A group of technologists, lawyers and other interested parties have come together to do what most people don’t want to: read those horribly long terms-of-service contracts to which most simply click “agree.”
Called ToS;DR for “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read,” the project creates grades — from “Class A” (the best) to “Class E” (the worst) — based on peer-reviewed summaries, enabling consumers to make more educated clicks.
“For example, if you’re uploading photos to TwitPic, you might want to reconsider,” explains The Atlantic. “They give the site their worst grade, a ‘Class E.’ Why? Well, they have an easy-to-understand summary… If you click on ‘Read the Details,’ you get an extended explanation of these warnings and can also link back (almost like a Wikipedia page) to the ToS;DR discussion that led to the thumbs-down.”
The Atlantic post includes a screen shot which shows simple bullet explanations for Twitpic’s grade, like “Twitpic takes credit for your content,” and “Deleted images are not really deleted.”
“‘I have read and agree to the Terms’ is the biggest lie on the Web,” according to the ToS;DR site. “We aim to fix that.”
“The project hatched about a year ago at the annual Chaos Communication Camp event in Berlin as an outgrowth of the Unhosted project, which is a system for building Web apps that leave users in control of their data,” notes TechCrunch in a related post.
The ratings are based on German energy efficiency ratings for appliances, according to TechCrunch, which reports the site plans to officially launch later this month.
Taking their cues from natural science, engineers have developed flying drones inspired by birds and swimming robots that emulate jellyfish.
The earthworm is the latest creature to inspire a team of scientists from MIT, Harvard and Seoul National University. Led by Professor Sangbae Kim, the team has created a robotic device named “Meshworm,” that crawls along the ground via the principle of peristalsis.
“The device is propelled by a spiral-shaped coil of artificial muscle made of a titanium and nickel alloy, a material chosen for a particular reason: It stretches when heated and contracts back to its original shape once cooled,” reports Smithsonian.com.
“The engineers used an internal battery and circuit board to apply a weak electric current to different muscle segments within the Meshworm, heating each of them in turn,” explains the article. “When each segment is heated, it expands in length, causing the outer circumference of the mesh to briefly contract, then return to its original size quickly afterward.”
The motion occurs successively at each segment of Meshworm, creating a wave of contraction that enables movement across the ground (the article includes a video of the lifelike movement). Steerage is controlled via lengthwise artificial muscles that are pulled when heated.
Since the Meshworm parts are all fibrous and flexible, it is nearly indestructible.
“The research is funded by DARPA…and some speculate that the robot could someday be used in reconnaissance missions, since it could be air-dropped, launched or thrown over relatively long distances and land without harm,” notes the article.
And since it can navigate rough terrain and fit into small spaces — quietly and inconspicuously — it may serve as a future robo-spy. The shape-changing artificial muscle technology may also be used for medical devices, prosthetics and CE devices such as mobile phones and portable computers.
Two free apps — EasyShift and Gigwalk — enable users to earn money by doing small jobs for companies. Users submit the work via the apps and then collect the payments through their PayPal accounts.
“EasyShift, made by Quri Corp., launched nationwide in May 2011 as an iPhone app that’s focused on stock-checking tasks in grocery, convenience, drug and discount stores,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “Gigwalk launched nationwide in May 2011 and works on the iPhone and Android phones. It matches businesses or people with workers, so its gigs, like taking menu photos for $4 or testing a mobile app for $20, vary more than EasyShift’s jobs.”
WSJ reporter Katie Boehret took both apps for a test drive: “The tasks I completed were easy and some were even fun, like answering a few questions and taking photos of energy drinks at CVS for $2. I found myself scouring the apps’ built-in maps for nearby jobs as I drove around Washington, D.C., where I live. In cases when the job felt more like work than fun, I got paid enough that I didn’t mind ($8 for taking seven simple photos).”
“I was startled by how much pride I took in doing the task correctly — all for a few bucks and a good reputation within the app’s community, which can lead to higher-paying jobs,” she adds.
Some of the more active workers make $200 to $800 a month. Boehret notes a couple who made $1,000 to pay for their honeymoon.
“With EasyShift, most people who do work during the day get paid that night,” she writes. “Gigwalkers get paid within a day or two of submitting work and no later than five days after finishing a job. Both apps offer simple ways to make quick cash — and no one is overqualified to say no to that.”
Engadget reports that the release of the 12-bit RAW Blackmagic Cinema Camera has been delayed.
