Yitang Zhang is a largely unknown mathematician who has struggled to find an academic job after he got his PhD, working at a Subway sandwich shop before getting a gig as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. He's just had a paper accepted for publication in Annals of Mathematics, which appears to make a breakthrough towards proving one of mathematics' oldest, most difficult, and most significant conjectures, concerning "twin" prime numbers. According to the Simons Science News article, Zhang is shy, but is a very good, clear writer and lecturer.
For hundreds of years, mathematicians have speculated that there are infinitely many twin prime pairs. In 1849, French mathematician Alphonse de Polignac extended this conjecture to the idea that there should be infinitely many prime pairs for any possible finite gap, not just 2.
Since that time, the intrinsic appeal of these conjectures has given them the status of a mathematical holy grail, even though they have no known applications. But despite many efforts at proving them, mathematicians weren’t able to rule out the possibility that the gaps between primes grow and grow, eventually exceeding any particular bound.
Now Zhang has broken through this barrier. His paper shows that there is some number N smaller than 70 million such that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N. No matter how far you go into the deserts of the truly gargantuan prime numbers — no matter how sparse the primes become — you will keep finding prime pairs that differ by less than 70 million.
The result is “astounding,” said Daniel Goldston, a number theorist at San Jose State University. “It’s one of those problems you weren’t sure people would ever be able to solve.”
EW.com: Ray Manzarek, the founding keyboardist for the Doors, passed away this morning in Germany, according to a statement from his publicist. The cause was bile duct cancer. As a member of the legendary rock band that formed in 1965 in Los Angeles and effectively ended with the death of frontman Jim Morrison in 1971 (though the group continued to perform and release music in other iterations for many years), Manzarek became an enduring symbol of the era — he was portrayed by Kyle McLachlan in the 1991 Oliver Stone biopic The Doors, and wrote a best-selling memoir about his experiences, Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, in 1998.
Cropping an object out of an photo in an image editor can be a tricky task, but Clipping Magic is a new webapp that does it for you in seconds. All you have to do is paint the foreground object one color, the background object another, and the app does the work for you.
Just drag and drop a photo onto the site, and you'll get a green box you can use to paint the foreground image, or the area of the photo you want to select. Click the red box to paint the background—or the part of the photo you want removed. You work with a version of the photo on the left, and you can see a live preview of the changes on the right, so you can always backtrack, or zoom in for a finer touch if you want.
When you're finished, just download the finished product to get the object you wanted, now on a transparent background. You can also just share a link to the finished image, so you don't have to email a file. Clipping Magic is ideal for logos, screenshots, and other images where there's a sharp pixel edge to the item you're trying to highlight or pull out of an image. The developer points out that hair, blurry boundaries, and partially transparent things are difficult for the webapp to handle, but they're working on making it better. Clipping Magic is in alpha, and while it's free right now, but when it leaves alpha the developers note they may start charging for the service. Right now though, using it couldn't be easier.
There are some Chromebooks with awesome hardware out there, like the beautiful Chromebook Pixel, but they don't quite hit their full potential with Chrome OS. Here's how to install Ubuntu and get more out of your Chromebook.
Chrome OS isn't bad, and you can actually do a lot of work with the great Chrome apps out there. But sometimes, you just need a full desktop to get things done. Enter Ubuntu: with just a few minutes of work, you can get a full-fledged Linux desktop up and running on some solid Chromebook hardware, making for a pretty great laptop.
We're going to use a tool called Crouton to install Ubuntu (hat tip to our friends at the How-To Geek), which uses the chroot command to run Ubuntu on top of Chrome OS, which is already based on Linux. Unlike dual-booting, that means you can switch between Chrome OS and Ubuntu with a quick keyboard shortcut, no reboots necessary, which is awesome. It's speedy, powerful, and there only when you need it. If you prefer a more traditional dual-boot environment, check out ChrUbuntu instead, but we'll be using Crouton today. We tested this on a Chromebook Pixel, but it should work on any Chromebook.
Step One: Enable Developer Mode
This will wipe your local data, so make sure to back anything up that you don't have stored in the cloud. To put your Chromebook in Developer Mode:
Press and hold the Esc and Refresh keys together, then press the Power button (while still holding the other two keys). This will reboot your Chromebook into Recovery Mode.
As soon as you see Recovery Mode pop up—the screen with the yellow exclamation point—press Ctrl+D. This will bring up a prompt asking if you want to turn on Developer Mode.
Press Enter to continue, then give it some time. It'll pop up with a new screen for a few moments, then reboot and go through the process of enabling Developer Mode. This may take a little while (about 15 minutes or so), and will wipe your local information.
When it's done, it will return to the screen with the red exclamation point. Leave it alone until it reboots into Chrome OS.
Note that some older Chromebooks have a physical switch that you'll have to flip in order to turn on Developer Mode. If you aren't sure, look up instructions for your specific device on enabling Developer Mode.
Step Two: Install Crouton
Next, we're going to install Crouton and get Ubuntu up and running. To do so, follow these instructions:
Download Crouton from the top of this page (or by clicking here) and save it in your Downloads folder.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T to bring up a terminal on your Chromebook.
At the Terminal, run the following command to enter a Ubuntu shell:
shell
Next, run the following command to install Crouton:
sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t xfce
If you're doing this on a Chromebook Pixel, change it to:
sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t touch,xfce
to get touch screen support. Optional: You can also encrypt your new desktop with a password for extra security using the -e flag (since Developer Mode inherently decreases the security of your machine). You can read more about that here.
Let your computer install Crouton. This might be a good time to grab a cup of tea. When it's done it'll ask you for a username and password for your new Ubuntu installation, so enter them when prompted.
After it's finished installing, run the following command to start your new desktop environment:
sudo startxfce4
If you want Ubuntu's Unity interface instead of the XFCE desktop environment, you'd change instances of "xfce" to "unity" (no quotes) in the above commands, including the last command (which would become "startunity"). You can also install LXDE or KDE if you prefer. See the Crouton GitHub page for more info on what you can do, and our guide to desktop environments for the difference between each one.
Step Three: Optimize Your Linux Desktop for Your Chromebook
Now, you can switch back and forth between Chrome OS and Ubuntu using Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Back and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Forward (if you're on an ARM-based Chromebook) or Ctrl+Alt+Back and Ctrl+Alt+Forward (If you're on an Intel-based Chromebook). In the latter case, you will also need to press Ctrl+Alt+Refresh after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Forward to bring up the desktop. To exit the Linux desktop, just log out of it like you would on a normal PC—you'll close it completely and go back to Chrome OS (after which you can run sudo startxfce4 again to go back).
Now that you're on the Desktop, here are some things you may want to know to optimize your experience:
Your desktop won't come with very many programs installed. You'll find that even a lot of default Ubuntu tools are left out, so you'll have to install them yourself using apt-get. If you're on an ARM-based Chromebook, not all apps will be compatible. Intel users will be much better off.
If you're using XFCE, you should disable the screensaver, which can cause graphics issues in Chrome OS.
The Downloads folder in Chrome OS is the same as the Downloads folder on the Linux desktop, so if you download or create a file in one environment, you can put it in the Downloads folder to make it available in the other as well.
If you're on a high resolution display like the Chromebook Pixel, your icons will be very, very tiny. The Crouton wiki has a few options for fixing this, though none are quite perfect. You either deal with a few tinier buttons or you go to a more standard resolution.
