You don't have to fully commit yourself to either Android or iOS, and there are many of us that make use of both major mobile operating systems simultaneously. That said, Android and iOS don't always work very happily together. No worries, though; we're here to tell you the best ways to make sure your Nexus 4 and your iPad play nice.

The bad news is there aren't always perfect solutions available—both Google and Apple are keen to lock users into their respective ecosystems as much as they possibly can. The good news is there are plenty of tools and tricks you can use to make a cross-platform life as straightforward as possible.

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Emails, Contacts and Calendars

Thanks to the magic of IMAP, it's not too difficult to manage an iCloud email account from the Email app on Android or a Gmail account from the Mail app on iOS (or a third-party client). If you're primarily a Gmail user, of course, then there are the official apps for Android and iOS that you can take advantage of.

What you can't do right now is create a unified master inbox that stores both iCloud and Gmail messages together (the iOS Mail app and Android Email app both do this, but only on the surface—underneath, you still have two separate accounts). You can't import incoming Gmail messages into iCloud, nor can you use Gmail to send and receive emails from an iCloud address. We'd advise you to choose one as your main email provider, and stick to it.

Android's Email client offers support for extra IMAP accounts.

When it comes to contacts and calendars, prepare yourself for some frustration and hair-pulling. Ultimately you're best off using Google's cloud services as the backend if you want two-way sync with both iOS and Android, which probably isn't welcome news if you have all of your contacts and calendar information in iCloud.

Use the "Other" option to set up CalDAV and CardDAV accounts in iOS.

There are all kinds of potential setups and configurations in this area, but if you already have all your contacts and calendars set up in Google/Gmail, then you're good to go on Android. To add this data to iOS, set up separate CalDAV and CardDAV accounts: Choose Other from the Add Account screen in Settings, select either CardDAV or CalDAV, then use your Gmail username and password with "google.com" as the server.

On the other hand, if all your contacts and calendar information is in iCloud, there's no easy way to get all of this data syncing across iOS and Android devices. What you can do is migrate your data over to Google, though this won't be to everyone's tastes. Log into the Contacts app on iCloud on the Web, select all of your contacts, then choose Export vCard from the pop-up settings menu. Save the resulting file somewhere convenient, then switch to the Contacts pane in Gmail and use the import option from the drop-down menu at the top to get your iCloud contacts into Google's system (you may need to make extensive use of the Find and merge duplicates option at the same time).

iCloud offers some export functions, though a full sync with Android is difficult.

As for calendars, the export process is a little more fiddly. Publicly share your calendar(s) from iCloud's Web interface, paste the resulting URL in your browser's address bar and change "webcal" to "http". Your browser will save the resulting .ics file to disk, where it can be imported into Google Calendar (or Outlook or anywhere else). Alternatively you can subscribe to iCloud calendars from Google Calendar with this Web gadget. In both cases, the transfer of information is one way, and you'll then have to switch to Google Calendar exclusively for a seamless Android/iOS experience.

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Music and Video

Let's start with the easy part: music. If you have MP3 or AAC tracks free of any digital rights management or other protection, you can easily get these onto Android and iOS devices alike, and there are plenty of tools to do the job for you. Google Music will store 20,000 of your personal tracks in the cloud for free, and can scan an iTunes library if you already have one set up (unfortunately there's no official iOS app to date).

Amazon Cloud Player is another option for storing and playing your personal audio collection, and this time there are official apps for both iOS and Android to take advantage of. Another option if you already have an iTunes library in place is DoubleTwist, often referred to as "iTunes for Android." It can scan your existing collection and move tracks over to portable devices. Going in the other direction is easier: Simply install iTunes and import your music ready for syncing with an iOS device.

Google Music is one option for getting iTunes tracks onto Android.

Now the tricker aspect: Video. If you've bought a stack of movies and television shows from the iTunes Store, Apple is very keen that you only play this content on its own hardware. It's well-nigh impossible—save for a few shady workarounds—to get these DRM-locked videos to play on an Android tablet or phone.

If you're dealing with unlocked, self-made videos (DVD rips for example) then the picture is a little brighter, and you can get this content onto your devices using either iTunes or DoubleTwist (we'd recommend Handbrake if you need a powerful free conversion tool). If you've bought or rented content from YouTube, you're also in luck—you can access it all though the official iOS YouTube app (though there's no support for Apple TV for the time being) as well as Play Movies on Android.

Your iTunes movie and TV purchases are locked to Apple devices.

If you've joined the streaming media revolution, of course, then your life is much easier. You can spend the time you'll save fiddling around with local files watching extra episodes of your favorite shows on Netflix or listening to the latest album releases in Spotify. Apps such as these and the likes of Hulu, Rdio, et al can sync across multiple devices and platforms and keep all of their available content remotely stored in the cloud.

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Apps, Documents and Files

If there is some kind of magic utility that ports all your iOS apps to Android or vice-versa, we haven't found it. Fortunately, many apps now run happily on both platforms, and will even sync across them—using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Skype and the like is fairly straightforward, particularly when all of your data is stored on the web rather than a local device. Many apps still launch on iOS first, but the playing field has leveled out, and most major releases can be found in both the App Store and on Google Play.

There are also plenty of third-party apps that will happily sync your files across Android and iOS for you. Our favorite is still the slick and unassuming Dropbox—it's straightforward to set up and works with a simplicity and lightness of touch that makes some of its rivals look like lumbering gorillas by comparison. In terms of Android and iOS, it can come in very useful for photos and videos: The Dropbox mobile apps can back up every snap and clip recorded on your devices and sync them together into one master stream of content that can be accessed from anywhere.

Dropbox lets you auto-upload photos and video from both Android and iOS.

Evernote is also worth a mention if you're looking to sync notes, documents and other scraps of content. Many of you will already be using it, but Evernote offers excellent cross-platform and Web operability. Microsoft's SkyDrive is also worth a mention as a tool that can keep all of your files accessible across Windows, Mac OS, Android and iOS.