“The camera is ‘in the final stages of Thunderbolt certification and internal testing’ and manufacturing will follow as soon as that’s done — probably in the second week of August,” according to the post. “It will still hit the market with the $2,995 price tag, Canon lens mount, 15.6 x 8 mm sensor and built-in SSD recorder intact.”
The company also claims to have identified the cause of aliasing previously reported and has posted new videos to back up the claim.
As noted during NAB, the new Cinema Camera touts a 2.5K sensor with the ability to capture film quality video.
According to Blackmagic Design’s April press release: “One of the most important features of the camera is its super wide dynamic range of 13 stops, allowing feature film quality images. Commonly people focus on more pixels, however often this just creates a higher resolution, but still ‘video’ looking images that suffer from highlight and black clipping that limits details. Blackmagic Cinema Camera’s wide dynamic range eliminates this problem and provides film quality with dramatically more detail retained in black and whites in the image.”
For those interested in the camera’s capabilities, check out the videos recently shot by DP John Brawley.
According to media consultancy Attentional, 113,000 people in the UK donned their 3D glasses for the London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony. Pocket-lint takes a closer look at the number to determine whether it is good or bad news for 3D adoption.
By comparison, 27 million people watched the opening ceremony on BBC. Another way to look at it is comparing the number of 3D-enabled TVs.
Taking into account the number of people who have 3D TV sets and access to 3D content from BBC, “…just 1 in 10 people who own a 3D-ready TV watched the opening ceremony in 3D. Not great,” the article suggests.
However, there are caveats. For one, the opening ceremony could be considered a more social, group viewing experience — one inhibited by limited numbers of 3D glasses and dark viewing.
The technology does show some sign of growth: Wimbledon 2011 saw a 3D audience of 18,000, which grew to 30,000 in 2012. While it still only accounted for 0.18 percent share of overall 2012 Wimbledon viewing, the London 2012 ceremony had 0.4 percent 3D viewing.
“So the verdict?” Pocket-lint asks. “It seems 3D TV numbers are growing, but at a very slow pace, especially when you consider just how many people still prefer to watch television without glasses.”
Even with millions of global viewers, NASA successfully streamed live footage of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars, and not once did their servers fail. By contrast, the team’s attempt to upload a clip of the event to YouTube had less luck.
Within minutes of the “NASA Lands Car-Size Rover Beside Martian Mountain” video being posted, it was blocked by Scripps Local News on copyright grounds, highlighting some innate issues with YouTube’s automated copyright monitor, Content ID.
“The good thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions. The bad thing about automation is that you don’t have to involve real people to make decisions,” said Bob Jacobs, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for communication, who added that these type of claims happen once a month.
Content ID scans the 72 hours of content uploaded each minute on YouTube, looking for videos that violate terms of service and for content that matches copyrighted material.
YouTube also enables copyright owners to submit requests for pirated video to be censored. Unfortunately, the site favors accusers, making it extremely difficult for the accused to reinstate their videos.
“YouTube’s policy requires the alleged violator to submit a signed counter-claim, under penalty of perjury, then awaits a response from the original supposed owner before possibly restoring the video,” Motherboard explains. “YouTube forwards the claim to the supposed copyright owner and waits ten days for a response. ‘If we do not receive such notification, we may reinstate the material,’ says YouTube.”
Jacobs argues there should be consequences for people who make false copyright claims.
“Stopping online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole,” suggests The New York Times. “Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.”
The article cites workarounds to several attempts of copyright protection to illustrate how battling piracy is often futile.
For example, when YouTube launched Content ID for movie studios and TV networks to legitimately upload copyrighted clips, YouTube users placed the videos inside a still photo of a cat that fooled the Content ID algorithm.
When authorities blocked access to BitTorrent site Pirate Bay earlier this year, whacking one big mole led to hundreds of smaller ones.
“In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers,” explains NYT. “People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.”
Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, says piracy will not go away and recommends that rather than attempting to combat it, companies should be experimenting with new content distribution models.
“There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” says Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”
“If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he adds. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”
Square has already gained popularity and success with its small credit card reader that plugs into smartphone audio jacks. The company wants to take the service one step further: remove the device altogether and enable payments without even digging out your wallet or phone.
Pay With Square keeps users credit card information to enable charges online. While it may be “unsettling” for first time users who don’t know whether to trust the app, the company hopes it will improve the payment experience and even help customer service.
“When you open a tab on Pay With Square at a store, café, restaurant or food cart, the merchant sees your name and face appear on Register. When you check out, you give your name, so the merchant knows on whose tab to put your order. When the payment goes through, your phone buzzes, and the merchant says you’re all set,” ReadWriteWeb explains.
