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While a number of rumors have focused on a flagship Google "X Phone," Google's Eric Schmidt says he's seen the future of Motorola's new "phenomenal" set of products. Images of an unidentified Motorola handset appeared in March, showing a potential Google design influence, but the company has not yet officially revealed any new devices. Speaking at AllThingsD's Dive into Mobile conference today, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt described Motorola's next products as "very impressive," without offering up any details on what's planned.

When pressed on whether the products are tablets or just phones, Schdmit said to "think of them as phones-plus," in a mysterious tease. Schdmit didn't discuss any Google "X Phone" or "X Tablet" rumors,...

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Google is testing a simple, visual interface to replace its text-based black navigation strip, and you can try it out right now with a small tweak to your browser. The experimental design replaces Google's ubiquitous black bar with the Chrome OS app launcher, which drops down into a grid of icons for sites including Gmail, Drive, and Calendar. While there's no suggestion as to Google's intention to fully implement this, the company has already begun to bring the Chrome OS app launcher to the Chrome browser itself, and it has previously enabled a site-wide redesign featuring a drop-down navigation menu.

For now, the experimental launcher is a tweak that seems to have slipped through to non-employees, and it requires a user to edit a...

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Tim Wu sez, "I wrote something quick in the New Yorker about America's big blind spot when it comes to big business -- if its not a monopoly, its no problem, so highly concentrated industries can get away with whatever they want."

This blind spot is of particular significance during an age when oligopolies, not monopolies, rule. Consider Barry Lynn’s 2011 book, “Cornered,” which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties. He found that dominance by two or three firms “is not the exception in the United States, but increasingly the rule.” Consumers, easily misled by product labelling, often don’t even notice that products like sunglasses, pet food, or numerous others come from just a few giants. For example, while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty per cent of the market (including seemingly independent brands like Tom’s of Maine).

The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity. The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled “The Return of the Monopoly,” describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries. With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly—all were oligopolies. So while The Atlantic is right about what’s happening, it sounds the wrong alarm. We know how to fight monopolies, but few seem riled at “The Return of the Oligopoly.”

Things were not always thus. Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust. In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy. (By this logic, the Delta and US Airways shuttles between New York and Washington, D.C., would probably be price-fixers, since their prices do vary by how far in advance you buy, but are always identical.)

The Oligopoly Problem

It’s one of those products we want to love on principle alone - but does it measure up to expectations?

Imagine a 7-inch Android tablet, and in the housing there’s a built-in game controller, complete with dual joysticks, directional buttons, even shoulder buttons. That’s what you have with the Archos GamePad. Android gamers have long been using controllers of one sort or another with their phones and tablets with varying degrees of success, but the GamePad is the first device to bundle everything together in one unit.

Just having the controls there is not enough, though. They have to function well to be useful, and integration into the games we love to play is a big deal. This is where Archos has to succeed, and quite frankly they have failed. Read through and see what I mean.

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Today is World Art Day and it's around two years since we launched Google Art Project. In honour of this and all our partners, large and small, traditional and modern, let’s take a quick look at how people are interacting with art online.

The Internet brings paintings to life and it seems that The Starry Night by van Gogh is the one that visitors to Art Project admire the most. In the past six months, this was the most viewed painting in gigapixel—an extremely high resolution painting which allows viewers to zoom in to brushstroke level. While nothing beats seeing a painting in real life, the ability to examine a work of art in this level of detail seems to be encouraging viewers to linger. One minute is the average time spent looking at any given painting on the Art Project website, compared to under 20 seconds (according to several studies) in a museum.

The Starry Night is also the most frequently included painting in user galleries, where individuals create and share their own virtual art collections. We have 40,000 works of art on the platform but some remain perennial favourites. The other most popular inclusions in user galleries (in order) are :

• Botticelli: The Birth of Venus
• Rembrandt: Self Portrait Drawing at a Window
• van Gogh: The Bedroom
• Manet: In the Conservatory
• Bruegel (the Elder): The Harvesters
• van Gogh: Sunflowers
• Holbein (the Younger): The Ambassadors
• van Gogh: Field with Flowers near Arles
• Böcklin: The Isle of the Dead

Viewings of user galleries were in fact higher than any individual artist or painting. To date, 360,000 galleries have been created, 14,000 of which are public on the web. To mark World Art Day, we asked some of our partners to curate user galleries of their own. Take a look through the selections of eight museum directors here.

