The FCC's vote on Thursday to classify Internet service providers as public utilities was ultimately the result of overwhelming popular support on the Internet. In the end, popular support for net neutrality overwhelmed the lobbying efforts of the cable and telecommunications industries that tried to kill or weaken the regulations. This raises one very big question: why did the online public suddenly embrace what, not two years ago, was called “breaking the Internet”?
This behavior ought to scare people. The conventional wisdom has
long been that government regulation of the Internet was a bad thing.
When the media industry pushed for passage of the SOPA and PIPA
anti-piracy legislation back in 2011-2012, massive outcry among the
Internet population led to the bill’s rapid demise. Open Internet
advocates cried victory, while media industry executives complained
about “the mob” and alleged — not without evidence — that the whole
thing was an orchestrated campaign among Internet companies like GoogleGOOGL+2.22%, Wikipedia, and Reddit.
The power of “the mob” to influence legislative and regulatory
activity has been growing for years. A scholar and net activist named
Bill Herman researched this for his PhD thesis
at the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn in 2009. Herman
looked at a series of legislation about digital copyright, such as the
Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act of 1998, and he traced an arc of the increasing influence of online
communication (as opposed to lobbying and the press) in determining the
fate of these bills. He predicted that the online crowd’s overwhelming
preference for looser copyright would eventually overpower the media
industry’s lobbying machine — and he was right. Herman’s rigorous
research brilliantly presaged the SOPA and PIPA defeats. It’s available
as a book called The Fight over Digital Rights: The Politics of Copyright and Technology.
But this time around, the mob turned against Republican politicians
and libertarian think tanks, and called for government regulation. When
Sen. Ted Cruz’s grandstanded about the FCC reclassification of Internet
services as “Obamacare for the Internet,” his Facebook page was bombarded with negative comments… from his supporters. Think tanks like the Cato Institute, often reliable partners of the tech industry, found themselves howling alone in the wilderness.
Why is this? There are two main reasons. First, not supporting “net neutrality” is like not supporting “freedom” or “peace” or “love.”
Second, it’s always necessary to have a “man” to stick it to: this
time it’s ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, companies that are
even easier to hate than the movie studios and major record labels who
were behind SOPA and PIPA. It’s all just a little too simple,
especially given the complexity and ambiguity around an issue like net
neutrality.
People ought to be looking at what just happened and separating out the substance of the FCC regulation from considerations of why and how the Internet population got so much power and wielded it in what seems like a capricious manner.
For the record, I’m in favor of net neutrality, and I’m glad that the FCC ruled the way it did. I like freedom and peace and love, too.
Bill Rosenblatt runs GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consultancy that focuses on digital media technology, business models, and copyright. Check him out on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Next time you have to access WhatsApp on your desktop, you won't need
to fire up Chrome if it's not your preferred browser. The messenger's
web client now works on both Firefox and Opera, giving you more choices
on the computer, though you'll still obviously have to settle if you're a
Safari fan.
That's pretty much all that's changed: the sign up process
remains the same, so you will be prompted to scan a QR code with the
mobile app in order to start using the web client like we mentioned when
the product launched.
Unfortunately, that also means iPhones still don't have the capability
to scan that QR code (Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Android devices
can), forcing faithful iOS users to stick to their mobile devices.
Microsoft DiplomacyBy Rich Edmonds | Thursday, Feb 26, 2015 at 4:27 am EST
Microsoft has donated $1 million to help fund the construction of a
high-tech interactive exhibit at the US Diplomacy Center (USDC), which
is set to open in Washington DC in 2017. The center itself will serve as
a next-generation museum and education resource that will showcase
areas surrounding American diplomacy.
Numerous Microsoft products will be on display at the USDC, including the Surface Hub, Skype Translator and Bing Maps.
Microsoft essentially plans to "gamify" diplomacy with the hope to
really bring exhibits to life and engage visitors. From peace talks to
natural disasters, those who visit the center will learn and experience
how the nation's diplomats engage in international diplomacy.
It makes sense for Microsoft to get involved, especially given how
technology - much like diplomacy in many ways - aims to connect people
distances apart. Interested to learn more? Head to the USDC website for more details.
