Davemichels

For those waffling on what to get the computer lover in their life, one tasty possibility is a keyboard-shaped waffle iron.

Unfortunately, it’s more of a tasty idea than a meal at this point. So far, the inventors have raised more than $18,000 of their $50,000 goal on Kickstarter, which is listed as a staff pick on the crowd-funding site.

The waffle iron’s creator, Chris Dimino, hopes to raise the amount by Christmas Eve. Orders will be taken through then, but the irons will not be available until April.

Dimino’s original design, from seven years ago when he was in design school, used a Smith-Corona typewriter, but it turns out that typewriters aren’t meant to handle the amount of heat needed to turn batter into waffles.

“I wanted to turn an obsolete typewriter into something useful,” Dimino said in an interview. “I think after staring at the keys long enough it started to look like a waffle to me.”

Here’s the video:

Microsoft customers in the U.S. can now use Bitcoin to add money to their accounts, the global computing giant announced Wednesday.

Users can take funds from their Bitcoin wallets and convert them into dollars to make purchases from the Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox Games, Xbox Music, and Xbox Video stores. The new feature doesn't support direct payments in bitcoin, so users must first convert the currency into dollars before they can use it.

The new feature comes as a direct result of Microsoft’s integration with Bitpay, a Georgia-based company for electronic payment processing of Bitcoin. This is far from Bitpay’s most high profile partnership this year; in September, it integrated with PayPal, too. Other clients include NewEgg and Shopify. Microsoft’s decision may have hinged on Bitpay’s ability to make Bitcoin transactions function similarly to credit-card ones.

See also: What It Will Take For You To Get Bitcoin At The Bank

“We’re much like any merchant processor in the credit-card space,” Bitpay CFO Bryan Krohn told ReadWrite in October. “We take payments, convert them to local currency, and put them in the merchant’s bank account.”

The Bitcoin currency has been cooling down since a single Bitcoin settled around a steady $350 selling point—down from upwards of $1000 at the beginning of this year. However, Microsoft has been a fairly staunch supporter of the cryptocurrency. Earlier this year, it updated its Bing search engine for Bitcoin currency conversions.

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Purchase a beverage or snack on a United flight next year and you probably won't see that bulky credit card terminal that never seems to print receipts properly. That's because the…

For the first three quarters of 2014, more than one third (36 percent) of the new electricity capacity built out in the U.S. came from solar systems, according to a new…

Given the bargain basement prices typically associated with browser-based Chromebooks, Avaya reps noted the approach also saves users extra funds when it comes to hardware.

Nine short months after the image-sharing site hit the 200 million user milestone, Instagram reports it now has 300 million users.

“Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70 million photos and videos each day,” the social network’s blog post said.

The latest numbers have prompted TechCrunch blogger Josh Constine to note that Instagram has now surpassed Twitter by user count, though keep in mind that Twitter has 284 million active users, while Instagram did not say which percentage of its users are active. On the other hand, Twitter says it has added just 38 million people in the past nine months.

See also: Polaroid’s "Instagram" Camera Finally Opens For Pre-Orders

In tandem with this news, Instagram has announced a new feature that ought to lend it more credibility—celebrity badges. These badges should roll out for eligible users in a couple of days.

“We’re excited to announce verified badges for celebrities, athletes and brands, making it easier for you to connect with the authentic accounts you’re looking for,” the post read.

Photo by 5chw4r7z

‘Tis the season. If you haven’t finished buying all your holiday gifts, don’t fret, there’s still time. Of course, searching for the right gift for a friend or loved one can always be a challenge — and we’re here to help.

Below you’ll find a few gift ideas for technology enthusiasts, both young and old, ranging from a speech-enabled smart home device to the latest in intelligent assistant technology.

Ubi
Ubi, a WiFi-connected, speech-enabled smart device for the home, was launched by a Toronto, Canada-based startup long before Amazon’s own version, Echo, hit the news about a month ago. And while prospective Echo buyers need to be added to a waiting list to request purchase, Ubi can be had today for $299, plus shipping.

Ubi is a perfect gift for that technology savvy friend of yours who is always one step ahead of the latest trend. It’s an especially great fit for do-it-yourself types who like tinkering with gadgets, setting them up, and making them work. Ubi is a voice-enabled box that plugs into an outlet in your home and connects to the Internet via your home WiFi. You can talk to Ubi to ask it questions, have it set reminders or play music, send text messages for you, control your smart appliances, and more.

