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Frank La Rue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion, has tabled a report (PDF) to the UN Human Rights Council that makes a connection between surveillance and free expression. This is a first in the UN, and the meat of it is that it establishes the principle that countries that engage in bulk, warrantless Internet surveillance are violating their human rights obligations to ensure freedom of expression:

La Rue reminds States that in order to meet their human rights obligations, they must ensure that the rights to free expression and privacy—and metadata protection in particular—are at the heart of their communications surveillance frameworks. To this end, the Special Rapporteur urges states to review national laws regulating surveillance and update and strengthen laws and legal standards:

Communications surveillance should be regarded as a highly intrusive act that potentially interferes with the rights to freedom of expression and privacy and threatens the foundations of a democratic society.

Legislation must stipulate that State surveillance of communications must only occur under the most exceptional circumstances and exclusively under the supervision of an independent judicial authority.

At present, access to communications data has been conducted by a variety of public bodies for a broad range of purposes, often without judicial authorization and independent oversight. Such overbroad access threatens basic democratic values.

Internet Surveillance and Free Speech: the United Nations Makes the Connection (via /.)

New plans come as carrier announces 500,000 4G subscribers, double speed rollouts and next phase of LTE expansion

EE, the UK's only 4G carrier, has today announced their next expansion plans for the network, alongside some new sharing plans as well as some pay-as-you-go 4G mobile broadband plans as well. The new sharing plans will allow customers to share their allowances across different devices, or with other people entirely. The mobile broadband plans represent the first time EE has offered 4G mobile data on the prepaid market. Prices and availability for both will be announced in the coming weeks. 

Also announced today are the first 10 cities to receive the 'double-speed' boost. This will take top line speeds up to 80Mbps with the average download speeds increased to 24-30Mbps. Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield will all receive the boost in the weeks to come. 

Not done there, EE has confirmed a bunch of new towns across the UK that will receive their own LTE expansions in 2013. Customers in Aberdeen, Bath, Bournemouth, Brighton, Cambridge, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Northampton, Norwich, Poole, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea and York are specifically mentioned as getting 4G data. As well as the expansion to cover towns and cities, the next phase of the LTE rollout will target major commuter routes, shopping centres and Airports such as Gatwick which recently flipped the switch. 

While EE has been criticized for some high pricing for their 4G plans, there's no doubts that they're making the most of their headstart in the market while we await competing networks lighting up. 

Source: EE

 

I firmly believe that vegetarians and vegans should never have to relegate themselves to ordering a meager salad when dining out. A healthy vegetarian or vegan meal can be "invented" at any kind of restaurant whether or not the options exist on the menu—all it takes is a willingness to ask questions and make specific requests.

Here are some examples of vegetarian and vegan meals you can "tweak" at your favorite restaurants and in a variety of dining scenarios.

Asian

The plethora of vegetable dishes and the relative absence of dairy makes it easy to eat vegetarian or vegan at an Asian restaurant. Order steamed vegetables, stir-fried tofu, lo mein, brown rice, or any other meatless offering at a Chinese place. Go for miso soup and a vegetable sushi roll if you're eating a Japanese meal. Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean restaurants usually offer multiple vegetarian options as well.

For strict vegans, always ask to make sure your meal won't contain any fish sauce or stock.

Barbecue

Although it seems like this category would be the toughest one of all, it's actually simple—just go for the side dishes! Build a "sampler platter" of sides like grilled corn or asparagus (vegans, hold the butter), a dinner roll or two, steamed broccoli, a baked sweet potato with cinnamon and sugar, or even steak fries.

For strict vegans, ask whether your veggies can be cooked on a separate grill or otherwise apart from where the meat is cooked.

Breakfast and Brunch

Whether you find yourself at a Denny's or a fancy-schmancy brunch spot, there are lots of options when it comes to breakfast food. Fresh fruit, oatmeal, hash browns, granola, bagels, and toast are a few classics.

For strict vegans, request that your oatmeal be prepared with water instead of milk, and always remind your server that you don't want butter on your toast.

French

French cuisine is notorious for its liberal use of butter and cream, but vegans can bypass that (no pun intended) with dishes like ratatouille, veggie soup, steamed vegetables, and baked or fried potatoes. When in doubt, check out the side dish menu and ask for your order to be prepared without butter.

For strict vegans, ask in advance whether soups are made with animal stock and if breads contain egg or dairy.

Indian

An Indian restaurant is a vegetarian paradise. Although many curries are made with ghee (clarified butter) and cream, most Indian restaurants will omit the ghee and substitute coconut cream if you ask—and it's delicious! Appetizers and sides like pappadum, pakora, veggie samosas, roti, and paratha are also excellent vegan choices.

For strict vegans, avoid naan, which, although delicious, is made with yogurt.

Italian

Fresh-baked bread with olive oil is my favorite starter of all time. Don't forget bruschetta and minestrone soup! You may think spaghetti marinara is the only entree possibility, but many places also offer a pasta primavera or spaghetti pomodoro, a sauce made with fresh tomatoes and olive oil.

