T-Mobile CEO John Legere has waded into the FTC furore over premium text message fees, accusing the commission of political posturing, and announcing a boost to the carrier's proactive refund program. Allegations of charge-stuffing surfaced earlier this week, with T-Mobile accused by the FTC of "masking" outrageous fees for premium services as well as shirking its responsibilities for refunds. Unsurprisingly, … Continue reading
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T-Mobile CEO blasts FTC; Goes “double-down” on SMS outreach
T-Mobile CEO John Legere has waded into the FTC furore over premium text message fees, accusing the commission of political posturing, and announcing a boost to the carrier's proactive refund program. Allegations of charge-stuffing surfaced earlier this week, with T-Mobile accused by the FTC of "masking" outrageous fees for premium services as well as shirking its responsibilities for refunds. Unsurprisingly, … Continue reading
Try Chrome and Firefox in VR now with Oculus and Cardboard
Welcome to the wide open door of the internet, Virtual Reality, it's nice to see that you've finally arrived. This week both Mozilla and Google are speaking about their efforts to bring a "VR-Engabled Browser" to the universe, one that'd allow the whole web to be visualized with virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift. With Google's most recent effort with … Continue reading
Hawaii is shooting lasers at birds and it’s for their own good
Filling the skies with laser beams and hoping birds fly into them doesn't, at first glance, seem the best way to prevent endangered species from dwindling in number even further, but it's exactly what one Hawaiian island is doing. The light grids - made up of thirty focused green lasers - are being mounted on electricity poles by service operator … Continue reading
Samsung snarks on Apple wall-huggers at airports
The Next Big Thing continues to be Here as Samsung releases another video spot snarking on iPhone owners. In this video you'll see masses of iPhone and iPad owners plugging in to the wall ports spread across airports in an effort to keep their batteries strong. Meanwhile, of course, Samsung Galaxy S5 owners are shown rolling through the day without … Continue reading
Facebook Messenger for iPad finally hits App Store
Facebook Messenger for iPad has finally been released, bringing the social network's standalone IM client to Apple's tablet. Previously only available on the iOS tablet as a doubled iPhone app, the new Messenger supports the same text chats, voice calls, and stickers as its phone counterpart, but in version 7.0 introduces a scaled-up UI. That UI keeps both the chat … Continue reading
Nokia Lumia mystery phone leaks with new camera
Someone with access to Nokia devices behind-the-scenes appears to have made a move in leaking their latest Lumia model this week. The device appears relatively massive, ready to bring at least a 4.5-inch display to the party, possibly in an effort to tac on a new generation in the Nokia Lumia 820 lineup. That'd make this a Nokia Lumia 830. … Continue reading
4th of July gaming: Transformers MMO goes Open Beta
![Transformers1[2]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uOmB105ERmNckrXr4-VFyJo-9fK3jLn_lH3tc50gyEb-S1dWcx2hh48W2KqibwAzfz59U1-iuOJOIm8RcWqm4HAnuDKSSV1gbwGqjV3ZMLW4Wo3hRcmQEL89tdGs1jE2P4-gqcxYWr-7TNV5dlv7uuOg=s0-d)
Starting tomorrow, Transformers Universe will go from Closed to Open Beta for the whole world. Users like yourself will be able to head to the Transformers Universe webpage, sign up, and jump in within the day. What's excellent about this game beyond the fact that you can transform into a vehicle to travel from place to place is that this … Continue reading
2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata dated for hotly-anticipated reveal
It's not often that a car manages to be both iconic and affordable, but Mazda struck that balance with the MX-5 Miata early on, and now there's no small amount of interest in the 2016 model. There isn't long to wait to see it, either, with the all-new 2016 MX-5 Miata now set to debut on September 3rd, complete with … Continue reading
Fox News rips off BioShock Infinite logo
Whoever's responsible for graphic design on "Fox & Friends" is not having a good day. This designer appears to have used a rather familiar source for their design of a "Defending the Homeland" segment marker as it looks rather familiar to a game we've played recently. The game: Bioshock Infinite. The design: main logo - typography, stars, colors, and all. … Continue reading
The EU’s “right to be forgotten” is a bad idea, and Google is handling it exactly the right way
This week, Google has begun notifying British media outlets that some of their news articles may not be available to UK audiences as a result of a European Union court decision enshrining the “right to be forgotten,” which allows people to have unpleasant information removed from Google’s search index. My colleague David Meyer argues that Google is doing this deliberately in order to create a straw man: in other words, to give the impression that the law is worse than it actually is. I disagree, however — I think Google is doing a good job of showing us why the law is a mistake, one with potentially huge consequences for free speech.
