Microsoft kills select MSN apps, Photosynth for iOS and Windows Phone

Microsoft has announced that it's axing the Photosynth apps on Windows Phone and iOS. Effective immediately, the apps are losing all developer support and being pulled from their respective stores. If you already have Photosynth installed, you can continue using it — but Microsoft is being very direct in warning that from here on out, you're on your own. "We are doing this because the new Photosynth Preview technology and its cloud processing is a more immersive way to capture a place than the spherical panoramas that our apps produce," the company wrote on the Photosynth website.

Users with existing panoramas created with the apps are urged to upload them to Photosynth.net (which isn't going away), where they can either be shared or set as private depending on your privacy preferences. Photosynth isn't the only app going away; Microsoft is also retiring a few (presumably unpopular) MSN mobile offerings. Thankfully in those cases, the end isn't quite so imminent.

Both MSN Travel and MSN Food & Drink for Windows, iOS, and Android will be discontinued on September 28th. MSN Health & Fitness for all three platforms will go away on November 1st. "We regularly evaluate our business to ensure we’re focused on the areas where our users find the most value," Microsoft said in a statement. "We will continue to support those apps with broad consumer appeal including News, Weather, Sports and Money, which will be made available as apps on Windows 10 and will remain cross platform."

Read Ellen Pao's goodbye letter to Reddit: 'I am just another human'

Ellen Pao is trying to end her time as interim Reddit CEO on a note of positivity. In her resignation letter, Pao says her time at the helm of one of the internet's most vibrant and influential communities has "been an adventure" since day one. "I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly," Pao said, with the latter — especially recently — causing her to "doubt humanity." "I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings." But Pao says the good has outweighed the bad by a huge margin, and she's thankful for those who rejected and pushed back against the disgusting behavior exhibited by Reddit's worst users over recent weeks.

Pao isn't leaving because of the threats, twisted words, and harassment, though. Those "trolls" as she openly calls them are likely in the midst of a victory dance, but that's not what this really is. "Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles," Pao wrote. Her full letter follows below.

Emphasis added by Ellen Pao.

After more than two years at reddit, I have resigned today. My first day was April 1, 2013 (go orangered!), and every day since has been an adventure.

In my eight months as reddit’s CEO, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly on reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity.

I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity.

What has far outshone the hate has been the positive on reddit. Thank you, kind strangers, for expressing your support. You gilded me 100 times. (For those of you who apologized for generating a wave of accusations that I gilded myself, please don’t feel bad. You did a good thing.) And thank you for sending cute animal pics and encouraging me to "Stay safe!" when the site overheated with expressions of hate in various forms. There were some days when your PMs inspired me more than you can imagine.

Most touching were the stories from regular users. Some told of people they knew who had committed suicide for being transgender or exposed in revenge porn. Others shared their experiences of being harassed and expressed empathy and gratitude. More recently, several users apologized for trolling me and for not giving me the benefit of the doubt when the troll hivemind moved against me. Initially users said they were afraid to post supportive messages openly; recently they started fighting back against the trolls publicly on reddit with support, corrections and positive messages.

So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.

You will be in good hands -- our strong leadership team will now be led by u/spez, one of reddit’s original co-founders. Like u/kn0thing, he’s lived and breathed reddit since its inception and will work passionately to ensure reddit’s success.

Thank you to all the users who shared your excitement about reddit and what we’ve done and for encouraging everyone to remember the human. And thank you for making my time here at reddit an amazing learning experience.

The paradox of popping back in time

Here we go again. The movie Predestination, released in the UK this week, is the very latest in the long history of time travel films. There's been more than 100 since theTerminator and Back to the Future franchises began 30 years ago — all of which are science fiction that have little to do with science facts.

Like many of them, Predestination has its own engaging twist: Ethan Hawke plays a time agent who nips back through history to snuff out crimes before they can be committed. Like all of them it's chronologically illogical: the split second a movie has someone monkeying with time you are doomed — predestined, you might say — to abandon the science and enter a plea of temporal insanity.

Things very quickly get very brain boggling. Consider this — if someone builds a time machine, what's to prevent them going back one minute and smashing it up before they first use it? Which means it never gets used — so how did it get smashed up? What prevents the whole parade of paradoxes thrown up by time travel to the past — becoming your own grandfather, killing Hitler before he starts World War II and so on — is that they trash big laws of physics. And the Universe, as far as we understand it, likes to play by the rules.

One of the fundamentals that underpins not just physics but every aspect of existence is the law of cause and effect, always in that order. Changing the past would violate that: your actions would affect what caused you to go back in the first place - so if you did manage to kill Hitler he wouldn't have done what led you to go back and kill him.

Holding a real Star Trek Communicator makes you feel like you're in Starfleet

Who wouldn't want to feel just a little bit like Kirk or Mr. Spock? Here at Comic-Con 2015, the Wand Company is showing off a prototype of its upcoming Star Trek TOS Bluetooth Communicator, a working replica of the communicator Federation officers used on The Original Series. In truth, it's a glorified Bluetooth speaker. But holding makes you feel a little bit like you're on an away mission.

The little device was actually designed using one of the original props from Star Trek, and is composed of a combination of pressed metal, aluminum, and textured plastic. Without having actually lived through the 1960s, I thought it felt authentic — weighty and purposeful for people in Starfleet. The grill flips opens with the actual sound effects from the show, and the speaker and transceiver make it look truly like a 23rd century artifact.

