consequences
13 million US Facebook users have no idea how much information they’re sharing with the public
thenextweb.com
Facebook’s privacy settings can sometimes be a source of confusion for the social network’s millions of users, and in the US, nearly 13 million of them are either unaware of, or simply don’t use, the privacy controls the site offers. In a recent study, Consumer Reports shows exactly why that...
Crowdfunding: $1.5B Raised, 1M Campaigns Funded In 2011; Figures Set To Double In 2012
techcrunch.com
Well, it’s been quite a year already for the crowdfunding industry. With the JOBS Act becoming law, the tech industry (and the economy) are headed for some big changes. Namely, the legalization of crowdfunding in startups for non-accredited investors has come to pass. In other words, now your mom can...
How the Technology Behind Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire
gizmodo.com
The afternoon of May 6, 2010 was among the strangest in economic history. Starting at 2:42 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones stock index fell 600 points in just 6 minutes. Its nadir represented the deepest single-day decline in that market's 114-year history. By 3:07 p.m., the index had rebounded....
Young File-Sharers Respond To Tough Laws By Buying a VPN
torrentfreak.com
Faced with the almost impossible task of physically restricting people’s activities online, during recent years authorities and copyright holders have sought to have legislation tightened up, to encourage citizens towards a path of “doing the right thing” through the fear of more and more serious consequences. In Sweden, the results...
For cold water corals, warming is beating acidification to drive a growth spurt
arstechnica.com
The release of excess CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation, and other processes doesn’t just affect our air; it also affects our oceans. The oceans absorb as much as 30 percent of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which lowers their pH. Thus, our emissions have...
On Privacy in Social Networks: The Provider's Perspective
www.readwriteweb.com
Editor's note: This is the second story in a three-part series by Alex Korth on privacy. Read the first post: On Privacy in Social Networks: What Drives Users? Most of the time, providers of social networks are commercial enterprises. Developing, bootstrapping and running a social network comes with very...
Mass Effect 3 Review - The sharp edge of hope
www.theverge.com
Mass Effect 3 is the fulfilment of a promise. It seemed so simple six years ago when BioWare originally announced the series. Take the decisions from every game, make them matter, and make them carry over. The unspoken insinuation was that persistent consequences would lead to a fiction that...
Rickroll Meme Destroyed By Copyright Takedown
torrentfreak.com
Anyone who has spent much time online, especially on Internet message boards of any kind, will be aware of Rickrolling. It’s an incredibly simple concept. The meme is based on a bait and switch, whereby someone posts a hyperlink which allegedly provides content relevant to the current discussion, but in...
52% of smartphone videos are watched at home as users become device-agnostic, study finds
thenextweb.com
Over half of smartphone videos are viewed at home, a new study reports. A partnership between online video tech company Tremor Video and consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates, it focuses on shifting content consuming habits in the US. Its key findings can be summarized in one sentence: “In essence, we’ve discovered that the...
Give this app your embarrassing photos and it blackmails you into getting things done
thenextweb.com
Much like GymPact, which lets users put cash on the line to encourage themselves to exercise, Aherk! is “goal-oriented self-blackmail.” Yes, for all you procrastinators out there, if you really want to get things done you know it takes motivation — and what’s better motivation than the threat of leaking...
One on One: Andrew Keen, Author of 'Digital Vertigo'
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Andrew Keen, author and technology reporter, discusses his new book, "Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us." He says the tragedy of the Web is the unthinking acceptance that free works. "It doesn't! The consequences have been very problematic. You have trashy products and...
Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place
arstechnica.com
A new report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development paints a grim picture of the world in 2050 based on current global trends. It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's, requiring 80 percent more...
Wish Your Droid Razr Had Maxx Battery Life? It Can!
techcrunch.com
When the Droid Razr Maxx first arrived I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was truly excited that Motorola found a way to make the Razr a plausible option — the original battery life on that thing is atrocious. On the other hand, I felt bad...
Facebook's Promoted Posts - a challenge for indie music businesses in the north
www.guardian.co.uk
With all the problems surrounding Facebook's launch on the stock market, initially a moment of glory but soon afterwards the opposite, it may come as little surprise that the bright entrepreneurial minds over in Silicon Valley have come up with a new method of extracting money from the pockets of...
60% of American parents secretly access their teens’ Facebook profiles
venturebeat.com
Teens, get ready to slam your bedroom doors and start pouting, because new research suggests that it’s common practice for your parents to spy on you by secretly accessing your Facebook account. In the U.S., 60 percent of parents access teens’ Facebook profiles without their knowledge, and moms are...
