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Sunday, August 4, 2013
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Samsung Galaxy Folder flaunts its dual-screen flip design for the camera
Samsung may have already spoiled the Galaxy Folder's upcoming launch, but it hasn't given us a peek at a real, live device. Contributors to Clien.net's forums claim to have what we're missing, however -- they've posted a trio of photos that appear to reveal the dual-screen Android clamshell in earnest. In line with the schematics we saw earlier, the Galaxy Folder should be an evolution of the W2013 from last fall. Its most visible change is an update to Galaxy S 4-era software. Other new external elements amount to subtle tweaks, such as the gold-like side trim and a camera key that replaces the W2013's dual-SIM button. Not that we'd accuse Samsung of playing it safe with the Galaxy Folder -- in a conservative handset market, it could be daring to produce an LTE-equipped Android flip phone in the first place.
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Obama tees off into birthday weekend with golf
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama kicked off his birthday weekend with a round of golf Saturday and planned to spend time with friends at Camp David.
Obama, who turns 52 on Sunday, left the White House unusually early for the half-hour trip by motorcade to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to squeeze in some golf before the celebration was to shift to the presidential retreat.
The White House said there were three golfing foursomes, which included some of Obama's friends from Hawaii, where he grew up, and Chicago, where he lived before becoming president, as well as current and former aides.
Among them were childhood friends Bobby Titcomb and Mike Ramos, and Chicago pals Marty Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker. White House aides Marvin Nicholson and Sam Kass, an assistant chef, rounded out the group, along with Reggie Love, who for years had been Obama's personal assistant, or "body man," and basketball buddy until he left the White House in late 2011 to finish the course work for an MBA.
The White House said little about how Obama would celebrate on Sunday, but the birthday wishes started rolling in early.
House Democrats presented Obama with a birthday cake when he went up to the Capitol this week, and American Legion youth members sang "Happy Birthday" to him during a White House visit late last month.
For last year's birthday, which fell during his heated campaign for re-election, Obama also celebrated with a round of golf and quiet time at Camp David, proving that he is a creature of habit. But he later held several birthday-themed campaign fundraisers in Chicago, including one at his family's South Side home.
Obama is scheduled to return to the White House on Sunday.
___
Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-tees-off-birthday-weekend-golf-133841962.html
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Libyan deputy PM resigns citing 'policy failure'
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) ? Libya's deputy prime minister says he has resigned due to failed government policies and deterioration of security following a string of assassinations.
The prime minister's office said Sunday it had accepted the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Awad al-Barassi.
Al-Barassi announced the resignation late Saturday on his official Facebook page, saying that a "fearful number of assassinations of honorable people" stemmed from government policy failure.
The last week of July saw a series of assassinations, including those of a leading Libyan lawyer and activist and a former top official in the country's newly-formed security force.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/libyan-deputy-pm-resigns-citing-policy-failure-081248841.html
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Senate seeks numbers from NSA on phone collection
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate wants to know how many phone records of Americans that the National Security Agency has collected in its sweeping surveillance program.
Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois included a provision in the 2014 fiscal year defense spending bill that would require the NSA to report to Congress on the records, all NSA bulk collection efforts, and the costs. The provision also requires a list of potential terrorist attacks that were thwarted.
Durbin wants the report 90 days after the bill becomes law. The Senate Appropriations Committee backed the effort on Thursday in voting for the bill.
The NSA has said that its two surveillance programs ? the other sweeps up Internet usage data ? have stopped at least 50 terror plots across 20 countries.
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How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online ...
How much do you like courgettes, the green vegetable Americans call zucchini? According to one Facebook page devoted to them, hundreds of people find them delightful enough to click the "like" button ? even with dozens of other pages about courgettes to choose from.
There's just one problem: the liking was fake, done by a team of low-paid workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose boss demanded just $15 per thousand "likes" at his "click farm". Workers punching the keys might be on a three-shift system, and be paid as little as $120 a year.
The ease with which a humble vegetable could win approval calls into question the basis on which many modern companies measure success online ? through Facebook likes, YouTube video views and Twitter followers.
Channel 4's Dispatches programme will on Monday reveal the extent to which click farms risk eroding user confidence in what had looked like an objective measure of social online approval.
The disclosures could hurt Facebook as it tries to persuade firms away from advertising on Google and to use its own targeted advertising, and to chase likes as a measure of approval.
