Chaos in new media! "WHO WILL SURVIVE?" -Gawker. "It's about to get ugly!" -Rafat Ali. "Shane Smith is a lying heap of drugs and dirty cash!" -Gawker again, sorry. "My new hobby is crushing writers with stacks of VC money!" -Jill Abramson. "More weight!" -Writers, probably. "Got dat Fusion money!" -Kevin Roose. "This is madness!" -Persian messenger. "THIS. IS. FUSION!" -Alexis Madrigal. "[Tim Herrera is] a fanatical hater of Thought Catalog!" -Thought Catalog. "Lol k. :thumbs-up-emoji:" -Washington Post. Taibbigoes back to Rolling Stone and Paul Carr demonstrates his amazing talent for being an off-putting prick even when he's more or less right. "Cry more, Carr, cause we just scooped your ass so hard" -NYMag. "Is it lunch time yet?" -Michael Wolff

How good is the Serial podcast!? Will there be an answer? WILL there?? I bet not, but I don't care. Herrman demolishes the John Oliver demolishes the internet video sweepstakes. Remember when Metafilter never went away and basically stayed great for 15 years and counting? Sweet'N Low put $1.3 million into an eBook that is also a lot of fake websites and a scavenger hunt for #brands or something? Alec Wilkinson profiles the founder of Modern Farmer for The New Yorker dot printmagazine and manages to quote only one ModFarm staffer (a dude) and bury all the recent drama amid weird dissociative lists of articles. (DISCLOSURE: Former ModFarm editor Reyhan Harmanci currently edits Tabs for syndication on Fast Company Labs, a top-tier destination for informative and engaging tech/business conte goddammit Reyhan would you stop I'm trying to disclose my conflict and subscribe to Fast Company in print now of interest here.)

Are you Queer? (Literally!) Do you want to destroy science fiction? (Figuratively!) Maybe submit toLightspeed Magazine'supcoming "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" issue!

Text file collectorJason Scott and The Internet Archive just released The Internet Arcade, which is a browser-playable archive of over 900 classic arcade games, and I promise it is not actually about ethics in gaming journalism.

Things 2 Read:

My Grandma the Poisoner: "…it wasn't until my 30s that I connected all this and it dawned on me that sleeping for three days is not normal or OK, and that the only times I woke up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, I was at Grandma's."

Up and Down: On Chairlifts and Ski Towns: "I remember the habitual reaching up and back to pull the restraining bar forward, the sensation of the cable being redirected by the bull wheel, like a train switching tracks. I remember the lonesome sound of the wind, suddenly audible when the chairlift paused…

Slackvalued at over $1bn, and Stewart is faving tweets like a man with few worries lately. Run the Jewels's all-cat remix album Meow the Jewels is funded and will happen. Lance Stephensonvideobombs everything (big shout@imbeccable). Drone Boning (NSFW) is disappointingly not drones having sex. It's the other thing. Googleoutgrows not being evil but Amanda Palmeris still the worst.

I have to admit I have not felt up to this one today. Enough people I trust have recommended it to confirm Bijan's usually-suspect opinion, though.

Meanwhile, on Etsy:Egg sweaters

Today's Song: Aphex Swift, "We Are Never Ever Getting Girl/Boygether" from this odd thing by David Rees

PS: Yes I heard about it. No I'm not going to mention it.

~Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and tabs of kindness.~

Today in Tabs is kind of a throwback today, I've been re-reading old Tabs and it used to be a lot less discursive. Also I have something special lined up for Friday this week! Stay tuned. Subscribe here or read us on FastCo Labs. Want to put your #brand in front of several thousand media types for some, but not too much, money? Get in touch.

In 2011, smarting from the loss of the Internet-fueled 2008 Presidential election, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced its plan to upgrade the operating system it uses for winning elections. Its first salvo in the high-tech voter outreach arms race was Data Trust, a massive database that now tracks the political habits of 260 million Americans (including voter registration, election history, and voter contact results). Republican campaigns now use an array of other tools--the ecosystem includes Para Bellum, Targeted Victory, FLS Connect, and i360--in the hopes of transforming future races.