As Danny Sullivan of MarketingLand has outlined in an overview of the issue, Google has removed a number of stories from leading British news outlets — including The Guardian, The Daily Mail and the BBC — and it has been sending notices to those outlets to inform them of the removals. But it doesn’t provide much detail (or really any detail whatsoever) about why these particular stories have been blocked, who petitioned for their removal, or why some terms have been singled out and others haven’t. The articles include:
- Stories from The Guardian and Daily Mail from 2010 about a Scottish soccer referee who lied about reversing a penalty.
- A Guardian article from 2002 about a man who was accused of fraud but was later found to be not guilty.
- A piece from the Daily Mail about a couple who had sex on a train.
- A Guardian article about how workers in France were decorating their windows with Post-It notes.
- A BBC column about former Merrill Lynch chairman Stan O’Neal.
- A story from The Daily Mail about staffers at the Tesco supermarket chain who criticized their employer on social media.
The point made by David and other Google critics is that in each of these cases, if the company believed that the article included in its search results is journalistically defensible, then it should be protesting to the appropriate legislative body and sending the issue to be decided by a court, because the decision that allegedly caused the removals — a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union — includes a clause that says data can remain if “it is justified by the preponderant interest of the general public in having access to the information in question.”
Is Google trying to stir up controversy?
By removing articles that seem to be clearly on the other side of this guideline — such as news stories about the disgraced chairman of a publicly-traded corporation, or an admission of fact by a football referee — Google’s critics argue that it is deliberately over-reacting, in an attempt to stir up controversy about a court decision whose specific application hasn’t even been decided yet by the EU’s member states, and whose outcome might not be as bad as it is being portrayed.
https://twitter.com/robertshrimsley/statuses/484664431495098368
Paul Bernal, a lecturer in media law, seems to be arguing that Google deliberately removed articles by prominent journalists such as Robert Peston of the BBC — who wrote about how his column had been “cast into oblivion” by Google — in order to gain support for its campaign to blunt the force of the EU law, and Guardian staffer Chris Moran says the clumsy way in which Google has implemented the removals (including posting a note at the bottom of a search page even when nothing has been changed) is a deliberate attempt to make it look bad. As David puts it:
“If Google is trying to prove that the system is unworkable, then it's succeeding — only the system it's apparently operating in isn't the system the CJEU described. It's a straw man, a nastified version of the actual legal framework that makes that framework easier to attack.”
Let’s assume for the moment that Google has actually orchestrated this process in as ham-handed a way as possible in order to make it look more draconian than it is, and has even cherry-picked certain journalists as targets so that it can get them on its side. Whether you believe this is justified or not hinges on whether you agree with the “right to be forgotten” law in the first place. If you believe it is wrong, then having Google fight against it is just as defensible as when it tried to stand up against Chinese censorship by making it obvious that searches for terms like Tianenmen Square were being censored.
Google is doing what it can to fight a bad law
The point made by Paul Bernal, Chris Moran and David is that Google should leave all of this decision-making to the courts, and that will somehow make it better — but I think it’s just as likely, if not more likely, to make it much worse, and the kinds of takedowns that Google has so far shown us are not nearly as far-fetched as Google’s critics would have you believe.