Since your Chromebook is in Developer Mode, it will take an extra 30 seconds to boot up, since it shows you the Developer Mode message. You can skip this by pressing Ctrl+D.
Lastly, if you want to remove your Linux desktop and go back to regular ol' Chrome OS, you can just reboot your Chromebook and press spacebar when it prompts you to re-enable OS verification. This will remove Crouton and restore Chrome OS in its original state.
That's it! Now you have a fully working Linux desktop on top of Chrome OS, and you can switch between them whenever you want with a quick keystroke. This makes those great but seemingly dumbed-down Chromebooks a lot more useful (not to mention tempting).
New WebKit-powered Opera 14 stable now available for Android
The Opera browser for Android has exited beta and arrived on the Google Play Store as a fully-fledged stable app. The mobile version of the long-running browser is based upon the WebKit rendering engine -- the same software used by the stock Android browser and (for the moment) Google Chrome.
But it's user-facing features rather than technical details that Opera's counting on to help it compete on Android. Speed Dial has long been part of the desktop Opera browser, allowing quick access to frequently visited bookmarks. The "Discover" tab provides a summary of news items. The "Off Road" mode uses data compression to make the most out of slow or expensive connections. And text reflow is included in the initial release, too.
Opera for Android is available now on Google Play at the Play Store link above. If you decide to take it for a spin, be sure to hit the comments and let us know what you think.
After launching an all-new app for iOS last December, Flickr is finally giving its Android offering a similar overhaul. Announced moments ago on stage at Yahoo's New York City event, the revamped Flickr for Android is available today for both phones and tablets. "The new Flickr for Android maintains your photos’ original quality, so every image you take, edit, share, or view on your phone or tablet looks spectacular," wrote CEO Marissa Mayer in a Tumblr post announcing the update. The new-and-improved Flickr for Android includes support for 10 languages and is available in the Google Play store now.
Smack-dab in the middle of Yahoo-Tumblr aqcuisition day, Yahoo is holding a major press event here in NYC. But announcements coming out of this event aren’t related to Tumblr as much as Flickr, the photo-sharing database and social network acquired by Yahoo in March of 2005 for $35 million.
Today, Flickr gets a huge revamp including a totally new look and feel, focused on three different things. First, there are no more bits of text or blue links, but rather a grid layout of huge pictures in full resolution.
Second, stemming from the updated iOS app recently, which yielded 25 percent more uploads, the company is also announcing a brand new Android experience, catching the Google version of the Flickr app up to the iOS version.
Finally, Flickr looks to get even “biggr.” The company is expanding storage for your photos, by quite a bit. Flickr is offering 1 terabyte of free storage for every Flickr user. Yahoo made it clear that no other Internet company in the world offers a free terabyte of storage. That’s the equivalent of 537,731 photos.
In terms of the UI redesign, the new photostream has a justified format grid layout, complete with a header photo and a Timeline-style profile for users. On the top left, next to the photostream button, you can also click into Favorites and Sets.
But what are photos without sharing? Users have an easy share button to send photos out on any of their favorite social networks, including Tumblr.
Most importantly, Flickr has fiddled with the picture page to give a black background and a fullscreen image for every single photo page. The site has been revamped to give easy-click access to the next photo in the set or photostream, even in full-screen mode.
Adam Cahan, SVP of Mobile and Emerging products at Yahoo, announced that Flickr currently has 89 million users who have shared over 8 billion photos. That’s a lot of pictures.
Mayer explained that most of the changes happening at Yahoo concerns users’ daily habits, which explains why the company has put so much focus on the Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo mail, and the Yahoo weather app. In a number of ways, these products are energized and enhanced by photos.
Yahoo’s, and particularly Marissa Mayer’s, tweaks to its overall service and the Flickr experience has helped build out both platforms, but there are still questions over Flickr’s ability to generate revenue and, perhaps more importantly, compete with photo-sharing behemoth Instagram.
It’s worth noting the timing here: Yahoo just bought out one of the biggest and most popular blogging platforms around, and Flickr is a huge resource for blogs in general. But how will Yahoo integrate the two to build out use of both and make both experiences more seamless?
“We have a nice set of the creator brands,” said Mayer. “Photographers and writers. With that, there is natural set of opportunities that arise between Flickr and Tumblr and we’ll deal with that as it comes.”
Alongside Flickr’s product announcement news, Mayer revealed that the company would be setting up shop at a new NY office in Times Square, in the New York Times building, which will hold all 500 employees based in NY, along with room for expansion to 200 more employees.
Trevor Timm at a Freedom of the Press Foundation writes: "Last night, the Washington Post reported on a little known leak case involving former State Department official Stephen Kim. In an alarming new extreme, the Justice Department and FBI finger argue there's "probable cause to believe" Fox News reporter James Rosen "has committed or is committing a violation of [the Espionage Act], as an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" by soliciting information from Kim for a story. While Rosen remains unindicted, the consequences of this argument are breathtaking." Here's the full 44-page Justice Department application for a search warrant of Rosen’s Gmail account.
Dear Lifehacker, I've read about why I really should use a VPN and I've been looking into different providers, but there's one thing I'm worried about. Can't a VPN provider just look at my traffic all they want and see what I'm doing? Don't I just have to trust them not to spy on me? If that's true, how do I pick one I can trust, when they can all see what I'm doing?
Sincerely, Watching the Watchers
Dear Watching the Watchers, To a certain extent, you're right. You do have to trust that your VPN service provider has your best interests at heart, because you're relying on them to secure your connection, keep everything encrypted, and to protect your activity from prying eyes. You're connected to their network and their servers, and you have to trust that when they say your exit IP is in Sweden, for example, it really is and they're not just obfuscating something else. It's true—when you sign up for a VPN, you put a lot of trust in the company you sign up with.
Why Trust In Your VPN Provider Is Important
Not all VPN service providers are worth your trust. Some diligently log your connection times, dates, IP addresses, keep track of how long you're connected, and some even keep an eye on the types of traffic that you send through their networks while you're logged in. They'll tell you it's in order to make sure you're not doing anything illegal, or anything that would damage their network, but that level of snooping does kind of go against the whole purpose of a VPN, doesn't it?
The best ones keep as few logs as possible, and aren't interested in what you do while you're connected at all. Some don't even track when you're logged in or out, and even if they do have to keep some logs, they purge them periodically in order to protect your privacy. After all, the reason you pay for a VPN is for privacy and security, and if they keep their own data, they're the weak link in that chain. Here's are some tips on how to research a VPN and decide whether they're a good match for you.
Ask Yourself: What Are You Using a VPN For?
Whether you have a VPN provider already or you're searching for a good one, the first thing you should ask yourself is why you want one in the first place. Now, we've made the case for why most people should have one and what types of people need a VPN, but ultimately most needs boil down to two things: Security and privacy, or some combination of the two.
If security is all you're concerned with, and you have a VPN provided to you by your school or company, you're already set. In fact, almost any VPN will cover you from the security angle, because you're only really concerned about protecting your activity from prying eyes, presumably on the same network that you're on—like a hotel, coffee shop, or airport's free Wi-Fi. Of course, you still need to make sure that your VPN provider isn't just sniffing your traffic themselves and making themselves the security issue, but we'll get to that in a moment.
