firehose

Coming soon, according to internal Microsoft sources: two fewer white dots on this promotional card.

We can report that multiple sources within Microsoft have been briefed on plans to make a long-awaited change to the Xbox Live Gold paywall for streaming media services. According to our sources, Xbox 360 and Xbox One users will soon no longer need a paid subscription to Xbox Live Gold to access Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming media apps.

Additionally, we've been told that Xbox Live Gold may put other services behind the paywall to make up for this shift, though those sources could not confirm whether that includes existing services or if that only includes upcoming content like TV series from Xbox Entertainment Studios.

The information has come to light thanks to ongoing discussions about the company's announcements at June's E3 games expo. At this point, it's important to note nothing is official, and Microsoft may change its mind before the company's June 9 keynote. Either way, we've been told that the possible change in policy is directly linked to a changing of the Xbox guard after Don Mattrick left the company to become Zynga's CEO.

If you're a news junky, you probably use an RSS reader like Feed.ly to keep up with stuff on the Web. One of the nicest ways to consume YouTube subscriptions was to use an RSS feed of new videos, allowing them to show up just like news articles do. You might not have noticed yet, but Google quietly shut down this feature a few days ago.

The RSS feed, which used to be http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[username]/newsubscriptionvideos, now throws out a "403 Forbidden" error. Previously, the URL would provide a publicly accessible feed of new subscriptions from any YouTube account, provided users didn't choose to turn off public subscription retrieval.

The feed was part of the YouTube Data API v2, which was deprecated in March of this year. The replacement—predictably named YouTube Data API v3—doesn't offer a comparable data stream. Bug reports filed for this regression as early as January 2013 have gone unanswered, save for a single response in January 2014 (yes, a year later) saying, "Patch is in the works, however we can't comment on the expected date." Now it's five months later, the feature is gone, and there's no solution in sight.

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by donating a staggering $100 million to the Newark public school system — but four years later, how much good has the big-ticket donation actually done? A new piece in The New Yorker looks at where the money went, taking a critical view of both the intransigent teacher's unions and the reformers that seek to replace them. Tens of millions went to buying out old teacher contracts — which Mayor Cory Booker and others saw as a necessary political step before unions would let them remake the current compensation system — while millions more went to consultants and construction projects that offered little tangible benefit to the city's students. The result was that, by March of 2013, the district was effectively broke, facing a $57 million budget gap. As one local figure put it, "everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read."

Submitted by: (via j0be)