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/484455992092938240
David argues that some or even all of the Google searches that have been modified so far would be covered by the “public interest” clause in EU privacy law — but at the same time, he also notes that those laws are in the process of being updated and likely strengthened as a result of rulings like the Court of Justice decision. How do we know that a court will see the public’s right to know about a football referee’s misdemeanors, or even the chairman of Merrill Lynch’s transgressions, as being stronger than the right to be forgotten? We don’t.
I know that free speech is not as sacrosanct a principle in Europe as it is in the United States, and the public’s right to know doesn’t automatically trump an individual’s right to privacy. That may be a positive social goal, but as a result of that tendency we’ve seen British courts hand down “super-injunctions” that restrict the right of the press to even mention that a court case exists, and other infringements on the right to know and freedom of the press. Do we really need more mechanisms for that kind of thing to occur? I don’t think so.
The reality is that the right to be forgotten could allow powerful individuals to effectively censor search results even when the facts contained in them are undisputedly correct and have some historical news value. That’s something worth fighting against, and Google is using all the tools at its disposal to do so. If it helps raise awareness about the issue and its drawbacks, then so much the better.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Bahri Altay
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Download this: Sunrise, a great free calendar app for the Mac
Google Calendar users looking for a better calendar app need look no further than Sunrise.
The app has long been a favorite of mine on multiple platforms such as iOS, Android and the web; there’s even a Chrome version for Chromebook owners that we featured on our Chrome Show podcast. On Thursday, Sunrise found its way to the Mac App Store and is now available.
Aside from the pleasant-looking layout, Sunrise is filled with tasty tidbits that make it a solid calendar contender. It works on- or offline, of course, and has native Mac notifications for any reminders of upcoming or daily events. It also synchronizes directly with the mobile version of Sunrise on iOS and Android. And you can connect Evernote, Tripit, Foursquare, Asana, Github, Songkick, and Producteev to it.
Events in Sunrise are typically more informative than those in Google’s base calendar app. And I also like that Sunrise includes a bunch of “interesting calendars” with the app. I’ve added the schedules for Nascar, my Liverpool FC matches, and a few other personal interest calendars. Clearly, if you don’t use Google for your calendar needs, this is a pass for your Mac. If you do, however, it’s well worth the download; particularly since it’s currently free.
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How to solve big data challenges in the ad-tech industry
Advertising technology involves a formidable set of requirements, and a new category of database known as NewSQL is emerging to address multi-genre analytics.
Table of Contents
Looks like Verizon’s prepaid plans will finally get LTE
Verizon’s prepaid customers make up a small percentage of its total wireless business in the United States, and part of the reason is that the service lags behind other prepaid plans. Currently, you can’t get LTE; you’re stuck on Verizon’s painfully slow CDMA network. But that’s about to change: according to a report at Droid-Life, it seems like Verizon will soon be turning on the LTE switch for its Allset plans.
Verizon’s Allset prepaid plans, introduced earlier this year, are actually fairly cost effective: you start with a $45 monthly charge that brings unlimited calls and texts with 500MB of data, then add what Verizon calls “Bridge Data,” which are data buckets in 500MB, 1GB, and 3GB increments. Uniquely for pre-paid plans, the data rolls over, so if you purchase 3GB of mobile data for $20 you can actually use that over a period of 90 days. That works out to $65 for unlimited calls, texts and 3.5GB of data, which is competitive with AT&T’s prepaid GoPhone plans and other competitors if it includes LTE.
Verizon’s prepaid website currently doesn’t sell a smartphone with the proper hardware to connect to Verizon’s LTE network, although it’s possible to bring your own device to the plan. Droid-Life expects the change to go live on July 17, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some LTE devices go on sale the same day — perhaps the LG G2 Droid Life points to, or maybe the iPhone 5 or Moto G with LTE.