If privacy is your concern, you have more to consider. Privacy-minded VPN users have to trust that their provider isn't watching what they're doing or willing to roll over and hand off their activity, logs, and personal data to whoever comes calling with a fancy-looking letter written in legalese. They also have to worry about what information the VPN provider themselves are keeping, and whether that information can be turned against them, sold to third parties, used for marketing, or just kept forever just in case someone comes calling. In either case, all it takes to either allay your fears or warn you off of a VPN provider is a little research. Here's how to go about it.
Do Your Homework
This should go without saying, but you shouldn't sign up for a VPN service without at least looking at their privacy policy and terms of service. That should go for anything you sign up for, but with VPNs it's a bit more important. With free VPN providers, you should definitely do as much research as possible. Free providers have to make money somehow, and if it's not on premium plans or usage limits, after which you have to pay, you should assume they're making their money off of your data, logging your activity, and using it for marketing purposes.
Services we've mentioned, like previously mentionedHotspot Shield, CyberGhost VPN, and HideMan, another service we like, are all great examples of free VPN providers that don't log, go out of their way to say so, and that support their free services by also offering premium and paid plans that offer more features (in the case of HotSpot Shieldf and CyberGhost) or more hours of use (in the case of Hideman).
Paid VPN providers are a different matter. Ideally, because you pay for their service, they should cater to both the privacy and security minded, but that's not true at all. Some providers are security minded, not privacy minded, and market themselves as such: You can use their services to stay safe online, but don't come with an expectation of privacy. If someone comes with a subpoena or a Cease and Desist, they'll cancel your account and turn over your data to whoever's asking for it, and they're not afraid to admit it. Here are some quick tips to help you research paid VPN services:
Google their name and "logging" in the same query. It may sound simple, but it's actually really effective. You'll usually turn up the provider's own privacy policy (which, in the worst cases can be so buried it's difficult to find), which can answer the question right away. Some VPN providers are proud to say they don't keep logs, or that they only keep access logs in order to bill you for usage, or that they do log, but they purge daily or weekly. Some will try to dance around the issue by saying they keep "whatever logs are required by law," which really means whatever law enforcement has asked them for—which could be anything. Others won't address the issue at all—that's where the rest of the results come in. You'll probably find other sites and articles discussing the company's logging policies, which can help you figure out if they care about your privacy as much as they care about your security.
Don't be afraid to ask outright. if you don't get the answer you want from simple searches, contact them and ask what their logging and data retention policies are. Again, this is something you'd want to do with premium providers more than free ones—you don't want to spend your money unless you're sure what you're getting.
Don't fall for the geography trap. Some people swear only by VPN providers outside their country for privacy. They're convinced that their local laws are privacy unfriendly, or that a provider in their country can be manipulated by other companies, legal wrangling, or law enforcement, and they'll just roll over and hand off whatever private data they have on their users. Trust us: geography won't save you. Living under the assumption that because a VPN provider is in another country it's immune to your local laws or will defend you when pressured is a false sense of security. Both law enforcement and private industry groups can exert authority and pressure anywhere in the world they choose, and in most cases they'll get the results they want if they push hard enough. Otherwise, they'll just pressure the government in that jurisdiction to act on their behalf. Put simply: Don't assume that because you live in the US and you use a VPN provider in The Netherlands that you're immune from the law, or that a VPN provider in your own country wouldn't fight harder for your privacy than one overseas. In some cases this is true, but logging, privacy policies, and the general philosophy of the company are generally more important than physical location. This thread at Wilder Security is essential reading on the topic.
Pay attention to technology. When asked back in 2008 by CNET about WiTopia's privacy stance and technology, WiTopia president Bill Bullock explained that a number of single-server, fly-by-night VPN providers were beginning to pop up, making big privacy and security promises without actually having the technology to back them up. Since then, the number has only grown—it doesn't take much to set up a VPN concentrator anymore, and all it really takes is a few friends in a few different cities and countries willing to run their own servers to build a small network. However, if the company doesn't have the right technology on the back-end, they could be putting both your security and your privacy at risk, or wind up being victims of data theft, hacking, or spying themselves. When you're researching VPN providers, make sure they're above board with the level of encryption they offer, the security features they provide, and are open about who's reviewed them and the press they've gotten. Then double-check those reviews and look for independent opinions of their service, just to be sure.
VPN services are thriving, and new subscriptions are big money. It's not uncommon for a VPN provider to play dirty, whitewash their issues, and put on a good face to attract customers. When we did our last Hive Five on VPN providers, we saw the ugly side of the business so clearly that we decided to do our own independent analysis to clear the air and make our own recommendations.
The best thing you can do is to take everything a provider themselves says with a grain of salt. If they're good, they'll back up their own claims, and welcome you to do as much additional research into them as you'd like. In addition to our guide to the topic, our friends at TorrentFreak recently updated their guide as well, and it's worth reviewing.
Take Matters Into Your Own Hands
VPNs aren't perfect. One thing you should always remember is that in general, traffic between your VPN exit node or exit server and your eventual destination is unencrypted—so while someone snooping on the other end may not get all the way back to your computer or location, if your data is unencrypted or sent in the clear (sites not using HTTPS, encrypted passwords, etc) it can be easily intercepted anyway. Using a VPN is no excuse for lax personal security.
Finally, you can always roll your own VPN if you have an always-on device at home, or a router that supports OpenVPN. You could even turn a $35 Raspberry Pi into a personal VPN you can connect to while you're on the go. Of course, this option is for the security-minded, not the privacy minded (as your traffic is only encrypted between a user and your home VPN server or personal router, and then unencrypted as it goes out to your ISP) but it's always an option, and add-ons like Privoxy (which we've shown you how to set up) can offer some anonymity for your home VPN.
We know it's a tricky topic, but you are right, Watching the Waters: Ultimately you have to trust your VPN provider has your best interests in mind, but the only way to get that level of trust is to do your homework, verify their promises and services are legit, and then take additional steps to protect yourself even if they're not, or they fail you somehow. There are good providers out there committed to your security and your privacy (we've mentioned some of them) that are worth your trust.
It's Sunday morning in London, where I'm living as of less than a week ago. I've got a hangover and kitchen cleanup duty, and on top of that, I'm out £10. An actual live baby fox entered our house last night. Last night was Eurovision. I've had my first Eurovision party as an embedded foreigner.
Wait, I'll tell you all about it, but let's back up a bit, first. My first Eurovision was last year in my New York home, playing host to English friends. Before that, I'm a little embarrassed to say I knew hardly anything of the pan-European song contest, and in watching it I experienced the kind of wonderment that's sadly pretty rare for us Americans: the world is so big.
I was also fascinated to learn about European politics in the guise of a pop competition. The winning nation has to host next year's event (this year Eurovision was in Malmo, Sweden, thanks to Loreen's victory last year) – but that's an expense some countries don't want. Sometimes when a country votes for you, as Portugal is wont to do for Spain, it's less support for your song and more trying to stick you with an inconvenient expense. Eastern bloc nations or Scandinavian countries have obvious alliances, where loyalty supersedes popularity or quality. It's not so much that the best song wins, but that the best-placed song wins.