As for document editing, we wouldn't hold your breath for Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps to appear for Android any time soon, though you can download files from these programs through iCloud on the Web as PDF or Office file types. Google Drive, on the other hand, is cross-platform, as is the newly updated Quickoffice for Android and iOS, which lets you edit on the go.

The new Quickoffice apps for iOS and Android offer on-the-go editing.

While it's impossible to cover every individual workflow, device and OS configuration, we hope that the pointers above can put you well on the way to getting Android and iOS working happily together. If you've got tips from your own setup that you'd like to share, leave them in the comments below.

Today's the day that the new iPhones have hit the shelves in the U.S. The pricier—and apparently more desired—iPhone 5S is not easy to find today, but after managing to get my hands on one, here's a quick comparison between the new 5S model and last year's iPhone 5.

First Impressions

The iPhone 5S, at first glance, is identical to its forebear. But with a flashy new A7 64-bit chip, the M7 motion co-processor, Apple's clever Touch ID fingerprint sensor and some powerful photography/video features, its insides bear little resemblance to the iPhone 5. Both phones boast a bright 326-ppi Retina touchscreen, of course, and the new version maintains the dimensions of its predecessor, weighing in at the same 112 grams. In our early testing, we compared a black 16GB iPhone 5S with a white Verizon iPhone 5 (pictured below).

Appearance

From the front, you could mistake the iPhone 5S for last year's iPhone 5 if it weren't for the new home button. The iPhone 5S's home button has lost the iconic rounded square of past generations in exchange for its nifty new fingerprint sensor. Beyond that, on the back of the device you'll note that the 5S has a new oblong-shaped dual flash to the right of the lens. The charging port, headphone jack placement, buttons and speaker arrangement remain unchanged. Beyond that, about the only discernable difference is that the iPhone logo has been Jony Ive-ified, featuring the printed "iPhone" logo in a thin font to match iOS 7's ubiquitous Helvetica Neue Ultra Light typeface.

Speed

As more comprehensive benchmarking comparisons would suggest, the iPhone 5S is noticeably faster than many competitors, easily doubling the speed of last year's model in many tests. The iPhone 5 is certainly no slouch, but upon activating my device, a "space gray" 16GB iPhone 5S running on AT&T's network, my first takeaway is whoa... this thing is fast. Granted, any new phone is blazing fast right out of the gate, but the 5S opens apps, loads webpages and executes so quickly it's hard to imagine a phone actually doing things faster than this. Next to an iPhone 5 over a shared Wi-Fi network, everything happens faster on the 5S. The camera was actually the most notable—it recovers in an instant with no lag at all. 

Camera

How does the iPhone 5S and its juiced-up camera compare to the iPhone 5? Well, the iPhone 5S's shooter is noticeably faster, like the phone is in most regards. The 5S, in our testing, seems to snap photos instantly. Burst mode is a cool trick, too—and one unique to the 5S, like the slow-motion video camera. Holding down the home button while shooting yields a ton of photos really, really quickly, but the only use cases we can imagine are tricky-to-capture shots, like maybe at a kid's football game when objects (and children) are moving, in order to get an in-focus shot.

The sample shots below compare the camera's respective capabilities in a handful of shooting conditions, though we've got a more in-depth examination of the 5S's camera features cooking too. In all of the pictures, we allowed autofocus to do its work rather than manually focusing with a tap like we make a habit of normally.

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

As you can see, the iPhone 5S performed a bit better under duress in bright- and mixed-light situations. The photos are mostly pretty comparable, though we'll be testing the 5S camera and its improved flash in more settings to see where (and if) it shines. Bells and whistles like Slow-mo, burst mode and the True Tone flash will likely be its strongest qualities, so we look forward to playing with all of those further.

We've grown accustomed to features taking a long time to make the leap from iOS to Android, but some are more aggravating than others. Back in 2011, SoundHound introduced the ability for iOS users to access their music search and discovery libraries across multiple devices, but nearly two years later, that feature had yet to make it over to Android. That changed today. Now Android fans also have the ability to restore music libraries when installing SoundHound onto a new phone or tablet.

• Your Move, Shazam - SoundHound's Free Android App Now Features Unlimited Music IDs
• SoundHound Updated With A New Tablet Interface, All Hail Big Screens
• Google Goggles Gets Updated, Now Includes Notes, Better Business Card Recognition, And Result Suggestions
• Ad-Free SoundHound Infinity With A Homescreen Widget Is Today's Amazon Appstore Free App Of The Day

SoundHound Finally Adds Cloud History Sync To Android Apps, Users Can Now Access Libraries Across Multiple Devices was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Today, in Der Spiegel:

Documents from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that Britain's GCHQ intelligence service was behind a cyber attack against Belgacom, a partly state-owned Belgian telecoms company. A "top secret" Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) presentation seen by SPIEGEL indicate that the goal of project, conducted under the codename "Operation Socialist," was "to enable better exploitation of Belgacom" and to improve understanding of the provider's infrastructure.

"In response to a FOIA request from USA TODAY, the Justice Department said its ethics office never looked into complaints from two federal judges that they had been misled about NSA surveillance," reports USA Today's Brian Heath. An email exchange between the reporter and a Justice rep published at Cryptome.org reveals that the government clearly did not want this story published.

So long, plastic bags. With less than a yard of fabric and a little bit of time, you can make your own reusable containers for snacks and sandwiches.

You'll need cotton fabric and nylon for the lining the inside (it helps keep moisture from leaking out), plus polyester thread, velcro, and basic sewing skills. Cotton napkins, already cut into squares, might be perfect for this.

This project will save you the $10 or so companies charge for similar sacks, plus you can customize ones for your whole family. Hit up the instructions on BHG below to get started.

How to Make Reusable Snack Bags & Sandwich Wraps | Better Homes and Gardens

Windows: We all let our open tabs get out of control sometimes (or that's what I tell myself to feel more comfortable about the chaos). If you ever need to move multiple tabs to a new window, select them all by holding down Control and drag.