Republican and Democratic data companies constantly tweak each other about who has the better toys. Writing on their official blog last August, Data Trust poked fun at the opposition, by pointing out that they developed a set of important tools for political consultants (a voter sample platform called "Lincoln" and an API for developers) ahead of NGP VAN, the toolkit favored by Democrats. At the same time, Democratic Party organizers make videos poking fun at Republican technology efforts that are aimed at a relatively small audience of engineers and strategists working in the political realm.

In other words, if you think the political fight playing out in public right now is wonky, wait until you hear about the machinations of the tech companies working behind the scenes to sway your vote. We surveyed the latest efforts from both parties to find out about the state of the art in electioneering engineering. The big obsession among the Republicans, it seems, is gearing up for the 2016 Presidential election.

Building A Tech Toolbox For The GOP

Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced the launch of , a tech firm dedicated to what they call "Data engineering to power elections," and with the unspoken goal of outflanking the Democratic Party's sophisticated data mining and information collating capabilities. In an email to Fast Company, Para Bellum co-creator and Republican Party chief data scientist Azarias Reda said that he was especially proud of his team's efforts to aggregate data such as door knock responses, and helping to develop constantly updated models of voter sentiment.

A big part of Para Bellum's work is in the area of creating a targeted sharing system that lets campaign volunteers enter information for potential contacts, and then generate customized messages for those contacts in real time. While this technology has been in the advertising world for some time, it is still relatively new to the political sphere. Political races often come down to field workers going door-to-door or working the phones, and Republican (and Democrat) organizations believe that giving better tools to build better mobile apps is crucial.

The big challenge for Para Bellum is that they're essentially building two different products at the same time: productivity management software for field workers and volunteers, along with sophisticated market research and advertising tools for the campaigns themselves. It's not a challenge specific to the Republicans--the Democrats face the exact same issue--but it's a unique development issue. Simply put, political campaigns don't run at the same tempo as the mainstream advertising and marketing world.

Data Trust has been actively working to make life easier for Republican campaigns in terms of implementing the latest technology for outreach and advertising. This summer they reached an agreement with i360, a rival data management company for right-wing candidates affiliated with the Koch brothers, to share and consolidate data. The organization has been pouring resources into making their assets more easily available for developers to build on.

The Targeted Advertising Future

If you've seen an ad for a Republican candidate pop up when looking at a website, there's a decent chance Targeted Victory is behind it. Zac Moffatt, the cofounder of the advertising firm and former head of digital for the Romney 2012 campaign, has a tough mission: making sure Republican campaigns aim ads at the smallest demographics possible. His company, which has just over 100 employees, helps GOP candidates place ads on websites and on television screens. And Moffatt's team has a big goal (one, again, shared with his Democratic counterparts): making political ads on television, smartphones, and computers tailored to every individual voter.

Moffatt told Fast Company that he views his company as an advertising firm first and foremost, with technical chops emphasized over ideological affiliation. Multiple references were made in conversation to being an online advertising company that is "best in class" and not just in the politics world. For Targeted Victory and its rivals, that means vacuuming up as much data on ordinary Americans as possible and putting it toward electing candidates instead of selling potato chips.

In August, Targeted Victory entered into partnership with Acxiom, one of America's largest data brokers, to use the company's databases on financial, entertainment, and home habits as well as demographic information. The announcement followed another partnership, with Twitter, to use the company's Targeted Audiences product to target highly specific audiences of influencers who use Twitter to talk about, say, health care or taxes.

The 2016 Countdown

Although 2014's races have been relatively sedate and low stakes by American political standards, companies like Targeted Victory are making lots of money placing targeted ads online. In August of this year, a digital advocacy group called IMGE, which works closely with Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, purchased all available YouTube ad inventory in Alaska to place targeted advertising for that state's senate race; similar big buys of online advertising took place by Republican-affiliated groups in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Iowa.

All of this, however, is a run-up to the 2016 presidential race and what Moffatt sees as the big trend for future political advertising: targeted advertising sent directly to television viewers. This technology, which is already available through DirectTV, allows different political messages to be sent to different people watching the same show depending on their demographics. That means your web-surfing habits may shape the political ads appearing on your television.

Industry analysts expect the market to grow over the next decade, but it may never replace the mass broadcast political advertising of a generation ago. "One in three voters didn't watch television last week except for sports," he added. "Right now, we waste money reaching those voters."