For strict vegans, make sure no chicken broth is used in the vegetable soup or pasta sauce, and if you're ordering garlic bread, request that it be prepared with oil rather than butter.

Mexican

Vegans—think Mexican food is no good without the cheese? Think again. After digging into the tortilla chips with salsa and/or guacamole, I like to ask for tacos, enchiladas, or a burrito filled with black beans instead of meat, plus a side of Spanish rice.

For strict vegans, ask your server whether the rice is prepared with chicken stock, and make sure the beans haven't been cooked in lard.

Middle Eastern

Hummus (my favorite food in the whole world) is a no-brainer, especially with freshly-baked pita bread, but there's also baba ghanouj, dolmas, falafel, and tabbouleh for appetizers. For the main event, veggie kebabs over rice pilaf is always a winner.

For strict vegans, verify there's no animal stock in the rice, and request that nothing be garnished with feta cheese, just in case.

Pizza

Vegans don't have to give up pizza night with friends! Just get your portion of the pie cheeseless (and ask for extra sauce instead) and pile on the veggies—roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and roasted garlic are my favorites.

For strict vegans, most pizza crusts are okay, but ask to make sure there's no dairy or honey in there.

Remember, whenever possible, check out a restaurant's online menu ahead of time to help you create a "plan of attack." It's always best to be prepared!

How to Eat Vegan When It's Not on the Menu | Menuism

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Amber Shea Ford, creator and author of the popular food blog Almost Vegan, is a linguist-writer-runner-metalhead-traveler-strangeling from Kansas City, Missouri. She is also a certified raw vegan chef, classically trained in the art of living foods at Matthew Kenney’s 105degrees Academy. As a health-oriented vegan, Amber eschews diets based on dogmatism and deprivation, espousing a flexible approach to food choices instead. Don’t look to her for strict rules, political rants or ethical diatribes. Amber is not your mom, your congressperson or your local PETA representative—she’s just a girl with a taste for nutritious, vibrant, sexy food! Read her musings at Almost Vegan and find her around the Web at Almost Vegan on Facebook and @AlmostVeganChef on Twitter.

Menuism is the best way to find restaurant reviews and food photos.

Image remixed from Andril Gorulko and violetblue (Shutterstock).

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.

Google has added yet another stock Android app to the Play Store: the keyboard. Now, users running Android 4.0 and above can get the stock keyboard on any Android phone, complete with all its Jelly Bean features like gesture typing, dictation, and more. Head to the Play Store to check it out.

If you haven't yet manually updated Gmail to the redesigned 4.5 release, it's rolling out on a wide basis this morning to users in numerous countries. If you can't see the update on your device, try forcing the install from the web version of the Play Store, here.

  

The new version of Gmail for Android includes support for the all-new inbox tabs from the desktop Gmail, along with a totally revamped slideout navigation bar. Learn more about the update and the new inbox experience here. In the meantime, head to the Play Store and get that update!

• Google Unveils Brand-New Gmail Inbox Experience, New Android App Coming 'In The Next Few Weeks'
• Getting To Know The Upcoming Gmail 4.2 - Revamped Attachments, Better Navigation, And More!
• Exclusive: Upcoming Gmail For Android 4.2 Will Finally Have Pinch-To-Zoom, Swipeaway Delete/Archive [Video]
• Redesigned Gmail Screenshot Leaks During Google I/O Session - It's Packing A Navigation Drawer And Dumps The Bottom Action Bar

Google Begins Wide Rollout Of Refreshed Gmail App (v4.5) - Slideout Bars For Everyone was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Hangouts for Android is receiving its first Play Store update - on a staged rollout basis - today, fixing a few notable bugs, and promising enhanced performance in unspecified ways. Here's the rather short changelog:

The double notification issue isn't one I'd heard of, but obviously that'd be quite annoying if you were experiencing it.

• Updated: Experiencing Issues After Updating Your Sprint LG Optimus S To Gingerbread? Here Are Some Potential Workarounds
• Hangouts Hangover: Here Are The Major Issues Google Has Promised To Fix In Hangouts... At Some Point
• T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S III Devices Receiving Minor Update To Build T999UVLH2, Currently Rolling Out Via KIES And OTA
• [Update: It's Rolling Out Now] Exclusive: EVO 4G OTA Update Coming June 20th - Fixes Netflix, Voicemail Notifications

Hangouts App Gets First Significant Update (v1.0.2) - Fixes A Few Bugs, Increases Performance was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

A warm front swept through the Mid-Atlantic region late last week and drove the temperature up into the nineties. It was humid and uncomfortable in New York City, but in iOS it was 73° and sunny. In the dead of winter as snow blankets the Northeast, and during sweltering summers while heat waves test our patience and our power grids, it's always 73° and sunny in iOS. The perpetually perfect weather displayed on the iPhone's Weather app icon is actually a profoundly apropos representation of the state of iOS itself. As other mobile platforms have continued to evolve over the past few years, iOS has in many ways remained static. And so an important question is raised as we prepare for WWDC next week: When will Apple's smartphone finally start getting smarter again?