Ubi is an especially great choice for the software developer on your list, because the open APIs allow developers to create their own functions that can be accessed from Ubi. A friend of mine and I are working on creating little stories for Ubi to narrate, for example. The possibilities with Ubi are endless.

ToyTalk’s SpeakaLegend app
SpeakaLegend is a speech recognition iOS app that creates an immersive, interactive experience encouraging children to have conversations with characters in the app. Developed by ToyTalk, a company founded by two former Pixar executives that specializes in educational apps for children, the team has mastered voice recognition and natural language processing technology so that it can better understand the voices of children. Standard out-of-the-box speech recognition systems have a hard time figuring out what kids are saying, but ToyTalk claims to have fixed that problem.

SpeakaLegend features characters that talk back and engage in dialog with the children to keep them engaged in the story. According to a recent article, ToyTalk claims that the average engagement time for the app is around 35 minutes a week.

SpeakaLegend combines speech with touch, so that young users can both talk to the characters and touch the screen to engage with the story world. For some fun, check out the real recordings on the ToyTalk blog of children’s conversations with the app characters.

EasilyDo
Who couldn’t use a little help organizing their life and staying in touch with people who matter most? I installed the free version of the EasilyDo smart productivity app a couple of months ago and I’ve been using it ever since.

EasilyDo keeps me on top of lots of important things including: email notifications of bills, flight updates for myself or friends, and a feature that I really like – “top pictures” from my Facebook friends — saving me from having to log into Facebook, but still keeps me current on what’s going on. The app is available on both iOS and Android platforms.

There’s also a premium version of EasilyDo ($49.99/year) making a great gift for busy professionals on your shopping list, or for anyone who travels a lot and likes to keep up with what’s going on in their social network. Features of the premium version include powerful tools for managing contacts, configuring real-time alerts and integrating Salesforce.

Keep the Conversation Going
Have ideas on voice-enabled gadgets or other intelligent assistant apps to recommend as gifts? Feel free to add them in the comments section.

Here’s wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and joyous holiday season. Conversational technology is great, but don’t forget that the best conversations are the ones we have with people, especially friends and family!

According to IBM's latest CISO study, 60 percent of security leaders feel as though their organizations are outgunned in the supposed cyber war.

The legal battle between Oracle and Google is entering a new stage, and whatever happens could change the  entire software industry.

The companies are now arguing whether the case should go to the Supreme Court. Google is trying to get the court to rule, while Oracle this week asked the court not to hear the case.

Some of the biggest names in the computer industry have filed opinions to the Supreme Court on why they think an Oracle win would be bad for the computer industry.

Among the folks involved in that are "father of the Internet" Vinton Cerf (who is also a Google employee),  Ken Thompson (co-designer of the Unix operating system), five Turing Award winners, four National Medal of Technology winners, privacy watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others, reports Computerworld.

To recap: a couple of years ago, Oracle shocked the world by suing Google for $6 billion (although the judge rejected that amount as ridiculously high), claiming patent and copyright infringement over Android. The original lawsuit had some of the biggest names in tech on the stand testifying, like Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

Oracle owns a programming language called Java. Oracle asserts that Google illegally copied Java when creating Android. The part that was copied is something called "application programming interfaces." That's the part of a program that allows two apps to talk to each other and work together.

Oracle lost the patent suit but the jury was split on the copyright suit. A jury agreed that Google did copy Java's API, but they were deadlocked on if that copying was actually illegal or if it fell under the "fair use" doctrine. An appeals court told Oracle it was free to take the case back to another jury trial. 

In October, Google decided to try and sidestep a whole new trial and instead asked the Supreme Court to take on the case. On Monday, Oracle asked Supreme Court not hear the case.

The group of computer industry luminaries filed a brief to the Supreme Court on Google's behalf. These folks argue if programmers have to worry about paying licensing fees when writing APIs for their apps, that will stifle innovation and make it harder for apps to work together.

"When programmers can freely reimplement or reverse engineer an API without obtaining a costly license or risking a lawsuit, they can create compatible software that the interface's original creator might never have envisioned or had the resources to develop," their brief said.

So there's a lot up in the air right now. Will the Supreme Court take on the case? Will it rule in a way that could damaging the software industry? Will Google wind up owing Oracle a lot of money?

