Sweet Pre-Roll Video Ads Chances are installed that you an ad blocking extension to skip Youtube pre-roll video ads.
But, according to an Adobe study, 26 percent of U s.-based Internet users installed an ad blocker.
advertising is the necessary evil of the web. So get ready to see some pre-roll video ads again s
The Clinicloud website is now open for pre-orders and the kits are expected to ship in July t
#Apple Will Spend $848 Million Building A Massive Solar Farm In Monterey Tim cook dropped a bit of news in a conversation at the Goldman sachs Technology and Internet conference today:
#Rakuten To Put Its Bitnet Investment To Work And Accept Bitcoin Worldwide Rakuten, Japan largest online retail firm, has announced that it will soon accept bitcoin across its global marketplaces.
The company is putting its investment in Bitnet a startup that raised $14. 5 million last October to work with this development.
Bitnet, which was founded by ex-Visa execs and is rivaled by Coinbase and Bitpay, will initially be integrated into Rakuten U s. marketplace to allow customers to pay in BTC.
Interestingly, there no specific mention of when Bitnet will be integrated into Rakuten Japan, which is the most prominent of its 12 country-specific services.
hopped onto the cryptocurrency to give customers an alternative avenue for payments. he integration with Bitnet platform will make Rakuten one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world to begin accepting bitcoin,
but it could help position Bitnet as a credible alternative to the increasingly dominant duopoly that is Coinbase and Bitpay both
Part of the plan to increase trade with Cuba included provisions aimed at allowing U s. telecommunications companies to provide better access to communication and internet services
#The Internet Applied To Things And The Third Industrial revolution Editor Note: John B. Rogers is chief executive and cofounder of Local Motors,
I call a product of the very recent Internet-applied-to-things (not the overused phrase Internet of things).
and download an STL file of a door grommet, send it to a 3d printer and within hours it printed
#Facebook Censors Blasphemous Page To Comply With Turkey#s Demand But Won t Publish It When Google and Twitter receive legal threats from countries to censor controversial content
or have their services shut down locally, they often publish them on Chillingeffects. org for transparency.
But today when Facebook followed Turkey legal order to block a Page that defamed the Prophet Muhammad from Turkish users,
Mark Zuckerberg has said it Facebook duty to comply with censorship so it can keep operating
Google and Twitter both have large archives of notices theye shared on Chilling Effects. But Facebook abstains from this transparency practice.
Instead, the company has been beefing up its transparency reports with an interactive map the shows
Some claim that Facebook is wrong to comply with censorship, and that it should accept bans.
Facebook growth and advertising objectives are cited often as supposed reasons it complies. However, Mark Zuckerberg recently commented on the censorship issue in a public Q&a saying one more country doesn add much extra ad money or growth.
Facebook declined to comment on this specific issue. Regardless it seems obvious that Facebook could maintain its current position
while also being more transparent and publishing the demands it receives in a timely fashion.
and is doing all it can to fight back without cutting off citizens from their social network i
You enter an email address a password and some basic info. At some point Number26 will need to verify your identity.
#Malaysia Airlines Site Hacked By Lizard Squad Hacker group Lizard Squad which took down Xbox Live
The site currently displays a picture of a lizard in a top hat and monocle as well as the text 04-Plane Not Found (a reference to flight MH370 which disappeared in March) and acked by LIZARD SQUAD-OFFICIAL CYBER CALIPHATE.
Some users may see a lite version of Malaysia Airlineswebsite as the air carrier restores access to its site.
It unclear whether or not Lizard Squad is linked actually to Cyber Caliphate a hacker group that claims to be associated with ISIS. Last month Cyber Caliphate took control of the U s. central military command Twitter and Youtube accounts.
Malaysia Airlines confirmed the attack on its Facebook page: In a tweet however Lizard Squad (which itself was hacked last week) claimed it had taken materials from Malaysia Airlinesservers.
#Google Joins Apple Others Cutting off Crimea Blocks Adwords Adsense Google Play Yet more developments around how U s. sanctions on Crimea in retaliation against Russia annexation by Russia are being adopted by tech companies:
Google is the latest to start complying with the orders to block import and export of tech products and services among other things.