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Much like spammers, Satanists and mimes, patent trolls are one of the rare groups around that Americans of all political stripes can unite in opposing. But although the White House on Tuesday announced some executive orders and proposed some legislative fixes to help end the flurry of lawsuits filed by patent holding firms, Quartz's Christopher Mims thinks that such proposals are laughably inadequate and don't go nearly far enough in addressing the real problems with the United States patent system.

Continue reading...

About two years ago, we reported that one of the most recognized patent trolls around, Lodsys LLC, had sued game maker Rovio over Angry Birds for Android, claiming that the defendant had "infringed and continues to infringe" on patents controlled by Lodsys.

If you're not up to snuff on your patent troll bestiary, Lodsys is a company that produces no real goods or services, but holds plenty of patents that they are willing to either license or use for legal action.

As David correctly pointed out at the time, Lodsys suit said less for Lodsys' actual claim to the patents they sued over, and more for their overall strategy of intimidation and unsavory utilization of the patent system.

• Lodsys Sues Rovio For Patent Infringement Over Angry Birds For Android - We Break Out The Popcorn
• Google Takes First Baby Steps In The Fight Against Lodsys
• Oracle Wants Some Karma Back, Sues Patent Troll Lodsys, Wants All Its Patents Invalidated
• Lodsys Flags Another Android Developer - Bithack, The Creator Of Apparatus. Here Is One Of Their Ridiculous Infringement Claims [Pictures]

Lodsys Releases Eighteen-Word Statement Indicating Rovio Has Taken Licenses For All Products 'On All Platforms' was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Bruce Schneier's editorial on CALEA-II is right on. In case you missed it, CALEA II is the FBI's proposal to require all American computers, mobile devices, operating systems, email programs, browsers, etc, to have weak security so that they can eavesdrop on them (as a side note, a CALEA-II rule would almost certainly require a ban on free/open source software, since code that can be modified is code that can have the FBI back-doors removed).

The FBI believes it can have it both ways: that it can open systems to its eavesdropping, but keep them secure from anyone else's eavesdropping. That's just not possible. It's impossible to build a communications system that allows the FBI surreptitious access but doesn't allow similar access by others. When it comes to security, we have two options: We can build our systems to be as secure as possible from eavesdropping, or we can deliberately weaken their security. We have to choose one or the other.

This is an old debate, and one we've been through many times. The NSA even has a name for it: the equities issue. In the 1980s, the equities debate was about export control of cryptography. The government deliberately weakened U.S. cryptography products because it didn't want foreign groups to have access to secure systems. Two things resulted: fewer Internet products with cryptography, to the insecurity of everybody, and a vibrant foreign security industry based on the unofficial slogan "Don't buy the U.S. stuff -- it's lousy."

In 1994, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act mandated that U.S. companies build eavesdropping capabilities into phone switches. These were sold internationally; some countries liked having the ability to spy on their citizens. Of course, so did criminals, and there were public scandals in Greece (2005) and Italy (2006) as a result.

In 2012, we learned that every phone switch sold to the Department of Defense had security vulnerabilities in its surveillance system. And just this May, we learned that Chinese hackers breached Google's system for providing surveillance data for the FBI.

The Problems with CALEA-II

Video Link

Video Link

Joel sez, "TRIPWIRE is a magazine that for over two decades has covered comics, genre and related fields. Described by Guillermo Del Toro as 'the touchstone of comic book culture in the UK and one of the leading periodicals dedicated to this narrative art form', this year sees the publication of TRIPWIRE 21, a book that celebrates 21 years of covering comics and its related culture. TRIPWIRE treats comics with the respect and depth that the field deserves."

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Public.Resource.Org has always been a strong supporter of British-American cooperation. In order to further what Winston Churchill so aptly dubbed our “Special Relationship,” I'm happy to announce two hands across the sea.

If you would like to be a citizen of the United Kingdom, you need to study a book called Life in the UK. The book is published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office, which is part of the amazingly well run National Archives. These are the folks that run legislation.gov.uk, the best legislative reference site in the world. Life in the UK has the kind of open license one has come to expect for government information, so we asked our friends at the Rural Design Cooperative to take a stab at creating an open version. They totally went to town, replacing the commercial stock photos with open artwork, creating much better navigation across the book, study guide, and tests, and making the tests better, and (of course!) publishing the whole thing as valid html and open source so you can fork it if you'd like and create your own version. Thanks to Oliver Morley, the Archivist of the United Kingdom, for enabling open publishing and to the folks at the Rural Design Cooperative for creating the new version. You can read the all new Open Life in the UK here.

I'm sorry to report that another agent of the UK government, the British Standards Institution, apparently didn't get the open government memo. As you know, we've posted a bunch of crucial public safety standards from the UK as well as the rest of Europe and the world. Well, the British Standards Institution decided that they didn't like the fact that we posted a copy of BS 8300:2009+A1, which is the “Design of Buildings and Their Approaches to Meet the Needs of Disabled People” which we have on our site and on the Internet Archive. They sent us a DMCA takedown notice. We sent them a strongly-worded 4-page answer and that answer is NFW. You can read all the traffic back and forth with the standards people on our docket of RFCs.

