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Every day, The New York Times’s staff scours the Web for interesting and peculiar items.
Early on Tuesday morning, Pamela Jones, the voice behind an influential legal blog known as Groklaw, decided to shut down her site because of concerns over government surveillance and insecure communications.
“No matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we say to one another, and no matter how ‘clean’ we all are ourselves from the standpoint of the screeners, I don’t know how to function in such an atmosphere,†Ms. Jones wrote on Groklaw.
The shutdown came a little less than two weeks after two small e-mail providers decided to stop their services to challenge secret government surveillance.
As Ms. Jones put it, “there is no way†to continue to run it without using secure email, and the threat of spying by the national security agency means that communications can be compromised.
Here’s what we noticed today:
Viral Videos May Harm Cute Animals, Study Shows
CBC | Are YouTube videos of threatened animals, like the “tickled†slow loris, increasing black market demand for them? - Amy O’Leary
Crowdfunding a Facebook Bug Bounty
Computer World | A security expert is crowdsourcing a fund to pay a researcher who was rebuffed by Facebook a $10,000 bounty for identifying a flaw in the network’s user privacy. - Ashwin Seshagiri
High-Speed In-Flight Internet Possible by 2014
BBC | A regulator in Britain is studying a satellite-based mobile Internet system that could make streaming Netflix in-flight possible. - Victoria Shannon
White House Taps McAfee C.T.O. for Cybersecurity Post
WSJ Digits | The Obama administration tapped Phyllis Schneck, a vice president and chief technical officer at McAfee, to be Homeland Security’s top cybersecurity official. - Ashwin Seshagiri
The ‘Mood Graph’
Wired | How are our emotions taking over the Web? - Ashwin Seshagiri
Inside Samsung’s Coming Watch
GigaOM | What’s inside Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch? @Om offers some key details. - Nick Bilton
Citing evidence found on YouTube, Turkey’s Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, claimed on Tuesday that Israel was behind the military takeover in Egypt last month.
In remarks broadcast on Turkish television, Mr. Erdogan scolded Western democracies for failing to condemn the military coup that deposed Egypt’s elected, Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, and blamed Israeli influence. “What do they say in Egypt? ‘Democracy is not the ballot box.’ Who is behind this? Israel,†the Turkish premier said.
Telling his listeners, “we have evidence,†Mr. Erdogan cited comments made two years ago by the Algerian-born French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who “is also Jewish,†as supposed proof of a longstanding Israeli plot to deny the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt, even if they won elections. Mr. Erdogan’s office later confirmed that he was referring to the YouTube video of Mr. Lévy’s remarks during a discussion of “Israel and the Arab Spring†with the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni at Tel Aviv University in 2011.
As can be seen in an edited copy of that video posted on YouTube last week with Turkish subtitles, Mr. Lévy did say in that forum, which was moderated by my colleague Ethan Bronner, that the Brotherhood should not be allowed to take power in Egypt.
Responding to a question about how he would view an election victory by the Brotherhood, Mr. Lévy compared such a possibility to the kind of “democratic coup†that allowed Hamas to take power in Gaza in 2006 and Hitler to become Germany’s chancellor 1933. Decrying the “archaic, pre-fascist ideology†of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Lévy said, “democracy again is not only elections, it is values.â€
Asked directly, “if they were to win a legitimate election, you would urge the military not to allow them take power?†Mr. Lévy said:
I will urge the prevention of them coming to power by all sorts of means, yes…. I said that in Algeria and I don’t regret it. It opened a terrible period of disturbance, chaos, murders and so on, but I believe it would have been worse if we had let them come to power.
Although YouTube remains officially blocked in Turkey, Turks who followed their prime minister’s advice found it easy to access the clip on Tuesday.
Given that there are credible, recent reports that Israeli officials are waging a “diplomatic campaign urging Europe and the United States to support the military-backed government in Egypt despite its deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters,†it is not clear why Mr. Erdogan chose to put so much weight on dated comments from a French philosopher who holds no official position in his home country or in Israel.