Given the list above, it’s clear the classics remain popular with viewers, but there is increasing interest in modern art as well, with Dali and Klimt featuring among the most searched for artists. The Internet has also allowed users to explore multiple genres in a single destination. More than 30 different mediums co-exist on Art Project with oil on canvas next to over 5,000 objects including silk textiles, sculptures and furniture. There can't be many places where you can find Brazilian street art alongside Botticelli.

Many partners who have contributed an art collection have also opted to put their museums on Street View. On average, visitors spend around two minutes exploring the interior of the buildings and viewing the paintings on display. The most-visited Street View destination on Art Project is The White House. As the majority of us will never get the opportunity to go inside, the Internet allows a rare glimpse into a global institution that also houses an extensive art collection.

With over 200 partners from 43 countries, we continue our quest to open up access to art to millions of professionals, students, beginners and amateur enthusiasts. At 1pm ET today, we’ll be holding the latest in our Art Talks series on our G+ page, which aims to put art lovers in touch with art experts online. Sign up here to hangout with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to chat about multimedia in the arts from the comfort of your armchair on World Art Day.

Posted by Amit Sood, Google Cultural Institute

Speaking at AllThingsD's Dive Into Mobile conference on Monday, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs announced that the first Firefox OS smartphones will launch around June, Business Insider reported. The executive revealed that initial availability will be limited to emerging markets including Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. The HTML5-based operating system will also be making its way to the United States, as Sprint has previously confirmed that it plans to launch a Firefox OS smartphone sometime next year. Kovacs noted that the delay is due to the company's plan to build a desirable ecosystem before launching in the highly competitive U.S. market.

BitTorrent, the content sharing and distribution network with 170 million monthly active users and 85 petabytes of content, continues to roll out more tools for artists and consumers to turn to the service for all their music, video and reading needs. Today BitTorrent is turning its attention to the mechanics of downloading. It is putting its Surf Chrome extension — which effectively turns the browser into a desktop client for downloading content — into beta and adding some new features, including Firefox support and a new recommendation engine.

BitTorrent is also taking the opportunity to tie Surf in closer with how it plans to monetize the service more in the future.

Included in the recommendation engine will be the content bundles that BitTorrent creates with artists. When a user searches for and starts to download a particular piece of content, other relevant artists, who have placed their work into BitTorrent bundles, will start getting preferential position and appearing near the top of the recommended list. This is something that BitTorrent says will be a hallmark of one of their newest bundle launches, from the DJ Pretty Lights based around his set from this past weekend’s Coachella music festival. As with the book bundles featuring best-selling author Tim Ferriss, Pretty Lights is a safe-ish bet for BitTorrent to try out new things. The musician is one of the most-downloaded artists on the network, with over 5 million downloads in 2012. (By comparison, Death Grips got 34 million; Counting Crows (!) nearly 27 million and DJ Shadow 4.3 million.)

BitTorrent, as it continues on the road of distributing legal content further and further from its roots and original reputation as a hotbed of illegal activity, has been putting quite a lot of effort into figuring out how best to package and deliver content bundles as the cornerstone of their business. They have offered advertisers, for example, the chance to include material of their own in the mix, in the case of a DJ Shadow bundle last year, while still keeping them free to artists to upload and free for users to download. A spokesperson for BitTorrent refers to the bundles as a “series of experiments,” with the goal being “a more sustainable distribution model for the Internet’s creators and fans.”

And those experiments are set to continue. “There are a lot of possible revenue models for BitTorrent bundles, and we expect to share more on that at a later date,” the spokesperson says.

The Surf plug-in, which also offers users a status window to monitor the progress of a download, first launched as a service in alpha in January, as a product out of BitTorrent Labs. As for other browsers beyond these two, “No timing announced today for the others, but we are looking at them,” said the spokesperson.

Last month Google announced that Netflix was now available on ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks thanks to the use of HTML5 video — and now the streaming service has outlined its larger plans to eventually move to the format for all computers. Currently, Netflix primarily uses the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in when streaming video to web browsers, but Netflix's Anthony Park and Mark Watson point out in a blog post that the current solution really can't stand. Plug-ins don't play well with with most mobile browsers, they can be cumbersome for users, and perhaps most importantly, Microsoft itself may not develop a new version of Silverlight beyond the current release.