Using the device involves just pairing it to your smartphone. We tested it using an older iPhone, so tapping one of the bottom-most buttons activated voice control, from which you can simply say the contact you want to reach via the Communicator's receiver. Calls came in loud and clear, so it works pretty well for a prototype.

The Wand Company partnered with ThinkGeek to make the Communicator available to the public by early next year

Google Picks A Fight With China State Web Registrar

Google has announced it will no longer accept certificates from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) following a major breach of false certificates issued by MCS Holdings in Cairo, the company who handles quite a few .cn domains.

The false certificates may have allowed unverified and malicious websites to obtain clearance, passing through web browser checks. Google claims this is reason enough to pull CNNIC’s certificates, although the web registrar in charge of millions of domain certificates is not happy.

In a statement the CNNIC called Google’s decision “unacceptable and unintelligible”. The decision will mean banks and government sites certified by the CNNIC will not be given the green tick by Google, but show a red cross instead.

Google is holding onto terms with CNNIC for a short time, but will remove the certificates from its database. The search giant has said the CNNIC is welcome to reapply once it sorts its system out and make sure no internal breaches of interest happen again.

It is not the first time Google and China’s internet regulator have clashed heads. In 2010, Google removed search from China following a lengthy amount of government requests and privacy violations. This has lead to Baidu—the Chinese language search engine—becoming the second most used search engine worldwide.

Google has also been seeing recent activity from the Chinese government to block Gmail. Even though Android is the most popular OS and Google Chrome the most popular web browser in the country, Google Play is blocked and most of Google’s apps are banned or unused.

The Chinese government has also been busy attacking GitHub, the coding databank for developers and casuals, attacking two areas directly angering the government. The first was a network allowing Chinese people to see the internet without the Great Firewall, the other was the New York Times translated into Chinese.

   

Netflix New Terms Of Service Allows Subscription Termination If You Use VPN

Netflix has been giving mixed signals regarding VPN and geo-location tools, with the first reports claiming a ban would hit, followed by CEO Reed Hastings and other executives appealing to VPN users, and now Netflix has changed its policy to destroy VPN users.

The terms of service change allows VPN users to be banned from the service. It is the first move by the streaming company to crack down on people changing location to watch movies only available on Netflix US.

It is not clear if Netflix will actually go through with the bans, but it does show that studios are cracking down on content being watched in regions where it is not supposed to be watched.

Studios that license content to Netflix already have a lot to lose from the move, considering customers pay $6 per month compared to $2.49 per episode on iTunes or $15 on DVD. Considering the licensee will only receive a small portion of the $6 per user on Netflix as well, it is most likely not beneficial to be on the platform.

That means shows tend to be unavailable or incomplete in other regions, due to lack of interest or lack of subscribers. Netflix US is far and away the most popular service with over 40 million subscribers in the US, and just 70 million subscribers in total.

Netflix is clearly trying to remove the barriers that the film studios are laying down, but it is a losing race. Even though Netflix has a huge audience and the potential to make a low budget TV show the next big thing (see Breaking Bad, White Collar), it is not enough for film studios to give up lucrative TV and DVD agreements in other regions.

Game of Thrones airing in all countries and coming to several internet TV providers might be incentive to change the trend, but HBO is in an advantageous position to offer the most watched TV show to as many people as possible.

Google Fiber Forces Broadband Companies To Compete

Google Fiber is preparing to launch in several new cities in North Carolina, Georgia and Utah in the next year, something that has shaken the traditional internet service providers to actually compete.

It must be an odd feeling for companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, who for the past decade have set oligopolies up to make sure competition in the American broadband market does not exist.

Sadly, Google Fiber has no interest in backroom deals. It is focused on bringing 1Gbps internet to millions of Americans, and is forcing broadband companies to fight tooth and nail for every customer—most of whom have already declared loyalty to Google Fiber.

In Atlanta, Comcast just announced it will launch 2Gbps speeds to customers through a high-tier package. It also plans to launch 1Gbps speeds nationwide, how convenient given the current uprise of Google Fiber construction cities.

It is still unclear whether the 2Gbps package will have any tacked on installation fees or massive monthly costs, knowing Comcast we are going to guess it will be out of the budget for many customers.

Comcast is not the only broadband provided feeling threatened, AT&T announced 1Gbps coming to Austin, Texas later this year, coinciding with Google Fiber’s launch in the city.

Time Warner Cable also announced customers in Charlotte, North Carolina will be receiving six times the current broadband speed on all packages, from 15Mbps to 50Mbps, in the next few months. That’s not exactly 1Gbps, but it is TWC’s attempt at customer loyalty.

Verizon and Cablevision have both announced nothing on the speed increase side, although they are both not available in the cities Google Fiber is planning to launch. Cox Communications announced it will double broadband speeds for customers nationwide by 2016, with 1Gbps options coming to some cities.

It is a great time for Americans, but in most cities there are still major issues with speeds and price. Google Fiber can only reach so many households, but with the net neutrality law coming into effect later this year we might see a surge in fiber movements by Google, as the utility rights grant them more freedom to construct and utilise older infrastructure.

Let’s not be naive here, Google is not the great guy that provides internet with no long term goal. Google wants as many users on the internet as possible without data caps or massive expenses, in order to have more users on Google services, and in turn more ads viewed.