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In just one year, Zynga has lost nearly half of its daily active users

It’s been a rough year for Zynga, which has relegated founder Mark Pincus to being chairman of the board. Fortune Live Media Zynga needs some good news, and fast: in its Tuesday quarterly earnings filling, the company reported that its daily active users rose from 27 million in the last quarter of 2013 to 28 million this quarter. But when compared to the first quarter of 2013 , Zynga had 53 million daily active users—which means the company has lost about half of its most active players in a year. Just months after Zynga spent $527 million on NaturalMotion , maker of Clumsy Ninja , the embattled social gaming firm also announced that it ended its first quarter by losing over $61 million. At this time last year, the company had profited $4.1 million during the first three months of 2013. Still, the company’s chief executive tried to play the loss down. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In just one year, Zynga has lost nearly half of its daily active users

Rolling in it: Comcast profited $1.9 billion in first 3 months of 2014

Alyson Hurt Earlier this month, Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that it needs the green light to purchase Time Warner Cable as a way to stay competitive with Google, Netflix, and others. Nevertheless, in its latest quarterly earnings report published on Tuesday, Comcast reported that it made $1.9 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2014—an 18 percent increase year-over-year. “Our operating momentum is continuing as we enter 2014 and is highlighted by our second consecutive quarter of video customer growth, as well as strength in high-speed Internet and business services,” Comcast CEO Brian L. Roberts said in a statement. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rolling in it: Comcast profited $1.9 billion in first 3 months of 2014

“Russian Facebook” founder flees country after being forced out as CEO

Pavel Durov, founder and former CEO of Vkontakte. Pavel Durov/VK Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte (VK)—the largest social network in Russia—said on Tuesday that he fled the country one day after being forced out of the company, claiming that he felt threatened by Kremlin officials. In a  post on his profile page on Monday, Durov explained that he was fired from his position as CEO of VK and that the so-called “Russian Facebook” is now “under the complete control” of two oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin. Durov explained that after seven years of relative social media freedom in Russia, his refusal to share user data with Russian law enforcement has set him at odds with the Kremlin, which has recently been trying to tighten its grip on the Internet, according to The Moscow Times . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Russian Facebook” founder flees country after being forced out as CEO

Using bugs—aphids, specifically—to spy on plants’ electrical communications

I’m catching some signals, fellow aphid. Are you? benimoto Internal communications in plants share striking similarities with those in animals, new research reveals . With the help of tiny insects, scientists were able to tap into this communication system. Their results reveal the importance of these communications in enabling plants to protect themselves from attack by insect pests. Like any organism, plants need to transport essential nutrients from one part to another. This is achieved by two parts of the plant: the xylem and the phloem. Xylem, which is largely made of dead cells, transports water and dissolved nutrients obtained by roots up to the aerial tissues of the plants. By contrast, the phloem is made up of living cells—active tubes that transport a syrupy sap, rich in sugars made by photosynthesis in the leaves. In the 1980s, scientists discovered that phloem cells also function as a communication system through which electrical signals travel, similar to the electrical signals transmitted through the neurons in your nervous system. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Using bugs—aphids, specifically—to spy on plants’ electrical communications

Active malware campaign steals Apple passwords from jailbroken iPhones

Sophos Security researchers have uncovered an active malware campaign in the wild that steals the Apple ID credentials from jailbroken iPhones and iPads. News of the malware, dubbed “unflod” based on the name of a library that’s installed on infected devices, first surfaced late last week on a pair of reddit threads here and here . In the posts, readers reported their jailbroken iOS devices recently started experiencing repeated crashes, often after installing jailbroken-specific customizations known as tweaks that were not a part of the official Cydia market , which acts as an alternative to Apple’s App Store. Since then, security researcher Stefan Esser has performed what’s called a static analysis on the binary code that the reddit users isolated on compromised devices. In a blog post reporting the results , he said unflod hooks into the SSLWrite function of an infected device’s security framework. It then scans it for strings accompanying the Apple ID and password that’s transmitted to Apple servers. When the credentials are found, they’re transmitted to attacker-controlled servers. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Active malware campaign steals Apple passwords from jailbroken iPhones

Digital Public Library of America to add millions of records to its archive

Aquarium, Battery Park, New York City [Postcard], ca. 1931. This is just one of the many resources you can find online through the DPLA website or through apps using its API. New York Aquarium Postcards collection of the Wildlife Conservation Society Archives. Via Empire State Digital Network. Today marks the Digital Public Library of America’s  one-year anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, the non-profit library network announced six new partnerships with major archives, including the US Government Printing Office and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The DPLA is best described as a platform that connects the online archives of many libraries around the nation into a single network. You can search all of these archives through the digital library’s website, and developers can build apps around the DPLA’s metadata collection using the publicly available API. It’s easy to find historical documents, public domain works, and vintage photos online through a search on the DPLA’s website, although sometimes a library will merely offer the data about an item, and retain the actual resource at the library. Still, having that data accessible through a single public portal is more useful for a researcher than having to search for it library by library. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Digital Public Library of America to add millions of records to its archive

