She wondered whether Google had actually Googled the name before it used hers -- and wished it had
Casey Baumer got her first message about Google Docs roughly two years ago.
A friend called and asked her, "'Uhh, did you know your name is the Google Docs name?' And I had no idea what she was talking about," the 20-something food stylist tells Business Insider.
Google uses "Casey Baumer" as the randomly generated dummy name on all of its document prompts.
A Google spokesperson says that the company decided to use that name instead of something like John Smith or Jane in the spirit of creativity, but the decision ultimately caused the real Casey Baumer to receive dozens of angry or confused messages.
After that initial phone call, Baumer started hearing more and more about her "alter ego" from friends and acquaintances
Sometimes it was kind of funny, so she tried to ignore it or would respond by explaining the situation. But things really got weird about a year ago when she discovered a heap of messages in her "Other" inbox on Facebook.
Strangers were accusing Casey of hacking into their Google accounts or secretly corresponding with their significant others.
While some of the messages made Baumer laugh, the instances where people seemed really mad made her uncomfortable, and it became a hassle to keep explaining to everyone what was going on.
"If you actually look at the documents, instead of just reading the name, it's clear that none of it's real," Baumer says. Google user a filler text, called "lorem ipsum," for the bulk of the documents, so it's just gibberish. "But people clearly don't really read it!"
The constant barrage of messages became frustrating and creepy.
Someone even started writing a fictional story about her.
She wondered whether Google had actually Googled the name before it used hers -- and wished it had.
She got so sick of the messages that she posted a couple of statuses on Facebook imploring friends to help her get in touch with someone at Google.
Her most recent status caught some steam (including leading Business Insider to reach out to both Baumer and Google).
A spokesperson said the company's in the process of updating its template names.
Finding your way around town isn't as complicated as it used to be thanks to our trusted smartphones. As is the case with most aspects of our lives, smartphones have made navigating from one place to another incredibly simple.
Nearly every smartphone made today, even budget ones, feature a GPS sensor thus shifting navigation apps towards mobile phones was a natural move for the industry. We come from a time when you had to carry around a separate navigation device when embarking on a longer journey, but that was still unmeasurably better than fumbling around with a map for which you had to have a degree in cartography to actually get anywhere. Thankfully those days are behind us and today we have more elegant solutions such as TomTom’s GO navigation. Being on the market for quite some time, the folks at TomTom know a thing or two about navigation, so it will be interesting to see how their improved app has turned out.
Unlike previous versions of TomTom’s app, this one is actually free to download. In order to attract more users to their platform, TomTom offered it free for the first 50 miles every month. This approach to TomTom GO is allowing users to experience every feature for a limited amount of time. And by limited amount of time we mean an allowance of 50 miles per month. Unfortunately, the miles don’t transfer from month to month so it’s better to use them up before they expire.
What happens when you reach the mileage limit you might wonder? Users will still have access to route planning, overview, and even traffic information, but turn-by-turn navigation and its goodies such as traffic avoidance and speed camera alerts will be off limits. Although there are many free alternatives out there, we think this is a great way to showcase the product to potential customers. The 50-mile allowance isn’t a barrier that you have to overcome, rather it represents a comfortable zone for testing out the product and all its features. Additionally, there is no time limit so you aren’t pressured into buying it just because the trial period is expiring.
Subscription stuff aside, how does TomTom’s interface perform in the real world? Well like all their products, TomTom GO provides users with a ton of options and unprecedented clarity when navigating big cities. 3D buildings provide reference points so you can actually plan your turns ahead and the traffic information is just a lifesaver on any trip. It is a feature we want to single out simply because it can save you hours on any journey. The downside is that you have to be connected, but it’s an obstacle we are willing to overcome. Those venturing into areas without internet connection will be glad to know that maps can be downloaded for offline use. Just make sure you have enough free space and download the maps before setting off because they are quite hefty and best downloaded over Wi-Fi. Route planning includes the standard settings such as shortest, fastest, most eco-friendly, etc.
TomTom’s latest smartphone app isn’t free like some competing apps, but it’s certainly worth every penny thanks to countless features and regular map updates. Features such as live traffic info just aren’t that robust on free apps and TomTom just feels more refined in every aspect. For those that travel often or commute between cities, TomTom GO is definitely a worthwhile investment.
The new site collects every website you’ve been on, everything you’ve searched and many of the things you’ve done with your phone
There's a lot to see
Google has launched a new site that shows absolutely everything it knows about its users. And there’s an awful lot of it.
The new My Activity page collects all of the data that Google has generated by watching its customers as they move around the web. And depending on your settings that could include a comprehensive list of the websites you’ve visited and the things you’ve done with your phone.
Google has long allowed its users to see the kinds of information that is being generated as people use the company’s products, including letting people listen in on automated recordings that it has made of its users. But the new page collects them together in a more accessible – and potentially more terrifying – way than ever before.