Despite "Gangnam Style" having over two billion views, hosting countless other viral clips and netting over a billion users per-month, YouTube can't seem to turn a profit. How's that? Well, after paying for the infrastructure that makes Google's video empire possible (and its content partners), The Wall Street Journal says that YouTube didn't contribute to Mountain View's earnings. The culprit, apparently, is that most users arrive at videos via links, rather than daily visits to the YouTube homepage where Google could charge a premium for ads. WSJ also reports that the site's reach isn't very wide either, with one source's estimate that nine percent of viewers account for a whopping 85 percent of online-video views. That makes it a much less appealing audience for advertisers than traditional TV programming, despite the outfit's increasing investment in original content.
Google's hoping that the Music Key subscription service, among other ideas, can hold the tide of red ink back and turn that sea black. Another method is with targeted ads, so you can get inundated with sales pitches for stuff you've recently browsed on Amazon. WSJ's sources say that those might be a bit harder to add than Google previously expected, though, and thankfully could take some time to roll out. At least there's some form of silver lining here.
Pretty soon chats in Outlook.com are going to be all Skype, all the
time. Microsoft is pulling the plug on Google Talk and Facebook chat in
Outlook.com. The company recently sent out email notifications to
Outlook.com users to let them know about the change.
Microsoft doesn’t explain why it has decided to end Facebook Chat
integration. For Google Talk, however, Microsoft blames it on “Google’s
decision to discontinue the chat protocol used by the Google Talk
platform.”
Google started moving away from Google Talk in favor of Hangouts in May 2013—ironically the same month that Microsoft added Google Talk to Outlook.com.
Unlike Talk, which uses the open XMPP protocol, Hangouts is proprietary
and unavailable to multi-chat clients. However, Google has continued to
support Talk and has yet to announce when it might shut down the
XMPP-based service.
Microsoft’s email to Outlook.com users about the end of Google Talk and Facebook chat integration.
The impact on you at home: Microsoft says the end of
Google Talk and Facebook chat in Outlook.com will happen “within the
next couple of weeks.” The end of third-party chat will not impact
Microsoft’s People apps online, or in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone.
Microsoft allows users to integrate Facebook and Google accounts (among
others) to add social updates and contact information from other
services to your Microsoft contacts list.
All about Skype
To compensate for the end of Facebook and Google integration,
Microsoft is encouraging users to switch to Skype. It’s hard to imagine
anyone who is using Outlook.com wouldn’t also be a big Skype user. But
users may have some contacts who are on Google Talk or Facebook and
don’t use Skype.
For Microsoft, dumping Facebook and Google also highlights how
valuable Skype integration is with Outlook.com. Not only can use the
platform to send text chats, but also voice and video calls. That’s an
important feature given that competitors, like Google’s Hangouts
platform integrated into Gmail and Google Talk before it, offer similar
features.
DO NOT TRACK | BY ANDREW MARTONIK | Saturday, Feb 21, 2015 at 1:16 pm EST
It takes some time, but you can completely control the location history Google collects from your devices.
We've already covered how to remove individual locations and history items from Google Maps on Android, but when you need to access and manage all of your location history, you need to hop onto the computer. As the old saying goes, "knowledge is power" — and we're going to give you all of the tools necessary to know what information Google knows about your location, and how to clean it up or stop further reporting.
Accessing and managing your Google location history
First thing's first, you'll need to make sure you're signed into your Google account and go to the Google Location History dashboard on the web. On this page, you'll see every bit of history Google has logged for where your Google-connected devices have been located, so long as you have opted in to location reporting on the device.
You can go day-by-day through the history using the calendar on the left side of the screen, with the map on the right populating the information collected on that day. Red dots are places that your devices have been, and Google does its best job at coordinating timestamps to show where you moved throughout that day. If you have more than one Android device turned on with location reporting, your map will be far less useful for determining where you went — Maps thinks you constantly bounce back and forth between the location of the two devices.
If you don't want Google to remember data from a specific day or set of days, use the drop-down menu under the calendar to select a time period — 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 14 or 30 days — and then click theDelete history from this time periodlink below it. A pop-up window will ask you to confirm, and explain that it may take up to 24 hours for the data to be deleted completely from the dashboard.
