Pinboard

From now until the end of 2014, Google will evaluate local regulations, topography and access to utility poles to see whether a 10-year venture in the City of Roses is viable. In other words, the deal is not yet done and Google can still step away from the opportunity. If the endeavor does move forward, Google will shell out at least $300 million in Portland to build the network, according to an estimate from Portland’s Office for Community Technology. According to the April agreement, Google would provide free Internet service to unspecified nonprofits and up to three free outdoor Wi-Fi networks in unspecified parts of Portland.

Google forayed into the health industry in 2007 when it launched Google Health, which also served as a repository of users' health information, including hospital and medical records. Google Health unfortunately did not gather mass appeal due to privacy concerns raised by users who were not entirely comfortable telling Google highly personal details about themselves. The company closed down Google Health in 2012. "Google Health never took off because consumers actually don't want to aggregate their data," says Derek Newell, chief executive at healthcare social network Jiff. "They haven't wanted to. What they want is information. They want meaning, rewards and a feedback loop."

Andy has a body double!!!

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA), member of the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee, introduced bicameral legislation to require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban so-called “paid prioritization” agreements between a broadband provider and a content provider. The Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act would help prevent the creation of a two-tiered Internet system, ensuring start-ups and entrepreneurs have access to the marketplace and ensuring consumers can access all content equally. Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.), Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) are original cosponsors of the legislation.

Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.

Scam???? I don't think this is POSSIBLE!!

I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I'm asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to "sign on" with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I'm a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.

Reports of YouTube launching a music streaming/ subscription service first emerged last year, but more recently it looks like the Google owned video giant is finally getting ready to launch. The service is said to be similar to Spotify, Rdio and others, in that it will offer free ad-supported music streaming, with a paid tier on top that provides ad free and offline streaming. According to the Financial Times, around 10% of the music industry has not yet agreed with the terms of YouTube’s new service. Holdouts are said to include XL Recordings, whose artists include Adele and The XX, and Domino, who represent Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand.

In a decision announced Thursday morning, the court's nine justices ruled unanimously to dismiss a previous patent the government had awarded to an Australian company for business software. In issuing its ruling in Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank, the court set a higher standard for patent awards, saying Alice Corp. did not deserve a patent for generic computer implementation of an abstract idea.

Nest itself was just purchased by Google just four months ago for $3.2 billion. But the company says it is undertaking this acquisition on its own, outside of Google. Dropcam will be folded into Nest’s brand and company culture, and will also be subject to its privacy policy, Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder and VP of engineering, told Re/code in an interview Friday.

Skype did not spell out what it meant by "retire" in the blog post -- whether the older software will simply not be supported or that only the most recent versions will work with the network -- but Microsoft clarified the situation. "Once a version is retired, users will no longer be able to sign into the retired version until they upgrade to the latest version of Skype," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email reply to questions.

Half the major publishers in Germany have started a process of arbitration — which, no doubt, will lead to suits — to demand that Google pay them for quoting from and thus linking to their content. And now we know how much they think they deserve: 11% of Google’s revenue related to their snippets. From their government filing, they want a cut of “gross sales, including foreign sales” that come “directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public.” [All these links are in German.]

Apple is said to be working with Los Angeles Lakers basketball player Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Kings right winger Dustin Brown, and a few other star athletes, including a player from the Boston Red Sox, on the testing project. The athletes are said to have signed non-disclosure-agreements regarding the existence of the upcoming Apple wearable device. Nonetheless, Bryant was spotted at Apple’s campus last month meeting with Apple design chief Jony Ive. Indeed, the meeting between the pair is said to have been in regards to “iWatch” testing…

The unveiling of BoringSSL, as the Google fork has been dubbed, means there will be three separate versions of OpenSSL, which is best known for implementing the secure socket layer and transport layer security protocols on an estimated 500,000 websites. Developers of the OpenBSD operating system took the wraps off LibreSSL a few weeks after the surfacing of Heartbleed. Google is taking pains to ensure BoringSSL won't unnecessarily compete or interfere with either of those independent projects. Among other things, the company will continue to back the Core Infrastructure Initiative, which is providing $100,000 in funding for two full-time OpenSSL developers so the organization can refurbish its badly aging code base.

But only if you ask for it

According SCOTUSblog’s report on the ruling, given by Supreme Court Justice Scalia, “the essence of the Aereo ruling is that Aereo is equivalent to a cable company, not merely an equipment provider.”

we know that if we talk about things before people see them, there’s a much more negative reaction. That’s one of the things we learned. It’s really important for people to be able to experience products; otherwise you fear the worst without seeing those benefits.

Hollywood's demands that Google remove from its search results a subreddit that encourages users to post links to free full length movies has reinvigorated the subreddit's ailing traffic.

“With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. “When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X.”

The puzzler is why the plaintiffs (TV stations and networks) didn’t pursue this technical angle more aggressively in the first place. In the first court case (2nd Circuit in NY), at least one judge (Denny Chin) called Aereo’s system a “Rube Goldberg” approach, cleverly designed to circumvent copyright law. He hit the nail on the head. There was some testimony from an RF expert at the first hearing, but either the testimony wasn’t presented correctly or contained technical flaws. So the copyright violation angle has been pursued exclusively by plaintiffs since then.

A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones.

Early Sunday morning, a Facebook spokesman emailed me with this statement: "We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process. There is no unnecessary collection of people’s data in connection with these research initiatives and all data is stored securely.”

Talking with Google engineering director David Burke confirmed that all of the new Android initiatives announced at the keynote this week—Android Wear, Android Auto, and Android TV—will have user interfaces and underlying software that is controlled by Google, not by the OEMs.