Zach Miners
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Mozilla tests a true stealth mode for Firefox
Mozilla wants to make private browsing truly private.The company is testing enhancements to private browsing in Firefox designed to block website elements that could be used by third parties to track browsing behavior across sites. Most major browsers, Firefox included, have a “Do Not Track” option, though many companies do not honor it.Mozilla’s experimental tool is designed to block outside parties like ad networks or analytics companies from tracking users through cookies and browser fingerprinting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple, Intel cite gains in hiring women and minorities
Apple and Intel are both making progress in their efforts to hire more women and minorities, according to figures released by the companies this week.In the first six months of the year, more than 43 percent of Intel’s hires in the U.S. were women and minorities, up from 32 percent at the end of 2014, the company reported in its first mid-year diversity report.At 43 percent, Intel said it was surpassing the 40 percent diversity hiring goal it set for itself for the full year.Apple, meanwhile, boosted its hiring of women by 65 percent globally over the past year, to 11,000, the company said in its second annual report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple, Intel cite gains in hiring women and minorities
Apple and Intel are both making progress in their efforts to hire more women and minorities, according to figures released by the companies this week.In the first six months of the year, more than 43 percent of Intel’s hires in the U.S. were women and minorities, up from 32 percent at the end of 2014, the company reported in its first mid-year diversity report.At 43 percent, Intel said it was surpassing the 40 percent diversity hiring goal it set for itself for the full year.Apple, meanwhile, boosted its hiring of women by 65 percent globally over the past year, to 11,000, the company said in its second annual report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google’s Niantic Labs to become independent company
Two days after announcing a sweeping reorganization, Google has detailed its first departure. Niantic Labs, an augmented reality unit of Google, will be spun off into an independent company.The split, which is unusual for Google, means that Niantic Labs won’t be part of Alphabet, the new holding company that is expected to be formed later this year to include Google and other parts of the company.The move was announced by Niantic Labs in a Google+ post on Wednesday, and confirmed by Winnie King, a spokeswoman for Google.She said the split would allow Niantic to accelerate its growth, “which will help them align more closely with investors and partners in the entertainment space,” but didn’t provide any more details.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Four knowns and four unknowns in Google’s Alphabet soup
When Google announced on Monday that it would create a new holding company called Alphabet, of which Google Inc. will be just one part, Larry Page said the new structure would allow the company to get more ambitious things done. But there was still a lot that he didn’t say.The move should free up time for Page and Sergey Brin to focus on Google’s forward looking projects like self-driving cars, and allow other leaders, like Sundar Pichai, to take care of the core businesses. It should also provide a bit more transparency for Google’s investors, allowing them to see better how those core businesses are performing.But there are questions too, about how Alphabet will evolve and which other companies might get their own CEOs. Here are four knowns and unknowns about what happened yesterday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Four knowns and four unknowns in Google’s Alphabet soup
When Google announced on Monday that it would create a new holding company called Alphabet, of which Google Inc. will be just one part, Larry Page said the new structure would allow the company to get more ambitious things done. But there was still a lot that he didn’t say.The move should free up time for Page and Sergey Brin to focus on Google’s forward looking projects like self-driving cars, and allow other leaders, like Sundar Pichai, to take care of the core businesses. It should also provide a bit more transparency for Google’s investors, allowing them to see better how those core businesses are performing.But there are questions too, about how Alphabet will evolve and which other companies might get their own CEOs. Here are four knowns and unknowns about what happened yesterday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Internet giants to block child porn images using a common list
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft will take a new step toward combating the spread of child pornography, by blocking images identified in partnership with an industry group.The companies will block images of child sexual abuse that have been identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K.-based nonprofit that aims to locate and stamp out such content online. The effort is aimed at speeding up the identification and removal of images of child sexual abuse worldwide, and preventing them from being uploaded in the first place.Only known child sexual abuse images identified by the IWF will be blocked. Each company will download a list of images that have been “hashed” by IWF analysts, under a process that creates a digital fingerprint of each image. The hashes are created from images that IWF’s analysts have assessed, which come from various online sources like reports from the public, and the U.K.’s Child Abuse Image Database.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Some Yahoo Mail users menaced by zombified deleted emails
For Yahoo Mail users, some messages just won’t stay dead.Some users of the company’s popular Mail service report that messages they’ve deleted are reappearing in their inboxes, an issue that some say is a recurring problem.Since the beginning of July, more than 100 complaints have been posted in a forum devoted to Yahoo’s email service. Some users say hundreds if not thousands of emails that they had previously deleted have reappeared. Others say the emails continue to reappear after being deleted again.“I have deleted thousands of emails just to find them still in my inbox,” one user wrote on Monday. “I have better things to do than sit at this computer and do something over and over and over again,” the person wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Nest Cam review: a slightly pricey way to secure your home
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. With Nest’s motion-sensing camera, that prevention will put a dent in your wallet.The Google-owned company, which makes a smart thermostat and smoke detector, recently launched its first home security camera, the Nest Cam. It offers higher-quality video and smarter motion detection than its predecessor, the Dropcam, which Nest acquired last year. But with a bunch of similar cameras on the market, some of which come with cheaper or even free cloud storage plans, the Nest Cam is not necessarily a smart buy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Reddit bans racist communities, ‘quarantines’ other offensive talk
Reddit is removing several racist communities from its website, as well as other offensive discussion topics, part of an ongoing effort to clean up the most toxic content on its site.Among those now banned are the subreddits /r/CoonTown and /r/bestofcoontown—as well as others with even more racist names—and also content related to “animated” child pornography, said Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, in a post on Wednesday.Reddit is trying to strike a balance between honoring its heritage as a place for free-wheeling free speech while also restricting hateful or harassing content. It’s a tough balance, though, and some of its longtime users have criticized what they see as censorship of the site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Yahoo picks up fashion commerce site Polyvore
