blockage of the Pirate Bay any more then a proxy makes little sense, and also any lawsuit against one.”

The fact that BREIN feels it has no legal basis to force proxies into compliance is very interesting. Earlier this week the anti-piracy group said it had killed in excess of 200 such sites in 2013.

Whether any will now return to their former glory remains to be seen but given that their services aren’t just of use to Dutch citizens (proxies are also very useful to Internet users in the UK) some are likely to restart their engines to operate legally from the Netherlands – at least until the Supreme Court ruling, that is.

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

Tumblr today added a new audio posting feature that lets you dial a toll-free number with your phone in order to post a short recording directly to your blog. We nearly missed the news of the addition because, in typical Tumblr fashion, the company doesn’t exactly describe the feature in detail on its blog. In fact, the post only reads, “Operators are standing by. Call now!”and… Read More

A little-known part of Star Wars history is Black Angel, a 25-minute film that tells the story of a medieval knight returning home from the Crusades and discovering a strange land instead. It was the directorial debut of Roger Christian, who designed the sets on the first Star Wars film, and was given a small budget by George Lucas to create the short film, which was later shown to audiences before Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in Europe and Australia.

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Our good pal Brandon "Offworld" Boyer has cancer. Lucky for Brandon, he signed up for medical insurance with Humana not long before he was diagnosed. Unlucky for him, Humana has decided unilaterally not to cover his cancer treatments and has stuck him with with a $100,000 bill. He's raising money from the Internet to help pay for his life-saving treatments. I'm in for $100. If you're thinking of getting insured, be warned: Humana will screw you and screw you and screw you.

It wasn't until a few weeks ago when the formal denial letter came through that the gravity of the situation really hit home: because I hadn't lied when I saw my first doctor -- because I'd told them that I'd had stomachaches at any point in the past five years, whether or not I'd gone to a doctor for it -- I'd fallen under a fine-print pre-existing condition clause that said that any signs of illness that could possibly have led a doctor to a diagnosis since 2008 were cause for denying any compensation for any ailment of pretty much my entire alimentary canal.

Patient Advocate took a look at the letter and were super candid: the chances for a successful appeal were basically zero.

When I tell people this, their first reaction is always: I don't get it, didn't this just get fixed with the new Health Insurance Marketplace? And it did, and it's maybe the single most important part of the initiative, but it only covers anything from January 2014 on, and I had the misfortune of being self-employed & sick in America in 2013.

Brandon Boyer Cancer Treatment Relief (via Waxy)

The wait is over Android fans — the Pebble Appstore (2.0.12) is now officially available in Google Play. That means you can get all of the goodies that came along in the update including the appstore, watchapp locker, revamped UI and more. Of course this means you'll get a firmware update for your Pebble or Pebble Steel to go along with it.

After installing the app you'll be prompted to update your Pebble watch to the latest firmware as well so you can take advantage of all the fun new features. This one has had a long run in beta form, and even though it's now official, there is still some tweaking to be done to get things up to 100%.

So if you're using Android, head over to Google Play from the link below to grab the update.

Download the Pebble Appstore from Google Play

Despite the silly name, Samsung's Milk Music service seems like a handy thing to have. It offers unlimited ad-free streaming of hundreds of music stations with the ability to create and refine your own stations. However, it's only for Samsung phones. If you have root access, there's a way around that and it's not even very hard.

  

You're going to need a capable file manager with root support. Total Commander is good, as is Root Explorer.

• Good News, Everyone: Trick The Netflix App Into Thinking Your Rooted Device Is Supported
• [Creamy] Samsung Announces Milk Music, A Free Streaming Music Service Exclusively For Samsung Phones (US Only)
• Hands-On With Samsung Milk: Music Made Refreshingly Simple... And Creamy [Video]
• Samsung Galaxy S4's Enormous 1.5GB System Dump Leaked And Ready For Download [Updated]

How To Use Samsung's New Milk Music Streaming Service On A Non-Samsung Device (Root-Only) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has submitted written testimony [PDF] to an EU committee investigating mass surveillance. Glyn Moody's Techdirt post gives a great tl;dr summary of the document, but you should really read it for yourself. It's ten single-spaced pages, but Snowden turns out to be an extremely talented writer who beautifully lays out his arguments, managing the trick of being dispassionate while simultaneously conveying the import of his subject matter.

