Internet News

Secret Bitcoin mining code added to e-sports software sparks outrage

Internet News, Law, Tech News 1 Response »

May 012013

Competitive video gaming community E-Sports Entertainment Association secretly updated its client software with Bitcoin-mining code that tapped players computers to mint more than $3,600 worth of the digital currency, one of its top officials said Wednesday.

The admission by co-founder and league administrator Eric ‘lpkane’ Thunberg came amid complaints from users that their ESEA-supplied software was generating antivirus warnings, computer crashes, and other problems. On Tuesday, one user reported usage of his power-hungry graphics processor was hovering in the 90-percent range even when his PC was idle. In addition to consuming electricity, the unauthorized Bitcoin code could have placed undue strain on the users hardware since the mining process causes GPUs to run at high temperatures.

“Turns out for the past 2 days, my computer has been farming bitcoins for someone in the esea community,” the person with the screen name ENJOY ESEA SHEEP wrote. “Luckily I have family in the software forensics industry.”

About five hours later, a separate user posted evidence of the ESEA software client included the Bitcoin code. The user also provided instructions showing how other ESEA players can check to see if their computers are running the secret program.

MORE: Secret Bitcoin mining code added to e-sports software sparks outrage | Ars Technica.

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Bitcoin value triples in a month to all-time high of more than $100

Internet News, Tech News 279 Responses »

Apr 022013

At the end of February, bitcoins hit an all-time trading high of just over $33. That suddenly looks like chump change, with the value of bitcoins today moving past $100.

You can see nearly real-time changes in the value of bitcoins at Coinlab and track the currency’s steady rise over the past month at Blockchain. We’ve seen the value go up and down today, fluctuating between $99 and $105. The new high is remarkable given that bitcoins were only worth about $13.50 at the beginning of this year.

RIP Google Reader

interface, Internet News, Tech News 310 Responses »

Mar 142013

Google Reader, one of the world’s most popular RSS readers, is shutting down on July 1, 2013, Google announced Wednesday.

The search giant is pulling the plug on the 7-year old project citing “declining usage.” Google says it is shuttering Reader and deprecating or shutting down a number of other services as part of the company’s “spring cleaning” initiative — one that seeks to help the company focus on the features that need the most use.

In addition to Google Reader, the company is also ceasing sales and updates for the Snapseed Desktop apps for Mac and Windows, shutting down its CalDAV API, as well as ending support for Google Voice for BlackBerry.

Still, the biggest and most forcible change is the death of Google Reader. Google will allow users to export their data — including subscriptions — using Google’s Takeout service, as well as the OPML export within Google Reader itself.

A Blow to News Junkies

Use of traditional RSS readers have slowed in recent years, thanks in part to Twitter and apps such as Flipboard. But Google Reader — and RSS in general — is still tremendously useful for individuals that follow lots of sites and web feeds.

READ MORE: RIP Google Reader.

Twitter acquires We Are Hunted, readies standalone music app

Internet News, Tech News 498 Responses »

Mar 142013

Twitter acquired the music discovery service We Are Hunted last year and is using its technology to build a standalone music app, CNET has learned.

The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.

Twitter Music, which is set to arrive in the wake of key competitor Facebook overhauling the music section of its News Feed, shows Twitter taking new steps into becoming a full-fledged media company. The app acknowledges the key role music has played in drawing new users to the service — particularly younger, mainstream users. Pop stars have some of Twitter’s most popular accounts, with followings in the tens of millions. The TwitterMusic account has 2.3 million followers — not a bad perch from which to launch an eponymous app.

Twitter and We Are Hunted did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

An app built for discovery

Unlike Vine, the video sharing app that Twitter released in January, the music app carries Twitter branding. The app’s icon consists of a silver “play” button with the familiar blue Twitter bird looking down on it from the corner.

Put Your Site on a Diet With Google’s Image-Shrinking ‘WebP’ Format

Internet News, Tech News, Web Design 426 Responses »

Mar 142013

Webpages are constantly getting bigger.

Massive JavaScript libraries and endless sharing buttons aren’t helping, but the main culprit behind most of the bloat is the good old image. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.

One way to do that is with alternate image formats like Google’s WebP, which can yield images between 25 and 34 percent smaller than more popular image formats. Despite the astounding space-saving potential of WebP it, like JPEG 2000 and other efforts before it, has not completely caught on with browsers.

So far only Google Chrome and Opera support WebP (both also automatically convert all images to WebP for their respective proxy browsing mobile services). Mozilla objected to WebP when it was first launched, but all of the issues raised in that post have been addressed as WebP has evolved. Firefox still does not support WebP. Nor does Internet Explorer.

