, including making government’s activities more transparent. And Wednesday, it appears that the government is taking at least a cosmetic step in that direction. On Tumblr. ). The official mission statement of the tumblr, according to an introductory post by NSA honcho James Clapper, is to provide “immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the U.S. Intelligence Community.” .
Tumblr is working to resolve an issue causing seemingly random content to be posted to people's blogs that they didn't put there themselves, with pornography showing up in some instances.
Former Army Pfc. Bradley Manning may have been handed a 35-year prison sentence on Wednesday for leaking classified documents, but “his fight is not over” and he could be free much sooner, according to Manning attorney David Coombs. Manning’s sentence could be reduced through a clemency process, and he also plans to file an appeal of the conviction, Coombs said during a press conference on Wednesday a few hours after the by a military court judge. There’s another potential avenue for Manning as well, Coombs said: “Hopefully, the president does the right thing and those options are ruled out because he pardons him or releases him with time served.” Manning, who has also been dishonorably discharged from the Army, had faced a maximum of 90 years in prison on charges related to his leaking of a massive store of classified documents to Wikileaks in 2009 and 2010.
If This Then That decided to make up with Twitter after almost a year apart. Now IFTTT users can use their favorite tweet triggers again.
With 10,000 U.S. baby boomers until 2030, the IT industry is among those that must plan how its workforce will be impacted when these employees eventually retire. While the tech industry emphasizes the new, legacy system skills are still valued since some companies run critical systems on dated technologies. Even when firms migrate to current IT, workers with older skills are needed to help with the transition and IT professionals who love their industry may want to keeping working after 65, but not necessarily full time. Companies keen on retaining veteran workers, and their knowledge, are initiating retirement conversations early to increase the likelihood that these employees will stay on in some capacity after they stop working full time, said Matthew Ripaldi, senior vice president at IT staffing firm . Businesses need to develop a structured plan that explains to employees “how do we retain you because you’re so valuable but at the same time give you the flexibility you need,” he said.
Razer’s latest headset serves up (virtual) 7.1 surround sound in a gorgeous shell.
According to reports, Google is talking to the National Football League about putting out-of-market games on YouTube. Evan Dashevsky thinks such a deal would make sense for the NFL, for Google, and for fans.
Payday 2, sequel to Overkill Software’s 2011 heist game, works as long as you have friends to play with. Otherwise, you might not want to bother.
A military court judge has sentenced U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison on Wednesday on charges related to his leaking a large store of classified documents to Wikileaks, according to a number of published and broadcast reports. Manning had faced a maximum potential sentence of 90 years. The judge in his case reduced the maximum sentence from 136 years earlier this month. Manning was also dishonorably discharged from the military. He will reportedly be credited with about three and a half years of time served in detention while awaiting trial. In July, Manning was acquitted of the most serious charge against him, aiding the enemy, but found guilty on a series of lesser ones, including 10 he had pleaded guilty to earlier this year.
Box has big news today for small companies and individuals. It is launching new, more affordable pricing plans to attract small and medium businesses to its cloud data storage and file sharing service, and it is doubling the amount of storage it provides for free personal accounts. For those people, Box is increasing the amount of storage available with the free Personal plan from 5GB to 10GB. Box also frequently runs promotions that add storage for customers, such as the campaign earlier this year that rewarded Dell customers with 50GB of free storage for life. It might still be beneficial to maintain accounts on other services in certain scenarios, but for general personal use it would be much better to have data consolidated in one place than trying to juggle four or five different services. The increased storage is great for individuals, but a business can’t—or at least shouldn’t—have employees running around sharing business data across their own personal cloud storage services. From a number of perspectives—protecting intellectual property, securing data from unauthorized exposure, and regulatory compliance to name a few—it’s just a bad idea. The company has no ability to limit or control access to the data once it leaves the internal network, and there is no way for the company to know which data is being stored where, or who it’s being shared with.
If you use the online file sharing service Dropbox, you know how easy it is for other users to send you files. But what about people who don't use Dropbox? DROP
Alleged specs for the reported Galaxy Gear smartwatch have leaked, but the most intriguing component of Samsung's wrist-rider is its app store—which isn't Google Play.
Maps are fascinating. They can show past trips that we treasure in our mind or they can show future trips that are in our dreams. Until the advent of the Internet, we had to make do with paper maps but with the Internet, Google Maps was introduced, and along with it, a whole host of interactive possibilities. Free web app Animaps takes Google Maps to the next level.
Netflix is making another big push into personalization for streaming users with a new “watch it later” queue that automatically sorts titles based on your viewing preferences. The new feature, called “My List,” is rolling out to all users worldwide over the next two weeks. My List will sit in the top row of your Netflix home screen, pushing the top 10 suggested titles section one row down. My List is only available on Netflix.com for now, but will roll out to mobile apps and third-party devices in the coming months. The new feature replaces the current “Instant Queue” option—a holdover from Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service that never really caught hold with streaming-only users. Unlike Instant Queue, My List ranks the movies and TV shows you save based on what Netflix thinks you’re most likely to want to watch first. The current Instant Queue, by comparison, lists items based on when you’ve added them to your list, with newly queued items at the bottom. The end result with Instant Queue is a long list of titles to watch, with the more interesting videos towards the bottom of the list.