Snowden makes the point that his testimony doesn't disclose anything that the press hasn't already published, but there's been so much that it's worth reviewing some of it. He directs our attention to something I'd missed: the NSA's Foreign Affairs Division (FAD) spends an extraordinary amount of time lobbying EU nations (and other countries) to change their laws so that the NSA can legally spy on everyone in the country. What's more, they cook these deals -- for example, they'll get German permission to listen in on everything by non-Germans and get a Danish deal that covers all the non-Danes, but since the Internet backbones traverse both countries, they can spy on Germans in Denmark and Danes in Germany. As Snowden says, "The surest way for any nation to become subject to unnecessary surveillance is to allow its spies to dictate its policy."

Snowden also reveals that before he blew the whistle on the NSA, he "reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them." He says that he'd love EU asylum, but doesn't expect any country to have the backbone to stand up to the USA. And he is admirably unequivocal on his relationship with China and Russia: "I have no relationship with either government."

He reaffirms that good crypto is proof against spies, and describes his relationship with Russia's spooks:

Of course. Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: that's their job.

But I didn't take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I'm sure they were disappointed, it doesn't take long for an intelligence service to realize when they're out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly fearless journalist [WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison] with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high.

EU Testimony of Edward Snowden [PDF]

Lisa T. McElroy is a law professor who's spending a year at the University of Denver with her two kids, one in high school and one in middle school. She learned that she could opt her kids out of the standardized tests the school administered. So she did. What followed was a total educational freakout, as the principal, vice-principal and administration alternately cajoled and guilted her over her kids' non-participation in pedagogically suspect, meaningless, destructive high-stakes testing.

McElroy's story is a snapshot of an educational system in the process of implosion, driven by the ridiculous idea that schools are factories whose product is educated kids, and whose employees must be made "accountable" by measuring anything we can put a number on -- attendance and test-scores -- at the expense of actual educational outcomes.

Despite the fact that the best-performing educational systems in the world don't treat teachers as assembly line workers and kids as standardized injection molds to be squirted full of learning, the west continues to pursue this approach, scapegoating teachers' unions and pitting parents against them when the real enemy is the doomed idea that schools are a specialized kind of industrial plant -- and the project of selling off public schools to privatized educational corporations that collect public funds to educate kids, but only to the extent that this can be done without undermining their shareholders' interests.

When I answered that I very much appreciated her call but was going to stick by my decision, she offered several reasons why my daughter should take the test. First, taking TCAP (Transitional Colorado Assessment Program, the relatively new set of state standardized tests) would help my daughter on the ACT. Huh. Given that she’s only in seventh grade, I wasn’t buying that one. The principal then said that the test would show us how our daughter was doing academically. But we get a report card every six weeks, and we can follow her progress in real time through an online school portal that lists her grade on every assignment, so we’re all set in that regard. One more try. The test results, she said, reward teachers by showing them that they are doing a good job. My reaction: And seeing their students’ progress doesn’t?

But when the lawyer in me started pushing back, pointing out to the principal that none of her arguments was especially convincing, I got nowhere. Including off the phone. The principal kept going on. And on. And on. My daughter really should take it. She was the only child in the entire school who was opting out. She might feel weird, being different from all the other kids.

I Opted My Kids Out of Standardized Tests [Lisa T. McElroy/Slate]

(via Hacker News)

Amazon has managed to snatch another minor victory in its back-and-forth battle over streaming rights with Netflix. The company has signed a licensing agreement with BBC America that will make Amazon Prime Instant Video the exclusive "online-only subscription home" for Orphan Black. The show's first season is now available, with the sci-fi series due to return for new episodes on April 19th. Orphan Black follows the story of Sarah Manning, an orphan who discovers she is a human clone "after taking on the identity of a dead woman who looks just like her." Lead actress Tatiana Maslany has received critical praise for her role in the show, including a Golden Globe nomination. The deal between BBC America and Amazon includes season one and...

