DirecTV offers its “Sunday Ticket” package each season for football fans who want to access every NFL game on their televisions.
Traditionally, only DirecTV customers could get the service — which led to many NFL diehards switching to the satellite service.
Last year, DirecTV allowed viewers with geographical restrictions regarding satellite TV to purchase Sunday Ticket through their PS3 game consoles.
But while the option is meant to be an extension of existing subscriptions (Sunday Ticket subscribers can watch on their PS3 at no additional charge), the offer also allows people to purchase Sunday Ticket a la carte.
When signing up for the service, people must say “no” to the question of whether they can receive satellite service. They can then purchase Sunday Ticket for $300.
AllThingsD cautions that if too many people exploit this loophole, DirecTV and Sony may take steps to close it off, but as of now the option seems to be alive and operational.
Amazon is expected to announce new versions of its Kindle tablets at a press event in Santa Monica on Thursday. The location suggests the announcement could include a video-related improvement for the Kindle tablets.
Seth Porges of Forbes speculates that Amazon may plan to announce a major expansion of its Amazon Prime video service. But TechCrunch reports that “an expanded Amazon Prime library doesn’t make much sense,” because Amazon has successfully grown the service with slow, steady additions.
Rather, TechCrunch suggests Amazon could target its existing partnership with UltraViolet. UltraViolet integration would greatly increase the video content available on Kindle devices.
Amazon could replicate Vudu’s disc-to-digital agreement, whereby users can bring DVDs to Walmart stores and convert the titles to digital copies for $2 to $5.
And TechCrunch speculates Amazon could go even further with the program by converting archived DVD purchase information into digital copies. Users would not have to go to a physical store — they would simply click and pay.
Musician Jack Kennedy recently explored parts of Europe, Thailand and Israel. Toward the end of his trip, he spent a month in Morocco recording music by Berber tribesmen.
“Now he is taking the same nomadic approach to capture bits of American culture for his Web show, NightBus Radio,” reports Wired. “It’s like what they did in Jack Kerouac’s novel ‘Dharma Bums,’ except nobody hitchhikes anymore,” says Kennedy. “This is kind of the next step up.”
Kennedy has no real plan of where he will go, who he will interview or what will come of the show. He uses fan suggestions from Twitter and Facebook to direct him across the nation. The article describes him as a modern-day Alan Lomax.
“Yesterday, this girl from Alabama named Rachel Saul came in to the hostel I’m staying at. She had a guitar and started singing,” explains Kennedy. “She had this amazing voice and an interesting story, so I just quickly got out my microphone and started recording her.”
This type of story epitomizes Kennedy’s journey, as he hopes his travels will spontaenously bring him to talented and interesting individuals. SoundCloud, the Berlin-based audio-sharing platform, is funding part of the project with one of its 15 Community Fellowships.
Kennedy has placed faith in his loyal followers, as his trip relies on his use of “mainly Facebook and Twitter where people can send me messages like, ‘I know this supertalented guy, you should meet up with him.'” He elaborates that after “you meet a core group of musicians in a town, you can get to the heart of the music scene.”
Eye-opening research from 2007 revealed that Internet users maintain an average of 25 Internet accounts but only use an average of 6.5 passwords to protect those accounts.
So if hackers discover one password, they can likely break into several accounts — especially since many users use e-mail addresses as usernames.
Leaked password scandals, like the one involving LinkedIn earlier this year, help hackers to analyze password patterns. They then use the information to develop algorithms more speedy and precise than ever.
This happened on a grand scale in 2009, when 32 million passwords were leaked from the gaming service RockYou.com. With that data, hackers compiled the largest collection of plaintext passwords in history, helping them to crack them in increasing numbers.
“It’s been an exciting year for password crackers because of the amount of data,” explains Rick Redman, who does penetration testing for the security firm KoreLogic. “Cracking 16-character passwords is something I could not do four or five years ago, and it’s not because I have more computers now.”
