Dropbox lets you win 100GB for sharing your story

Dropbox, the current top dog in cloud storage solutions, is celebrating its 100 millionth account by offering free cloud storage to people who share their Dropbox story.

If yours is one of the top ten favorite stories, you will get 100 GB of cloud storage for life. If it makes it in the top one hundred favorites, then you get a consolation prize of 10 GB for life.

So what is a Dropbox story? A high school football team in Utah uses it for studying game films and scouting reports. An elementary school music class uses it to share their music with students in other countries.

We mostly use it for cat pictures and stuff.

Head over here to check out other peoples’ submitted stories, and maybe you’ll get enough inspiration to put up one of your own.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

UK government also probing Huawei, says it currently has no security concerns

Following the House of Representatives damaging report, the UK has revealed it has also been examining Huawei amid security concerns.

The story following the House of Representatives report that Huawei and ZTE pose a security threat to US national security continues, as international governments examine their involvement with the Chinese companies and look for their own evidence of security risks.

In the UK, it has been revealed that a parliamentary committee has also been examining Huawei’s presence in the country for a while, as it’s a major supplier of network equipment to British Telecom, Vodafone, O2 and most other network providers, plus it’s responsible for much of the infrastructure behind EE’s 4G network.

Should any discrepancies be identified, the continued rollout of both fiber and 4G broadband could be slowed or halted. Both projects, and the relationship with Huawei, are well established, and disruption would be costly. The report is due to be published at the end of the year.

Quite apart from the network disruptions, there’s a political aspect at work too, as Prime Minister David Cameron had a meeting with Huawei’s CEO Ren Zhengfei last month, where a £1.3 billion deal was reached. One of the first stages is for Huawei to move its UK workforce into a new 140,000 square foot office building in April next year.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson, Derek Smith, has been talking to the UK press about the government’s view on both Huawei and ZTE ahead of the final report, which is notably different to that of the US House of Representatives.

Cyber Security Evaluation Centre

Smith told TechRadar.com that “the Cabinet Office is confident that there are no security concerns,” and “comparisons with the US don’t hold up with what we’re doing here. We have a very strict evaluation process for products from any country, not just China, coming into the UK.”

He then referred to Huawei’s Cyber Security Evaluation Centre, which opened in 2010, where hardware and software are tested to, according to Huawei “ensure its ability to withstand growing cyber security threats.” The closest the blurb gets to admitting the centre is more about checking Huawei’s equipment is the admission that it’s there to “build mutual trust in the area of cyber security.”

A 2011 report covering the center’s opening from notorious scare-mongers The Daily Mail is far less subtle, starting with the headline “New cyber attack fears over the Chinese ‘Red Army Lab’ being used for BT tests.” The piece goes on to quote numerous security experts who warn against using Huawei’s services, plus it reveals that Huawei has an identical copy of BT’s computers and telecoms system back in its Shenzhen head office, so it can evaluate new hardware. Thankfully, the system isn’t connected to the UK network.

For now, it seems Huawei’s operations in the UK are safe, but things will take a turn for the serious — not to mention politically embarrassing — should the forthcoming report not back up the Cabinet Office’s statements, as Huawei is already sitting at the table with its slippers on in the UK, instead of only knocking on the door in the US.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Why are we all so terrified of Google?

Google’s data-hoarding reputation may be well deserved, but is helping users connect the dots really such a bad thing?

Our story begins in a bar in Amsterdam in the summer of 2001. I was slightly inebriated and a heated conversation with friends turned into a debate on privacy and porn-surfing habits. I can remember being amazed when one of my friends claimed he didn’t surf porn on the Internet because Google might be recording his every perverted move.

He’s not a celebrity. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in a list of his porn preferences. Is Google going to use it to blackmail him? Maybe threaten to send his wife a list? Does anyone in the wider world care about his predilection for busty MILFs? (I don’t want to impugn his anonymous honor, so I should point out that’s my predilection, not his.)

More than a decade later, the Web is awash with scaremongering stories about how Google is turning us all into products it sells to advertisers. Our enjoyment of all these ostensibly free Google services, from Gmail to Google Maps to YouTube, must be tempered by the idea that Google is pimping us out behind our backs. What is it that people are so afraid of? What does everyone imagine that Google is going to do with our information?

What does Google record?

At the time I thought it was highly unlikely that Google would keep that kind of information. Turns out I was wrong about the likelihood of Google recording everything. The ability to compile detailed information on browsing habits has been central to its development as an advertising company.

Google compiles information about you from any of its services that you use. That can include Web search history, emails and contacts from Gmail, chat history, Google+ likes and posts, documents accessed in Google Docs, YouTube activity, Blogger and Picasa photos, posts, and comments, information on purchases through Google Wallet and Checkout, Google Voice data on numbers and call duration – the list goes on and on.

The search engine giant can keep that information indefinitely. You can find details on what Google does with your data on the Google website. That’s the big question, isn’t it? Google also started the Data Liberation Front so you can find out how to access and move your data in Google products.

What does Google actually do with your information?

There are basically two things Google does with your data:

1) It aggregates large quantities of anonymized data to improve its own and partner’s services

2) It uses your information to serve targeted advertising to you

Aggregated data allows companies to measure trends, analyze what people want, how they behave, and theoretically improve services or tailor them for specific demographics. Concerns generally focus on stereotyping, but companies always use stereotypes to classify consumers, at least with aggregate data from Google they are getting a more reliable picture.