The response to Mr. Erdogan’s remarks in Cairo was predictably testy. As the journalist Menna Alaa reported on Twitter, a spokesman for the interim president installed by the army replied that “Western agents shouldn’t be giving lessons in patriotism to Egyptians.â€
The Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia noted that the use of the philosopher known as BHL as a Zionist bogeyman seemed to come straight from a Mubarak-era playbook.
The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that Mr. Erdogan “also criticized Gulf countries that have provided financial aid to Egypt’s military government,†ostensibly to make up for threatened reductions in financial aid from the United States and Europe.
In a speech this week, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi went out of his way to thank the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain for supporting his overthrow of Egypt’s democratically elected president.
On Tuesday, however, the activist filmmaker Aalam Wassef remixed video of General Sisi’s speech to show leading members of each of those royal families with senior Washington officials â€" highlighting what he called the irony of Egypt’s American-backed military rejecting criticism from the United States but welcoming support from five kingdoms that depend on the Pentagon for protection.
Google wants to see what you see. And then, of course, make money from those images.
The company was recently awarded a patent that puts forth an idea for pay-per-gaze advertising â€" a way in which people interacting with ads in the real world could be analyzed in the digital world.
In the patent, which was filed in May 2011 and granted last week, Google claims that “a head-mounted gaze tracking device†â€" presumably Google Glass â€" would send images and the direction the person wearing the device was looking to a server. The system would then identify real-world ads that the person wearing the gadget had seen, allowing Google to then charge the advertiser.
“Pay-per-gaze advertising need not be limited to online advertisements, but rather can be extended to conventional advertisement media including billboards, magazines, newspapers and other forms of conventional print media,†states the patent, which was discovered by Fast Company.
As Google notes in the filing, advertisers can be charged a fee based on whether a person looks directly at an ad in the real world, and the fee can change based on how long they interact with the ad.
Eye-tracking ads are not unprecedented. Companies including Umoove, Tobii Technology and Cube26 already offer technology to track eye movements, gestures and even emotional responses to advertising.
Google does not show any advertising in Glass. It goes so far as to forbid app developers from selling apps or ads, too. But there have been hints that Google will eventually show ads, its core business, and the company has consistently said it expects Glass to be profitable.
One of the first places to expect ads is through Google Now, the predictive search app that shows information without the user asking for it and is particularly suited to Glass. It does not yet show ads, but they are expected.
“The better we can provide information, even without you asking for it, the better we can provide commercial information people are excited to be promoting to you,†Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said in April, though he did not mention Glass specifically.
Of course, a Google patent would not be complete without some reference to search. The filing also presents the idea for “augmented search results†where a person looking at an image in the real world could see additional virtual information based on a search query.
When Google Glass was first announced last year, virtual reality experts noted that prototype versions of similar wearable computers had taken advertisements in the real world and replaced them with virtual ads.
Google Glass is “going to change real-world advertising, where companies can virtually place ads over other people’s ads,†said William Brinkman, graduate director of the computer science and software engineering department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
But don’t fret that Google will start siphoning images from your Google Glass just yet.
According to people who work on Google Glass but asked not to be named because they were not allowed to speak publicly for the company, the Google Glass team has no plans to use this patent and it was “filed years ago.â€
Google also said in a statement that it did not plan to actually build products based on the eye-tracking patent in the immediate future.
“We hold patents on a variety of ideas,â€Â the company said. “Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patents.â€
Today, for my birthday, I received a slew of lovely birthday greetings.
By early morning I had stacked up 93 birthday wishes on Facebook â€" one even included a $5 Starbucks gift card! About 20 strangers digitally congratulated me on Google Plus. A dozen people chirped “happy birthday†to me on Twitter. Fifteen friends and family members sent me emoji-filled birthday wishes over text message. Eight over e-mail. Two voicemails. And one person yelled Happy Birthday on SnapChat.
