Columbus wants as much data and analysis as it can get to help it become a smart city – and it’s asking for your help.
The city is making available datasets used in applying for the $40 million federal transportation grant awarded to Columbus last year in the Smart City Challenge. It wants the Smart Columbus Sandbox to be used as a tool for developers to experiment with the data.
The sandbox – you can play around in it – is part of the integrated data exchange, a cloud-based platform that…
John Oliver has again fired off his quick wit at the new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the Trump administration for trying to roll back Obama-era Net Neutrality rules.
This isn’t the first time Oliver has addressed the issue of an “open internet,” as he touched on the topic back in 2014 during his fifth episode of Last Week Tonight. In that episode, he identified then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler as a dingo. Ring any bells?
This time, Oliver is going after the new Chairman and ISPs to bring to light the effort to roll back net neutrality rules.
For those of us who need a brush up on the matter, it’s rather simple:
ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon etc. are currently forbidden from favoring one website over another by giving them a “fast lane.” Companies don’t like that. You can obviously imagine a world where Netflix pays a fee to ISPs to be served to its consumers faster than Hulu, limiting consumer choice and killing industry competition across the internet.
It’s this “fast lane” that Oliver seeks to stop.
But we all know Oliver can deliver his own speech far better than I, so without further ado, check out this kick-ass diatribe from the man himself:
The website to which Oliver pushes viewers (http://ift.tt/2plaFGb) seems to be giving the FCC some trouble as the comments form is not loading for certain people. We reached out to the FCC to see if the service issue on its website is related to Oliver’s call to action (of course it is) and if it has been resolved so that people can continue complaining.
We haven’t heard back.
Disclosure: Verizon owns Aol (or Oath?), and Aol owns TechCrunch.
It’s been a rough week in Mac security. First, Checkpoint warned users of a Trojan spreading in Europe that was the first of its kind. And now, one of the most prominent video transcoding apps for Mac has a malware problem.
The developers of the transcoding software Handbrake have issued a statement that warns one of the mirror sites to download the software has been compromised by hackers. The post explains that anyone who has downloaded the software between May 2nd and 6th of this year has a 50/50 chance of being infected. But, it’s probably a good idea just to double check if you’ve downloaded it anytime recently.
Advertisement
Advertisement
According to yesterday’s alert, the installer file on the mirror server download.handbrake.fr (HandBrake-1.0.7.dmg) was replaced by a malicious file. The malware is a variant of OSX.PROTON, it gives a hacker root access privileges to the system. Back in February, Apple had to issue an update to XProtect to account for the original Proton and on Saturday, the company began the process of updating for the this latest variant. It should automatically download for most users.
Here’s how to detect and remove it:
Detection
If you see a process called “Activity_agent” in the OSX Activity Monitor application. You are infected.
For reference, if you’ve installed a HandBrake.dmg with the following checksums, you will also be infected:
Then Remove any “HandBrake.app” installs you may have.
For the sake of precaution, users should change passwords stored in any OSX or browser keychains. While primary mirror site and the automatic updater on versions 1.0 or later weren’t affected, anyone who uses Handbrake should just make sure.
Reader mirandakatz writes: It’s the 10th anniversary of Scratch, the kids programming language that’s become a popular tool for training the next generation of minds in computer science. But as Steven Levy writes at Backchannel, Scratch’s real value is how it imparts lessons in sharing, logic, and hackerism: ‘A product of the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is steeped in a complicated set of traditions — everything from educational philosophy to open source activism and the pursuit of artificial life. The underpinnings of this tool subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, convey a set of values through its use… These values include reverence of logic, an unshakeable belief in the power of collaboration, and a celebration of the psychic and tangible rewards of being a maker.’
An oil refinery is an industrial cathedral, a place of power, drama and dark recesses: ornate cracking towers are its gothic pinnacles, flaring gas its stained glass, the stench of hydrocarbons its heady incense. Data centres, in contrast, offer a less obvious spectacle: windowless grey buildings that boast no height or ornament, they seem to stretch to infinity. Yet the two have much in common. From an article on The Economist:
A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era (Editor’s note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). These titans — Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year. Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century.
I just migrated my photos off of Flickr. Yes, it’s 2017, and I was still using Flickr. Why? Because I’d been using it since 2005, it’s free, and the mobile app is… fine. But now that it seems like Flickr is joining the likes of AOL and Earthlink in the internet graveyard, it’s clearly time to leave. Why did it take this long for me to leave to begin with?