Game over, man, game over! Late Tuesday, Riot Games announced that hackers managed to breach the company's servers, swiping the usernames, email addresses, salted password hashes, and real-word names of North American players of the uber-popular League of Legends game. Worse, nearly 120,000 credit card transactions have been accessed. "The payment system involved with these records hasn't been used since July of 2011, and this type of payment card information hasn't been collected in any Riot systems since then," Riot Games founders Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck explained in . "We are taking appropriate action to notify and safeguard affected players. We will be contacting these players via the email addresses currently associated with their accounts to alert them." League of Legends had roughly 70 million registered users as of last October, with 12 million users active daily. In March, Riot said the game often has more than five million players online simultaneously. (It's also one of .) Affected players will want to keep an eye on their bank statements, but fortunately, those transactions were also hashed and salted, which means—like the swiped passwords— that they are . Even so, all League of Legend users will have to change their passwords the next time they log into the system. Better safe than, well, even more sorry.
Microsoft has launched an ad-free, no cost version of its Bing search engine that can be used in public and private schools across the U.S. Activating ad-free search also activates an automatic filter that blocks adult content and enhances privacy protections, said Microsoft in a news release on Wednesday. The service is meant for primary and secondary (K-12) schools with students aged from 5 to 18. Several schools with more than 800,000 students have already signed up for the pilot program including the Los Angeles Unified School District, Atlanta Public Schools, the Fresno, California, Unified School District and Detroit Country Day School, Microsoft said. Other interested schools can sign up for the pilot, although space is limited, it said. Microsoft took the opportunity to lash out at its biggest competitor. “When students use Google for searches in school, they are shown ads that can distract from their studies,” it said on the Bing for Schools that is part of Microsoft’s “Scroogled” campaign which targets Google’s search practices.
LG Display has developed a 5.5-inch screen for next generation smartphones with 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, which is the highest to date, according to the company.
Chinese police have detained two Internet users for allegedly starting online rumors that tried to defame government groups and a cultural icon in the nation.
Google on Tuesday shipped Chrome 29, patching 25 vulnerabilities and rolling out under-the-hood changes the company said would offer more relevant suggestions when users typed in URLs or search strings. The upgrade also sported a new option that restores the browser to near-factory defaults—think of it as a take-a-mulligan button—which can come in handy when mystery problems persist. As usual, Google highlighted only a few changes in the newest Chrome. The technology behind the "Omnibox," as Google insists on calling the combined search-address field, has been improved, the company said in a , and should result in "more timely and contextually relevant suggestions" appearing when users type in URLs or conduct a Web search or previously viewed sites.
An advertisement circulating on Facebook and Twitter for a desktop version of the photo-sharing application Instagram is a scam, according to security vendor Symantec. Satnam Narang, a security response manager with Symantec, on Tuesday. “Both of the supposed versions of Instagram for PC do not deliver as promised,” Narang wrote. “This is just another vehicle for the scammers to convince users to fill out surveys, so they earn money through shady affiliate programs.” Luckily, Narang wrote that “there was no malicious functionality bundled with the software, such as a keylogger or backdoor.” Such ploys are typically wrapped up with malicious software.
Games developers using Unity Technologies' cross-platform tools can now access a translation plug-in in beta that could expand their products' geographical reach. Helsinki-based Transfluent offers a service for apps, social networking sites and websites that distributes translation work to a network of about 20,000 people who together can translate content into 80 languages. The company already has tools for translating iOS and Android apps, but is now extending those to the Unity environment. "We noticed that a lot of our clients had started using Unity, so we decided to build a plug-in for it, which can be used to translate all Unity apps," said Jani Penttinen, founder and CEO of Transfluent. shows how users can pick and search for strings they want to translate, select the language they want to translate to, and then send it off for translation.
Facebook, Opera, Qualcomm, Samsung and others said Tuesday night that they’re setting out on a quest to bring the Internet to remainder of the world that doesn’t yet have access. , the Web site Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, formed with its partners to make the vision a reality. So far, however, the vision is just that: a set of ambitious goals with no real timeline to accomplishing it, and a basic roadmap for how to get there. The partners include Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm, Samsung, and other, future partners. The goal is to make Internet access more affordable, in part by reducing the cost of data access, while also encouraging businesses to adopt the Internet as well. ”Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect,” Zuckerberg said in a statement released Tuesday night. “There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.”
The glorious era of PC stardom is over. Once the belle of the technology ball, desktops and laptops now share the spotlight with smartphones and tablets, and the embrace of mobile devices by consumers has provoked deep changes in the computing landscape. No, PCs aren’t dying out, but they are shifting form to more closely resemble the Hot New Things. And there’s good reason for it. “Consumers are mainly driven by simplicity and familiarity,” says Carolina Milanesi, Gartner’s research vice president of consumer technology. In a word, people yearn for . And as the industry struggles to satisfy that demand, mobile design is bleeding over to the desktop—though the Big Three PC operating systems are approaching the convergence in drastically different ways.