The solution is HTML5 video, but that relatively young technology requires...

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Google has released documentation for the Mirror API, the interface that programmers will use to write services for Glass. The contents include everything from quick start guides for Java and Python to in-depth developer guides and best practices, and starter projects and libraries are available for download. The news comes just as the first Glass units are beginning to roll off the production line.

Glass is a web app

We already saw many of the implementation details in Google's SXSW presentation, but everything is presented here in much more detail. Services are "installed" by authorizing them to post to your Glass timeline with OAuth 2.0, and those apps post text, images, and other data to your device using JSON objects and HTTP...

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Syfy has released a haunting new trailer for Helix — the highly anticipated TV series from Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore. The series, which was officially greenlit last month, revolves around a group of scientists investigating a possible disease outbreak in the Arctic. Their research eventually leads them down a more dystopian path, culminating in what the network describes as "a terrifying life-and-death struggle that holds the key to mankind’s salvation or total annihilation."

The show's first trailer, embedded below, doesn't offer many more plot details, though it certainly gives a clearer idea of its tone. Set against a snowy white backdrop, the camera slowly pans across the Arctic before cutting to a shot...

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At a recent auction, French Burgundy Domaine de la Romanée-Conti went for $13,061. A bottle. But there aren't many of us who can (or want to) pay that much for a few glasses of wine—after all, when we uncork a bottle, drinking what we like should be our main objective.

This is a guest post from Food52.

So what makes a bottle that expensive? One of the reasons is that there’s precious little of it, and that’s because certain wine laws (for our Romanée-Conti, we’re talking French wine laws—a canon you definitely don’t want to mess with) classify very specific parcels of land for a limited quantity of grapes. Supply is low, demand is high—and so too are the prices.

To replicate that same experience, minus the lifetime investment, here's what you can do.

One Vineyard, Two Vineyard

On the label, look for the words “single vineyard.” That means, just like with that pricey French bottle, that all the grapes used to make the wine come from one very specific place. Get the same effect as something like an expensive Burgundy Prémier Cru for a third of the price with a single-vineyard, balanced California Chardonnay. (We like this one.) A single-vineyard wine is a wine that knows exactly who it is—it's confident and pulled-together, partly because of its unified origin.

The Label Matters

Try looking for “second labels.” Some wineries have extra juice leftover from bottling their premium wines, and they either sell off the juice, or bottle it themselves under a different label. Some companies, like 90+ Cellars, have built their businesses on buying juice from superior wineries and simply bottling it under their own label—these usually range from $10 to $16 dollars.

Look for second labels especially with rich, Napa Cabernet Sauvignons, which will often run you more than your nightly wine budget. In a blind taste between two cabs—one a $60 well-known bottle, one a second label that ran about $16—my friends found the less expensive bottle to be a natural pleaser, over the expensive, more restrained one.

Experiment With White Wine and Different Varietals

If you’re looking to be adventurous, remember these two things:

1) White wines tend to be less expensive than reds. You’re likely to find a larger range of bottles in your price range, making trying a lot of different wines easy. Just don’t drink them all at once.

2) Go for lesser-known varietals, which tend to be more affordable. Like Sauvignon Blanc? Try this bottle of Torrentes from Argentina, or this inexpensive Vinho Verde from Portugal.

Drink Local

It’s becoming just as easy to drink local as it is to eat local, so look closer to home than the expensive, well-known varietals of abroad. (This book can help.) Ice wines serve as a great example here—indulge in a renowned Sauternes from Bordeaux for $200 a bottle, or choose a wonderful bottle of Eden Ice Cider, from upstate New York, for $25.

If You Can't Afford This Bottle, Go with That | Food52

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Cathy Huyghe is a wine writer and lover of all things digital. Follow her on Twitter @cathyhuyghe.

Top image remixed from Refat (Shutterstock) and pixabay. In-post photos by James Ransom.

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.

Entertainment industry groups, such as the RIAA, BPI, IFPI and MPAA, view BitTorrent sites as a major threat.

Owners of BitTorrent sites, on the other hand, believe they do nothing wrong.

