The popular headphone maker Beats is reportedly attempting buy back HTC's 25 percent stake in the company. The news comes from a Wall Street Journal report that cites "people familiar with the matter" as claiming Beats is looking to bring in a new investor to provide "fresh funds for growth," and plans on buying back HTC's stake at the same time. Although HTC bought a $300 million, 50.1 percent stake in Beats back in 2011, the headphone maker paid $150 million to take half of that stake back last year.

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The partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who published classified information on U.S. government surveillance, was detained for 9 hours in London’s Heathrow Airport. On Sunday morning, David Miranda was detained for the maximum allowable time under British Law; his property was confiscated and has yet to be returned, according to Greenwald.

Miranda was visiting Laura Poitras, a documentarian who has also worked on exposing classified intelligence practices. However, there is no indication that Miranda, who was transferring in London en route to Brazil from Berlin, should have been subject to Britain’s Terrorism Act of 2000.

Greenwald’s response, in the Guardian, is admirably measured and worth quoting in full:

“If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world”.

In a separate statement to his newspaper, Greenwald said, “This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process.”

Greenwald, who first interviewed rogue whistleblower Edward Snowden, has been ground zero for the international attention brought upon the National Security Agency, which is suspected of monitoring millions of Americans, by collecting data on phone and Internet browsing behavior. Details of the interrogation are still unknown, as Miranda has no way of contacting Greenwald.

I can’t tell if British authorities are crazy or stupid. On top of being horribly anti-democratic, how could authorities think it was a smart idea to detain the family members of a critic with the largest soapbox on the planet. Immediately, on the usual lull of a Sunday afternoon, the story is front page news at every major news outlet, as both British and Brazilian lawmakers express outrage.

"Never connect at Heathrow if you can possibly avoid it" is right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia"

—
Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) August 18, 2013

Intimidating journalists by detaining their family is what China and Russia do. And now UK. All perfectly legal. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

—
Pierre Omidyar (@pierre) August 18, 2013

If authorities were brazen enough to detain someone so closely connected to the leaks, it means they’ve probably extended their legal powers to intimidate others with less fame. Now a bright and unwavering spotlight is on their questionable tactics.

Even worse for authorities, most of the debate around NSA spying (and proposed legislation to limit their authority) has been whether agencies have too broad of a definition for who qualifies as a suspect. As the New York Times points out, Miranda’s detention is legal under British law, which means the definition of ‘terrorist threat’ is most definitely being abused.

This reflects badly on both British authorities’ general competence and their regard for the freedom of the press. Heads are going to roll.

[Photo Credit of adorable couple, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian]

Rare images from planet Arrakis just resurfaced after being pulled from the archives of the recently-relaunched sci-fi magazine Omni. The images, which paint a dark, bleak desert world 21,000 years in the future, were reportedly commissioned from artist John Schoenherr for the 1978 Dune calendar. "I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr’s careful and accurate illustrations," Dune author Frank Herbert said at the time.

Omni has posted nine of the detailed, beautiful images, which depict the enormous Sandworms, Ornithopter flying machines, stoic Sarduakar warriors, and other aspects of the universe featured in Herbert's novel and sequels.

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Jim O'Donnell was at a library conference in Singapore when his Ipad's Google Play app asked him to update it. This was the app through which he had bought 30 to 40 ebooks, and after the app had updated, it started to re-download them. However, Singapore is not one of the countries where the Google Play bookstore is active, so it stopped downloading and told him he was no longer entitled to his books.

It's an odd confluence of travel, updates, and location-checking, but it points out just how totally, irretrievably broken the idea of DRM and region-controls for ebooks is.

But all of my books had un-downloaded and needed to be downloaded again. The app is an inefficient downloader, almost as bad as the New Yorker app, so I dreaded this, but clicked on the two I needed most at once. (I checked the amount of storage used, and indeed the files really have gone off my tablet.)

And it balked. It turns out that because I am not in a country where Google Books is an approved enterprise (which encompasses most of the countries on the planet), I cannot download. Local wisdom among the wizards here speculates that the undownloading occurred when the update noted that I was outside the US borders and so intervened.