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Samsung is doing something unusual for the company – focusing on mobile software design, with a new product out today called Milk Music. It’s a streaming radio app, with free (and ad-free) streaming of tracks in the U.S. that’s available via Google Play to owners of Galaxy smartphones, including the Galaxy S4, Galaxy SIII, Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Mega and Galaxy S4… Read More

Popular Canadian comedy series Trailer Park Boys is being revived for two more seasons, and you'll only be able to watch them on Netflix. The show originally ended after seven seasons in 2007, but fans will be able to stream new episodes beginning this year. Ten new episodes will come to Netflix before the end of 2014, along with all previous seasons of the show (where they aren't already available), three standalone specials, and two full-length films. The deal includes all of Netflix's current markets, meaning subscribers in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, the Nordics, and Latin America will be able to stream Trailer Park Boys for the first time starting March 31st. (New episodes will arrive at a later date.)

The shift to online...

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I've written a guest editorial for the new Guardian Cities site about the way that the offices that house the startups of London's famed "Silicon Roundabout" are being systematically demolished by developers who are put up cheap, high-rise private student housing to take advantage of a foreign-student bubble.

(Note: this went up briefly last week by accident and came down again, apologies if you see this twice)

Within months of the unveiling of Silicon Way, Hackney council approved the demolition of all of the small office spaces in its vicinity: a two-square-block razing that saw Berg, Last.fm and all those other plucky startups chucked out on their ears. Berg's new offices – a tumbledown building slated for demolition at the end of 2014 – are strictly temporary, and they say they're fearful they'll be priced out of Shoreditch for their next move. Last.fm has already left the neighbourhood altogether.

The social media startup in the pub is also long gone – the freeholder, Truman Brewery, got fed up with not selling any beer there, and invoked the lease clause that requires the space to be tenanted by someone who'll sell their products. But almost immediately, they sold out to a property developer who boarded up the windows and moved in "live-in guardians".

Live-in guardians and builders are the two growth industries in Silicon Roundabout these days. Hackney council's planning department is quick to hand out permission to large developers with ambitious high-rise plans, and rumours circulate among planning consultants and architects about the supposed revolving door between jobs in planning and developers' offices.

How startups of Silicon Roundabout are gradually being flattened

On Hackaday, Shenzhen demonstrates some proof-of-concept "taser-proof clothing" created by adding carbon fiber to the clothes' lining. The carbon fiber textile can be procured in a variety of forms, including upholstery fabric (58" wide, $19.50/yard) and peel-and-stick 50cm tape rolls. Shenzhen claims this will work even if the taser's prongs get to the wearer's body: "Electric current flows through the carbon tape and not through the human body. Always. Even if the taser's needle pierced the skin."

Homemade carbon tape Taser-proof clothing (via Sean Bonner)

In this International Labour Office complaint, Miranda Brown, a former employee of the World Intellectual Property Agency, alleges that WIPO Director General Francis Gurry illegally collected DNA samples from WIPO staffers in order to out a whistleblower. The complaint stems from Gurry's campaign to secure the Director General's job, during which an anonymous staffer posted letters alleging that Gurry engaged in sexual harassment and financial improprieties. Brown, who was forced to resign, says that Gurry secretly directed UN security officers to covertly collect lipstick, dental floss, and other personal items from WIPO staffers in order to attain DNA samples that could be used to identify the letters' author. Gurry is also implicated in a multi-million dollar construction scandal over the building of the new WIPO HQ, which took place when he was legal counsel to the agency.

The entire affair is incredibly sordid, with multiple cover-ups. The complaint paints a picture of a reign of absolute terror, with staffers fearful of reprisals from Gurry over any questioning or reporting of a pattern of bullying, impropriety, harassment and defamation. Having served as a delegate to WIPO, I find it all rather easy to believe. I have never encountered a body more openly corrupt in my life.

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR OFFICE ADMINISTRATIVE TRIBUNAL [PDF]

via Copyfight)

(Image: HL Dialogue No 3, ICT Innovations and Standards, a CC-BY image from itupictures)

Welcome back to Android Gaming Weekly, our weekly recap of new game releases. We still plan to cover upcoming releases and games we’re playing, but this column is dedicated to new games that you can start playing right now. Check out our top picks and let us know in the comments section if you have any suggestions for next week’s post.

