7 April Fool’s Day Pranks To Play On Your Friends’ PC http://t.co/KAcEbltOsH
— Mr. Walker (@clevelandhighschool) March 31, 2014
-
-
Google’s First April Fool’s Day 2014 Prank
And so it begins. Google April Fool’s Day Pokeman Challenge https://t.co/wFh0P63qPR
— Mr. Walker (@clevelandhighschool) March 31, 2014
-
The world’s largest photo service just made its pictures free to use
Getty Images is betting its business on embeddable photos
Article from The Verge
If you go to the Getty Images website, you’ll see millions of images, all watermarked. There are more than a hundred years of photography here, from FDR on the campaign trail to last Sunday’s Oscars, all stamped with the same transparent square placard reminding you that you don’t own the rights. If you want Getty to take off the watermark, you’ll have to pay for it.
"OUR CONTENT WAS EVERYWHERE ALREADY."
Starting now, that’s going to change. Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. For a small-scale WordPress blog with no photo budget, this looks an awful lot like free stock imagery.
It’s a real risk for the company, since it’s easy to screenshot the new versions if you want to snag an unlicensed version. But according to Craig Peters, a business development exec at Getty Images, that ship sailed long ago. "Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply," he says. "The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening… Our content was everywhere already."
THE NEW EMBEDS STRIKE DIRECTLY AT SOCIAL SHARING
Looking at the pictures on Twitter, it’s hard to disagree. Wildly popular accounts like @historyinpics can amass hundreds of thousands of followers with nothing but uncredited, unlicensed images, and since there’s no direct revenue, there’s little point in asking them to pay. At that scale, anything more expensive than free is a prohibitive cost. The new embeds strike directly at that kind of social sharing, with native code for sharing in Twitter and Tumblr alongside the traditional WordPress-friendly embed code. Peters’ bet is that if web publishers have a legal, free path to use the images, they’ll take it, opening up a new revenue stream for Getty and photographers.
The new money comes because, once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information. "We’ve certainly thought about it, whether it’s data or it’s advertising," Peters says, even if those features aren’t part of the initial rollout.
THE DIGITAL SHIFT HAS BEEN HARD ON PHOTOGRAPHERS
The clear comparison is the music industry, which was hit hard by piracy in the ’90s and took decades to respond. "Before there was iTunes, before there was Spotify, people were put in that situation where they were basically forced to do the wrong thing, sharing files," Peters says. Now, if an aspiring producer wants to leak a song to the web but keep control of it, they can drop it on Soundcloud. Any blog can embed the player, and the artist can disable it whenever they want. And as Google has proved with YouTube, it’s easy to drop ads or "buy here" links into that embed. "We’ve seen what YouTube’s done with monetizing their embed capabilities," Peters says. "I don’t know if that’s going to be appropriate for us or not." But as long as the images are being taken as embeds rather than free-floating files, the company will have options.
EMBEDS HAVE ENABLED A NEW KIND OF LINK ROT
Getty Images’ profits haven’t cratered like music conglomerates: its profits actually increased nearly $100 million from 2007 to 2011, thanks in part to digital licensing. Still, the digital shift has been hard on photographers, with professional stipends increasingly replaced by smaller payments to amateur or freelance photographers. Part of Peters’ promise is that the new embeds will open up larger flows of money down the road.
The biggest effect might be on the nature of the web itself. Embeds from Twitter and YouTube are already a crucial part of the modern web, but they’ve also enabled a more advanced kind of link rot, as deleted tweets and videos leave holes in old blog posts. If the new embeds take off, becoming a standard for low-rent WordPress blogs, they’ll extend that webby decay to the images themselves. On an embed-powered web, a change in contracts could leave millions of posts with no lead image, or completely erase a post like this one.
Still, such long-term effects are years away, if they happen at all. In the meantime, Getty Images is focused on the more immediate problem of infringement. "The principle is to turn what’s infringing use with good intentions, turning that into something that’s valid licensed use with some benefits going back to the photographer," says Peters, "and that starts really with attribution and a link back."
-
3 Essential Steps To Get Rid Of Chrome Hijackers In Minutes
This article is copied from Mashable.com for use in class in the event it gets removed from them. Remember class, go to the ORIGINAL WEBSITE to see the number of shares, comments, and related information and articles which are NOT provided here.
The images have been shrunk as well to encourage you to look at the original web site!
Have you ever opened your browser of choice and been greeted with a bizarre-looking start page or an unsightly toolbar glued to the top of the page? These changes seem to happen by magic and without warning. At their worst, they can slow your browsing to a crawl and spawn ads into nearly every page you visit, so it’s wise to purge them from your browser. Fortunately, with just a few minutes of your time and a keen eye, you can restore your browser to tip-top shape. These instructions cover Chrome on Windows, since it’s the browser most people seem to have issues with.
How Does This Stuff Get On Here, Anyway?