Without a guide I might have bounced off it, but thanks to the inimitable Ste Curran – game designer, One Life Left radio show host and Eurovision Sage – I had an amazing time. This year we weren't at the same party, but his complete sincerity as regards the song contest, alongside his pure urge to immerse himself in unmitigated joy, are still with me.
“The ‘general' opinion in Britain is that Eurovision is ridiculous, a joke: dumb, homogeneous pop music for a competition that's decided more by politics than artistry," Ste writes me, when I extend clutching fingers for emotional support by mail. “‘Eurovision' as an adjective is more a pejorative than anything: everyone knows about it, lots of people watch, but largely to laugh. Appreciation for the event is often soaked in irony, the coward's way to enjoy anything. Never commit your heart to anything, never get hurt."
This 2007 Eurovision performance by Verka Serduchka of Ukraine is what I show my U.S. friends who don't know what Eurovision is. It's spectacular, and hilarious, and so genuinely awesome that if I'm in a bad mood I just put it on and it fixes everything. Try it.
Yeah, the pop songs are funny whether intentionally or not, and one should laugh. But truly enjoying Eurovision is about empathy for its narratives, Ste asserts: "Every four minutes a new artist appears, does everything they can to win the hearts and votes of 125 million people," he says.
“Think of that: for each of the performers this is their moment, as big a moment as they'll ever have, their World Cup, their Olympics, representing their country; likely the most visible they'll ever be and perhaps the single high point of their lives," he says. "They have trained and practised and dreamt and worried and oh my God here it comes, everyone is watching them, it is happening right now."
When I asked him what I should do at my first Eurovision party in London – a recently-blooded Eurovision fan (who still dances to Loreen's “Euphoria" and Tooji's “Stay") – his main piece of advice was to turn off the commentary. That and to watch out for regular, if ill-advised, dubstep breakdowns among all the songs.
UK commentator Graham Norton can get a bit derisive at times, right? When each contestant was introduced with a little visual montage of their home life, Norton called the framing convention “a bit banal." On Russia's singer's creatiive background, he said “she loves paintings, and... things."
“People often mistake the British allergy to taking anything at all seriously for cynicism," friend and British writer Laurie Penny explains to me. There are only a very few things, like Doctor Who and binge drinking, that we allow ourselves to enjoy unironically. Eurovision isn't one of them, particularly because we consider ourselves culturally and creatively superior to almost every other national entrant, despite our terrible food, horrible weather, Tracey Emin and Coldplay."
“We're also poor team players and worse losers; whoever invented the idea that it's the taking part that counts was not from the Home Counties," she adds. “So, we're only allowed to have fun watching Eurovision as long as we pretend to hate it and groan all the way through, and then console ourselves after another unsuccessful year with the idea that we're not really part of Europe anyway. Despite all of that, I imagine the growing xenophobic consensus in the screaming bear pit that passes for political debate in Britain right now would be blown wide open were anyone to suggest withdrawing from Eurovision."
Interesting! Now, on the big night my housemates made snacks – chips, oven pizza, and crusty things with meat in them that I've yet to fully understand. We went to the “American" section at Tesco, a shelf that had Aunt Jemima maple syrup (England has perfectly fine maple syrup and there is no reason to spend £6, or, like, $9, on the Aunt), and Lucky Charms, and strawberry-flavored marshmallow Fluff. We bought the Fluff. Everyone was surprised to like it on white bread with peanut butter. Yeah, that was my contribution to our Eurovision party. I'm sorry.
London is a place where people are fine with dipping Pringles in guacamole, and where guacamole is an odd, sour treacle resembling an avocado in color alone. It was good, though. Our housemates are wonderful, our friends are wonderful. There was some really nice liquor, and I think even Ste would agree with me that's all it takes to have a Eurovision party. Last year Ste brought me a bottle of cranberry Finlandia vodka as a house gift. I can't even tell you what all we drank this year.
Properly watching Eurovision requires a little research – there are semi-finals and eliminations rounds ahead of last night's Grand Final, and it's best to educate oneself ahead of time so that you know who you want to root for in the main event, whom to tell your friends about, when you can take a cigarette break and when you need to tell the whole room to quiet down and pay attention.
Last year there were a lot of songs we liked. This year I hitched my star to only one nation: Romania, and the incredible operatic acrobatics of Cezar Ouatu – a spangled, handsome Dracula accompanied by lyrical dance renditions of romantic blood rituals. My friend commented that songs called “It's my life" or including the lyrics “it's my life" generally represent a sort of tough everyman aesthetic, but in this case, the Romanian life is ballet blood sacrifices.
There's even a dubstep breakdown halfway through the performance that serves to remind what dubstep breakdowns can actually be good for. Oh man. Standout superstar of Eurovision 2013.
I couldn't wait for our friends to see Romania's entry. France was up first of all, with a blonde chanteuse in a fringed dress who reminded us all of Tina Turner (Graham Norton snarked about her being a little bit like Courtney Love). Her last name is “Bourgeois". No, really, it is.
Our friend Paul couldn't wait for us to see Lithuania's entry, a Morrisey-ish guy who used to be in a band called “Hetero," if we heard correctly, and sang a song about being in love because of one's shoes. Seriously.
Next up was Moldova's entry, who had a La Roux-ish coif and a massive dress that slowly elevated her taller and taller into the air. A Hunger Games-ish pattern of flames evolved across the dress; she was a real Girl on Fire, and I remember liking the song, but nothing else about it. Oh, but Finland's though, we'd already heard about – a cheerleader sort of lady in a saucy wedding dress singing a song called “Marry Me," which was more than a little misogynistic lyrically.
To address that criticism, “Marry Me" employed a trite sort of “surprise reveal": The tuxedo-ed backup dancers were actually women, and the singer kissed one of the women at the end of the song, which offended Turkey and threatened to interrupt the Eurovision broadcast in that country. Powerful gay marriage anthem this wasn't; I also heard rumors the singer wrote the song to enjoin her boyfriend to propose.
Belgium's was the sort of entry that reminds me of my friend Ste's encouraging us all to remember that for every silly pop act on that stage we might be tempted to have a laugh at, for those performers, this is their momentous big day on the world stage. Belgium's song itself wasn't especially remarkable, but the way the singer cupped his face at the end and hopped up and down to all of the applause was one of those touching Eurovision moments.
All I remember about Belarus is how much the song made me wish there were a “best legs" prize in Eurovision, is that a horrible thing to say, she came out of a disco ball, it was incredible. There's an interesting war going on in Eurovision between showmanship and actual excellent pop song, and a lot of times stunning showmanship lets people forget it's a song contest, and could you dance to it in a club and so forth.
Ah, there was the Maltese Doctor (Malta's entry was fronted by an actual adorable young doctor), with a sort of strummy twee jam band song that set everyone in the room to abrupt and fevered swaying. Think the Plain White Ts and their grating marshmallow-Fluff “Hey Delilah," that sort of thing. A collective awwww went up around the room here, and as much as any of us would gag to hear such a thing on the radio, the band looked so familial, so cheerful and sweet, it was hard not to like their performance.
Russia's performance last year was a set of dancing grannies, either an earnest subversion or an ironic cop-out (probably the latter, let's be real). This year Russia brought something more sincere, a balladeer that might have been even a little too dour, a little too restrained – aside from some lovely luminescent technology toward the end that saw audience members' glow bracelets glimmer on in convincing ripples as light-jellyfish seemed to rise through the air.
