Internet & Websites News - Page 28

Torrentz.eu has been a fixture in the torrent community for more than 13 years, providing users with aggregated torrent search engine results. Now, due to what appears to be legal trouble, it has all but closed its doors.

Earlier today, it very suddenly disabled its search and login functionality, and its external links to torrents no longer work. Additionally, the site now refers to itself in the past tense.

The site's operator reached out to Torrentfreak, but would not comment on the situation, at least not publicly. Typically when this happens, it's for legal reasons, and given the trouble Torrentz has had with the RIAA and MPAA in recent years, it's not hard to believe his hand was forced.

Facebook's handy news feed isn't perfect, sometimes offering up misleading and/or clickbait article titles. Well, the people have spoken and as a result, the company is cracking down.

"We've heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles," it writes in a blog post. "These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer. For example: "When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS... I Was SHOCKED!"; "He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe"; or "The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless."

"To address this feedback from our community, we're making an update to News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming weeks. With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds."

If you've ever wanted to sit down and rewatch your favourite TV show but don't want to watch in any particular order, now there's a browser extension that mostly solves the issue. Named Netflix Shuffle, it chooses a random episode of a random TV show and plays it for you.

The downside is not all shows are available: creator 'minervaheavyindustries' must add shows manually before they are supported. However, as of right now, the list is pretty hefty at nearly 100 titles, including tons of popular ones like Californication, Futurama, That 70s Show, X-Files, and Sons of Anarchy. If you'd like to see a show added, contact the creator via Reddit or leave a review on the Chrome or Firefox pages.

Facebook has somehow continued its growth into 2016, with the company reporting its second quarter earnings, where we now know just how many people use Facebook daily, and monthly.

Facebook is now home to over 1.7 billion monthly active users (MAUs), which is a nice increase of 15% year-over-year, while we have 1.57 billion monthly active users on mobile. Facebook has also hit another milestone, where the social network is now home to over 1 billion mobile daily active users (DAUs).

The company defines MAUs as "Mobile-only MAUs are defined as users who accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or mobile versions of our website, or used our Messenger app, in the last 30 days of the given quarter. The number of mobile-only MAUs do not include Instagram users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users based on their other activities on Facebook".

Fox has signed a deal that will see American Crime Story stream exclusively on Netflix as of 2017. Available everywhere but Canada (where Rogers' holds rights to FX content), each season will launch on the service after their broadcast windows are up.

The first season of the show -- which earned 22 Emmy nominations -- centers on the fevered trial of O.J. Simpson that began in the mid-90s and gained worldwide attention and earning the title "Trial of the Century." It stars John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sarah Paulson (who funnily enough also has a role in American Horror Story), and David Schwimmer.

The second season focuses on Hurrican Katrina and will debut on FX next year.

The upcoming Star Trek TV series will be available for almost anyone anywhere to watch on Netflix. The online video streaming company has signed an exclusive agreement with CBS that will see the show broadcast weekly on its service to users in 188 countries, which is to say all of them except for the US and Canada. Each episode will release within 24 hours of the US premiere.

If you live in North America, you'll have to watch the show the old-fashioned way (or through CBS All Access), at least until CBS eventually releases the show to all Netflix regions.

Star Trek, which is based on the original series, will begin production in Toronto as of September and will premiere in January; it is created and produced by Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller, who combined have worked on Deep Space Nine, Voyager, the Star Trek Movie, and Into Darkness.

Television provider companies are under threat in Canada, where approximately 200,000 customers cut the cord in 2015, according to a new Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) report.

The companies' response to the shift as well has an increased cost of business has been to increase prices to offset the losses, which for now at least, appears to have worked, with revenues declining just 0.1 percent to $8.9 billion after the adjustments. The average TV bill increased from $65.25 in 2014 to $66.08 in 2015.

The CRTC states the cost of business increased by 1.3 percent to $7.2 billion over the one year period. Meanwhile, the industry employed 6.3 less people during that time, down to 27,244 people.

Comcast user reports from residents all over Illinois, USA indicate the company has introduced a 1TB data cap on its internet services in the region, which it refers to as a "Terabyte Internet Experience."

The e-mail sent out to customers reads: "We're writing to let you know that we will be trialing a new XFINITY internet data usage plan in your area. Starting August 1, 2016, your monthly XFINITY internet service will include a terabyte data usage plan."

It later goes on to say that if you need more data, there's always the Unlimited Data option, but that it's only relevant to less than 1% of its customers. As well, that less than 1% will remain unlimited for two "courtesy months."

AMD has just launched its new Radeon.com website, with it being a new hub for all things Radeon.

Radeon.com offers feature articles, details on RTG's new Radeon RX 480 video card, and entire section at the bottom dedicated to recent social media posts, and so much more.

AMD's new Polaris architecture is detailed, with the latest 'VR For All' featured article at the top, and an easier spot to grab the latest Radeon Software drivers for your video card in an easy-to-reach location at Radeon.com.

YouTube launched its ad-free subscription service YouTube Red back in February. If you were wondering how it's doing, the company says it's still "early days" but that it's "happy" and "encouraged" by numbers so far. That said, it was never really about numbers, as VP of content partnerships Kelly Merryman explains.

"YouTube Red just launched in the US and really for us it's all about consumer choice," she says. "Ads continue to be our core business and we are really thrilled about the business of reaching over a billion users a month and with momentum continuing behind that business, so there's no shift in where our business focuses. But we believe in consumer choice. One of the nice things about YouTube Red is we have created a subscription product that allows consumers to have an offline experience or ad-free experience, but we've also chosen that's another way we can invest in our creators to allow for our creators to actually bring a different cost structure to the platform."

That last bit is referring to YouTube's plans for introducing 15 to 20 original shows to the service this year, adding further value. Said shows will come from popular YouTubers like PewDiePie as well as more traditional creators.