Targeted advertising is about analyzing what you search for and talk about in emails and elsewhere and then trying to serve ads that cover those topics. If you talk about football incessantly then expect to see football-related ads popping up more often. If you consider that you’ll be served with advertising whatever you do, surely targeted advertising is better? At least it might be something you’re actually interested in.

With services like Google Now, the company is looking to tie all the information it is learning about you together in order to serve you useful information before you need it. How is that a bad thing?

The company is not behaving altruistically, but it is also not inherently evil simply because it compiles information on you. Google uses the information to improve its services so it can make more money.

The obvious answer for anyone concerned about Google compiling information on them is simply not to use Google services. Good luck finding alternative services that don’t do the same, though.

Why worry about Google specifically?

I have to assume that the panic and vitriol surrounding Google’s data collection is merely because it is the biggest search company around and so many people use its services. Obviously Facebook, Microsoft and many, many other companies are also doing their best to compile detailed data on your online activities.

You also have to consider your ISPs and the government. Whether Google is compiling data on you or not, you can be sure that the ISPs are and governments can easily compel them to hand that data over, although they rarely refuse requests anyway.

The real concern

According to comScore, Google accounted for 66.5 percent of all searches and that amounted to 11.4 billion searches – in April 2012 alone. All that information has to be stored physically somewhere. Huge data centers are storing vast quantities of data, often inefficiently, according to the New York Times. We are struggling to store data as fast as we produce it.

The carbon footprint of your digital life could be substantial, especially as cloud services really begin to take off. At least Google is aiming for efficient data centers. Still, the amount of electricity being consumed to power these data centers is rising steadily. That NY Times article also includes the claim that “data centers used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or roughly two percent of all electricity used in the country that year, based on an analysis by Jonathan G. Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University.”

When you consider how much of that data is junk, the whole thing just seems stupid. Royal Pingdom’s annual Internet stat roundup for 2011 revealed that 71 percent of all email worldwide was spam, that 48 hours of YouTube video was uploaded every minute, and that there are well over 100 billion photos on Facebook.

The privacy principle

I understand that privacy is a point of principle for some people. It’s not about what they are doing, which is usually inane and of no interest to anyone; it is about a perceived lack of respect. Our society is packed with double standards on this issue, though. Privacy laws are different from country to country. Are you concerned that the police can take a DNA sample from you, along with fingerprints and photographs, even if you are just arrested on suspicion of a “serious offense?”

Here in Scotland the police can take a DNA swab from you if “a police officer has reasonable grounds to suspect that you are committing, or have committed an offense”. I’m wary of that old argument that if you have nothing to hide you won’t mind giving up your privacy, but Google’s data compilation doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t get much more private than DNA does it? We’re already giving up our privacy in far more worrying ways than online activity.

Google and the rest of the data mining, online advert gang are merely adhering to a long established trade-off, namely that we accept advertising in return for free services. I don’t think it’s a bad deal, and if you’re really concerned about privacy you need to look beyond Google.

[Image credit - Network server room: .shock/Shutterstock]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

I think, therefore I choose: How brain control will change how we do everything

Learning to read brainwaves will open the door to everything from choosing the radio station with your thoughts to unmasking spousal infidelity.

A few years ago, I wrote a very short story called Aha! (You Are a Cheating Spouse). In it, a cheating husband gets caught when his wife employs a “toy” headset to detect the P300 response in his brain to a photo of the woman with whom he was having an affair. His involuntary brain response proved that he knew the woman.

The story is fictional, but the P300 response is real. It’s your brain’s response to certain stimuli, and it’s automatic. Researchers use P300 to allow “locked in” patients — who have lost control of their bodies — to use a brain-computer interface (BCI) to type.

For example, patients watch a scrolling list of letters and numbers, and when they see the one they want, their brain has an “aha!” response that the BCI detects, and thus the BCI selects the right letter for the person.

Today, BCIs are pretty dorky; they have more wires than you can count, and require grease on your head to ensure a good signal. Emotiv and NeuroSky are cooler consumer-oriented devices, but they don’t seem to work as well as the dorky options. Still, BCIs are just sensors for you brain, and as I’ve previously written, sensors are going to proliferate everywhere.

In the early days of personal computers, many people wondered what anyone could possibly do with a computer at home. You might be wondering the same thing right now about putting a BCI on your head.

A few brain waves go a long way

To really simplify matters, to be effective a BCI needs to be able to notice a change in your brain’s activity. It doesn’t have to read your mind. It can ignore 99.9999 percent of what happens in your brain, as long as it accurately reacts to a few key changes.

There are numerous situations in which your brain generates a recognizable change in activity. To name a few, when you:

• realize you have made a mistake

• recognize a face or object

• become bored

Let’s start with a few possible applications, which represent a tiny portion of the entrepreneurial opportunities.

I type pretty fast with three fingers, and there are many occasions on which I hit the wrong key. When this happens, my brain sort of goes “oops.” Imagine if your keyboard could know exactly when you thought “oops.” It could highlight the letter you just typed, and then can show you some likely replacements. When you see the right letter, you could think, “That’s it.”

Congratulations. You just corrected a typo with your thoughts.

The tactic of error detection has some interesting possibilities. Imagine that football teams put sensors inside players’ helmets that record each “oops” moment and synchronizes it to video footage of the game. An athlete and his coach could then review the “high” lights of these events, rather than a tedious replay of the whole game.

