Zynga today reveals its very own social game platform, Zynga.com, which was previously called Z-Live and Zynga Direct. The service launches today with five of Zynga’s best-performing games: CastleVille, CityVille, Words with Friends, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Poker.

Here’s what Zynga.com is: a platform on which social games can run synchronously and relatively seamlessly between it and Facebook. A CityVille player logging into Zynga.com today will find their city exactly as it appears on the Facebook canvas, with the same amount of virtual goods in their inventory and same amount of virtual currency in their e-wallet. Thanks to a deeper-than-anything-we’ve-seen integration with Facebook Connect, all in-game activity that takes place on one platform happens on the other. That CityVille player can buy a new park decoration on Zynga.com and it will appear in Facebook if they player were to jump back to the social network and play CityVille there. A Facebook player can used Credits to buy 20 Crowns in CastleVille and those 20 Crowns will be in the virtual bank if the player jumps to Zynga.com.

Here’s what Zynga.com is not: an alternative to Facebook. The service is focused on the games experience to the exclusion of almost all other social networking tools. Players can’t post pictures, can’t create events and can only group themselves by Facebook friends and players that play the same games. The only social network features Zynga.com cribbed from Facebook are the chat function, social discovery of new friend connections and a live app ticker for games activity (which is something Facebook recently disabled on canvas apps).

Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

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Meet Zynga.com, also known as Zynga Direct, Z-Live and Zynga’s declaration of independence

Anyone hoping for a truly unlimited “unlimited” data plan is still out of luck, but AT&T has announced some changes (or a clarification, as it puts it) to its throttling procedures today that will at least give you a bit more room to work with. For customers on an unlimited plan with a 3G or “4G” phone (i.e. HSPA+), you’ll now be able to enjoy full data speeds up to 3GB, after which you’ll then see your speeds decrease until the start of the next billing cycle. If you have a 4G LTE phone, however, you’ll have a full 5GB to play with before the throttling kicks in. That’s as opposed to the roughly 2GB of full data speeds that was available in both cases before — and, as with the throttling that was imposed originally, these changes only apply to those still on an unlimited data plan, not those on AT&T’s tiered data plans.

AT&T announces throttling changes, now kicks in at 3GB or 5GB for LTE originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T announces throttling changes, now kicks in at 3GB or 5GB for LTE

Netflix now provides content with captions or subtitles for more than 80 percent of the hours streamed in the U.S. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that 80+ percent of Netflix’s streaming content has captions, but that of all the hours of streaming content watched in the U.S., over 80 percent of it was captioned in some way.

This is a significant improvement, considering that captions were only present on 40 percent of hours streamed in June, and 60 percent in November. Netflix is also pushing content providers to offer up already-captioned content, while authoring subtitles for content that doesn’t already have them, according to this blog post.

But the company warns, that final 20 percent won’t be completed as quickly as the rest. This is because it’s mostly content that is rarely watched, so even if Netflix adds captions at a crazy rate, the metric itself will take some time to catch up.

Back in June, Netflix was sued by the National Association of the Deaf for not providing captions for most of its streaming content. If you’ll notice, that’s around the same time that Netflix picked up the pace to now double the number of hours streamed with captions.

If you’re like me and watch almost all of your Netflix streaming TV/movies on a laptop, captioning isn’t just helpful, it’s necessary. Those little speakers don’t help much at all when I need to pick up every little detail in Battlestar Galactica and Lost, so we’re glad to see Netflix keep up the pace.

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Netflix Gets Serious About Closed Captioning

Although Windows 8 has a radical new interface for touch, it still supports the mouse and keyboard and in fact comes with a few new keyboard shortcuts that can make working on Windows 8 more productive and navigating easier. More »

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Learn The New Windows 8 Shortcut Keys [Windows 8]

xyzzy123 sez, “Want to make a freedom-of-information request to the FBI or other three-letter agencies for any information they might have about you? This post links to a website that lets you enter personal information (or not, if you prefer), and then automatically print form letters to the correct government offices.”

The incident that precipitated the article is pretty bizarre: a woman with a history of protest asked the FBI for her file and discovered that she’d been closely followed. What’s more, she learned that despite all that close surveillance, the FBI got her political allegiances completely wrong, describing bitter rivals as fellow travelers and generally getting it all messed up.

Life Get Your FBI File!

(Thanks, xyzzy123!)

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HOWTO request your FBI file

MrSeb writes “Japanese researchers have created a hand-held gun that can jam the words of speakers who are more than 30 meters (100ft) away. The gun has two purposes, according to the researchers: At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking — but its second application is a lot more chilling. The researchers were looking for a way to stop ‘louder, stronger’ voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: ‘We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.’ In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce ‘proper’ conversations.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Speech-Jamming Gun Silences From 30 Meters

First time accepted submitter ausrob writes “Domain seizures are nothing new, but this particular case is interesting. The Department of Homeland Security has seized a domain name registered outside of the U.S., by individuals who are not American citizens, and who registered with a Canadian registrar. From the article: ‘The ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of US federal and state lawmakers (not exactly known their cluefulness nor even-handedness, especially with regard to matters of the internet).'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Shuts Down Canadian Gambling Site With Verisign's Help

Email inboxes can get full of newsletters, subscriptions, and other useless junk pretty easily. Just because you ordered a sweater three years from a store doesn’t mean you need to continue getting a catalog from the company. Unsubscribr scans your email box for newsletters and unsubscribes you quickly and easily. More »

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Unsubscribr Crawls Through Your Email and Provides a One Click Unsubscribe Button for Spam and Newsletters [Email]

Ever wonder what those freaky guys and gals that hang out at your local watering hole are all about? Don’t get the ins and outs of their particular brand of bad taste, and you want to know what they’re doing walking around looking like that?

Well, this field guide to subcultural tribes by artist Rob Dubi should help you to understand just what sort of freak you’ve encountered when you spot one in your neighborhood.

From Fixed Gear Hipsters to Apple Store Indies, these informative charts break down their style and the message they’re sending to the world in easy to understand illustrations. So now you can get to know these breeds from afar, and start a new people watching hobby at the same time!

Link –via DesignTAXI

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The Urban Field Guide To Subcultural Tribes

Still not satisfied after our minute by minute liveblog of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Consumer Preview event this morning from Barcelona and detailed hands-on impressions? Video of the entire presentation, along with a few demo trailers are available on the company’s press site so you can feel that Sinofsky magic for yourself. One of the preview videos is embedded above, press play or hit the source link to download the 688MB 90 minute long version for repeat viewing.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 Preview event videos now available originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s Windows 8 Preview event videos now available