For some reason, this trick doesn't seem to work on Chrome for Mac, but in Windows, you can hold down Control and select multiple tabs in the same way you select multiple files in Explorer. Then, simply drag them out and create a new window, or move the tabs to another existing window, exactly the same as you would with a single tab. This is just yet another trick that's probably been around for a while, but we never knew.

Can You Move Multiple Chrome Tabs to a New Window? | How-To Geek

It took 24 hours for the latest Grand Theft Auto to earn $800 million, making it the fastest-selling video game in the world. Today, publisher Take-Two Interactive announced that in three days the game has now surpassed $1 billion in sales, setting yet another record. "We believe this marks the fastest that any entertainment property, including video games and feature films, has reached this significant milestone," the company said in a statement. It's certainly quite a deal faster than the previous record holder, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which took 15 days to top the $1 billion mark last year. Take-Two didn't reveal just how many copies of the game, which launched this past Tuesday on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, were needed...

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Android: Daydream mode is a pretty underutilized feature on Android, but Dashclock makes it much more useful. By adding Dashclock (or other Daydream-compatible widgets to your Daydream screen, you can have an always-on display of all the information you want.

As we covered earlier this week, Dashclock is already one of the best widgets you can add to your phone or tablet. Daydream mode automatically kicks in when your display turns off while docked or charging. So, if you have a phone or tablet sitting at your desk, try adding the widgets. Dashclock isn't the only widget you can add, either. Tumblr, Google Currents, and others can plug directly into Daydream mode.

5+ Cool Uses for Android’s Daydream Mode | How-To Geek

The Internet Archive is widely regarded as the largest online repository of free-to-share media.

The site hosts millions of public domain and Creative Commons licensed files, many of which can be downloaded through BitTorrent. In recent weeks, however, the Internet Archive has been flooded with more dubious content.

Searching the site for the titles of Hollywood blockbusters now results in long lists of seemingly pirated movies. With names such as “World War Z 2013 DVDRip Xvid AQAS” and “The World’s End full movie part 1 Xvid” it is safe to say the files in question are not in the public domain.

However, on closer inspection it turns out that these titles are not being uploaded by pirates who want to spread free movies, but by scammers trying to earn hard cash through the Internet Archive.

Those who try to download or stream the movies in question will soon notice that it’s not as straightforward as it looks. The “scam” uploads come in different shapes. Some have actually uploaded what looks like a movie file, but one that requires a special software such as the MKPlayer illustrated in the image below.

Needless to say, this is just a money-making scheme designed to lure people into downloading suspicious software.

Another trick scammers use is the YouTube video screenshot.

The page pictured below suggests that you can stream the film Epic directly from the Internet Archive, but those who click play will notice that it’s just an image which points to an external streaming site.

Whether the third-party sites do indeed stream these movies is unknown, but they do ask for the credit card details of those who are gutsy enough to give it a try.

Several movie links point to the same page at Cinemablast.info with fake user comments. When the “film” starts playing a notice pops up saying that the film was approved for all audiences by the non-existing Independent Film Rating Association of America, instead of the MPAA. After this notice visitors are redirected to the pay site.

While these type of scams are nothing new for the average BitTorrent search engine, this is the first time we’ve seen them abuse the Internet Archive.

One of the factors that may explain the increase in interest is the fact that the Internet Archive added BitTorrent downloads last summer. After this announcement several torrent search engines started indexing the site, which makes the scam torrents spread to other sites as well.

Unlike well moderated torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, the Internet Archive has yet to find a good way to keep the scammers at bay. TorrentFreak asked the Internet Archive for a response to our findings, but we have yet to hear back.

Source: Scammers Flood The Internet Archive With Pirated Movies

After creating the stunning Gravity last month, video editor Zach Prewitt is back with another visually arresting montage. The Last Thing You See effortlessly blends the final shots of almost 70 movies into a single "meditation on the beautiful, cathartic, and transcendent power of the final shot."

Featuring footage from seemingly disparate works like Badlands, Tron, and Naqoyqatsi, The Last Thing You See isn't as cohesive as Gravity, but nonetheless retains much of its hypnotic charm. It's definitely worth five minutes of your time. Once you're done watching, you can head to the source link below for a complete list of the films featured in the video.

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After months of rumors, Dow Jones has confirmed that it will not renew its agreement with All Things D, the influential tech blog run by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, at the end of the year. The move means Mossberg will no longer write product reviews for the Wall Street Journal, where he's been an industry fixture since his Personal Technology column began in 1991. The Journal has not announced who will replace him, but managing editor Gerard Baker says the paper will be hiring 20 new staffers to replace the outgoing ATD team.

@WSJ and #AllThingsD have decided not to renew agreement at the end of the year.

— WSJ Communications (@WSJPR) September 19, 2013

Swisher and Mossberg have been shopping All Things D for months,...

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

Angry Birds Star Wars II

Description: The Force is strong with this one. Get ready for Angry Birds Star Wars II – the epic follow-up to the #1 smash hit game! Based on the Star Wars movie prequels, use the Force for good against the greedy Pork Federation or choose a much darker path.

Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing

Description: The world’s fastest hedgehog, Sonic, and the SEGA All-Stars are zooming on to your Android phone or tablet for the ultimate party racing showdown. Race as your favorite character across 16 white-knuckle courses in a frantic race to the finish line.

Incredipede

Description: Incredipede is a puzzle game that celebrates the vast diversity of life in the world. Follow Quozzle, a lone Incredipede with the unique ability to grow new arms and legs wherever she needs them. Transform into a snake, a spider, a horse, a monkey – anything you can imagine.

Dumb Ways to Die

Description: Enjoy 15 hilarious mini-games as you attempt to collect all the charmingly dumb characters for your train station, achieve high scores and unlock the famous music video that started it all.

