firehose

1. This is one reason why the Behmor is a smarter design than the HotTop — far less chaff and oil builds up in the roaster, and it’s much easier to clean when it does.

   Remind me to finally write my Behmor-vs.-HotTop review sometime. ↩

The Slowskys are vehemently opposed to this bill.

Comcast

A Senate bill called the "Consumer Choice in Online Video Act" takes aim at many of the tactics Internet service providers (ISPs) can use to overcharge customers and degrade the quality of rival online video services.

Submitted yesterday by US Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the 63-page bill (PDF) provides a comprehensive look at the potential ways in which ISPs can limit consumer choice, and it boots the Federal Communications Commission's power to prevent bad outcomes. Let's take a look at a few of the areas the bill targets.

Online video degradation

"It shall be unlawful for a designated Internet service provider to engage in unfair methods of competition or unfair or deceptive acts or practices, the purpose or effect of which are to hinder significantly or to prevent an online video distributor from providing video programming to a consumer," the bill states. A little more specifically, it would be illegal to "block, degrade, or otherwise impair any content provided by an online video distributor" or "provide benefits in the transmission of the video content of any company affiliated with the Internet service provider through specialized services or other means."

After spending $1 billion to buy Instagram, Facebook was reportedly willing to triple that sum in a bid to acquire Snapchat. But according to The Wall Street Journal, Snapchat rejected an offer of "at least $3 billion" in what would have been an all-cash transaction. It's a startling revelation, and suggests that Snapchat's executives believe their product could ultimately prove even more valuable than what Facebook put on the table.

The Wall Street Journal's report suggests that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel isn't likely to serious consider any acquisition offers until early next year. The young executive is reportedly hoping that Snapchat's meteoric growth will propel the company to an even higher valuation.

Developing...

Apple is under investigation for tax fraud in Italy, where it's alleged to have concealed more than 1 billion euros ($1.34 billion) from tax authorities, reports Reuters. Though few other details have been revealed, a judicial source with knowledge of the investigation tells Reuters that "the Apple investigation is under way." Apple has been the subject of much scrutiny for its tax policies lately. In particular, those accusations have focused around Apple's use of Ireland as a tax haven — something that Ireland itself has considered ending.

The tax fraud allegations were first reported by the Italian publication l'Espresso, which includes additional details on the allegations. According to AppleInsider, l'Espresso reports that Apple's offices in Milan have been searched as part of this investigation. It also says that the authorities are taking issue with Apple's use its Irish holding company, alleging that more of its revenue should have been reported as having come from business inside of Italy. Reuters did not confirm those details, however, which appear to only be reported by l'Espresso for now.

Pocket is releasing an update to its app today that puts a new focus on helping you discover the best of the items you have saved, using algorithms to surface content likely to interest you the most. Pocket 5.0 searches through your saves to find articles that are trending, longform content, and items that you're likely to enjoy based on your interests.

The company designed the Highlights feature after discovering that the average user has more than 100 items saved, said Nate Weiner, Pocket's founder and CEO. After the 30th item in your list, he said, less than 5 percent of items get opened. "It just ends up being this total jumble," he said. Highlights tries to find the best items saved inside a long list by by adapting to each user according to the person's interests, most used tags, and favorites sites and authors.

The company also released a developer tool called Pocket Preferences that can plug into third-party apps and pre-populate it with your interests. Log into the newsreader Zite, for example, and the app will automatically generate a list of articles based on the articles you have previously saved to Pocket. Preferences are generated automatically and are also dynamic, so that if you suddenly stopped saving items about a particular subject (weddings, for example, after the big day), they will drop out of your list automatically.

Pocket has been used by more than 10 million people who now save 1.5 million items a day, the company said. Version 5.0 is is out for iPhone and iPad today and on Android Nov. 20. It will come to other platforms "soon," Weiner said. The Highlights feature will roll out to users over the next week or so, he said.

Dropbox has made its business product a major focus over the last year, and now CEO Drew Houston has announced some new products and milestones for the company at an event in San Francisco. The company has been struggling with how to deal with the fact that many users include both personal and business data in their Dropbox, so they're announcing a redesigned service today. Essentially, Dropbox for Business users now have two separate containers for their data — the personal account is still only accessible by the individual, but the business account can be managed by a company's IT department. Head of product Ilya  Fushman is demoing the new Dropbox client on stage now, and we'll update with more details as they're announced.

