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Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Robyn Lee On Tuesday, a California appeals court ruled that Yelp’s ad sales strategies do not extort small businesses and merely amount to “hard bargaining” by the company. Yelp lets anyone review a business, and businesses can’t opt out of being reviewed. So when Yelp’s ad sales team began calling around asking companies to buy advertising in exchange for displaying good reviews more prominently, some storefronts cried foul. In 2010, four small business owners banded together to sue Yelp for extortion after they refused to buy advertising from Yelp and allegedly found that bad reviews were displayed more prominently. Two of the business owners also alleged that Yelp authored negative reviews to induce them to advertise or in retaliation after the business declined to buy advertising. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole’s two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole A home’s Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation . The Helmholtz equation models “the propagation of electronic waves” that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces. The author of the post in question , Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment’s long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

A sixth-generation iPod Nano embedded in a watch band. Aaron Muszalski Re/code is reporting that Apple will introduce a wearable device on September 9 alongside two next-generation iPhones. Such a device from Apple has been highly anticipated since the wearable market received newcomers from Samsung, LG, and Motorola . Apple’s entry into this market was originally expected sometime in October based on an earlier report from Re/code. The site has had a good track record of correctly predicting the timing of Apple product releases since the AllThingsD days. John Paczkowski, who reported the news, says that the coming device will certainly be equipped to make use of Apple’s HealthKit platform for its Health app, as well as HomeKit, which is a platform to connect devices to smart appliances and light bulbs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Kevin / flickr The US Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has deleted nearly a decade’s worth of documents from four US appeals courts and one bankruptcy court. The deletion is part of an upgrade to a new computer system for the database known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. Court dockets and documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, were maintained with “locally developed legacy case management systems,” said AOC spokesperson Karen Redmond in an e-mailed statement . Those five courts aren’t compatible with the new PACER system. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

Jawbone opens a window to our humanity-tracking future

Jawbone’s graph of users who were woken up by the earthquake in California early Sunday. Jawbone Wearable computing company Jawbone released a graph  on Monday showing its users being woken up by the 6.0-magnitude earthquake centered in the Napa Valley region of California on Sunday morning. 120 people were injured, a lot of wine went to waste, and a few people wearing Jawbone’s Up fitness bands lost some sleep, according to a huge spike in the percentage of users who were up and moving in affected regions at about 3:20am (close to 80 percent in Berkeley, Vallejo, and Napa Valley itself). The graph accurately plots the nexus of the earthquake, with smaller spikes of activity in more distant regions, including San Francisco and Oakland (around 60 percent of users), Sacramento and San Jose (25 percent), and Modesto and Santa Cruz, with only a tiny bump of a few percent from the baseline. Together, the locations form a basic map of the earthquake’s reach, not dependent on scientific measurements and existing equipment waiting for a disaster, but just a large, distributed population wearing tracking devices . The Up bands don’t collect location data themselves, so they can’t pinpoint where a user was asleep with perfect certainty. Rather, the data is based on the locations logged by the app used to store users’ information, which always records a user’s location when the app is opened. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

According to the slides, there will be three new NUC boards spread across give different boxes, all launching in the first half of 2015. FanlessTech We’re generally fans of Intel’s NUC (“Next Unit of Computing”) mini-PCs, which use Ultrabook parts to create reasonably capable desktop PCs that can fit just about anywhere. When last we heard about new Broadwell-based versions of the boxes, they were due to launch in late 2014, but delays of higher-performance Broadwell parts  has apparently pushed them back. New Intel slides from FanlessTech now show seven new NUC boxes launching in the first half of 2015. The slides also tell us what kind of boxes we can expect, though there are no big surprises here; the Broadwell NUC lineup is broadly similar to that of Haswell. There appear to be three boards: one high-end Core i5 model, one middle-end Core i3 model, and one Core i5 model with Intel’s vPro technology integrated to make it more appealing to enterprises. All appear to come in two types of enclosures, one with extra room for a 2.5-inch SATA III hard drive and one without. This makes for a total of six Broadwell NUC boxes. The revised NUC roadmap. FanlessTech All six boxes will share most of the same ports and features: two display outputs, Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, NFC, M.2 slots for SSDs, support for up to 16GB of RAM, and changeable lids (these may just be for customization purposes, though past rumors have suggested that some could be used as wireless charging pads). The vPro models will use two mini DisplayPorts while the standard i5 and i3 boxes will use one mini DisplayPort and one micro HDMI port, and all models appear to come with Intel’s 7265 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter soldered on—with current models, you must supply your own mini-PCI Express Wi-Fi card. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