Yeti on Flurry

Description: Unleash the yeti’s fury on completely crazy climbers in a hilarious tower defense in 3D… and fur. Confront an onslaught of insane climbers – from the most stupid to the most vicious – all of whom have special tricks for reaching the top of the mountain: tunnels, ziplines, even teleporters!

FINAL FANTASY ALL THE BRAVEST

Description: FINAL FANTASY ALL THE BRAVEST is a casual and light-hearted game in which you continuously battle enemies to advance through the many available stages. Defeat foes to level up, which in turn grants you character slots to add more and more members to your party.

Bumblebee

Description: Help the cute bumblebee collect as many flowers as possible! Show it the way through the world full of thorn branches, evil hornets, strong wind, falling leaves and lethal lightnings! Achieve bonuses and use extra powers to increase a chance to survive.

Zombie Gunship

Description: Zombie Gunship® puts you in the gunner seat of a heavily-armed AC-130 ground attack aircraft. Strategically fire your powerful guns to slay endless waves of zombies and protect the remaining survivors of the zombie apocalypse!

Smash’n'Bash

Description: Smash’n'Bash is a compelling runner game in the finest handheld tradition. Bash opponents with an innovative match-color battle system and dodge obstacles. Use your looted gold in the shop to purchase numerous updates and become even stronger.

DuckTales: Scrooge’s Loot

Description: A new DuckTales adventure begins in this all-new quest for gold! Jump into mounds of riches with this exciting, online treasure-hunting game! The infamous Beagle Boys have swindled Scrooge’s fortune! It’s up to you to join the citizens of Duckburg to recover his stolen loot!

COMING SOON

The venerable Nielsen TV ratings are finally starting to get up-to-date with the internet age. Starting in September 2014, Nielsen will reportedly include  TV viewing on a smartphone or tablet as part of its national TV rankings. According to Variety, Nielsen will announce the move next week, marking the end of a three-year attempt to build a ranking that measures consistently across TVs and digital devices. From the sound of things, Nielsen's updated TV rankings will only measure "linear" viewing — that is, viewing that takes place at the same time as a show is being broadcast on TV. So, catching a show the next day on Hulu wouldn't count towards this ranking. Presumably, apps from networks like NBC and ABC will be included in these...

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It’s been more than a year since Google acquired Quickoffice, a mobile app for editing Microsoft Office files on tablets. Over the last few months, it has slowly expanded the tool’s availability by making free for Google Apps for Business customers. Everybody else still had to pay for the apps. Today, however, it is changing this policy and is making Quickoffice for iOS and Android available for free to anybody with a Google account.

As Google bemoans in its announcement, while converting documents to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides is easy, “sometimes the people you work with haven’t gone Google yet.” Using Quickoffice to work on Office files is a reasonable compromise, the company seems to imply, especially given that the documents are saved on Google Drive.

Current Quickoffice for Google Apps for Business users can update their app to the new version and get a number of new features in the process. The app can now, for example, create .ZIP folders and allows you to view charts in Excel and PowerPoint. It also, Google stressed, works across devices, “so you don’t have to worry about installing separate versions anymore when you go from using your phone to editing on your tablet.”

To sweeten the deal, Google is giving anybody who signs in to the new Quickoffice app for Android or iOS before September 26 10GB of extra Google Drive storage for the next two years.

Earlier this year, Google also said it was bringing Quickoffice to the browser, using its Native Client technology. So far, however, we haven’t heard much about the web version. With the mobile app freely available to all now, however, chances are the launch of the web app isn’t that far off either.

Google just got a refreshed flat logo and the black navigation bar is gone. Earlier this morning, we reported that Google’s new “App Launcher” style navigational menu was just weeks away from launch. Turns out, it is much closer to launching, as the company just made the change official.

Gone is the black bar that runs atop all of Google’s properties. It’s now been replaced with a new menu that sits next to the Share and account info. The launcher, which looks just like the app launcher on Chrome OS, brings up an App grid with your favorite Google services.

Google previously attempted to revamp the navigation bar back in 2011 by canning it in favor of a drop-down menu inside the Google logo. While the company officially announced this change, it later gave up on this idea. It’ll be interesting to see how Google’s users will react to today’s change.

With this announcement, Google is also making its new flat logo official. The new logo had already been spotted across the web for the last few weeks, but given Google’s fondness for bucket testing small changes, it wasn’t clear if this was ever going to become the official logo.

We’ll have to wait and see if Google will post a Yahoo-like explanation of the design process behind the flatter logo, but here is what the company had to say about it so far: “As part of this design, we’ve also refined the color palette and letter shapes of the Google logo.” That’s it.

The majority of the reports and press releases put out by music industry groups over the past several years can be summarized in a few words: “Piracy is evil and we lose a lot of money because of it.”

On the other side, however, numerous studies have also shown that on average file-sharers spend more money on legal purchases, whether it’s music or box office tickets.

The most logical explanation for this finding is that “pirates” are more engaged than those who don’t share, and that they complement their legal purchases with unauthorized downloads.

The above indicates that music piracy might not be the right scapegoat for the massive losses the industry has suffered since the early 2000s. At least, not the prime reason. This appears to be supported by new data released by the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom last week.

Since last year Ofcom has surveyed the download habits of tens of thousands of Brits. The latest data wave shows that between March and May of this year about 9% of the people in the UK pirated music, with Ofcom signaling a clear downward trend compared to last year.

The estimated number of downloaded tracks in the UK dropped from 301 million last year to 199 million in the latest measurement. In other words, according to Ofcom’s findings a third of all music piracy evaporated in a year.

The number of people who admitted to pirating music during the same period dropped as well, approximately 10% during the same time frame.

This is great news for the music industry, but neither the BPI or IFPI have cheered on the findings in a press release. It might be that they are not convinced by the data, or perhaps they too might have noticed that the unprecedented drop in piracy had virtually no effect on music sales.

