Google Play Bans Pirate Bay

Google has been pushed by the movie and music industry, alongside other anti-piracy groups, to help try to shut down file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay Proxy, The Pirate Bay Premium, The Pirate Bay Mirror and PirateApp have all been removed by Google from the Play store. Any others that crop up will be dealt with in the same fashion. Most of the apps provide a proxy service to The Pirate Bay on mobile, allowing users to download various pirated material. Typical ISP blocks do not affect proxy services. Read more. . .

Google’s Android 5.0 Lollipop Tips

All right — you’ve heard all about Google’s Android 5.0 Lollipop release. You’ve read the reviews. Now what should you do once you actually get your hands on the software?

Here are 10 cool things to try with Lollipop on your Android phone or tablet:

1. Set up a trusted Bluetooth device.

2. Check out the revamped Face Lock feature.

3. Take Lollipop’s always-listening voice command system out for a spin.

4. Interact with a notification on the lock screen.

5. Set up and try priority notification mode. Read more. . .

Control Spotify with Your Phone

Many people were wondering when Spotify would use its Connect feature to connect their phone and desktop devices. Well, I’m pleased to say that this #firstworldproblem has been fixed, and you can now use your phone or tablet as a remote control for the tunes playing on your desktop.

The only stipulation is that you are a paying Spotify customer, but that’s always been the case for Spotify Connect — which lets you play music on WiFi-enabled devices in your vicinity, like speakers, using a mobile device. Read more. . .

Apple Pay Not Welcome

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CVS and Rite-Aid did it not shut off their NFC-based payment systems just to stifle the competition of Apple Pay, but because they’re contractually obligated not to offer Apple Pay in their stores.

The whole Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) group, including these two drug stores and big-box retailers Walmart and Best Buy, signed a contract years ago that binds them to Current C. That contract, signed way before anyone knew if Apple Pay was ever going to materialize, prevents them from supporting rival technologies, as doing so will earn them outrageous fines. Read more. . .

PhotoMath Solves Math Problems

PhotoMath by microblink uses a phone’s camera to solve equations and then teaches you the step-by-step method for solving it yourself.

The app can do arithmetic: addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. It can handle fractions. It knows what 23 is and can calculate the root of 246. It can even do simple linear equations, provided the x you’re solving for is italicized so the app doesn’t confuse it with the x multiplication symbol.

Hint, Hint Teachers: The only catch is that the equation you’re trying to solve must be printed text, rather than handwritten. Read more. . .

Android Ads Bring Joy to Our Hearts

If you happened to be watching The Walking Dead last night, you may have noticed some clever new Android ads. Naturally, that’s led to speculation — many think the devices shown are the rumored Nexus 6 or X. That’s a stretch, but we do know that Google has a surprisingly great new ad campaign hyping Android L on multiple devices, along with that mysterious link. With that, we do expect to see new stuff soon!

Marriott Offers Wireless Charging

If you find yourself staying in a Marriott hotel later this month, you may encounter wireless charging in the lobby.

The lodging outfit is set to install Qi-equipped tech from Kube Systems in the greatroom lobbies of 29 locations in October. Stations can power up to six devices at the same time while replenishing that smartphone and tablet duo without a tether. Support for iOS, Android and Windows is included, so you’ll be able to leave those cords in the room when heading down for a drink at the bar. Of course, Marriott has 500 hotels around the world, so this seems to be a limited trial before widespread deployment or significant investment. Read more. . .

Facebook Creeper Ads

Starting today, Facebook will use data from its users for their new ad network, Atlas, which will serve up ads on non-Facebook sites based on what Facebook knows about you.

Which is good news for advertisers, and not so good news for users concerned about their personal privacy.

Different from Audience Network, a mobile ad network Facebook introduced in April, Atlas is a sort of alternative to Google’s AdWords, which will let advertisers follow users across the web and mobile devices.

Erik Johnson, head of Atlas, wrote in a blog post that the network addresses a major limitation of cookies, the industry’s vehicle for tracking users and serving ads on desktop. “Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world,” The blog presents Atlas as the solution since it uses “people-based marketing.” Read more. . .

Users Complain of iOS 8

You’ve waited almost a full year for this update—You’ve even deleted over a thousand photos to reach the minimum 5GB storage needed to download the new update, iOS8. You hovered over your phone for over an hour, waiting for the new system installation and reboot. With excitement, the welcome screen greets you to your new OS. You are officially ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’

But was the new iOS 8 update really worth it? Honestly, no. Here are a many reasons why, after a full week, users are downgrading. Read more. . .

Pop-up creator: ‘I’m sorry’

Hate pop-ups? So does the guy who made them!

Ethan Zuckerman worked for the webpage hosting site Tripod.com from 1994 to 1999, when it was struggling to develop a revenue model. “Along the way,” he writes in The Atlantic this week, “we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.”

The pop-up ad started as a solution to a complaint from a car maker upset that its banner ad was running on a page containing sexual content. “It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content,” Zuckerman wrote the code to launch ads in separate windows, laying the groundwork for what would become one of the Web’s biggest nuisances. “I’m sorry. Our intentions were good. Read more. . .