Frontline Commando 2

Description: Let the bullets fly in the sequel to the popular third-person shooter, Frontline Commando! Betrayed and left for dead on the battlefield, you must build your team of mercenaries and exact a war of revenge against your enemies.

 

Smash Hit

Description: Take a surreal journey through an otherworldly dimension, move in harmony with sound and music and smash everything in your path! This experience requires focus, concentration and timing to not only travel as far as you can, but also break the beautiful glass objects that stand in your way.

 

QuizUp

Description: Join over 10 million people who play and love QuizUp! Challenge your friends and connect with other players around the world in the largest real-time trivia game ever. Go head to head with over 200,000 questions in over 400 topics, ranging from your favorite TV shows and books to sports and music. New topics are added every week, so QuizUp will surely test your knowledge while keeping you entertained for hours on end!

 

Swordigo

Description: Run, jump and fight your way through a vast world to defeat the spreading corruption. Explore a magical realm of dungeons, towns, treasures and devious monsters. Gain experience and level up your character.

 

Caveboy Escape

Description: Caveboy Escape offers innovative puzzle gameplay, utilizing subtle match-3 and connecting tile gameplay that feels fresh and will tickle puzzle gamers’ brains. It takes a keen eye and quick thinking to navigate Caveboy to the exit. Finding the right path will be a challenge as the size of the labyrinth continues to grow. Time is also of the essence as Caveboy must reach the exit or the maze will collapse.

 

Royal Revolt 2

Description: Defend your castle and build a deadly maze for your enemies. Explore and conquer the kingdoms of your friends and foes in this brilliant sequel. Overthrow the royals on your way to the top, but be aware of your own enemies, your Highness – there’s a royal revolt going on!!!

 

RPG Rusted Emeth

Description: Jink makes his living riding Golems, battle weapons operating on ‘”Edea,” to hunt down Bounty Targets in the Commune of Bista. Attempting to track down the truth about the mysterious “Edea Banishes” that destroyed his hometown, one day he meets Nao, a young woman who claims to be a researcher of Edea with the knowledge of who is responsible for causing the Edea Banishes.

 

Tales of Illyria EP2

Description:  Tales of Illyria: Beyond the Iron wall is the second episode in the Tales of Illyria series. Episode Two thrusts you into the role of Kepri bint’Kaman, a priestress dedicated to the protection of the Iron Wall that defends Vasena from the rest of the world. When enemies come to destroy the wall, she must gather an army of allies and bring the fight to them in a game filled with critical choices. Explore a vast world of mythical djinn, sandworms, lamias, the arcane undead and much more!

 

Foxtrot!

Description: You are Neville the fox and your cubs are hungry for eggs! You must find keys, open doors, defeat enemies and GET EGGS! Using a simple and elegant control system, you will need all your all your platform-hopping and puzzle-solving skills to collect all the eggs in over 30 gorgeous and fiendishly hard levels. There are Boss Fights! There are Speed Runs!

 

Lightomania

Description: Immerse yourself in the ultimate gaming experience while playing this thrilling puzzle game. Don’t miss a chance to try a new combination of addictive gameplay, comical style and challenging tasks. Meet two adorable fuzzy thieves, who are addicted to the light and steal all bulbs on their way.

 

Facebook has gone through many iterations, and some growing pains, in its quest to find a happy balance between an interface that people love to use, and that will serve the best business purpose for ad-funded the social network. Starting today, Facebook will be embarking on another chapter in that story, with the rollout of a new look for its News Feed -- announced last year but never launched. Read More

Outside of select government and military applications, on demand satellite imagery and video is still little more than a dream. But a few startups are working on tackling that problem, and we're getting to see the first fruits of their labor. SkyBox Imaging has released a video showing off its satellite assets, including incredible video footage of the world from far above. The clip below of Beijing's Capital International Airport is stitched in with Google Earth-like still satellite imagery. The result is an exciting peek at what future mapping service could look like with live HD video footage of the entire earth.

If you don't find the final product truly impressive, it may be because movies like Black Hawk Down have made such video...

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Has it really been two years already? You're getting to be such a grown up app marketplace, Google Play. Google is offering some modest sales to celebrate two years of Google Play (also two years since the Android Market was smothered in its sleep). You'll find an assortment of apps, music, books, and movies, but don't expect amazing deals.