While it’s true that streaming services such as Spotify are expanding their user base at a rapid pace, overall sales revenues in the UK are still dropping. While piracy plunged, music sales fell from $1.41 billion in 2011 to $1.33 billion, a hefty 6.1% decrease.

Previously, when music piracy increased various industry groups pointed out that there was a direct correlation with the decline in sales. This argument will be much harder to make now.

Of course, the music industry can point out that 199 million downloads is still very significant, and that the losses might have even been higher if piracy hadn’t declined. That said, it’s clear that unauthorized downloads are not the only problem for the music industry, and that there are other, perhaps more important, factors that explain the continuous losses.

In fact, Ofcom’s study once again shows that not all pirates are cheapskates. Those who consumed a mix of legal and illegal music said they spent the most on music – £95.31 – while those who only consumed music legally totaled £41.40.

Perhaps that explains the recent sales decline?

Source: Massive Music Piracy Plunge Fails to Halt Decline in Sales

In 2010, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN went to court to try and force Ziggo, the Netherlands’ largest ISP, to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay.

Ziggo were later joined in the case by rival ISP XS4ALL, fighting the action together in the hope of avoiding a damaging precedent. Initially the court decided that blocking all subscribers went too far but BREIN wasn’t satisfied and took the case to a full trial.

In late 2011 the case was heard, with the ISPs arguing in favor of their customers’ right to have free access to information and BREIN countering that copyrights need protecting too.
In January 2012 the ISPs lost the case and BREIN celebrated victory.

Both Ziggo and XS4ALL subsequently filed appeals but in May 2012 yet more local ISPs – KPN/Telfort, UPC,T-Mobile and Tele2 – were ordered to block The Pirate Bay on the back of the original ruling.

Ziggo and XS4ALL appeal

Today the Ziggo / XS4ALL appeal is being heard in the Court of The Hague. Andreas Udo de Haes, editor of Dutch news site Webwereld, has been live tweeting from the courtroom and there are some interesting arguments to report.

The legal team for XS4ALL began with a reference to the failed SOPA/PIPA legislation in the United States which would have allowed DNS and IP blocking of ‘pirate sites’. Over in Europe, the EU Enforcement Directive is clear on ISP liability for third-party infringements and proactive blocking of communications is prohibited according to recent case-law (1)(2), the ISP’s lawyer argued.

XS4ALL went on to insist that blocking the full Pirate Bay site is a disproportionate response – even if 90% of the indexed content is illegal, many hundreds of thousands of legitimate files are now affected by the blockade.

In any event, the ISP believes that website blocking is ineffective in stamping out copyright infringement. Research carried out by ISPs and researchers has found that blocking The Pirate Bay is futile. If the tool is useless, then there can’t possibly be a need for it, the ISP told the court.

A combination of improved legal options and educational measures are a better bet, XS4ALL concluded.

Ziggo: File-sharing is an advertising channel

Next up was the lawyer for Ziggo, who began by pointing out that not only is the blockade of The Pirate Bay easily circumvented using proxy sites, but there are also plenty of alternative sites offering similar content.

Ziggo said that file-sharing had not caused the end of the music industry and that offering decent legal alternatives leads to a decline in piracy. The existence of iTunes shows that it is entirely possible to compete with ‘free’, the ISP said.

Ziggo’s lawyer said that while BREIN insists that the growth of file-sharing has damaging effects on culture, creativity and the entertainment industry, research shows that the sector is actually growing. The ISP said if there is indeed a relationship between piracy and legal services, it is a positive one, with piracy operating as an advertising channel.

Ziggo went on to underline that it has absolutely no connection to The Pirate Bay and operates only as an intermediary, yet it is expected to implement a very broad filter which indiscriminately blocks users regardless of the kind of content they’re trying to access.

The ISP added that the EU court previously held that preventive measures are only allowed if the fundamental rights at stake in the case are carefully weighed. The current blockade is the start of a very dangerous path, Ziggo concluded.

BREIN: Pirate Bay is run by teenagers profiting from ads of naked girls

After a short break, BREIN presented their case. The anti-piracy group said that despite the ISPs proclaiming the end of the Internet if they are forced to block sites like TPB, no such thing has come about. ISPs are able to block spam because their customers prefer it, but blocking a site such as The Pirate Bay is suddenly difficult only because their customers find it useful.

ISPs are in the business of selling bandwidth, BREIN’s lawyer said, but this is at the expense of poor artists and bankrupt record stores.

BREIN said that the nature of BitTorrent is clear – its users upload as well as download so are therefore infringing copyright. The Pirate Bay also infringes and represents the greatest instance of piracy “in the history of mankind” and must be stopped. Just this week it had Grand Theft Auto V in advance of its official launch.

BREIN’s lawyer said that 95% of the content indexed by The Pirate Bay is illegal and the legal content has “zero seeders and zero peers.” The site removes fakes, does not respond to takedown notices, and is run by “a pair of Swedish teenagers who turn 30 million euros in revenue with ads of naked girls.”

Countering claims that the blockade is ineffective, BREIN said that its research shows that when confronted with a block, users tend to go to other sites, an indication that the blockade is indeed working. Those other sites, BREIN said, will be targeted in due course.

Blocking is a proportional response and costs very little to implement, BREIN went on to argue, adding that according to Alexa, Google and Comscore, The Pirate Bay’s traffic dropped when the blockades were introduced and fell again when its proxy sites were hit. Surprisingly, BREIN told the court it had shut down around 200 proxies.

BREIN went on to argue that the blockades had been effective in reducing piracy and stated that previous studies reporting no decrease in torrent traffic after the blockades were introduced could not be relied upon. There had been an increase in legal BitTorrent usage, BREIN said, such as server syncing carried out by Facebook, traffic which the studies did not look at.

The anti-piracy group also contested the notion that DNS blockades are a form of abuse. BREIN said the technique was more akin to a configuration change rather than an attack on the Internet. As for the EU ruling in the SABAM case, BREIN said it had concentrated on the L’Oreal v eBay judgment. It was not asking for hugely expensive packet level filtering but a straightforward block of The Pirate Bay, in same way that the ISPs block thousands of spam sites every day.

