Olympics GIFs apparently did get someone banned from Twitter
You may have heard that the IOC placed a ban on media outlets using unlicensed footage from the Rio Olympics to make GIFs for their social media channels. Of course, since it’s 2016 and people have Twitter, that didn’t stop some from trying. One of the more popular clips on social media showed Katie Ledecky destroying her opponents in the women’s 800m freestyle race, providing enough time for Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana to reach “Man it’s a hot one” before another competitor even finishes. While the IOC did have that video pulled, its poster’s account remains active. Meanwhile, Jim Weber posts on LinkedIn that after posting three GIFs of Olympic action, his account ended up permanently banned.
After a few automated messages sent over a period of a few minutes, @JimMWeber was gone for good. According to Weber, while he assumed Twitter might yank the GIFs, he did not think it would ax his account entirely. Still, pulling this GIF of Aly Raisman’s floor routine that someone else posted to Reddit appears to have done the trick.
We contacted the company and it said that “We don’t comment on individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.” As a result, it’s hard to see why this account got the hammer and others have survived (some accounts were banned, at least temporarily, for posting videos), but it is yet another example of how quickly things can move when a powerful organization wants to control the conversation, vs. harassment targeting groups and individuals.
Source: Jim Weber (LinkedIn)
Samsung Launches Limited iOS Beta Program for Gear S2 Smart Watch
Back in January, Samsung announced plans to add iOS support to its Gear S2 Smart Watch, and it appears the South Korean company is getting close to launching the promised iOS app.
Starting today, Samsung is launching a new beta testing program for the Gear iOS app (via SamMobile), which will run from Wednesday, August 24 to Monday, September 19, suggesting a release date that could come as early as late September.
The Gear iOS beta is only available to Samsung Gear S2, Gear S2 Classic, and Gear Fit 2 owners who are located in South Korea, so U.S. users will not be able to participate in the beta testing process. Participation in the beta program requires an Apple ID and an iPhone 5 or later running iOS 8.4 or later.
Samsung plans to use the feedback garnered from beta testers to make improvements to its upcoming iOS app. Details on the app, including screenshots, leaked out back in April. Based on that leaked information, the Gear S2 iOS app will be able to deliver notifications to the smart watch and it will be able to install and manage apps from the Gear store.
Aside from an end date of September 19 for the beta testing program, Samsung has given no hints on when iOS support will be officially implemented.
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Apple Adds to Vintage Software Collection With eBay Purchase
An Apple collector who was selling his vintage Apple software collection on eBay received a surprise earlier this month when Apple itself bought out much of his software inventory for its software archives (via MacGeneration).
According to seller “Marcoguy,” he made several listings of various Apple CDs and received a message from someone asking to buy a dozen discs. When he went to ship the package, he noticed it was going to 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, Apple’s corporate address. Upon asking the buyer about the purchase, he was told that Apple maintains a lab at its headquarters containing archived materials. “We were missing some of the disks that you placed on eBay,” wrote the buyer.
So yeah, Apple bought some of their own software back from me. 🙂 Feel free to post if you’ve had a similar experience, as I would love to hear about it. I knew Microsoft has a pretty robust archive of their history, but I wasn’t aware Apple does too until this happened.
Just goes to show how necessary this community is. If is wasn’t for collectors like us, so much software would just be lost, out of the grasp of even the companies that produced it.
It’s not clear how much Apple paid to fill out its archives, but the seller lists his software at prices ranging from $9.95 to $19.95. It’s also not known exactly what Apple purchased, but the seller is offering many rare CDs from the early 90s, including a beta version of Apple’s System 7 operating system and a disc from WWDC in 1994.
Discuss this article in our forums
Apple Stops Signing iOS 9.3.2 and iOS 9.3.3
As of today, Apple has stopped signing iOS 9.3.2 and iOS 9.3.3 for compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models, meaning users can no longer upgrade or downgrade to those versions of iOS using iTunes. Apple is now only signing iOS 9.3.4.
iOS 9.3.2, initially released to the public on May 16, 2016, was an update that initially bricked some 9.7-inch iPad Pro devices until an updated version was released on June 2.
iOS 9.3.2 was followed by iOS 9.3.3, released on July 18, and iOS 9.3.4, released on August 4. iOS 9.3.2 and iOS 9.3.3 were both compatible with the recent Pangu iOS jailbreak software, which is disabled by iOS 9.3.4.
