Zunka Bhakri......: April 2013

13 Million Facebook Users Haven't Touched Their Privacy Settings


As Facebook prepares Graph Search for wide release, some have concerns about the privacy issues the new feature raises.

How can you be sure only your friends will see your name during searches? After all, more than a quarter of Facebook users share information with an audience much wider than their social circle. And 13 million users haven't even touched their privacy settings.

To see how Graph Search will affect you, as well as a few helpful tips for customizing your privacy settings, check out this infographic, courtesy of Marketo.

Are you worried about Graph Search invading your privacy? Tell us about it in the comments.


by Bob Al-Greene  Homepage image courtesy of Flickr, D. Stenvers

Google Adds App Activities to Search


Google announced on Tuesday it is adding app activities to its search functionality, giving users access to data typically found within certain programs such as movie reviews and ratings.

When searching for a website or app on Google, you will now be privy to popular and aggregate user activity within the results. However, this only applies for apps integrated with Google+ Sign-In app activities.

"Searching for Fandango, for example, will show the top movies among Google users. And when you click on a movie, 
you’ll go directly to its page on Fandango," Google said in a statement.

To check out how it will look within search results, click to enlarge the image below.

Google will be rolling out the feature to Search in desktop — not mobile yet — in the next few weeks. Movie and music apps will get the treatment first, starting with Deezer, Fandango, Flixster, Slacker Radio, Songza, SoundCloud and TuneIn.


"We'll be adding more apps over time," Google said. "We've got lots more improvements planned."

by Samantha Murphy

2013 Webby Award Winners Announced


The Webby Awards on Tuesday announced the winners for its 17th annual webstravaganza.

Nate Silver, Charlize Theron and the Mars Curiosity Rover should dust off their fancy duds because all scored nods for achievements in Internet-ing.

Each category includes both a Webby Award winner — selected by judges from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences — and a People's Voice Winner, which is voted by fans. This year's People Voice honorees received votes from more than 200 countries and territories, setting a new record for the Oscars (or People's Choice Awards) of the Internet.

Singer-songwriter Frank Ocean nabbed the 2013 Webby Person of the Year for using the Internet as his megaphone to encourage acceptance and dispel stereotypes. Ocean famously came out on his Tumblr page in what the Webbys described as "historic moment for both the music and social media industries."

Other winners who received multiple awards included Dumb Ways to Die (7), Dropbox (6), Google Maps for iPhone (5), Tumblr (5), HBO Go (4) and Pinterest (4).

Other big Webby Award winners include:

Outstanding Comedic Performance: Jerry Seinfeld, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

Webby Special Achievement: Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti, House of Cards

Webby Breakout of the Year: The Obama for America 2012

Webby Artist of the Year: Grimes

Webby Special Achievement: Burning Love

Webby Athlete of the Year: Chris Kluwe

Webby Lifetime Achievement: GIF inventor Steve Wilhite

Best Celebrity/Fan Website: Conan O’Brien Presents: Team Coco Digital

Best Practices Mobile & Apps: HBO Go

Best Viral Online Film & Video: Dumb Ways to Die

Best User Experience (All Devices): Google Maps for iPhone

Best Community (General Website): Tumblr

Best User Experience Games: Angry Birds Star Wars

Best Business Blog: Mashable (#humblebrag)

View the full list of 2013 Webby Award winners.

Comedian Patton Oswalt will play master of ceremonies when the winners gather on May 21 to collect their awards and deliver five-word acceptance speeches.

The show will be available to view online May 22.
by Annie Colbert

Google Glass Twitter App Appears. Tweet With Your Eyes?


In the not too far off future, you'll be able to tweet with your eyes. Or at least that's what it looks like.

A new Twitter app for Google Glass — the search engine giant's new high-tech specs — has been spotted in the wild, according to TechCrunch.

The publication caught wind of a Twitter user by name of Shivster Muddler who tweeted on Monday night of a picture of a lemon tree. But this wasn't just any old image. The message, which said "just shared a photo #throughglass," was uploaded via "Twitter for Glass," as indicated next to the time stamp.