Amazon Yanks 5,000 Kindle IPG Titles In Fight Over Terms
paidcontent.org
Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) has turned off the buy button on nearly 5,000 Kindle titles from distributor Independent Publishers Group after IPG refused to capitulate to Amazon’s demand for better terms. The story was first reported by Publishers Marketplace and was confirmed by IPG President Mark Suchomel, who told me, “We’re...
Cyberrisks to U.S. electric grid a matter of timing
news.cnet.com
Co-chairman of North American Energy Standards Board committee says that unless digital signatures used in the industry are made more secure, the consequences could be disastrous. [Read more]...
The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder
www.theatlantic.com
Algorithms are shaping how we see the world around us, with big consequences. What a machine thinks we need to know can become what we fear....
@facebook.com e-mail plague chokes phone address books
arstechnica.com
The splash damage from Facebook's forced addition of @facebook.com e-mail addresses to users' profiles has carried over to phone contacts. Users who have given Facebook permission to sync information from the site to their phone's contacts have noticed that since the great e-mail address donation, legitimate e-mail address entries have...
Daily Report: Amazon Set to Shake Industry by Cutting E-Book Prices
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
The government's decision to pursue major publishers on antitrust charges has put the Internet retailer Amazon.com in a powerful position, David Streitfeld reports in Thursday's New York Times. The nation's largest bookseller may now get to decide how much an e-book will cost, and the book world is quaking over...
'60 Minutes' profiles threat posed by Stuxnet
news.cnet.com
Former U.S. intelligence officials and computer security experts warn of the potential problems and consequences that accompany this relatively new type of weapon in cyberwarfare. [Read more]...
DuckDuckGo: The default search engine for Anonymous
thenextweb.com
For reasons unknown, the famous and perhaps infamous hacker group Anonymous has released its own operating system, dubbed Anonymous-OS. And just as this news broke, I noticed something peculiar in one of the screenshots on the project’s blog. As you can see below, DuckDuckGo, complete with its playful name and goofy logo, is...
Facebook faces far-reaching consequences for tampering with user email addresses
www.theverge.com
Last week, after adding new granular privacy controls for showing or hiding email addresses you've listed, Facebook hid every email address you've ever added to your profile. Since your @facebook.com email address is the same as your Facebook.com URL (which anybody can see), Facebook didn't bother hiding that address....
A/B Testing: Why Is a Financial Times Subscription So Expensive?
www.wired.com
Wired has a big article on A/B testing this month, which makes a good point: Today, A/B is ubiquitous, and one of the strange consequences of that ubiquity is that the way we think about the web has become increasingly outdated. We talk about the Google homepage or the Amazon checkout screen, but it’s now...
Spanish Recording Industry Lobbyists Sue Professor For Highlighting Its Monopolistic Practices
www.techdirt.com
Yet again, we're left scratching our heads at the basic failure of recording industry lobbyists to think about the consequences of their actions. The latest is that Promusicae, the Spanish recording industry lobbying group that is associated with the IFPI (which, itself is associated with the RIAA) has sued Spanish...
As Facebook’s stock slides, the value of its Instagram deal falls below $1 billion
thenextweb.com
Facebook is off over 7% today, at the time of writing, with its stock valued at $29.42. That puts the total value of the company at nearly exactly the $63 billion mark. For investors in its initial public offering, that’s a rough price to stomach. Remember: many retail investors got...
Google Street View's WiFi snooping triggers renewed scrutiny in the UK
www.engadget.com
You remember that little Street View privacy problem that Google had back in 2010? Authorities in the UK sure do and Mountain View's gonna have some serious splainin' to do if the Information Commissioner's Office has anything to say about it. Big G initially denied that its cars were...
You're calling that a troll? Are you winding me up? | James Ball
www.guardian.co.uk
Real trolling can have charm – a childish, even funny act of provocation. It's certainly never used to include vicious abuse"When I use a word,' said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, of Wonderland fame, "it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." The words of...
Why Tomorrow's Apple Conference Call Is A Really Big Deal
www.slate.com
Apple has announced a conference call for tomorrow morning at 9 AM eastern time to discuss plans the company has for its large cash* stockpile. A recent Moody's analysis of corporate cash positions underscored why this is such a huge deal: Apple alone represents $64 billion or 36% of the...
Mathematicians prove that video games are hard to solve
www.theverge.com
Head-butting bricks, pouncing on Goombas, and sliding down flagpoles might not seem challenging to veteran Super Mario Bros. speed-runners, but what about to number-crunching computers? A group of mathematicians analyzed the computational complexity of Mario, Donkey Kong, the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon, to find out how difficult...
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