A technique known as “rainbow tables” helps hackers to crack passwords of 7-8 characters. This length is typically too long for GPU, brute force password cracking.
Using rainbow tables, rather “than asking a computer to enumerate each possible password in real-time and compare it against a targeted hash, precalculated data was stored in memory or on disk in a highly compressed form to speed up the process and lower the computing requirements needed to brute force huge numbers of hashes,” explains Ars Technica.
UPS has placed $2 million of faith in same-day delivery service Shutl. The company will use the investment to “expand its engineering team, sign up new retail partners and prepare to launch in the U.S. early next year,” reports AllThingsD.
Shutl offers 90-minute delivery windows as part of its retail partnerships. Customers can also pick a customized one-hour delivery window. All deliveries are same-day as purchase.
“We’ve spent this last year taking Shutl national across the UK; now we are ready for the U.S., a market that we estimate will be worth around $26 billion by 2016,” claims Shutl founder and CEO Tom Allason.
As more consumers shop online, the demand for premium, fast shipping services has increased. Amazon’s Prime Two-Day Shipping allows customers to pay an annual $79 fee for unlimited two-day shipping. Amazon reports it now ships more items with this service than with its Free Super Saver service.
While eBay has also experimented with same-day shipping, Amazon maintains it has not found an economically efficient way to employ the service.
Bloomberg L.P. expanded its analytics offerings with the launch of Bloomberg Sports in 2010. The service now serves 25 Major League Baseball teams, will launch a soccer-based service in the United Kingdom in September, and offers a fantasy football tool called Decision Maker 2012.
President of Bloomberg Sports Bill Squadron expects “to be within all major sports in two years, maybe three on the outside.”
The company’s most successful product to date has been its tablet application for Major League Baseball players. The application offers video of upcoming pitching opponents, including individualized videos of past performances against opponents.
The soccer application targets fanatical soccer supporters and betters in Europe. The app will use metrics, statistical comparisons, and projections to aid betters.
Squadron told Mashable that the growth of Bloomberg Sports has essentially followed his projections, and that when he formed the entity he had planned to establish a presence “in baseball especially, then build a platform that could be expanded to other sports from there.”
Global communications agency M Booth and analytics firm Simply Measured studied sharing patterns and interactions on Facebook and other social networks. The report found videos and photos are much more effective sharing tools than links or text.
The report indicates users share videos twelve times more often than text and links combined. The report also indicates users like photos twice as much as text posts.
Photographs also dominate Tumblr, as pictures represent 42 percent of all posts, while text, chats, quotes, videos and links constitute the rest.
The success of Instagram also lends credence to the importance of photographs in social media. Instagram is on pace to reach 100 million users in under four years, which would represent a record for social media growth.
As of February 2012, users share 700 YouTube videos per minute via Twitter.
The post includes a compelling infographic featuring additional statistics.
More than two-thirds of smartphone users say they cannot live without their smartphones, according to “A Portrait of Today’s Smartphone User,” a report from The Online Publishers Association (OPA).
The report estimates 107 million Americans own smartphones. This represents 44 percent of the American Internet-using population. The OPA expects this number to grow to 142 million within the next year.
OPA President Pam Horan explains the shift to smartphone use as consumers “now expect the world at their fingertips anytime, anywhere, and publishers have worked vigorously to optimize their mobile sites and create apps that cater to this demand and behavioral shift.”
She also notes that “smartphones are providing a great monetization opportunity for publishers. With over half of smartphone users accessing content on a daily basis, this growing smartphone population is showing a willingness to pay for content.”
The report found that 24 percent of smartphone users have “purchased content for viewing on their smartphones,” 54 percent of multiple device users prefer using their phones over other devices for at least one activity, and 84 percent of smartphone users self-identify as two-screen multitaskers.
According to a related post from Mashable, a recent survey from free messaging app TextPlus found that “half of all teens surveyed said they couldn’t live without their mobile device for a week, while 36 percent said they weren’t able to go 10 minutes without checking their phones.”