All of the major torrent sites, The Pirate Bay excluded, have a takedown policy and remove links to infringing content when they’re asked to. However, for some reason copyright holders send many more takedown requests to Google for these torrent sites, than the websites receive themselves.

In other words, Google is asked to remove links to infringing content on torrent sites, but the copyright holders aren’t bothering to take the original content down.

This unusual situation becomes more clear when we compare the DMCA takedown statistics of Google and KickassTorrents.

Over the past month Google removed more than 125,000 kat.ph URLs from its search index. KickassTorrents on the other hand received only 2,536 DMCA requests in the same period. In total Google received 1,344,885 takedown requests for KickassTorrents URLs while the site itself was asked to take down “only” 278,864.

So why this discrepancy? Shouldn’t the priority be to take down the actual URLs instead of Google’s links to them?

Speaking with TorrentFreak the owners of KickassTorrents explained that they have staff who remove infringing content swiftly when they are asked to, so it’s hard to see what’s stopping the copyright holders.

“We are very serious about removing copyrighted content following DMCA requests. We have staff who review and process all incoming requests. On working days the processing time of these requests never takes longer than several hours,” KickassTorrents said.

But perhaps copyright holders have another reason to focus more on Google?

It is no secret that they want Google to do more to make pirated links unavailable in their search engine, and high DMCA stats may give the rightsholders a better position in these negotiations.

While copyright holders are within their rights to ask Google to remove links to infringing content, it would make sense to ask the target sites to do the same. In fact, if the original content is taken down there is no need for Google to remove these links.

TorrentFreak asked the BPI and RIAA to comment on our findings but we have yet to receive a response. Perhaps they’re busy writing DMCA notices to Google?

Update: An employee of one of the content detection companies, who requested to remain anonymous, says that Google is targeted because they publish their stats in public.

“Copyright holders are interested in Google only for its “visual effect.” They can “see” how many links are removed so it’s easier for removal companies to show the ROI. (it makes them look like they are achieving something).”

Also, the employee says that KickassTorrents does not remove all torrents despite sending valid takedown notices.

Source: Obsessed With Google, Copyright Holders Ignore The Actual Pirated Content

If you've tried as many apps and games as we have, you've probably come across one or two that were great... with the exception of annoying, vaguely spammy notification alerts. Starting with Jelly Bean 4.1, there's a simple and somewhat obscure solution: check the App Info menu to disable notifications. But that can get tedious, especially if you're setting up a new device. Developer Giorgi Dalakishvii has created a more elegant solution, which puts notification settings for all your apps in one handy place.

  

Notifications Off is a simple app, but it does a lot with a little.

Done With This Post? You Might Also Like These:

• Jelly Bean Feature Closer Look: Expandable, Interactive, All-Around Enhanced Notifications
• [Android How-To] Make Your Own Ringtones, Notifications, And Alarms From Media Files
• [New App] Notification History Keeps Tracks Of Notifications, Lets You Find The Source Without Jelly Bean
• Getting To Know Android 4.2, Part 1: The Notification Panel, Recent Apps, And Other System-Wide Changes

[New App] Notifications Off Gives You A Handy Way To Selectively Banish Apps From Your Notification Bar was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

"Oh, man! It's so real!"

Two explosions at the finishing line of the Boston Marathon killed at least three people and left at least a dozen more injured, according to news reports. Law enforcement officials said they were caused by small, home-made bombs.

Photos and videos posted within minutes by witnesses showed scenes of chaos and bloodshed, with emergency services swarming the scene on Boylston street and smoke billowing into the sky.

The organizers of the Boston Marathon reported that two bombs detonated seconds apart, about three hours after the front-runners crossed the finishing line. A third device was destroyed later in a controlled detonation. Flight restrictions were in force late Monday afternoon.

The death toll looks set to rise, with some sources already reporting many more dead, and police still working to evacuate streets near where the explosions took place.

Updates below, timestamps in Eastern.

~3:15 p.m.: the first photos are being posted to twitter (1, 2, 3)--WARNING for blood and dismemberment.

~3:20 p.m. -- Police report another device is in front of the Mandarin Hotel.

3:24 p.m. -- 90.7 RAV FM posted a photo of an explosion, and reported that media was "locked down at nearby hotel." -- Dean

3:27 p.m. Boston's WHDH.com has livestreaming coverage.

