Southwest is so awesome. You can watch TV for free onboard , the flight attendants aren’t jerks, and now you can use iMessage during your flight for just two bucks. Read more…
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Southwest Airlines Will Let You Use iMessage Onboard For $2
Data consolidated from a farmer’s plow’s GPS as it circled near Dmitriyev, Russia. Uncovering unknown territory is more and more rare, as GPS paired with the Web has made even the most remote or unusual routes accessible to the world. The free service of OpenStreetMap (OSM) has more than one million registered users contributing data from GPS, aerial photography and just regular traversing across every possible route in the world. OSM has more than a decade of consolidated data and is often referred to as the “Wikipedia for maps.” But the interesting part is that their data are considered their primary product, and not actual maps. Many sites are powered with OSM data—like Craigslist, Foursquare, Geocaching, MapQuest—organizations that want to use it instead of pricey Google Maps. But OSM also powers the beautiful maps produced by the startup MapBox. Here’s an example of a runner’s various routes (the thicker red lines represent the number of times he ran that particular route) using data from OSM. (more…)
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The Next Big Thing in Geo Software
We can’t say as we were particularly taken aback by today’s Spotify announcement, after all someone spilled the beans the other week (thanks a lot, The Wall Street Journal ) – but we trekked through a cold New York City morning to Spotify headquarters all the same. As anticipated, the company used the occasion to announce a free version of its tablet streaming service. Of course, nothing in this life is truly free, right? As such, the streaming offering will be ad-supported, much like the non-premium version of its desktop offering. Ek kicked things off by rattling off some impressive numbers, including 1.5 billion playlists created (with one and a half million made each day) and 4.5 billion hours of music streamed last year, before launching into the big news of the morning. The new version of the service will work with both Android and iOS tablets and plays along nicely with the company’s new Connect offering, so you can play that music through some of those high-end compatible speaker systems. You’ll be able to access your playlists through your tablet devices, but beyond that the exec didn’t break down the service too much, save for saying that it’s “the same as the desktop experience.” Filed under: Home Entertainment , Software Comments
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Spotify tablet streaming goes free — if you don’t mind sitting through a few ads
A law in Norway has their National Library scanning all literature and then making it publicly available to anyone to anyone coming in under a Norwegian IP address. Pretty cool, if you’re in Norway now or in the near-ish future. But it’s also pretty awesome for the much more distant future. Read more…
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In Norway, all library books must be digitized — by law
AT&T is watching you browse. Seth Anderson AT&T’s “GigaPower” all-fiber network has launched in parts of Austin, Texas, with a price of $70 per month for download speeds of 300Mbps (which will be upgraded to a gigabit at no extra cost in 2014). The $70 price is only available if you agree to see targeted ads from AT&T and its partners, however. Interestingly, AT&T labels the Internet service with targeted ads as its “premier” service while calling the service without targeted ads “standard.” Not only is the price of the premier service (with ads) only $70 a month, but it comes with a waiver of equipment, installation, and activation fees. The standard service without ads is $99 a month, and there’s no mention of a waiver in AT&T’s announcement . “The waiver is part of the Premier package, so is not available with the standard service at this time,” AT&T told Ars. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history
Behold the Pertamina Energy Tower, a U.S.-designed building that’s slated for construction in Jakarta, Indonesia. Reaching a height of a half-kilometer, the tower will harvest its own wind energy through an opening at its peak. Read more…
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This gorgeous skyscraper is also a wind power plant
Square has just announced that it has acquired Evenly , a company that was built to make it easy for friends to send and receive payments for splitting bills and other expenses. The company was founded in 2012, and was similar in concept to Venmo, an NYC-based startup that was acquired by Braintree last year . Evenly offered a mobile app that let people send and receive requests for funds from their contacts list, organized around events and experiences. For each participant in a pool, it would list what a user owed and what they’d already paid, if any, and you could see progress towards the total cost of an event displayed visually, as well as send reminders to all parties involved that they have to pay up. There’s also an activity feed that tracks progress and adds a social element to the bill sharing. Evenly will remain open and active until January 15, 2014 for existing users, and the team says on its own blog that it will give existing users “plenty of time” to get money out of the app and finish collections. Users can find out more here at an FAQ designed to guide those who will be transitioning off of the service. The app has been removed from the App Store, however, and new user registrations are turned off completely. On Square’s Engineering blog, the payment company’s Product Engineering Lead Gokul Rajaram says that the Evenly team will be working on “seller initiatives,” and it seems likely this is designed to bring Evenly’s talented five-person engineering and design team into the fold to boost Square Cash and help it continue to ‘square’ off against the now Braintree-owned Venmo and Google Wallet.
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Square Acquires Evenly, A Venmo Competitor For Sending And Receiving Payments With Friends
The maintainers of the security-conscious FreeBSD operating system have declared that they will no longer rely on the random number generators in Intel and Via’s chips , on the grounds that the NSA likely has weakened these opaque hardware systems in order to ease surveillance. The decision is tied to the revelations of the BULLRUN/EDGEHILL programs, wherein the NSA and GCHQ spend $250M/year sabotaging security in standards, operating systems, software, and networks. “For 10, we are going to backtrack and remove RDRAND and Padlock backends and feed them into Yarrow instead of delivering their output directly to /dev/random,” FreeBSD developers said. “It will still be possible to access hardware random number generators, that is, RDRAND, Padlock etc., directly by inline assembly or by using OpenSSL from userland, if required, but we cannot trust them any more.” In separate meeting minutes, developers specifically invoked Snowden’s name when discussing the change. “Edward Snowdon [sic] — v. high probability of backdoors in some (HW) RNGs,” the notes read, referring to hardware RNGs. Then, alluding to the Dual EC_DRBG RNG forged by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and said to contain an NSA-engineered backdoor, the notes read: “Including elliptic curve generator included in NIST. rdrand in ivbridge not implemented by Intel… Cannot trust HW RNGs to provide good entropy directly. (rdrand implemented in microcode. Intel will add opcode to go directly to HW.) This means partial revert of some work on rdrand and padlock.” “We cannot trust” Intel and Via’s chip-based crypto, FreeBSD developers say [Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]
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FreeBSD won’t use Intel & Via’s hardware random number generators, believes NSA has compromised them
You don’t think it’s only laptop, tablet, and smartphone designers that go the extra mile to make their devices thinner and thinner do you? Watch makers are constantly battling each other for the same notoriety, and now Piaget has reclaimed the title of ‘world’s thinnest mechanical watch’ with its new Altiplano 38mm 900P that measures in at 3.65mm—making it thinner than many digital alternatives. Read more…
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World’s Thinnest Mechanical Watch Is as Thick as Two Stacked Quarters
Twenty years ago, on December 10, 1993, John Carmack, John Romero and the rest of the team at upstart id Software unleashed a game called Doom upon the world. Twenty years later, both men have written about their favorite memories of the game for you and all fans of Doom to read. Here they are, in their own words… Read more…
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Memories Of Doom, By John Romero & John Carmack