The page shows a full catalogue of pages visited, things searched and other activity, grouped by time. It also lets people look at the same timeline through filters – looking at specific dates, which go all the way into the past, and specific products like Google search, YouTube or Android.
When users open up the page for the first time, pop-ups make the case for why it has been launched and why Google collects quite so much data. You can use the site to “rediscover the things you’ve searched for, visited and watched on Google services” and help “delete specific items or entire topics”.
All of the information that’s used is how Google uses its ads services. By tracking people around the internet it can tailor those ads – but people can use the same site to opt out from the tracking entirely, or just delete information that they would rather wasn’t used for advertising.
Users aren’t automatically opted into the interest-based advertising tools, despite heavily rolling out the feature. The site asks people instead to turn it on – encouraging people to do so because it makes adverting more helpful and muting any specific ads that people don’t want to see.
The hugely successful game has struggled since it was launched under the pressure of its massive popularity.
That hasn't been helped by reported intentional attacks on the game's servers, which have seen malicious people send huge amounts of requests in an attempt to bring down the game.
Developer Niantic has promised to make the game more stable, and has stopped it being rolled out across the world until it is fixed. But neither seems to have fixed the game yet.
Sometimes it will be down entirely, and if you try these tips and find the app doesn't load properly repeatedly, then it might be worth giving up for a while.
But here are some things worth trying.
1) Get your timing right
There are certain times when it's impossible to get on, and others when it's far better. They seem mostly to correlate with when people in the US are playing, and presumably putting more load on the servers. That means that you'll find it far easier, in the UK and Europe, to play in the morning and early afternoon local time; once 3 or 4 o'clock comes around, and people in the US start having their lunch breaks, the game becomes mostly inaccessible.
2) Mobile data vs WiFi
Try WiFi when you can. The problems are mostly with Niantic's servers, it seems, and so the speed of your connection shouldn't theoretically matter. But anecdotally it does seem easier to get on when on WiFi, presumably because all-important delays are avoided.
3) Know when to close the app
If the game doesn't load quickly, it probably won't load. The two initial loading screens can hang and go slowly when the game isn't working properly, but they'll usually load in less than a minute. It seems that if the game is taking an unusual amount of time to get through them, you're probably not going to get through. In those situations it's best to close the game — entirely, by shutting it from the multitasking screen on your phone — and then try again.
The new Prime Minister was labelled the villain of the year by the internet industry, and has come to stand for many of the most invasive parts of the modern surveillance state
Britain's Home Secretary Theresa May passes a police officer as she arrives in Downing Street
Theresa May might have some fans but her time in the Home Office will also be remembered less favourably – by the privacy campaigners and internet industry that named her “villain of the year”.
Ms May’s time in the Home Office has been marked by conflicts with the biggest technology and internet companies over laws that would see them forced to break their own security to help surveillance. That has come despite an apparent commitment to liberal ideals in her campaign speeches, leaving many campaigners worried that she might actually pursue more aggressive policies despite her public statements.
"Theresa May has been a draconian Home Secretary, introducing the wrong policies at the wrong times for the wrong reasons,” said Harmit Kambo, campaigns director at Privacy International. “Instead of responding to public alarm about the Edward Snowden disclosures by rolling back state surveillance powers, she has instead ratcheted it up with the Investigatory Powers Bill, the most intrusive surveillance legislation of any democratic country.”
The Investigatory Powers Bill – which in its earlier form was stopped by the Liberal Democrats – looked to hand huge new surveillance powers to bodies including the police and spies. It seems to force companies to weaken their own security technology to let those authorities in, and compels internet companies to store huge amounts of data on their customers’ browsing histories, which can be accessed at any time by the Government.
Ms May’s pushing of that bill put her in a bitter and unprecedentedly public dispute with many of the biggest technology companies – including Apple, Facebook and Google – over whether the law should be passed. Campaigners argued that it was a law that allowed more intrusive surveillance than anywhere else in the world.
Her commitment to strengthening surveillance and rolling back privacy could be further strengthened by the fact that Brexit could allow the UK to opt out of many of the European laws that safeguard people’s privacy, campaigners have warned.
The first test of Ms May’s approach to surveillance will come when European courts decide on a dispute between the Government and two MPs, David Davis and Tom Watson, who argue that the DRIPA legislation that is used to spy on Britons is unlawful. The court is expected to give a preliminary judgement later this month, though it will not in itself be binding.
Campaigners say that it will be important to watch how Ms May responds to the judgement, which could compel the Government to change some of its surveillance practices. Though the UK has voted to leave the EU, it is bound to accept its judgements until it actually does so and the degree to which the new Prime Minister accepts them could define her time in power.