Atypically, Google has Google Play help service available by email, but a series of exchanges demonstrated that the droids at the Android Store were neither able to comprehend my issue, sympathize with my plight, or offer a remedy. I must return to the US to be allowed to spend a few hours redownloading "my" books before I can read them again. At one point they asked what features I might suggest be added to Google Play. I suggested "Don't Be Evil", but got no response.

Current Liblicense Archive - DRM follies (via Copyfight)

Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops

Out with the old, and in with the new

You might have noticed a new addition to the application drawer on your Android (provided you have the Google+ app installed) as well as the absence of a long familiar face. You're not seeing things — it's part of the Google+ app update that started rolling out a few days ago.

It seems like most users have the update by now, so they're noticing that the old Google+ Messenger application was removed (the whole service is basically gone, usurped by Hangouts), but it's been replaced by an equally redundant app icon, the G+ Photos app.

We hesitate to call it an app. It's more like a shortcut to the Photos tab inside the Google+ app. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way the psuedo-gallery-app-thing works or looks, it's just a bit superfluous. It's easy enough to hide with a custom launcher if you just can't deal with it. 

Thanks everyone who sent this in!

Graffiti/street artist Banksy has built and installed a BP-leak-themed dolphin ride on Brighton Pier. The coin-op ride offers trenchant commentary on the light liability borne by BP for its role in the poisoning of the gulf. Plus, it looks like a lot of fun!

Banksy Turns Kiddie Ride Into Anti-BP Statement (Thanks, Michael!)

Xbox Music and Xbox Video are the future of Microsoft's digital media ecosystem. But putting a greater focus on the Xbox brand means saying goodbye to some past ventures. Today, the company announced plans to phase out support for purchases and rentals on Zune Marketplace "as early as" August 22nd — coinciding with the death of Microsoft Points. Thankfully for people still hanging onto a Zune HD or one of Microsoft's other legacy PMPs, the Zune Music Pass will live on. Customers will still be able to stream music from the Marketplace and continue downloading 10 tracks per month, a unique model that become perhaps the strongest selling point for Zune hardware. Keeping the Zune Marketplace alive in some capacity is necessary to...

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Android: Everyone hates it when they go through a routine app update only to discover the new version changed everything for the worse. Appwererabbit solves this by saving old versions automatically.

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Few people have set out to reinvent desktop printers (at least in ways that don't involve shrinking them). But Mugi Yamamoto has a fresh take on how the office mainstays should work; he's trading the bulk of conventional units for a compact device that sits atop a pile of paper and "eats" its way down. The Stack, created by Yamamoto as a university diploma project, swallows pages beneath it and forms a new heap of paper with your printed jobs on top. Yamamoto says the design allows a "very light appearance" that's downright tiny compared to traditional printers from the likes of HP, Canon, and Epson.

That minuscule footprint is possible because Yamamoto has managed to forgo the paper tray, which he says is the bulkiest component of...

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Earlier this summer, the German Booksellers Association announced a daft "watermarking" process for ebooks that would introduce random variations in the text as a means of uniquely identifying them. At the time, I pointed out that this was just silly: firstly, it's not hard to detect and vary the watermarks (just compare two different copies of the text using a 40-year-old program called "diff") and secondly, because the fact that a pirate site has a copy of a book with "your" watermark in it doesn't mean that you've done anything wrong. It's not illegal to lose your computer, be hacked, or give your hard-drive away.

What I totally failed to anticipate was that booksellers and publishers would use watermarking as a rubric for tracking and sharing information about everything that everyone is reading. In the Netherlands, ebook sellers have announced that they will retain full reading records on their customers for at least two years, and will share that information with an "anti-piracy" group called BREIN (a group that already has the power to order Dutch ISPs to censor the Internet, without due process or judicial oversight; and who, ironically, were caught ripping off musicians for their anti-piracy ads).

I am not often shocked by the insanity of anti-piracy efforts, but this one has me agog. As a former bookseller, I can't believe that people in the business of putting books into readers' hands would casually spy on their customers' reading habits, and, worse still, turn them over to a sleazy third party with a track-record of bullying, corruption, and censorship.

It's hard to imagine a less ethical business practice. Piracy (that is, "reading books the wrong way") pales by comparison alongside of it. If the Dutch booksellers had set out to build the case for piracy as the safest, most virtuous reading practice, they could have done no better.