Germany came with “Glorious," an absolutely blatant rip-off of winning song “Euphoria" from Sweden's Loreen last year. I kind of liked Netherlands' Anouk and her patently un-Eurovision, minor key-heavy “Birds." Her odd voice put me a bit in mind of a Janis Ian or Melanie Safka kind of singer. Ukraine's act got voted very highly in the end, but she reminded me of a listless Rebecca Black-alike.
Erm. Okay. So. Here's where we got drunk and preoccupied, suddenly deciding that we would register with an online betting site and place £10 on Romania to win Eurovision. Not that we thought they would, really. We'd seen the odds sheet. But I was carried away with Eurovision fever, and thought if one is going to bet on Eurovision, why not do so in commitment to SPIRITUAL RIGHTNESS? The least opportunistic, least-cynical bet I could make?
It all degenerates from there, really. A baby fox broke into our house. A REAL LIVE BABY FOX. It was quite distracting. Then, our neighbor one house over yelled at us to be quiet because it was “ten minutes to one" (in New York, if someone tells you to quiet down on a Saturday night you yell even louder). People got into deep dialogues on the carpet and couldn't remember which member of Black Sabbath wrote Armenia's song (it was Tommy Iommi).
And yeah, my last note on Eurovision has to do with Graham Norton comparing the representative Ukraine had elected to announce its votes “Sideshow Bob." Tooji, who sang my favorite song last year, gave out the votes on his home Norway's behalf. It was nice to see him again. Denmark won, overall, as most people predicted they would going into the Grand Final.
Denmark's song was fine. The tinny drums and panpipes were a bit too Celine Dion for my taste, but the performers were captivating, the gold confetti was transporting, and I have to admit the tune is catchy. I'm still humming it a day later. It's no Romania, but it's all right.
At the time, by the end of Eurovision 2013, I was so busy drunk-Tweeting and trying to force the hashtag #RomaniaWasRobbed to trend that I hardly remember it. Denmark's singer looked like Isla Fisher and had a white dress, if I remember correctly. This year a good Eurovision drinking game would have been to drink whenever one sees a white dress (as Ste and his friends did), or whenever there was a dubstep breakdown, or whenever the TV marquee warned of seizure risk from flashing strobes.
Oh, Eurovision. Next year I aim to be in Denmark. Bet on it.
Photo: Montenegro's “Who See feat. Nina Zizic" [REUTERS/Janerik Henriksson/Scanpix Sweden]
Not sure you can wait until 2015 for your Star Wars fix? Help is at hand in the shape of a new TV show called Star Wars Rebels, which will explore the time period between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope. The animated show is due to premiere next year with a one-hour special on the Disney channel, followed by a regular slot on Disney XD.
So no, it's not the long-discussed live-action series, but this will still explore a new facet of the Star Wars universe. We're told that, "Star Wars Rebels takes place in a time where the Empire is securing its grip on the galaxy and hunting down the last of the Jedi Knights as a fledgling rebellion against the Empire is taking shape. "
Beyond that, no one is talking just yet. Still, the creative team behind the show is promising. As well as Clone Wars veteran Dave Filoni and animation stalwart Greg Weisman (Gargoyles, Young Justice), Simon Kinberg is one of the executive producers. It was revealed months ago that Kinberg, best known for his work on the likes of Sherlock Holmes and X-Men: First Class, was set to be involved in future Star Wars projects - and now it looks like this is the one, or at least one of them. Still, the implication in previous reports was that he'd be working on the live-action films, so the question is, was that not the case? Is he doing both a live-action film and this animated series? And if the latter answer is "yes", will this show tie-in to, or set up, his big-screen effort? Much remains to be seen.
"I couldn't be more excited to explore new corners of the Star Wars universe,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm. “I think Star Wars Rebels will capture the look, feel and fun that both kids and their parents love about Star Wars."
Lucasfilm Animation will be producing the show, and the first peek will be unveiled at Celebration Europe. Casting and other snippets going forwards will, as you'd expect, be unveiled on StarWars.com and on this show's Facebook page.
During the past couple of years the UK has become the easiest country in the world to have a website blocked on copyright grounds.
Against a background of initial pessimism, Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act has proven more than capable of enabling the filtering dreams of the entertainment industries after blocking provisions in the Digital Economy Act were deemed too controversial.
While more recent blocks were actioned by the UK recording industry under the watchful eye of the BPI, it was the MPAA who pioneered site censorship in the UK. Their success against Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has become the model through which ISPs can be forced to black out sites based on the order of a judge.
Last week we reported that the music industry are considering future action against a wide range of sites but there is a more immediate situation developing courtesy of their movie-making counterparts.
Sometime in the past two months the MPAA went to court with a copyright complaint against two sites – Movie2K and another called Download4All (DL4All). The precise details are unclear, but it seems likely that they presented similar arguments to those offered in earlier cases.
Broadly speaking the studios will explain that these sites breach their copyrights and cost them money and, since ISPs are now aware that they’re facilitating their users’ infringements, they must now block the sites to avoid becoming liable themselves.
TorrentFreak can confirm that in the last week of April several of the UK’s leading ISPs including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, and almost certainly O2, EE and Sky, received a copy of a High Court order compelling them to block the sites.
BT have already begun blocking the site in the UK and Virgin Media inform us that they too will initiate a blockade today.
“Virgin Media has received an order from the Courts requiring it to prevent access to Download4All and Movie2K in order to help protect against copyright infringement,” a spokesperson told TorrentFreak.
“As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company, but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”
And in a final and somewhat amazing note, the operators of PirateReverse.info, one of the largest Pirate Bay proxy services, informs TorrentFreak that they have already deployed a proxy site to unblock Movie2K.
“We’ve just deployed movie2kproxy.com (in record time), still working on getting the images to load properly but should all be fixed shortly.”
The moles in this game now appear to be getting whacked even before they appear.
UPDATE: The operator of PirateProxy.net, the world’s largest Pirate Bay proxy, says that he too will unblock Movie2K for UK users.
Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel.
Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz with the Midas touch, recently opined that Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities and successes represent a meaningful threat to Google’s product-search-related advertising business.
I will take Jeff’s thesis — with which I fundamentally agree — one step (maybe even more) further by saying that I believe Amazon is one of the few companies that has the ambition, permission, structure, and, maybe most important, data, to actually beat Google at its own game.
What Makes Amazon Different
As an Internet equity research analyst from 1996-2009 — go ahead... throw your drink on your screen and curse me loudly enough that the barista hears you — I had a front seat to The Show. I covered Amazon from its days as “just” a bookseller and Google when it was still a private company, in addition to eBay, Yahoo!, Excite, About.com, Netflix, Omniture, aQuantive, CNET, E*TRADE, and many other industry-defining companies.
From the earliest days, it was clear to me (and a few others, obviously) that Amazon was no ordinary company, at any level. However, three attributes set it (far) apart in my mind:
Vision and ambition that were orders of magnitude beyond those of others team that I encountered (until, that is, I met Google);
A cult-like dedication to customer experience/satisfaction that permeated every decision made by every person at the company; and,
A business model that not only valued long-term cash flow and absolute profit potential, but also deemed near-term profits and profit margin largely irrelevant.