Now that Apple has stopped signing iOS 9.3.2 and iOS 9.3.3, it is no longer possible to downgrade to a version of iOS that supports the Pangu jailbreak.
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Origin PC Millennium (2016) review – CNET
The Good There’s plenty of room for two of Nvidia’s latest GeForce 1080 graphics cards in this smartly designed custom case. Configuration options are vast, and customer support is excellent.
The Bad While many gaming desktops are getting smaller, this is still a huge tower that will eat up a ton of space. Building a rig like the one we tested is very, very expensive.
The Bottom Line This expensive build of the Origin PC Millennium is overkill for even most VR gamers, but the component selection, tuning and hands-on support are top-of-the-line.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
The last time we looked at the Origin PC Millennium was a couple of years ago, just when the idea of 4K gaming was starting to take hold. Driven by higher-end graphics cards, in that case the then-new Nvidia GeForce GTX 980, desktops were still a much better way to play high-end PC games at high resolutions, and by a fairly wide margin.
Since then, gaming laptops have closed the gap considerably, with decent mobile GPUs playing games easily in full HD and even in many cases, at higher resolutions like 4K. It looked as if the traditional gaming desktop was on its way to being an anachronism, until virtual reality came along and dropped a shocking high-end list of required specs (including desktop-only components) in our laps.
View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET
Gaming notebooks are again starting to catch up, and a small handful of bulky models have desktop GPUs crammed inside (including the excellent Origin PC Eon17-SLX), and there’s a generation of laptops coming soon with the new mobile Nvidia 1070 and 1080 chips that promise VR compatibility in slim packages.
Still, for the time being the best VR and high-end PC game experiences come from a desktop, and among the most flexible, most powerful (and in the case of this no-limits configuration, most expensive) is the Origin PC Millennium. (You can also compare the Millennium with other Nvidia 1080 VR-ready desktops in this roundup.)
The custom desktop case hasn’t changed since we last tested a Millennium, but that’s because it was a rare beast to begin with — a desktop PC case designed from scratch for a boutique PC builder. Most desktop and laptop gaming systems built by smaller, boutique companies are essentially high-end parts inside generic off-the-shelf cases, which is a shame in some ways, as these designs often don’t reflect the high prices and attention to detail found inside.
But, the Millennium is built into a custom midtower desktop chassis, designed by Origin PC, and its unique configuration allows it to work in both ATX and inverted ATX positions, plus you can rotate its motherboard and components by 90 degrees, giving you a total of four starting shapes, which is useful for tweaking heat management and fitting in extra components.
View full gallery Sarah Tew/CNET
Configuring a Millennium from scratch starts at around $1,900 in the US, but adding high-end parts, such as the Intel Core i7-6950X processor used here, or a couple of Nvidia GeForce 1080 graphics cards, can drive up the price quickly. Our test system also included overclocked components, a big 512GB solid-state drive (SSD) and 3TB of hard-drive space, which added up to $6,050. Note that component prices and availability can shift, so the exact price may be different depending on when you look.
Origin PC has an Australian site, and the closest available configuration there comes out to AU$9,049. For the UK, the company can provide a custom quote (the US price converts to about £4,570, but the UK price may differ), which may include a hefty shipping fee.
Logitech M320 review – CNET
The Good The curved ergonomics and double-wide scroll wheel make the dirt-cheap Logitech M320 mouse a pleasure to use with any OS while you’re on the go. Its basic button layout relieves your fingers from the strain of a stylus or touchpad and it operates for two years on a single AA battery.
The Bad The rubberized thumb rest on the left side means it’s only useful for right-handed mousers.
The Bottom Line The Logitech M320’s featherweight design, double-wide scroll wheel and supremely smooth optical sensor make it a worthy — and ultra-affordable — travel mouse.
Logitech is easily my go-to brand of PC accessories for the simple fact that it has the biggest selection of shapes, sizes and designs. But if you’re not a die-hard researcher like me or just don’t feel like poring over the 22 different mice on the Web site to find the right pick, you’ve come to the right place.