In the longer term, how Ms May chooses to deal with the various parts of European law that will be scrappable could define her approach to privacy. EU rules have been a restraining factor on Ms May’s Home Office, serving as a framework that protects against certain data protection abuses and forces companies to look after information in particular ways.
“If [Theresa May] goes for a full-on exit from European law, we’re going to have some really fundamental challenges,” said Jim Killock, the executive director of the Open Rights Group. “What happens to data protection law? Do we have the same standards, or ones that are similar or weaker?”
The same questions can be asked of electronic privacy regulations, net neutrality, safe harbour rules and copyright. “Nearly everything we do that’s digital is European law at the moment”, notes Mr Killock, and all of them can be re-written once Britain leaves the EU.
In the wake of all of those decisions, we could encounter problems because there will be a rush towards getting rid of regulations rather than preserving or re-writing them. The UK parliament has shown little interest in deciding on laws governing digital rights and privacy, potentially meaning that those decisions will be made by civil servants instead.
Much of the surveillance and anti-terror policy that Ms May has been criticised for began under the Labour government that preceded her. And the Home Office has gradually moved towards an approach of assuming that the best amount of surveillance is also the most, and that it is best limited by legislation that decides how exactly it can be used rather than how much data can be stored.
That will mean that the new Home Secretary is likely to keep much of the same surveillance policy, whoever is chosen to take on Ms May’s now vacant job.
Campaigners have also pointed to reasons for believing that Ms May’s new and public commitment to liberal policies could signal a switch towards being more open about privacy.
“While in opposition she opposed the introduction of ID cards,” said Mr Kambo. “As Home Secretary she has reformed police stop and search powers and has strongly supported equal marriage. She has also recently indicated that she will not pursue earlier plans to pull out of the European Convention of Human Rights, admittedly only because the majority of Parliament opposes withdrawal, not because she does.”
Over two thirds (68 percent) of consumers across Europe are interested in using biometrics when making a payment, especially when integrated with other security measures.
Half of Europeans (51 percent) said that biometric authentication for payments could create a faster and simpler payment experience than traditional methods
Over two thirds (68 percent) of consumers across Europe are interested in using biometrics when making a payment, especially when integrated with other security measures.
According to new research from Visa, 73 percent see two-factor authentication as a secure way to confirm an account holder. Responses were collected from more than 14,000 European consumers in the UK, Sweden, Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland.
Online retailers have the opportunity to gain the most from biometric change as 31 percent of people have abandoned a browser-based purchase due to the payment security process.
“This study proves that there is a strong desire on the part of consumers to have secure AND frictionless user experiences when interacting and transacting online. The desire, however, might not match up with the reality of the situation. Physical biometrics such as fingerprints, selfies and voice authentication are seen by some as the ‘holy grail' in user authentication, but they aren't fool-proof, and there are other challenges that may block their widespread adoption in non-face-to-face interactions,” said Robert Capps, VP at NuData Security in emailed commentary to SCmagazineUK.com.
“Passive biometric solutions identify suspicious activity in a completely passive and non-intrusive way by understanding how a legitimate user truly behaves in contrast to a potential fraudster with legitimate information. So, even if the fraudster has your spoofed fingerprint, and all of your account information, organisations can look at your behavioural events, biometrics, device, geography and other layers to determine if you are the real actor behind the device or fingerprint,” Capps continued.
Half of Europeans (51 percent) said that biometric authentication for payments could create a faster and simpler payment experience than traditional methods. A third (33 percent) are content and take comfort in the fact that their details would be safe even if their device was lost or stolen.
Over half (53 percent) prefer fingerprint authentication to other forms of biometric authentication for payments. Nearly a quarter (73 percent) are as comfortable with fingerprint authentication as they are with PINs.
Far fewer consumers say they prefer voice or facial recognition as a payment method whether physically shopping in a store (12 percent) or shopping online (15 percent). In the UK, the figures fall for voice or facial recognition as payment forms to eight percent for physical store shopping and 15 percent for online shopping.
“As we move into the future, consumers will have an increasing number of choices in how they pay. Just as the payment behaviour will change dependent on where you are and on what device you are shopping, the methods of authentication will need to be use-case appropriate. While biometric forms of authentication offer significant opportunities to achieve the right balance between convenience and security, they are not the only answer. In the future we will see a mix of solutions dependent on the purchasing situation. By adapting our standards to recognise these technologies as valid forms of authentication now, we can help provide the environment for payments to continue to take place securely, conveniently and discreetly,” said Jonathan Vaux, executive director of innovation partnerships at Visa Europe.
NEXT flagship device from Samsung could be full of power, but might also break your budget too.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 - could this be Samsung's next powerhouse device?
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 could be set to be the company's dearest handset to date, according to reports that suggest a huge price tag could be coming.