Individually, these characteristics have been powerful; in combination, they have been revolutionary. Jeff Bezos’ worldview gave his entire team permission — in fact, it gave them the mandate — to think Big, with a capital “B.” Customers’ pure delight with every Amazon interaction gave the company permission to sell (almost) anything to (almost) anyone.
And, finally, management’s clarity of financial intent (i.e., to perpetually focus on long-term potential) has, from day one, conditioned shareholders and Wall Street to expect a business that will forever be amorphous and unpredictable, with razor-thin margins.
The Yin To Google's Yang, Sort Of
Liberated from more typical corporate constraints, Amazon has evolved like few other companies in history — from its humble origins as an online bookstore into: Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Flexible Payments Service, state-of-the-art warehouses (~70) everywhere, Amazon Cloud Player, AmazonFresh, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Prime, A9, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Diapers.com, Silk, Amazon Cloud Drive, Zappos, Amazon CloudFront, Kindle, and so on.
Sound familiar? It should, because this transformation mirrors that of Google, itself, which began as “just” a search engine company focused on “organizing the world’s information,” and has now become: Gmail, Maps, Apps, Drive, Chrome, Android, Motorola, YouTube, Wallet, Voice, Google Cloud Storage, Shopping, Chromebook, Google App Engine, Google+, and so on.
While not perfectly matching each other solution-for-solution, Amazon and Google now find themselves overlapping across, and competing within, most major categories of Internet-fueled technology and business. SaaS. Hardware. e-Commerce. IaaS. Enterprise. Media. Consumer. Applications. Browsers. Storage. Payments. Consumer. Tablets. And so on.
Amazon's Trump Card: Data
Despite all these evolutions and comparisons and similarities and overlaps, I actually think there’s one final aspect to Amazon’s business with which Google cannot (yet) directly compete, and which may prove to be the difference-maker in this faux-ish battle: Data.
With 17+ years of history and hundreds of millions of transactions across almost every category of goods, Amazon now has massive quantities of data about the actual buying habits of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of consumers around the globe. Not just what people are searching for (Google, though Amazon.com actually has it too). Not just what people “like” (“like” that, Facebook).
Not just what people want (Pinterest, though Amazon.com actually has it too). Not just what people tweet about (Twitter). But the items that people actually pay for with their own hard-earned dollars!
Armed with this unique transaction- and SKU-specific data, at scale, Amazon.com has the potential to become one of, if not the most signficant advertising platforms in the world, in my view — matching, if not besting, Google.
Look at it this way: if advertisers pay Google $44 billion per year for connecting them with consumers that it oftentimes thinks have interest in their product(s), what might those same advertisers be willing to pay Amazon for connecting them with people they know are interested in their products (or those of their competitors, or those in which they will soon have interest)?
What That Data Might Be Worth
For instance, do you think Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, Ford, et al., might be willing to pay a small fortune to be introduced to an individual in Huntington Beach, CA, who suddenly begins buying newborn diapers by the pallet? What about Gymboree? Gerbers? Whole Foods? Safeway? Fab? Gap? Pottery Barn? Ross? Home Depot?
Similarly, how much interest might be generated among home decor vendors, local service providers (e.g., physicians, athletic clubs, veterinarians), home maintenance vendors, etc., by a change in shipping and billing information for one of Amazon.com’s long-time customers? Say, someone whose pattern of purchases are highly suggestive — remember, Amazon.com has developed one of the best predictive commerce models in the world for its own e-commerce franchise — of a home with at least one child and one dog, an avid athlete/runner/yogini, with a taste for gourmet cooking and a passion for gardening, among other attributes?
And these hypotheticals say absolutely nothing of the extraodinary value Amazon could (theoretically) deliver to its customers/partners by sharing with them relevant online transaction activity that might follow said advertisements, effectively offering a closed loop marketing environment unlike any other.
By some accounts, Amazon has (finally) started focusing on the business potential of advertising. For years, it has run ads on its own sites. Then, in late 2010, the company also began serving advertisements on others’ sites, introducing what is, in effect, a full-fledged online advertising network. But these are just warm-ups in my mind — Amazon methodically experimenting (as is its custom) and purposefully tiptoeing around the edges of its potential.
I’m convinced the day will come — sooner rather than later — when Amazon unleashes its data and announces itself as an advertising powerhouse. And, when it does, I think the gloves officially come off and the real battle with Google commences.
The battle between BlackBerry and Microsoft for the No.3 spot in the smartphone platform war is showing no signs of slowing, but a new contender will soon come to market to challenge these struggling giants. Jolla, whose CEO spoke with us nearly a year ago about the company's efforts, has unveiled its first smartphone. Named simply "Jolla," the handset will feature a 4.5-inch HD display, a dual-core processor, 4G LTE, 16GB of internal storage, microSD support, an 8-megapixel camera, Android app support and the Sailfish mobile operating system. Most impressively of all, perhaps, is the price tag: just €399 before taxes and subsidies. Jolla says it hopes to begin shipping the phone by the end of 2013, and a video of the upcoming handset follows below.
Google clearly has a number of strengths, but its greatest may be the freedom to fail. Google shares are up more than 28% so far in 2013 and the company's market capitalization recently topped $300 billion for the first time. Investors are bullish on Google's prospects for the future and perhaps one of the reasons is that Google has shown time and time again that it is willing to take big risks in an effort to drive innovation.
Getting called out by the Obama administration wasn't enough of a deterrent for Unit 61398, the cyberattack unit of the People's Liberation Army of China, because apparently they're at it again, working to pilfer information from private company and public government data stores.
The New York Times is reporting that Unit 61398 has resumed operations and is actively engaged in hacking into any U.S. systems that might hold information considered to be of use for the People's Republic of China.
Security firm Mandiant told the Times "that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the organizations they had infiltrated. But over the past two months, they have gradually begun attacking the same victims from new servers and have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data without detection.
"They are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of the level they were working at before, according to a study by Mandiant requested by The New York Times," the article reported.
If accurate, then it's clear that the U.S. is going to have to step up its game when it comes to cybersecurity, particularly organizations that have data related to trade secrets or, more disturbingly, infrastructure plans - both targets of Chinese hackers.
Even if this isn't the PLA, someone is hacking these systems, and it's time to stop treating cybersecurity like a game.
After leveraging its customers as a test audience, Amazon has begun choosing which of the 14 pilots it will produce as part of the company's first major foray into original programming. Viewer feedback and engagement have led to Alpha House (starring John Goodman) and Betas (centered around a Silicon Valley startup) being the final picks. The latter was easily our favorite among the potential candidates, though we found the field as a whole to be rather lacking. Amazon has said it aims to pick "somewhere between" zero and seven shows to produce for full-length seasons.
The company isn't revealing its entire list of greenlit projects just yet (nor which children-oriented shows will make the cut), but we know that Zombieland won't be...
The web version of Google+ isn't the only thing getting some extra eye candy after I/O. Today Google announced an updated version of the G+ Android app, incorporating all the automatic photo selection and improvement tools shown during the Google I/O keynote last week, plus a few new additions for the location and stream functions of the app. Version 4.0 will be rolling out to the Google Play Store for the rest of the day - if you've got it on your phone or tablet already, you should see an update within the next 24 hours.
The biggest changes are to the photo functions in Google+.