No word whether this means that prepaid devices will gain access to Verizon’s faster XLTE network. We’ll also have to wait to see whether the change will carry over to MVNOs that resell Verizon spectrum — currently, MVNOs like PagePlus and Net10 restrict their customers to 3G CDMA connections as well.
This was bound to happen eventually; Verizon pushes its LTE network heavily for its post-paid contracts, and the growth of carriers like T-Mobile show there’s a segment of the network looking for prepaid plans with a comparable level of service to post-paid plans.
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YouTube reportedly in talks with indie labels to avoid blocking videos
YouTube may not block music videos from some indie labels after all: The video service is currently in talks with the labels in question to strike a deal to include their music in its upcoming subscription service, according to a Financial Times report.
The paper had first reported two weeks ago that YouTube was planning to block the videos of five percent of all of its label partners if those labels wouldn't agree to also make their music available through YouTube's upcoming subscription service.
Some indie labels have been holding out on striking a deal with YouTube because of what they believe to be unfavorable conditions; YouTube declined to comment further on the current state of the negotiations, according to Thursday's Financial Times report, but told the paper that it has been offering all labels a fair deal consistent with what other streaming music services have to offer.
Of course, there is a big difference between services like Spotify and YouTube: The Google-owned video service already has a huge audience for free music videos, some of which are making labels money through advertising, and there are also third parties like Vevo distributing ad-supported music videos through YouTube, which would be excempt from any blocking.
Speaking of which: It's still very much unclear what any blocking measure would actually look like. Some reports over the last two weeks have claimed that indie labels could continue to use YouTube as a promotional platform, but would be blocked from monetizing those videos through advertising.
However, a report from Digital Music News this week suggested that YouTube may actually take down any affected video altogether. A YouTube spokesperson declined to comment on any details of the blocking measure when I asked about this two weeks ago, and Google's PR department didn't return a request for comment Thurday.
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Yahoo releases massive Flickr dataset, and a supercomputer steps up to analyze it
In case you missed this like I did (I blame a Structure hangover), Yahoo released last week a huge dataset Flickr images and videos. Called the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million, it contains 99.3 million photos, 700,000 videos and the associated metadata (title, camera type, description, tags) for each. About 49 million of the photos are geotagged and, Yahoo says, comments, likes and social data for each are available via the Flickr API.
Needless to say, this is a pretty impressive resource for anyone wanting to analyze images for the sake of learning something or just to train some new computer vision algorithms. We have been covering the rise of new artificial intelligence algorithms and techniques for years, most of which have benefited from access to huge amounts of online images, video and related content from which to derive context. Often, though, researchers or companies not in possession of the content (that is, pretty much everyone but Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo) have had to scrape or otherwise gather this data manually.
That being said, Google and Yahoo, in particular, have been pretty good about releasing various large datasets, usually textual data useful for training natural-language processing models.
Just a taste of what the dataset looks like. Source: Flickr user David Shamma (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ayman/14444554781)
To test out just one possible function of the new image dataset, Yahoo is hosting a contest to build the system best capable of identifying where a photo or video was taken without using geographic coordinates. The training set for the contest includes 5 million photos and 25,000 videos.
Yahoo is also partnering with the International Computer Science Institute (at the University of California, Berkeley) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to process the data on a specialized supercomputer — the Cray Catalyst machine designed for data-intensive computing — and extract various audio and visual features. That dataset, which Yahoo claims is north of 50 terabytes (the original 100-million-photos data is only about 12 gigabytes), and tools for analyzing it will be available on Amazon Web Services later this summer.
Image courtesy of Flickr user David Shamma.
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U.S. regulators should just ban premium SMS products outright
T-Mobile is hot water with both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission for cramming practices, which allow scammers to attach unwanted charges onto consumers' mobile bills. It just goes to show that the mechanism underlying such fraud should have been chucked a long time ago.