Stay tuned.

SEE ALSO: Google Just Made Another Smart Move In Its War With Microsoft

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Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post is downgrading Google to "neutral."

His reasons:  

• Lower than Street estimates (search maturity, lack of product catalysts, and margin pressure to investments in competitive and long-duration businesses like cloud computing and retail delivery)
• Increased regulatory risk, particularly in the EU
• Strong Apple product cycle and search contract renewal uncertainty
• Competition (FB in ad networks, possibly search) and reversal of US online advertising market share gains due to social emergence (we estimate Google's US market share will fall from 41% in 2013 to 40% in 2014E and 39% in 2015E).
• We are slightly lowering our 2016 revenue/EPS to $73.72bn/$33.81 from $74.44/$34.15 (which is below Street at $73.40bn/$$35.77) and lowering our price objective to $580 (from $600) based on 17x our lower 2016 EPS of $33.81. Google is well positioned with search tech, Android, YouTube and cash, but with our 2016 estimate 5% below the Street, we cannot make a strong case for multiple expansion.

Google's stock is down 1% in premarket trading. Google's stock is down for the year. 

NOW WATCH: Here Are 5 Big Things Paul Krugman Says He Got Wrong Over The Years

 

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Former Apple CEO John Sculley gave his take on the Apple Watch and Apple Pay in a recent interview with Forbes.

Sculley lauded Tim Cook's success as CEO, but said he doesn't think Apple takes enough risks.

"If you say who in Silicon Valley is willing to go out and take the big risks, change the game, you see people like Amazon and Google, Facebook, are willing to take big risks to go into entirely new industries than they were in before."

Sculley said Apple will continue reaping insane profits even if they don't innovate new products.

"The question is: is there anything on the horizon," he said. "I'm not convinced yet that the Apple Watch is one of those items. Maybe I'll be wrong. But it isn't clear to me that it's as big a deal as an iPhone, or an iPad, or an iPod."

Keep in mind Wall Street expects Apple to sell in the neighborhood of 24 million Apple Watches next year.

But despite Sculley's negativity about the Apple Watch, he's bullish about Apple Pay:

I think Apple Pay can be a fundamental creative leap. Look what AliPay is doing. So I'm very optimistic about Apple Pay. But realistically, even if you're an optimist, it's going to take several years to deploy that around the world. And no retailer wants to bet 100% of their future just on Apple.

At least some analysts share Sculley's optimism about Apple Pay: Barclays published a note on Monday pointing to services as a growth area for Apple in the next few years when they raised their target to $140, up from $120 per share.

SEE ALSO: Here's Apple's Next Great Business

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Tommy Hilfiger is selling a unique jacket for men and women for the cold winter months. It's designed to keep you warm and your phone fully charged at all times.

These wool and nylon jackets are adorned with 7-10 solar panels on the back, which charge a battery that gives juice to your mobile devices. The solar pack is totally removable, and the jacket also comes with a removable bag to stow the solar panels when you’re not using them. 

According to Tommy Hilfiger, the jacket can charge “most smartphones” beyond their capacity.

You can check out the jackets (mens and womens) on Tommy Hilfiger’s website. If you're so inclined to purchase this item, 50% of all net proceeds from this particular jacket go to support the Fresh Air Fund, which sends inner city children to host families to experience country life. 

SEE ALSO: 21 Video Games We Can't Wait To Play In 2015

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Google is really getting serious about selling Google Apps for Work, its Microsoft Office killer, to more businesses.

It is rolling out a better, more sophisticated program to attract partners, called "resellers," to help it sell.

And one big thing it will do is paying its most successful resellers a bigger commission.

Currently, the standard commission it pays is 20%, sources close to Google told the Wall Street Journal. To do the math: at the low end, Google sells Apps for $50/user/year, which gives the reseller a $10/user/year commission, while Google keeps $40. On the high end, it costs $120/user/year, which equates to $24 commission for year for the reseller while Google keeps $96.

For resellers that sell more, Google will now give them a bigger commission. Plus they will be encouraged to sell other services to Google Apps customers (like support, training, and customization).

This move is one of a series that Google is making to win over Microsoft.

Microsoft has a world-class enterprise sales force and partner program, and many customers who are locked into complex, multi-year enterprise contracts known as enterprise agreements.