After announcing its deal to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion, mostly in cash, Yahoo today started to lay out some of the details for how it intends to make use of the property while trying to stick to its promise “not to screw it up.” Expect more advertising by next year as well as more Tumblr content on Yahoo properties, but more of a cautious step as to how Yahoo will deal with some of Tumblr’s more NSFW content.
Here are some of the more interesting details revealed in the call:
What are Tumblr ads going to look like? Tumblr apparently made only $13 million in revenues last year but CEO David Karp apparently thinks the site is “ready” to make more now that it understands its users, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. But she also noted that they will be working from a challenged position, not just because of user resistance but because Karp himself has been “skeptical” about online ads.
In the conference call, Mayer made an early reference to how Tumblr would be able to make good use of Yahoo’s advertising technology, in ways that fit Tumblr’s so-far successful, image-based, quick-blogging, youth-oriented format — what she called “native advertising formats.”
As one example, she pointed to an ad format that Yahoo launched at the end of April, in-stream ads that it runs on its news pages. “On Tumblr we feel we can monetize in ways that are meaningful and add to user experience,” she said. She cited the Tumblr dashboard, or as she called it, the inbox for the blogs you follow. “Today Tumblr already does some ads in that feed. We would like to look at that and understand how to introduce more ads where the ads fit the expectations and follow that form and function.” She also noted that Yahoo may possibly work with bloggers to provide ads that will be run with their permission.
On top of this, expect to see more search ads: there are also plans to integrate Yahoo’s search functionality into the site as well. “We think there is a complelling search story,” said Mayer. “Their body is 50b posts and 5 billion posts of original content so search is already vast. We see an opportunity to integrate with search and provide that. That’s one area we are excited by the acquisition.”
Throughout this, a focus on trying to be Tumblr-centric about whatever Yahoo tries to do there. “It’s not a choice between creativity and monetization,” insisted Mayer.
So when are those ads coming? CFO Ken Goldman said that ad revenues from Tumblr will be “modest” this year — the acquisition is not expected to close until the second of of 2013 — but that they will “ramp up” in 2014 “and beyond.” “We do think those revenues will start monetizing materially [and] will contribute to revevenues in 2014 and beyond,” he said on the call, “not just standalone for Tumblr but also incrementally, helping Yahoo to growth.”
Porn? The NSFW, notorious part of Tumblr was never referred to by name, but an analyst did ask about what Yahoo, while courting mainstream brands to market to that attractive Tumblr audience, would do about content that is not “brand safe”. “The richness and breadth of the content… is what makes it more exciting,” enthused Mayer. “In terms of addressing concerns around brand safety we need to have good tools for retargeting.” [Another acquisition, methinks? In any case, no outright announcement that Yahoo intends to get rid of all those sites that Tumblr has more or less accepted into the fold.]
Mayer continued: “Tumblr is now at the point that they do know what it is and what makes sense to monetize in way that is tasteful.” She also mentioned due diligence but also something else, effectively implying that Yahoo will figure out a way of getting around the NSFW content and serving ads where they want them to go, because that’s what the advertisers want: “There are a lot of marketers eager to participate in Tumblr platform and the demographics,” she said.
What does the $1.1 billion “substantially in cash” mean? Goldman noted that it’s effectively an all-cash deal, save for some shares in Yahoo for David Karp. He also noted that Yahoo still has “ample cash” for more acquisitions and investments, to the tune of about $6.2 billion. These will not likely be along the lines of Tumblr in terms of size. “This is an exceptional company and team,” she said of Tumblr. At 300 million monthly unique users, Yahoo is paying about $3.67 per user for the acquisition.
Complementary properties. Mayer made a lot of the fact that Tumblr and Yahoo actually fit “really beautifully together,” like South America and Africa, in her words. In addition to Yahoo skewing older and Tumblr skewing younger, “We are strong on sports, finance and news; Tumblr’s strong on architeture, travel and fashion. We need great tools for content publishing and creation. They have them. Tumblr prides itself as a home for brands. Yahoo is all about brands.”
Tumblr comes to Yahoo. While a lot of the expectation so far has been about how Yahoo may mess up or spiff up or monetize up Tumblr, another theme that emerged during the call was the idea of Tumblr content going out to Yahoo properties — a way of attracting users to Yahoo that may not have gone there before.
“Our strategy is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” said Mayer. “There are some who will always prefer Tumblr and will never come to Yahoo. [But] as we pull Tumblr content into our news feed and media experiences it will cause them to become that much more interesting and richer and will cause more to come to Yahoo. I imagine engagement will improve as we incorporate that content.”
Flickr. There is a separate news conference today that will likely concentrate on updates to Flickr, but today Mayer appeared to douse out speculation that it will be a move to begin integrating its online photo site with Tumblr in any way: “In terms of how the content of Tumblr evolves it depends on the creators,” Mayer said in answer to a question of what this acquisition will mean for Flickr. “It’s something that we will turn our attention to in the future. It will provide great storage, but we will see how those two cousins should relate to each other.
If the last few years have all been about building compelling mobile-first or mobile-only experiences, the latest trend seems to be bringing those experiences back to the web. (Just look at Instagram!) Anyway, with that in mind, social TV startup Dijit became the latest to follow this lead, with the launch of NextGuide Web.
The new web experience is kind of like Dijit’s NextGuide app, in that it helps people search for and discover new shows they’d like to watch, while providing ways to easily get alerts and set notifications for shows and movies when they come on. That includes shows that are on both live and on the web, providing a way to manage both traditional TV and streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
The site, like the app, is highly personal — when making recommendations, it takes into account shows that you’ve liked, either in NextGuide itself or on Facebook. It also allows you to see what shows and movies your friends have liked or shared, giving you a sense of what’s cool or popular.
But it also includes the necessary search and browse functionalities necessary for “social discovery” apps. And while it hooks into a whole lot of online services — like Amazon Prime, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Hulu Plus, and, of course, Netflix — it also lets you know when your favorite shows and movies are going to be on TV.
NextGuide Web allows users to create watchlists and queue up shows they will want to watch later. And it will remind users when a show is on live TV, or when a new episode is added to a streaming service. For those who have DirecTV, it’ll even allow those users to record to their DVR with one click. (Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman says other cable TV providers will be added as time goes on.)
Those who are already users of the NextGuide iPad app can log in with their account credentials or Facebook Connect right now. But for others, the Web experience is being launched in a closed beta, with Dijit sending out new invitations each week.
NextGuide is just one product that Dijit has rolled out over the years, but it’s the one that the company is (obviously) most focused on. It also still supports the Dijit Remote app. Oh, and not too long ago it acquired Miso and all of its products.
As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.
In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.
Cloud Services Can Lag
I am pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud providers - as long as they are free or close to it. However, as I was moving files around while preparing my most recent book A Week at the Beach The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide I was a little surprised at the lags I sometimes experienced using the big-name cloud-based file-transfer services.
More than once when I wanted to use a file from one computer to another, I was disappointed by my cloud services. There were a few times that I got so tired of waiting for a file to show up on my other computer’s cloud drive that I resorted to sneakernet using a USB thumb drive.
After my book was published, I decided to go back and run some simple tests to see just how long the four best-known file-transfer/backup services actually take to put the files where you want them.
To compare Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive I started by exporting a 500K JPEG test image from Lightroom on my Windows 8 computer directly to each of the four services.