However, as Opera’s Bruce Lawson recently pointed out, using some cutting-edge CSS wizardry you can serve WebP images to Chrome and Opera, while still offering JPGs to the rest.

Pinterest Adds Analytics for Verified Websites

Internet News, Your Brand 373 Responses »

Mar 142013

Pinterest has launched Pinterest Web Analytics, a tool that allows profiles with verified websites to see what Pinterest users are pinning from their sites and, as a walkthrough video puts it, understand where those pins are going.

That means brands with verified accounts like Honda, McDonald’s, and Walmart can see how Pinterest users organize and share their content on the network and learn more about how those users want to incorporate the content into their lives, Pinterest says.

“Bloggers, businesses, and organizations often ask us, ‘What are people pinning from my websites?'” Pinterest Software Engineer Tao Tao writes in a blog post announcing the tool. “These website owners help create the content on Pinterest and we wanted to help them understand which pieces of content people find most interesting.”

Web Analytics features include how many people have pinned from a brand’s site, how many people have seen the pins, and how many people have visited the brand’s site from Pinterest.

The Analytics page also has tabs for Most Repinned, Most Clicked, and Most Recent Pins. The blog post says this will give brands a better idea of what’s popular.

Is Your Business Benchmarking its Engagement Rate?

Internet News, Marketing, Your Brand 362 Responses »

Mar 142013

Do you now how to measure your Engagement Rate? It´s an important social media metric that expresses how successful you are in engaging your audience within a social network.

It´s also a key performance indicator that has a direct impact on reach, as proven here, and drives the conversion of your fans to paying customers. We monitored the average Engagement Rates of Facebook Pages of different sizes and industries for a whole year, beginning from January 2012 to the end of January 2013, and reached the following conclusion: the more fans you have, the more challenging it gets to engage and reach more Facebook users. It´s only natural that engaging a larger fan base is more difficult, as it sets higher demands on the quality of the content – you need more people to Like, Comment on, and Share your posts in order to be successful.

Google Offers Help to Webmasters Whose Sites Were Hacked

Internet News, Tech News 213 Responses »

Mar 132013

Google has launched a page and a set of tutorials aimed for webmasters whose site was hacked.

Specifically, Google explains webmasters how to deal with Google’s search warning that a site is dangerous, which usually appears if a hacker has infected the site with harmful code.

“Every day, cybercriminals compromise thousands of websites. Hacks are often invisible to users, yet remain harmful to anyone viewing the page — including the site owner,” claims Google on the site titled “Webmasters help for hacked sites.”

via Google Offers Help to Webmasters Whose Sites Were Hacked.

Android Director: ‘We Have the Most Accurate, Conversational, Synthesized Voice in the World’

interface, Internet News 454 Responses »

Mar 132013

When Google unveiled its latest mobile operating system to the world last week, the company asked a reserved but extremely confident man named Hugo Barra to grab the microphone, and celebrate Android 4.1 as the best mobile operating system the world has seen. It couldn’t have been easy to sing the praises of an OS code-named “Jelly Bean” with a completely straight face, but Barra, Android’s director of product management, was cool and composed as he shared Android’s latest killer features.

There was the new graphically enhanced search tool, Google Now. There was the new voice-based search assistant — Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri. And there was also a new piece of hardware — the Nexus 7 — which would show off Android’s full potential. Barra anchored all these announcements, reporting the Google I/O news that the world was most interested in hearing.

And now he speaks directly with Wired about Google’s mobile future. We sat down with Barra last week at Google I/O to pick his brain about the Nexus 7, and all the other key Android announcements. Here is the edited conversation.

‘Google Now’ Reportedly Coming to iOS, Chrome OS, Windows 8

interface, Internet News, Tech News 1,847 Responses »

Mar 132013

Google Now is arguably the single best feature found in Android Jelly Bean, and soon, it seems, it may be coming to iOS, Windows 8 and Chromebooks everywhere.

Google Now brings you search results before you even go looking for them. Just swipe up, inside of Google’s search app (or from any home screen on a Nexus 4, 7 or 10), and Google Now activates. From there, the Google search app delivers today’s weather, your Google Calendar appointments, directions to home or work (depending on what time of day it is), a heads up to nearby events, the score from your favorite sports team’s latest game, boarding passes, package tracking, dinner reservations and a lot more.

via ‘Google Now’ Reportedly Coming to iOS, Chrome OS, Windows 8 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

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