The Logitech M320 is one of the company’s most basic wireless mouse models, listing for $30 but available online (in the US, at least) for less than half that: $12.99. (In the UK, the price delta is smaller: £30 list and £25 online. The M320 doesn’t appear to be officially available in Australia, but Aussies can opt for the very similar M280 for AU$30 list.) Don’t let the budget price fool you, however: Its featherweight design, double-wide scroll wheel and supremely precise optical sensor make this a trustworthy addition to your mobile workstation.
View full gallery
Palm-size portability and smooth scrolling make the Logitech M320 mouse a great travel partner.
Sarah Tew/CNET
The M320 looks ambidextrous but the left side actually has a slightly wider rubberized thumb rest, so left-handed users should consider the company’s wireless M310 mouse instead.
There’s a potentially habitable planet just one star over
Locating potentially habitable planets outside of our own solar system is pretty difficult — and when we do find them, they’re usually unfathomably far away. Today, one isn’t. Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet in the habitable zone of Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system. For now, it’s called Proxima b, and it’s just over four light years away.
That’s a lot closer than Kepler-186f — but that doesn’t mean the planet was easier to find. Proxima b orbits Proxima Centauri, a dim red dwarf star that’s impossible to see without a powerful telescope. Even so, Astronomers long wondered what was orbiting the star, and launched the Pale Red Dot campaign earlier this year to study Proxima Centauri’s unique stellar ballet. By measuring the star’s Doppler shift, researchers uncovered Proxima b.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the planet, but here’s the basics: Proxima b is just a little bigger than the Earth and has a startlingly short year, orbiting its star every 11.2 days. Astronomers think it could be a rocky planet, and is the right distance from the dwarf star to potentially have water, but are split over if it actually does. You see, the little planet is tidal locked — meaning that the same side of Proxima b always faces its star, leaving half the planet in perpetual darkness. The dwarf star also puts out a lot more solar flares than we see here on earth, bombarding Proxima b with X-rays. If the planet has an Earth-like atmosphere, it might be protected from that radiation, but at this point it’s impossible to tell.
Sadly, the star is too far away for humans to investigate it first hand, but it’s close enough that we might be able to send a probe within our lifetime. The team at Breakthrough Starshot (the tiny, laser powered nanocraft that hopes to make it to Alpha Centauri within 20 years) is already talking about scheduling a Proxima b flyby. That mission is still years away, and even if it did make it out there, we wouldn’t know what it found for at least four years after it arrived — but the potential for discovery is incredibly exciting. We’re closer to the stars now than we’ve ever been.
Source: Nature, CNET, ESO
Find out what Facebook thinks about your political views – CNET
If you’re like me, you tend to shy away from posting anything related to politics during election season. Odds are, my witty posts aren’t going to persuade anyone one way or the other.
As The New York Times first reported, Facebook classifies your account as Conservative, Moderate or Liberal based on a myriad of factors, even if you don’t partake in political coverage. Facebook provides advertisers with this data (anonymized) to help them better target users.
Those factors include pages you’ve liked — even they aren’t political — your friends, an ad you may have clicked (even if by accident), age, race, gender, location…the list goes on. Facebook has extraordinary access to a data about its users, and is very good at using it to infer your personal tastes.
To see how Facebook identified your political affiliation, follow these steps:
- On your computer, visit your Facebook Ad Preferences page.
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Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
- A list of interest categories is shown, ranging from “Business and industry” to “People.” We’re only concerned with Lifestyle and Culture right now, which is tucked away under the More dropdown.
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Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
- After selecting Lifestyle and Culture, several thumbnails will populate. Look for the thumbnail titled US Politics. You might have to click on See More to find it.
Kind of unnerving, right?
But Facebook doesn’t always get it right. For example, it has West Africa as an interest of mine because I clicked on a related ad. I have no idea when this occurred, nor do I have any problems with West Africa, but it’s not an interest of mine.
If you want to know why Facebook included an interest, click on the thumbnail and read through a brief explanation. Click on the “X” to remove it from your ad preferences.
