FlipYourGeek

The best news about #Mobile & #Tech. Google - Android - Apple - iOS - Microsoft - Advertisement and more

[impartially-gay]

Me when I get out of school early

[flipyourgeek]

Carriers Beware: Facebook Is Testing A New App Called 'Phone' Parmy Olson, forbes.com

Facebook has accidentally leaked information about a new app that it’s testing, called ‘Phone,’ and this news should come as no surprise to anyone who believes Facebook wants to be at the center of how we communicate with the world around us. That…

[nathanielsss]

[flipyourgeek]

When Alan Turing first conceived of the Turing Test in 1947, he suggested that a computer program’s resemblance to a human mind could be gauged by making it answer a series of questions written by an interrogator in another room. Jump forward about seven decades, and Google says it’s now developed a Turing Test that can spot a bot by requiring it to do something far simpler: Click on a checkbox.

On Wednesday, Google announced that many of its “Captchas”—the squiggled text tests designed to weed out automated spambots—will be reduced to nothing more than a single checkbox next to the statement “I’m not a robot.” No more typing in distorted words or numbers; Google says it can, in many cases, tell the difference between a person or an automated program simply by tracking clues that don’t involve any user interaction. The giveaways that separate man and machine can be as subtle as how he or she (or it) moves a mouse in the moments before that single click.

“For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience,” says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google’s Captcha team. “They basically get a free pass. You can solve the catptcha without having to solve it.”



Google’s new captcha, which requires only a click in a checkbox.

Instead of depending upon the traditional distorted word test, Google’s “reCaptcha” examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. And Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot.

“All of this gives us a model of how a human behaves,” says Shet. “It’s a whole bag of cues that make this hard to spoof for a bot.” He adds that Google also will use other variables that it is keeping secret—revealing them, he says, would help botmasters improve their software and undermine Google’s filters.

In cases where a mere click doesn’t produce a conclusive response, a pop-up window will require users to decipher the same old distorted text. In tests during the past week on sites that use Google’s captcha, however, it’s verified most human users without that backup. About 60 percent of WordPress users and 80 percent of users at video game sales site Humble Bundle got past the captcha with only the checkbox.

[popmech]

Everything You Need to Know About NASA’s Orion, the Spacecraft That Could Take Humanity to Mars

At 7:05 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, December 4, an unmanned, unpressurized version of NASA’s Orion crew capsule will lift off from Cape Canaveral for its first test flight, called Exploration Flight Test-1. This will mark the debut of the first new NASA spacecraft meant to fly astronauts since the Space Shuttle took flight in the early 1980s. And while this first flight will be unmanned, it will see a crew capsule travel farther from the planet’s surface than any manned vehicle design has gone since the Apollo moon mission.

[flipyourgeek]

The team behind The Grid is developing a website builder that uses artificial intelligenceto automatically create new sites based on the content you provide. The company ran one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns for a software product earlier this year, but the team also went out to raise a larger fundraising round. As the company today announced, The Grid has raised $4.2 million in a Series A round led by Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. Other investors include former President of Disney Interactive John Pleasants, former Facebook VP of Product and Engineering Greg Badros and the founder of Elegant Themes Nick Roach, who also led in The Grid’s $3.1 millionseed round. “The Grid’s cloud-based artificial intelligence will reinvent web design by eliminating the mundane, time-consuming parts of web development and creating elegant websites in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost,” said Yang in a canned statement today. “This will completely reinvent modern web design for everyone.”  The Grid CEO and co-founder Dan Tocchini gave me a demo of an early build of the service last month. It’s still rough around the edges — especially the user interface on the backend still needs quite a bit of work — but so far it looks like it could actually fulfill its promise of allowing anybody to quickly create a good-looking website without the need for any templates. The Grid’s own homepage is built with this early version of the software and it’s a good example for what these sites will look like.  The software does a deep analysis of all the content you want to add to your site. It does sentiment analysis for the text you want to add, for example, and look at whether people in your photos are smiling to determine what kind of fonts and colors it should use. It then looks for low-contrast areas in your photos to figure out where it can put text on an image. The tools can also automatically crop images based on The Grid’s face-detection algorithms and the service looks at the overall color spectrum in those images to help decide the color palette for the site. In its current form, the service is clearly meant for content-heavy corporate or portfolio sites. It’s not optimized for blogs or news sites, but Tocchini noted that it could be used to create Snow Fall-like experiences. Right now the team is targeting the end of spring 2015 for the launch of The Grid. Users who sign up for early access can still sign up to get the service’s discounted rate of $8 per month. Users who sign up after the launch will pay $25 per month.