Hands-free control

A person wearing a BCI could use his or her brain to select the right answer from several possible choices. This would be especially useful in situations when it is difficult to use your hands, such as driving your car.

Here are some questions – posed by a software program – you could answer like this:

“Would you prefer the heat to be higher, lower, or off?

“Do you want to call your wife at work or on her cell?

“Would you like to listen to Pandora or NPR?”

Total and complete privacy

A BCI is the only device I can name with the potential to offer total privacy to its user.

You could sit across from a person at a table, answer questions from your BCI like I just described, and the other person might have no idea. You could remain motionless and silent, but your instructions could put actions in motion far outside the room in which you are sitting.

With (a little) practice, you could learn to activate your BCI at will. If you are having coffee with a good friend who is going on and on, you could cancel your next appointment without interrupting your friend, or even revealing that any such conflict exists.

As BCIs become more integrated with existing databases and technologies, you will enjoy a growing ability to access information without others being aware that you are doing so.

Learning made easier

Huge amounts of capital are pouring into online learning, and this creates an opportunity to do things at home (wear a BCI) that students probably wouldn’t do in a classroom. You don’t learn much when a lesson gets too easy or too difficult. Bored students start to daydream. Overwhelmed students get completely lost.

But a BCI could indicate how engaged you are. Combine this type of feedback with any sort of individualized teaching approach, and you end up with better learning.

When your attention wavers, an online course could try another approach. If the new approach doesn’t work, it would try another until you get back in the ideal zone. If this never happens, it could ask your parent, colleague or educator to intervene.

Since 2008, I’ve managed a Brain-Computer Interface group on LinkedIn, and many of the top researchers in the world participate. But most are mainly focused on the science; few are interested in exploiting the commercial possibilities. This area is filled with entrepreneurial opportunities, and probably worthy of your attention.

Bruce Kasanoff is a speaker, author and innovation strategist who tracks sensor-driven innovation at Sense of the Future. Kasanoff and co-author Michael Hinshaw teamed up to explore more of the opportunities unearthed by disruptive forces in Smart Customers, Stupid Companies.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Digital publisher BlueToad claims to be unwitting source of leaked Apple UDIDs

BlueToad, a digital publishing company, has said it was the unwitting source of last week's leaked Apple UDID codes.

The story of the Apple Unique Device Identifiers, or UDID codes, leaked by hacking group Anonymous last week, has taken another turn. This time, rather than blanket denials, someone has owned up to being the unwitting source of the codes themselves. And it’s not the FBI.

NBC reports that the database of one million UDID codes came from BlueToad, a digital publishing company based in Orlando, Florida, that has a library of nearly 150 apps — primarily niche print magazines converted over for digital use — for both the iPhone and the iPad inside the iTunes App Store.

BlueToad’s attention was drawn to the missing UDID’s by security researcher David Schuetz, who documents his sterling work uncovering the source of the leak in a blog post.

He contacted BlueToad and told them of his suspicions, and the company launched an investigation, resulting in a 98-percent correlation between BlueToad’s database and that of the leaked UDIDs.

BlueToad’s CEO, Paul DeHart said “that’s 100-percent confidence level, it’s our data.”

Subsequently, DeHart published a statement on the company’s blog, saying that “a little more than a week ago, BlueToad was the victim of a criminal cyber attack, which resulted in the theft of Apple UDIDs from our systems. Shortly thereafter, an unknown group posted these UDIDs on the Internet.”

BlueToad is now working with law enforcement agencies in the ongoing investigation into the leak. To help put its business partners and the public’s minds at ease, it says it has fixed the vulnerability that allowed the UDIDs to be stolen, and has stopped storing them inside its database. BlueToad had already followed Apple’s directive to cease reporting UDIDs from its apps.

Case closed?

It would certainly seem so, as both the FBI and Apple have stated the leak didn’t come from them, and BlueToad seems convinced it’s the source. Taken at face value this way, the story now reads that hackers affiliated with Anonymous and working under the Operation AntiSec name, stole UDIDs from BlueToad’s computers, then published them saying they came from a larger file obtained from an FBI Agent’s laptop.

Agent Christopher Stangl was implicated due to his involvement with operations against Anonymous and LulzSec, as proven by his presence during a conference call that Anonymous claimed to have eavesdropped back in March.

After all, the easiest and most logical explanation is most likely true.

However, those who don’t like to connect the dots in this way will undoubtably have alternative theories. For example, the FBI could be working with BlueToad (although we can’t imagine for what reason), or the company is taking the fall — it is after all, completely innocuous — at their behest.

Even David Schuetz isn’t convinced this is the end of the story, and questions whether BlueToad is the original source, or a secondary leak.

A member of Anonymous, seemingly unfazed by the recent developments, took to Twitter to say simply “FBI-notebook – There is still no evidence. Stay tuned.”

For now at least, we’d say the file on this one needs to remain open, but on hold.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

James Cameron: Avatar 4 will be a prequel

According to director James Cameron, Avatar 4 will be a prequel that sets up the second arc of the franchise's story line.

There have been some conflicting reports of late on what exactly director James Cameron has in mind for the future of his Avatar movie franchise. In June, comments made by Avatar star Sigourney Weaver led us to believe that Cameron was planning to shoot three Avatar sequels back to back to back. Then, last week, Cameron’s long-time collaborator and Avatar co-producer Jon Landau told the Courier Post Online that while Cameron was planning to shoot both Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 in short order, Avatar 4 was not yet on the man’s short term schedule.