As we previously reported, one way that Microsoft has been able to expand its cloud services so rapidly (and keep customers from moving to Google) is by adding them for little or no extra cost into these agreements. It's a "try-it-you'll like-it" strategy and its very successful.

But Google doesn't sell enterprise software or have enterprise agreements.

So it has been smartly building up its salesforce the old fashioned way by signing up more partners. For instance, in October, it signed a big agreement with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to be both a customer and a partner that sells Google Apps for Work to enterprises.

The deal today will help Google attract even more partners, big and small.

The man helping Google build an enterprise partner program is Murali Sitaram, the WSJ reports. Google hired him earlier this year away from Cisco Systems, another company with a huge, powerful enterprise salesforce. 

That's also important. A year ago, businesses were telling us that one reason they chose Microsoft over Google was because Google was fairly clueless about enterprise sales. But Google is hiring people and investing in new partner programs to fix that.

Google hasn't publicly released details of the new commission plan. But it did post this blog telling resellers all the great new things it plans to do for them.

Introducing the Google for Work and Education Partner Program

Posted by: Murali Sitaram, Director of Global Partnerships & Strategic Alliances, Google for Work

The landscape of cloud technology has changed significantly since we started selling Google Apps in 2006, and our breadth of offerings has changed with it. Today, millions of companies and schools around the world turn to Google's products to help them launch, build and transform their organizations in the cloud. Our commitment to bringing the best of Google to work has also grown substantially.

Our partners are a fundamental part of our business and this effort. Partners help customers move, live and grow in the cloud by taking full advantage of the Google for Work and Education suite of products. They onboard and train new customers, manage change, create specialized software to integrate with Google Apps and develop unique solutions using Google Maps and Google Cloud Platform.

In order to meet the needs of customers moving to the cloud, and a new generation of partners, we’re updating our partner program. Our existing programs across Apps, Chrome, Cloud Platform, Maps and Search will fuse into one Google for Work and Education Partner Program. The new program allows partners to better sell, service and innovate across the Google for Work and Education suite of products and platforms.

Our new partner program is simple in design, having just three tracks, each designed to address specific customer needs (partners can join multiple tracks):

The Sales Track is for partners whose core competency is marketing and selling Google for Work and Education products at high volume. Selling includes ongoing account management and renewals associated with a partner’s customers.

The Services Track is for partners who provide the full range of services to customers, such as selling, consulting, training, implementing and providing technical support for Google for Work and Education products.

The Technology Track is for partners who create products and solutions that complement, enhance or extend the reach or functionality of Google for Work and Education products.

To ensure the best customer experience, we have also updated the requirements and application process for the Google for Work and Education Partner Program, which will roll out in early 2015. Partners will receive a range of benefits to help them better support customers, including:

• Access to Google for Work Connect, our one-stop community for partners to access marketing campaigns, sales content, support resources and training
• Ongoing program communications
• Console to manage customer accounts
• Use of the designated Google for Work or Google for Education Partner badge
• Resale discount on the list price of our suite of products
• Listing in our partner directory

We will also offer an updated Premier tier, which is reserved for partners that have demonstrated higher levels of excellence within their track. Premier partners will receive exclusive benefits and support, including:

• Designated partner manager support
• Co-marketing opportunities with Google
• Access to marketing funding and other financial incentivesExclusive training and events
• Use of the exclusive Premier Partner badge

From Cloud Sherpas to Sprint, Agosto to Softbank, CDW to Promevo, and many more, our partners are helping transform businesses around the world. With the new Google for Work and Education Partner Program, we will continue to invest in creating world-class business relationships with our customers and provide the support and investment our partners deserve.

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Firefox Hello, the WebRTC-based video-calling feature that Mozilla and partner Telefónica revealed as a beta feature in October, hit the mainstream -- sort of -- with the full release of Firefox…

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In a June 30, 1975 article in Bloomberg Businessweek, people revealed their vision for the office of the future.

They wondered if desktop terminals could be made "friendly" enough for executives to use them, and if all information would be stored digitally or in giant file cabinets.

"IBM and Xerox will dictate the future because of their marketing power," Timothy C. Cronin, president of Inforex, Inc. told Businessweek. An office-equipment supplier agreed, "With IBM and Xerox pouring out $1.5 billion yearly in R&D, they will control the pace of technology in their interest."