The original tweet (and the user account) has since been deleted, but fortunately, a screenshot of the tweet has been making the rounds online.
Although the tweet could have been doctored to look authentic, the report indicates venture capitalist John Doerr has alluded to Twitter working on an app for Glass. So either way, we'll likely see one from the company soon.
by Samantha Murphy

19 Fascinating Maps

In the simplest sense of the word, a map is a spatial representation of something. It provides us with a sense of context, scale and location. Maps began as 2D depictions, but technology and data enable maps to become dynamic, real-time and compelling visualizations of how we live and move.

Below, we've rounded up 21 awesome maps from around the web. Some will help you navigate your city, some show the actual mapmaking process and some are just mindblowing visualizations of people flowing throughout cities. No matter what kind of map it is though, it hammers home the exciting pulse and pace of urban life.

1. New York Transit: One Day of MTA Activity

New York City's MTA transports approximately seven million people every day. One YouTube user (correctly) thought it would be interesting to visualize commutes throughout all five boroughs from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m.

2. Global Flight Paths
What faster way to get from one country's metropolis to another? Flight. As of January 2012, the OpenFlights/Airline Route Mapper Route Database had information on 531 airlines flying 59,036 routes between 3,209 airports; these routes are shown in the image above. (All of the airports of the world, according to this same database, are shown in the image at the top of this article.)

3. CityMaps

The CityMaps app was founded in 2010 as a social map to help people discover the places in their city. It maps out city landmarks — shops, sites, restaurants, cafes — on a simple interface that's somewhat reminiscent of a shopping mall legend. Venue names line the map's streets, peppered in with logos of big chains like McDonald's and Starbucks.

4. High-Speed Rail Map

Whether a high-speed rail system ever gets built in the United States is still up in the air, but if it is, artist and activist Alfred Twu figured out exactly where those speedy rail lines should go. Twu started working on this map in 2009, when President Obama's plan to build high-speed rail was unveiled. "There were many such maps being made by various designers," says Twu, but since then he's updated the map with labels and put it on Facebook, where it went viral.

5. A More Geographically Accurate London Underground

The London Underground map was designed by Harry Beck and published in 1933. While it's streamlined and colorful and gives a bird's eye view of the system, it's not exactly geographically accurate. In fact, a lot of people end up taking a longer route than necessary because it looks like the shortest route on the map. The map above, designed by Mark Noad, shows the stations of the London Underground closer to their true geographic position; it's a compromise between the clean lines of Beck's map and the true layout of the system.

6. Instahood

Looking for a more intimate view of an street than you can get on Google Street View? Instahood lets you zoom in on any area of the world and see Instagrams that have been geotagged to that location.

7. U.S. Interstate Subway System

Cameron Booth is a graphic designer in Sydney, Australia. In the map above, he reimagines American cities as stops on part of an interstate subway system that's reminiscent of the London Underground.

8. Tetsudo Now

Tokyo is home to the busiest subway system in the world, transporting 6.31 million passengers every day. Tetsudo Now is a real-time Google map of the city's public transit — subways and busses — that dynamically update so commuters know where trains and busses are at any given moment. The animated subways and busses mosey along the lines based on transit timetables.

9. A City's Heartbeat: Geneva

A City's Heartbeat uses Google Maps, CartoDB and D3.js to colorfully and dynamically visualize Geneva's urban transport system over a two-day period. Filters on the interactive map let you see train activity at each station and the volume of people (shown above), so you can get a sense of the pulse of the city as its inhabitants go about their daily lives.

10. London's Oyster Card Tap-Ins

Oliver O'Brien is a researcher at University College London who focuses on spatial visualizations, especially in London. The video above is an animation of Oyster Card (commuter smartcard) taps in and out of London's tube and rail stations. Taps are recorded in 10-minute intervals, and red represents flow into the system, while green indicates exiting a station. Oyster Card data was provided by Transport for London, and this video is a recording of an OpenLayers map produced by O'Brien at UCL for the exhibit.