Reports have claimed that the upcoming phablet could start at an eye-watering €849 (£715), significantly more that many of the other competing devices on the market today.
This includes the company's existing flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7 edge, which is currently available on Samsung's online store for £639.
This is also far more than the iPhone 6S Plus, Apple's top device, which is available to buy for £539 from the company.
Samsung is hoping for great things from the Galaxy Note 7
Sources speaking to Sammobile said that a price drop is likely soon after release, but that this high initial cost will put off many customers.
However those who choose to shell out that amount of money, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 does look like it will provide a huge step up from current devices.
This includes possibly featuring an entirely new build of Google's Android software, which was spotted in a benchmarking test last week.
The as-yet-unknown 'Android 6.1' does not fit in with any current Android naming or release structure, as Google has confirmed that the next version of Android, version 7.0, will be named Nougat.
Also set for the Galaxy Note 7 is a powerful Samsung Galaxy Exynos 8893 chipset and 4GB of RAM.
The device will also do away with a fingerprint scanner, replacing it with an iris scanner that looks into your eyes to unlock your phone, and can also give access to protected apps, files, folders, and documents.
Another rumour claims that the Galaxy Note 7 will come with some amazing new translation features.
The new Dictionary and Speaking services will let users quickly translate words from one language to another, as well as finally introduce a reliable text-to-speech functionality.
In 40 years, the internet has morphed from a military communication network into a vast global cyberspace. And it all started in a California beer garden
In the kingdom of apps and unicorns, Rossotti’s is a rarity. This beer garden in the heart of Silicon Valley has been standing on the same spot since 1852. It isn’t disruptive; it doesn’t scale. But for more than 150 years, it has done one thing and done it well: it has given Californians a good place to get drunk.
During the course of its long existence, Rossotti’s has been a frontier saloon, a gold rush gambling den, and a Hells Angels hangout. These days it is called the Alpine Inn Beer Garden, and the clientele remains as motley as ever. On the patio out back, there are cyclists in spandex and bikers in leather. There is a wild-haired man who might be a professor or a lunatic or a CEO, scribbling into a notebook. In the parking lot is a Harley, a Maserati, and a horse.
It doesn’t seem a likely spot for a major act of innovation. But 40 years ago this August, a small team of scientists set up a computer terminal at one of its picnic tables and conducted an extraordinary experiment. Over plastic cups of beer, they proved that a strange idea called the internet could work.
The internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle.
The internet is the opposite. It’s everywhere, but we only see it in glimpses. The internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and email, but its essence is always elsewhere.
This feature of the internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. But it doesn’t. The internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success.
The people who invented the internet came from all over the world. They worked at places as varied as the French government-sponsored computer network Cyclades, England’s National Physical Laboratory, the University of Hawaii and Xerox. But the mothership was the US defense department’s lavishly funded research arm, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) – which later changed its name to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – and its many contractors. Without Arpa, the internet wouldn’t exist.
As a military venture, Arpa had a specifically military motivation for creating the internet: it offered a way to bring computing to the front lines. In 1969, Arpa had built a computer network called Arpanet, which linked mainframes at universities, government agencies, and defense contractors around the country. Arpanet grew fast, and included nearly 60 nodes by the mid-1970s.
But Arpanet had a problem: it wasn’t mobile. The computers on Arpanet were gigantic by today’s standards, and they communicated over fixed links. That might work for researchers, who could sit at a terminal in Cambridge or Menlo Park – but it did little for soldiers deployed deep in enemy territory. For Arpanet to be useful to forces in the field, it had to be accessible anywhere in the world.
Picture a jeep in the jungles of Zaire, or a B-52 miles above North Vietnam. Then imagine these as nodes in a wireless network linked to another network of powerful computers thousands of miles away. This is the dream of a networked military using computing power to defeat the Soviet Union and its allies. This is the dream that produced the internet.
Making this dream a reality required doing two things. The first was building a wireless network that could relay packets of data among the widely dispersed cogs of the US military machine by radio or satellite. The second was connecting those wireless networks to the wired network of Arpanet, so that multimillion-dollar mainframes could serve soldiers in combat. “Internetworking,” the scientists called it.
Internetworking is the problem the internet was invented to solve. It presented enormous challenges. Getting computers to talk to one another – networking – had been hard enough. But getting networks to talk to one another – internetworking – posed a whole new set of difficulties, because the networks spoke alien and incompatible dialects. Trying to move data from one to another was like writing a letter in Mandarin to someone who only knows Hungarian and hoping to be understood. It didn’t work.
In response, the architects of the internet developed a kind of digital Esperanto: a common language that enabled data to travel across any network. In 1974, two Arpa researchers named Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf published an early blueprint. Drawing on conversations happening throughout the international networking community, they sketched a design for “a simple but very flexible protocol”: a universal set of rules for how computers should communicate.