That particular Facebook page on courgettes was set up by the programme makers to demonstrate how click farms can give web properties spurious popularity.
"There's a real desire amongst many companies to boost their profile on social media, and find other customers as well as a result," said Graham Cluley, an independent security consultant.
The importance of likes is considerable with consumers: 31% will check ratings and reviews, including likes and Twitter followers, before they choose to buy something, research suggests. That means click farms could play a significant role in potentially misleading consumers.
Dispatches found one boss in Bangladesh who boasted of being "king of Facebook" for his ability to create accounts and then use them to create hundreds or thousands of fake likes.
Click farms have become a growing challenge for companies which rely on social media measurements ? meant to indicate approval by real users ? to estimate the popularity of their products.
For the workers, though, it is miserable work, sitting at screens in dingy rooms facing a blank wall, with windows covered by bars, and sometimes working through the night. For that, they could have to generate 1,000 likes or follow 1,000 people on Twitter to earn a single US dollar.
Sam DeSilva, a lawyer specializing in IT and outsourcing law at Manches LLP in Oxford, says of the fake clicks: "Potentially, a number of laws are being breached ? the consumer protection and unfair trading regulations. Effectively it's misleading the individual consumers."
Dispatches discovered an online casino which had sub licensed the Monopoly brand from its owner, the games company Hasbro, and to which fake likes had been added on its Facebook page.
When contacted, Hasbro contacted Facebook and the page was taken down. In a statement, Hasbro said it was "appalled to hear of what had occurred" and was unaware of the page.
Dhaka-registered Shareyt.com, meanwhile, claims to act as a middleman to connect companies seeking to boost their profile on Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, LinkedIn and YouTube.
"We made it as simple as mouse-clicking," the front page of the site says, claiming that it is "a crowd-sourcing platform to help you improve social media presence and search engine ranking FREE".
It adds: "Whenever and wherever you need massive workforce to complete petty tasks, call for Shareyt and get it done like magic! You can't imagine the potentials [sic] until you explore!" It claims to have generated 1.4m Facebook likes and to have 83,000 registered users.
The implication is that the site "crowdsources" clicks ? that lots of people around the world mutually help each other to promote each others' work.
But Sharaf al-Nomani, Shareyt's owner, told Dispatches in an undercover meeting that "around 30% or 40% of the clicks will come from Bangladesh" ? which implies about 25,000 people in Dhaka using computers laboriously and repetitively for hours on end to boost the visibility of specific products to order.
Some companies have used shareyt.com in the course of standard marketing.
Sir Billi, a British cartoon film voiced by Sir Sean Connery, has more than 65,000 Facebook likes ? more than some Hollywood films.
Although it has so far only been released in South Korea, Facebook data suggests the city of Dhaka is the source of the third-largest number of likes. (The Egyptian capital, Cairo, is presently the source of the highest number.)
Tessa Hartmann of Billi Productions, which made the film, said they had been promoting it since 2006, and paid ?271.40 to advertise it on shareyt.com in August 2012 for six months as a "very small" part of their marketing campaign. At the time, she says, it already had 40,000 Facebook likes. Her company stopped using the site in February.
A link also appeared on shareyt.com to Coca-Cola's 2010 Super Bowl advertisement "Hard Times", showing the Simpsons' Mr Burns learning to get by on less (but with Coke).
The video's presence on the site is likely to have helped its nearly 6m views. Coke said in a statement that it "did not approve of fake fans"; the video was made private soon afterwards.
Shareyt.com has now seen Facebook and Twitter prevent links to the site being posted on their networks. Twitter bans "fake followers" or the buying of followers.
Faked internet use has been a bugbear of the burgeoning advertising industry ever since the web went commercial in the mid-1990s and the first banner ad was rolled out in 1996.
The rise of advertising networks and "pay-per-click" advertising ? where an advertiser pays the network when someone clicks on an advert, whether or not it leads to a sale ? also saw a rise in faked clicks which benefited unscrupulous networks.
And it is still a problem. In February, Microsoft and Symantec shut down a "botnet" of up to 1.8m PCs that were being used to create an average of 3m clicks per day, raking in $1m per year since 2009.
But click farms exploit a different sort of computing power altogether: the rise of cheap labour paired with low-cost connectivity to the internet.
"Russell", the manager of the click farm identified by Dispatches, said some of the methods he used were legitimate; he blamed those who commissioned the work if it was seen as immoral.