According to multiple reports out of Russia Google has started now to block Adsense and Adwords accounts in the region
and from February 1 it will also cease Google Play services but it will continue to allow access to free Web-based services like Google search Google+Gmail
and Maps. anctions have recently been imposed on Crimea by the US and the EU. We are complying with thema Google spokesperson confirmed to Techcrunch.
The move comes after Apple expanded its own implementation of the sanctions from developers to products
In a way the Google block is a bigger deal than Apple considering that Android devices are far more prevalent among users
and Google is a key player in other web services. It also come up more than once against authorities in restrictive countries concerned about
While Google has yet to specify to us which services are impacted Russian press reports that Google is paid initially cutting off services specifically B2b products like Adsense and Adwords.
And even if Google did decide to circumvent U s. laws (which it is not) it wouldn be able to collect money for services
and out of the country. oogle prohibited from providing paid services in the Crimeaa source at Google told Lenta. ru. n addition Google cannot make payments to anyone in the Crimea.
It is now technically impossible as almost all international banks have ceased to make payments. ater the block will extend to apps via Google Play
The Russian agency ITAR-TASS reports that Google will be ending Google Play services both paid and free in the region from February 1 as they fall under the restrictions on the import
and export of services. rom February 1 we will start to limit access to apps in Google Play
Access will continue to free services Google such as search Gmail and Google Mapsa Google source told the agency.
The backstory here is that Crimea a peninsula with less than 2 million residents is effectively a pawn in a chess game between much bigger powers the U s. and Russia.
you can sync all of those notes to the team Dropbox or Google Drive for easy record keeping D
but the mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) that the full name of what was called previously the owler Ridge IV Wind Projectwill only be used to power Amazon AWS data centers.
As Amazon announced last November, its long-term goal is o achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint.
US WEST (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt) and its AWS Govcloud. mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of datacenters
said Jerry Hunter, Vice president of Infrastructure at Amazon web services, in today announcement. his power purchase agreement helps to increase the renewable energy used to power our infrastructure in the US
While Google has made various wind energy investments over the last few years this is Amazon first (or at least the first one it is publicly talking about) s
the tiny devices that fuel the Internet of things are getting smaller and cheaper all the time. As they do,
The Internet of things is a term that being bandied about with increasing frequency these days. You could think of it as the loudof 2015 that buzzword that marketers put in absolutely everything
The Internet of things in actuality involves a network of smart sensors collecting data. As the sensors grow ever cheaper,
On The Edge Of A major Shift Nils Herzberg, global co-lead for Iot at SAP says the beauty of sensors that they bring real-time data to applications. ustomers run applications for business critical processes,
The reason why wee seeing more talk about the Internet of things is the diminishing size and cost of sensor technologies, says James Bailey,
Our perspective is literally everything will have IOT technology at some point, he said. James Bailey, Accenture Bailey believes that we are not there yet,
#Microsoft Outlook Hacked In China New Report Finds Only a few weeks after Google Gmail service was blocked in China a new report from online censorship monitoring organization Greatfire. org released this morning
states that Microsoft email system Outlook was subjected recently to a an-in-the-middleattack in China.
but the web interfaces for Microsoft webmail services were not. That is Outlook. com and Login. live. com were affected not.
Affected users were shown warning messages in their email clients that weren as immediately worrisome as those web browsers display which means that some users may not have been aware that an attack was taking place.
However when Greatfire. org reproduced the same result via the Firefox web browser the message the browser offers is far more detailed saying also that the error could means hat someone is trying to impersonate the site
when their email client tried to automatically retrieve new messages. In most cases they would simply hit ontinueto dismiss the message likely thinking that a network problem was to blame.
so their emails contacts and passwords were able to be logged by the hacker. The self-signed certificate is suspected to be from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information center)
which is governed by the Cyberspace Administration of China as this would be consistent with previous man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in China. iven the dangerous nature of this attack on Outlook we again strongly encourage organizations including Microsoft
What happens when a Chinese user accesses Outlook in their email client: The attack comes within a month of China blocking Gmail
It also one of many recent MITM attacks in China including those affecting services from Google Yahoo
The company bought its shares from internet giant Tencent which reduced its stake in Kingsoft to 9. 6 percent.