These rules had to strike a very delicate balance. On the one hand, they needed to be strict enough to ensure the reliable transmission of data. On the other, they needed to be loose enough to accommodate all of the different ways that data might be transmitted.
Vinton Cerf, left, and Robert Kahn, who devised the first internet protocol.
“It had to be future-proof,” Cerf tells me. You couldn’t write the protocol for one point in time, because it would soon become obsolete. The military would keep innovating. They would keep building new networks and new technologies. The protocol had to keep pace: it had to work across “an arbitrarily large number of distinct and potentially non-interoperable packet switched networks,” Cerf says – including ones that hadn’t been invented yet. This feature would make the system not only future-proof, but potentially infinite. If the rules were robust enough, the “ensemble of networks” could grow indefinitely, assimilating any and all digital forms into its sprawling multithreaded mesh.
Eventually, these rules became the lingua franca of the internet. But first, they needed to be implemented and tweaked and tested – over and over and over again. There was nothing inevitable about the internet getting built. It seemed like a ludicrous idea to many, even among those who were building it. The scale, the ambition – the internet was a skyscraper and nobody had ever seen anything more than a few stories tall. Even with a firehose of cold war military cash behind it, the internet looked like a long shot.
Then, in the summer of 1976, it started working.
If you had walked into Rossotti’s beer garden on 27 August 1976, you would have seen the following: seven men and one woman at a table, hovering around a computer terminal, the woman typing. A pair of cables ran from the terminal to the parking lot, disappearing into a big grey van.
Inside the van were machines that transformed the words being typed on the terminal into packets of data. An antenna on the van’s roof then transmitted these packets as radio signals. These signals radiated through the air to a repeater on a nearby mountain top, where they were amplified and rebroadcast. With this extra boost, they could make it all the way to Menlo Park, where an antenna at an office building received them.
It was here that the real magic began. Inside the office building, the incoming packets passed seamlessly from one network to another: from the packet radio network to Arpanet. To make this jump, the packets had to undergo a subtle metamorphosis. They had to change their form without changing their content. Think about water: it can be vapor, liquid or ice, but its chemical composition remains the same. This miraculous flexibility is a feature of the natural universe – which is lucky, because life depends on it.
The flexibility that the internet depends on, by contrast, had to be engineered. And on that day in August, it enabled packets that had only existed as radio signals in a wireless network to become electrical signals in the wired network of Arpanet. Remarkably, this transformation preserved the data perfectly. The packets remained completely intact.
So intact, in fact, that they could travel another 3,000 miles to a computer in Boston and be reassembled into exactly the same message that was typed into the terminal at Rossotti’s. Powering this internetwork odyssey was the new protocol cooked up by Kahn and Cerf. Two networks had become one. The internet worked.
“There weren’t balloons or anything like that,” Don Nielson tells me. Now in his 80s, Nielson led the experiment at Rossotti’s on behalf of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major Arpa contractor. Tall and soft-spoken, he is relentlessly modest; seldom has someone had a better excuse for bragging and less of a desire to indulge in it. We are sitting in the living room of his Palo Alto home, four miles from Google, nine from Facebook, and at no point does he even partly take credit for creating the technology that made these extravagantly profitable corporations possible.
The internet was a group effort, Nielson insists. SRI was only one of many organizations working on it. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t feel comfortable popping bottles of champagne at Rossotti’s – by claiming too much glory for one team, it would’ve violated the collaborative spirit of the international networking community. Or maybe they just didn’t have the time. Dave Retz, one of the researchers at Rossotti’s, says they were too worried about getting the experiment to work – and then when it did, too worried about whatever came next. There was always more to accomplish: as soon as they’d stitched two networks together, they started working on three – which they achieved a little over a year later, in November 1977.
Over time, the memory of Rossotti’s receded. Nielson himself had forgotten about it until a reporter reminded him 20 years later. “I was sitting in my office one day,” he recalls, when the phone rang. The reporter on the other end had heard about the experiment at Rossotti’s, and wanted to know what it had to do with the birth of the internet. By 1996, Americans were having cybersex in AOL chatrooms and building hideous, seizure-inducing homepages on GeoCities. The internet had outgrown its military roots and gone mainstream, and people were becoming curious about its origins. So Nielson dug out a few old reports from his files, and started reflecting on how the internet began. “This thing is turning out to be a big deal,” he remembers thinking.
What made the internet a big deal is the feature Nielson’s team demonstrated that summer day at Rossotti’s: its flexibility. Forty years ago, the internet teleported thousands of words from the Bay Area to Boston over channels as dissimilar as radio waves and copper telephone lines. Today it bridges far greater distances, over an even wider variety of media. It ferries data among billions of devices, conveying our tweets and Tinder swipes across multiple networks in milliseconds.