How to fix a slow Android phone
Make your Android fast again — it is possible
We’ve all been there. You have a fancy, new, highly complex Android device that can do everything from checking your email to surfing the web to controlling your microwave so your popcorn doesn’t burn. It’s shiny, and screaming fast while doing all the things we wanted it to do. Everything is roses all around.
Fast forward a year down the road, and besides the shiny wearing off, things aren’t as zippy as they used to be. Apps take longer to open and run. Transitions between screens take longer to redraw than we would like. The speed demon that your device once was is starting to get a little frustrating to use. Your Android is slow.
Don’t fret. This happens to every computer, even the Android one you carry in your pocket. The good news is that there are a few things you can do to alleviate your pain and get back to Speed Racer mode again. None are difficult, and we’re going to take a look at the five best things you can do to “fix” a slow Android.
Note: To keep you up to date with the latest information, we’re periodically updating this page.
Delete all those apps you’re not using
You know the ones I mean. We all download apps on a whim, try them a time or two, then forget they are even there. They sit in the app drawer, counting their days and plotting ways to make your phone slow by using resources like CPU cycles for background services, taking up memory blocks and fragmenting your storage, and generally cluttering the place up. It’s not you, dog whistle simulator app, it’s us. Things just aren’t going to work and we have to say goodbye. We’re still the best of friends, right?
To delete any app you’ve downloaded, you can head into the device settings to find the App “manager.” The people who made your phone might have buried it inside another section (hello there, Samsung!) but poke around or ask somebody and you’ll find it.
Once open, you’ll see lists of apps that are installed on your phone with various sorting options. When you find an app that needs to go away, tap the list entry to open the application’s info screen. At the top you’ll see a button to Uninstall it. Tap. Boom. Bam. Goodbye unwanted application.
Be vicious here. You can always download an app again if you decide you needed it after all — and that includes apps you paid for — but getting rid of the stragglers and hanger-on apps can make a big difference in how your phone runs the apps you do want.
Clean up that device storage space
After some time, you’ll find a literal crap-ton of “junk” in your storage. Remember all those times you said, “Wait, let me take another one” while you had the camera open? All those pictures you didn’t want are still there. So are the screenshots you took to share then promptly forgot all about them. Add in the Downloads folder and you just might have one hell of a mess. I know I do.
This is also an easy fix. To delete the pictures you no longer need, simply open the gallery app and choose the ones that need to go, and delete them. The same goes for videos. And doing it this way, through the gallery, means you have to see each picture or video before you delete them to be sure you really want to delete them.
Next, open the Downloads folder from your app drawer. There’s a good chance you’ll find it’s filled with images, zip files, sound clips and any number of files that you no longer need. If you don’t need them, there’s no reason they should be taking up storage space, right? Zap them to oblivion. Again, doing it this way makes sure you look at files before you delete them.
Finally, open the storage page in the settings and move down the list until you see an entry for “Misc.” or Other. Tap it, and you’ll see a list of miscellaneous files that applications have created on your device storage. If you see something you know you no longer need, you can delete it here. If you don’t know what a file is for, don’t delete it.
If you root and ROM, be sure to look at your backup files and toss any that you no longer need. Those suckers can be HUGE.
Clear your cached data
Cached data is generally a good thing. Intelligently keeping some things in a local storage, like the post thumbnails for the Android Central app, means you don’t have to download or generate them each and every time you open the app itself. And a well-written app knows when to clear its cache and start it all over again. But like all good things, there are drawbacks.
Apps you rarely use will have cached data that not only takes up space, but is always out of date and will need flushed and rebuilt anyway. Sometimes, cached data can be buggy and cause apps to misbehave — especially when it’s woefully out of date. You can clear the cache for an individual app in the Application’s info page (see section one about deleting apps above), but if we want to freshen things up so that our Android runs faster we want to wipe the cache all at once.
That’s also easy!
Open the settings on your Android, and go into the device storage page. Scroll down the list until you see the Cached data entry, and tap on it. You’ll see a pop-up telling you that you’re able to clear out all cached data. Say yes with no fear — there’s nothing here that an app needs, and anything important will be re-cached the next time you open the app.