11. San Francisco's Michelin-Starred Restaurants

A huge component of travel is tasting the cuisine of the region you're visiting. Global standards like the Michelin Guide make it easy for tourists to know what are the best (and sometimes, the priciest) restaurants in a city. Food blog Eater mapped San Francisco's Michelin-rated restaurants on a Google map so hungry residents and visitors could put the restaurant's location into context.

12. Real-Time Ottawa Traffic

Cities are congested, and it's estimated that by 2050, 6.3 billion of the world's 9.3 billion inhabitants will live in cities. That has many implications, but one major issue with this increased population density is automobile traffic. Cities around the globe are implementing smart solutions to manage traffic flow and disseminate important traffic information. The Google map above illustrates the City of Ottawa's interactive traffic map, which shows traffic conditions in real time (thanks to traffic camera), as well as accidents, construction, parking and bike routes.

13. Tweat.it

Food trucks are all the rage, and the Tweat.it Google map pulls locations from food truck tweets and plots them on a map, using the truck's logo as a marker. If the truck moves or shuts down for the day, the Tweat.it map is updated.

14. Mapped in Israel

Wandering the streets of Tel Aviv? You can pop into one of the bustling city's hustling startups by tapping into Mapped in Israel. The interactive map lets you filter the country's startup scene by accelerators, startups, investors, co-working spaces and more. (There's a similar map in New York City that lists all Made in NY startups.)

15. London Cycle Map

This London cycle map was designed by Simon Parker and also inspired by Harry Beck’s London Underground map. As more cities implement bike-sharing programs, it's crucial for cities to create safe roads for drivers and cyclists alike.

16. Foursquare Check-Ins in New York & Tokyo

More than 30 million people worldwide use Foursquare, and they've logged more than 3 billion check-ins to date. Because people use Foursquare in real-time, the app functions as a sort of virtual itinerary tracker and has collected a lot of data since its 2009 launch. Foursquare recently sought to visualize this data, plotting a year's worth of check-ins in New York City and Tokyo and pressing fast-forward. Each dot in the video above represents one check-in, while lines indicate sequential check-ins. Much like the Geneva heartbeat video above, this data visualization illustrates the pulse of the city.

17. 201 Bike Commutes

Briton Aidan Samuel used Strava to track 201 bike journeys over four months, all transposed into a 24-hour period. The map starts pretty quietly and remains quiet until about 6 p.m., illustrating rush hour from a cyclist's point of view.

18. Mapping Bangalore in OpenStreetMaps

OpenStreetMap is an open-source maps API that relies on the contributions of users in a Wikipedia-style format for not only roadmaps but also hiking trails, bike paths and footpaths around the world. It was founded by Steve Coast in 2004 as a one-man project, and it boasts more than 500,000 volunteers across the globe. This video shows the process of mapping Bangalore's roads that started in 2007, driving home how much work goes into to mapping the globe's cities on the open-source platform.

19. Sumus Technology's Transit Maps

If you go to the Sumus website and click on any of the green busses on the map, and you'll be able to see a video that shows public transit activities that city. The videos are created with General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data, and each point represents one vehicle. Each video tracks urban mobility for one weekday, letting you visualize the movements of a population on the go. Cities that have been visualized and are available on the YouTube channel include Sydney, Honolulu, Dublin and Madrid.
by Lauren DrellApr

What If Other Planets Replaced Our Moon?


The epic scope of the universe sometimes inspires us to ask answerless questions. What would happen if the sun just blinked out? What if Mars took the place of our moon? The laws of nature prevent these things from happening, but still, we wonder.

Feed your imagination with this set of photos, which substitute a number of familiar planets for our satellite. Enjoy the peaceful views, because if these images were real, you wouldn't have long before some cataclysmic celestial collisions; we would probably crash into Jupiter within a day.