Advertisement
First off, let’s talk about why someone would want to leave Flickr, even if it might seem obvious to anyone who’s attempted to use the service in the last couple years. Beyond the fundamental lack of development in Flickr, including the fact they pulled support for free automatic photo uploads, there was that massive Yahoo hack they revealed last year, which turned out to be worse than initially thought. Then, a few months ago, Verizon purchased Yahoo, which puts Flickr’s future up in the air. All these factors combined were enough of a signal to me that it was time to go. But it still took months of convincing myself to do so.
The Longer You’re With a Service, the Harder It Is To Leave
The sunk cost fallacy is a term that pops up with work or financial investments a lot, but it’s applicable here as well. The idea behind sunk cost is the more you invest in something, the harder it is to abandon it. If you’ve ever woken up one day and realized you’re using some outdated, junky app that barely works because it’s what you’ve always used, then you know exactly how sunk cost works.
Advertisement
I had invested a lot of time in Flickr. I’d spent hours uploading photos. Hooked up IFTTT recipes that scooped up photos from Facebook and Instagram, and created shared vacation albums. As time went on, I sunk more and more time into Flickr, even though I knew the service was never going to get updated. When I signed up for Flickr eons ago, there weren’t a lot of options, but even two or three years ago the likes of Google Photos and even Apple Photos had outpaced Flickr. Too bad though, because I’d spent so much time learning the ins and outs of Flickr’s increasingly dated system that it felt too complicated to leave it. I hated Flickr the last couple years but I also didn’t have to think too hard about how to use it. Sure, it had its quirks, but I’d worked them into my workflow and I could use it without a ton of thought.
So I continued to use Flickr because I felt like the time it would take to research alternatives and migrate over wasn’t worth it. This is the exact same thinking that prevents us from quitting stupid projects, or even playing a dumb game. As humans, we often prefer to stay the course and persevere in the hopes that things will get better. Once we’ve spent a lot of time on something, it feels like a waste to let go of it.
Web Services Make It Hard to Leave on Purpose
The difficulty that comes from trying to leave a service isn’t all in your head. Web services are notorious for making it difficult to leave. It turns out that Flickr might be one of the worst offenders.
Advertisement
Sponsored
To download all your photos from Flickr, you have to select every single photo, move it to an album, and then download that album. When you do so, Flickr breaks that album down into separate ZIP downloads. In my case, I had 12 archives to download. Each ZIP was about 1GB in size, and each one failed to download three or four times. One of those archives refused to download at all. That meant that I would sit there, waiting for the archive to download, then for no reason whatsoever, it would quit, cancel the download, and I’d have to start over. As best as I could tell, this was because the connection speed with Flickr was awful, but I tried it over the course of several days, on different browsers, and even on different computers, all with the same result.
Eventually, I tracked down Flickr Downloadr, which, although archaic at a glance, could at least download all my photos in bulk. And then I had to install a few different frameworks to get the app to run. Once I did that and got used to the fact the app wasn’t entirely in English, I was able to download all my photos.
Advertisement
Over the years, we’ve talked more and more about the importance of data portability to a point where it’s now one of the most most important aspects to consider about any service. The fact is, no app or service will last forever, and at some point, whether it’s because the company does something stupid, the service goes under, it gets bought out, or it starts to suck, you will want to leave. The ability to do so is important. I even pay for my notes app now because it offers easy data portability.
Here’s one more sad confession about my relationship with Flickr: I actually tried to leave a couple years ago and migrate everything to Google Photos but gave up halfway through because I had the same download issues I experienced more recently. This made the second attempt all the more difficult, because not only did I have the sunk cost of my time with Flickr, I also had the sunk cost of one failed migration to deal with.
Advertisement
This time, I suffered through it, and after a week, I finally had my photos downloaded and accessible.
Flickr’s bullshit download capabilities are bad, but it’s not like they’re the only ones who do this. Apple is notorious for making it hard to export your files, and a lot of productivity apps—to-do apps especially—make it impossible to move over to something else using any type of automated service. Even leaving a service that seems simple, like Evernote, can get complicated and you’ll lose some of your formatting in the process. Flickr, for all its clunkiness and all-around outdated design, at least kept my photos in their original resolution and format.