[flipyourgeek]

Sony's e-paper watch is a thing of minimalist beauty

Two days ago, we heard of Sony's plans to build a watch made entirely of e-paper — one where the band and the watch face would both change in response to the user's wrist gestures. It sounded wild and provocatively different, but what we really wanted to know was what it looked like. As it turns out, that watch is already in the public eye, though Sony's involvement had until now been kept clandestine so as to judge the product on its own merits. Say hello to the FES Watch.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Fashion Entertainments startup behind that crowdfunded watch is in fact a subdivision of Sony, tasked with designing and experimenting with products that can define the next evolution in personal electronic devices. The watch is extremely thin and makes no pretence of being smart, relying on the chameleonic flexibility of its appearance and a clean minimalist shape to win over fans. Because it has no sophisticated electronics inside, it's also said to last for as long as 60 days on a single button battery.

The FES watch is just one of a number of prototypes that Sony has developed while investigating the viability of e-paper as an unusual material for wearable devices. The company is also looking into making bow ties (see video below), hat and shoe accessories, and paper holders out of electronic paper. There's no release date set for this watch yet, however supporters on the Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake have been told they'll be able to get theirs some time after May next year.

Watch video...

[flipyourgeek]

The numbers don’t lie: mobile game Trivia Crack is now one of the most popular apps in the US, currently occupying the eighth rank of the App Store’s Top Free iPhone Apps section. Things are even more clear-cut in its own category, trivia apps, which it has been leading since October. While Trivia Crack’s rise in the North American market has been more than impressive, it won’t be too surprising for anyone in Latin America, where the exact same trend started a few months ago. So what the story behind this boom? Keep reading...

[flipyourgeek]

Russian internet giant Yandex has launched an alpha version of its new Chromium-based browser for Windows and Mac OS X that incorporates a few interesting ideas of how a modern browser might look. The main difference from the interface of Chrome or Firefox is the ultimate minimalism and the fact that the tabs are moved to the bottom of the page. Explaining its new approach in a blog post, Yandex stated that it treats each website as a standalone application rather than a few linked pages of content. That’s why the tabs are moved all the way to the bottom to resemble launched app icons in Windows or Mac OS X. Keep reading...

[flipyourgeek]

Video game graphics, explained in gruff Estuary English.

[flipyourgeek]

Are you still looking for a gift for the TV fan in your life? Or maybe you are looking to upgrade one of your own TVs to finally watch online video in the downstairs den? The streaming sticks that bring Netflix, YouTube and other apps to any TV are a great option, especially if you’re looking for a gift that doesn’t break the bank. But with everyone and their mother making their own TV stick, you might ask yourself: Which one should I buy? Look no further. This ultimate guide to streaming sticks looks at the video services you can watch with different sticks as well as the hardware each dongle packs — all to find the right stick for your needs. Keep reading...

[flipyourgeek]

You now how it goes: one day you decide to open a YouTube account under the name of ‘JimmyLovesCats’, and on another you decide to start uploading your favorite videos of your feline friend. Before too long, you have a following on your Channel, and a branding problem. Your username – and therefore Channel URL – is JimmyLovesCats (YouTube.com/JimmyLovesCats) but you know you might stop posting cat videos one day, so branded everything JustJimmy from the start. However, you’re stuck with the original URL. To rectify this specific issue, YouTube creators can now change their URL via theCreator Studio to one that more closely matches their branding. In order to do so, Channel owners need to have at least 500 subscribers and need to jump through the few hoops in these instructions. However, users still don’t get free choice over the name. Instead, YouTube will suggest potential alternatives “based on your channel’s description, Google identity and associated websites”, which you can then pick from, the company said in a blog post. It’s not the perfection of completely free choice, but it’s better than being stuck with a URL that bears no relation whatsoever to your channel. ➤ Want your URL to match your channel? [YouTube]

[flipyourgeek]

8 Insights on How the Top 100 Brands Use Twitter in 2014 – Study Jeff Bullas, jeffbullas.com

Facebook is now your pay to play channel and Twitter is your stream of consciousness.Also, how you use Twitter and Facebook should be different as they are not the same beast. Tweets don’t have the same longevity as a Facebook post and so Twitter…

[flipyourgeek]

The FAA's upcoming commercial drone rules could be brutally restrictive By Russell Brandom, theverge.com

The Federal Aviation Administration's forthcoming drone rules might require all operators to have a license and limit flights to daylight hours, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, which cites sources familiar with the…

[flipyourgeek]

Apple, Microsoft And Google Are World's Most Valuable Brands Kurt Badenhausen, forbes.com

A strong brand name is an incredibly valuable asset. Consumer companies in particular devote huge chunks of time and resources to solidify and expand their brands. “A valuable brand delivers a return for the company on two dimensions,” says David…

[flipyourgeek]

Facebook’s social network for businesses reportedly launching January 2015 Abhimanyu Ghoshal, thenextweb.com

Facebook is slated to launch its collaboration and social networking tool for workplaces early next year, reports WSJ.

Dubbed ‘Facebook at Work’, the tool will allow employees to work together on projects and chat in real-time via an interface…

[android---headlines]

European Parliament Wants To Split Google Into Smaller Companies http://bit.ly/11DQ17W