In August, a technology company called NGP VAN that serves Democratic political candidates held a press conference. They unveiled a comprehensive redesign of their organizing tool, which played a key role in President Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 elections. Eight days later, Data Trust, an organization which supplies huge voter databases to Republican candidates, announced it was partnering with a competitor named i360 to streamline its voter outreach operations.

Just as Democrats and Republicans duke it out in public forums leading up to election day, there's a behind-the-scenes battle between the parties to achieve supremacy in 2016. So far, the Democrats are still winning.

At the press conference, the Democratic Party also told attendees they were building a formal alliance with NGP VAN that would make it, in effect, the Democratic Party's top tech provider. While Republican candidates and right-wing interest groups have their choice of a complicated ecosystem of computer software and products, Democratic campaigns would squarely be NGP VAN territory. Any other vendors that wanted to enter the sphere with supplemental products, including rivals like the non-partisan NationBuilder, would have to work inside the NGP VAN platform. It looked less like a Democratic platform than something out of the playbook from the platform teams at Facebook or Twitter.

While Republican vendors like i360 and Data Trust have also been building powerful databases and APIs for developers, NGP VAN's update--the first since 2007--is the culmination of a year-long consolidation spree. Last November, NGP VAN acquired NationalField, which tracks field organizers using a Facebook-like interface and was a cornerstone of the 2008 win.

The update included a revamped version of a massive database called Voter Activation Network (VAN) which gives campaigns extremely detailed information about voters. VAN is considered to be one of the Democrats' secret weapons. The core of VAN, originally constructed in coordination with Obama for America, is a massive database on voters and their habits nationwide. Now, in the age of mobile, that information is being mashed up with information from web browser cookies, mobile consumption patterns, Facebook profiles, and a million other data points.

NGP VAN also unveiled a set of APIs for developers to build applications for individual campaigns or organizations around, and a designer-friendly style and pattern library called ProgressUI. ProgressUI's existence in itself is fascinating: It's a clear signal that the Democratic Party wants a unified, top-down software ecosystem for candidates.

This ecosystem includes mechanisms for fundraising, organizing, and recruiting volunteers from individual voters' social networks. They even accept bitcoin.

Barack Obama's previous campaigns gave birth to prominent strategy agency Blue State Digital and an extremely talented and high-profile cohort of data and advertising gurus. Despite the best efforts of Republican candidates, the centralized approach of the Democrats appears to yield better dividends. And as the 2014 elections give way to a heated Presidential election in just two years, the tech campaigns use will get increasingly micro-targeted and personal.

In the long term, NGP VAN CEO Stuart Trevelyan--just like Republican consultants I spoke with--feels that digital advertising is simply less wasteful for candidates than broadcast advertising. "Television is fundamentally a wasteful medium the way ads have been bought for decades," Trevelyan told Fast Company. "There are all kinds of people watching a show who have already decided to vote for you or against you. It's wasteful. Online ads let us do person-level targeting... Working with our company, a variety of online ad agencies serving Democratic candidates match voter files to cookies which allows us to advertise towards just 10,000 people who meet our criteria."

Trevelyan then went on to express his excitement about DirectTV and Dish allowing political candidates to send television ads targeted at individual households, and expressed hope that other service providers would offer similar services in the future. Targeted ads for candidates in high-stakes battlegrounds--or aimed at specific households that tend to disproportionately view Internet content about key issues--is seen as a more effective way of spending limited advertising funds for candidates.

But even if television advertising is returned in some personalized way, it is unlikely to have the impact that mass media political advertising used to. If you want to see the future of political advertising, it's probably going to look something more like Social Recruiting.

Social Recruiting systematically finds supporters for a particular candidate who are influencers in their social networks, and then reaches out to them in order to convert them into campaign volunteers. The technology is currently being tested by the Ready for Hillary super PAC, and using social network graphs to find and recruit "influencers" for Hillary Rodham Clinton's potential 2016 presidential run.

Rather than layering on top of social networks, Social Recruiting is designed to give campaigners algorithm firepower usually found inside hedge funds or intelligence agencies--which will then apply them to finding and recruiting the nodes inside a network that stick out. It signals a more personal, possibly more annoying, and much more insistent approach to getting out the vote for future political races.

Hieronymus Bosch's surreal triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights takes us from creation to damnation in an epic warning of just how humanity's hedonistic compulsions can drive them out of a very nice garden to a place where monstrous creatures claw at your flesh and musical instruments are being jammed into your orifices. That is, if you want to get biblical about it (interpretations vary).