The "Open Life in the UK" that Public Resource put together is much better than the study guide I used when I was becoming a British citizen. On behalf of all migrants to Britain, thank you, Public Resource!

Open Life in the UK (Thanks, Carl!)

Last month copyright troll law firm Prenda suffered losses on several fronts, including a $81,319.72 court sanction. However, Prenda’s troubles are far from over.

A new filing submitted by defense lawyer Graham Syfert opens up a new can of worms, accusing the copyright trolls of seeding the very files they claim to protect.

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

Neville gave Prenda a taste of their own medicine by conducting a thorough analysis of the IP-addresses sharing the files the copyright trolls are suing for.

Many of the torrents detailed in Prenda lawsuits originate from a user on The Pirate Bay called ‘Sharkmp4′. Could it be that this user is somehow linked to Prenda and distributing the files to increase their list of potential targets?

The expert report found that some interesting patterns emerge from the list of IP-addresses observed sharing these files. Several IP-addresses were present in the majority of the swarms, all using a rather rare version of the BitTorrent client Vuze which is often used for BitTorrent tracking.

The IP-addresses in question resolve to the VPN provider Mullvad, and Neville suggests in his report that these IPs were used by Prenda’s BitTorrent tracking company 6881 Forensics. The same addresses were also found commenting on Prenda topics published on the anti-copyright troll blogs FightCopyrightTrolls and DieTrollDie.

The report goes on to describe many connections between Sharkmp4, the tracking company, and Prenda. Among other things it ties the Comcast IP-address 75.72.88.156 to John Steele’s GoDaddy account. The same IP-address is also associated with porn studio Ingenuity 13 whose work was shared by Sharkmp4 before it was commercially available.

Steele’s GoDaddy account

“It appears from all the evidence that John Steele (or someone under his control or with access to his GoDaddy account records with authorization to make changes to domain names) is the most probable candidate for the identity of Pirate Bay user sharkmp4. Sharkmp4 was the originator of the only found public releases of Ingenuity 13 works prior to the creation of naughty­hotties.com,” Neville writes.

“Some works were shared by sharkmp4 prior to the registered copyright date with indications of access to a higher resolution copy more related to the direct source,” he adds.

While the above makes it likely that Prenda were indeed sharing the files they were supposed to protect, there is one final piece of evidence to conclusively link “Sharkmp4″ to the copyright trolls.

It’s no secret that The Pirate Bay stores users’ IP-addresses, so after hearing about the new filing they handed TorrentFreak the log files for Sharkmp4. They link the user to John Steele and Prenda Law.

Below is an overview of some of the uploaded files which are all still online.

Sharkmp4 IP-addresses

The Pirate Bay logs not only link Prenda to the sharing of their own files on BitTorrent, but also tie them directly to the Sharkmp4 user and the uploads of the actual torrent files.

The IP-address 75.72.88.156 was previously used by someone with access to John Steele’s GoDaddy account and was also used by Sharkmp4 to upload various torrents. Several of the other IP-addresses in the log resolve to the Mullvad VPN and are associated with Prenda-related comments on the previously mentioned anti-copyright troll blogs.

The logs provided by The Pirate Bay can be seen as the missing link in the evidence chain, undoubtedly linking Sharkmp4 to Prenda and John Steele. Needless to say, considering the stack of evidence above it’s not outrageous to conclude that the honeypot theory is viable.

While this is certainly not the first time that a copyright troll has been accused of operating a honeypot, the evidence compiled against Prenda and Steel is some of the most damning we’ve seen thus far.

It’s now up to the judge to decide what to do with it.

Update: The logs caused some confusion among TPB users but Pirate Bay’s Winston ensures TorrentFreak that IPs in the database are wiped after 48-hours.

“the IPs I dug up are from the daily database backups. I had to decrypt the backups one by one after checking the upload times and fetching the correct backup file for that day,” Winston tells us.

“The backups are stored on a separate cloud provider, pgp encrypted so the decryption key is not the same as the encryption key, and the decryption key is safely stored offline and is itself encrypted with a passphrase. So there’s no risk of users IPs getting compromised in a raid!”

“As for us sharing the IPs, we would obvious only do this to out the bad guys, after we linked them to the addresses.”

Source: The Pirate Bay Helps to Expose Copyright Troll Honeypot

Google's updating every part of its Gmail ecosystem this week, and iOS is the latest to get the upgrade. Version 2.3.14159 (an awesome version number Easter egg, by the way) brings the new tabbed inbox to Gmail's mobile interface, though you'll have to enable the new inbox in your desktop Gmail before it'll appear in the app. With customized inboxes come customized notifications, too: you can get notified only when you have important messages, or get none for a single account, or anything else you so desire. It brings the iOS app slightly closer to parity with the Android app, and brings the best of Gmail's new sorting features to all your devices.

Continue reading…

Patent trolling is far from a divisive issue in the United States. Pretty much everyone but the trolls can agree that patent trolling is damaging to the economy, and generally kind of a dick move. Patent trolling, if you're not familiar with the practice, is quite simple in concept: buy patents, extort licensing fees from alleged infringers, and sue if they refuse to comply. President Obama proposed some "major" changes to US law that will supposedly reduce the effectiveness of such companies. Before we look at those, though, let's look briefly at what makes a troll tick.