While that leaves us wondering when/if Avatar 4 might hit theaters, we can confirm that James Cameron wants to make a fourth Avatar film. At a recent press event to promote the September 10 release of a new Blu-ray Collector’s Edition of Cameron’s massive hit movie Titanic, MTV asked the director what plans he has for the future of the Avatar series. Though Cameron is a bit vague on the specifics of Avatar 4, he makes it plain that the inevitable movie would be a prequel and that it would kick off the second arc of Cameron’s overarching Avatar storyline.

“I have an idea for a fourth,” Cameron said. “I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world.”

“Because when we drop in, even in the first film in Avatar 1, as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization. That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating Star Wars, but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films.”

That’s an ambitious plan, especially given that Cameron is talking about a film that is still hypothetical and won’t even enter pre-production for at least four years. Then again, Cameron goes on to tell MTV that making Avatar sequels should be far, far easier now that the first movie has laid the technological and canonical ground work for Cameron’s Avatar universe. “It was a hideously complex process to make [Avatar] and a lot has been said about that, but we don’t want [the sequels] to be done in the same prototypical way as the first one, we want it to be a much smoother workflow just for creativity reasons,” Cameron added.

That’s great news for Avatar fans, but we have to wonder if perhaps this far-reaching scheme isn’t a bit overly ambitious. What happens to this franchise if Avatar 2 is a flop? Will Cameron drop his planned third and fourth Avatar films, or will the director be forced to make them regardless of fiscal gain simply because he’s already put so much effort into mapping out the tale he wants to tell? We have faith in James Cameron — even his early work under Roger Corman is surprisingly watchable — but we worry that the man may be biting off more than even his massively popular, intensely wealthy jaws can chew. 

Then again, like we said, Avatar 4 is a long, long ways off. It seems a bit premature to worry about a film that won’t materialize until the end of the decade, so instead let’s all start grilling Cameron about the far more imminent Avatar 2. Isn’t it odd how little we know about that film compared to the hypothetical fourth Avatar movie?

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Twitter beats Facebook on mobile ad revenue, says eMarketer

Online market research firm eMarketer estimates that Twitter's mobile ad revenue will surpass Facebook's mobile ad revenue in 2012. But 2013 will be a different story.

The latest report on mobile revenue from online marketing research firm eMarketer won’t console Facebook investors, at least not until next year. According to its report, Twitter will beat Facebook in mobile ad revenues through this year.

EMarketer estimates that Twitter will earn $129.7 million in mobile advertising revenues this year, while Facebook will earn just $72.7 million.

Strategizing an effective mobile business model is becoming increasingly imperative for companies, as the volume of mobile phones on the market skyrocket alongside the number of mobile devices owned by households. By 2015, tablet sales are estimated to reach 248.6 million units and smartphone sales are expected to reach 1.048 billion units, according to Transparency Market Research.

Twitter has already found its footing in mobile advertising. Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, boasts that Twitter was developed with mobile in mind. As the company began selling mobile ads earlier this year, just weeks into its mobile ad program, the company garnered more ad revenue from its Promoted Tweets program on its mobile platform than on its desktop app.

Likewise, Facebook’s mobile ads have seen higher click-through rates than its desktop application. From a study conducted by SocialCode, the click-through rate for Facebook mobile ads was found to be 0.79 percent, while desktop, News Feed-based ads garnered just 0.327 percent of click-throughs. With a click-through rate on mobile over two times higher than on its desktop app, Facebook charges higher CPMs for mobile, which on average is $7.51.

Facebook has been slower to capitalize on its mobile strategy compared to Twitter, with even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attmitting that mobile is Facebook’s toughest challenge yet. Unlike Twitter, Facebook was designed for the desktop, and as we already know, translating a desktop app into a mobile app requires dramatic structural changes to compensate for the different screen size. Adding to the complication, a study by Trademob found that up to 40 percent of clicks on mobile ads have been found to be accidental clicks, in part due to the small screen size of mobile devices in comparison to the width of your fingers.

Fortunately, according to eMarketer, Facebook is forecasted to surpass Twitter in mobile advertising revenue by next year when Twitter’s mobile advertising revenue is expected to amount to $272.6 million, and Facebook’s mobile ad revenue will reach an estimated $387 million. At the moment, however, Facebook even trails Pandora, which is currently bringing in $226.4 million in mobile ad revenue. But Facebook is expected to surpass the music streaming service in 2013 to become the second-highest mobile revenue generating company in the study, next to Google, which brings in a chart-topping $750 million.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Graveyard tech: QR codes to bring cemeteries alive

Now here's an interesting idea: QR codes in cemeteries linked to a webpage telling the life story of the deceased.

If you own a smartphone, the chances are you’ve scanned at least one QR (Quick Response) code up to now, whether it was in a magazine, on the Web, on a poster or inside a retail store.

And if a new use for the codes being tried out in Denmark takes off, you might also find yourself scanning a QR code in a cemetery before too long.

A graveyard in the city of Roskilde has started to use the codes to help commemorate the deceased, offering more information than found on a traditional headstone. Printed on a porcelain plate and attached to a small stone, the QR codes can be found in the ground beside the headstones. Scan it with a smartphone and you’re taken to a website of the deceased showing their photo alongside a summary of their life.

