"That's mine!"
"No, it isn't! It's mine!"
Such is the dialogue I imagine the writers of "Glee" would pen to describe a slight kerfuffle between its own creators and Jonathan Coulton.
Coulton enjoys a bit of fame on YouTube. He writes tunes like "Code Monkey." He created the themes of Portal video games.… Read more
A year after file-storage site MegaUpload was brought down by U.S. law enforcement officials targeting piracy, flamboyant founder Kim DotCom has cut the ribbon on his new site, Mega.
"As of this minute one year ago #Megaupload was destroyed by the US Government. Welcome to http://Mega.co.nz," DotCom tweeted today.
Not long after, he followed up with a tweet trumpeting what he said was the site's immediate popularity: "Site is extremely busy. Currently thousands of user registrations PER MINUTE." And indeed, as of this writing the site was difficult to access at … Read more
It seems that people want to announce everything on Facebook, even their imminent demise.
30-year-old Eric L. Ramsey knew his time was up, so he took out his cell phone and posted on his Facebook wall: "Well folkes [sic] im about to get shot. Peace"
As NBC News reports, some of his friends thought he was joking.
However, shortly after his 3:15 a.m. post, he was fatally shot by a policeman.
The police were searching for Ramsey after he allegedly kidnapped and raped a woman at Central Michigan University, set a house ablaze, stole a sanitation … Read moreBitTorrent Surf is a new Chrome add-on (download) that turns the browser into a torrent client. While that's not an innovation on its own, this is the first time the company has built a complete torrent-manager for the browser.
In development for the past six months, according to the BitTorrent blog announcing the add-on, Surf lets you find torrents on the Web and download them.
Still in rough alpha, Surf goes beyond that. It allows for automatic torrent detection when you navigate to a site, and you can save favorite sites to "create your own combined engine," … Read more
In its most basic state, Facebook's nascent Graph Search is a structured search engine for finding people, places, photos, and interests on Facebook. But the third-pillar product, which surfaces information hiding in Facebook's secret garden, has depth that we're only beginning to understand.
Graph Search is a new paradigm in search that could make modern search giants start to look dated. It's also a powerful new vehicle for discovery. Ultimately, Graph Search is smart, original, and a foundational piece of Facebook's future as a relevant social network.
Let's talk about why.
1. Graph Search … Read more
Hardly a day goes by that some high-profile person -- along with countless people of lower profile -- has an account hacked. Weak password, stolen password, non-existent password -- whatever the cause, breaking into our digital lives is easy and getting easier.
That's why Google says passwords are no longer the best solution for sensitive accounts. "We contend that security and usability problems are intractable," write Google's Eric Grosse and Mayank Upadhyay, in an article to be published later this month in IEEE Security & Privacy. "It's time to give up on elaborate password … Read more
Earlier this week Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, defended her office's handling of the criminal case against Aaron Swartz, following news of the Internet activist's suicide.
Legal scholar and Internet activist Lawrence Lessig is having none of it.
On his personal blog in an emotional post titled A time for silence, Lessig slammed Ortiz's statement to the press, criticizing the prosecution of Swartz for helping "in part at least" to drive "this boy to his death."
Ortiz's statement is a template for all that is awful in what we … Read more
A 26-year-old graduate student named Matthew Riese has an ambition to create a business building custom hovercrafts. And he's making waves -- literally -- on the way to realizing that dream.
On Saturday, Riese's vehicle took a brief dip in the water and then spun out on a beach in San Francisco, giving tourists taking in views of the Golden Gate Bridge something entirely unexpected to photograph and show the folks back home. This wasn't the first time Riese's invention has made its way into San Francisco Bay. Here's a recording made last year of … Read more
As Manti T'eo and Lance Armstrong have discovered this week, you attain true credibility only when people make jokes about you.
Credibility -- true, natural recognition from the man in the tram -- is something Silicon Valley has craved for quite a few years.
Sadly, its first attempt -- Bravo TV's "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" -- delivered all the credibility of a rubber cowboy boot.
Here were vacuous people uttering vacuous thoughts in a vacuum.
It was not a hit. Indeed, Bravo says it currently has no plans to revive the corpse.
HBO, though, is undeterred by the interred. Indeed, it has ordered a pilot of a show currently named "Silicon Valley." … Read more
The loved ones of Internet activist Aaron Swartz are holding a memorial service Saturday in New York City "to celebrate his life and remember their beloved friend, sibling, child, and partner," according to a press release.
Swartz's suicide last week spurred criticism over the U.S. prosecutor's handling of his computer fraud case, with critics accusing the feds of unfairly trying to make an example of the 26-year-old hacker.
Swartz was accused of stealing 4 million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. The authorities claimed … Read more
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How tech is becoming an extension of you
Lindsey Turrentine and Brian Cooley talk to folks from Fitbit, Nest and Leap Motion about how humans interact with this next generation of tech.