Houston also said that his file-sharing service now has over 200 million users, double what it had last November. Additionally, more than four million businesses are now using Drobox, again doubling where the company was at in 2012. Among those businesses are 97 percent of the Fortune 500 companies.

Developing...

Crime in New Orleans is the sixth-highest among midsize cities. The Crescent City also has one of the worst income inequality rates and one of the worst school systems in the country. It was the nation’s murder capital until 2012, when it was surpassed by two even more economically wretched cities, Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

At the same time, the New Orleans police department is chronically underfunded, shorthanded, and plagued by corruption. With more crimes than they have time to solve, cops are increasingly relying on video to fill in the gaps.

Getting crime footage hasn't been easy, however. The city installed a public surveillance network in 2003, but pulled the plug in 2010 because there weren’t enough cops to monitor the cameras, many of which were perpetually broken. (Also, the official in charge was indicted for taking kickbacks from camera-makers.)

police have effectively blanketed New Orleans with cameras they don't have to install, maintain, or monitor

On Halloween night in 2011, there was a fatal mass shooting on the famous drunken promenade Bourbon Street. "Some youths got into an altercation, and one pulled out a gun and randomly shot people in the Quarter," recalls Bob Simms, an Englishman and former Lockheed Martin executive. "The police only had people who were eyewitnesses. They had no video evidence that was worth anything."

He and another French Quarter retiree, former LA Times editor Larry Lane, decided to do something about the crime in their neighborhood. "We want to be safe when we walk out our doors," Simms says. "One of the first things we looked at was: we need to put cameras all over the French Quarter."

Simms attempted to get funding for a $3.5-million network of street cameras in the French Quarter. When that failed, the pair landed on the idea of outsourcing surveillance to civilians. Simms and Lane installed security cameras on their own homes, then their neighbors’, then their neighbors’ neighbors’.

Once the cameras were in place, building a database was easy. New Orleans detectives can’t pull up the footage in real time, but they can see exactly where all the cameras are on a secret Google map. The map also includes contact information for the owners and the best time to call.

Simms and Lane call the cameras initiative SafeCams8, because it has expanded beyond the French Quarter to the entire 8th District. The database now includes more than 1,200 cameras in the area around the Superdome, the up-and-coming Warehouse District, and bohemian nabe The Marigny.

The Vogels have given the police about six videos depicting burglaries, vandalism, and other crimes since registering their cameras. Many of their neighbors have done the same, picking up iPhone snatchers and murder suspects. "I wouldn’t be upset if there were cameras covering every part of the street," Vogel says.

Civilian cameras aren’t as high-quality or consistent as public surveillance systems, but they can be an efficient alternative. By relying instead on footage from people like Vogel, the New Orleans police have effectively blanketed the city with security cameras they don’t have to pay to install, maintain, or monitor.

The cops also started posting clips of crimes on the district’s YouTube channel, which has resulted in double the number of tips called into the Crime Stoppers hotline, the NOPD says. One video even went viral, racking up more than 2.6 million views.

New Orleans isn’t the only place where this is happening. Increasingly, residents of high-crime cities are installing surveillance cameras on their homes. And increasingly, footage from those cameras is ending up in the hands of the police through camera-registration programs.

"People who have decided to steal something are going to steal it no matter if there’s a camera or not."

SafeCams8 was modeled on Safecam, a similar effort by the Philadelphia Police Department that has registered 2,400 cameras all over the city and counting. Philly police say they’ve made 191 arrests based on civilian video-footage since the program started two years ago, and other cities are looking to follow their lead. Police departments in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and other cities have reached out to Philadelphia for advice on how to set up similar programs.

French Quarter residents say criminals avoid neighborhoods where there are cameras, reducing crime in those areas. But it’s hard to say how many criminals the cameras are actually catching, and what kind. Cameras make it easy to nab kids keying cars or stealing bikes, for example, but rarely capture drug deals. And of course, the cameras do nothing for the low-lying, poorer neighborhoods where poverty breeds criminals.

Poor kids in New Orleans commit crime in the French Quarter out of a lack of opportunities, says Malcolm Suber, a community organizer based in the Upper 9th Ward. Suber is skeptical that the cameras really catch that many criminals, pointing to the low resolution on most of the footage.

He doesn’t believe it will deter crime, either. "People who have decided to steal something are going to steal it no matter if there’s a camera or not," he says. "The cause of crime is the great social distance between the poor people and the rich people. If you really wanted to solve this problem, you’d give these kids some jobs, give them some recreation, give them a good education."