Apple note which has been reproduced in more than one place online (including here on Russian-language tech site Habrahabr
Putin government has put in place measures for tracking data on websites and restrictions on certain types of content.
This has resulted in some sites like Github getting blocked and others like Intel shutting down some of their online operations u
and formerly ran Twitter security team. he idea is to scramble the information so well that it not worth pursuing.
#Facebook Open-sources Some Of Its Deep-Learning Tools In the world of machine learning the buzzword these days is eep learning.
It a technique that has been popularized a by Geoff Hinton who is now at Google and previously worked at Microsoft Research as well as other computer science researchers like Yann Lecun who are looking for better ways to teach computers how to recognize objects and speech.
Facebook too has done quite a bit of work in the area and today the company is open-sourcing some of its projects around the Torch7 computing framework for machine learning.
and artificial intelligence projects in academic labs and at companies like Google Twitter and Intel. Facebook today is optimized launching tools to increase the speed at
which deep-learning projects that use Torch run. One allows developers to parallelize the training of their networks using multiple GPUS simultaneously.
In addition Facebook is launching a number of additional tools that bring more speed to other parts of Torch as well.
Some of these are modest but many of Facebook projects results in 3 to 10x improvements over the default tools.
Google+Photos for example uses it to allow you to find images in your photo library.
Just look at the Google Trends for the word ronesor JI. Check out the number of drone videos on Youtube (827
000). ) According to Frost and Sullivan, an aerospace research firm, over 200,000 drones were sold each month in 2014.
Companies like Bouygues, Balfour Beatty and Webcor are using drones to map construction sites. They are employing drones made by Skycatch,
punch in your destination via Google maps, and be driven by a computer, guiding your destination while avoiding all other air traffic.
#Facebook Unveils Facebook At work Lets Businesses Create Their Own Social networks About six months ago we reported that Facebook was working on a new product aimed squarely at the enterprise market under the working title B@Work
today the company is launching new ios and Android apps called acebook At Workalong with a version of Facebook At work accessible via its main website
which will let businesses create their own social networks amongst their employees that are built to look
and act like Facebook itself. Facebook At work is now available for download on ios and wel update with a links to the Andriod version once it live though both are usable via a limited pilot to start with.
Check out Josh follow-up story for more screenshots details on privacy and analysis.)Employers can create separate logins for employees to use with their Work accounts
The product puts Facebook head-to-head with the likes of Microsoft Yammer Slack Convo Socialcast and a huge number of others who are trying to tackle the nterprise social networkspace.
Even Linkedin conveniently let drop last night that it too was looking at building a product for coworkers to communicate
(but not chat as a Linkedin spokesperson tells me). Not all of these have been a hit:
Lars Rasmussen the engineering director at Facebook who is heading up the project had in his past once headed up one of the failed efforts at an enterprise social network Google Wave.
Facebook is positioning today debut as a bold first step. ee putting the app into the app stores
In fact Facebook has already been running tests of the service with very small setof external businesses around the world Rasmussen says;
In fact the existing Facebook Groups product is used already by smaller organisations. Because of the early nature of the product there are a lot of questions in the air.
For now Facebook Platform has been disabled on the Work product meaning no ads or apps. That may not always be the case (t could be paidhe says.
Rasmussen says that Facebook has effectively been working on Work for the last 10 years because it is based on
what Facebook own employees have been using to communicate with each other pass on news plan meetings and share documents.
That long-time use and Facebook familiarity to all of us are part of what makes Facebook confident that it can carve a place for itself in a market that already is crowded very. acebook At work strength is spent that wee ten years
and incorporated feedback from 1 billion active usershe says. ll embedded of that is now in the same product
but adapted for different use cases. nd it actually used by staff hen Mark Zuckerberg the CEO makes an announcement he just posts it on Facebook at Workrasmussen says.
In fact Facebook own popularity could be Facebook At work biggest advantage. A lot of efforts in offices to get employees to collaborate more with each other have been stymied
In that vein Facebook At work built essentially on Facebook itself will be arguably the closest of all to an authentic onsumersocial experience.