(And no, Apple is not a 'patent troll.' This has basically nothing to do with Apple.

• FTC And Google Settle: Google To Stop Seeking Product Bans Against Competitors In The US, Take Disputes Out Of Court
• Google Takes First Baby Steps In The Fight Against Lodsys
• Lodsys Flags Another Android Developer - Bithack, The Creator Of Apparatus. Here Is One Of Their Ridiculous Infringement Claims [Pictures]
• Google Wants To Co-Defend HTC Against Nokia In Patent Lawsuit

President Obama Proposes Patent Troll Laws That Will Probably Do Very Little To Stop Most Patent Trolling was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

As we noted a few weeks ago, Twitter introduced charts for its #Music product. The company’s intentions for the service aren’t known, and it seems like they’re taking somewhat of a public beta approach with it. Having said that, before the service launched, I noted that it could be the next “Top 40″ phenomenon.

To compile meaningful charts, a huge chunk of data is needed to make them meaningful. It goes without saying that Twitter has more data than it knows what to do with, and #Music is a public showcase of what it’s capable of doing. I don’t think of Twitter as a “media” company, but rather a meaningful social data company. If you think about the impact that charts make on every vertical that has data to create one, it’s a huge business opportunity for Twitter.

Charts drive usage, conversation, publication mentions, sales and, most importantly, trends. Yes, Twitter has had a trending topics section of the website for as long as I can remember, but the results aren’t focused and don’t give the proper context to make the phrases that appear actionable…or all that interesting. Take a look:

Without context or proper relevance, trending topics are nothing more than a snapshot for people who spend fewer than 10 minutes on Twitter a day. The brand-new layout for #Music is a sign of what’s to come for all trending information on the platform.

Not only is this a more attractive design, but it gives you all of the context you need to engage with the content. If you apply this approach to video games, movies, television shows or anything else you can think of, then Twitter’s massive pool of data finally starts to make sense for users. Not only does it make sense, but it’s the formation of a solid platform for advertising. While buying your way to the top of a chart probably won’t happen, snapping ads to portions of pages like this will convert better than banner ads.

You can imagine a world where Twitter could serve up charts on apps, video games, publications, TV shows, movies, sports teams, or anything that’s currently tweeted about, but unstructured on the site. The advertising opportunities for brands will be there, the usability improvements for users will be there and the marriage of the two will make for a better public offering come 2014.

#Music is just the logical testing ground.

[Unnecessary Disclosure: I'll be moving on to Yahoo! soon]

Google will soon launch Google Web Designer, an HTML5 development tool for “creative professionals.” The service, Google says, will launch within “the coming months” and is meant to “empower creative professionals to create cutting-edge advertising as well as engaging web content like sites and applications – for free.”

The company shared this news in a sidenote in a blog post about its DoubleClick advertising platform this morning. We reached out to Google to find out more about this project and a company spokesperson told me that Web Designer will indeed be a stand-alone product that’ll be aimed at creative agencies and designers.

This description obviously doesn’t give us much to go on, but Google notes that the tool will be integrated with DoubleClick Studio and AdMob. Google is clearly going after the “native” ads market, as well (think online brand experiences and sponsored stories), so the connection between Web Designer and DoubleClick makes sense. But it sounds like this tool will be quite a bit more capable and will go quite a bit beyond ads, though Google told me that it’s focus will be on creative advertising creatives.

Google’s only service for creating websites right now is Google Sites, which allows you to easily create basic sites and wikis from pre-built templates. That product has lingered without any meaningful updates for a while now, so maybe Web Designer will be a more sophisticated replacement for Sites’ editor.

It’ll be interesting to see how competitive Web Designer will be with tools like Squarespace, Weebly or Wix’s HTML5 website builder. When it comes to native formats for ads, the standard is now something more akin to the New York Time’s Snow Fall than just a basic site, so Google will have to step up its game if it wants to make it easy for marketers to create these kind of experiences.

https://twitter.com/doubleclick/status/341953097414873088

Chrome for iOS now has support for Google's conversational search. Just tap the microphone above the keyboard, and Chrome will search for and read answers back to you. Grab the update over in the iTunes App Store.

Connectivity problems preventing customers from enabling 3G data

British mobile operator Three has confirmed that it's experiencing connectivity issues on its 3G data network. The outage is affecting many of us on the Mobile Nations team, and a quick look at Twitter reveals many other Three subscribers in the same position. Those affected are unable to connect to 3G data, with devices hanging when attempting to connect to the data network. Calls and text capabilities, however, do not seem to be affected.

Three says it's aware of the data issues and is working on a fix --

We're having some issues with our data network this morning. It's being worked on as a priority, sorry for any inconvenience. More to follow.

It's the first widespread outage to affect Three in recent years, but not the first to hit a major UK carrier. A series of high-profile network issues plagued rival network O2 in 2012, and more recently EE offered customers free data as an apology for network issues.