Premium SMS, as it is called, was developed in an age before the app store and the smartphone, when marketers wanted to sell you wallpapers, ringtones, Java apps or reality TV votes but needed a way to bill you. The answer was to package up your purchase in an SMS transaction and charge it to your carrier bill at a "premium" rate over your typical text message.
Obviously, the modern app store is how we buy much of our content and services these days and it has proliferated beyond the smartphone and postpaid plan to feature phones and prepaid services. Premium SMS is a throwback. Consequently most legitimate services have abandoned it, and it's become fertile ground for the kinds of text spammers and scammers that are raising the ire of consumers and regulators. The common scam is to trick consumers into authorizing SMS subscription services like horoscopes, burying charges deep within their carrier bills.
An example of a premium SMS charge on a T-Mobile bill (Source: FTC)
Last year, the carriers finally got wise to the problem. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile came to an agreement with 45 states to stop billing for premium SMS, and Verizon said it had begun phasing out premium SMS charges as well. They also agreed they would work with their customers and regulators to recover money lost due to such SMS scams.
But as the FTC's complaint against T-Mobile points out, carriers aren't the ancillary victims they claim to be. They take a hefty cut of every premium SMS transaction sent their way and therefore have conflicting motives when it comes to cracking down on offenders. According to the FTC, T-Mobile kept charging customers for these SMS services for years after learning they were fraudulent (T-Mobile said the accusations are unfounded).
It seems there's an easy solution here: just ban these kinds of SMS billing arrangements entirely. The conflict of interest the carriers face goes away, and given the datedness of premium SMS, no one is going to miss it except for scammers.
If there is going to be an exception to that rule, it should be charitable giving. In the last half-decade, SMS donations have had a big impact on donations to non-profits and humanitarian organizations, especially those that respond immediately to global disasters like the Haiti earthquake of 2010. Not only do they get funds to these relief groups quickly (carriers in the past were slow to deliver funds, but they've since accelerated payouts for emergencies), but it also allows them to collect micro-donations from millions of people that wouldn't normally typically be donors.
Making charities an exception wouldn't be difficult. For the most part, SMS donations are handled by two organizations: Mobile Accord and the Mobile Giving Foundation. It's a lot easier for a carrier or regulators to police two organizations with good reputations than thousands of individual scammers.
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CBS website OnGamers shows why you shouldn’t rely on — or try to rig — a social network like Reddit for your traffic
The dangers of relying on a single site or social network to drive visitors to your website are relatively well known by now, but we got another useful example this week of why that can be a bad thing — especially if you try to game that traffic — when Reddit banned the CBS Interactive online-gaming news website OnGamers from its network for at least a year as a result of vote manipulation. According to the CBSi executive in charge of the site, Reddit accounted for as much as half of the traffic that OnGamers received before the ban.
The year-long ban is actually the second penalty that the CBSi site has gotten, according to a post at The Daily Dot: in April, links from the site were blocked for nine days, and the penalty was only lifted after OnGamers promised to stop its staff from posting links to their own content, and to stop using multiple accounts to vote up their articles, which is forbidden. But the activity apparently continued.
The ripple effects of the Reddit ban could potentially be extremely serious for OnGamers, as CBSi vice-president for esports Kim Rom told the Dot, since “roughly 50 percent of traffic going away overnight is a lot.” And the move has already claimed its first casualty: Rod Breslau, the site’s first employee and senior editor, was fired on Monday for his role in the vote manipulation. He posted an apology to the site in which he admitted emailing Reddit users and asking them to post stories from OnGamers, including instructions on what headline to use.
“I admit to having sent messages to users with instructions on submitting content, and then upvoting my own content thereafter. I acted alone in this matter without the knowledge of any of my colleagues, including senior editors. They have followed the rules since the reversal of the last ban, they did not upvote on Reddit or participate in any manner, and there has not been any manipulation of votes from employees beyond my own singular vote.”