In a contemporary rethinking of the iconic 16th century work, artist Carla Gannis tells a modern narrative of humanity's misadventures--with emojis. Lots and lots of emojis.

The amount of detail in The Garden of Emoji Delights is almost nauseating (and best viewed in full-screen). Consciously recalling Takashi Murakami's Superflat cartoon aesthetics, Gannis has painstakingly re-imagined and animated every little detail of the oil painting using a very finite alphabet of message icons, as well as Photoshop, After Effects, Scultptris, DAZ 3D and the help of her studio assistant, Rafia Santana.

In this animation detail shared with Co.Labs, we see the opulence of Eden translated into flat, very digital, yet still Boschian hills. Little "space invader" icons swarm over the "rainbow." Then, the background shifts, nature giving way to industrial cityscapes of smoking factory pipes and bridges.

There are also planes crashing, cute little syringes and pills collecting in piles and toilets, guns, CDs and flags swirling in patterns. A theme emerges--religious sins have been replaced with contemporary hieroglyphs of consumer culture.

In Gannis's artist catalog essay "Digicalyptic Realities Or, The Frolic of the Flat," Sabin Bors explains: "Bosch's controversies are intensified here, especially in the case of the digitally animated triptych, while references to Murakami's Superflat aesthetics are 'corrupted' by the visually distinct digital fabrics. As with Murakami, the flattened forms in the work of Carla Gannis are an expression of the shallowness that defines consumer culture. They, too, reflect the consumerist pop culture, sexual fetishisms and underlying desires that are prevalent in today's society by appealing to distorted images and grotesque scenes impregnated with the jolly yet most often empty emotionality we've become so accustomed to using in our daily expressions. Digital creatures engaged in apparently sinful pleasures mimic what has become of our communication through text messages and social media. This flat visual language no longer expresses the conflict of one's actual presence, as the Emoji promiscuity of happy sinners translates our growing inability to relate to one another. The deeper the gaze within the Emoji Garden, the darker the digital horrors and the bleaker our understanding of time, history, culture, and the other."

The Garden of Emoji Delights is on view at the Kasia Kay Gallery in Chicago.

November is National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). You're probably thinking: Write a book in a month? Are you kidding? Such an endeavor would require an attention span of the sort we possessed before Twitter, not to mention the ability to... what was I talking about again?

There is a more efficient way to write a novel. And if Vim or Emacs is your word processor of choice, then you're in luck. November also happens to be National Novel Generation Month (aka NaNoGenMo). It's a call for developers to build apps capable of automatically generating at least 50,000 words.

Started via GitHub last year by Boston-based developer and self-proclaimed "Internet artist" Darius Kazemi, the projects don't necessarily need to be hosted on GitHub, but that's where Kazemi is encouraging participants to share their initial ideas and progress.

"I decided on a whim last year that it would be fun to do their event but by writing code that writes novels," says Kazemi.

The rules of the competition are pretty loose: Coders need only submit a sample book and their source code when finished. The book doesn't even have to make sense. It can be a massive vat of "Lorem ipsum" soup or an attempt to get a machine to churn out something coherent.

Last year, a developer named Leonard Richardson created a script called In Dialogue that automatically takes the dialogue in one book and swaps it out with that of another. "I love it because it's a very simple task, computationally, but does a wonderful job of generating a surprising and funny novel that reads like a new text," says Kazemi.

So how do you win NanNoGenMo? You don't, really.

"There are no prizes in NaNoWriMo; similarly there are no prizes in NaNoGenMo," says Kazemi. "The way you win is to write code that writes 50,000 words. That's it. Really, it's up to individual participants to decide whether they've won."

The deadline for entry is Dec 1. Come back after that for an update on the best entries.

A wave of smart home security products is coming to market that promise to make your connected home bionic. Pick an area of interest and there's some hardware that specializes in it. Some have ultra-sensitive hearing, others offer better vision. Many of them can detect things humans-not to mention traditional security systems-just can't.

The trouble is that none of the products pack all the superpowers into one package.

Here are some of the features to look forward to while you await that solution.

1. Bionic Ears

Positioned more as a teenage girl than a renegade thug, Point is the "home sitter" that listens to your home and keeps it safe without a camera. Form, the company behind Point, thinks that cameras give off a creepy feeling, which is why their product looks for trouble by detecting different sounds in your home.

