Wayne Williams

Search engine DuckDuckGo released a video a few days ago that shows how Google personalizes results for all signed in and signed out users. It asked 131 people to search for the same Election related topics ("abortion", "gun control", and "Obama") on Google at the same time, and most of them received slightly different results.

That Google personalizes results in this way is hardly new information. The company has been doing it since 2009 and Eli Pariser covered the topic in depth in his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble (a great read). He also gave an enlightening Ted Talk on the subject in which he observes that "the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see."

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Raspberry Pi, the massively popular credit-card-sized computer, has had a surprising update -- the Model B version will now come with 512MB of RAM as standard, but will remain priced at $35.

If you’re not familiar with the device, it’s essentially a bare, single-board uncased ARM GNU/Linux computer that you connect to your TV and a keyboard. It’s designed to encourage programming and while aimed at children and students has proved a hit with all age groups, and has been put to some great uses, including sending back photos from the edge of space.

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Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner broke a number of records with his breathtaking edge-of-space skydive yesterday -- and not just the highest jump from a platform (128,100 feet), the longest distance free-fall, (119,846 feet) and becoming the first skydiver to break the sound barrier (with a maximum vertical velocity of 833.9 mph or Mach 1.24). He was also responsible for notching up the most simultaneous live views on YouTube to date.

According to Google, over eight million people (myself included) visited the live stream to watch Baumgartner jump from a capsule attached to a giant helium balloon some 24 miles (39km) above the Earth and land safely around nine minutes later, nonchalantly touching down almost -- as a friend described it -- as if stepping off a bus.

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Whether you think Microsoft wants to be Apple, or not, the company continues to roll out products designed to compete with its major rival. Today’s announcement is for Xbox Music, a digital music service for the Xbox games console, which will also appear as the default music player in Windows 8.

The service, which goes live tomorrow and will be available in 22 countries from launch, is a cross between Spotify and iTunes. Users will be able to listen to songs or full albums for free, create artist-based streaming radio stations, and put together music mixes and playlists. The iTunes element comes in the form of a music store, which will allow users to purchase and download tracks. The store will reportedly offer over 30 million songs, some four million more than Apple's store. There will also be over 70,000 music videos on offer.

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You’ll no doubt be familiar with The Innocence of Muslims, the controversial film that has angered Muslims across the Middle East, sparking riots and leading to several deaths.

It’s unlikely you’ll have actually watched it, although the more curious among you may have caught some of it on YouTube, where the film is still freely available -- provided, of course, you’re not reading this in one of the countries where Google has blocked it, specifically Libya, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Russia recently banned the film, too, which unsurprisingly also is not available to watch in Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, where they’ve chosen to go a step further and block YouTube entirely.

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According to a story on the Russian Interfax news site, some Russian Christians have taken to defacing, or replacing, the logo on their Apple products because it’s "anti-Christian" and insults their faith.

While to you or I the logo just looks like a Golden Delicious that’s had a chomp taken out of one side, to some radical Orthodox Christians, including some priests, it apparently represents the original sin as described in the Bible, where Adam and Eve disobey God by noshing on some forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

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Google’s panoramic, street-level maps feature -- recently added to its mobile web app -- received a massive upgrade today, in what Google calls its biggest Street View update ever. As well as allowing users to explore numerous new global sites of interest, Google has refreshed some 250,000 miles of roads.

Expanding and maintaining all its Street View imagery is a massive task, but Google makes it look easy, casually adding extra coverage to the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Macau, and doubling its number of "special collections" in a single update. Some of the highlights now available to explore include:

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Microsoft has a long history of copying Apple. Back in the early 90s, Bill Gates' company introduced features found in the Macintosh GUI into Windows 2.0, sparking a copyright infringement lawsuit (Apple's taste for litigation is nothing new). Microsoft arguably has pilfered ideas from its rival's OS ever since -- Windows’ taskbar and Aero Peek certainly share clear similarities with OS X's Dock and Exposé. When the iPod became a massive hit, Microsoft introduced the Zune. Apple stores are hugely popular, which is why we’re now seeing Microsoft Stores popping up everywhere. Surface, in a way, copies the iPad, although of course Microsoft has tried (and failed) to popularize tablets since 2002.