By making this free Facebook could potentially drive a lot more users to its wider network.
The fact that Rasmussen would not rule out advertising as an option down the road to me suggests that Facebook could consider tiers of its own where some businesses may pay for the product
Plus this would give Facebook another revenue stream beyond ads and app-related payments. How it will work Facebook wouldn show me a demo ahead of the launch
but this is how Rasmussen describes it: hen an employer adopts Facebook At work they can construct it with a set of new accounts.
Users can then link their work and personal accounts together so that they are logged into both at the same time. his would work much like Groups
The content stays entirely within your personal or work Facebook. hat not there/integrations. You can share documents today
but for now there will be no in-app editing urrently. gain that leaves this open as something that will come down the line. he set of features are identitcal to personal Facebook
Hopefully in the future other enterprise tools will integrate with Facebook At work. ackstory on development. Back in June I deduced that Facebook At work was connected with Rasmussen work in London but what
I found out from sources after that report was that this was more than casual: this was his baby.
and the knowledge of a failure of doing this at a different companyhe says referring of course to Google Wave. thought that maybe Facebook experience was
however is one that Facebook will have to continue to grapple with all the more so as it continues to grow.
Canvassing opinion on a Facebook At work product I heard not only once people shy away from the idea concerned with the thought of Facebook wningyour data
and the potential lack of confidentiality resulting from it. That can be frustrating when related to pictures of you too drunk
#Ford#s Applink Will Soon Support Third-party Navigation Apps Most carsbuilt-in navigation systems tend to be compared a bit clunky to modern smartphone apps like of Google maps.
There no reason to believe the company will stop Google Microsoft Telenav or Here from offering its mapping services on its platform though.
Slickr, a fashion social network. Swipentap. com a POS ipad app. Integreight which develops novel products for the electronic hobbyist and education market.
according to an Uber blog post. Uber said that the service is ideal for ferrying any kind of item around:
and scored a $10 million investment from Chinese social network Renren in 2014. Lalamove and Gogovan are based both in Hong kong,
and add Baidu as a strategic investor in China Uber Cargo is another reminder that new Uber initiatives can
since the 1950 (Wikipedia says the first reference to it was in 1838) but gas and other fossil fuels have eclipsed it as a preferred energy source.
and while it still conceivable that the Google-owned company could build a Sensibo-style device,
Prior to today updates to Square Cash had other updates including the ability to send money via Bluetooth and email
#Tencent Launches China#s First Private Online Bank Tencent one of the top Internet companies in China launched the country first private online bank today.
Called Webank after Tencent popular messaging app Wechat the financial institution is the first one in China to be based on the Internet.
while Alibaba Baidu and electronics seller Suning Commerce Group also got government licenses to offer mutual funds loans and insurance.
All bookings are made through the site, with the startup handling the required insurance and offering 24/7 road assistance cover in the event of a breakdown. ur insurance setup allows car owners to list their cars in less than a minute
provide their information on our website and rent a car as soon as the car owner approves the request,
#The Bank of Facebook Technology is changing one of the most fundamental mediums that touch every person on the planet:
and securityare actively being created by the world social network. This past March, Facebook rolled out free peer-to-peer payments and set the company down a path to becoming one of the world most powerful financial institutions.
Last year foreign workers sent $583 billion to individuals in their home countries, also known as remittances. Remittances are one of the largest financial inflows to the developing world.
Facebook isn charging fees on transfers. While the company does incur charges from banks on the back end,
Facebook says it will not pass these on to the consumer. At the moment Facebook transfers are limited to users within the United states,
but sources inside the company have confirmed it will expand beyond U s. borders in the near future.
if Facebook will charge users a nominal fee on cross-border transfers and currency conversions,
According to Steve Davis, product manager at Facebook: ee not trying to make a profit out of payments. acebook is already well on its way to becoming a global financial institution.
Last summer, Financial times discovered that Facebook is close to receiving approval from the Central bank of Ireland to become an electronic money institution throughout Europe.