Luckily, none of this will happen. But still, it's fun to look and ask "What if." First, here's a refresher, just in case you forgot what the moon looks like:


Venus


Mars


Jupiter


Saturn


Uranus


Neptune

by Bob Al-Greene  Images courtesy of Ron MIller

iOS 7 Design Rumored to Have Completely New Look

When Apple dismissed iOS head Scott Forstall last year, the software's look and feel became the domain of the company's designer-in-chief, Jonathan Ive. Many predicted that Ive, whose simple hardware designs have become iconic in the industry, would introduce a flatter, less showy aesthetic to iOS.

A new rumor suggests he's doing just that. Ive is said to be eschewing Apple's "skeuomorphic" design — where digital representations of objects are designed to resemble real-world counterparts — in favor of simpler shapes and non-textured surfaces, 9to5 Mac reports.

Details on how the design of iOS will get flatter are scant, but one source says the interface will lose "all signs" of gloss and skeuomorphism. For example, the Notes app, which currently resembles a yellow legal pad, may become something closer to Evernote or any number of iOS to-do list apps.

Although the changes, as reported, are extensive — including redesigned toolbars and tab bars — iOS 7 won't be any harder to use than any previous version of the software. Although it will look different, the report says, it will operate in a similar way as it always has.

Rumored to be codenamed "Innsbruck," iOS 7 is said to have new "glance-able" information panels, perhaps similar to some of the functions shown in this concept video from an ambitious designer. Apple had previously considered adding a function similar to Exposé on OS X for multitasking, but opted instead for the "bottom drawer" that exists in iOS now.

If the report is true, Ive will fully put his stamp on iOS with version 7, officially moving away from the skeuomorphic aesthetic that's been a hallmark of the system since its inception. Steve Jobs was known to be a proponent of the design philosophy, as was Forstall.

Apple, with Ive as chief software designer, has already started to move away from skeuomorphism. The revamped version of Apple's Podcasts app, for example, ditched the reel-to-reel tape icon for playback that was criticized as silly, difficult to use and a waste of space.

Would you be excited or apprehensive if Apple fully discarded skeuomorphic design in iOS 7? Share your thoughts in the comments.

7 Stunning iPhone Concept Videos
1. iPhone 6 Commercial

Would you ever be interested in a transparent phone?

2. iPhone 5 Concept Features

This design had us at "holographic display."

3. iOS 7 Apple iPhone 5S Concept Video

Joe Hall's iVision "infuses animation, emotion and personality into the new OS."

4. iPhone 5 3D Concept

Would a 3D camera tempt you to upgrade?

5. iPhone 5 New Concept Features

We love the idea of a fingerprint reader for security.

6. New iPhone Concept Features — Speakers

Want!

7. iOS 7 Concept

Finally, there's some really imaginative iOS ideas here. Apple, please take note.
by Pete Pachal. Image by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images News/Getty Images

New 'Pacific Rim' Trailer




Guillermo del Toro's dark, apocalyptic vision of the future is filled with monstrous beings from the deep. Earth's only chance? Giant robots, of course.

In "Pacific Rim," each robot is operated by two humans via a neural link, but we already saw that in the first trailer for the movie. This one — originally intended only for WonderCon — focuses on one thing only: epicness.

Simply put, everything in this movie is huge. One example: a monster near the end of the trailer is beating on a robot with a tanker as it were a baseball bat. To some, it might be over the top, but to us, it screams "IMAX."

Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi star in the movie which opens July 12, 2013.
by Stan Schroeder

The World's First Website Gets Its Original Web Address Back


The folks at CERN, the organization responsible for devising the fundamental web standards, are celebrating World Wide Web's 20th birthday by bringing back the first ever website to its original URL.

Although the first website was launched in 1991, it was on April 30, 1993 when CERN made the WWW technology available on a royalty-free basis.

The website, obviously very scarce by today's standards, contains only text explaining some of the basics of the World Wide Web. It was originally available at this address — http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html — but for many years that URL has been redirecting to http://info.cern.ch.

Now, CERN has dug up a 1992 copy of the site — the earliest it could find — and put it back online at its original address.