Look at your SD card
Not all Androids have one, but if you do, a messy slow SD card can really make your Android chug. We can fix that to some extent. What we want to do is backup the card, format it so that it’s clean and ready, then put our files back into place. The easy way to do this is with a computer.
Warning — you can lose game progress, app data, coins you paid real money for in Tiny Tower and other things you may not want to lose by doing this. If your favorite application doesn’t use Google Cloud save, think about this before you do any tapping clicking or popping.
Power down your Android, then take the SD card out of the device. Place it in an adapter so that it can go into either an SD card slot on your computer or into a free USB port on the computer, and insert it in the appropriate hole. Your computer will take a second then mount it so that you can see all the file on the card itself.
Next, make a folder on your computer desktop to put all the files in. Name it something you’ll remember, like sd-card-backup or the like. Using the file manager on your computer, copy all the files from the SD card and paste them into this new folder you created. Double check that they are all there. Then triple check that they are all there. Once you know all the files were copied, unmount the SD card from your computer and pop it back into your phone.
Fire up your phone, the dive into the storage section of the settings again. This time, we’re going to format the SD card. This wipes all data off the SD card. Make sure you have everything backed up, or you’ll be sorry. Go ahead and format the card, then power the phone off again.
Pop the SD card back into the computer and open the backup folder. Go through and delete anything you know you no longer need, but be sure you don’t need it first. I have three DVD images for Red Hat on the SD card in my Note 3. Those don’t need to be on my phone, so I wouldn’t copy them back over to the freshly-formatted card. Err on the side of caution here, and if you don’t know what a file or folder is, copy it back over. Once you have everything you want and need copied back to the SD card, place it back in the phone and power it back on.
Once everything is up and running again, go into the app drawer and say “Dammit, Jerry, what happened to my apps!?” Some of your apps were partially installed to the SD card in a secure image when they were installed. Find those apps in Google Play and reinstall them to fix it.
Pro tip: This step is sort of a pain in the butt. It also can make a huge difference, so it could be worth doing. Either way, it’s not something you want to do very often, so think about upgrading that SD card when you do it. This is a perfect time to move to something faster and bigger than that Class 4 16GB card you bought when you first got your phone …
If all else fails, factory reset
Trust me: I hate resetting a device as much as you do. They take hours to set back up, and no matter how careful you were backing things up you always lose something. Not to mention all the game progress you are going to lose. But sometimes, things are so FUBAR that you just have to go here. Especially if you’re the type of person who just has to root and mess with things to make them “better.”
Factory resetting makes everything go away and returns your phone to the same condition it was in when you first opened the box. Firmware updates will still be in place, but things like your text messages and other data not in the cloud are gone forever. But sometimes, a fresh start is the best way to go.
You’ll find a way to reset your phone in the device settings. Look for words like backup and restore or privacy to find the exact entry. Once you find it, tap away and wave goodbye to all those Knights of Pen and Paper levels.
When things boot back up into Android, you’ll be nice and fast again, which is good because you’ll be spending plenty of time swiping and tapping to set everything back up.
OnePlus introduces OxygenOS 3.5 as its first Community Build
OnePlus has announced Community Builds, a new way for people to test upcoming software updates, and the first version will be OxygenOS 3.5 for the OnePlus 3. The company wants to give users a chance to try the software before anyone else and help give feedback on it in the process. With OxygenOS 3.5, OnePlus has introduced some back-end changes that it says will improve the user experience in the long run, but that comes at the cost of some other issues.
Some of the new features include:
- Several UI improvements
- New and improved OnePlus apps, including clock, weather and file manager
- Improved camera software
- More robust settings and customization features
With it being the first build, there are also a number of issues as well. Some of them include:
- Android Pay is not currently supported
- Only English is currently supported in several OnePlus apps
- Some performance issues
- Some UI issues when using custom themes
- System UI tuner is unstable (do not use); using the system UI tuner could cause serious issues that can only be resolved via factory reset
- You will need to re-register your fingerprints if you have fingerprint authentication enabled
Getting started is easy. OnePlus has set up a downloads page with instructions to get started. You will need to be on the stock OxygenOS with the OnePlus recovery for this to work. If you take the plunge and load it up, be sure to let us know how it is working out for you.
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