This would allow users the ability to store money with the social network, transfer money to others,
Long term, Facebook payments has the power to completely destroy Western union and Money Gram (good riddance) and massively benefit millions of people in the developing world with billions of dollars more freely flowing into those countries.
Facebook is in a position to control the lion share of remittances sent globally by offering below market-rate transfers and the best experience on mobile.
It couldn come at a better time for the social network, which desperately needs the rest of the world to sign up
The last couple of years have been especially rough for Facebook with North america and European markets reaching saturation.
There is no better way for Facebook to add new users in the developing world than by becoming the de facto app for how they receive their income from abroad.
that possibility pales in comparison to the larger opportunity for Facebook offering a way for people who don use banks now to do e-commerce.
In the next five years, nearly every person on the planet will have access to the Internet.
When every family on the planet has access to a smartphone with fast Internet, the paradigm changes.
It easy to imagine a world where workers in developing countries are paid through Facebook via peer-to-peer payments,
store their money on Facebook, purchase local goods through transfers, and have the ability to pay for items using Facebook.
The effect that Facebook could have on the world as an electronic financial institution is nothing short of profound.
So why would Facebook facilitate millions of transfers and online purchases for next to nothing?
For one, it puts them closer to attaining the holy grail of datahow users spend their money.
Let not forget that at the end of the day Facebook is most definitely an ad network at its core.
For example, how many of Lamborghini 11 million Facebook fans could actually afford that car? While Facebook could make an educated guess,
it can answer that question with certainty. However, in a world where Facebook could combine financial transactions and social graphs,
advertisers would be given near-perfect information on their audience. No other ad network in the world would be able to match Facebook targeting capabilitiespurchase behavior, income, savings, etc.
Despite the doomsayers, the world future has looked never so bright. Wee currently undergoing a period of massive socioeconomic growth.
Or can mobile and the Internet change all that? I like to believe the latter. While many of these ideas will take decades to come to fruition,
Facebook has an incredible opportunity in front of itselfo use technology to change the way the world thinks about money.
I quit using Facebook years ago but maybe, hopefully, Mark Zuckerberg will give me a compelling reason to sign back up b
The Telegraph newspaper this week suggested new powers to be outlined in the Bill will require companies like Google
and Facebook to give U k. intelligence agencies access to the encrypted conversations of suspected terrorists and criminals.
That scenario presupposes Internet companies have the ability to access their usersencrypted messages. While that is certainly true for some digital services with a sloppy attitude to security (or with business models that rely on data mining their users), others,
the Communications Data Bill widely criticized as a nooperscharter on the grounds that it would have required ISPS to retain detailed data on web usage failed to pass through Parliament owing to the lack of support from the Conservative Lib dem coalition partners.
and we agreed to doone was about requiring ISPS to keep track of web logs, effectively.
So a list of every website you go to, and things like that. And the third thing was to have a power to require ISPS to keep track of third party information so
what you do on Facebook, what you do on any other site, says Huppert. hose were the three things they said they wanted.
The IP ADDRESS matching basically was the only thing they had any evidence for. And it doesn involve any significant privacy intrusions
but has huge advantages. Whereas I think the concept of keeping track of every website everybody ever goes to,
or of requiring ISPS to keep track of what you do on Facebook all the time are deeply intrusive.
And actually they couldn come up with any significant evidence of why it was useful.?There should be a clear piece of legislation that sets out
and privacy intrusion of having the state require systematic logging of citizensweb browsing habits and social media activity,
he argues. o unlike IP ADDRESS matching where there really was a strong case, there isn a clear case here.
but also if you look at some of the things that Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance David Omand has argued saidhe for full public
Speaking at an Internet festival taking place in London this week he asked of politicians:
of which will ripple out to affect both U k. web users and their online behavior, and global companies doing business in the U k. The U k. is referred often to as the most surveilled country in the world typically a reference to the pervasive use of CCTV.
Imagine the power of state surveillance tapping into an expansive Internet of things infrastructure that ceaselessly gathers real-time data on every point of human intersection public
this same outsourcing modus operandi used with CCTV is being applied by governments to Internet companies with the U k. government now preparing to push one of the most hawkish data retention agendas in the Western world,
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