The Alpine Inn Beer Garden today – still a place where Silicon Valley crowds gather.
This isn’t just a technical accomplishment – it’s a design decision. The most important thing to understand about the origins of the internet, Nielson says, is that it came out of the military. While Arpa had wide latitude, it still had to choose its projects with an eye toward developing technologies that might someday be useful for winning wars. The engineers who built the internet understood that, and tailored it accordingly.
That’s why they designed the internet to run anywhere: because the US military is everywhere. It maintains nearly 800 bases in more than 70 countries around the world. It has hundreds of ships, thousands of warplanes, and tens of thousands of armored vehicles. The reason the internet can work across any device, network, and medium – the reason a smartphone in Sao Paulo can stream a song from a server in Singapore – is because it needed to be as ubiquitous as the American security apparatus that financed its construction.
The internet would end up being useful to the US military, if not quite in the ways its architects intended. But it didn’t really take off until it became civilianized and commercialized – a phenomenon that the Arpa researchers of the 1970s could never have anticipated. “Quite honestly, if anyone would have said they could have imagined the internet of today in those days, they’re lying,” says Nielson. What surprised him most was how “willing people were to spend money to put themselves on the internet”. “Everybody wanted to be there,” he says. “That was absolutely startling to me: the clamor of wanting to be present in this new world.”
The fact that we think of the internet as a world of its own, as a place we can be “in” or “on” – this too is the legacy of Don Nielson and his fellow scientists. By binding different networks together so seamlessly, they made the internet feel like a single space. Strictly speaking, this is an illusion. The internet is composed of many, many networks: when I go to Google’s website, my data must traverse 11 different routers before it arrives. But the internet is a master weaver: it conceals its stitches extremely well. We’re left with the sensation of a boundless, borderless digital universe – cyberspace, as we used to call it. Forty years ago, this universe first flickered into existence in the foothills outside of Palo Alto, and has been expanding ever since.
STARING at your phone screen in the middle of the night to quickly check a Facebook notification or skim-read a few emails can leave you with fuzzy vision – or temporary blindness in one eye. This is why.
Blindness due to using bright screens in bed was covered in New England Journal of Medicine
If you've ever checked your smartphone in a dark room – or during the middle of the night – you might have noticed it can temporarily make your vision blur.
Reading a text message or double-checking your Facebook notifications in the night can play havoc with your eye sight.
You may have noticed when you roll-over after ogling your screen that you can see from one eye but have temporarily lost sight from another.
Your eyes will readjust and your vision will return, but it can be a little frightening.
Harsh blue light can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep
Doctors recently detailed the phenomenon as part of a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A 22-year-old woman told her GP that she was having trouble seeing from her right eye at night, but after a swathe of tests, the doctor determined that she was perfectly healthy.
The same frustrating result was thrown up when a 40-year-old woman underwent the same tests after reporting she had difficulties seeing from one eye for up to 15 minutes in the morning.
According to the final findings in the New England Journal of Medicine: "When the women went to an ophthalmic clinic, specialists took detailed histories and figured out that the women were using their phones in the dark before falling asleep and right after waking up, respectively.
Night Shift mode will "shift the colours in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum"
"After asking them to record their symptoms for a few days, they said that the vision problems were always in the eye opposite of the side they were laying on.
"The doctors suspected this was because if a person lays on, say, their left side, their left eye is partially blocked by the pillow and adapts to darkness, while the right eye adapts to the light and does most of the viewing.
"Which is fine until you look away from the phone and, with both eyes uncovered in the dark, the right, light-adapted eye is perceived to be blind until it readjusts to the darkness.
"They tested this theory on themselves and also had trouble seeing out of one eye for a few minutes.
"They said that although people look at their phones with both eyes the majority of the time, we are increasingly attached to the damn things and their brightness is only increasing so they expect doctors will see more and more cases like this."
You have probably experience the temporary blindness described in the doctors' report.
And it looks like things are only going to get worse.
According to the doctors, the displays on modern smartphones and other portable gadgets are only getting brighter, and our bedtime reading habits are getting worse.
If you decide to use your device in a dark room, turn down the brightness on the screen.
Apple recently tried to address this issue with the introduction of its Night Shift mode, which shifts the colours in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum.
Harsh blue light can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep.
F.lux – a hugely popular Windows and Mac app that gradually changes your display lighting based on the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day – works on desktop and laptop devices.
The lightweight app, which hopes to reduce eye strain in users who work at night or in dimly-lit areas, has been downloaded more than 15 million times, according to the company.
Service will also have disappearing messages, Snapchat-style
First it was WhatsApp, now it seems Facebook Messenger is about to up its security levels.
First it was WhatsApp, now it seems Facebook Messenger is about to up its security levels. The social network is beginning to test a new feature called secret conversations that will offer end-to-end encryption and disappearing messages.