Typically, these problem-causing programs are not intentionally installed by the user, but rather by trickery. Here’s an example. You’ve probably seen this image before:
Yes, that’s the Ask Toolbar installer, which arrives bundled with Oracle’s Java. This toolbar, as you can see, provides a user with only features that they could readily find elsewhere. Modern browsers can search the Web simply by typing into the address bar and create shortcuts to sites such as Facebook and weather below the address bar manually.
The worst part of all is that the boxes are already checked – and every time Java updates, which is often, the user must remember to uncheck the boxes once again. And heaven forbid, if you do forget to uncheck those boxes of death, removing the toolbar is an absolute horror.
Seeing as even a legitimate program like Java bundles in this junk for you, it’s no wonder that many users find their browsers plagued over time. Whether you’re sure that you’ve been affected by these programs or you just want to do a wellness check-up, here are three places to check to make certain Chrome is completely clean.
Extensions
Extensions in Chrome are often the root of undesirable behavior, and thankfully, they’re easy to find all in one place. Simply click the menu bar in the top-right of Chrome (the three bars), then expand “Tools” and click on “Extensions.” From here, you will see a list of every extension installed in your browser. Ones that you purposefully installed likely are not the culprit, so look for any that seem out-of-place.
One big clue is the “installed by a third party” message under an extension – this indicates that something other than you installed it. Often these extensions also have the generic “puzzle piece” icon – but not always.
There’s no reason for something to stay on your computer that you didn’t authorize, so it’s a good idea to remove them.
If you’re on the fence about an extension, seek help: the Chrome Web Store allows users to leave reviews on extensions, so if others rate it poorly, throw it out. Another valuable resource is the website Should I Remove It? The site allows you to look up any program and see what it does, where it typically comes from, and what percentage of users removed it. It’s extremely helpful if you don’t consider yourself a good judge of a program’s integrity.
The Default Search Engine
Even though you’ve removed a shady-looking extension that was injecting ads into your browser, traces may still remain. The next place to check to make sure that Chrome is healthy is the search engine settings.
From the extensions menu you were just visiting, click on “Settings” on the left hand side of the menu. A list of settings comes up, but for now we’re interested in one – entitled “Search.” A drop-down box lets you pick your favorite. If it’s not something recognizable like Google, Bing, or Yahoo!, then change it to whichever you prefer.
An optional follow-up step is to completely remove the offending search provider(s). Choose “Manage Search Providers” and all the way to the right of a provider’s name there will be an X. Click that, and the provider goes poof.
Why is this step important? As aforementioned, when you type something into the address bar that’s not a web address, Chrome automatically searches for it using the default search engine. Additionally, some of these search engines try to imitate Google, so if you’re in a hurry you may not notice what you’re actually using.
If that engine is a garbage one, you’ll still be using it every time you search the Internet in this way, and since these search providers are usually filled with a mountain of ads, they’re better off left alone.
The Home Page
Similar to the default search engine, many of the malicious extensions like to change your default homepage. For this step, you’ll want to check two spots in Chrome:
First, visit the “On Startup” section in Chrome’s settings. If “open a specific page or set of pages” is the chosen option, click “set pages” and make sure none of them look strange; if they do, remove them and set them back to whatever you like.
Second, under the “Appearance” header in the settings, choose to show the home button. Again, if the page listed here looks weird to you, change it and you’re good to go.
All clean!
By performing these easy steps, you’ve cleaned your browser of all unwanted litter. This will get rid of most problems of this type; if they persist, you may need to visit the programs list in Windows to see if they’re installed on your computer instead of just in the browser, or perhapstake even more drastic measures. And thankfully, the future looks bright in this area, as Google will soon enact a policy that blocks these third-party extensions by default. Once that is in place, a much lower amount of spam extensions will appear in the wild. Until then, you now have the knowledge to take charge of Chrome on your own.
Have you experienced any particularly nasty browser extensions? What are your best strategies for avoiding bundled-in software? Sound off in the comments!
-
Infographic: Living With Less
60 years ago, incredible amounts of people in the U.S. were given the opportunity to live in their own house, outside of traditional centers of populations (cities). A significant complication to this new lifestyle slowly developed, as markets produced more to meet consumer needs. Not only did most living a quiet suburban lifestyle start to buy more items individually, but they bought nearly identical things for their own households — which could be easily shared with a few neighbors. This phenomenon has spread to nearly all ways of living, as dominant culture has come to dictate product consumption as the remedy for social ills.A highly consumptive lifestyle, focused around maintaining and accumulating stuff, requires much more time and effort to uphold: nearly 66 hours are spent each week by the average person living in the U.S.
Many people find different paths toward happiness, including valuing materialistic practices. A challenging view is Minimalism, which proposes that happiness and healthful living can be found through reducing the amount of possessions one owns/uses. Some make the case that the sentimental value attached to certain ‘stuff’ can be related to experiences and other ways of perceiving one’s surroundings, and are not tethered to the things themselves.
Minimalism may not be a sustainable model for the current world of international trade and finance, but at its core this philosophy can change/challenge a person’s outlook on what’s actually necessary in order to live in a fulfilling fashion.
Image compliments of Masters in Human Resources Degree Guide