The TextPlus survey also found that “texting is the first and last thing teens do everyday, with 73 percent checking their phones before bed, and 72 percent on their devices first thing in the morning.”
Google has created a new Infringement Finder feature within Google Patents to help patent owners and lawyers investigate cases of patent infringement.
Google indicates the feature is meant to aid in its internal attempts to ward off patent infringement. But the company has made the feature open to the public, suggesting Google’s explanation is little more than a way to defend itself against critics.
Users access the feature within Google Patents. After choosing a specific patent to explore, users click the “Find prior art” link and then look through the search results.
Google automatically sets an “end date” based on the date of the patent, and then researchers “only need to remember one of the simplest truisms of patent law: That which infringes if later anticipates if earlier,” notes Gametime IP. “Thus, by changing the ‘earlier’ (End date) to become ‘later’ (Start date), you can sift through a variety of sources that might indicate infringement.”
“Google’s motivation to create this new feature are not entirely clear, but they have provided what should be a useful advancement in patent analysis,” concludes the post. “By speeding up access to information that may lead to evidence of infringement, Google puts more power back into the hands of inventors and patent owners.”
Dish Network plans to offer a satellite broadband service that will allow people in rural areas to access the Internet. The company hopes to launch the service by September or October.
Dish will use an EchoStar satellite for the service. The satellite can deliver 15 megabits per second, but Dish’s service will offer 5 megabits per second in order to serve more customers, sources tell Bloomberg.
The slower data rates will allow Dish to serve up to two million customers with the service.
Dish and ViaSat currently partner to offer satellite broadband, but cover only limited parts of the United States. The new satellite service will cover every region.
The company will likely need to add more satellites if it wishes to maintain at least 5 megabit per second speeds while expanding beyond two million customers.
Dish CEO Joseph Clayton explains that Dish’s service is meant to serve the “nearly 8 to 10 million rural American households” without Internet coverage. Dish will not compete with traditional broadband, as services like Verizon FiOS can deliver 300 megabits per second.
The stop-motion technique has traditionally created an array of production challenges for Hollywood animators, something that may dramatically change thanks to a new technology.
The notoriously slow process is experiencing an update with the advent of 3D printing, which is helping animators shift from mechanical to computer-based animation. Engadget recently visited LAIKA’s facility in Oregon (formerly Vinton Studios) to learn how the new technique was successfully used to produce “ParaNorman.”
In mechanical animation, animators adjust gears and paddles beneath the skin of the models to create different expressions. But in 3D printing animation, the animators can print interchangeable faces for the models.
The animators for “ParaNorman” used 3D printing to create 1.5 million different expressions for their protagonist. They originally used the technology in the film “Coraline” in which the protagonist could display 200,000 expressions.
The animators in “Coraline” had to hand paint each of the printed expressions. But new technology allowed “ParaNorman” animators to use Photoshop to display color models of the expressions.
The studio believes it has only scratched the surface of what could come from 3D printing in stop-motion animation.
“I think it’s a huge quantum leap on multiple levels between ‘Coraline’ and ‘ParaNorman,'” says Brian McLean, director of rapid prototyping. “At the time, ‘Coraline’ was the pinnacle of stop-motion animated films and I think that ‘ParaNorman’ has just risen the bar that much further.”
South Korean researchers have developed a new method to view 3D movies without glasses. The research was recently published in The Optical Society’s Optics Express.
In traditional 3D theatrical displays, we know that projectors shoot two images onto the same screen at the same time. 3D glasses help separate the images, only allowing one image in the left eye, and the other image in the right eye.
There are some glasses-free 3D displays on the market, such as those used for Nintendo’s 3DS handheld game system and the HTC Evo 3D smartphone. But using a similar technique theatrically would require rear projection — an obstacle for most theaters.
The South Korean research team’s system uses a “special array” to polarize the light as it leaves the projector. The method also uses a filter to partition the screen into different sections.
“The trick then is to have the light visible to your left eye contain the left-eye pixels and vice-versa for the right eye,” explains Wired.