Blizzard no longer expects World of Warcraft subscriber growth

The World of Warcraft isn’t usually this empty, but it’s getting there… For about six years after its early 2005 launch, it looked like there was nothing that could stop the runaway success of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft , which grew to a peak of 12 million paid subscribers by the end of 2010. Since then, though, the game has seen a long, mostly uninterrupted slide in its player numbers, with only 6.8 million subscribers as of July . Blizzard obviously isn’t happy about this trend for one of its biggest products but seems to have accepted that things aren’t going to change any time soon. “We really don’t know if [ World of Warcraft ] will grow again,” lead game designer Tom Chilton told MCV in a recent interview. “It is possible, but I wouldn’t say it’s something that we expect. Our goal is to make the most compelling content we can.” A new expansion pack like the upcoming Lords of Draenor could juice those subscriber numbers, as previous expansion packs have seemed to do. Chilton seems to see a bit of diminishing returns in this strategy, however. “By building expansions, you are effectively building up barriers to people coming back. But by including the level 90 character with this expansion, it gives people the opportunity to jump right into the new content.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Blizzard no longer expects World of Warcraft subscriber growth

Delaware becomes first state to give executors broad digital assets access

Tim Redpath Delaware has become the first state in the US to enact a law that ensures families’ rights to access the digital assets of loved ones during incapacitation or after death. Last week, Gov. Jack Markell signed House Bill (HB) 345,  “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act,” which gives heirs and executors the same authority to take legal control of a digital account or device, just as they would take control of a physical asset or document. Earlier this year, the Uniform Law Commission, a non-profit group that lobbies to enact model legislations across all jurisdictions in the United States, adopted its Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA) . Delaware is the first state to take the UFADAA and turn it into a bona fide law. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Delaware becomes first state to give executors broad digital assets access

Steve Ballmer leaves Microsoft board

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced that he’s stepping down from the company’s board, effective immediately. With his ownership of the LA Clippers , teaching, and “civic contribution” taking his time, Ballmer wrote  that he’s now “very busy,” and with both a new NBA season and new class of students, it would be “impractical” for him to remain on the board. In announcing his departure, Ballmer expressed confidence in new CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership, noting that although there are challenges ahead, there are also great opportunities, and he said that Microsoft’s mix of software, hardware, and cloud skills is unmatched in the industry. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steve Ballmer leaves Microsoft board

A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it

We’ve all had this first-world problem, but USB is still leagues better than what came before. Like all technology, USB has evolved over time. Despite being a “Universal” Serial Bus, in its 18-or-so years on the market it has spawned multiple versions with different connection speeds and many, many types of cables. The USB Implementers Forum , the group of companies that oversees the standard, is fully cognizant of this problem, which it wants to solve with a new type of cable dubbed Type-C . This plug is designed to replace USB Type-A and Type-B ports of all sizes on phones, tablets, computers, and other peripherals. Type-C will support the new, faster USB 3.1 spec with room to grow beyond that as bandwidth increases. It’s possible that in a few years, USB Type-C will have become the norm, totally replacing the tangled nest of different cables that we all have balled up in our desk drawers. For now, it’s just another excuse to pass around that dog-eared XKCD comic about the proliferation of standards . While we wait to see whether Type-C will save us from cable hell or just contribute to it, let’s take a quick look at where USB has been over the years, what competing standards it has fought against, and what technologies it will continue to grapple with in the future. Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it