Breslau and OnGamers aren’t the first to suffer this kind of fate on Reddit: The Atlantic magazine’s site was briefly banned from the network after social-media editor Jared Keller was found to have submitted and upvoted links to the site’s content under a pseudonym, and the Daily Dot’s social-media editor even suffered a similar fate for posting links to his site’s content under his own name. One of the things that makes it difficult to steer clear of a Reddit ban is that the site doesn’t forbid linking to your own content, it just says that doing so can be risky.
Many internet users or readers of mainstream sites like The Atlantic may not go to Reddit, but over the past few years the network has become one of the few sites that can drive massive amounts of traffic to a destination — even more so within the online gaming community. That creates the incentive to try and game that traffic, especially when you are trying to get a new site off the ground. But as OnGamers has shown, the downside of that strategy can potentially be fatal.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / bluehand
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Going huntin’ or fishin’ in North Carolina? Leave your drone at home
If North Carolinians want to bag some game they’ll have to do so the old fashioned way, without help from an unmanned aerial vehicle (a.k.a., a drone) if new legislation passes in the state legislature. The state’s lower house recently unanimously passed a bill outlawing the use of drones for hunting and fishing and the state Senate is about to vote on it.
The bill also outlaws the use of drones to surveil people or private property without consent; their use for hunting (or fishing) prey would also be restricted.
Per WRAL Techwire:
Using a drone to hunt or fish or to harass hunters would be a misdemeanor. Putting a weapon on one, or using one with a weapon on it, would be a felony, as would using a drone to interfere with manned aircraft traffic.
(One word: Phew.)
As IEEE Spectrum reported, there was never really a question of allowing armed drones to hunt by proxy, but the new law would mean that a hunter can’t use images from a drone to help locate prey.
The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is already struggling with how to handle an influx of consumer operated drones and it’s unclear whether its rules regulating drones will stand.
But other authorities are stepping into the fray: last month the National Park Service moved to outlaw drone use over 84 million acres of park lands. In January, Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife Commission banned their use to assist hunters. Field & Stream has a good story on the controversy.
In a nutshell, purists feel that use of drones to find prey is akin to using bait and traps. But I’m betting this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this.
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Facebook finally brings Messenger to iPad
After debuting its standalone Messenger app for iPhone and Android three years ago, Facebook has finally expanded the app to accommodate for the iPad. The app works more or less the same as the Messenger app currently available for the phone, including Stickers and VoIP calling. Right now, Facebook seems to be keeping chat baked into the iPad version of the Facebook app, but it will be interesting to see whether it decides to spin out Messenger and eliminate chat from the flagship app as it did for the iPhone.
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Op-ed: E-sports cannot fight segregation with segregation
Look closely at this International e-Sports Federation promotional image. See any women? Us either.
International e-Sports Federation
On Tuesday, a sub-reddit dedicated to the video game Hearthstone exploded with discussion. A Finnish e-sports tournament had just been announced, and the Helsinki event, scheduled for July 31, would include a competition based on the Blizzard-produced card-battle game, complete with a grand prize of €1,000 and free travel to the tournament's world finals in November.
While Hearthstone is a relatively young game, and less intense than other popular video games in the e-sports world, its inclusion in a big tournament was indicative of both its popularity and the quickly growing nature of e-sports in general. However, that's not why it was the topic of reddit users' conversation. Rather, user Karuta posted the tourney's rules and highlighted a strange stipulation: only men need apply.
As people dug in to the tournament's details, they found that the whole affair was divided into male- and female-only categories, and worse, women were invited to fewer competitions. Starcraft 2 will be played by both men and women in separate tournaments, while Dota 2 and Hearthstone tourneys were announced as male-only. (A curious separation came in fighting games, where men will face off in Ultra Street Fighter IV, and women will fight in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.) These stipulations were all due to rules attached to the eventual, final competition, hosted by South Korea's International e-Sports Federation (IeSF).
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