George E. Pake, head of Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center said that in 1995 there would be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. "I'll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button," he said. "I can get my mail or any messages. I don't know how much hard copy [printed paper] I'll want in this world."

Others wavered, and deemed the phrase “word processing” a fleeting buzzword. People worried it would never catch on because, if widely adopted, it would fundamentally change the traditional secretary-executive relationship. 

"The biggest problem we face is the office wife," said Jonathan Pugh III, marketing head of Lexitron Corp., a company that produced display text editors. "She likes giving total loyalty to one boss, and he likes getting it."

One employee at Xerox said that filing cabinets could someday be replaced with magnetic or optical disks, but microfilm could also be the way forward.

"By 1990, most record-handling will be electronic," predicted Vincent E. Giuliano of Arthur D. Little, Inc.

Robert Hendel, 32-year-old president of LCS Corp was skeptical of the transformation. "This scare talk about drastic changes in the office structure, which is worrying potential users, is an IBM misconception," he said. 

"IBM tries to make word processing complex so that people will think they need an IBM to help them," he explained. "But that kind of talk is just gobbledygook."

Via: Jason Healey.

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Anything that changes how we feel emotionally can have an impact on our physical health too, according to the science of psychoneuroimmunology.

Read more...

Design students rejoice – Autodesk today announced it’s making its suite of of apps free for students and teachers worldwide. According to Autodesk, the new access should allow more than 680 million people from over 800,000 schools and 188 countries have access to the software at no cost. As usual with free student software, however, the access is meant for educational purposes only – no commercial usage allowed. The announcement follows an earlier move by Autodesk to make its software available to middle and high school students in the US as part of Obama’s ConnectEd initiative, which looks to make…

This story continues at The Next Web

Google has been releasing a slew of updates for its Google Docs platform the last couple of months, and today it is introducing a few new features to make its software more powerful. First up, you can now merge cells, letting you customize tables to your specific needs (or make fancy mosaic art, if you’re bored). The company  also now lets you perform some new image edits on the fly: you can recolor photos or adjust their transparency, brightness and contrast right within the web apps. Finally, in Slides, you can add slide numbers to help you and your audience…

This story continues at The Next Web

If you were a teen today, there's a good chance you'd be finishing your homework on your smartphone on the way to school. 

At least, according to the eight New York City teenagers, all juniors or seniors in high school, that Stephanie Retblatt of Smarty Pants grilled about their productivity and work habits on stage at Business Insider's Ignition conference.

The general consensus: Teens like to work on-the-go and in collaborative ways and almost all of their school work happens on the internet. 

When asked about what programs or apps they used to get work done, Google Drive came up the most. 

"It's a huge thing at our school," one teen boy said. "A lot of us depend on Google Drive, so we can edit our work at the same time."

"Google became very student-efficient over the last few years," another girl added. "Google Drive has a lot of resources to make things easy for us."

Teachers post homework on assignment-dedicated websites. Some apparently tweet out assignments. Other classes create Facebook groups to discuss projects. A number of the teens said they often finished work on the way to school or got started on the bus or subway ride home. 

"I'll start typing essays on my iPhone's Notes app," one student said. Because of an Apple feature called "Handoff," he can then pick up right where he left off on his computer.  

At a similar panel last year, one teen said they would start writing papers by telling Siri to create a memo and then just speaking for 30 minutes.

One program that was notably ignored by the teens: Microsoft Word. 

Microsoft recently released a free version of Office that will let you create and edit documents for free. It recently hit #1 on the iOS app store. Still, not a single kid said that they used Office to do school work. Today's teens seem to be content sticking to what they know: The world of Google. 

Other productivity apps the kids mentioned were Quizlet, which lets students and teachers create digital flashcards and PDF Notes, which allows students to download textbooks and mark them up with notes and highlights.  

People think we just use our phones for stupid stuff, one teen said, but they've really changed how we work. 

SEE ALSO: Jeff Bezos: Why It Won't Matter If The Fire Phone Flops

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In the wake of a malware attack on Sony Entertainment Pictures, which saw the leak of four unreleased films, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is warning United States businesses to brace themselves for the worst.

See also: Sophisticated Malware Regin Linked To NSA, British Intelligence

Reuters reports that a five-page confidential “flash” FBI report was issued to businesses late on Monday to warn them last week's Sony attack wasn’t the end of it. The FBI has reason to believe hackers are planning a malicious software attack to target another US business.