The new digital distribution deal for eBook merchants will see them ‘watermark’ unique codes into the digital eBooks they sell which will identify a specific transaction number. These transaction numbers will be linked directly to a specific customer account.

So far the process isn’t much out of the ordinary, but the new deal will also bridge the missing link between random-looking transaction numbers in a digital file on the Internet and a real person’s identity.

The agreement will see vendors connected to the eBoekhuis platform share previously-private customer data directly with copyright holders and anti-piracy group BREIN. This means that should digital books turn up on BitTorrent networks or Usenet for example, with a minimum of fuss BREIN will be able to match the embedded watermarks with the customer who bought them.

According to the document seen by EReaders.nl, eBook vendors will be required to store customer transaction data and make it available to BREIN and rightsholders for a minimum of two years.

EBook Sellers Strike Deal To Share Customer Details With Anti-Piracy Outfit

Sony's new "lens cameras," wireless accessories that clip onto your smartphone and turn it into a high-quality point-and-shoot camera, have been detailed again, this time through a leaked manual. Sony Alpha Rumors (SAR) has previously leaked photos of the devices, and is back now with a lot more detail. Diagrams taken from the manual show that the lens cameras won't leave all the controls down to the smartphone they're attached to. Both lenses detailed in the menu feature power switches, microphone, shutter keys, and power zoom, as well as a small display panel that shows vital information like battery levels and SD card status. The models will also have tripod mounts and a "multifunction jack."

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Further expanding the methods of communication with a single app.

Android is an operating system that is truly global, and Google is expanding the capabilities of Google Translate today to reflect that by adding important new languages. First are two new languages that can be used for handwriting recognition, and those are Hindi and Thai. It's especially important for handwriting recognition for languages such as these because they have a non-Roman character set that is difficult to use on a standard keyboard layout.

Today's update is also expanding the capabilities of Google Translate's "camera input", which reads languages you capture from physical objects with your phone's camera, to Afrikaans, Greek, Hebrew and Serbian. With these new capabilities in Google Translate for six more languages, Google is adding to an ever-expanding list of foreign languages that can help people communicate whether they're traveling or hosting travelers themselves.

As the poster child for copyright trolls, Prenda Law has been running into all sorts of trouble lately.

In June, Prenda and its boss John Steele were accused of running a “honeypot” based on an expert report authored by Delvan Neville, whose company specializes in monitoring BitTorrent users.

The report hinted that the law firm was seeding the very files they claimed to protect, and found that many of the torrents detailed in Prenda lawsuits originate from a user on The Pirate Bay called ‘Sharkmp4′.

In an effort to expose the alleged honeypot, The Pirate Bay then jumped in and revealed the IP-addresses that ‘Sharkmp4′used to upload the torrent files. Since the site wipes all IP-addresses after 48 hours, The Pirate Bay team had to decrypt older backups to eventually offer the list below.

Sharkmp4 IP-addresses

While the public is already convinced that the honeypot is real, the Pirate Bay evidence has now become part of the AF Holdings v Patel case which could land the law firm in even more trouble.

After a judge approved discovery to both parties in the case, defense lawyer Blair Chintella sent out a series of subpoenas hoping to expose the copyright troll’s nefarious tactics.

One of the subpoenas covered the Comcast IP-address 75.72.88.156 used by “Sharkmp4,” as can be seen at the bottom of the list of Pirate Bay IPs shown above.

After a few weeks Comcast returned the subscriber details that matched the IP-address at the time the files were uploaded. As can be seen from their response detailed below, this IP is indeed the Comcast account of Steele Hansmeier PLLC, which is directly connected to Prenda Law.

Comcast confirms

The revelations above are the first solid proof of copyright trolls operating a honeypot scheme on The Pirate Bay, or any other BitTorrent site for that matter.

The honeypot strategy is just one piece of the puzzle, albeit an important one. The defense team has filed more subpoenas which are expected to be returned later, in the hope of uncovering more dirt on Prenda and its associates.

The discovery process in the case is still ongoing and ends in September. After the dust has settled it will be up to the court to decide how to rule on this and other damning revelations.

The irony of the above is that Prenda is now being haunted by the IP-address subpoenas they first used to pressure accused file-sharers into paying thousands of dollars in settlement fees.