CERN employees will keep trying to find an earlier copy; in the meantime, you can browse through it and see what the World Wide Web (all of it) was like in 1992.

by Stan Schroeder

No-Wash Shirt Doesn't Stink After 100 Days

A New York City startup is saying it can produce a men’s button-down shirt from wool that’s super-soft, doesn’t need ironing and won’t smell even after being worn for 100 days straight without washing. And the company’s founder apparently did just that.

The clothing company, called Wool&Prince, was started several months ago by Portland, Oregon native Mac Bishop two of his friends. Their button-down shirt prototype was made from wool put through a special process to make it soft, wrinkle-resistant and odor-free. While they don’t reveal what techniques are used to achieve this, Bishop documented wearing one of the shirts for 100 days in a row here. (Hat tip to Gizmodo.)

Bishop extolls the benefits of sheep wool, and talked with Margaret Frey, an associate professor of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University about it in a Skype video. Australian sheep have been bred to have fine, soft fibers for an even flat fabric, Frey said. “It doesn’t have that itchiness that we might have associated with wool.”

Still, I’m highly skeptical about the shirt’s odor-free properties after seeing a GIF of Bishop next to a smoker, but will have to take his word for it since nobody I know has tried the shirt out yet. The company recently created a Kickstarter campaign to sell the shirts at $98 apiece so they can raise enough to place an order with the factory.

Living in Colorado, I’ve accumulated a few really nice albeit expensive wool items for outdoor use, including base layers and socks. Washing seems to reduce their smell-resistance, though. The pieces have a vaguely sheep-like smell after they’re gently cleaned and hung up to dry. Plus the socks could walk home by themselves after several days of heavy, sweaty use.

If this NYC startup can branch out into socks and underwear that truly don’t smell after lengthy wear, then we’ll really talk. Summer and its putrid sweat is just around the corner.

by Alyssa Danigelis for Discovery News

What Does the Internet Know About You?

As Rebecca Martinson knows, there’s no privacy on the Internet. When a profanity-laden rant she emailed to only her Delta Gamma sorority sisters made its way onto Gawker and into viral history, she was publicly mocked and forced to resign from the sorority. But the Internet is not only a place to be humiliated. It's also a place for people or companies to pick up even more information about you. That includes your address, gender, date of birth and, with a little sleuthing, your Social Security number and credit history.

That's been made clear in a recent spate of "doxing" (document tracing) of celebrities that revealed, for example, that Microsoft CEO Bill Gates had an outstanding debt on his credit card. But none of this information comes from hacking. It's either already public or accessible by, for example, paying an online people-finding service to get a Social Security number, and then running a credit check.

Then there's all the data you pour into social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Foursquare and others. Now employers can fire workers for expressing opinions they don’t like, strangers can stalk you with mobile apps and college administrators can judge the quality of applicants by the number of drinking photos posted to their account.

Aleecia L. McDonald, director of privacy for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University, said people are grappling with the idea that their information has a secondary use. “The issue isn’t so much that information is out there and people can see it,” she said. “On Facebook, that’s the point. But it’s when that information gets used in a new and different way.”

It's All Public
Many gun owners felt that secondary use of private information when they saw an interactive map published by the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., that listed the name and addresses of everyone in two New York state counties with a gun permit. A maplisting the names, addresses, phone numbers and social media accounts of Journal News reporters, including the author of the original story, was circulated online in retaliation. At least one county refused to turn over pistol permit records, citing the possibility of “endangering citizens.”

However, the records are all public. There is no law against publishing them either in print or online, even if it makes some uncomfortable.

“I can use Zillow.com and see home prices for everything up and down the neighborhood,” McDonald said. “Sure, all that information was available at City Hall, but I wasn’t going to look it all up [in person] because that takes effort.”

When real estate search site Zillow first came out, many people were shocked at the amount of information on it — including the price paid for homes and names of owners. Zillow has since backed down from publishing names, but last year, it began listing homes going through the foreclosure process, which caused another firestorm of people looking to opt out. But all the information comes from public records. Zillow says it doesn’t list names, only properties; and it does not allow those with foreclosed property to opt out” of being published.