Three (and its customers) will be hoping that its own issues are resolved in short order, and we'll keep you posted with any further developments. Three customers -- are you affected by today's outage. Shout out in the comments!

Source: @ThreeUKSupport

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

This is the app roundup. The game roundup from this week can be found here.

Featured App

DigiCal Calendar & Widgets

Today's roundup is presented by DigiCal Calendar & Widgets from Digibites. DigiCal is a complete calendar solution that integrates with Google Calendar, matching it feature-for-feature and then some.

• [Hands-On] Fleksy Keyboard Has Some Interesting Tricks, But Definitely Still Beta
• Completely Redesigned Opera Browser Exits Beta, Now Available In The Play Store
• [CES 2013] New Smartphone Keyboard 'Fleksy' Promises Predictions So Accurate That Even The Blind Can Use It
• Dolphin Browser Beta Hits The Play Store, Boasts Major HTML5 Rendering Speed Improvements

24 Best New Android Apps And Live Wallpapers From The Last 2 Weeks (5/22/13 - 6/3/13) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

One year ago, Zynga paid $180 million for OMGPOP, the creator of the wildly popular game Draw Something for iOS and Android. Zynga seems to have decided that was a $180 million mistake. After directly writing off up to $95 million of OMGPOP last October, it now appears that Zynga is completely shutting down the studio — among other divisions — in an attempt to save $80 million more.

As we reported earlier this afternoon, Zynga is laying off 520 employees, a full 18 percent of its global workforce, and reportedly shutting down offices in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York. What we didn't realize is that OMGPOP is Zynga New York.

Now, OMGPOP's official Twitter account and some of its staffers are unsurprisingly tweeting that they're...

Continue reading…

Investors were unsettled by Zynga’s announcement that it is cutting 520 employees, or almost one-fifth of its workforce, with shares plummeting 12% to $2.99, before recovering slightly in after hours trading. Trading of Zynga shares were halted twice in the afternoon on the Nasdaq stock exchange, first for the layoff announcement and then again due to volatile trading during which the stock fell by as much as 15%.

Though Zynga said the layoffs will result in $70 million to $80 million in annualized pre-tax savings, its guidance for its second-quarter earnings is still a loss between $39 million and $28.5 million. As Anthony Ha reported earlier, Zynga’s rationale for the mass layoffs is to create a tighter, leaner operation as the company hopes to replicate the success of mobile gaming startups like Supercell and King.com, which have released huge hits despite their much smaller size. Zynga also plans to launch fewer game and franchises in order to focus on turning each franchise into a big brand name.

But today’s plummet in Zynga’s stock price shows that the company still has a long way to go in order to win investors over to its restructuring plans, especially since this isn’t the first time Zynga has attempted to reduce costs by laying off staff. Last October, the company fired 5% of its employees after cutting its revenue outlook for the third quarter of 2012, citing weakness in games like The Ville.

CEO Mark Pincus has described 2013 as a “transition year” for Zynga as it continues to face a challenging environment on the Facebook platform, struggle to build its mobile revenue and deal with declining user numbers, but it’s still far from certain if the transition will be a positive one.

The Rhapsody-owned Napster streaming music service is expanding into 14 new European countries today, significantly ramping up its presence in the region.

The Napster service was already available in Germany and the U.K. but from today it’s also live in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and The Netherlands. The service is being priced at €9.95 per month for unlimited web and mobile streaming – both online and offline.

The (re)launch of the Napster brand across Europe looks to be an attempt to leverage what Rhapsody dubs a “cult” brand, but obviously without any of the illegality which brought Napster to Europeans’ attention in the first place. A cult brand may be required to muscle in on what’s already a very crowded space, with no shortage of streaming music startups in the region — Spotify and Deezer to name just two — plus larger tech companies taking an increasing interest. For instance Google has just jumped into the space with Google Play Music. And Apple is rumoured to be readying an iRadio streaming music service.

Rhapsody said Napster’s catalogue has more than 20 million songs globally for online or offline listening. The service is available on iOS and Android, plus can be accessed via connected audio systems and other devices. Additional features of the service include content curated by a dedicated team of “music experts” — putting playlists, featured artists and editorial content into the Napster Music Guide to help users discover new music, plus inside tips, live sessions and exclusive artist interviews.

Speaking to Music Ally about its European expansion, Rhapsody said it’s planning to introduce ‘laddered’ pricing — presumably in a bid to undercut more established European streaming music rivals. “There is going to be distribution of pricing tiers that we ladder people up as a way to create what will be a very profitable business,” Rhapsody International president Jon Irwin told Music Ally. “It could be capped on number of listens, it could be capped on functionality, it could be capped on availability on devices. The potential to innovate on those product models and laddering models is almost infinite.”

The laddered pricing structure will apparently be launched “in the coming months”. (h/t to Stuart Dredge for flagging the Music Ally interview.)

Rhapsody’s Napster service is also already available in the U.S. — where it’s branded Rhapsody, not Napster (yeah, that’s not at all confusing…).