Roskilde resident Dorthe Frydenlund decided to place a QR code by the grave of her father, Brent. “As a family it means a lot when you are here and feel the need to commemorate Dad,” Dorthe told the BBC.

She added, “It’s not meant as a comfort, more an opportunity for other people to learn his life story. It’s a good way for my son to remember his grandfather.”

The service costs 100 euros ($123), with not just photos and text but also audio snippets and videos included on the commemorative webpage if desired.

Niels Kristian Nielsen, director of Denmark’s largest gravestone manufacturer, thinks QR codes in cemeteries will one day be commonplace.

“It’s a good way to tell the story of a person. And we all have a story. Both the farmer, the director, they all have a story. And also it makes a visit to the graveyard much more interesting,” he said.

A church council in the Danish town of Holbaek is also looking to use the codes to help provide more information to visitors, with plans to upload the obituaries of local monks who once lived in a monastery close to the town.

“There are lots of people who are important and I think their story and what they have done with their life is important,” the council’s Hanne Korsby commented. “I think it’s very important for the next generation to have this memory.”

With little more than a date of birth and death, and possibly a heartfelt or possibly witty epitaph, the regular information-poor gravestone may soon be getting a serious makeover with the inclusion of a smartphone-ready scannable QR code.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Yippee ki-yay, law maker: Bruce Willis may sue Apple over ownership of his digital music collection

Bruce Willis may be contemplating legal action against Apple over the ownership of his digital music collection.

At first, this appears to be a slightly ridiculous story that exists only because it features a movie star and the world’s most talked-about technology company, Apple. However, there is a little more to it than that, but first here’s the tabloid-friendly story:

Bruce Willis, star of many an action film including most recently, The Expendables 2, is said to be gathering a legal team to potentially fight Apple in court, over the ownership of his digital music collection.

This doesn’t refer to his own discography from the 80s and 90s, but to songs he has purchased through iTunes. Willis wants to pass on the presumably extensive collection — which according to The Sun contains songs by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin — to his children, Scout, Tallulah and Rumer after he dies.

Except Bruce has done what many of us haven’t — he has read the iTunes terms and conditions, which under the “nontransferable license” section clearly says that “licensed applications” (in this case, songs), cannot be used on any Apple device you do not own or control. You aren’t really purchasing the music through iTunes, but the rights to listen to it, which can’t be passed on to others.

His legal team is in the process of setting up a trust to hold his music collection, but if the report is accurate, he’s also readying them to go to court over the situation.

Save us, Bruce Willis!

For those not in the know, The Sun is one of the best-known tabloid newspapers in the UK, and as such a degree of sensationalism in its stories should be expected; but Bruce’s frustration will be felt by a great many others too.

Attempting to bequeath digital media isn’t as easy as it is with a physical collection of music, books or films. An estate attorney for a New Jersey law firm told the Wall Street Journal that despite digital collections being recognized as “an asset and something of value, the law is light years away from catching up.”

This won’t help Bruce Willis, who has the added problem of agreeing to the terms and conditions when he signed up with iTunes. It’s hard to argue about something when you’ve already accepted the consequences.

Setting up a trust is a way to circumvent the troublesome ownership issue, which according to the blurb on one such site advertising such a service, “manages your digital assets and allows those who you preselect to access them without violation of the license terms and without potential liability.”

While this is probably the route Willis will end up taking, one must wonder what would happen if a media personality with clout stood up in court with the intention of changing the rules concerning digital content ownership. Could Willis, who has said “I think I could save the world five or six more times” before retiring, be that person?

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Have sword will travel; Hands-on with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Konami and Platinum Games continue the Metal Gear franchise with the story of a man with a sword, and his penchant for slicing everything in the way.

Although once nearly dead, Konami and Platinum Games’ Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is back with a, well, a vengeance. I have to admit that I have had grave misgivings over this game, but they were all due to the history of the property rather than the game itself. In 2010, Kojima Productions cancelledRising after it came out that the development team was having trouble finding the right balance and couldn’t settle on a firm direction. It sounded like it was a mess. Then Platinum Games came in an saved it, but that just meant it was going to be released, not necessarily good.

The important thing to know about Rising is that the game is based on the mechanic of sword combat. Everything else is just details. Thankfully the mechanic is a good basis to build a game on.

Rising is a full-on action game. The stealth mechanic that defines the Metal Gear series has been abandoned in favor of a much faster paced experience. The main character, Raiden, is a shark; he can never stop moving or the game is dead. There is always a very direct path for you to follow – or at least that was the impression the demo gave, and that fits with the style Platinum Games has shown in its previous releases.

There is a frenetic pace to Rising. There are a few collectibles that make exploring the limited areas beyond the direct path worth exploring – including a handful of enemies hiding in cardboard boxes ala the classic Metal Gear hiding spot – but for the most part the game wants you pushing forward at all time.

You have two ways to attack. The first way is through button strikes. You have the traditional heavy and light attacks along with a parry and jump, but the real feature that deserves attention is the “blade mode.”

When you hold the left trigger or L2 button, the game slows down. With the right analog, you then control the arc of the swing. At first it takes a moment to realize the amount of control you have with this method. If you slowly move the indicator, you then need to pull the stick back then let go to swing. It feels clunky and awkward, but that is not how you are meant to play.