Perhaps that can be called justice?

Source: Copyright Troll Ran Pirate Bay Honeypot, Comcast Confirms

See Sir Ben Kingsley prove his acting prowess!

Iron Man 3 is the year's biggest film to date, and so we're rather pleased to be able to bring you a deleted scene / gag from the film ahead of its home entertainment release next month. This does contain a spoiler for one character, so please beware if you haven't seen the film at all, but if you know what you're in for then enjoy this rather amusing clip.

Yes, that's Sir Ben Kingsley once again proving why he's an acting legend in the company of Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark and Don Cheadle's James Rhodes. Obviously if you've seen the film you know how this fits in; if you haven't seen it yet what the heck are you doing watching this? We told you there were spoilers.

We know now that Robert Downey Jr has signed up with Marvel to return as Tony Stark and Iron Man in Avengers: Age Of Ultron in 2015, and in a further Avengers outing down the line (Marvel head Kevin Feige has, lest we forget, planned as far ahead as 2021 if all goes to plan), but with no further solo outings set in concrete it's nice to go out with a bang here. Or as in this case, quite a lot of bangs.

Marvel’s Iron Man 3 is available on 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray and DVD on 9 September (TM & ©2013 Marvel). The disc is reviewed in the next issue of Empire, out August 29.

As one of the largest file-sharing services online 4shared is closely watched by copyright holders who vigorously try to scrub pirated files from the site.

The file-hosting service offers a standard DMCA takedown procedure but recently decided to go a step further by developing its own content identification technology based on audio fingerprints.

Under the new system copyright holders can upload their files to 4shared’s backend. The company then makes a unique fingerprint of each file to prevent them from being shared in public by its users.

“4shared has always been a personal online file storage service and has never endorsed online piracy,” 4shared’s Mike Wilson tells TorrentFreak.

“So we have decided to introduce a music identification system, among the other steps, to maintain the reputation of a legitimate file storage and further prevent illegal usage of our service,” he adds.

4shared’s system is based on the open source solution Echoprint, which is powered by the music intelligence company Echo Nest. This technology allows 4shared to identify files based on audio characteristics instead of just a file hash.

“The algorithm calculates special code for each music file, based on its acoustic properties rather than on a digital hash code, thus making the code or ‘fingerprint’ a unique identifier of a certain title, no matter which properties or format the file has,” Wilson says.

When an attempt is made to share a pirated file in public it will be blocked, assuring copyright holders that their content won’t be distributed without permission. The system only scans public files meaning that it’s still possible for users to backup their own files privately.

The system 4shared has developed works in a similar way to YouTube’s Content ID system, which also offers filtering based on files copyright holders upload to the site.

4shared plans to expand the music identification system with an option to monetize pirated files in the future. This means that in addition to blocking pirated transfers, copyright holders will have an option to replace them with links to sites where the content can be bought legally.

“In the nearest future we will also provide a monetization option instead of simply blocking the file so the users can get the content in a legal way and the owners can make their profit,” Wilson told us.

Aside from audio files, 4shared can also offer similar services for video although these are expected to be rolled out at a later stage. For now, the company is focused on signing up content owners to its music identification account.

Source: 4Shared Uses Unique Fingerprinting Tech to Scan For Pirated Files

Samsung plans to unveil its next-generation Galaxy Note III handset during a press conference on September 4th and details continue to leak ahead of the device's official debut. We have already seen the new phablet's specs leak extensively, and now a new report from the often reliable SamMobile claims to reveal the complete list of markets that will receive each of the Galaxy Note III's three main variants. As is the case with the Galaxy S4, Samsung reportedly plans to launch two versions of the Note III — one with a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor and a second version with Samsung's eight-core Exynos 5 Octa chipset. A third version will seemingly be available with dual SIM support, and earlier reports suggest that the Galaxy Note III will also feature a 5.7-inch display, Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, 3GB of RAM and a massive battery. According to this new report, The U.S. models will feature a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 chipset thanks to its 4G LTE support, while other markets like France, Germany and Italy will get the eight-core model. Some markets like the United Kingdom will have access to both versions. The full list of countries can be found on SamMobile's site, which is linked below.