The report warns of a similar malware to the Korean-language software at the center of the devastating Sony attack, which overrides all data on an affected computer’s hard drive and prevents affected computers from booting up.

"The overwriting of the data files will make it extremely difficult and costly, if not impossible, to recover the data using standard forensic methods," the report said.

A group calling itself “Guardians of Peace” has taken responsibility for the malware and the prior Sony attack, but we can only speculate on its origins. Given that the software is written in Korean, and that the attack leaked a movie called ‘The Interview’ that was critical of Kim Jong-Un, some security experts suspect the North Korean government to be behind it. 

Photo via Shutterstock

I bought a Blackberry Passport a week ago, and I'm really loving it so far.

I was fascinated by the big, weird squareness of the phone and got nudged into buying one by Business Insider Australia's Peter Farquhar, and his take on it. 

Even the person in the store I went to was taken aback. He wasn't sure that they had one to show me (they did) or if they had any in stock (they also did). He gently asked while I took a look at it if I'd seen Samsung's Galaxy Note 4, or the iPhone 6 plus, and whether I had been forced by my employer to get a Blackberry.

His reaction was pretty similar to most of the people I've met since: a cross between bemusement, excitement and disgust. Though of course, almost none of those people have actually used the Passport.

The truth is, it's a pretty solid phone. If you want to watch Frozen on the way to work, the Passport is not for you: there will be little black bars above and below the screen, regardless of whether you rotate the screen (which of course, looks weird with a physical keyboard). If you want to read emails, blogs, look at charts, and have basically never viewed a video on your phone it might just be an improvement on whatever you currently have. 

In short, this is the normcore smartphone of 2014. It does a great deal of what any other smartphone released this year does, without some of the apps that you're (like me) not cool enough to use, and with a little bit of extra functionality for the things you use most of all. 

There's very little issue (for me) in having half of the keyboard in physical form and half on the screen: numbers, the shift key and other characters pop up as necessary while you're typing. I think the viewing experience for reading is excellent. I'm a little slower at typing than I was before (I owned a Nexus), but I'm getting there. 

You'll struggle to type one-handed if you've got hands as small as mine, but the other phablet-type phones out there are equally difficult. For say, scrolling through twitter, one hand is perfectly adequate. 

There's a 13 mega-pixel OIS camera, as opposed to the iPhone 6 plus' 8 mega-pixels. It doesn't bend in your pocket (and the reduced length means it's actually not hard to carry it there). The Amazon app store is apparently a big improvement on previous Blackberry models: it's got a much more limited selection, but if you're not willing to give up Snapchat then you probably knew this phone wasn't for you already.

Blend, which brings up your communications Hub on any desktop computer, is excellent, and the battery is a dream. Even under heavy use, mine lasts for 24 hours. Here's how the Hub looks:

The phone feels like it will be perfect for people like me: People who need their phones to do a lot of work, a lot of email, a lot of reading and a lot of business stuff like PDFs. If iPhone and Android are social media tools, then the Passport is a work productivity tool. It's a great fit for people who currently have both a smartphone and a work Blackberry that they'd like to consolidate into one device.

Maybe it's not good if you're a tech person. I'm not a tech person, I'm a finance and economics person. There are a lot of us, and we need phones too.

That's really the point here: Blackberry's brand is now so incredibly damaged among a generation of people that even it came out with a great phone, you wouldn't know: you wouldn't buy it, and neither would any of your friends. 

I reckon people won't consider it as an option, which is a massive shame, because I'm loving mine.  

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Last week at the WebRTC World conference in San Jose, California, Twilio unveiled a Network Traversal Service that enables developers to build their own WebRTC signaling solution without also having to implement a media relay solution.

Cards Against Humanity, which bills itself as a "party game for horrible people," decided that it wanted to help potential customers "experience the ultimate savings" on Black Friday by taking its game off its website completely. 

Instead, though, the site offered a bizarre and hilarious "deal": It sold boxes of bull poop for $6 each. 

Truly.

Creator Max Temkin assured people on Twitter that the deal was legit. 

Miraculously, the site sold out poop boxes, meaning Cards Against Humanity sold 30,000 boxes, Temkin told me via tweet. That's $180,000 of revenue from poop.

