Items tagged with Misc
As the war over net neutrality rages on, the Internet Association fired off the latest volley by supplicating the FCC with concerns and a mandate to take decisive action on the issue. The IA’s voice is bolstered by a chorus of major tech companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Yahoo!, and more...
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New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has his work cut out for him. Although Microsoft is still one of the most important tech companies in the world, the company’s dominance is slipping as technology evolves rapidly. The company’s old product paradigms simply don’t work anymore, and Microsoft has appeared...
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We were critical of Google’s recent decision to choose a high-end fashion retailer to sell Glass through a third party for the first time (which included a $300 markup), but Google is doing some good work with Glass through its “Giving Through Glass” program. The company awarded five nonprofits with...
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Three Uber riders experienced one of the worst-case scenarios skeptics of the rideshare service--a high-speed car chase and a (brief) de facto kidnapping--during a visit to the Washington, D.C. area. The Washington Post reports that Ryan Simonetti, co-founder of a company called Convene, and two colleagues hailed...
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In a Microsoft post announcing a mostly uninteresting list of products and their respective dates for when Microsoft will terminate support for them is a notable standout: Windows 7. Within the next six months, all versions of Windows 7 will enter the Extended Support phase, which lasts for 5 years and includes free...
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The Internet of Things promises big things, but to get past the theoretical stage, companies need to develop practical solutions to major obstacles, not the least of which is finding a way for devices running on different platforms to communicate effectively. Microsoft and 50 other companies have teamed up on the...
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Rideshare service Uber is already established in New York, but competitor Lyft is about to launch its service in the city as well, beginning with Queens and Brooklyn. From Lyft’s perspective, this isn’t just about edging into a market to keep pace with a competitor--it’s about bringing a much-needed...
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Gearbox Software, maker of the popular Borderlands series, is back with a new title that promises some of that exciting genre-bending fun the company has made successful. In tandem with 2K, Gearbox announced a futuristic shooter called Battleborn. “If Borderlands 2 is a shooter-looter, Battleborn is a...
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There’s a complicated battle that persists between prolific copyright violators, ISPs, and rights holders who want to take the violators down. The Internet has been the ideal place to pirate and distribute digital wares, and thus managing the issue has been problematic. However, according to TorrentFreak, a privacy monitoring firm called...
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Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows v2 sensor has a release date; you can get yours starting on July 15th. It’s been available for preorder for a month, and you can still claim one early if you like for $199. This iteration of the Kinect for Windows has a new look that differentiates it from the first version...
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Here’s an unsurprising factoid: Billionaires don’t understand what it’s like to not have enough money, especially when they’ve been rich virtually their entire adult lives. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page sat down for a “fireside chat” at the Khosla Ventures CEO...
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Here’s the setup: Someone stole a Tesla Model S in L.A. and went for a joyride that turned into a police chase and resulted in a horrific multi-car crash. The Model S itself ended up ripping in two, with the front part of the car and the rear completely separated. It looks as if the rear of the vehicle embedded...
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After Netflix posted a message on broken video streams stating that Verizon’s congested network was to blame, the former went ballistic, going as far as sending Netflix a cease and desist letter. The FCC has now stepped in to investigate (and possibly mediate) the spat. However, it’s not just Netflix...
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Now here’s a use for drones that we can surely all get behind: Filming a fireworks display from inside the beautiful, explosive mayhem. One Jos Stiglingh sent up a DJI Phantom 2 drone with a GoPro Hero 3 silver strapped to it and filmed a fireworks show, and the resulting video is approximately as marvelous as...
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We’re sure there’s a mathematical formula somewhere that demonstrates that if you give a nerd enough time plus sufficient gadgetry and the proper amount of nostalgia, you’ll get hilarious, amazing results. Case is point is a t-shirt on which you can play Tetris. “I always wanted a playable Tshirt, well now I made one...
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In the immortal words of The Simpsons, July 4th is a time to celebrate the independence of our nation by blowing up a small part of it. Despite the fact that fireworks are insanely dangerous, they’re also a lot of fun--and there’s a lot of chemistry behind the dazzling displays we here in States will enjoy all day and night. Professor...
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After warning that it was doing so back in March, Google has changed its AdWords policies to ban sexually explicit advertisements, meaning that we’ll no longer see any porn ads in search results or anywhere on the AdWords network. “Google AdWords doesn't allow the promotion of some types of sexual content on the Google Network....
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The good news, if you can call it that, is that after polling hundreds of technology experts, the Pew Research Internet Project found that they don’t believe that cybercrime or hacking are the chief problems facing the Internet by 2025. Unfortunately, that’s because they believe there are other problems...
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Video game broadcaster and community-builder Twitch is poised for big things. The company is rumored to be working a billion-dollar acquisition by YouTube, making it a Google-owned entity, and in the meantime it’s building a studio in San Francisco to take its enterprise to new level. According to Reuters...
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As the Internet of Things trend continues to evolve, there are several questions that the industry must answer, not the least of which is “How will everything talk to everything else?” The AllSeen Alliance is looking to answer that question by developing an open source consortium of partners companies, and...
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So it’s not just us then. While we seethe over NSA spying allegations here in the U.S., ISPs across the pond who believe they were spied upon by the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks are taking action. According to BBC News, seven Internet providers, in conjunction...
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Perhaps Facebook is conducting a meta-experiment. The first part of it was the emotional contagion experiment we covered yesterday, wherein Facebook manipulated close to 700,000 users’ emotions via their Newsfeeds without any apparent knowledge, consent, or reasonable ethical oversight. The real experiment...
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