The “Auto-Open Tab When Near” option will open and close your tab based on location so you don’t even have to use your phone at all.
“Likewise, on the merchant’s side, Register keeps track of when customers are nearby and ready to pay. Since it shows their names and faces and keeps track of their visits, the merchant has a powerful customer service advantage: ‘Hi, Anna. How are you? Would you like the usual?'” the article says.
“Higher technology made payments more complicated,” suggests the post. “As our economies gained complexity, so did our media of exchange. But now we’re over the hump, and mobile networking can make things simpler again.”
As mobile usage increases, non-profits like the Wi-Fi Alliance continue to work with manufacturers, creating standards to make the wireless experience seamless and faster for all users.
One example is the new 802.11ac wireless standard, which enables high-speed connectivity, backup and sync for wireless devices.
“802.11ac significantly increases available Wi-Fi bandwidth, improving wireless performance for reliable high-definition (HD) video streaming, alleviating nuisances such as slow loading times and videos pausing in the middle of a scene,” Forbes explains. “802.11ac also allows consumers to transmit multiple HD videos simultaneously without losing the connection.”
NFC is also going to be important to digital households, allowing “two devices to securely communicate wirelessly without the hassle of passwords,” the article states.
Besides enabling mobile devices to connect to Wi-Fi automatically when close, near field communication also “simplifies the pairing of Bluetooth devices such as remote controls, 3D glasses and an array of mobile and audio streaming products,” reports Forbes.
The article also details the new technology, Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Miramast, which, “uses a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection to deliver audio and video content from one device to another without cables or a connection to an existing network,” so users can easily stream mobile content onto their big screen TVs.
“In the coming years,” Forbes concludes, “the latest and greatest consumer devices will only be as good as the wireless technologies they’re built on and the standards that they support.”
Do you prefer writing over typing? For those of you who answered yes, Google has just released a new handwriting recognition feature that will translate your scrawls into searches (with support for 27 languages).
“Google Handwrite works in the background while you scribble your search so you don’t have to look back and forth from the keyboard to the search box,” Mashable explains. “Google says the feature isn’t designed to replace keyboard search but instead supplement it.”
Available on Android phones and tablets as well as iOS devices running iOS 5, Google Handwrite is still experimental so users have to opt-in to use it.
“On your mobile device, login at google.com, tap on ‘Settings’ at the bottom of the screen and enable the ‘Handwrite’ feature. Then save your changes and refresh the homepage to get started,” the post states. “To enable Handwrite, tap the icon on the bottom right corner of your screen. You can scribble on any part of the screen, not just the search box. After writing a few letters, autocomplete options will appear below the search box.”
Warner Bros. is targeting several unnamed users of Amazon.com’s resellers market, filing at least 16 separate lawsuits in California.
The complaints claim the defendants have been selling counterfeit DVDs ranging from “Harry Potter” films to various HBO original shows.
Amazon’s e-commerce platform, which enables third parties to sell products, is protected by the first sale doctrine. However, a 2010 9th Circuit Appeals Court decision set the precedent that the original vendor could limit resale by “crafting the terms of use for media content to define the purchase as a ‘license’ rather than a strict ‘sale,'” notes The Hollywood Reporter.
However, a source told THR that the lawsuits aren’t concerning issues of used merchandise.
“If Warner Bros. is suggesting that illegally downloaded or camcorded copies of shows and movies are being passed off as new or used items on Amazon, the lawsuits launched Monday suggest a different sort of problem,” the article states. “Namely, the lack of internal controls in the Amazon Marketplace to deal with such ‘counterfeits.’ Amazon has been known in the past to suspend the accounts of counterfeiters, so the litigation raises the question of why not this time.”
Warner Bros. is seeking damages and attorney costs (Amazon is not a named defendant) and that “the defendants be restrained from offering unauthorized copies of their works for sale as well as marketing, advertising and promoting such copies,” explains THR.
Consumers are faced with a dizzying array of options to catch up with TV viewing as the cable business struggles with windowing strategies across multiple digital platforms.
One frustration for viewers is the inconsistent manner in which their favorite shows are offered online and on-demand.
“What is delaying the multichannel TV world is a complex web of vested interests ranging from the cable and satellite operators that dictate most of the distribution parameters for programming to the studios that hold onto some of the rights to the content they license to the networks,” notes Variety. “Then there are the varying off-air marketing strategies, not to mention just old-fashioned indecision.”