Dispatches: Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
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Posted Express power up to down Senators to Sports
By Jeff Nations
STRASBURG -- Erik Armstrong counts Aldie starting pitcher Junior Delatorre as a friend, even if it didn't seem that way Friday night at First Bank Park.
Armstrong, Strasburg's starting right fielder, launched a pair of home runs off his University of South Carolina-Beaufort teammate to spark the Express to a lopsided 12-2 victory in the oft-delayed opening game of their best-of-three Valley Baseball League playoff series.
"Junior's a great pitcher," Armstrong said. "I've been playing with him, this will be my third year coming up here, and he's done great things for our school team. He's still a great pitcher, great friend of mine."
Delatorre, a right-hander, was getting the best of the matchup early. After getting the start in Thursday's makeup from Wednesday's rainout, Delatorre tallied a third of an inning shortly before the deluge returned for a second day.
Unlike Strasburg's Thursday starter, James McDade, Delatorre returned to the mound on Friday when action resumed with one out in the bottom of the first. Delatorre looked sharp, no-hitting the Express through 3 1/3 innings before Armstrong connected for a solo homer in his second at-bat after Delatorre had struck him out in the first.
"He's swinging it well," Strasburg manager Butch Barnes said of Armstrong. "Erik's never faced [Delatorre} before, even down there in their inter-squad. So he knew what he had, he's seen him pitch, but as far as seeing him and getting a read on him, tonight was it. Maybe got a little bragging rights to take back there."
Armstrong's long blast to left pulled third-seeded Strasburg to within 2-1 against the fourth-seeded Senators, who'd struck for single runs in the third and fourth on Austin Wobrock's RBI single and a run-scoring double from Travis Ferrick. Both of those runs came off eventual winner Jordan Wilcox, who got what amounted to a start when he took over in he second inning and pitched four frames for the Express. Barnes said the team decided to treat McDade's abbreviated start as a bullpen session, and he'll start tonight's Game 2 at Aldie.
Delatorre ran into real trouble in the bottom of the fifth. Johnny Schiotis drove in the tying run with an RBI double, and league MVP Jordan Tarsovich followed with a run-scoring triple to left. Delatorre then walked Andrew Kubuski to bring Armstrong to the plate with two aboard. That was a mistake, as Armstrong turned on another Delatorre pitch and launched it over the fence in left-center field to cap a five-run rally.
"He got me in my first at-bat, and that's not how I wanted the day to go," Armstrong said. "So I decided I needed at least to put something into play, and luckily I got off the home run in my second at-bat and got a good pitch to hit my third at-bat and got another one."
Down to 15 or possibly 16 players left on the roster, Aldie manager Erik Lemley decided to stick with Delatorre after Strasburg's five-run outburst. In the seventh, the Express jumped on him again with another four-run rally. Kubuski had an RBI single and Cameron Johnson connected on yet another home run, a three-run blast to left-center that ended Delatorre's night.
"Junior's been good for us all year," Lemley said. "He's one of the league leaders in wins and we're getting pretty low on guys, so I was going to let him go out there and see how long he could go. He got hurt by the long ball, but you take the home runs away and he threw a pretty good game."
Kubuski brought two more in the eighth with a two-run double off Aldie reliever Kyle McCormick.
"We've been living and dying with that home run," Barnes said. "We'd better start putting some hits together, and I thought we did that tonight for the most part."
Strasburg used six pitchers in all over the two day-long game, five on Friday. The Senators' options were a bit more limited, and it showed against Strasburg.
"We're hanging by a thread, but the guys we have left want to compete, they want to win," Lemley said. "They'll play hard until the end."
Armstrong has that same mindset, and is hoping the end won't come until next week with the Express winning the franchise's first James W. Lineweaver Cup.
"I'm in it for the long haul," Armstrong said. "We're hoping that it'll go all the way. We're here now, been here all summer. It's been a long summer for all of us, so might as well go all the way and try to win it."
Note: The Lineweaver Cup championship series, originally scheduled for a best-of-five format, has been cut to a best-of-three due to this week's rain-delayed semifinals.
Contact Sports Editor Jeff Nations at 540-465-5137 ext. 161, or jnations@nvdaily.com>
Source: http://www.nvdaily.com/sports/2013/08/express-power-up-to-down-senators.php
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