Amazon has assembled a list of some of the funniest, top-rated product reviews posted by its customers. Just don't expect the tongue-in-cheek examples to help with your buying decisions. "Helpful product reviews written by Amazon customers are the heart of Amazon.com, and we treasure the customers who work hard to write them," reads a new webpage that showcases the selections. "But occasionally customer creativity goes off the charts in the best possible way." Unsurprisingly, the best reviews on Amazon are often paired with some of the retailer's most famously bizarre items. Take for example the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt. A featured review by overlook1977 says, "Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this...

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In the UK, rightsholders have the power to demand arbitrary censorship of websites they dislike, and ISPs are required to block those sites. The Premier League -- the multibillion-dollar football organization -- carelessly added the IP address of a major web-host to its censorship list, and as a result blocked The Radio Times (the BBC's listing service), Galaxy Zoo (an important astronomical research project), and many other legitimate sites. People who tried to visit those sites instead saw a warning saying that the sites were devoted to copyright infringement and that anyone visiting them was also infringing copyright.

ISPs were flooded with complaints, and began to unblock the sites themselves. But the Premier League is outraged at this. They say that even if the Premier League censored the wrong sites, it isn't up to the ISPs to uncensor them -- the ISPs are supposed to comply with the lists they get from rightsholders, no questions asked.

The way the system works is that the rights-holders are responsible for identifying which IP addresses are being used and then sending the details to the ISPs.

The court specifically said that ISPs are "wholly reliant" on the rights-holders "accurately identifying" which IPs should be blocked and had "no obligation" to check them themselves.

In addition to Radio Times, several football clubs - including Blackburn Rovers, Reading and Brentford - as well as the Notes from Nature science project and Galaxy Zoo space education site have been affected...

... "The court order that requires internet service providers to block this website clearly states that any issues they have in implementing the block must be raised with the Premier League before taking any further action," said a spokesman.

"This is the first we have heard of this issue and are looking into it as a matter of urgency.

"The fact remains that the High Court has ordered an injunction requiring ISPs to block First Row Sports and we will continue to implement it and expect the ISPs to respect the ruling."

Radio Times caught up in Premier League's piracy fight

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Trevor Timm has a handy guide to decoding NSA doublespeak. The spookocracy has a pathetically transparent way of lying their way out of direct questions, but the press (and, more importantly, Congress) seems incapable of detecting the low-grade BS emanating from the smoke-filled rooms. For example, when you ask the NSA if they can read Americans' email without a warrant, they reply "we cannot target Americans’ email without a warrant." The amazing thing about this stuff isn't that the NSA tries it on, but that its nominal supervision doesn't notice it. My five year old is better at this than they are.

This makes a great addition to the glossary of NSAspeak compiled by the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer and Brett Max Kaufman.

Another tried and true technique in the NSA obfuscation playbook is to deny it does one invasive thing or another “under this program.” When it’s later revealed the NSA actually does do the spying it said it didn’t, officials can claim it was just part of another program not referred to in the initial answer.

This was the Bush administration’s strategy for the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”: The term “TSP” ended up being a meaningless label, created by administration officials after the much larger warrantless surveillance program was exposed by the New York Times in 2005. They used it to give the misleading impression that the NSA’s spying program was narrow and aimed only at intercepting the communications of terrorists. In fact, the larger program affected all Americans.

Now we’re likely seeing it as part of the telephone records collection debate when administration officials repeat over and over that they aren’t collecting location data “under this program.” Sen. Ron Wyden has strongly suggested this might not be the whole story.

A Guide to the Deceptions, Misinformation, and Word Games Officials Use to Mislead the Public About NSA Surveillance

We're all aware that hearing loss is pretty easy to prevent, but most of us probably don't bother actually getting our hearing tested that often. If you're curious about how your hearing is doing, the folks over at AsapSCIENCE have put together a quick test you can administer yourself with nothing but a pair of headphones.

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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.

Delta-V Racing

Description: Snake your way through the galaxy’s finest race tracks and charge to victory in some of the coolest ships known to man. Quick thinking and faster reactions are the order of the day. Race tactically; throw off homing missiles with decoy mines or risk the tight fast route to pull a chain-boosted lead then claim your victory from the tournament BOSS as you take him out with a Laser blast.