The sound of a window breaking, the sound of different alarms, or even the sound of doors being opened and closed, can all trigger alerts. There's a lot you can tell about what's going on just from the sound in a home. Because it's a connected device, it also learns about your sound patterns and can tell when no one is home.

Of course, Point can also light up at the sound of noise and detect smoke-thrown in for good measure, I'm sure.

2. Subsonic Sensing

Technically, Cocoon is also in the game of crazy cool hearing, but the way it does so feels more like wizardry. Instead of listening to the same audible noises humans can hear, it uses its Subsound to listen to things that people can't hear.

Using infrasonic sound technology-the same thing scientists use to detect earthquakes-coupled with machine learning, Cocoon can be aware of activity throughout the entire home, from a single vantage point.

Cocoon also uses your phone's location to learn when you're actually home. Instead of just guessing when you leave, it has a more definitive way of knowing which members of the family are in the house.

3. 180 Vision

There are a lot of security cameras out there. Some would argue it's the key to security, which makes the iSensor HD's ability to pan 180-degrees a nice feature. Cameras that move aren't new, but they usually cost a lot more than the iSensor's $160 entry price. Most also don't use Skype as the connection method, which gives this camera the ability to remained versatile on a wide variety of mobile phones.

One downside is that it uses a phone's motion sensors-tilting it left or right-to remotely pan the camera. If you're not interested in moving the camera manually, there's also the connected and sensor-stuffed Piper, which has a 180-degree viewing angle. Meaning, it should see most of the room it's looking at without having to move.

4. Selfie Security

Someone opens the door; it takes a selfie. Smoke detected in the house; it takes a selfie. I wouldn't call Novi vain, but it does like to take a lot pictures. Although the device does provide the ability to look in and see video of what's going on, the fact that Novi sends a picture with the notification is a pretty great feature.

One of the problems with connected cameras is the time it takes to open the app and load the video connection. In the context of security, a few seconds feels like a long time. Having a picture with the notification is a convenient way to mitigate the time video can take over a cell connection for false alarms.

Novi isn't the only system that's able to send pictures when it detects activity, but the unit is also completely portable and doesn't require an electrical outlet for power. That's a big plus for a picture taker on the move.

5. A Sensor-tive Soul

Along with the standard security features like a camera and motion detector, the Sentri can also sense how your home feels. It has some of the more unique built-in sensors that detect air quality, humidity, and temperature.

Sentri itself is laden with sensors, but its ability to connect with other products puts it into overkill territory. The picture-frame-looking hardware can connect with your Nest thermostat, door locks, and other connected home items to reach all aspects of your home.

Sentri isn't alone in its sensitivity, however, the Withings Home camera can also detect the quality of air with its volatile organic compound (VOC) sensor.

The Extras

Verging on creepy, the Withings Home camera will take a picture and five-second video every time it detects something-it also uploads these items and stores them for two days. It calls this feature the Home Diary.

Rico's approach to home security is to use your old iPhone or Android device as the brains-killing multiple birds with one stone.

Canary is one of the nicer looking all-in-one connected security units. Nothing about it's sensing technologies particularly stands out compared to other units, though it does stress its machine learning aspect in an attempt not to annoy you every time the cat gets crazy.

Depending on where you sit on the techno-optimist scale, the advent of facial recognition is either a marvelous tool or the downfall of privacy as we know it. Either way, the ability of computers to recognize us is getting better, and now it's cheaper and easier than ever to implement.

Facial recognition is a computing-heavy technical endeavor, and as a result has generally been the domain of engineering teams at Google, Apple, and Facebook. But now there's Face++, an API that any developer can use to weave face detection into whatever they're building. And while it sells an enterprise-level service with better performance and some coding perks, Face++ starts out the way most devs like it: free.

The API can do basic things like determine if there's a face in an image, track that face in the frame and recognize different points on it, like the eyes, mouth and so forth. This kind of functionality comes in handy for camera apps and any game that might make use of a phone's camera, for instance.

From there, it gets more specific. Is the person smiling? How much are they smiling? What's their gender? Race? How old are they? How are they posing? Face++ can pinpoint all of these general details about a given face.

If the implementation demands it, the API can even be used to identify a particular person based solely on an image of their face. Of course, for this feature to work, the software would need some kind of verifiable identity data to compare the image to-it doesn't just ping Facebook and identify strangers out of the box.

