Low on funds, Reddit ups the ante and goes for the gold with new focus on Reddit Gold program

As Reddit grows it's becoming more difficult to scale, and the company needs funds in order to keep everything ship-shape. In lieu of increasing advertising, Reddit has ramped-up its little known Reddit Gold program.

As Reddit grows, so does its need to scale — and by scaling, we mean more server space. Reddit is and will likely always remain a free service, and the collective Internet easily takes the platform and everything it offers for granted. Yishan Wong, Reddit’s newly appointed CEO, disclosed that the site raked in 3.8 billion page views last month and boasts 46 million unique users, but behind the guise of its successes, Wong hints at the reality that Reddit can’t sustain its growth without money. The solution, Reddit announced, is to ramp up its for-pay Gold program.

Reddit has stuck to remaining relatively lean in terms of the ads served on the site. Its contextual ads are non-intrusive and are native to its platform, with the exception of the lone banner ad on the right. To Reddit’s credit, that ad more often than not recommends Subreddits or the occasional hilarious cat or dog picture. You’re not going to find an insurance ad, but instead ads for Busted Tees.

While Wong admits that advertising will “probably always be a part of our revenue,” the little known Gold program that the team at Reddit has never overtly promoted hasn’t realy taken off, and the platform wants to change that. Reddit Gold is typically gifted to other users for a few dollars per month as a gesture of appreciation. There are a few perks like receiving exclusive access to new features before public release, surfacing content from up to 100 Subreddits, access to a super secretive members-only lounge whose existence is neither confirmed nor denied by Reddit, and a few other goodies. But many Reddits aren’t even aware of the program’s existence, says Wong, and if you’re a long time Redditor, the service wasn’t doing much to entice you.

“We want to announce a recommitment to Reddit Gold, a program we’d like to expand and promote,” Wong wrote in the blog post.

The new features that will be added to the Gold program, as Wong announced, include:

• An oft-requested feature: Comment saving and filtering saves by Subreddit
• Ability to give Gold to other peoples’ comments you really like [or “gilding” as Reddit calls it]
• Some upgrades and fun stuff in the members-only lounge …[that may or may not exist]
• [Reddit] might add a remote-controlled office robot you can drive. Under construction.

Wong adds that this is just the start of the program and that Reddit Gold will be worth its weight. “We also want to make Reddit Gold a membership that confers real benefits that are worth what you pay for it, so we’re talking to some Reddit-friendly companies to provide special perks or access to stuff for Gold members.”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Withings releases the WS-30 Web-connected bathroom scale

Definitely helpful when determined to lose weight, the new Wi-Fi scale from Withings offers an easy tracking solution as well as motivation to hit goals.

Definitely positioned to compete with the Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi connected bathroom scale, Withings announced the U.S. launch of the WS-30 Bluetooth-connected wireless scale earlier this week. Similar to the Aria, the Withings WS-30 will automatically detect the person that’s standing on the scale based on previous weigh-ins. Basically, an entire family (up to eight people) can use the scale and they won’t have to select their name in the user interface. When a person steps onto the scale, the digital readout will quickly tell the person their weight in addition to tracking their body mass index (BMI). Different from the Aria, the WS-30 doesn’t offer the user an estimation of their body fat percentage.

When setting up the WS-30 for the first time, the scale can connect over Bluetooth to an iPod, iPad or iPhone. The Apple device will automatically share the home’s Wi-Fi network configuration, ideally so the user doesn’t have to hunt down the wireless password. As long as the Withings scale is within range of the Wi-Fi router, it will automatically upload a user’s weight and BMI to a personal user profile.

Using the Withings Health Companion mobile application for both Android smartphones and the iPhone, the user will be able to view a personal weight chart and track progress over time. Within the application, the user can set a weight loss goal as well. 

In addition, the mobile application can provide notifications on a regular basis as a reminder to step up on the scale. The development team at Withings has also designed the application to be compatible with other fitness applications. For instance, users can track Runkeeper’s exercise data, LoseIt! caloric intake data or Zeo’s sleep efficiency data within the Withings application. If a user wants to monitor their blood pressure, data from the Withings blood pressure monitor can also be fed into the application. According to the company, there are over sixty compatible applications that can feed fitness and health data into the main Withings application.

All weight information can also be viewed on Withings site through a personal login. By default, the weight data that’s transmitted from the scale is kept completely confidential. However, Withings encourages users to share the data with family or friends in order to provide extra motivation to hit weight loss goals.

Similar to the previous Withings scale, the WS-30 includes an option to share weight information on Facebook and Twitter. This feature can be setup for automatic publication each time a user weighs themselves or once a week. Users can also share weight information on those social networks manually through the user interface. 

Similar to the design of the Fitbit Aria, the slick glass top of the WS-30 can be easily cleaned with a damp cloth periodically. However, the device isn’t waterproof and hopping on the scale after taking a shower isn’t recommended  The Withings scale runs on four AAA batteries, comes with a one-year warranty and is only available in white. Identical to the Fitbit Aria in price, the Withings WS-30 bathroom scale is priced at approximately $130. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Use The Pirate Bay? You’re being watched, study shows

BitTorrent users are being monitored on a "massive" scale, according to a newly published study from the University of Birmingham, U.K.

If you’ve ever downloaded a hit movie, song, e-book, video game, or television show from The Pirate Bay, your activity was more than likely monitored and recorded within three hours of hitting “download” — even if you only did so once.

This frightening — if not entirely predictable — revelation comes from a newly published study (pdf), conducted over the past three years, by computer science researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Dr. Tom Chothia, the study’s lead researcher, unveiled the study’s findings at the SecureComm conference, which is taking place this week in Padua, Italy.

Dr. Tom Chothia

The study found that the IP addresses of peer-to-peer network users were being recorded on a “massive” scale by “copyright enforcement organisations, security companies, and even government research labs.” Fortunately for you pirates out there, the study also found that the tracking techniques used by these companies were often unreliable, which likely reduces their usefulness in lawsuits or other court proceedings.

To conduct the study, the team created their own software that mimicked a BitTorrent client and logged any “newly-published” torrent files to the Top 100 of each category on The Pirate Bay. They then monitored any connection made to their software. Within three hours, 40 percent of the trackers had connected to their client. The longest connection took 33 hours.

Dr. Chothia’s team found that trackers used two techniques to gather information about users of The Pirate Bay. The first is “indirect” monitoring, which uses “indirect clues that a peer is uploading or downloading some content,” according to the study. While use of “indirect” tracking is said to be “extensive,” previous research has found that this technique generates a “high rate of false positives,” going so far as to implicate “innocent devices such as printers and wireless access points as file-sharers, which later received cease-and-desist letters.” (Ha!)

The second technique is “direct” tracking, which allows trackers to collect “first-hand evidence” of illegal downloads.

“Direct monitoring can be active if the monitor establishes connections with peers to confirm that they are sharing a file, or passive if the monitor advertises its IP address to a tracker and waits for peers to connect to it,” reads the study. (Emphasis theirs.) While is method is far more effective, it is also much more expensive due to a need for more bandwidth and servers. The team says that it is currently unclear how prevalent direct tracking is.

Due to the inaccuracies of indirect tracking, Dr. Chothia says that it is unlikely that copyright owners could use the evidence gathered through such methods in court.

“All the monitors observed during the study would connect to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content and verify that they were running the BitTorrent software, however they would not actually collect any of the files being shared,” said Chothia in a statement. “Therefore, it is questionable whether the monitors observed would actually have evidence of file sharing that would stand up in court.”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com