Facebook made waves this week when it was revealed that the social network had been conducting social experiments on nearly 700,000 of its users in order to see how their mood could be manipulated based on the content they saw on their news feeds. As you might expect, the Internet was outraged, but The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is trying to quell the anger by admitting that the terms were “poorly communicated.”
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The Guardian is now starting to report on the bizarre first wave of Google search results that are being erased thanks to the so-called “right to be forgotten” ruling. After a European court ruled that individuals have the right to demand that “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” search results be erased, we are now witnessing the first signs of random people’s awkward and embarrassing incidents vanishing from collective consciousness.
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Why on Earth would anyone want to make a real life recreation of a trailer for a video game? Because it’s awesome, that’s why. The team at Zapruder Pictures recently released a truly amazing recreation of Rockstar Games’ trailer for the smash hit Grand Theft Auto V. Every single scene has been acted out by live actors and some nifty special effects fill in the blanks. The result is a recreation so great that even Rockstar Games had to tweet it out in appreciation.
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Microsoft is continuing to streamline the Xbox One Preview program with a new Dashboard app which allows members of the program to send feedback and see the changelog without leaving their couches.
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Want to know why Comcast’s merger with Time Warner Cable has any chance of passing despite huge opposition from even the company’s own customers, look no further than emails recently uncovered by MuckRock that show Comcast execs have a very friendly relationship with an attorney at the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.
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Actress Lindsay Lohan on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Take-Two Interactive, makers of Grand Theft Auto V and other games in the wildly popular Grand Theft Auto franchise. Lohan claims a character named Lacey Jonas that plays a role in the latest installment in the GTA series uses her image without her permission.
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We’re very happy to hear that Google isn’t going to stop producing Nexus-branded products anytime soon, particularly since both its Nexus 5 smartphone and its Nexus 7 tablet were two terrific gadgets. Now @evleaks brings us word that Google’s next major tablet, which will likely be called the Nexus 9, will have some absolutely killer specs that should make it the best Google tablet yet released.
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The Internet is a strange and wonderful place, full of magic and mystery and videos of kittens doing cute kitten things. The digital world evolves so quickly, though — can you even imagine what the Internet will look like 100 years from now?
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Believe it or not, you can have a reasonably secure smartphone without shelling out $630 for the recently released Blackphone. The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey Fowler has written up five best practices for making sure the conversations and messages you have on your smartphone stay as private as possible and they’re simple enough for just about anyone to use.
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We’ve seen that battery life has became a huge factor when it comes to choosing a smartphone and Google has smartly made improving battery life a key goal of its upcoming Android L release. Ars Technica decided to put Android L to the test and found that the same phone with Android L had 36% more battery life — or about two extra hours of run time — than it had when it was running Android 4.4 KitKat.
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