The full-blown facial recognition feature of Face++ is being used by Lenovo to let users log into devices using only their faces. In the future, one can imagine far weirder uses.

Face++ isn't the only open tool available for facial recognition. Lambda Labs has a general face recognition API, as well as one tailored to Google Glass specifically. OpenBR isn't an API per se, but rather an open source framework that handles facial recognition, age estimation, and gender recognition.

Judging from the banter on Hacker News, Face++'s API is relatively well received among those who know a thing or two about computer vision technology-even if the free version does occasionally misfire (a "grey-beard Swedish sysadmin was identified as a black woman" for instance). For those interested in giving it a whirl, there's a browser-based demo of the Face++ API to toy with.

The only thing you need to read today is Paul Ford's "The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing," on emulating old computers, losing a friend, and the history of networks both human and machine. I mean you can make your own decision, as always, but I want you to know that if you choose not to read this you are making a bad decision. This morning PJ said "one day we will look back and think it was crazy that we got a Paul Ford essay about once a week." It is crazy! It's that time, right now, and you are here in it! Don't waste it.

This is the only old OS that feels like home to me

Way over at the other end of the good/bad spectrum is the latest in Nick Bilton's series of technology columns for idiots, "Artificial Intelligence as a Threat." "Maybe a rogue computer momentarily derails the stock market, causing billions in damage," imagines Bilton, speculating wildly about the terrifying possibility of an event that happened four years ago. "But let's be realistic: It took nearly a half-century for programmers to stop computers from crashing every time you wanted to check your email. What makes them think they can manage armies of quasi-intelligent robots?" Hard to fault that logic. Hard to even find that logic. Bilton also worries about killer robots, against whom he is presumably uninsured. The kicker is Bilton's conclusion: "…we can hinder some of the potential chaos by following the lead of Google." And then I lit my computer on fire and walked west into the sunset forever.

Some people really hate Lena Dunham. Jonah Goldberg, for example, is willing to write that she should be disenfranchised under his own byline and squinty, resentful picture. Recently some hateful jack-basket took an anecdote from Dunham's new book out of context, and used it to allege that she sexually abused her younger sister. Which is the purest bullshit, and I wouldn't mention it at all except that it has provided a pretext for Roxane Gay to demonstrate again that she is our most empathetic and sane writer. And Jia Tolentino, who had a similar response, is not far behind. The accusations are trash but those two posts are worth reading regardless.

Mathew Ingram examines the numbers behind Jill Abramson and Steven Brill's #longreads thing and is not convinced. There have been goat heads hanging from a light post in Park Slope since at least Saturday. Alexis Madrigal went to Fusion and is actually producing articles again, so I guess we know Fusion isn't literally rendering journo talent down into aspic (yet). Jon Stewart directed a movie and clearly does not care whether you like what he has to say in this NYMag profile. Ann Patchettcorrects an error. Kanye should definitely play Steve Jobs. Did you know all the episodes of Dr. Katz are on Youtube? Reverse OCR. The emoji diversity standard.

I've avoided even mentioning Alex from Target because uuuuuggggghhhh but Bijan found something worth reading about it.

Bijan is also a hoax.

Today's Song: Charisma.com, "『HATE』"

Today's Billy Corgan Holding Cats:Here you go.

~Despite all my rage, I am still just a tab on a page~

Today in Tabs was off yesterday because I'm sick. I'm still sick, but at some point the Tabs must go on. Read us on FastCoLabs, tell your friends to subscribe by email. I need some Theraflu.

Coding your product out in the open is fairly standard operating procedure for tech startups. It's not something that typically seeps through the legacy cultural barriers and dwindling budgets of the newsroom at a 193-year-old newspaper. Yet that's just what's been happening at The Guardian.

Borrowing from the open source ethos long beloved in engineering circles, The Guardian launched a new responsive site that was built via a public GitHub repo and with a steady of flow of feedback from thousands of readers. It may sound like a bunch of hype, but their approach has real-world benefits that other publishers could learn from.

"Open is the guiding philosophy at the Guardian, so developing our new site in the open was a logical step for us," says The Guardian's lead software developer Patrick Hamann. "It also allows us to share the knowledge we have gained in the process externally and to learn from other organizations and developers, as well as from our readers."