The new feature means the messages can only be read on the device of the recipient - so a conversation you start from your smartphone can only be read there, even if you later log into Messenger on your PC or tablet - and it will be optional rather than the default.
“Secret conversations can only be read on one device and we recognise that experience may not be right for everyone,” Facebook said in the announcement.
Messages sent in top-secret conversations can also have a timer set for each message, controlling how long the message is visible.
There are other things to consider. At present, secret conversations don’t support GIFs or videos, along with other extras Facebook has added to Messenger over the years.
It’s a limited test at the moment, but Facebook said it will be more widely available throughout the summer.
Five other features Facebook has added to Messenger over the years:
Calls:
If you thought Facebook Messenger was just about sending funny images and texts to your friends, you’re wrong. You can call people over Facebook Messenger, using your wifi connection to get free phones calls with your contacts. If they don’t pick up, you can leave them a voicemail, which they can then pick up from their web browser. it works for group calls too, allowing you to create a conference call at the touch of a button.
Video calls:
Who needs Skype or facetime? Facebook also offers the ability to make video calls to your contacts, as long as they are using Messenger.
Location sharing:
Sending your location to friends can be done with a tap. No more guessing or giving cryptic directions (“past the house that has black fencing and looks like something out of Breaking Bad” doesn’t cut it).
Chat bots:
The newest thing to hit your social network is an army of chat bots that will help you with everything from ordering flowers to getting the news. It’s as simple as striking up a conversation with a bot.
Payments:
Facebook has been testing ways to send and request money through its Messenger service, eliminating the need to use a service such as Paypal to pay back your friends or family. Peer to peer payments are a US only thing for now.
Bitcoin, long held as the standard for instability, is becoming a safe refuge when compared to the post-Brexit pound
The British pound has become more volatile than Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has long been thought to be the world’s most unstable currency – moving from being worth $2 to $1,137 in the last five years. But that wildly volatile currency is now becoming a safe refuge when compared to the fluctuations in the pound.
For a brief period this week, Bitcoin’s 10-day historical volatility – a measure of how much its price has been changing – dropped below that of the British pound.
Sterling became incredibly volatile straight after the UK voted to leave the European Union on 23 June. Its value dropped sharply as soon as the results were announced, sending volatility up by more than double, and that instability has stayed high ever since.
In contrast, Bitcoin has enjoyed a relatively stable period in the days since the Brexit vote.
That has come at the same time as a huge number of people are looking to trade Bitcoin, apparently because it represents a safe haven when compared to the pound. Exchanges told Bitcoin that had seen volumes more than double in the wake of the EU referendum, particularly from people in the UK.
Bitcoin has long been regarded as one of the most unstable things to trade in the financial markets. Because of the relatively small amount of them, and the controversies and shocks that the currency has endured in its short life, it has a tendency to rise and fall dramatically by huge amounts very quickly.
The digital currency’s price was especially volatile in the run-up to and after the referendum. Its price dropped sharply the day before it was held, but began to rise again on the morning that results came in.
A teenager's iPhone “exploded” as he travelled on the Eurostar, burning and scratching his arm.
“Horrible smell”: Arthur Smith, 19, with his ruined iPhone 5s. The top-left corner of the battery is badly melted
Arthur Smith, 19, was returning from touring Europe by motorbike when the two-year-old iPhone 5s “blew up”.
The trainee lawyer from Streatham is now considering legal action against Apple. He told the Standard: “I was asleep on my way home when my iPhone started to ring.
“I woke up and was getting funny looks from people because you’re not supposed to use phones in the carriage.
“The screen was completely blank but I went to turn it off and it was so hot. It let off this horrible smell like burning sulphur and the screen popped out and scratched all the way up my arm.
“It felt like being scalded by a burning piece of metal. It just made this huge popping sound, it was pretty scary. I panicked a bit because it was smoking and the other passengers were getting worried so I wrapped it up in a napkin to try to make it stop.”
Mr Smith suffers from haemophilia, which affects the blood’s ability to clot. When he arrived at St Pancras station after the train journey last Wednesday, he was seen by an emergency medical officer, who applied balm to his arm.
He said: “If it had happened the day before when I was on my motorbike at 100 miles an hour it could’ve been fatal.
“I love Apple products and have had this one since new. I trust them normally — so much so, I went and brought an iPhone 5c to replace it.”
He said of his wrecked phone: “I took the screen away and the battery had blown up on one corner.
“I just hope this is a one-off because children use these things. I feel responsible for my little sister who is 10 and on her iPhone all the time. I will be contacting Apple because even if it’s out of warranty it shouldn’t just explode like that. I sleep with it next to my pillow and it could have hit me in the face.”