Interestingly the judge then questioned BREIN on the effectiveness of the blockades. BREIN said its goal is to have The Pirate Bay blocked, however the judge recalled that BREIN had already admitted that people circumvent that ban by going to other sites. BREIN said they would tackle those sites next but Ziggo countered by stating that many of those sites are outside the Netherlands.

And now comes the wait, possibly as long as six weeks, for what could turn out to be an extremely important ruling.

Source: Pirate Bay Blocking Orders Should Be Overturned Under EU Law, ISPs Argue

Most mobile devices will run out of juice before you do after heavy use, so external battery packs are sometimes a necessity. New Trent sells many such devices and has just announced a new one. The PowerPak Xtreme is a gigantic battery that's built to last. If only your phone was that rugged.

 

This device quietly went on sale a few weeks ago, but is only being made official today.

• [Deal Alert] EasyAcc 10,000mAh Portable Battery Pack Only $27.99, 12,000mAh $36.99 From Amazon
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• [One-Day Deal Alert] Vaas 9000mAh Portable Charger With Quad-Charging Capabilities Only $29 From Daily Steals

New Trent Officially Launches Rugged, Water-Resistant PowerPak Xtreme 12,000mAh Battery, $49.95 After $10 Off Promo Code was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Yahoo’s rollout of new products and redesigns continues today, with the release of an updated My Yahoo homepage featuring the same, more modern look-and-feel which accompanies all its online and mobile properties as a part of the company’s “Grand Slam” makeover project. In other news: yes, My Yahoo apparently still exists.

The idea of using personalized homepages to kick off your day’s web surfing is a holdover from another era – before tabbed browsing and always-on Internet connections became commonplace, and before tools to get quick hits of information, like Twitter or mobile apps, supplanted the need for portals filled with widgetized bits of data. The personalized homepage is decidedly a Web 2.0 product, and no amount of fresh paint can really change that.

That being said, there’s always a core group of users attached to these products. When Google decided that its personalized homepage iGoogle was no longer worth the investment last year, hundreds of commenters responded with outrage. They claimed that using a homepage is easier than having multiple tabs open, thank you very much, and they had used the service daily. And they shook their tiny, virtual fists at Google for abandoning them.

Well, maybe now those users will consider Yahoo’s homepage, given that it’s no longer the ugly, dated-looking product you may remember from days past (see below). There’s even a way for My Yahoo to import your iGoogle settings.

So take that, Google, with your self-driving cars and cures for death, My Yahoo is back and stealing hundreds of your users!

Really Old My Yahoo:

The newly revamped portal lets you tailor your page with widgets that access your email accounts, calendars, stock portfolio, sports scoreboard, weather, Flickr, other Yahoo content, and content from around the web.

The pages ship with theme packs including Oscar de la Renta (CEO Marissa Mayer’s fav), Rachel Zoe, Jenni Kayne, artists Chihuly, Polly Apfelbaum and Alec Monopoly, and bands like Empire of the Sun, Twenty One Pilots, and FUN. Oh, branding fun!

Yahoo, in what’s now becoming an infuriating behavior, is showing off what the new page looks like via an animated GIF on its official blog this morning. But here’s a less seizure-inducing shot.

New My Yahoo:

* Oh, did I use the wrong Yahoo logo here on this post? Sorry, I thought this one would be a better fit for today’s news. 

Activity trackers are all over the place, except maybe on the wrist of the vast majority of the public. Moves is an app that launched with the goal of putting that power on devices people already carry with a software-based activity tracker, and now it’s expanding its availability from iOS to Android.

The iOS app from the Helsinki and London-based startup has seen over 2.5 million downloads since launching on iPhone back in January, and Moves CEO and Designer Sampo Karjalainen credits its success to the combined price and convenience of using his company’s software vs. hardware accessories like the Jawbone UP or the Fitbit Flex.

“The mobile phone will be the activity tracker for the mainstream,” he said in an interview. “There are over a billion smartphones in the market that could do all-day activity tracking. Dedicated activity tracker gadgets make sense for specific needs, but the big opportunity is in mobile phone as an activity tracker.”

Still, Karjalainen says that Moves will be watching the progress of multi-purpose wearable hardware, to see how it might be able to take advantage of those devices. Jawbone has just opened up the API for UP, for instance, which means software like Moves could use its hardware to enhance their own apps, too.

Maybe more exciting is Apple’s new M7 processor, tech in the iPhone 5s that act independent of the A7 main system-on-a-chip to track motion, conserving battery. It’s a boost for Moves, but not the be-all and end-all for motion-tracking startups, Karjalainen says.

“The M7 confirms our vision. Mobile phone manufacturers are clearly starting to recognize the opportunity in smartphone-based activity tracking,” he explained. “The great thing is that M7 helps minimize battery consumption, which has been the biggest limiting factor. But it lacks cycling recognition and is available only for top model, iPhone 5S, so we can’t fully rely on it.”

As for the new Android app, the attention here has been about making sure Moves actually replicates the same kind of experience users have on iPhone in terms of accurately tracking daily activity.

“On Android we’ve first focused on making the core technology work well, and this means that 1.0 version doesn’t have all features of iPhone version yet,” Karjalainen said. “We’ll add for example Connected Apps support and user accounts soon. We think the 1.0 version is a great simple way to track your activities and document your life.”

He also added that the team considered using the new Google Play Activity Recognition APIs, which Google itself provides, to track a phone’s movement with Moves for Android, but in the end they could recognize running with their own house-made tech, while Google’s couldn’t, and their cycling algorithm was more accurate in testing.

Moves may face more competition as a result of the M7 and Google’s APIs, but it clearly feels it can keep ahead by focusing on differentiating via its own movement tracking software engineering efforts. The startup also has a head start on an exciting market, so tapping the large potential user pool that comes with Android is a good step.