Advertisement
Anyway, I took two lessons away from this whole stupid process: don’t let the time you’ve spent on something prevent you from leaving it, and make sure it’s easy to take your data with you whenever you sign up for a new service.
ELEY has made it possible for the .22LR shooter to see the performance before they buy.
U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Have you ever wondered how your ammunition performed prior to purchasing? ELEY has made it possible for the .22LR shooter to see the performance before they buy. With the ELEY lot analyzer you will now be able to enter an ELEY lot number into the website and see many different statistics about the particular lot of ammunition entered.
Visit http://ift.tt/2pOtVh8, scroll to the ELEY lot analyzer and click to enter your lot number.
ELEY is dedicated to producing the most accurate and consistent .22LR at all price levels and by introducing the ELEY lot analyzer a consumer can see how accurate and consistent each lot performs. The ELEY lot analyzer will give information such as quantity loaded, group size, percentage of shots within tenths of inches from center, velocity and much more.
It is now possible to be standing in your local sporting goods store, enter an ELEY lot number that is on the shelf and instantly see the performance of the ammunition. This service will be available for all ELEY lot numbers in the United States from 2015 forward. You can find the year of your ammunition by the third and fourth numbers in the lot. For example, if your lot number is 3016-30xxx, it is from the year 2016.
It is now possible to be standing in your local sporting goods store, enter an ELEY lot number that is on the shelf and instantly see the performance of the ammunition.
It is exciting to be able to offer this service to consumers to gain their trust in ELEY ammunition across every product and pricing level. To analyze your lot of ammunition please visit http://ift.tt/2pOtVh8 and click the lot analyzer button to discover your possibilities. ELEY .22LR ammunition is accuracy defined.
For more information on ELEY and ELEY ammunition please visit our website, http://ift.tt/2pOtVh8.
About ELEY Ammunition:
ELEY ammunition is a British management owned company that has been producing ammunition since 1828. ELEY has been the choice .22LR ammunition for more Olympic medalists than all other .22LR manufacturers combined, making ELEY recognized as the manufacturer of the most consistently accurate .22LR ammunition in the world. Innovation and continuous product development separate ELEY from its competitors. ELEY have always been at the forefront of the ammunition industry, pushing technological boundaries which have resulted in patented new methodologies and techniques.
I usually reserve this feature for light-hearted fare; what the news industry calls a “kicker.” Well, this ain’t that. This is a kick in the pants to all those Jews and Jewish politicians who think it’s a good idea to pass gun control laws. Laws that do nothing more than inconvenience and stymie law-abiding Americans seeking to exercise their natural, civil and Constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms. Hey! Chuck Schumer and other fellow Tribe members! Watch this video on Netflix. You might learn something.
Five seasons of Netflix-Marvel goodness (or, in the case of Iron Fist, mediocrity) have all built up to this. Building on last month’s teaser, Netflix has released the first full-blown trailer for The Defenders. Like The Avengers movies, the project is a culmination of many interlocking ‘cinematic universe’ projects. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist — all four TV shows stand on their own, but share characters, lore and the occasional cameo appearance to bind them together. The Defenders, a team-up of New York’s street-level heroes, will prove whether Netflix can deliver such an ambitious crossover project in the streaming world.
The trailer shows Jessica Jones, played by Krysten Ritter, in an interrogation room with detective Misty Knight. Before the two can exchange vocal fisticuffs, Matt Murdoch (Charlie Cox) bursts into the room, explaining that he’s now Jones’ attorney. The teaser then cuts to Harlem hero Luke Cage (Mike Colter), who crosses paths with mystical martial arts expert Danny Rand (Finn Jones). All four are soon forced to work together against a greater threat, Alexandra (Sigourney Weaver). Plenty of Marvel-Netflix side characters make an appearance too, including Elektra, Daredevil’s teacher ‘Stick’ and she-only-saves-everyone Claire Temple.
It’s a fast, witty video that hints at the chemistry all four superheroes will share on screen. The mini-series will be released globally on August 18th, 2017, so you’ve got plenty of time to binge-watch the existing shows, should you have managed to somehow avoid them until now.
We’ve seen Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist all individually do battle with the evil that plagues Netflix’s corners of the Marvel Universe. Now, for the first time we get a look at all four of them fighting together as the Defenders they were destined to become.
Advertisement
A newly resurrected Elektra’s back and she it seems as if she’s brought a whole mess of well-dressed, evil ninjas with her. Defenders hits Netflix August 18th.