Programmers are faced with ad revenue challenges when considering premiere telecasts, reruns, DVR playback and more.
“Cablers also need to protect their relationships with operators that pay them a fortune in carriage fees,” explains the article. “On the other hand, programmers want to maximize the exposure of their shows in ways that can drive ratings back to on-air, dilute the appeal of piracy and capitalize on the momentum of online video in general.”
The industry’s lack of uniformity has evolved during the dawn of the TV Everywhere era, enabled by over-the-top products and services (and impacted by consumers’ changing expectations).
“What we’re really trying to do as an industry is to get a point of consistent time-shifted product available on all devices and platforms to pay TV subscribers,” said Mike Hopkins, president of distribution at Fox Networks.
The DASH Promoters Group is a newly formed collection of companies and organizations, supported by the European Broadcasting Union, that is working to promote the adoption of MPEG-DASH as an international standard for multimedia delivery over the Internet.
According to the group’s website, they believe the use of this open standard “will accelerate market growth, enable interoperability between content preparation tools, servers, CDNs and end devices, reduce the cost of delivery and eventually benefit the end user.”
During the London Olympics, Belgian broadcaster VRT is offering its audience an opportunity to stream the games via MPEG-DASH. “The public trial allows for a maximum of 1,000 concurrent viewers to watch their favorite sport events on a laptop, smartphone or tablet,” explains the site.
This marks the first live public trial of MPEG-DASH (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP), which the group hopes will serve as the next step toward adoption of a standard and eventual commercial deployment.
The DASH Promoters Group is facilitating the streaming with DRM content protection — available via the VRT Sporza website — but due to copyright restrictions it will not be available outside the Belgian territory.
“This trial is supported by a number of DASH Promoters Group members,” notes the DASH-PG site. “Encoding is provided by Elemental, Harmonic and Media Excel; streaming origins are courtesy of Wowza and CodeShop, who is also providing encryption; Web clients for PC and Android are supplied by Adobe; and BuyDRM is providing applications for iOS and Android, which incorporate its DRM solution.”
In response to NBC’s inability to provide live Olympics coverage online for non-cable subscribers, some U.S. viewers have taken up VPN services to access BBC footage with a UK IP address.
StrongVPN.com is one such VPN service provider that has had a jump in UK VPN sales recently, according to its president, Phil Blancett. He, however, holds no responsibility for what users do with their edited IP addresses.
“It’s not the responsibility of the VPN provider how people use our connections,” says Blancett. “We provide a VPN account and a secure connection, not what happens on those connections.”
“He compares the role of a VPN provider to that of an ISP, which should not be monitoring how you are using your Internet connection,” TechCrunch reports. “Another issue [is] that these companies are making money elsewhere and have other concerns with getting their Olympics coverage right.”
“I really don’t think the BBC or NBC really care,” Blancett says. “They’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
These VPN services are frequently used in countries like China that “geo-block a number of sites like Facebook and Twitter for political reasons,” the article explains.
“But as the amount of content — and specifically video content — has continued to grow online, so has the desire among consumers to get it where they want it, and when they want it,” concludes TechCrunch. “And just as torrent sites arose out of a time when getting content elsewhere simply wasn’t there, so has the market for VPNs and what they are getting used for, too.”
Tapping into coverage of the London Olympics could be a good way to spark 3D adoption. This year, NBC and Panasonic have devoted 30 ENG cameras, 20 rigs and three Olympic Broadcasting Services trucks to cover the games in a whole new way.
“NBC is working with Panasonic, the official sponsor of the 2012 Games, to pump more than 300 hours of 3D coverage into homes and bars worldwide,” Mashable reports. “According to the companies, about 80 percent of U.S. households have access to the programming — you just need a 3D-enabled TV to watch it.”
After tests during the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics, the project is now going full force, providing 12 hours of 3D programming each day.
In general, 3D has issues gaining traction despite the 10 million 3D TVs expected to ship to the U.S. this year. Some blame the lack of 3D-worthy content; others point fingers at the resistance to wearing 3D glasses.
While glasses-free 3D TVs aren’t expected to proliferate any time soon, Panasonic Chief Technology Officer Eisuke Tsuyuzaki remains optimistic about the current technology.
“So far, the response has been great,” Tsuyuzaki told Mashable. “We know people love 3D movies and seek them out, so it’s not a surprise that viewers love this too. We just need to give them more programming events in the future, so they keep coming back to watch more in 3D.”