Most of the apps are offering discounts on in-app purchases. Although, you can play as a bugdroid in Badlands now, which it worthy of celebration all by itself.

• Here Are The Google Play Movies, Books, And Music 25 Billion Downloads Promo Sales
• The Play Store's 1-Year Anniversary Sale Has Begun... In Australia - Here Are Some Of The Deals You'll See Tomorrow
• Google Play Store Surpasses 25 Billion App Downloads, Has A $0.25 Sale To Celebrate
• Motorola Now Offering Financing On Phone Purchases – $0 Down And 0% Interest For Up To 18 Months

Google Play's Second Birthday Sale Is Live In The US was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

With Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp last month, mobile messaging apps have taken center stage thanks to the sheer weight of their ever-expanding user bases. Such apps are colossal players in the mobile game, originating everywhere from Silicon Valley in California to Gurgaon, India.

Here are 10 international messaging apps whose worldwide influence is racking up millions of users from across the globe.

Spotify has acquired The Echo Nest, as revealed by an official blog post today. The financial details of the acquisition haven’t been revealed, but The Echo Nest is a self-described “music intelligence company” that does things like determines what recommendations to make to listeners for automatic streaming radio services, and the arrangement will help Spotify gain increased… Read More

February is the shortest month of the year, and it also happens to contain the biggest Android-related tech conference, Mobile World Congress. Between the two of them, you might think we'd be short of good games this month. On the contrary - February has given us one of the better crops of high-quality and diverse Android games we've seen in quite a while. Here's our pick for the top seven, in no particular order, with some honorable mentions thrown in for good measure.

• [New Game] Crescent Moon's Shadow Blade Is An Action-Packed Platformer With Touch Controls You Might Actually Enjoy
• [New Game] First-Person Shooter Neon Shadow From Crescent Moon Games Brings Human On Robot Violence To Android [Update x2]
• [New Game] Pathogen Is The Latest Abstract Strategy Game With Very Few Colors That Will Consume All Of Your Free Time
• [New Game] Pacific Rim Gets A Second Official Android Game: Surprise, It's An Infinity Blade Clone

[Game Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Games Of February 2014 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

It's been a busy month in the Android app world, particularly if you want useful tools or visual tweaks. There's one big app that we're not featuring in this roundup: the Google Now Launcher, AKA the Google Experience Launcher. We're omitting it from the main list because it's only compatible with Nexus and GPE devices - even the few standard Android devices that have been upgraded to KitKat can't play with it unmodified.

• [New App] Project Management Tool Basecamp Comes To Android With An Official App
• [New App] Auto Finder Runs In The Background And Remembers Where You Left The Car So You Don't Have To
• Muzei Extension Roundup Part 2: Google Plus Hashtags, Album Artwork, Dropbox, And More
• [New App] MultiMuze Rotates Your Muzei Extensions Automatically So You Don't Have To Choose

[App Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Apps Of February 2014 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

If you've been craving a game of Trivial Pursuit but can't manage to get your friends together, you may want to check out one of the newest additions to the Play Store. QuizUp is a slick and fast trivia game with a focus on head-to-head multiplayer. The easy matchmaking, varied topics, and impressive presentation have made it a hit on iOS, where's it's maintained a 4.5-star rating.

  

The game is very simple: log in via Google+, Facebook, or email, select a category, and you'll be automatically matched with a random player who's near your skill level.

• Google Opens Official Chromecast Product Forums For All Your Complaining Needs
• [Review] Pirates of the Caribbean: Master of the Seas Will Let You Pillage And Plunder On A Race To Own The Seas
• [New App] Jelly Is A Search Engine Powered By Social Networks, From The Co-Founder Of Twitter
• Google Play Store Game Category Expansion Is A No-Show For February, Support Page Now Says March

[New Game] Popular Head-To-Head Trivia Game QuizUp Lands On Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Android: Every phone comes with built-in alarms, but AlarmPad is a new utility that makes them useful. You can set contextual, personal alerts that show you calendar appointments before and after, the weather at the alarm time, or even recurring alarms that Android's default clock won't let you set.