The idea is to attack quickly. Once you grasp the fundamentals, you can initiate the blade mode and quickly dissect an enemy. There is a counter that appears and you can track the number of cuts you make, which later helps to factor in to your overall score for the level. If you are fast enough, you can quite literally cut a human enemy into dozens of pieces in seconds. The game is also incredibly gory, and cutting a human to bits or just doing a single, powerful stroke opens them up and shows you their insides. Metal Gear Rising in an incredibly gory and grotesque game, but it is so over the top that it doesn’t really seem as horrific as you might think, and it is actually fun to try to get as many strokes in as possible.

But human enemies are not the only ones you will face, and you don’t even need enemies to slice and dice things for that matter. You will frequently face off against mechanized enemies, including many from the Metal Gear Solid series. Finding their weak spots is key, and once you do they can be chopped to bits. Some enemies will also require a secondary means to defeat them, like the rocket launcher sub-weapon you have, but it seems to be a set up to finish the enemy with the sword. You can also lay into just about anything from cars to pillars, tanks to tables.

Movement is also a major part of the game. Raiden has the ability to do a “ninja run”, which means that by holding down the proper button and running, he will begin a parkour-like sprint over any obstacles in his way. This, like the manual sword attack, uses up energy, which can be recharged by collecting energy packs dropped by defeated enemies.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is not Metal Gear Solid 5 (or even Metal Gear Solid 2.5, as the game takes place after MGS 2 but before MGS 4), but it does have a place in the series. It is a fundamentally different game from the other Metal Gear titles, and the stealth-action has been abandoned for something completely different, but despite that it still bears the influence of Hideo Kojima, who remained on the game as executive producer.

The sword mechanic is what will win over or lose fans. As a devotee of the Metal Gear franchise I may be a bit biased, but I personally thought it was exceedingly fun and I look forward to playing more of it in the future. The over the top action may feel a bit like a button mashing hack-n-slash to some, and in many ways it is, but the finely tuned sword mechanics mixed with the Metal Gear mythology make this game worth paying attention to as its February 19, 2013 release date nears.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Trebuchet Toaster sends toasts launching onto your plate

This Ivo Vos-designed toaster starts your breakfast on a high note... literally.

There’s this Nutella commercial on TV right now that tells a story of a mom who can’t get her kids to come to breakfast until she exclaims she’s putting the hazelnut spread on their toasts. Oh, please. If you wanted your children to run straight to the breakfast table every morning, you’d own a Trebutchet Toaster, an interesting device that catapults toasts right out of the machine when they’re ready. Could you imagine the kind of launch parties you can have with your kids every day? Even adults would be entertained.

This concept toaster is unfortunately not a real live product just yet, but the design is definitely unique. The machine sits an an angled position, allowing you to set the projectile height before awaiting the golden brown toasts. It’s like learning to play with the physics behind Angry Birds combined with breakfast, and of course, real life.

Trebuchet Toaster is part of designer Ivo Vos’ concept of a full breakfast tool set called The Brunch. Included in the design is the Bread Slicer, a device to help prevent you from cutting yourself with a bread knife, the Teapot which can record the height at which you can pour tea from, and a placemat that outlines where you should put your plate and utensils.

“The Brunch is a series of consumer products that celebrates the mundane,” says Ivo Vos. We couldn’t agree more.

No word on whether The Brunch breakfast set will ever hit stores, but if it does, we could only imagine the experiments with how far one can catapult their toasts and still catch it on their plate. That, or how horrible the future of food fights will be now that you have a mechanical device to send food flying.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Saab’s “Phoenix platform” rises from the ashes

The bankrupt Swedish car company's last new design could form the basis of a partnership between former owner Spyker and China's Youngman.

The story of Saab, enigmatic Swedish carmaker and bane of Kurt Vonnegut, is starting to sound like a soap opera, mixed with a zombie movie. After the company went bankrupt in 2011, its remains were purchased by an Asian conglomerate, which plans to produce electric cars under the National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS) brand. Now, Saab’s former owner, Dutch boutique carmaker Spyker, and a Chinese firm are making their own bid for some of Saab’s remains.

That Chinese firm is none other than Youngman, the same company that tried to buy Saab from Spyker before General Motors nixed the deal. Spyker and Youngman may not have the Saab trademark, but they do have the company’s last design. The appropriately-named “Phoenix” platform could underpin a new Dutch-Chinese car in the near future.

“Since the regretful demise of Saab in 2011, we have been investigating the possibilities to continue our cooperation with Youngman,” Victor Muller, CEO of Spyker and former CEO of Saab, said in a press release. “With this framework agreement, Youngman and Spyker lay the foundation for an intense cooperation whereby we will pursue the objectives we each had in mind when forging our cooperation as partners in Saab.”

Under a joint venture called Spyker Phoenix B.V., the two companies hope to build a range of premium cars based on the Phoenix platform, which was supposed to form the basis for nearly all future Saabs. Spyker will do most of the engineering work and sell the cars under its brand name.

However, Spyker does not own the Phoenix; it lost the rights to all of Saab’s designs after the latter was sold to the NEVS conglomerate. That’s where Youngman comes in. In addition to providing the venture with cash, Youngman still has a non-exclusive license for the Phoenix platform. The Chinese company took the license as collateral when it loaned Saab money in 2011. That loan was obviously never repaid. S

till, NEVS technically owns the Phoenix platform, and it might not like seeing another car with its design driving around. In his statement, Muller said that, whether NEVS pays off Saab’s debts or not, the license granted to Youngman would still be valid. He added that Spyker Phoenix may try to purchase the platform outright if the opportunity arises.