Marissa Mayer knows fashion, and she’s bringing more of it to Yahoo with her latest acquisition announced Friday.Yahoo has reached a deal to acquire Polyvore, an e-commerce site that lets you shop for “what’s trending in the style community,” Yahoo announced Friday. It hopes the deal will give it a place to sell more ads for retailers.The site lets users shop for clothing and accessories, but it also has a social networking component that lets users post collections of desired items, like they might on Pinterest. The majority of Polyvore’s users are women between the ages of 18 and 34, the company says.In its announcement, Yahoo cited advertising as a key driver of the deal. Yahoo will integrate Polyvore’s ads into Gemini, its native ads platform. Polyvore has more than 350 advertisers who are retailers, Yahoo said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook says Flash security woes could hurt its business
Earlier this month, a security vulnerability in Adobe Flash compelled Google and Mozilla to temporarily block the plug-in from their browsers. Now, Facebook says the problems with Flash could hurt its bottom line.In a filing with U.S. regulators on Friday, Facebook said security issues with Flash could harm the revenue it collects from its Payments service. That’s because social games on Facebook rely on Flash, and they’re also the source for substantially all the revenue it gets from Payments.The company listed the concern for the first time among the “risk factors” in its quarterly filing. Public companies in the U.S. are required to disclose such risks to investors. It doesn’t mean Facebook’s revenue from Payments is about to collapse, but it means it’s enough of a concern that Facebook felt the need to disclose it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook aims to launch unmanned drone by year-end
At 140 feet, it has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, but carries no passengers—and it’s much lighter too, weighing in at no more than 1,000 pounds. And within the next couple months, Facebook hopes to get its drone off the ground on an inaugural test flight.Named Aquila, the aircraft is the product of more than a year’s work at the social networking giant. Its function is not to drop retail items from the clouds like Amazon’s drones, but to provide Internet access to the hundreds of millions of people who don’t have it in under-served parts of the world. Facebook aims to partner with carriers and other companies to provide connectivity, potentially at a lower cost than typical infrastructure like cell phone towers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook revenue surges 39 percent but costs also soar
Facebook has posted strong sales results for the second quarter, showing continued success in its advertising business, though its costs also rose sharply.Total revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was US$4.04 billion, Facebook reported Wednesday, up 39 percent from the same period last year and just over analysts’ estimates of $3.99 billion, as polled by Thomson Reuters.But the company made less money than it did a year earlier, with net income falling by nearly 10 percent to $719 million. Earnings per share declined from $0.30 to $0.25.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Twitter surprises with a sales gain, but user growth lags
Twitter reported a higher than expected increase in revenue on Tuesday, suggesting progress in the company’s efforts to grow its ad sales.Total revenue for the second quarter ending June 30 was US$502 million, Twitter reported, up 61 percent from the same period last year, and beating estimates of $481 million from analysts polled by the Thomson Financial Network.Twitter also reported decent growth in its users, although with a caveat. For the quarter, the total number of users logging in monthly was 316 million, up 15 percent. But compared to the first quarter, the vast majority of the increase was derived from SMS Fast Followers, people who access Twitter content on mobile devices but do not have accounts on the service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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NSA will lose access to ‘historical’ phone surveillence data Nov. 29
The U.S. National Security Agency will lose access to the bulk telephone records data it has collected at the end of November, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Monday.Congress voted in June to rein in the NSAs mass collection of U.S. phone metadata, which includes information such as the timing and location of calls. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court then gave the NSA 180 days to wind the program down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook opens Internet.org to more mobile operators
Facebook is inviting additional mobile operators to take part in Internet.org, its project to bring Internet access to poorly connected parts of the world.Internet.org turns one year old this week, and Facebook says it’s ready to scale the project to reach more people.The company is making it easier for more mobile operators to join the project by launching an online portal where they’ll find technical tools and best practices to help them get started.So far, Facebook has been working with about a dozen operators in 17 countries to provide an app that gives people free access to a set of basic Internet services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google to decouple Google+ from some of its sites
Google is severing the ties between its social network and other of its services, so that users will not need to log in to other sites like YouTube using a Google+ account.In the coming months, people will only need a standard Google account—not a Google+ account—to do things like share content, communicate with contacts, and create a YouTube channel, the company announced Monday. YouTube will be one of the first products to adopt the change.Since launching Google+ in 2011, the company has tried to integrate it into its various other properties, partly in an aim to unify people’s identities across them. But the integrations have not always gone smoothly. Google sparked outrage from users when in 2013 the company began requiring people to hold a Google+ account to post YouTube comments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook prevails in shareholder lawsuit over IPO
An appeals court has ruled that shareholders cannot sue Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg in a case that accused the company of withholding key financial information from the public until after its IPO.The shareholders alleged that Facebook had failed to share its projections for mobile ad sales prior to the offering, disclosing them only to analysts who then relayed the information to certain investors.The plaintiffs complained that Facebook’s stock was “hammered” after it went public and the market learned of the lower forecasts. Facebook’s shares opened at just over US$42 on the Nasdaq on May 18, 2012, and fell to the low $30-range in the ensuing days. The stock has since risen strongly, trading at around $96 on Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Downloading your LinkedIn contacts can now take all weekend
LinkedIn users now have to wait up to three days if they want a list of their contacts on the service.Previously, the social networking site provided a way for users to instantly export their contacts. It was a useful feature for people looking to manage their contacts elsewhere. Under a change made Thursday, users now must make a request to download their account data. In a page describing the new process, LinkedIn says users will receive an email within 72 hours with a link to download the archive when it is ready.A link to the instructions for the process appears in very small type on the LinkedIn export settings page. The change was reported earlier by VentureBeat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here