Fighting what it calls an inaccurate portrayal of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the leaking of diplomatic cables in 2010, WikiLeaks has done what it does best: leak a full script and a scathing takedown of upcoming film The Fifth Estate. The film, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and based on two books that WikiLeaks has declared inaccurate and libelous, covers the rise of WikiLeaks, "Cablegate," and its aftermath, told from the perspective of estranged WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg. But WikiLeaks has called it irresponsible, biased, and misleading, pointing out both factual inaccuracies and rhetorical strategies that it says could sway public opinion in the wrong direction.

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PlayStation 4 owners won't be able to play PS3 games at launch, but it won't be a long wait. Sony plans to release a digital library of PlayStation 3 titles powered by its Gaikai streaming technology in North America starting next year. That's according to Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida, who revealed the news during a roundtable discussion at the Tokyo Game Show. And since all the heavy lifting and processing will take place in the cloud, you'll also be able to play those PS3 classics on a PS Vita and the newly unveiled PS Vita TV. Yoshida says gamers can expect a "decent number" of titles to be available when the feature launches, with selection growing over time — much in the way Sony releases PSone and...

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NVIDIA has finally taken the lid off of its tablet. The Tegra Note is a "complete tablet platform" created by NVIDIA and powered by its own Tegra 4 mobile processor. The Tegra Note will feature the latest Android OS, a 7-inch HD IPS LCD display at 1280 x 800 resolution, rear 5-megapixel and front VGA webcam, 16GB internal storage with microSD slot, "HD Audio" stereo speakers, stylus with DirectStylus technology, HDMI port and 10 hours of HD video playback.

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Google has been embroiled in more than its share of privacy controversies recently but the company may be taking steps to change its reputation for shady privacy practices. An unnamed source tells USA Today that Google is working on a less intrusive way to track users' online behavior that it may use to replace cookies. USA Today's source says that Google's anonymous identifier for advertisers (AdID) technology can "be transmitted to advertisers and ad networks that have agreed to basic guidelines, giving consumers more privacy and control over how they browse the Web." If Google follows through on building AdID then it would mean that two of tech's largest companies have developed their own in-house versions of ad trackers, as Apple has also built its own alternative to third-party cookies into its Safari browser.

Posthaven, the blogging platform co-created by Y Combinator partner Garry Tan after his previous startup Posterous was bought and shut down by Twitter, has reached financial sustainability.

They’re also launching the feature that effectively made Posterous a serious competitor against Tumblr in the early days of micro-blogging — e-mail-to-post.

Posthaven is a basic blogging platform that’s meant to last forever. That’s because it is member-supported at a cost of $5 a month and not venture backed.

The product is a labor of love that Tan and his old co-founder Brett Gibson started furiously working on once their old company was bought by Twitter. Tan had left Posterous for Y Combinator in January of 2011, more than a year before Twitter acquired the company in March of 2012. It was a classic founder’s disagreement over the direction of the company.

Once Posterous was sold, Tan deliberated over how to keep the service alive. When it became clear that he couldn’t buy back the product, he decided to go down a different route by launching Posthaven, a place where old Posterous users could migrate all of their work.

Instead of raising venture funding, Tan’s keeping Posthaven as a permanent side project that co-exists with his day-to-day work as a partner advising Y Combinator startups.

“Posthaven is like the anti-rocket ship,” Tan said. “We’d certainly like it to be something that a lot of people use, and if we keep working to make it a great product that will happen. But we don’t want to trade off stability and the ability to stay online in exchange for faster growth. That’s really what outside capital is — a lot more growth, but with some expectation of return.”

Now the company’s picked up enough paid users to reach profitability, he says. That will fund the server space and development of new features like multiple contributors, email subscriptions and theme customization.

The big feature this week, however, is e-mail to post. That was what jumpstarted Posterous’ traction to begin with about five years ago.

“It resonates with non-technical people because it doesn’t require learning any new behavior,” Tan said. “It was really something ‘normals’ could use.”

Back in 2008 when Posterous was founded, smartphones and apps were also new, so people were more familiar with e-mail as a way to post content off their phones.

After an NSA cryptographer took to ZDNet to defend his organization's lawless surveillance, EFF co-founder John Gilmore posted a long and thoughtful reply to the Cryptography mailing list (an absolute must-read, these days), in which he explains why the idea that spies should be able to spy on everyone, so long as they do so for the right reasons, is a bad idea. It's a high-level version of an argument a lot of us are having these days, so it's worth reading carefully. The tl;dr is "There will always be 'emergencies', always 'crises', always 'evildoers", always 'opportunities', that would be relieved 'if we could just do X that wasn't allowed until now'."

Having watched the Drug War over the last 50 years, NSA for 30 years, and TSA/DHS over the last decade, I have zero faith that NSA can collect intimite data about every person in America and on the planet, and then never use that data for any purpose that is counter to the interest of the people surveilled. There will always be "emergencies", always "crises", always "evildoers", always "opportunities", that would be relieved "if we could just do X that wasn't allowed until now". So what if general warrants are explicitly forbidden? And if searching people without cause is prohibited? We could catch two alleged terrorists -- or a few thousand people with sexual images -- or 750,000 pot smokers -- or 400,000 hard-working Mexican migrants -- every year, if we just use tricky legalisms to ignore those pesky rules. So the government does ignore them. Will you or your loved ones fall into the next witchhunt? Our largest city was just found guilty of forcibly stopping and physically searching hundreds of thousands of black and latino people without cause for a decade -- a racist program defended both before and after the verdict by the Mayor, the Police Commission, the City Council, and state legislators. NSA has secretly been doing warrantless, suspicionless, non-physical searches on every American with a phone for a decade, all using secret gerrymandered catch-22 loopholes in the published constitution and laws, defended before and after by the President, the Congress and all the courts. Make rules for NSA? We already have published rules for NSA and it doesn't follow them today!