Authorities and entertainment industry companies in the UK are working together on a new initiative which targets sites said to be offering copyrighted material without permission, TorrentFreak has learned.

The first signs came last week when a major torrent site received a letter from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), a unit set up following the Government’s National Fraud Review. The unit has a mission to identify serial offenders and organized crime gangs in order to disrupt their activities.

The letter (copy below), sent to “The owners and/or operators of the website known as ‘XXXXX’,” states that the NFIB has become particularly concerned by websites causing harm to the UK’s creative economy.

“We are therefore currently working on an initiative with Government and industry bodies to help prevent, deter and disrupt the criminal activity linked to websites involved in online copyright infringement. In that regard, we have reasonable grounds to suspect that through your ownership and/or operation of the website known as ‘XXXXX’, you are involved in online copyright infringement,” NFIB explain.

So far TorrentFreak is aware that at least two torrent sites have already received letters from the NFIB. Their operations are detailed as follows:

“XXXXX is a BitTorrent website that – without the permission of the copyright holder – actively provides UK internet users with a bespoke directory and search engine for torrent files. This enables users to find and download copyright content which would otherwise be time consuming or impossible to locate,” the letter notes.

Even though neither site is located in the UK, police believe that sites’ operators are committing crimes there.

“We have grounds to suspect that as owners and/or operators of the XXXXX website, you are committing the offense of communication to the public under s.107(2A) of the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 (“CDPA”). Section 107(2A) is an indictable offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment,” NFIB state.

But while allegations of copyright-related offenses are nothing out of the ordinary, in their letter the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau elevate the seriousness of file-sharing offenses to unprecedented levels.

“Further, we have grounds to suspect that as owners and/or operators of the XXXXX website, you are committing offenses under the Serious Crime Act 2007 by doing acts capable of encouraging and assisting communication to the public (under s.107(2A) of the CDPA); and/or distribution (under s.107(1)(e) of the CDPA) of copyright content seeded by others – intending or believing that those offenses will be encouraged or assisted.

“Such activity is an indictable offense under the Serious Crime Act 2007 and is punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment (two years for encouraging/assisting communication to the public; and ten years for encouraging/assisting distribution),” the NFIB warn.

The letters conclude with advice for site operators to contact the NFIB immediately in order to “prevent the further commission of offenses.”

“If no contact is made before 14th June 2013 then you and/or the XXXXX website may face police action,” the letter concludes.

TorrentFreak contacted NFIB who confirmed that an initiative is indeed underway.

“City of London Police has begun an initiative to target websites that attract visitors by providing unauthorised access to copyrighted content for criminal gain. These websites are able to operate and profit from advertising on their sites without having licenses or paying the creators and owners of the films, TV programmes, music and publications,” a spokesman said in a statement.

“Intellectual property crime is a serious offense that is costing the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds each year. Working with the UK advertising industry, City of London Police and rights holder groups FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft), BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and The PA (The Publishers Association) are committed to tackling this problem.”

The BPI say that an NFIB officer was previously embedded with their anti-piracy unit.

“This appointment is the first secondment by NFIB into private industry, enabling City of London Police to develop a greater understanding of the illegal distribution and sale of music online by organised crime gangs,” the music group reveals.

The NFIB add that their initiative also seeks to protect UK consumers from “malware and other harmful programs that may be downloaded unwittingly from sites that provide illegally offered content.”

Any site or service in receipt of the NFIB letter can contact us in confidence at the usual address.

The letter

Source: UK Police Launch Campaign to Shut Down Torrent Sites

Pollice are permitted to take DNA samples from individuals arrested for felonies and other serious crimes, the Supreme Court ruled today. DNA cheek swabs may be collected regardless of whether that person is ultimately charged or convicted of the corresponding crime, justices decided in a 5-4 ruling. "When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in the court’s majority opinion.

At issue was whether performing DNA...

Continue reading…

Six-second video app hits Google Play with new zoom feature

Twitter-owned video-sharing app Vine is launching on Android today, seven months after the initial iOS-only release. The app allows you to create and share six-second square-shaped videos and follow fellow Viners through your own tailored feed. Essentially, it's Instagram for video.

In addition to all the editing and social networking features of Vine for iOS, the Android version of the app is getting something unique -- zooming support. The Vine team also promises further updates in the weeks ahead, including front-facing camera support, search, mentions, hashtags and Facebook sharing.

After a brief delay, the app is now live on Google Play at the link above. You'll need a device running at least Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Anyone been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Vine on Android? How are you getting on with the Android version of the app? Shout out in the comments.

Source: Vine

Following a High Court ruling in March, six UK ISPs were required to block subscriber access to three of the world’s largest torrent sites, Kat.ph, H33T and Fenopy.

The legal action was initiated by the music industry group BPI on behalf of a variety of major labels who previously won a similar case regarding The Pirate Bay. The movie studios also successfully targeted other infringing sites, as illustrated by the recent blockade of Movie2K.

While the court rulings in these cases are public, the actual blocklists are not. We do know that one list of prohibited domains is maintained by the music industry group BPI, who have the freedom to add new entries when sites move to new domains or IP-addresses.