This isn't the game company's first quirky special. Last year, Cards Against Humanity sold its game for $5 more than usual, and ended up getting a huge spike in sales. 

It's also holding a Ten Days Of Kwanza Or Whatever sale where for $15, customers will get ten mystery gifts throughout December. 

Here's what you see now on the company's main website:

 The company's FAQ page was equally amusing:

(Hat-tip to Ars Technica, where we first saw this story.)

SEE ALSO: Here Are Google's Big Holiday Sales

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Someone at Microsoft made a big mistake.

TechCrunch reports that people who had subscribed to the official Microsoft blog via its RSS feed had a surprise yesterday when a new post appeared titled "blank post please delete."

There weren't any clues to its meaning in the body of the post itself, either, which also simply read "blank post, please delete."

But it was the URL of the post that was really interesting: http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/11/25/microsoft-acquires-acompli/

No post with that URL exists on the Microsoft blog, so the "blank post" was taken down as soon as it was published. But the URL reads as if Microsoft is planning an announcement of a company called Acompli. 

Accompli is an email app for iOS and Android that includes an integrated calendar and helps people find the most important messages from their inbox. It's certainly a good fit for Microsoft, with The Verge already calling it the "Outlook for iPhone."

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Shuuterstock / Alexander Supertramp

Here’s yet another charge against Uber’s handling of privacy: The ride-hailing company’s Android app asks for what seems like an excessive amount of access to user data.

And Uber is far from alone among Android apps that demand access to a long list of information and access from its users.

A blog post by Phoenix-based security researcher Joe Giron being passed around today calls out Uber for all the permissions baked into its Android app.

“Christ man! Why the hell would it want access to my camera, my phone calls, my Wi-Fi neighbors, my accounts, etc?” Giron wrote.

Uber said in a statement sent to Re/code, “Access to permissions including Wi-Fi networks and camera are included so that users can experience full functionality of the Uber app. This is not unique to Uber, and downloading the Uber app is of course optional.”

But why does a ride-hailing company need blanket access to just about everything a phone knows about its owner?

The answer comes from Google. A large part of what’s going on here is that Google requires Android developers to ask for privacy permissions up front, when an app is first downloaded. Users have no way to selectively opt out of any of the permissions. It’s all or nothing. (Go to Uber’s Google Play profile and click on “view details” under Permissions to see the list.)

The way Android handles privacy is a weakness versus other mobile operating systems, like Apple’s iOS, which allows users to decline permission to data on a case-by-case basis. Google has made some recent changes to permissions — such as setting up category groupings so they are easier to read — but it actually yanked back a hidden feature last year that some developers had used to allow users to turn off individual permissions.

The way the current system is designed, it forces Android app makers to ask for a lot more up front. Uber rival Lyft’s list of Android permissions is even more extensive, including additions like the ability to send SMS messages and “read calendar events plus confidential information.”

Uber and Lyft have posted explanations for why they demand permission to various Android features, although they do not explain everything.

For instance, Uber says it requires camera access to enable a feature that allows users to enter payment information by snapping a picture of a credit card. Lyft says it needs the camera to take profile photos.

A better system might allow users to grant one-time access to the camera for the purpose of taking the picture of the credit card or the profile photo, and then block Uber and Lyft from the camera unless it’s explicitly needed in the future.

Reached by phone, Giron said he was planning to do additional research to see if and when Uber actually takes advantage of all the data and functions it has permission to access.

“Uber asks for the permissions up front,” Giron said. “The question then becomes, what are they going to take and use?”

He added, “We have a natural tendency to feel that we’re being watched or spied upon. I’m showing evidence that it’s possible, but I still need to be presented with more proof that it’s happening.”

Long-time mobile developer William Hurley, who is now CEO of the startup Honest Dollar, said he thinks this is an area that’s likely to draw more fire.

Where Apple and Microsoft discourage developers from accessing data, Google has set up a situation where developers are incentivized to ask for more access than they need, and to do it up front, he said.

“For developers, Android offers more flexibility in how and how much data you can collect on a user. This has led a number of developers to gather as much data on a user as possible, and that’s not always a good thing.”

Hurley added, “I suspect there will be some serious repercussions — both at the consumer level and from a regulatory compliance angle. Uber does operate globally, after all, and the laws are very different in the E.U. and other geographies.”

Google declined comment.