All sent and and received e-mails in Gmail will be analyzed, says Google

Google  added a paragraph to its terms of service as of Monday to tell customers that, yes, it does scan e-mail content for advertising and customized search results, among other reasons. The change comes as Google undergoes a lawsuit over its e-mail scanning, with the plaintiffs complaining that Google violated their privacy. E-mail users brought the lawsuit against Google in 2013, alleging that the company was violating wiretapping laws by scanning the content of e-mails. The plaintiffs are varied in their complaints, but some of the cases include people who sent their e-mails to Gmail users from non-Gmail accounts and nonetheless had their content scanned. They argue that since they didn’t use Gmail, they didn’t consent to the scanning. US District Judge Lucy Koh refused Google’s motion to dismiss the case in September. Koh also denied the plaintiffs class-action status in March on the grounds that the ways that Google might have notified the various parties of its e-mail scanning are too varied, and she could not decide the case with a single judgment. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All sent and and received e-mails in Gmail will be analyzed, says Google

After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Netflix’s decision to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the Comcast network has resulted in significantly better video streaming performance for customers of the nation’s largest broadband provider. Netflix has bemoaned the payment, asking the government to prevent Comcast from demanding such interconnection ” tolls .”But there’s little doubt the interconnection has benefited consumers in the short term. Average Netflix performance for Comcast subscribers rose from 1.51Mbps to 1.68Mbps from January to February, though the interconnection didn’t begin until late February. In data released today, Netflix said average performance on Comcast has now risen further  to 2.5Mbps , a 65 percent increase since January. Comcast’s increased speed allowed it to pass Time Warner Cable, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T U-verse, and others in Netflix’s rankings. Comcast remains slower than Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, and Google Fiber. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65%

Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Soon, you’ll be able to use Apple’s CarPlay without buying a whole new car. Apple So far, consoles compatible with Apple’s CarPlay feature have only been integrated into a handful of high-end cars. If you want to use the feature without buying an entirely new vehicle, Alpine Electronics will soon be able to hook you up—Nikkei reports that the company will begin selling a standalone CarPlay console in the US and Europe this fall. The console is “likely” to have a 7-inch display and will reportedly cost between $500 and $700. Alpine already sells a lineup of entertainment and navigation systems , and it’s possible that this new CarPlay-compatible version will offer similar features when there’s no iPhone connected to it. Current CarPlay-compatible vehicles offer the CarPlay interface when an iPhone is connected, but it’s available as an alternative to the automakers’ own software solutions rather than a complete replacement. CarPlay was first demonstrated as “iOS in the Car” at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year and was officially released earlier this year as part of the iOS 7.1 update . It provides access to Apple Maps’ turn-by-turn navigation features, your music and podcasts, and a handful of third-party streaming services approved by Apple; as of this writing, there’s no public API that developers can use to support the feature independently. CarPlay requires a compatible in-dash display and an iPhone 5, 5C, or 5S connected via a Lightning cable. Rumors of a wireless version of CarPlay persist, but it’s not clear whether these first CarPlay-compatible displays will be able to operate wirelessly when (and if) that capability arrives. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Aftermarket CarPlay console coming this fall, costs between $500 and $700

Here’s how Windows 8.1 Update tries to give you the right UI on any device

The Windows 8.1 Update that introduces a bunch of interface changes to Windows 8.1 is designed to enhance the experience of mouse and keyboard users, but what about the growing number of happy touch users? About 40 percent (and increasing) of PCs available at retail have a touchscreen (compared to just 4 percent when Windows 8 launched), and for the most part, their buyers enjoy how they work. With touch interfaces a growing part of the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft didn’t want to make the touch experience worse. While many desktop users may want their systems to boot straight to the desktop, this is unlikely to be a popular option for tablet users. Touch laptop users could easily go either way. Microsoft’s goal, therefore, was to pick a sensible default based on the kind of system being used. The way the update does this is based on something called the power platform role , a setting found in the computer’s firmware specified by the manufacturer. For Windows PCs, it will typically be “desktop,” “mobile,” or “slate,” for desktops, laptops, and tablets, respectively. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Here’s how Windows 8.1 Update tries to give you the right UI on any device