3:32 p.m. -- "Medical tents already full" ... "All victims off scene" [via]

3:35 p.m. -- "Everyone in the area needs to evacuate immediately. Danger zone, do not stay." [via]

3:40 p.m. -- WHDH's Janet Wu reports that the area has been completed evacuated due to the possibility of other devices. "about 40 minute ago, I was a half block away. ... It's unconfirmed, but it happened at 671 Boylston Street. ... The response was immediate because there were so many medical personnel in the area. ... My colleagues and I saw many many injuries and those injuries were severe."

3:41 p.m. -- CBS reports "at least a dozen" injured.

3:42 p.m. -- A vine video of the explosion itself from WHDH — Dean. And on YouTube.

3:50 p.m. -- The organizers of the Boston Marathon report that the explosions were caused by bombs, detonated seconds apart. A fire was reported at Boston's JFK library, though it's not clear if there is a connection.

3:54 p.m. -- "Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities." [via] CBS News: "Third bomb detonated by police" [via]

4 p.m. -- Three confirmed deaths, reports Fox. Boston Police, however, say 2 are dead and 22 injured. Boston.com says dozens are injured. The New York Post reports that 12 are dead.

5:34 p.m.: Google People finder, for anyone looking for missing persons in Boston. The Red Cross has an online register for people in Boston to let their loved ones know they are safe and sound. Here are other online tools people are using to connect. —Xeni.

5:41 p.m.: Multiple reports citing Boston police say JFK Library fire was not an explosion, but a fire believed to be unrelated to the marathon bombs. —Xeni

5:46 p.m. ET: Boston.com has a video from directly next to the finish line as the first explosion goes off. Certainly the highest quality video so far– this shows scale of it, the immediate reaction and you can hear the second blast. Warning, graphic. — Dean

5:46 p.m.: President Obama scheduled to speak at 6:10pm Eastern. CNN and CBS are among the news organizations now referring to this as a terrorist attack. —Xeni

7:02 p.m.: Hundreds of Bostonians offering free rooms in their homes for people affected by the bombings. —Mark

8:53 p.m.: Patton Oswalt brings some positive perspective, and reminds us that the good people here outnumber the bad and we always will. — Dean

8:41 a.m.: This Reuters piece from yesterday has a few details missing from other coverage I'd seen, including the fact that the bombs appear to have been filled with ball bearings and other shrapnel. — Maggie

8:51 a.m.: Mother Jones tells the amazing story of Carlos Arredondo, a first responder who was photographed helping victims of the bombings while wearing a cowboy hat. Arredondo lost his son, a Marine, in Iraq in 2004 and attempted suicide while he was still struggling with that grief. He survived and became a peace activist. Yesterday, he was at the Boston Marathon, saving lives. — Maggie

9:00 a.m.: WBUR Boston reports that police were on hand, searching an apartment belonging to "a person of interest" in Revere, Mass. early this morning. Revere is just north of Boston. In general, WBUR Boston is doing an amazing job of sober, responsible reporting. Their update feed is worth following. — Maggie

9:05 a.m.: "Marathons aren't a sporting contest, but a celebration of being alive. ... These people aren't our rivals or our enemies, they were our partners." Marathon runner Jeff Pearlman has written a deeply moving essay about what this tragedy means to the closely knit community of marathon runners. — Maggie

Have you seen his Kryptonian pal?

While the team behind Man Of Steel – including producer Chris Nolan and director Zack Snyder – and studio Warner Bros. have chosen to keep the marketing for the movie relatively scanty compared to other superhero/sci-fi franchises up to now, things are moving up a notch. General Zod, played in the movie by Michael Shannon, has a message for us all with the viral title You Are Not Alone. It’s so nice of him to think of us, because we’ve been feeling awfully vulnerable lately. Take a look below. 

 

Wait… Was that a threat? Was he threatening us? He starts out sounding like he’s looking for a lost dog, then says if we don’t hand some guy called Kal-El over, or if that guy won’t surrender within 24 hours, our world will suffer the consequences. That’s charming, that is. Next thing you know, he’ll be asking us all to kneel.

The movie’s official site is also now pointing to a newly static-filled page called iwillfindhim.com, which has a countdown, presumably to our eternal doom. Or, more likely, to the new trailer, which is scheduled to arrive soon.