Fighting The Randomization Factor
After running the tests a few times, I noticed what can only be described as random operating system differences. Sometimes the file would pop up first on my Mac and other times it showed up first on my Windows 7 laptop.
In order to eliminate the operating system differences, I restarted the tests and this time stopped the timer when the file showed up on either my Mac running Mountain Lion or my Windows 7 laptop. I also reran my tests with a variety of sizes and types of files. In all I ran twenty-five sets of tests.
The differences were significant, if not overwhelmingly huge. The fastest synchs took less than 3 seconds, while a few others took several minutes. The biggest chunk of tests clocked in between 10 seconds and one minute. A few synchs never completed. But which service recorded the best times with the fewest problems?
Dropbox FTW!
Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.
Skydrive brought up the rear. It was fastest on 12% of the tests, but but slowest on a whopping 80% of the tests. It also had two files that never showed up on the Mac and one that never showed on the Windows 7 laptop.
The Amazon Cloud slightly outpaced Google Drive - which had one file that never showed up on the Mac and another that took a very long time to complete.
If my tests convinced me of anything, it is that Skydrive is a work in progress and has a long way to go. I even had trouble setting up the tests on Skydrive.
My tests also revealed a number of odd results. When testing files saved from Word, strange extra files sometimes showed up on all the cloud drives except Dropbox. The file names always began with the characters “~$”. Sometimes the mystery files disappeared and sometimes they hung around.
Cloud Drive Recommendations
So here are some quick recommendations:
First, do not treat your cloud drive as one huge dumping ground. Create folders and try to force a little organization on yourself.
If you save a file to the cloud in order to work on it from another computer, quit the application or close the file on the first computer after you have saved the file to the cloud drive.
Make sure you have a local copy of important files in your documents folder - not just the replicated cloud folder on your computer. Interesting things sometimes happen when cloud files get updated or deleted from another computer. When you come back to the computer where you first created a file, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
If you cannot get a cloud folder on your computer to update, trying quitting the cloud application or rebooting your system.
Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.
Even so, I have no plans to throw away my USB thumb drives.
After a number of newspapers and blogs wrote about Yahoo's now-confirmed $1.1 billion acquisition of popular blogging platform Tumblr, users were angry. The world has no idea what Yahoo has in store for Tumblr, of course, but the Internet giant's reputation has many users worried. So much so, in fact, that some have already begun to defect. According to WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg, Tumblr users are switching to WordPress in droves. In a recent blog post, Mullenweg says WordPress typically imports between 400 and 600 Tumblr posts per hour, but during a one-hour period on Sunday as news of the imminent deal spread, that figure climbed to 72,000. Yahoo confirmed the $1.1 billion deal on Monday, and it is expected to announce further details during a press conference in New York on Monday evening. Yahoo's full press release announcing the acquisition follows below.
Barnes & Noble’s E Ink e-readers are getting an update next month that will add a web browser and email client, reports TechCrunch. Citing an unnamed source, it writes that the Nook Simple Touch and Simple Touch with GlowLight will start receiving the updates on June 1st.
The Nook Simple Touch shipped with a limited, hidden web browser when it was first released in 2011, but Barnes & Noble removed the function in a software update a few months later. The ability to check news headlines and do some light email work should give the $79 Nook platform some extra value, although slow-refreshing E Ink doesn’t really provide the best browsing experience. The low-priced Nooks aren’t the only ones to be getting extra attention from home...
The 20th century, in particular the latter half, played host to some of the most ambitious scientific projects in history. Atlas Obscura's feature Ruins Of Super Science takes a look at some forgotten gems, many of which are in a state of disrepair. There's the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a Russian project to drill as far into the earth as possible, which reached a stunning 7.5 miles deep; the Project HARP Space Gun, which as the name suggests was a joint US-Canadian project that aimed to fire a payload into space (it never succeeded); and Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower and Laboratory in Long Island, NY, the birthplace of many of Tesla's experiments, and the subject of a successful campaign last year to turn the lab into a Tesla museum....
While the online sharing of music has been widespread for close to a decade and a half, the sharing of books has only gathered real traction in the past few years.
When it came to legal action to prevent sharing the music industry led the way but even now, book publishers – Wiley aside – seem generally unwilling to follow the example. However, there are companies prepared to make uploaders suffer, even those with no malicious or commercial intent.
Pāvels Jurs is a teacher in Latvia who operates a website where children can research history topics, see presentations and find other learning aids. Jurs created the site so that children from poor families can still have access to education. According to Latvian media, Jurs even received recognition from the Ministry of Education for his efforts.
Last Thursday, however, Jurs was leaving home to go to school and found himself confronted by four police officers from the Economic Crime Bureau. They proceeded to search Jurs’ home and confiscate the computer he uses in his teaching job. He was arrested and subjected to two hours of interrogation during which he learned he had committed a serious offense that could result in a two year jail sentence.
Jurs’ crime was to upload a scanned copy of the high school history book “Vēsture Vidusskolai” to his website, an act which drew the ire of publisher Zvaigzne ABC and an official complaint earlier this year.
The publisher currently sells the book for the princely sum of $4.00 and it appears that Jurs had previously held discussions with its author but there was a misunderstandings over what content should have been removed from his site.
Nevertheless, the episode has left Jurs questioning why such heavy handed tactics were needed when a civil action would have sufficed. The police have taken down Jurs’ website and since exams are currently underway, students no longer have access to its resources.
“Is there really such a need for punitive action against these methods of teaching, such as the maintenance of a websites from which I did not receive any benefit, but, on the contrary, cost most of my salary payments for maintenance? I understand that I have violated copyright laws, but is it really necessary to act this way?” Jurs said.
Since the raid a meeting has taken place during which some kind of a settlement was discussed. Further meetings will take place this week but it’s now believed that the publisher will not raise any “substantive claims” against the teacher.
The film, created by Simon Klose, is available for no cost and has already been watched by millions of people. The public response to this free release model has been overwhelmingly positive, but it’s now meeting resistance from Hollywood, TPB’s arch rival.
Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows.
The silent attacks come from multiple Hollywood sources including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate and are being sent out by multiple anti-piracy outfits.
Viacom sent at least two takedown requests targeting links to the Pirate Bay documentary on Mrworldpremiere and Rapidmoviez. Finally, Lionsgate jumped in by asking Google to remove a copy of TPB-AFK from a popular Pirate Bay proxy.
Lionsgate DMCA notice
While it’s entertaining to think that these takedowns are truly targeted at TBP-AFK, the more likely explanation is that they are collateral damage. Most DMCA takedown processes are fully automated and somehow the TPB-AFK links were (mistakenly) associated with infringing titles.
However, that doesn’t make it less of a problem.
The whole episode shows once again that something is seriously wrong with the current implementation of the DMCA takedown system. At the moment rightsholders get to take down whatever they want, with almost no oversight and no incentive to improve the accuracy of their systems.
Perhaps a six-strikes plan or some other form of “education” is in order for copyright holders who fail to learn from their mistakes?
For hundreds of years, mathematicians have speculated that there are infinitely many twin prime pairs. In 1849, French mathematician Alphonse de Polignac extended this conjecture to the idea that there should be infinitely many prime pairs for any possible finite gap, not just 2.
During the past couple of years the UK has become the easiest country in the world to have a website blocked on copyright grounds.
After years of anticipation, The Pirate Bay documentary 