Holey Moley

Description: Holey Moley is a FREE classic, frantic and addictive Whack-a-Mole game featuring Google Play Game Services Integration, 3 difficulty levels and different varieties of Mole, from super-squishy to ultra-tough.

Momonga Pinball Adventures

Description: Momonga is a unique pinball game, where you bounce through different worlds. On the way, you team up with friends to defeat enemies and conquer boss fights. A little flying squirrel takes on the forces of evil. Join Momo, Panda and Fry in a quest to save the momongas from the claws of the evil owls.

FableScapes 2

Description: FableScapes 2 is a fun, educational storytelling game that unleashes your imagination to create fantastic fables and terrific tales. FableScapes 2 gives children and parents a virtual puppet theatre to play with. Inside, you’ll find a whole world of stories and images for kids which can be created, changed, saved and shared.

Nun Attack: Run & Gun

Description: The Fallen Nun has been defeated, but Evil never truly rests. Find out what lies beyond the wretched world left behind by Mortanna, as the Nuns dash, shoot and slide through a plethora of obstacles and monsters! Test your faith in this fast-paced, hectic runner that’s not for the faint of heart! Pick your favorite Nun, equip bad-ass weapons, choose from a slew of holy power-ups and start running towards your next destination, as all Hell’s breaking loose.

Middle Manager of Justice

Description: Congratulations, you are the new Middle Manager of Justice! You have been hired to whip the latest branch of Justice Corp. into shape! Train and manage your team of superheroes to thwart crime and save citizens around the city! Increase efficiency in your branch by building new facilities and upgrading the equipment! Could it be done without you? Yeah, probably. But it would be sloppy, costly and demotivating!

Guardian Cross

Description: Capture and train over 120 different Guardians as you attempt to create the most powerful party possible. Undertake thrilling quests to unlock the secret of why the divine beasts of antiquity have woken after a millennium of slumber,and battle other players from around the world in an online coliseum!

Squishy Bubble Popper

Description: Squishy Bubble Popper is a match-3 style physics game where you must tap 3 or more bubbles of the same color to clear them. In addition, this game changes its physics each level. This game is part of a human interaction study. It explores how the user can best be asked to change the behaviour and graphics of a game.

What the Block?!

Description:

“What the Block?!™ is the 5-star rated puzzle game that will challenge both your brain and your dexterity! Named App of the Week by Corona Labs! How do you play? Just pick up and arrange the colored blocks to match a pattern. But don’t forget about gravity — the blocks have to stay in place after you let go!”

Hero Forge

Description: Hero Forge is a fantasy puzzle RPG where you battle opponents by matching 3D blocks and executing skills in a series of intense rounds.

COMING SOON

A court clerk who helped exonerate a man wrongly imprisoned for rape was fired in June, and now she's speaking out about the ordeal. Robert Nelson was convicted of rape in 1984. After two previous motions for DNA tests that could clear his name were rejected, 70-year-old clerk Sharon Snyder decided to step in and better his odds. She provided Nelson's sister with a successful DNA motion from another case, giving Nelson a better idea of how to properly seek the tests. His third request was granted, and ultimately Nelson was cleared of a 1984 rape conviction; he'd been serving time for the crime since 2006.

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Much hay has been made around Yahoo's reinvigoration under CEO Marissa Mayer — the company has released some very solid mobile apps, reinvigorated Flickr, and of course there's that big Tumblr purchase. However, today's news shows that old habits really do die hard: Yahoo has just announced a new update to its browser toolbar, a product that most people probably forgot about years ago. As expected, it offers quick links to Yahoo services like Mail, Flickr, weather, stocks, and news; it also lets you plug in social networks like Facebook and Tumblr, of course.

Since the heyday of toolbars (sometime back when IE 6 was a dominant force), Chrome, Firefox, IE 10, and Safari have all essentially replaced the functionality that these...

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Today Microsoft announced that Skype will come installed in Windows 8.1, likely helping the communications service that was purchased for $8.5 billion grow more quickly. The move immediately causes something of a gut reaction that this will be challenged in court, probably in Europe.

Microsoft has a history of pissing off regulators by over-bundling its own services that compete with third parties into its operating system. However, I strongly suspect that Skype will lean only on publicly available Windows APIs, providing something of a fire shield.