Other sites, such as Arrests.org, list mug shots by state. And some local police departments are now posting photos of recent arrests on Facebook. Now with the Internet and databases, public records are easy to distribute and see.

Social Oversharing
Adi Kamdar of the Electronic Frontier Foundation cautions about the use of Facebook Graph Search, which allows users to search information from news feeds of friends and those users with settings set to public on Facebook. Now anyone can look for, for example, single women living in San Francisco who share their taste for tapas and perhaps find a phone number and email address. Who needs Match.com anymore?

Facebook has also reportedly been working for the past year on a socially ambient mobile app — one that lets you literally track people or friends via a map and GPS. While the socially ambient aspect hasn’t appeared yet, it’s expected to surface, according to Bloomberg News, likely in a new version of the Facebook Home interface.

“There’s nothing you can do in the electronic world that your boss can’t find and you can’t be fired for,” said Lewis Maltby, president of National Workrights Institute. “I got a call today from someone who got fired because he was writing short stories on his own time (online) and apparently they were a little kinky.”

Maltby, whose organization fights for human rights in the workplace, said that today, people’s futures are in peril every time their boss or college admissions office looks on the Internet. That means users shouldn’t post photos of themselves with an alcoholic drink in their hand or espouse political views, because it can lead to a value judgment.

“You can still go online and say what you want, but you’re crazy if you do,” Maltby said.

Another problem today is social networks becoming a larger part of one’s life. To comment on articles, people frequently log into a Facebook account first. Others are finding that their Google+ social account is being attached to their Gmail account and will be needed to comment on apps or games on Google Play. Google+ accounts are also used to sign into YouTube and other Google sites. Many social networks are seemingly trying to end anonymous posting.

To preserve privacy, a person would have to walk away from Google or Facebook. “It’s a trade-off to some extent,” Kamdar said. “The more these services get adopted, the more you have to think, ‘My entire online presence depends on this corporation or this service I don’t want to opt into.’”

Recently Facebook Home was launched on Android devices, and many noticed that the interface logged online purchases and visits, although Facebook said that it doesn’t assign names to the information. Facebook is using customer loyalty cards' information and public records to sell to advertisers and marketers. However, Facebook Home isn’t hunting anyone down to do this; people themselves are opting to use an Android phone with the Facebook skin on it.

What You Can Do
Long-term solutions could be legal, regulatory or even codes of conduct for companies, said McDonald. The White House is now working on a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, but there is still not a working draft of the bill, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, users can save themselves some headaches by understanding that whatever they place online will stay online. Nothing online is temporary; instead, it's more like an Internet tattoo. Martinson’s online (and likely late-night) outburst will follow her throughout college and possibly the workforce, according to CNN.

Keep all social networks set to the highest privacy settings even if you have to manually approve follow requests.

If posting to a forum or other online database, don’t use your real name or email address (or at least one you don’t mind people seeing).

Never give out your date of birth, phone number or physical address if you can help it.

Never give out your Social Security number. Many colleges, banks, brokerage houses and other companies now have alternative login IDs to use provided you ask for one. (However, not even colleges or banks are immune to hackers, so always monitor your credit for suspicious activity.)

Remember that what you post can be seen by others. Be careful of what you say and which photos are posted because it could potentially be seen by millions of people.

“A lot of data is coming from people directly,” McDonald said. “Lock down [social media] accounts to only friends. Being more mindful is the first step we can take before looking for other solutions.”

by Barbara E. Hernandez, TechNewsDaily contributor for TechNewsDaily

Gymnast's Shocking Routine Will Blow You Away



This gymnast's eye-popping routine has gone viral for good reason, and must be seen to be believed.

The incredible sports sequence involves a ball, some major contortions and a whole lot of grace. We're not quite sure where this young lady comes from or who she is, but we do know this much: her amazing video has become popular enough to hit the front page of YouTube with more than 3.7 million views since being uploaded on Saturday. 


by Sam Laird