Category: Technology

Now this is my kind of an app!

Finally! An app for my social type!

The Story:

We have myriad tech-enabled ways to encounter friends (and strangers!) in real life. We can check in on Foursquare. Tag a location on Instagram. Swipe on Tinder. Tweet, from just about anywhere.

The inevitable backlash has, at last, arrived: It’s called Cloak, and it’s an “antisocial network” that uses social check-ins and other geo-location information to help you avoid people you’d, well, rather not see.

Here’s how the app works. After downloading Cloak for the first time, you can connect it with Foursquare and Instagram (with more networks to come soon). Cloak then plots where your Foursquare and Instagram contacts are, according to their most recent check-ins. You can casually check the map, or — for exes, chatty neighbors and other undesirables — “flag” them to receive an alert when they pass within a preset radius.

via Meet Cloak, the ‘antisocial’ network that helps you avoid people.

You bet your dollar I will be downloading this; I have to try it. I’m not much into the social interaction thing, at all. So, it’s going on the phone. Finally! An app I can actually use! 😀

Update: I just checked the website for the app. It’s only available for apple devices on the iTunes store. Ugh. 🙁 Not fair. Hopefully, they make a version for Android soon.

Ray Dolby, Audio Pioneer dead at 80

Sad news to report:

SAN FRANCISCO –  Ray Dolby, who pioneered noise-reducing and surround-sound audio technologies which are fundamental to the music and film industries, has died aged 80, the company which bears his name announced Thursday.

Dolby had suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease for a number of years, and was diagnosed with acute leukemia last July, it said, adding that the Oscar-winning scientist died at home in San Francisco.

“Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary,” said Kevin Yeaman, President and CEO of Dolby Laboratories, the company which the young Dolby created in 1965.

‘Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary.’

– Kevin Yeaman, President and CEO of Dolby Laboratories

“Ray Dolby founded the company based on a commitment to creating value through innovation and an impassioned belief that if you invested in people and gave them the tools for success they would create great things.

He added: “Ray’s ideals will continue to be a source of inspiration and motivation for us all.”

via Ray Dolby, audio pioneer, dies aged 80 | Fox News.

 

 

How ironic is it?

That the family of this kid writes this below?:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

via Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz – Remember Aaron Swartz.

But, yet, progressives still want and advocate for big Government. This just does not make any sense to me, at all. When will the progressives finally wake and realize that the Government, is not your friend at all. Most likely, when it is too late and ALL of our freedoms are taken from us.

Others: Associated Press, Firedoglake, GigaOM, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Guardian, Taylor Marsh, The Moderate Voice, Politico, Unhandled Exception, Wonkblog, BuzzMachine, Making Light, Boing Boing and TechCrunch,  Crooks and Liars, The Adventures …, Mashable!, Blue Mass Group and The Moderate Voice 

The Saturday Night Music Express – Special Memorial Edition – Presents: Stone Temple Pilots

Los Angeles (CNN) — Aaron Swartz, an Internet savant who at a young age shaped the online era by co-developing RSS and Reddit and later became a digital activist, has committed suicide, a relative told CNN Saturday.
He was 26 years old.

A prodigy, Swartz was behind some of the Internet’s iconic moments, soaring to heights that many developers only dream of. At the same time, he was plagued by legal problems arising from his aggressive activism, and he was also known to suffer depression, a personal matter that he publicly revealed on his blog.

Related:

Others: AlterNet, Mashable!, Guardian, The Daily Caller, The Verge, VentureBeat, Towleroad News #gay, The Raw Story and Gothamist,  New York Times, Hullabaloo, Althouse, Guardian and Brad DeLong,  Crooked Timber, The Agonist, The Atlantic Online, Guardian, Balloon Juice, The Lede,Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Gawker, TechCrunch, Althouse and Lessig Blog, v2, The Reality-Based Community (Memeorandum)

Yeah Sure: Instagram says no user photos in ads

They really expect us to believe that?

SAN FRANCISCO — Instagram, the popular mobile photo-sharing service now owned by Facebook, said Tuesday that it will remove language from its new terms of service suggesting that users’ photos could appear in advertisements.