Is the HP Envy Rove a supersized tablet or a portable all-in-one desktop? You can make an argument for either case, but at the end of the day, the Rove’s 12-pound-plus weight precludes serious consideration as a portable in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, HP's designers view this Windows 8 Home–based system as an all-in-one desktop that users can haul around the house as needed—hence the name, Rove. Its sturdy hinged prop-up stand works as a handle. And because the Rove can operate for nearly 3 hours on internal battery power (one of its tabletlike features), you don’t necessarily have to bring along its power cord. You can even lay the machine flat to use its 20-inch multitouch display as a gaming platform, something HP encourages by bundling several games that take advantage of multitouch support. The Envy Rove isn’t the first system we’ve seen that straddles the desktop-tablet divide. The , which we reviewed last year, boasts strikingly similar specs, starting with the 20-inch touchscreen display. And like the Tap 20, the Envy Rove is based on Intel's mobile technology, although HP opted for a less powerful CPU—the Core i3-4010u, which along with the Envy Rove’s skimpy 4GB of RAM probably accounts for the machine’s dismal performance on our benchmarks. Its WorldBench score of 78 is pretty poor for any system, but especially when compared against conventional desktops you might be considering. Even the Sony Tap 20 did a lot better (it earned a score of 95), thanks to an older but higher-end CPU and an additional 4GB of system RAM. On the other hand, you don’t really need great number-crunching power in a general-purpose home computer, and the Envy Rove is perfectly up to the tasks it’s more likely to face: managing email, checking Facebook, watching YouTube videos, and calling friends on Skype. True, the 1600-by-900 resolution doesn’t look especially fine on the 20-inch screen, but its colors are crisp and bright, and the integrated 720p webcam produces acceptable if unremarkable video. Beats-branded audio from speakers embedded in the bottom of the display is also decent.
If you're looking to control your home entertainment system with your smartphone, you could do a lot worse than the Harmony Hub line.
A widely used Bitcoin wallet service plans to issue refunds to people who saw their bitcoins stolen as a result of a weakness in its application. Blockchain.info, which has a Web-based service called My Wallet, has also upgraded its application after finding a vulnerability similar to one discovered earlier this month in some Bitcoin wallet programs running on the Android mobile OS. “Likely if you have been affected by this problem your coins will have been taken already,” a Blockchain.info official on the Bitcointalk.org forum. “All affected users will be refunded in full.” The number of affected users is small, said Roger Ver, who is an investor in Blockchain.info, via email. Blockchain.info expects to refund around 50 BTC or $5000, he said.
Google needs help. More specifically, the Internet giant is looking for people who are experts on basically anything to lead some of the first sessions for its soon-to-launch Helpouts video calling program. Helpouts is a face-to-face, live video calling service, based on the company’s Google+ Hangouts product, that the company has been testing internally for some time. The service is designed to let professionals or experts in a particular area share their expertise or knowledge with others who want to learn from them, for a price. Helpouts could provide an additional platform for Google to attract new users beyond its usual channels within the Google+ social network. It may also give Google a strong e-commerce business in providing users with more personalized expert information that can’t be gathered from a simple search on Google.com. If someone is an IT expert looking to make some extra cash, Helpouts can connect that person with less technically savvy people to, say, hook up a wireless router or connect a laptop to a printer, Google said in one example of the service.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Responds To #GoogleGate: AdWords Account Manager’s Accidental Voice Mail Recording Earlier this week, Martin MacDonald, inbound marketing director at...
Earlier this week, Martin MacDonald, inbound marketing director at Expedia EAN, in a post on his website titled “#GoogleGate – Can you Trust Google?,” embedded a voice mail recording a Google AdWords account manager unknowingly left for a client. Presumably thinking he’d...
Trying to get your head around Google authorship? The Google Webmaster Central blog has posted a new FAQ designed to provide some answers. What Qualifies For Authorship? What pages can have authorship applied to them? Criteria include the page actually being mostly authored by the designated...
In a recent article in AdAge, Bert DuMars cites Forrester research which found that “only 11% of marketers set aside a specific budget for marketing innovation efforts, and only 9% make marketing innovation a part of every marketer’s budget.” I won’t go into how to secure...
On Twitter, there are many different “conversations” happening simultaneously. There are also particular moments — TV finales, sporting events, breaking news and more — where many people have all “tuned in” at once. Both types of conversations are opportunities...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Without Fanfare, SEMPO Turns 10 Today marks the 10th birthday of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization – SEMPO – formed to be a trade advocacy...
Today marks the 10th birthday of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization – SEMPO – formed to be a trade advocacy body for the search marketing industry. What’s a decade of the group produced? An annual industry survey. Beyond that, little that really seems to stand...
Understanding what drives customers to take action is critical to your advertising investments. With a flood of available metrics along the path to purchase, advertisers must wade through data in an attempt to understand the metrics that truly matter. This Digital Marketing Depot white paper,...
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said once again that Google’s +1 data has no direct impact on their web search ranking algorithm. Moz published a story today named Amazing Correlation Between Google +1s and Higher Search Rankings in which Matt Cutts responded to in Hacker News...