In case you’re worried, Superman will be here to save us on June 14 when Man Of Steel lands. Henry Cavill, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe, Diane Lane, Amy Adams, Laurence Fishburne and Antje Traue are all among the cast. You can see the most recent trailer below. 

UK mobile operator Vodafone has been forced to disable one of its cell towers in the city of Southampton after a peregrine falcon (duck hawk) chose the site for its nest. According to the BBC, some customers in the north of the city have been left without signal after engineers were unable to fix a problem with the mobile mast because the bird has a protected status and cannot be disturbed. Wildlife experts believe Vodafone may have to wait until June before the fledglings leave the roost.

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To protect themselves against excessive monitoring and security exploits, many BitTorrent users have signed up for anonymizing services such as VPNs and proxies.

However, getting a subscription doesn’t guarantee privacy. If for some reason the connection with the VPN is lost, BitTorrent downloads will simply continue from one’s residential IP-address.

Luckily there are ways to minimize this risk and make sure BitTorrent downloads only work when the VPN is connected. Vuze, for example, now has a “connect through VPN only” option built-in.

This new feature comes with Vuze’s updated proxy and VPN support in version 4.8.1.0. It notifies users via a pop-up and asks them whether they want to connect only when the VPN is running.

“Vuze now includes logic to detect when you are running over a VPN and prompts you explicitly to bind to its interface to increase privacy,” Vuze explains on its blog.

If the automatic detection doesn’t work, which is often the case, the feature can be activated manually in a few simple steps.

1. ‘Tools’ > ‘Options’ > set ‘Mode’ to advanced

2. Go to ‘Connection’ > ‘Advanced Network Settings’

3. Make sure that you are connected to the VPN. Select the right network interface from the list and enter the corresponding id in the “Bind to local IP address or interface” box. This varies per computer.

E.g. On Windows PPTP/L2TP generally goes through the WAN Miniport and OpenVPN uses the TAP-Win32 Adapter V9. Usually you will see the name or IP-address of the VPN listed.

4. Make sure the box “enforce IP bindings” is ticked at the bottom.

Then when everything is working correctly a green “routing” icon should appear in the bottom bar of the client.

To check whether it’s working you can simply disconnect the VPN. The “routing” icon should then turn red and all active downloads and uploads will be halted.

As far as we know Vuze is the only popular BitTorrent client that has a network interface binding feature. Many BitTorrent / uTorrent users have been asking for a similar privacy protecting option as well, but for now these clients only allow binding to static IP-addresses.

For those not using Vuze there are other options available though. The easiest, and perhaps most safe, is to install a general VPN monitoring tool. We’ve discussed these and other tips in a previous article on VPN security.

Do you have other tips or suggestions? Please post them in the comments.

Source: Protecting BitTorrent Users from VPN Disconnects

For the 1963 spring collection fashion editorial in Harper's Bazaar, Melvin Sokolsky photographed model Simone d'Aillencourt in a bubble, dreamily floating around Paris. All of the stunning images have been collected in a limited-edition art book packaged in a die-cut lucite slipcase.

"Harper's Bazaar 'Bubble' Spring Collection"

Paris 1963: A Limited Edition Art Book

If you struggle with bad Wi-Fi reception, or just don't have a good table to set your router, you could mount it high on your wall with some inexpensive hangers.

David Goodier realized that GRUNDTAL hangers from IKEA fit perfectly into the grooves of his Airport Express to hold it on the wall. The result looks clean and professional, and at only $8 for four hangers, it was way cheaper than any custom mounting hardware available commercially.

Even if you don't have an Airport Extreme, there are a few other DIY options. As we've mentioned before, a piece of pegboard is great for mounting a variety of networking hardware, and 3M Command Hooks are a more minimal solution for certain routers.

GRUNDTAL Hanger Airport Extreme Wall Mount | There's Always Something Else to Mess Up via Apartment Therapy

A few months ago, while visiting a hacker friend’s magnificent new San Francisco loft, he gestured to a little alcove stuffed with server racks and said: “And over there are the Bitcoin mines.” I smiled and nodded, thinking, Oh, right, Bitcoin. Is that still a thing?