And yes, before I go too far into this article, I’m aware the above paragraph could be seen as troll bait, so I’ll point out that Microsoft copies from other companies too -- Google being a major example -- and Apple, in turn, has lifted ideas from Microsoft, particularly from its operating system. Big companies copy from one another, it’s a fact of life. My point, however, is when Apple does something exceptionally well, Microsoft is keen to try and follow suit.

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With the newest incarnation of Windows fast approaching, Microsoft has released a 102MB cumulative update for the "gold", or final, versions of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, designed to make the new operating system ready for general availability. According to Steven Sinofsky’s Building Windows 8 blog post, the update improves the OS’s "performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility."

You can install the 'Update for Windows 8' through the control panel and see exactly what’s been addressed in the accompanying Knowledge Base article.

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MegaCloud is a new, free-to-use cloud storage and backup service (compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, and Mobile) that lets you store, sync and share all your documents, photos, music, videos and more across all of your devices. Unlike some similar services, having a free account doesn’t mean being restricted in any way -- all free users get 16GB of space, divided into 8GB for storage and 8GB for backups.

Well, that’s how much ordinary, everyday free users get. But obviously, as a BetaNews reader you deserve a little extra, so MegaCloud has kindly upped the free storage on offer to 21GB (13GB for storage, plus 8GB for backups) exclusively for us, and all you need to do is click on the link below and sign up for a free account. And if that’s still not enough free space for you, you can get yet more gratis storage simply by installing a mobile app or referring friends to the service.

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QR Codes are pretty much everywhere these days, but few companies really make the most of the possibilities they offer. TagMyDoc is a great example of what can be done with them, and lets you add a QR Code to your own physical documents, directly from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. When someone scans that code, they’ll get a full copy of the document on their device.

It saves on printing costs, and means you don’t have to worry about how many copies of a document or presentation to output for a meeting, for example, because anyone with a QR reader can get a copy of their own. It’s a great service, but TagMyDoc has just been made even more useful, as it now lets you connect to popular cloud storage services Box and Dropbox, and tag and securely share documents you store there.

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Nominum is the world’s leading provider of integrated subscriber, network and security solutions for network operators and its software currently processes over one trillion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day from hundreds of network operators worldwide; a number that far exceeds the combined 6.5 billion searches, likes and tweets served by Google, Facebook and Twitter each day.

Its new N2 Platform and Nominum IDEAL ecosystem gathers and anonymizes this data, allowing application providers’ seamless access to it. I spoke to Nominum’s CEO, Gary Messiana, to find out more about how it works and what it means for network operators and consumers.

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Google has introduced Street View into its web app, bringing back one of the most sorely missed features lost when Apple swapped Google’s popular mapping app for its own much poorer solution in iOS 6. I’m sure you’re more than familiar with the whole sorry tale that led Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue an apology, and our own readers saying they wouldn’t be buying an iPhone 5 because of it, so I won’t dwell on the subject here.

If you followed my advice and added a shortcut to Google’s web app, you’re all set to start using Street View. Its rollout seems to be complete, so you should now have access to it, wherever you happen to live.

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You know what’s cooler than 500 million Facebook users? One billion. That’s the number of people Facebook says are now using the social network every month. It reached that magical milestone on September 14 at 12:45 PM Pacific time, so it’s probably one billion and a bit, by now.

To celebrate, Mark Zuckerberg posted a little thank you and a fact sheet about the news, which contains some interesting key metrics, including that there have so far been 140.3 billion friend connections, and over 1.13 trillion likes since that feature launched in February 2009. There are 219 billion photos currently on the site, not including deleted ones, which Facebook says totals around 46 billion.

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The way some people covet the new iPhone 5 you’d think it was made out of solid gold rather than glass and aluminum. Of course if it was available in that precious metal you’d have to pay quite a bit more than $399 for a 64GB model. Somewhere in the region of $35,411, in fact.

If you’re wondering how I arrived at that figure, the answer is that’s how much British designer Stuart sells his limited edition 18ct gold iPhone 5s for. Yes, that’s right -- targeting the "more money than sense" market, Stuart has decided to create a new solid gold chassis for the phone, hand-finishing it, and adding an apple logo made out of 53 diamonds (amounting to 1ct) for good measure.

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