Whether it works or not, the SafeCams8 program is expanding rapidly, Lane and Simms say. The pair are also working on the next phase of the program, a high-end camera system for the 500 block of Bourbon Street sponsored by area businesses. "The more cameras, the better it is," Lane says.

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pc review.

Motorola

The price of the Moto X when it was first announced was pretty surprising. At $580 off contract, it wasn't the best deal, especially when compared to the $350 Nexus 5. The price has since tumbled downward, but to really attack the bottom of the market, Motorola has announced the Moto G. The big news is the price: only $179 off contract.

At the unveiling, Motorola said the Moto G is "setting [its] sights on the world," where the typical $200 phone is something like the Samsung Galaxy Fame. Motorola is looking to boost the usually low expectations for a $179 price tag with a 4.5-inch 720p display, 1.2Ghz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor, 1GB of RAM, Adreno 305 GPU, 2070 mAh battery, and Android 4.3. All that for $179 is pretty amazing. There's no LTE support though—the fastest supported speed is 21Mbps HSPA+.

Instead of manufacturer-level customization like in the Moto X, the Moto G has a removable back in several colors, along with smart covers and bumpers.

By John Walker on November 13th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

Our coverage of Battlefield 4 got rather interrupted by the arrival of a baby. It happens. So in trying to catch up, I wanted to play through the single player campaign, see how it compared to COD: Ghosts’. Yeah. That would have been nice, wouldn’t it. But then EA happened.

Here’s how the process for launching a game should go:

1) Launch game.

That’s the system by which I think we can all agree games should start. This was how it went with Battlefield 4′s single player game. Let’s just repeat: single player.

1) Download via Origin. This went smoothly enough.

2) Launch game. Except no. Clicking “Play” took me to a web browser, and the Battlenet site. Except no. Because it told me that there was an error with my login details. The ones it hadn’t yet asked me for.

3) Persist with logging into Battlenet. I don’t want to use Battlenet, because I’ve no intention of playing the multiplayer. I want to just play the game. But eventually it let me in.

4) Select “CAMPAIGN”.

5) Click “PLAY CAMPAIGN”.

6) “DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL THE LATEST BROWSER PLUGIN TO PLAY THE GAME” it booms. So I click Download Plugin.

7) I follow the instructions, and it tells me it will now work.

8) I click “PLAY CAMPAIGN”.

9) It continues to ask me to download the plugin.

10) I reboot the web browser, and now when I choose “PLAY CAMPAIGN” things start happening at the bottom of the screen. It is “initiating”.

11) It jumps back to Origin, in its attempts to start.

12) It jumps back to the Battlenet site, with a new message about logging me in.

13) It jumps back to Origin, with a new window that declares that my version of Battlefield 4 is not registered to the address I’m using. I’m using only one address for the entire process.

14) I try to start over, but now the EA servers won’t let me log in at all. “Problem contacting EA Login, please try again in a while.”

15) Start writing this.

16) Keep trying to log in. Eventually it works.

17) Click “PLAY CAMPAIGN”.

18) If faffs around, flips back to Origin, back to the website, and then finally, it launches.

19) I alt-tab out of the “Borderless Window” game to get back to this CMS page to report the success.

20) I can’t do that.

21) BF4 has taken over Chrome, despite the number of tabs I have open, and it’s impossible to access any of them while the game is running.

22) Quit out of BF4.

23) Drop to my knees, shake my helpless fists at the sky, and wonder if EA just hates its customers beyond all previously known scales of hate.

This is pitiful. After the clusterfuck of idiocy that accompanied SimCity’s pathetically embarrassing launch earlier this year, you’d imagine EA might have gained some insight into the abject stupidity of making your game near impossible for people to play. The above likely happened because of a blip on their servers. But it happened. And goodness knows how often they blip. I tried to play a single-player game, with no interest in the multiplayer component, and I was forced through a monstrous process of gibberish that had nothing to do with anything. Sure, if it weren’t permanently spying on my otherwise offline gaming I wouldn’t get the Wuzzles sticker to put on my soldier’s backpack in the online game, or whatever blither it might be. I think I’d scrape through.

And yes, BF4 is considered, by the hardcore die-hard fans, to be a multiplayer game, it’s single-player there for only the silly people. But what die-hard fans tend to forget is that they aren’t everyone else, and the single-player game was created – at vast expense – for people to play. Except then the bullshit gets involved and what a miserable experience it is to try to.

It runs, in a fashion, now. But bloody hell, if I hadn’t had the satisfaction of being able to chronicle the tedium on here, I’d have given up trying and gone to play something else.