The language in question had appeared in updated policies announced Monday and scheduled to take effect Jan. 16. After an outcry on social media and privacy rights blogs, the company clarified that it has no plans to put users’ photos in ads.

That said, Instagram maintains that it was created to become a business and would like to experiment with various forms of advertisements to make money. Instagram doesn’t currently run any ads. As of now, the free service has no way to make money and brings in no revenue to Facebook.

“Our main goal is to avoid things likes advertising banners you see in other apps that would hurt the Instagram user experience,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

What had riled users and privacy advocates was Instagram’s new assertion that it may now receive payments from businesses to use its members’ photos, user name and other data”in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation” to them.

via Instagram says users’ photos won’t appear in ads | Technology | Detroit Free Press | freep.com.

Needless to say, I deleted my account, right after seeing about this on twitter. I’ll just use twitter’s photo sharing service instead.

California tech world shows its true colors

This comes via Bill Quick, it is related to this here:

IDFSpokesperson, Facebook
#PillarOfDefense
IDFblog, Facebook
Some idiot at TechCrunch is not pleased.

Wonder if they would feel the same way if Palestine were doing it? Even better, wonder if they would feel the same way, if Obama were doing it.

It is to wonder.

Update: Yes, I know what I posted here. There is a grand canyon of difference between pointing out a NeoCon’s idiocy and actually hating on Israel for defending themselves. Anyone that does not know the difference between the two; has no business being on the internet, much less reading blogs.

Also too, like I wrote before:

If you are Jewish, I have zero quarrels with you at all; but, please, if I happen to say something you do not like, SUCK IT UP and please, do not wave your damned yarmulke in my face, and call me a hater —-because if you do, I am going to tell you to kiss my ass.

I stand by that comment. I just do not respect, nor do I traffic in identity politics; left or right. I do not do it with the Blacks or Latinos; and I do not do it with the Jews, at all. I also happen to not be too fond of White Nationalists either. Because that too, is just another form of identity politics.  I believe in equal rights for ALL. Special privileges for NONE.  This includes with the wealthy. I could go on and on, but I think you all know what I mean here.

 

 

Confirmed: Google now executing searches on Blogs

This posting is for those who are worried about Google controlling our lives and sticking their noses into our business.

You might have heard that Google was cracking down on duplicate content, and that they tried to downplay that quite a bit.

Well, I would not settle for what they are telling us; because I have discovered that Google is now coming to my blog, every time I post something new to the blog and executing a search of my blog and the internet for duplicated content.

Here is proof this:

Google searching my blog, against their database. Click to make bigger.

Now, I am not much into conspiracy theories or anything like that, but why does Google feel the need to search my blog against their database? Now, if I were an Alex Jones type or an overly paranoid Conservative; I would be thinking that the Government is indexing my posts for investigation purposes or something worse. Now, I really do not believe that something like this would be occurring, but this searching my blog stuff really has me wondering.

The funny part is this; if they are doing this to protect their AdWords customers, I am not even on Adsense, I am on Adbrite for my banner ads. So, unless they are working together or something.

Either way, it does kind of creep me out and I would like some answers, as to why they feel the need to do this.

Update: DaTechGuy Links in! Thank You! 😀

Good point

As much as I hate to link to this site, for some very good reasons. This guy has a point when reacting to this:

Many of my nerdly friends find these protests distressing. They’re not thinking hard enough.

If a major publishing house in New York decided to put out a special edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and made it available for free download on every Kindle on the planet we could expect lots of protests.

Google pretends that it is just a platform, not a publisher. But of course Google does scrub YouTube of videos that break copyright laws or other decency laws. Nerds just don’t think that propaganda against religious minorities, or at least these religious minorities, is indecent. For Google, content from NBC Universal is sacrosanct, The Prophet is not.

The digital-age fanatics talk endlessly of how “revolutionary” their products are. And Google isn’t exactly shy about its own desire to see religiously-inspired laws go down across the world. They shouldn’t be so shocked when the counter-revolutionaries show up to protest them.

Nerdly? That’s a new word on me. ThinkingConfusedI dont know I think he meant nerdy. But, I know what he meant. Otherwise, yes, he does have a very good point.