Specialized Bicycles gave us an inside-look at the secret sauce involved in making their awesome bikes.

Oh yeah, and they also showed us their custom-designed WIND TUNNEL.

Go, take a look, we’ll wait.

[MORE: Specialized Aims to Make Bicycling Less of a Drag With New Wind Tunnel]

(Source: Wired)

“Hello.”

The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.

“Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said. “Here, drink this. You’re slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose.”

I was taken aback. “How did you…” I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.

“As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws–or lack thereof–apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn’t speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.”

Welcome to Google Island.

FAVORITE NEW TUMBLR ALERT (!!!)

It was only a matter of time.

(Source: whitemenwearinggoogleglass)

Culminating a two-week trial in which no hacking in the traditional sense occurred, a California man was convicted Wednesday under the same hacking statute internet sensation Aaron Swartz was accused of before he committed suicide in January.

Defendant David Nosal was convicted by a San Francisco federal jury on all six charges ranging from theft of trade secrets to hacking, despite him never breaking into a computer. Nosal remains free pending sentencing later this year, when he faces a potential lengthy prison term.

Nosal, a middle-aged man wearing a dark suit, sat stone faced as a clerk read “guilty” on all counts. Jurors deliberated for little more than two days.

After U.S. District Judge Edward Chen dismissed the 12-member jury, Nosal’s defense team demanded a hearing to urge the judge to set aside the verdict. A hearing was set for later this year.

“We think, legally, these counts can’t stand,” Steven Gruel, a Nosal lawyer, said outside the courtroom. Prosecutors declined comment.

[MORE: Man Convicted of Hacking Despite Not Hacking]

“I think we’re only 15 years away from a tipping point in longevity.” - Ray Kurzweil

[More: How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the Ultimate AI Brain]

(Source: Wired)

Netflix is reaching out to all the “families” butting up against its current two-simultaneous-streams limit with a plan that shows the streaming service understands how viewers actually want to use it. It knows we want to share, and that in fact sharing can be good for Netflix too.

In today’s first-quarter earnings letter (.pdf), Netflix announced a $12-a-month plan that doubles the current limit of two simultaneous video streams to four simultaneous feeds plan. Netflix says that the plan best serves large families that have butted up against the two simultaneous-stream limit. It also says that it expects less than one-percent of members to take advantage of the plan.

“The core focus is on the immediate family. We don’t think there’s much going on with sharing password with a marginal acquaintance,” said David Wells, Netflix CFO during the earnings call.

[MORE]

(Source: Wired)

For every new website that goes up, there are some like these that get lost or forgotten – along with a sense of what online culture used to look like. We may have faster network speeds and better web features now, but – like finding an old mixtape (yes, on actual cassette tape) – finding a webpage dating back to the turn of the century is like unearthing King Tut’s tomb.

And there’s something about those artifacts that’s worth preserving, whether it’s a promo site for the 1996 film Space Jam (above) full of twinkling-little-stars backdrop and spinning GIFs, a virtual “mall” promoting Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, or a collection of (now-nearly-obsolete) “Enter” pages. Some of these gems are easy to find, but others are not, and there’s always a chance that some may disappear from the web forever and while the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has logs of more than 240 billion pages and counting, but it probably can’t save everything.

In 2009, fearing that the web would lose a lot of great Flash-based pages – particularly with Yahoo’s shuttering of GeoCities – Ryder Ripps began archiving a lot of the best images from his favorite sites. Dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the internet” he set up Internet Archaeology and began archiving hundreds of images with the intent to “explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture.” As Ripps and his fellow internet archaeologists see it, web culture is just as important as any album, painting, film, or other cultural artifact and its preservation is essential to chronicling the birth of internet culture – as much for the historical record as for the creative one.

[MORE]

(Source: Wired)

It doesn’t look like much. The brick office building sits next to a strip mall in Cupertino, California, about an hour south of San Francisco, and if you walk inside, you’ll find a California state flag and a cardboard cutout of R2-D2 and plenty of Christmas decorations — even though we’re well into April.

But there are big plans for this building. It’s where Baidu — “the Google of China” — hopes to create the future.

[MORE]

(Source: Wired)