There have been several reports of iPhones exploding in recent years. Last year, an iPhone 5C burst into flames in a New Yorker’s pocket, melting it shut. The man was forced to rip off his trousers and suffered third-degree burns.
Apple said it did not comment on individual cases.
They just need devices that actually support them first
We all knew microSD cards wouldn’t be around forever, and Samsung has confirmed our suspicions by introducing the world’s first removable Universal Flash Storage (UFS) cards.
The cards are able to offer storage capacities of 32, 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes and they’ll provide a significant performance boost compared to the microSD cards we know and love.
In fact, according to Samsung, the UFS cards will have a read speed that’s five times faster than your typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 megabytes per second. A high read speed means that you’ll be able to move photos and videos from the card onto your laptop or PC even faster, perfect for transferring high-resolution video files.
Write speeds are better on these cards, too, performing almost twice as fast as microSD cards. If you do photography that involves high-resolution files or you’re interested in shooting HD videos, these higher writing speeds mean that the moments you capture will be saved to the card even faster, reducing the risk of lag.
With everyone capturing increasingly high-quality and high-resolution content on everything from their smartphones to their action cams and even 360 degree cameras, Samsung says that more powerful removable storage will be needed to keep up with this and that their UFS card “significantly reduces multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users.”
However, this increased power is only actually going to be useful when we have devices to support it and as of right now there aren’t any. Though it's not unreasonable to expect that removable UFS card compatability is something Samsung is considering for its future smartphones, particularly as it already has UFS standard specifications as embedded memory in its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge devices.
Samsung hasn’t revealed just how expensive these cards are going to be or when they’ll be available for commercial release either. Whilst it’s clear that as far as removable storage technology goes they’re a big improvement, we wouldn’t throw our microSD cards away just yet.
SAMSUNG looks set to unveil its new Galaxy Note 7 in August and it could include some super-powered software.
UPDATE: Samsung's next smartphone could include a mystery new feature
Samsung has already produced the best smartphone of the year with the launch of its awesome Galaxy S7 edge.
Now the Korean tech giant looks set to unveil another flagship phone which could include a mystery new feature.
The Galaxy Note 7 is likely to be unveiled next month and rumours are rife that this smartphone could be Samsung's fastest to date.
Reports have claimed that a brand new version of Google’s Android software could be specially installed on the device, giving it a super-powered advantage over rival smartphones.
That’s according to a leaked benchmark listing spotted on hardware database Geekbench, which seemed to suggest the device is running software identified as “Android 6.1”.
What's strange about this software is it's never existed before with Google saying that its next version of Android Nougat will be have the code 7.0.
LEAK: This picture may show how Samsung's Note 7 will look
Even the device used in the Geekbench test is a mystery, as it appears to contain several pieces of hardware from previous Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones to build a hybrid Note 7.
The device used in the tests conformed to many of the rumoured expectations for the Galaxy Note 7, including a powerful Samsung Galaxy Exynos 8893 chipset and 4GB of RAM.
REVIEW: Samsung Galaxy S7 is the best phone of 2016
Earlier this week, several official-looking renders of the Galaxy Note 7 were revealed on Twitter.
The pictures show a polished-looking device that bears a strong resemblance to Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7, which was released back in March.
The Galaxy Note 7 will also do away with a fingerprint scanner, replacing it with an iris scanner that looks into your eyes to unlock your phone, and can also give access to protected apps, files, folders, and documents.
u>LAPTOPS made by HP and Compaq over the past few years affected warns consumer watchdog.
Certain laptops could be a fire risk due to overheating batteries
Thousands of laptops across the UK could pose a fire risk to users due to unsafe batteries, a leading watchdog has warned.
Which? has revealed that some HP and Compaq laptops pose a danger to consumers due to overheating batteries which could potentially cause a fire.
The watchdog says that the ProBook, Envy, Presario, and Pavilion Notebook brands are among those affected, and is advising users to stop using their laptops immediately.
The HP Pavilion 17 is among the affected models
Laptops bought between March 2013 and August 2015 are at risk, with HP already confirming that some devices sold during this time have 'the potential to overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to customers'.
Which? says that users can find out whether their laptop is affected by checking the bar code on the battery itself. This can then be compared to a list of affected models online, with customers then able to contact HP for a replacement battery.
In the meantime, HP says that users can continue to use your laptop without the battery installed, simply by connecting the laptop to the mains instead.
The warning comes as gadget fans were advised the cost of charging their devices could be far less expensive than expected.
A new service from GoCompare.com found that it costs on average 0.3p to fill up a smartphone – that's less than half a pence per charge.
That means keeping your smartphone topped up every day of the week will set you back 2.1p or £10 for the full calendar year.
Meanwhile a tablet costs 0.5p per refill and a laptop costs 1.95p each time it goes from flat to full.