If the deal does fall through, Youngman and Spyker will still have a joint venture. Under Spyker P2P B.V., the two companies will work together to launch Spyker’s ultra-luxury SUV, the D8 Peking-to-Paris, which was supposed to debut in 2009. Youngman will provide the cash needed to get the D8 into production.

Saab may be gone, but its cars may live on under the NEVS and Spyker banners. Like seeing a beloved friend resurrected as a zombie, it might be too much for the Saab faithful to bear.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Kred evolves into Kred Story, a dashboard for digestible social analytics

Kred has shed its complicated analytics dashboard and launched Kred Story, an easy to navigate social influence analytics dashboard.

Behind every influencer is a story waiting to be shared, and Kred believes that its users are more than just a number. Kred, the influence measurement service, has redesigned itself as Kred Story, a comprehensive and easy-to-use analytics dashboard that displays its users’ social media activity.

It can often be difficult to make sense of charts, graphs, and numbers that may not necessarily mean anything to you. With this in mind Kred, is evolving how it displays a user’s influence measurement. Through an interface reminiscent of Pinterest’s tiles — a design trend adopted by many sites — anyone can browse through the visual history of a Kred user’s influence around the Web. There’s a simplicity with navigating tiles that captures a user’s attention in lieu of the list that the Kred dashboard once sported. Despite the changes, Kred continues to remain transparent about what figures make up a user’s Kred score through the tile, “Total Influence Points.”

“Kred Story is the culmination of many years of research by PeopleBrowsr. It shifts the emphasis from scores and data to people and their content,” said Andrew Grill, CEO of Kred, in a statement. “Kred Story gives everyone access to social data in an intuitive format that enhances their social media experience. It makes influence metrics useful for all of us.”

Kred now offers 16 types of tiles. With one, you can now browse the stories that a user has shared on Twitter and the number of retweets that those posts have received. Another allows you to find the Influence Kred score, a number identifying the user’s social media influence (FYI: it’s out of 1000 possible points); and the Outreach Level, which is measured by how generous users are with sharing content. You’ll also find a tile for important metrics about the number of individuals that have interacted with the Kred user, a tile dedicated to displaying the people around the social media sphere that have mentioned the user, and a tile for hashtags that have been used in conversations — just to mention a few.

Displaying a user’s social media activity in a visual manner should appeal to many users. But what we found to be particularly useful with the new changes is the demographic information on the right of the dashboard, which presents information about how the social media community is interacting with the Kred user, and the types of communities that each user belongs to. There is one caveat, however; Kred Story in its current design only presents Twitter analytics, but integration for LinkedIn and Google+ may arrive by the end of this year.

Kred Story sheds the impression that analytics has to be displayed in a complicated manner, and offers a simple solution that just about anyone can understand. “[Kred’s] beautiful visual format shows what people think is most influential about them and how they engage in social media,” said Lee Hammond, vice president of Digital for Interscope Records, who got a sneak peak at Kred Story. “Kred Story is a big step forward for social media influence measurement.”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Darksiders II review

In building a bigger world for Darksiders 2, Vigil forgot to make a better story.

Darksiders is the coolest game about unemployment ever made. In most games about losing your job, the goal is blowing up the corrupt government that turned you into a violent killing machine. Boring. In Darksiders though, you play as War of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, wrongly accused of ending life on Earth before the Rapture was supposed to kick off. Not boring. Your goal is revenge on the people who cost you your job. War’s simple to understand so it’s easy to take up his cause. His skills are specified! How’s he supposed to find work now? Riding through the ruins of reality, kicking angel and demon ass alike until someone pays: Now that’s motivation. It just makes sense that Darksiders II should be cooler, right?

This time you’re playing as Death. Guy has even more reason to be pissed about jumping the Rapture gun. No more humanity means no more need for a Reaper so he’s bound to be angry and powerfully motivated. The sequel is also physically bigger than its predecessor. War was confined to Earth, but Death jumps between many worlds. The land of the dead, the forested Forgelands where God had people making mountains—Death gets around. There are also more tools to play with. He can’t ride ten feet on his green fire-spewing pale horse without stumbling on a pile of new armor and scythes.

It isn’t cooler though. It’s bigger, it feels better to play, but not much is at stake in Darksiders II and as one drab dungeon gives way to another, the game reveals itself to be pretty, well made, and empty.

The first problem is Death himself. Decaying WWE wrestler looks and cheesy mask aside, Death is lithe and a joy to steer around. Jumping up platforms, running across walls, and slinging around twin scythes is lusciously kinetic. Even swimming, hard to pull off in action games, feels effortless. How you beef him up through experience depends on taste. There are two evolving paths for abilities, one based around physical moves and another around undead-summoning spells. Even as you load up on new skills and gear, Death feels easy to use throughout and that’s no bad thing. Personality, however, isn’t his strong suit.

With the exception of the occasional wry quip, Death is a personality-less cypher. Darksiders II is inappropriately named—It’s not a sequel but a series of parallel events wherein Death is working to clear War’s name. For people who’ve played the original, there’s no tension; we already know War is just fine. For neophytes though, Death doesn’t come of as driven. He wants to help his brother, but we never hear why or see any passion from him. War went out looking for the people that wronged him, but Death is usually just chasing Maguffins for characters he meets along the way. Hints that he’s haunted by his role aren’t explored in detail. Death’s history is the subject of a few thin monologues. He’s a reactor, not a catalyst, impotent rather than authoritative.

