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Showing posts from August, 2015

Meet the $35 USD smartphone

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Darryl Linington Orange has unveiled the Klif smartphone. According to Orange, the Firefox 2.0 powered device was developed by Mozilla’s Egyptian subsidiary Mobinil, and made by Alcatel. When taking a closer look at the device, we found that it features a dual-core 1.0 GHz processor, which is a accompanied by a 3.5 inch HVGA screen, and a 2MP rear-facing camera with LED flash. The device is powered by a 1300 mAh battery and features 512MB storage and 256MB RAM. The phone also features an FM radio. When it comes to connectivity, the device features Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and 3G. Mobinil has essentially claimed that the Klif smartphone is the cheapest smartphone on the market, as it retails for EGP 275 ($35 USD dependent on the current rate of exchange). The Orange Klif will launch in 13 countries in Africa and the Middle East..

Map of the Internet 1.0: Explore this beautiful, hand-drawn map of the online world

How do you map something like the internet? It’s a challenge that continues to fascinate many virtual-cartographers, and amateur graphic designer Martin Vargic is the latest to try his hand - creating the magnificently baroque image above. Vargic began the project in December 2013, using old National Geographic maps for visual inspiration and Alexa data of the most visited websites in the world to scale the different land masses. Perhaps the amazing fact is that the map was drawn free hand, directly into Photoshop. "My map is divided into two distinct parts,” Vargic explained to The Independent. “The eastern continent, the Old World, showcases software companies, gaming companies and some of the more real-life oriented websites." "The western part, the New World, is composed from two major continents; the northern one showcasing social networks, search websites, video websites, blogs, forums and art websites. All major adult-oriented websites, in addition to various

G is for Google

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have. We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about. We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant. Our compa

Windows 10 doesn’t offer much privacy by default: Here’s how to fix it

Windows 10, by default, has permission to report a huge amount of data back to Microsoft. By clicking through "Express Settings" during installation, you allow Windows 10 to gather up your contacts, calendar details, text and touch input, location data, and a whole lot more. The OS then sends it all back to Microsoft so that it can be used for personalisation and targeted ads. This isn't entirely unusual: recent versions of Windows, unless you explicitly say otherwise, have reported some kind of data back to Microsoft. Windows 10 definitely goes one step (well, a few steps) further though, primarily thanks to Cortana (which ideally needs to be personalised/optimised based on your voice inputs, calendar, contacts, etc.) and other "cloudy" features that somewhat necessitate the collection and squirting of personal data back to Microsoft. That isn't to say you should be happy about this state of affairs, however. If you'd like to retain most of your priva