But the blocking of light in different parts of the screen causes low screen resolution. Despite this problem, physicist John Koshel still believes many theaters will eventually adopt the technology since it is less expensive than using multiple projectors, and people will enjoy not having to wear glasses.
“This technology is still in its infancy, but it’s a new step that was hidden for a long time,” explains Koshel.
When hackers attacked Wired senior editor Mat Honan’s data, they targeted iCloud, Google and Amazon. But while these cloud-based services served as the gateway into his technological life, Honan believes that the cloud also became his digital “salvation.”
Honan argues that although he has been a happy Apple customer for 20 years, the lack of cloud security disgusts him. Apple IDs are too easy to reset, he argues.
After days of struggling to recover Twitter, Gmail, and various other tech accounts, Honan finally stopped the remote wipe of his MacBook data with the help of Apple support.
Honan suggests local backup for data, writing that when “you control your data locally, and have it stored redundantly, no one can take it from you. Not permanently, at least.”
He also champions the cloud. “Because I use Rdio, not iTunes, I had all my music right away. Because I use Evernote to take reporting notes, everything that I was currently working on still existed. Dropbox and 1Password re-opened every door for me in a way that would have been impossible if I were just storing passwords locally via my browser,” he explains.
But Honan cautions that even when consumers take steps to protect themselves, they are still vulnerable if companies do not increase security. He writes that Amazon, Google and Apple are not alone in their lack of security.
“We don’t own our account security,” he concludes. ” And as more information about us lives online in ever more locations, we have to make sure that those we entrust it with have taken the necessary steps to keep us safe. That’s not happening now. And until it does, what happened to me could happen to you.”
Irish start-up CloudVertical has been analyzing how customers use Amazon Web services, VMWare and Heroku and concludes that most companies do not come close to fully leveraging the resources they pay for.
CloudVertical CEO Ed Byrne explains that the problem does not affect one demographic, but rather “from companies spending less than $50,000 a year to those spending millions, people are only using about 30 percent of the resources they pay for.”
“This is really remarkable considering that for the past decade, the sales pitch for virtualization has been ‘physical servers only get about 30 percent usage,’” he notes.
Byrne recommends that CFOs analyze “capacity, usage, and cost” to effectively determine if they are making the most of their cloud storage options. “The cloud is not pay-as-you-go but pay-as-you-provision. People still fire up lots of servers and leave them there,” he says.
According to Google, most CFOs think they are effectively using the cloud, as 58 percent of surveyed CFOs said cloud computing reduced IT costs and 96 percent reported quantifiable benefits from cloud computing (VentureBeat cautions that the second number may be skewed by the fact that Google included Gmail under its definition of “cloud services”).
Byrne hopes CloudVertical can help solve the “lack of transparency and accountability” present in the cloud computing marketplace. “Most often compared to Cloudability, Byrne insists that CloudVertical’s real competitors are enterprise tools like IBM’s Tivoli or HP OpenView,” reports VentureBeat.
U.S. District Judge William Pauley III has ruled that law enforcement officials can access a suspect’s Facebook profile without a warrant if they do so with a friend’s permission.
“The decision, which is part of a New York City racketeering trial, comes as courts struggle to define privacy and civil liberties in the age of social media,” reports GigaOM. “Judge Pauley’s ruling is significant because it is the latest in a series of cases that defines how and when police can search social media.”
During the New York investigation, police used an informant’s Facebook account to access suspected gangster Melvin Colon’s Facebook account. After reading threatening messages, the police obtained a warrant to access the rest of his information.
The judge ruled that actions by the police do not violate the Fourth Amendment because Colon made his information known to friends on Facebook.
“Colon’s legitimate expectation of privacy ended when he disseminated posts to his ‘friends’ because those ‘friends’ were free to use the information however they wanted — including sharing it with the Government,” explained Judge Pauley in the Bronx case.
The judge likened the methods to when police legally listen to a phone call as long as one of the parties agrees to allow the tapping to occur.