Darksiders II’s worlds mirror Death in most ways—They’re architecturally sound but soulless. Developer Vigil said that it abandoned Earth as a setting because it wanted to unshackle its creativity. Instead of one dense world that’s engagingly twisted and familiar, Vigil made four worlds that feel like generic fantasy templates. Does every single wall in the land of the dead need five skulls on it? The dungeons Death saunters between are full of brain-massaging puzzles, but lack character. Figuring out how to trigger a switch with a well-thrown bomb is gratifying in the short term, but without a coherent sense of history or place, it’s no more revelatory than assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

Vigil might have been better off making Darksiders II its own game rather than a sequel. They’re infrequent but the game does have moments that hint at a world full of characters worth exploring. Near the beginning of the game, you stumble on an old golem made out of rocks and plants. Who his master was, why he had to wait in this spot; his background is lost because he’s been there so long, but he does know that he’s hungry. His diet consists of rare glowing rocks. This is just set up for having you gather some of the game’s hundreds of optional doodads, but the real reward is getting to know the countryside Death’s exploring a little more. Darksiders II doesn’t expand on these rare opportunities. None of these quests add to the universe established in the first game, and Death doesn’t change because of them.

Conclusion

Corruption, the tainted remains of another of Death’s brothers, is a fitting villain for the game. He’s an all-consuming void eating away at the worlds Death visits on his aimless journey. Darksiders II is bigger, and in many superficial ways better, than Darksiders, but it doesn’t do the same job as well. War’s adventure was about something, silly as it was. Death’s adventure is just the barest excuse to run and jump on stuff while swinging a scythe. For some that might be enough, but like the difference between a job and a career, Darksiders II could have been far more fulfilling.

Score: 6.5 out of 10

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Bane’s origin was cut from The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises was almost an origin story -- not for Batman, but for antagonist Bane.

Though Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is widely revered as a great movie, there are few that would claim that it lived up to the film’s pre-release hype. Of course, it should be noted that to live up to said hype the movie would have had to cure cancer and rescue dozens of puppies from a burning orphanage, but that’s neither here nor there. Fans collectively seem pretty content with the way Nolan opted to end his Batman trilogy, especially because he’s one of the few filmmakers willing to introduce a major character into a comic book movie without wasting valuable screen time by retelling an origin story that’s available to anyone with an Internet connection or a sizable comic book collection.

Or is he?

According to a recent GQ interview with The Dark Knight Rises’ costume designer Lindy Hemming, it seems that the original plan was to rehash the origin of the film’s main villain, Tom Hardy’s Bane, but that these scenes were cut from the final version of the film. Hemming offers the following description:

There were two things about his clothes. The first thing is that they should be pretty undefined in date and where they came from, other than perhaps north of Asia.

The other thing that you should have seen during that sequence is him being injured in his youth. So one of the fundamental things about his costume is that he has this scar from the back injury. Even if he hasn’t got the bulletproof vest on, he still has to wear the waist belt and the braces. In that scene in the prison, where he’s learning to fight the same way Batman learned to fight, he’s wearing an early version of his waist belt. It’s showing support, but it’s not the finished one he eventually wears. He’s also wearing an early version of his gas mask, all glued together.

If you look at the film, unless they’ve cut it—and I’m sure they haven’t—there’s a whole early section for Tom Hardy where he’s fighting and being taunted by people. He’s got chains on him, and he’s standing on a wooden thing while people are attacking him. And in that scene, he’s wearing a much more ragged, primitive version of the mask.

When it was revealed to Hemming that these scenes were, in fact, excised from the final cut of The Dark Knight Rises, she expressed sadness, before dropping another hint at how Nolan had originally planned to tell the Bane origin tale:

Well that’s an awful shame, but I suppose you have to cut things. I won’t elaborate on it too much, because it isn’t in the film, but there was another section that showed you why he had the mask and where it came from.

As Bleeding Cool points out, with the film’s 3-hour-plus runtime the inclusion of Bane’s origin likely would have made the flick far too long for mortal attention spans. Likewise, the site also notes that anyone with a functional browser already has access to Bane’s origin in full. Wikipedia offers a useful synopsis, though it basically boils down to “Bane was raised in prison, educated in a vast range of subjects, eventually rose to control the various prison gangs around him, then got hooked on a synthetic drug that massively boosted his strength and endurance. Also, this one time, he totally broke Batman’s spine.” Nolan’s vision of Bane seemingly ditches the steroid allegory, though the rest of it seems like a perfectly valid backstory for the character seen in The Dark Knight Rises.

While these origin scenes did not appear in the theatrical version of Nolan’s film, it’s entirely possible that they may show up on the eventual Blu-ray release of the movie as bonus material. Obviously we can’t guarantee anything, but with Nolan moving away from making movies about a crazy vigilante who dresses up like a bat and punches people in the face it makes sense that the movie’s producers would want to market any extraneous scraps from the movie that were left on the cutting room floor.

Sadly, it also makes sense that the aforementioned producers might hold off on releasing this footage alongside the initial home video release. A trilogy box set of Nolan’s Batman movies is almost inevitable, and what better way to promote such a presumably pricey compilation than by telling the world that this collection is the only way to see the deleted scenes we’ve been discussing?

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com