Andy, if you’re reading this, I apologize. Is it ever, and how. Over the last few weeks the hype around everyone’s favorite distributed cryptographic currency has gone insane. It’s a Ponzi scheme; no, it’s the first instance of the third era of currency; no, it will spiral up and down forever; no, it’s the new venture-capital frontier; no, it’s an existential threat to the modern state.

No, possibly, conceivably, maybe, and no. But: I realized this week that Bitcoin actually is a really big deal — in a way that’s been almost entirely obscured by all the hype.

A rare voice of reason this month came from Felix Salmon, who wrote (in a post marred by some remarkable ignorance; for instance, Facebook Credits ceased to be a $1 billion market when Facebook discontinued them almost a year ago):

A peer-to-peer payments system, allowing anybody on the internet to pay anybody else on the internet without having to sign up with some financial-services behemoth first, could revolutionize global commerce … Bitcoin isn’t the future. But it has helped to light the way ahead.

I mostly concur. Of course, I would, since I concluded exactly the same thing two years ago, when Bitcoin was at its previous hype peak. I went on then to speculate that its real future might be as a national currency in a nation like Zimbabwe previously scarred by hyperinflation.

…And I don’t know what I was thinking. Bitcoin’s true long-term value was staring me in the face, and I missed it. It wasn’t until I read this superb Nyaruka post on the subject that it hit me.

Almost everyone else writing about Bitcoin is doing so from the perspective of a First World citizen living in a nation with thriving electronic payment networks and a strong, easily traded currency. But that’s not the context where it really matters. Where Bitcoin matters, where it’s important, is the developing world.

Ever tried to exchange Colombian pesos in Guatemala, or Tanzanian shillings in Zambia? I have, and believe me, it’s a Kafkaesque nightmare. Now imagine living in the developing world and trying to sell goods or services internationally. Talk about a pain point. Until Bitcoin. To quote that Nyaruka post:

Someone in Rwanda that builds a compelling service can instantly start taking payments from the rest of the world, without asking for permission, without filling out any paperwork and with the same fee structure as the biggest retailers … So Bitcoin is exciting to me not so much because it is a new currency, but because it has the potential to be a globally recognized, yet completely decentralized, form of digital payment.

Of course unofficial distributed international payment networks are as old as the hills. Our own John Biggs points out that Bitcoin is in essence much like a modern day hawala network; but it is to hawala as PayPal is to money orders sent by Pony Express. No ID required, no setup costs, no nothing: just send and receive. Bitcoin is no threat to the modern nation-state…but it is conceivably an existential threat to PayPal.

However, it’s not without its flaws. For one thing, Bitcoin’s “block chain” — the record that verifies all transactions — could conceivably be forked, as happened due to a versioning bug back in March. That wasn’t a significant problem, but now that Bitcoin’s collective value has briefly hit 10 figures (although it might be back down to eight figures by tomorrow…) you have to wonder if someone might try a brute-force attack on it. “If a user controls the majority of computational power in the mining network, they can manipulate this to their advantage by creating two diverging chains,” to quote a Cornell writeup.

In other words, if a true computing megapower (say, Amazon, Apple, Google, or one of a handful of national governments) really wanted to break Bitcoin, they could. In fact I’ve seen speculation that anyone willing to splash out a few million dollars on custom hardware would probably be able to hijack the block chain.

Furthermore, it’s not really all that anonymous, which is a highly desirable feature in a digital currency; and worst of all, if the last few weeks have proved anything at all about Bitcoin, it’s that it’s ridiculously volatile… which is exactly what you don’t want in a payments mechanism.

So I believe it’s Bitcoin’s successors — whether that be Ripple/OpenCoin, or the anonymous Bitcoin bolt-on ZeroCoin, or something else still being dreamed up — that will truly change the world. But not the First World. We don’t much need Bitcoin and its descendants, at least not yet. In the developing world, though, crippled by weak currencies and byzantine payment infrastructures, a simple, seamless, frictionless, reliable international peer-to-peer payments system could be a huge, huge deal. But not until the volatility diminishes…which is to say, not until the hype here fades away. Here’s hoping that’s soon.