As of last week, however, Sky Broadband appears to have updated its blocking measures with several new domains that go beyond the specific sites detailed in the initial court action. Before the weekend Sky subscribers started to notice that several proxy sites, which are meant to bypass the blockades, are not longer accessible.

The new Sky blockade restricts access to a wide variety of proxies including pirateproxy.net, fenopyreverse.info, h33tunblock.info, h33t.uk.to, kickassunblock.info, katproxy.com, movie2kproxy.com. In addition, torrentproxies.com, a site that offers a list of available proxy sites, is also rendered inaccessible.

Thus far it is unknown whether Sky is acting on its own or whether the new sites are part of a blocklist update sent out by BPI. The latter would mean that other ISPs will also start blocking these proxies in the near future.

Both Sky and the BPI were asked for a comment on the recent changes, but we have yet to receive a response.

TorrentFreak talked to the operator of pirateproxy.net, the most visited proxy site in the UK, who is convinced that the new blockades are not an accident.

“I believe the blocks are intentional based on the specific list of sites they are blocking,” PirateProxy’s Drastik tells us.

Drastik says that the new blockades took him by surprise, but that they won’t work for long. PirateProxy is already working on a bypass and other proxy site owners are doing the same.

“I find the blocks to be a bold move since there are so many proxy sites and workarounds out there. If they do continue blocking proxy sites, it will be a cat and mouse game on a large scale,” he says.

The Pirate Reverse team, who operate a series of proxies and the proxy list torrentproxies.com have also begun taking countermeasures. Among other things, they have released a tool which allows subscribers to check which sites are being blocked by their ISP.

“We created the proxy block checker tool because it is difficult from our perspective to see what ISPs have blocked what sites, so the data that it provides is crucial if we are to implement workarounds and continue fighting censorship,” Pirate Reverse told us.

The user submitted results will help the Pirate Reverse team to roll out effective countermeasures.

Block Checker

“The end result is to analyse the data and use it to come up with better solutions, at the moment even though there are only a few results gathered we can see a pattern emerging in how the recent Sky blocks are implemented.”

Ironically, the block checker tool may not be all that effective as Sky has begun blocking that website too.

From the reports we received it appears that Sky’s new blocking mechanism is highly adaptive. Several proxies moved to new IP-addresses, only to find out that these were also added to the list in a matter of hours. Pirate Reverse is now trying to figure out a way to game this system.

“The system they are using is automated and queries our DNS to get our current IPs, then blocks them, however it removes previously blocked IPs that we are no longer using. We are testing an automated method of cycling through our IP addresses,” they say.

Perhaps we will soon see the first proxy sites that allow users to access proxy sites? In any case, the game of whack-a-mole continues.

Source: Sky Broadband Starts Blocking Pirate Bay Proxies

If you have a smartphone then there’s a good chance that it comes with an ARM chip inside. The British company ARM Holdings is the market leader in smartphone processors.

Today the company announced a series of new products at Computex, with one standing out in particular. Not because it includes ground breaking features that will improve the consumer experience, but through its embedded hardware DRM.

Developed on Hollywood’s demand, the Mali-V500 video processor is the first mobile chip optimized to prevent high-definition video from being pirated.

Until now the major movie studios have been hesitant to move some of their videos to mobile platforms since these are harder to secure. However, this will change in the future if ARM’s new processor is implemented.

“In order to protect their multi-billion dollar investments, studios and content owners are demanding hardware-backed security across all devices that play their premium content,” ARM’s director of market development Cris Porthouse notes in a blog post.

“This means that in order to support premium content mobile and other consumer embedded devices must support hardware-backed protection of content from download to display.”

Mali-V500

ARM’s Mali-V500 is the first chip of its kind to offer this kind of protection, sometimes dubbed hardware DRM. According to Porthouse the video processor offers state of the art security with support for a wide variety of DRM solutions.

“In order to meet the stringent security requirements of movie content owners, Mali-V500 has been architected to efficiently support ARM TrustZone and associated media playback use cases efficiently,” he writes.

Speaking with the Financial Times, Porthouse said that Hollywood and Netflix demand hardware protection as traditional DRM solutions are no longer sufficient.

“Hollywood movie studios and major content distributors like Netflix and others are demanding for premium or early window content – their highest-value content – to be protected not just by digital rights management but by the hardware, all the way from download through to display.”

So if it’s up to ARM your smartphone will soon be shipped with built-in DRM to keep pirates at bay.

The question is, however, whether all this expensive technology will be effective in preventing movies from leaking out. Or will it mostly cause trouble for legitimate consumers, as is often the case with other forms of DRM.

Source: ARM Launches Hollywood Approved Anti-Piracy Processor

Android: Gmail just got a new update with a brand new inbox featuring labels, contact images, and indicators for your promotional, update, and social notifications. Additionally, new slide-out navigation makes it easy to access whatever you need when you need it.

Google plans to roll out this update slowly over the next few weeks, but Android Police grabbed the APK and you can download it now from their site.

New Gmail For Android v4.5 With Slide-Out Navigation And Brand New Inbox | Android Police

Screenshots by Android Police.