You might ask yourself why Microsoft would be in danger of governmental oversight and crackdown over Skype, and not, say, over the Bing Weather app. Why can one be bundled into Windows 8 safely, and perhaps not the other? Scale, essentially. Skype is a huge service, and one with obvious competition from both large and small companies alike. The field that it competes in is large, and lucrative. Therefore, Microsoft tipping the scales of its platform — which can still, in some ways, be judged a monopoly — in favor of its home-built communications tool will irk many.

Microsoft non sum qualis eram, but that doesn’t stop the potential to fractious legal scrapping.

All that aside, the move is great for Skype, and helps to better explain perhaps why Microsoft was willing to pay so many billions for the company. By baking Skype into Windows 8.1, Microsoft will add it to the plate of nine-figure users, perhaps boosting Skype’s usage by double-digit percentage points. Also, Skype is a better product than some of the native social applications built into Windows 8. If Skype can supplant them at least in usage, it will be a net boon for Windows.

Windows 8.1 isn’t completely locked yet, but it is close. Yesterday Microsoft confirmed that Windows 8.1 will be digitally available on October 17, and will land in stores on the 18th.

Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.

Today Google confirmed that it has blocked the new YouTube app for Windows Phone. Yesterday, the day after it was released, users reported issues regarding playback within the application. Those errors, it is now clear, were due to Google axing the application’s access to YouTube.

In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch that “Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully featured YouTube experience,” which led to the company re-releasing “a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service.” For that reason, it has been shuttered from Google’s end.

Microsoft informed TechCrunch that it is “working with [Google] to resolve the issue.”

Someone fucked up. Microsoft and Google are working in concert to get a functional YouTube application out for Windows Phone. For Microsoft to launch something that failed the Google test means that something went south. And given the lilt of the situation, I suspect Microsoft more than Google in this case.

The real losers in the situation are Windows Phone users who just want to watch videos on their phones but can’t, because two bickering corporate giants can’t play nice long enough to do well by their users (YouTube fans for Google, and Microsoft’s mobile customers).

Google and Microsoft have been in a long spat this year, arguing over email and calendar syncing, mobile mapping access, YouTube on Windows Phone and more. This is one episode that is simply unneeded. Though you have to wonder if Microsoft is being slightly impish, and is poking Google in the eye on purpose over the application.

Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan

40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World 

Hat tip to Doc Quatermass.

A new species of mammal—a pretty cute one, at that—has been discovered in the cloudy mountains of South America. Named the Olinguito, or Bassaricyon neblina, the raccoon-sized creature lives in the treetops of Colombia and Ecuador, and is the first carnivorous mammal species to be uncovered in the Americas in 35 years.

Hidden by fog and their own nocturnal habits, olinguito is unusually widely-distributed, says finder Kristofer Helgen, who presented the biological evidence establishing its status as a separate species.

"This is extremely unusual in carnivores," he told Smithsonian.com's Joseph Stromberg. "I honestly think that this could be the last time in history that we will turn up this kind of situation—both a new carnivore, and one that's widespread enough to have multiple kinds."

Confirmation of the discovery also exposes mislabeled bones and fur samples in museum collections, previously believed to be examples of other species in the Olingo family. It even appears that an individual lived at U.S. zoos in the 1960s, its unusual behavior confusing keepers.

Here's Boing Boing Science Editor Maggie Koerth-Baker:

It's kind of a big deal to identify a new carnivore in this day and age, and a nice reminder that there's still lots of Earth left to explore. At the same time, though, it's not like nobody had ever seen an olinguito before it turned up in the pages of the journal ZooKeys. In fact, the olinguito is one of those species that looks, superficially, a lot like a related-but-distinct species. In this case, the olingo. Historical records show that olinguitos have been captured before — one even lived in American zoos — but all those animals were just misidentified as olingos.

So, the olinguito is also a really good reminder that, sometimes, we don't really have to travel far afield to discover something new and fascinating. Sometimes, those things are sitting right in front of us, just waiting for us to pay a little closer attention.