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I don't think I've ever seen Joss this young :)

The US publishing industry appears to be turning over a new leaf: ebook sales made up 22.5 percent of the industry's net revenue last year, according to a new survey from the Association of American Publishers. That's up from just 0.05 percent 10 years prior, when the AAP first began keeping track of ebook sales, and up from 16.98 percent in 2011. The categories that saw the biggest increase in ebook revenues included adult fiction, adult nonfiction, and religious books. Even more encouraging, the overall net revenue for the US publishing industry was $7.1 billion, up 6.2 percent from 2011.

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A lot of companies are invoking Star Trek these days, from Makerbot's Replicator to the Tricorder Project, but Google seems to have taken it one step further. In Slate, Farhad Manjoo delves into Mountain View's preoccupation with the omniscient, disembodied on-board computer that's been a Trek hallmark since the '60s. Apparently Google has adopted the computer as an ideal of human-computer interaction for Search. So far, the result is an increased emphasis on speech recognition and machine understanding — the skills a computer would need to carry on a conversation — as a way of expanding what a search engine can do. It's a striking example of pop culture influencing modern tech, and good context for whatever's unveiled at Google's...

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Farhad Manjoo: "Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer." [Slate]

In Dubai, the fuzz drive Lamborghinis. Also, BMW 5 Series, Chevy Camaros, and Dodge Chargers. (Laughing Squid)

UK carrier appears to be following in the footsteps of T-Mobile USA, allowing customers to pay off their phone separately to their service plan

O2 UK has announced the launch of "O2 Refresh," a new kind of price plan designed to disconnect the cost of smartphones from the cost of service plans. On O2 Refresh, customers effectively pay a separate service charge and monthly installments towards the cost of the phone.

That means O2 customers wanting to upgrade early can simply pay off the remaining amount on their phone plan and start a new one, with no changes to the service plan. Naturally, if you're upgrading O2 encourages you use its O2 Recycle service to cash in on the value of your old phone, up to £260. Alternatively, if customers fully pay off their phone plan they'll then only pay the service fee each month.

O2 refresh service plans range from £12 per month for 600 minutes, unlimited texts and 750MB up to £22 p.m. for unlimited minutes and texts, and 2GB. From Apr. 16 O2 Refresh will be available with the HTC One, Sony Xperia Z, Blackberry Z10, Samsung Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5, with the option of making an up-front payment towards the cost of the phone.

In today's press statement O2 points out that many smartphone owners want to upgrade more than once every two years. O2 Recycle allows them to do just that, in a more economical way, while cleverly renewing their commitment to O2 in the process. (After all, phones purchased through O2 will be locked to the network.) The network also cites its push towards 4G LTE this summer as a reason for making it easier for customers to pick up new 4G-capable handsets.

On the other side of the Atlantic T-Mobile USA has been switching to a similar system, with separate service fees and installments towards buying your phone, as well as the option to pay off the remaining cost of your device at any time.

Brits, hit the comments below and let us know if you'd switch to O2 for this kind of deal.

Source: O2

A web page has appeared at music.twitter.com with a #music hashtag graphic and a sign-in button, adding further weight to reports that Twitter will be launching a music service very soon. The sign-in button leads to an authorization request for an app called "Trending Music Web," which Stephen Phillips, founder of We Are Hunted — the music service Twitter just acquired — has recently been tweeting songs from. The tweets link to tracks on SoundCloud and Rdio, suggesting that these services will form a part of Twitter Music.

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The UK government has opened an investigation into whether children are being unfairly targeted in free games and with in-app purchases. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT), has said it will look into whether game developers are "potentially misleading" children or adopting "commercially aggressive practices" to pressure them into making purchases for free games on mobile devices or the web. The OFT is the UK's consumer and competition authority — similar to the FTC in the US — and has previously investigated (and approved) Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram.

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Death is a subject that no one likes to discuss – be it that of a family member or our own. Unfortunately, it's a part of life that we'll all have to deal with at one point or another. When it comes to preparing for your own death, however, what's left behind in the digital space is often overlooked. Considering our digital life is becoming such an important part of who we are and the legacy we leave behind, a simple way to manage what should happen to our data in the event our passing is quickly becoming requisite.

Thankfully, Google has unveiled the Inactive Account Manager, a service that looks to provide just that.

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Google Announces 'Inactive Account Manager' – A Tool That Lets You Manage What Happens To Your Personal Data After Death was written by the awesome team at Android Police.