But I didn’t receive a single physical birthday card. It was the first year since I was born that my birthday wishes were all digital.
The collapse of the greeting card industry has been a long time coming. According to a 2010 report by the United States Postal Service, the number of greeting cards mailed within the U.S. has declined by 24 percent from 2002 to 2010, and continues to drop today.
A report this year from IbisWorld, a research firm that monitors the greeting cards industry, the sale of traditional cards â€" including some other printed products like diaries â€" has fallen by 60 percent over the last decade, to $5 billion a year.
These declines are clearly hurting companies that once made billions of dollars from little square cards that required a pen and a stamp.
American Greetings, the No. 2 paper card maker after Hallmark, purchased its shares and went private this year after rapid declines in sales. American Greetings’ stock was valued at 65 percent less than it was in 1998. The company told The Wall Street Journal that it still had millions of American customers, but, there was a caveat: “The average customer is in their 40s.â€
Hallmark’s card sales dropped to 5 billion cards a year in 2012, down from 6 billion in 2011.
So how are people wishing their loved ones happy birthdays? Another report by IbisWorld notes that digital greeting cards continue to rise, up to $4 billion in sales in 2013, a 20-percent increase from 2012.
But even that increase could be fleeting.
While these digital greetings companies, including Egreetings and Blue Mountain, have been on the rise for years, it seems that even that is too much for most of the people I know â€" not all of whom are digital nomads.
My 89-year-0ld grandfather e-mailed me happy birthday. My father called me (and left a voicemail). And my mother wished me and my twin sister birthday greetings on Twitter. Close friends who once took to Facebook to share their salutations, seemed to think that was now too impersonal and instead chose text messages as the preferred form of communication.
For me, I’m just grateful people remembered my birthday, though I probably have Facebook to thank for that, too.
Today, for my birthday, I received a slew of lovely birthday greetings.
By early morning I had stacked up 93 birthday wishes on Facebook â€" one even included a $5 Starbucks gift card! About 20 strangers digitally congratulated me on Google Plus. A dozen people chirped “happy birthday†to me on Twitter. Fifteen friends and family members sent me emoji-filled birthday wishes over text message. Eight over e-mail. Two voicemails. And one person yelled Happy Birthday on SnapChat.
But I didn’t receive a single physical birthday card. It was the first year since I was born that my birthday wishes were all digital.
The collapse of the greeting card industry has been a long time coming. According to a 2010 report by the United States Postal Service, the number of greeting cards mailed within the U.S. has declined by 24 percent from 2002 to 2010, and continues to drop today.
A report this year from IbisWorld, a research firm that monitors the greeting cards industry, the sale of traditional cards â€" including some other printed products like diaries â€" has fallen by 60 percent over the last decade, to $5 billion a year.
These declines are clearly hurting companies that once made billions of dollars from little square cards that required a pen and a stamp.
American Greetings, the No. 2 paper card maker after Hallmark, purchased its shares and went private this year after rapid declines in sales. American Greetings’ stock was valued at 65 percent less than it was in 1998. The company told The Wall Street Journal that it still had millions of American customers, but, there was a caveat: “The average customer is in their 40s.â€
Hallmark’s card sales dropped to 5 billion cards a year in 2012, down from 6 billion in 2011.
So how are people wishing their loved ones happy birthdays? Another report by IbisWorld notes that digital greeting cards continue to rise, up to $4 billion in sales in 2013, a 20-percent increase from 2012.
But even that increase could be fleeting.
While these digital greetings companies, including Egreetings and Blue Mountain, have been on the rise for years, it seems that even that is too much for most of the people I know â€" not all of whom are digital nomads.
My 89-year-0ld grandfather e-mailed me happy birthday. My father called me (and left a voicemail). And my mother wished me and my twin sister birthday greetings on Twitter. Close friends who once took to Facebook to share their salutations, seemed to think that was now too impersonal and instead chose text messages as the preferred form of communication.
For me, I’m just grateful people remembered my birthday, though I probably have Facebook to thank for that, too.