If for some reason you wish to delete all location data Google has from your devices — which may not be a bad idea from time-to-time if you want to keep things fresh — you can simply click the Delete all historylink on the left. Again you'll be asked to confirm, and it may take up to 24 hours for everything to be cleared out. But once you do it, Google will no longer have any of that data.
Double check your phone's location history settings
If looking at your location history is a bit of a shocking experience as to how much location data is being stored from your devices, you may want to consider looking at the location history settings on your devices. Though the interface may look slightly different depending on your phone, everyone can access the location history settings by going into their app drawer and opening the Google Settings app (it's a grey icon shaped like a gear). You can then tap Location, which will launch you into your phone's location settings screen.
Once there, look for an entry called Google Location Reporting and tap it. You'll then see all of your active Google Accounts on the device listed, and two entries under each: Location Reporting and Location History. You can turn either one or both off, but it's important to first understand what each one does.
Location Reporting is the service that lets Google know where your phone is right now, which will let Google apps like Google Now and Google Maps know roughly where your phone is so it can offer up location-based information. This feature is what helps you quickly get located on a map without first locking on GPS, or gives location-based information when you walk by certain stores or areas. If you were to turn off this setting your phone wouldn't give its current location to Google apps, but it will still keep that location history when you view it from the Google Location History Dashboard.
Location History is the setting that lets Google create a long-term log of places where your phone has been. When you have Location History turned on Google will aggregate location data of your device(s) and use it for things like commute time predictions in Google Now and better search results in Google apps. Location history is kept private and you can access it any time you wish, as we've shown above. You can turn off this Location History setting at any time without deleting your history, but if you wish to delete all location history you can do so from this setting or from the web, as we've shown.
While Adobe is well known for its many different graphics applications, perhaps none is more famous than Photoshop. For creatives, medical professionals, and scientists, it’s the go-to digital imaging program. To the general public, it’s the software you use to superimpose a person’s head onto another’s body. In fact, the word Photoshop has become a verb that’s now part of our vernacular – even for those who have never used it. For Adobe, it’s the flagship that’s tied to the rest of its ecosystem of design programs. In fact, Photoshop as a brand may even be bigger than Adobe itself. This week, Adobe not only celebrates Photoshop’s 25th year, but also the anniversary of one of computing’s most important milestones. Among the celebratory activities to take place this year, the company is launching a new advertising campaign during Academy Awards on February 22, 2015 (Photoshop has been used in the film industry, starting with The Abyss in 1999, and in recent films like Avatar, Gone Girl, and How to Train Your Dragon 2), and is inviting young artists to participate in a Adobe Behance competition to showcase their Photoshop masterpieces.
The first boxed version of Photoshop. Inside were floppy disks and documentation.
Adobe Systems Inc.
So, how did this venerable computing program get to where it is today? As the story goes, Photoshop traces its roots to two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll. While studying at the University of Michigan in the late 1980s, Thomas, as a hobby, was writing a program that could display a grayscale image on a black-and-white monitor. Collaborating with John, who was then working in special effects at Industrial Light and Magic, they added tools and features that turned it into a digital image-processing program. Called Display, the Knoll brothers pitched it to Adobe in 1988, demoed the software’s editing features using an image called “Jennifer in Paradise” (Jennifer in the photo was John’s future wife); Adobe acquired the program in 1989, renamed it Photoshop, and released version 1.0 in 1990. Adobe thought it would sell 500 copies a month – not really anticipating it to be a moneymaker. Of course, Photoshop would not only go on to become lucrative, but it would become a de facto program used by anyone who needs photo-editing tools.
When Photoshop launched for Macintosh, the features included the Magic Wand selection tool, color correction, and level adjustments. As the program evolved, Layers was introduced in version 3, a revolutionary feature that allows users to edit and “make mistakes” while leaving the original image intact. Windows compatibility came in version 4, which opened the program to move users. But it wasn’t just photographers who embraced Photoshop.
Zorana Gee, Photoshop’s senior product manager, has been with the team since 2000. Like her colleagues, few leave the team because the “product has been so amazing.”
Adobe Systems Inc.