Android's default clock has alarm features, but if you need to set alarms with greater frequency than it allows, or more sporadic frequency than it allows, you're out of luck. AlarmPad lets you configure alarms for any frequency or recurrence you prefer, lets you add notes and additional information for each alarm, and even lets you set alarms for your calendar events on your own schedule—past what Google Calendar lets you do with reminders. The app also detects when you create a calendar event, and offers to create a notification for it.

When you do set an alarm, AlarmPad shows you relevant information for the alarm time, including the weather, any nearby calendar appointments that you might want to know about when the alarm goes off, and more. When you dismiss an alarm, you'll see a notifications view that shows you that information again, and if you prefer, AlarmPad will speak the information aloud. Similarly, AlarmPad can be used with voice commands, either to set your alarm or to dismiss it.

The app also integrates nicely with Tasker, so you can hook it up with other apps, and supports DashClock, so you can see and manage your alarms from your lock screen. AlarmPad is free at Google Play, but you can only have five alarms set up in the free version. The full version will set you back $1.

AlarmPad (Free) | Google Play
AlarmPad Pro ($1) | Google Play

If you go to the Getty Images website, you'll see millions of images, all watermarked. There's more than a hundred years of photography here, from FDR on the campaign trail to last Sunday's Oscars, all stamped with the same transparent square placard reminding you that you don't own the rights. If you want Getty to take off the watermark, you'll have to pay for it.

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I love Update Wednesdays, and today we've already seen pretty decent updates to several Google apps. As you've already seen, Google Play Games was updated to v1.5, but the one I'm excited about the most is, without a doubt, Google TTS v3.0, which made a jump today from v2.4.

What’s New

So, what's so cool about TTS 3.0?

High-quality voices

First and foremost, Text-to-Speech 3.0 adds support for high quality voices.

• Surprise! Google Search Update 2.8.7 Changes Hotword To 'Ok Google' And Enables Hotword From Search Results, After Language Pack Update
• [New App] Type Your Ringtone Uses Text-To-Speech To Turn Words Into A Ringtone [Banana Phone Video Demo]
• Android Voice Actions Now Available In Europe In British English, French, Italian, German and Spanish
• Google Introduces 18 Additional Languages For Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, And Slides

Google Releases Huge Text-To-Speech (TTS) For Android Update v3.0 With High-Quality Voices, New Languages, And UI Changes [APK Download] was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Delhi police lost the password for a portal that hosted complaints that had been passed on by the Central Vigilance Commission after an initial vetting. 667 complaints had been judged serious enough to be passed onto the police since the password was lost in 2006, but none have been acted upon, because no one had the password. Now they have the password. Presumably, the 667 unserved complainants believed the police to be either too slow or incompetent to have gotten back to them.

Each Delhi government department under the CVC, including the MCD, DDA and several investigating agencies, have a chief vigilance officer to look into complaints. If a complaint reaches the CVC, either it tackles it independently or it sends it to the concerned department.

In 2006, a portal monitored by the CVC was created, putting the complaints it sent to departments online. Each department could access the portal with a password. Complaints regarding the Delhi Police were also sent to the portal.

Every year, the CVC holds meetings with government departments to take stock of the complaints with them. Sources said that since 2006, the CVC had got no feedback on complaints pending with the police.

Vigilance complaints pile up as Delhi Police doesn’t know password [Shalini Narayan/Indian Express] (via BBC News)

It has been about a year-and-a-half since game streaming service OnLive abruptly shut down operations and fired its staff. The company was sold off to an investment firm that kept the lights on, but it was unclear until now what was to become of OnLive. Now OnLive has returned with a new approach to selling you games in the cloud and new management that aims to avoid making the same mistakes twice.

• [Update] NVIDIA Is Launching An OnLive-Like Cloud Gaming Service, Aims To Hand Unthinkable Power Over To Game Devs
• OnLive Launches L.A. Noire: Touch Edition, Bringing Context-Specific Touch Interaction To Award-Winning Detective Thriller
• OnLive's Easter Sale Is Going On Right Now, Get Lifetime Passes To Many Games For Up To 75% Off
• OnLive Partners With BT And GAME, Brings On-Demand Cloud Gaming To The UK

OnLive Returns With New Leadership And A Steam-Infused Game Streaming Subscription was written by the awesome team at Android Police.