If you appreciate beautiful, full-bleed graphics in an app that performs as good as it looks, the all-new updated Yahoo! Weather app is one you'll want to have a look at. Checking the weather on our phones is one of those things nobody needs to do —getting up and looking outside would be good for anyone — but most of us do it. It's convenient, and lets us see what the skies and temperature are like in places where we're not. Maybe you're traveling and need to know whether to pack an umbrella or which jacket to take, or you're wanting to know the forecast of the place you're going. Or maybe you just like being able to check something as trivial as the weather through your expensive smartphone. We never judge.

There are a lot (as in a whole lot) of apps out there that show you the weather, but Yahoo! has found a way to stand out from the crowd. Using high-resolution pictures from Flickr —a company Yahoo! owns — that show the location and current conditions as a backdrop, the weather never looked this good. I've been playing with the update here for a couple hours, and I'll tell you that looking at the weather in Berlin is better when the background is a gorgeous picture of the Brandenburg Gate in the background. The same goes for a sunset picture of the National Mall in Washington, DC. Of course not all locations are going to be covered, so if you live somewhere out-of-the-way like, for example, Bunker Hill, West Virginia, you'll have a generic image.

The app is also really feature-rich. The settings cover everything from unit types (Celsius or Fahrenheit) to persistent notifications and alerts. You can add as many locations as you like, and of course your current location is always available. Add in things like 10-day forecasts, 24 hour forecast, the chance of precipitation, wind and pressure numbers, the moon phase, UV patterns, sunrise and sunset times, an interactive map and a set of widgets of all sizes and you've got the recipe for an app everyone will like. There's even a lock screen widget if your Android supports them.

The app is free, and if you're already using the Yahoo! Weather app you'll be getting an update notification soon. If you're not, and want to give it a try, grab it via the Google Play link above. We've got a whole slew of screenshots of the UI and settings after the break.

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Card payment processor Stripe is now available in its first European country, the U.K. British businesses can now add card processing to their websites and accept payments in GBP, EUR and USD. After expanding its service to Canada last year, more international locations should come soon.

Stripe isn’t partnering with any local player in the payment processing space and will have to compete with established companies, such as WorldPay or SecureTrading.

“There was a significant amount of work required to build the right relationships on the banking side and make the product work as seamlessly in the U.K. as it does in the U.S.,” Stripe U.K. director Andy Young told me. “We could have rushed out a hacky solution by partnering with existing payments companies in the U.K., but the downside is that this ends up with a much lower-quality product,” he continued. Stripe now has an office in London with four employees and is looking to double or triple this number by the end of the year.

Pricing in the U.K. is 2.4% + £0.20/€0.24/$0.30 per transaction + VAT. It is slightly cheaper than the U.S. pricing (2.9% + $0.30). European businesses will have to collect VAT on every transaction just like they would do using other payment processors. For now, only U.K. users can start charging in USD, GBP and EUR.

“For example, an ecommerce store in London can show prices in GBP for customers in the UK, EUR for customers in France, and USD for customers in the US,” Young said. It remains to be confirmed whether existing U.S. customers will soon be able to take advantage of this feature as well.

Accepting payments in other currencies was one of the most requested features. Most European banks charge a steep fee when you pay with your card in dollars. It hurt the bottom line for online shops who sell digital goods. “In the future we’ll be expanding with more currencies for users worldwide,” Young said.

Long-time partners Shopify, Bigcommerce, Squarespace, BigCartel and Wave updated their Stripe features for the new U.K. version of Stripe. For example, British users can now set up an online shop in Shopify or Squarespace from the U.K. and accept payments in GBP, EUR or USD. In addition to its existing partners, the company partnered with Kashflow and FreeAgent.

International expansions are a big part of Stripe’s current strategy. Yet, it’s a long and complicated process. “A substantial proportion of the work required to build Stripe in the U.S. has been repeated for the U.K.,” Young said. Financial regulatory systems are very different around the world and Stripe wants to provide the same product everywhere — the company needs to accept all the various payment methods, provide the same fee structure and stay competitive with local players.

When asked when Stripe users should expect other international expansions, Young was surprisingly transparent about the company’s plans. “We’re working on quickly expanding to other countries within Europe and Australia, but we don’t have a timeline on our launches there just yet”, he said. “We’re already available in beta in Ireland, France and the Netherlands.”