So Mr Barkan moves on to why NSA would never work against the citizens. The US imprisons more people than any country on earth, and murders far more than most, but it's all OK because those poor, overworked, rule-bound government employees who are doing it are "defending freedom". Bullshit they are! Somehow scores of countries have found freedom without descending to this level of lawlessness and repression. NSA cannot operate outside of this context; rules that might work in a hypothetical honest and free government, will not work in the corrupt and lawless government that we have in the United States.

NSA employees are accountable for following the rules, Mr. Barkan? Don't make me laugh. There's a word for it: impunity. EFF has diligently pursued NSA in court for most of a decade, and has still gotten no court to even consider the question "is what NSA did legal?" Other agencies like DoJ and HHS regularly retain big powers and budgets by officially lying about whether marijuana has any medical uses, rather than following the statutes, despite millions of Americans who use it on the advice of their doctor. None of these officials lose their jobs. Find me a senior federal official anywhere who has ever lost their job over major malfeasance like wiretapping, torture, kidnapping, indefinite imprisonment, assassination, or malicious use of power -- let alone been prosecuted or imprisoned for it. Innocent citizens go to prison all the time, from neighborhood blacks to medical marijuana gardeners to Tommy Chong and Martha Stewart -- high officials never.

[Cryptography] Gilmore response to NSA mathematician's "make rules for NSA" appeal

Outbound firewalls, or firewalls that only throw up alarms when a program on your machine tries to call out to the internet, are largely useless, according to our friends at How-To Geek. They don't offer real protection, ignore inbound threats, and give you a false sense of security. Here's why.

The assertion is a bit controversial, especially for those of us who like knowing when something on our computers is connecting to the internet. However, Chris Hoffman over at How-To Geek explains that outbound firewalls give their users a false sense of security, and security companies eager to get you to spend money on their products prey on your fear that you need someone watching all the time, alerting you whenever a program checks for a software update:

Outbound firewalls aren’t an effective defense against malware. You should focus on using an effective antivirus program, keeping your software up-to-date, and making sure you don’t have Java installed. That will keep your PC much more secure than using an antivirus program that won’t help much after the fact. If your computer is compromised, it’s compromised.

Many geeks say that they like using an outbound firewall to block apps that aren’t malware but aren’t too trustworthy from “phoning home.” You’d only know if such an app was phoning home if you were running an outbound firewall, after all.

Ultimately, you shouldn’t be running an application you don’t trust on your computer. If you’re using an application but you don’t trust it enough to let it access the Internet, you’re likely making a mistake — you’ve already trusted the application quite a bit by giving it full access to your system. In this day and age, almost every program will be connecting to the Internet for some reason, whether it’s to sync your personal data with an online service or just check for updates online.

He notes that for an outbound firewall to sound the alarm, the offending software must already be installed and well rooted on your machine. If it is malware, you've already lost and the app has full access to your system and data. Additionally, your firewall is probably late to the game: The app has likely opened its own holes in your firewall software or bypassed your security tools by piggybacking on existing apps or using ports that no firewall would ever block (port 80, for example, which is standard http traffic) to communicate.

Chris goes on to note that if you want an outbound firewall to alert you to outgoing connections or you just like customizing how each individual app on your system calls out to the internet, by all means install one. As long as you're aware that it's really more of an informative novelty than any real protection, it won't really hurt. However, your real security focus should be on keeping threats from getting onto your system in the first place, something I think most people can agree on.

Why You Don’t Need an Outbound Firewall On Your Laptop or Desktop PC | How-To Geek

Android: If you have multiple email accounts from multiple providers, you probably also have multiple apps on your phone to check them all. SolMail is a new email client that wants to bring them all under one roof, without sacrificing features for the convenience.

SolMail is new, so it's definitely a bit rough around the edges, but the developers are actively working on it and taking feedback. The app currently supports any IMAP or POP account, with special support for Gmail, Hotmail (Outlook), AOL, and Yahoo! The devs are working on Exchange support next. You can swipe to archive, star and filter, filter by attachments or by read/unread, and by messages sent directly to you as opposed to those sent to a group. You can add a mobile signature to your outgoing messages, and tweak the reading font size of your emails to fit your screen.

The app isn't perfect though—SolMail passes credentials directly as opposed to using OAuth, which means it'll be out of the question for more security-minded folks, or people who use their Google or Outlook accounts for business. It also doesn't support Gmail's push notifications, although you do get notified of new mail in any account through the built-in Android mail widget. Finally, the app is optimized for Android phones and not tablets (yet), something the devs say they're working on.

Those things aside though, SolMail is a sharp looking app that makes reading and organizing mail from multiple accounts easy. Color-coding your email and filtering it goes a long way towards keeping everything organized, and the gestures to archive and move forward and back among messages is nice, too. The "stickers" feature is pretty much emoji for your email, so if you're into that kind of thing, enjoy. SolMail is free, you can grab it at the link below.

SolMail (Free) | Google Play via Addictive Tips

Yes, Angry Birds is back again. This time the sequel to the surprisingly fun Angry Birds Star Wars has dropped out of Hyperspace right in the middle of the Play Store. Angry Birds Star Wars II is based on the prequel films – you know, the ones that your inner child refuses to acknowledge.

There are over 30 playable characters in Angry Birds Star Wars II. Everyone from Mace Windu to Queen Amidala (for some reason) is included in the game this time.

• Angry Birds Star Wars II Announced, Will Insult You With Shameless Money Grab Toy Tie-In, Characters From The Crappy Trilogy
• Rovio Releases Series Of Trailers Revealing 4 New Characters From The Upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II
• All Wings Report In: Angry Birds Star Wars Begins Its Attack Run On The Play Store
• [New Game] Star Wars Force Collection Available Now, Because There Aren't Enough Card Games In The Play Store Already

[New Game] Angry Birds Star Wars II Hits The Play Store With Prequel-Based Characters And Telepod Toy Integration was written by the awesome team at Android Police.