“We have so many ranges of people and industry types that use our products, from photographers to designers, down to astronomy and NASA, medical industries, forensics,” says Zorana Gee, senior product manager for Photoshop. Gee came to Adobe not as a photographer or designer, but with a science background and using Photoshop to create research publications. “Basically, you name it, any industry that has to deal with digital imagery has used Photoshop in some way. Even to this day, for me, I am still continually shocked and surprised by how people use Photoshop.”
As the years went on, Photoshop continued to add features that accommodated the demands of users’ every-changing workflows, such as the ability to save to Web as more users were moving toward Web production. With every introduction of new digital cameras, Photoshop would be updated to support them. Recently, Photoshop added support for 3D printing and tools like smart content selection, camera shake reduction, Focus Mask, and Perspective Warp. Looking ahead, it’s adapting to mobile devices. Interestingly, the most popular tools used today are the same tools that were introduced in the beginning, Gee says. And, if you’re looking for a way to slim down a person in an image or crop a head and put it onto another person’s body, Photoshop is still the way to go.
Digital imaging manipulation is commonplace today, but we take for granted how complex and time consumer when things were analog. “In the photo retouching world, a lot of the fundamental techniques we do in Photoshop, you were able to do in the darkroom – dodging, burning, even some basic swapping heads and putting on another image, and things like that,” Gee says. “People spent hours, if not weeks and months, figuring those things out – we just made it faster and easier to do.” Which puts into perspective why Photoshop was so revolutionary in the early 1990s.
While the Photoshop team has grown since the Knoll brothers (Thomas is still with Adobe), surprisingly, it’s relatively small at around 50 people – given Photoshop’s scope. Gee, who has been on the Photoshop team since 2000, says many of her colleagues, including Adobe’s creative director, Russell Brown, have been working on Photoshop since the beginning (click here to watch the first four Photoshop pioneers – the Knoll brothers, Brown, and Steve Gutman – talk about the beginnings, five years ago). For Gee, she has stayed with the team because “product has been so amazing,” she says.
“We don’t have a lot of movement,” Gee adds. “We have a lot of developers who have been here since the beginning, and they continue to stay here for many of the same reasons.”
Russell Brown, Adobe creative director, showing the new software to attendees at Adobe’s 1990 Photoshop Invitational. Adobe didn’t have high expectations for Photoshop at the beginning, thinking it’d only sell 500 copies a month.
Doug Menuez/Stanford University Libraries/Contour by Getty
Photoshop isn’t – and was never – the only photo-editing option, but it continues to retain users, due in part to new enhancements, familiarity, and, as Gee puts it, Photoshop’s early start in the game. With users dedicating so much time to learn it (the program has a steep learning curve) and the resources to run it (it’s a power-hungry application), it’s understandable why users would stick with it. But a big reason why users stay with Photoshop is that it has every tool one needs to design whatever it is he or she wants to make.”
“It’s a blessing and a curse, the fact that Photoshop does so many things,” Gee says. “But it’s a toolbox that has every tool that you need.”
“Any industry that has to deal with digital imagery has used Photoshop in some way.”
However, as creatives are increasingly adopting mobile devices in their workflow and using smartphone cameras to capture images for publication, Adobe has had to adapt, creating various apps (many bearing the Photoshop name, but are different from the main program) and opening a software development kit (SDK) to third-party app developers. Adobe has also launched a lower-price Photoshop subscription (Adobe has moved its programs to a cloud-based subscription model, and no longer sells as boxed versions) in an effort to attract a new group of users, as there are plenty of photo-editing tools – many of them free or built into operating systems, desktop software, and mobile apps – available to them. It’s engineering challenges like these, Gee says, that Photoshop will work on in the next few years.
“We are taking advantage of the many new opportunities presented to us,” Gee says. “With multiple devices, we are thinking about Photoshop in a different way, in being able to access the technology from whatever device it is that you are on.
“Going forward, it’s really about proliferating the brand and the technology and the workflow in the platform that makes sense for our customers,” Gee adds. “Aside from the 25 years, our engineers are really excited about the cloud [because] it’s getting them to rethink Photoshop.”
But for an application that has seen major transitions in its 25 years – analog to digital photography, print to Web publishing, desktop to mobile computing – adaptation may be Photoshop’s biggest strength.
Bill Rosenblatt Contributor |
479 views
by 
