Internet & Websites - Page 16

Facebook is punishing clickbait, and now Google is about to punish intrusive ads on mobile -- the future of the internet is bright, indeed.

The search engine giant acknowledges how frustrating intrusive "interstitials" (pop-up ads that obscure content) can be, and says it will soon be cracking down. Should a site employ these types of ads, its ranking on Google may find itself lower than it would otherwise. The emphasis here is on "may", because if the content is of great quality and relevant enough, it could still rank highly.

The policy does not affect pop-ups related to cookie usage, age verification, login, or reasonably sized banners.

Flash's swift decline is imminent, as Google is preparing to block all content that uses the software in its Chrome browser. Larger Flash content has been blocked in the popular browser for awhile now, Google is extending its coverage to the smaller stuff too. Tacking platforms and page analytics are among that, and can slow down browsing and drain battery just the same.

It's taken awhile to provide coverage for small Flash elements because until recently, there was no way to detect them.

Google isn't taking a hard stance on Flash quite yet though: if you want to enable Flash objects on a given page (like Twitch and Facebook, which require it), you'll still be able to. Eventually, such an option won't exist.

Disney is buying one-third of revered streaming company BAM Tech -- which powers NHL.tv and MLB.tv -- at a cost of $1 billion.

The company's long-term plan with this move is to launch an ESPN-branded subscription-based streaming network (emphasis on branded, because it won't include current ESPN programming, but rather, separate, ESPN-type channels).

The network makes the most of any for Disney and it's already formed ESPN deals with cable and satellite companies, so understandably, it doesn't want to mess up a good thing. However, should the whole cordcutting thing really take off, Disney can easily shift its content.

Hulu is ending its free streaming service and moving to a subscription only model. By no coincidence, it's also expanding its partnership with Yahoo, who will be launching Yahoo View, an ad-supported TV streaming site.

View will feature the five newest episodes of shows from ABC, NBC, and Fox, among others -- eight days after the original air date. Also available: day-after clips and full seasons of anime shows and Korean dramas.

"For the past couple years, we've been focused on building a subscription service that provides the deepest, most personalized content experience possible to our viewers," Hulu senior VP and head of experience Ben Smith explained in a statement. "As we have continued to enhance that offering with new originals, exclusive acquisitions, and movies, the free service became very limited and no longer aligned with the Hulu experience or content strategy."

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.

We all remember the days of MySpace, and if you don't... well, you're probably too young. The social network has been hacked, with over 360 million passwords taken.

The 360 million passwords are being sold, of course, with the hacker being the same one who was selling the data of the 160 million users that were hacked on LinkedIn recently. The data was taken by a hacker called Peace, as well as LeakedSource, a search engine of hacked data.

The credentials haven't been shared just yet, but to verify the data, Motherboard gave the email addresses of five MySpace users and LeakedSource "was able to send back" passwords on all five accounts. The database has 427,484,128 passwords, but only 360 million emails that had a second password attached. Each of the 360 million records contain "an email address, a username, one password and in some cases a second password".

Mostly in line with earlier rumors, Twitter has confirmed that media and @names in replies won't count toward its 140 character limit before too long.

A source previously indicated links wouldn't count either, and while that's not specifically pointed out by Twitter in its blog post, it does say it's "exploring ways to make existing uses easier and enable new ones, all without compromising [the service's] unique brevity and speed."

Other changes include the ability to retweet and quote yourself with a simple button click, and new tweets (not replies) that begin with @name will reach all of your followers, eliminating the need for the ".@name" workaround. The latter is good if that's what you want, but bad if you want to privately ask a question, for example; hopefully Twitter creates an option to enable or disable this behaviour, whether per tweet or globally.

AT&T began data capping its U-Verse broadband customers back in 2011, although it didn't enforce its new rules. That changes this week as May 23 has arrived: the date the company said it would begin enforcing caps.

Whereas the cap was 250GB per month in 2011, that's been increased to 300GB for those with 768 Kbps-6Mbps plans; 12Mbps-75Mbps plans will have a 600GB cap, and 100 Mbps-1Gbps means a 1TB cap. Should you exceed the limit (and you'll receive plenty of e-mail warnings before you do), you'll be charged $10 for each 50GB of extra data. Alternately, you can pay a flat $30 extra per month for unlimited data.

AT&T says about 4% of its customers go over the new limits.

Netflix has launched its speed test site Fast.com. Like Speedtest.net (which it links to for comparison purposes), it tells you your current download speed with a brief data test. In this case, the data is downloaded from Netflix servers.

Unlike with Speedtest.net, the test is extremely quick, the site pretty much only features the test itself, and it elects to nix upload speed and ping results, saying it's aimed at consumers of data who want a quick, straightforward tool (which makes sense given a lot of people will learn about it through Netflix).

The company says the results should be similar to what you see with Speedtest.net, so it's not about more accurate results, but simplicity and time.

Google is set to soon integrate shopping advertisements into its image searches on mobile.

"The most common feedback people have left with Google Images is, 'I like these products - how much do they cost and where can I buy them?'" says Google's VP of shopping Jon Alferness.

When you search for an image on your phone like say, couches, sponsored links with couch prices will show up. If you want more specific links, you can sort by colour, type, location, and store.

Fans of football young and old will have the opportunity to easily discover or relive historic games in NFL history soon. The league is currently negotiating a renewed deal with YouTube whereby it will provide three full, classic games for each of the 32 teams for a total of 96 games; all will be available through the NFL YouTube channel, which currently boasts nearly one billion total views.

No exact date is set for the release of the full games yet, but the league says it will be sometime before the start of the new season (September 8).

The deal will also see highlights for games in progress show up in Google searches for NFL teams in a dedicated box that will also include information like broadcast time, kick-off time, and current score.