The design itself meets the standard criteria for a news site redesign: Faster page loads, a modular content framework and a responsive layout that—crucially in this evolving industry—accommodates new types of ad units. As our cohorts at Co.Design put it, "The Guardian's new design joins the rest of us here in 2014." But the benefits of using an open process are the same as they are for anybody else: Distributing the workload, learning from the community and ensuring high standards in quality and security.

"Using GitHub has enabled us to promote internal and external visibility on new feature development and to utilize a fast feedback mechanism," says Hamann. "The peer reviewing process like 'pull requests' also facilitates a much higher quality of code."

Allowing outsiders to contribute code and offer feedback on designs made it considerably easier to hire the new talent to work on the project internally. What better way to find developers than by letting them contribute code to your company's most important project as it unfolds?

The impact was even more pronounced on the design side. "The project has literally changed the way our design department has had to work," Hamann. "No longer is design a service, but is now innate within our product development teams. Designing in the open like this has been a revelation."

Building the new site wasn't without its challenges and, as you might imagine, many of them were design-related. As anyone who's ever been involved in any kind of redesign project knows, managing internal expectations and opinions can be a huge challenge even among a small team. Imagine inviting the public into the process.

"The toughest balance has been with creative design as that's where reader opinions are often strongest, while internal viewpoints are fairly fixed," Hamann says.

Throughout the redesign, the Guardian's UX team rounded up reader responses and then fed that feedback directly into the product development process, where it was reconciled with internal priorities and design best practices in general.

The open approach raised unexpected questions related to licensing, especially for fonts. "We eventually settled on the Apache license, which offered a good balance of IP protection and freedom of sharing," says Hamann.

The team was also forced to think differently about security. Hamann says that one side effect of coding in the open was the need to design a system with bulletproof security and avoid things like storing passwords in the codebase.

While the Guardian's U.S. site was formally relaunched last week, this is hardly a project that begins or ends with that big unveil. The team remains committed to an iterative development process, reportedly sending out as many as five code pushes per day. As the front-facing interface and the underlying code continue to evolve, the next big milestones will be launching the site in the U.K. and Australia.

The redesign builds on top of under-the-hood development that has been underway for some time, but nonetheless played a critical role in letting the project unfold as efficiently as it did.

"One of the biggest lessons we've learned from 15 years of software development at the Guardian is that large monolithic applications are a nightmare to maintain," says Hamann. "With that in mind we have spent the last three years separating our entire infrastructure into a service-orientated architecture. Our fantastic content API has meant that our new responsive application never has to query a database and is purely responsible for rendering content."

The Guardian's backend also employs strategy called swimlaning: decoupling crucial parts of the site's architecture so they can be hosted and served separately. For instance, photo galleries live in one place while news articles live in another. If one goes down, the other won't be affected.

"One of the hardest challenges of this project is that we've essentially been rebuilding an aircraft while it's in flight," says Hamann.

For instance, transitioning to the new content management systems (yes, they built two CMSs) required a cautious juggling between the legacy systems and new ones. It was tedious, but ultimately worth it. "The new tools are completely bespoke," explains Hamann. "The Guardian could never be produced from generic CMS, so we consider these tools to represent real strategic value."

Analyzing enterprise data may never be as enjoyable as scrolling through an Instagram feed. But Chartcube, a new app launching today, is at least trying to make business data as easy to use.

The free app is the effort of former Evernote, eBay, Prezi, and McKinsey employees who are attempting to get rid of the unnecessary steps required to deal with critical business data. Instead of opening Excel to look at the information, sending comments or questions over email, and then displaying graphs in powerpoint, Chartcube wants to handle the entire process in a single app.

Initially, users will be able to import excel data from email and Dropbox (more sources coming in the future), and have it displayed in a visually attractive way. The app will also support commenting on graphs which should help keep relevant members of the project in the loop together.

At this point, it doesn't matter whether the an app is for the end consumer or the enterprise; it better fit in someone's pocket. Chartcube ultimately wants to include all kinds of enterprise data and make it fit comfortably on people's small touchscreen devices. Because even though other solutions like Quip or Google Docs may provide spreadsheets on-the-go, it's still a spreadsheet on your phone.

"The differentiator for Chartcube is the complete rethinking of how data could be reviewed on a small touch screen," says head of growth at Chartcube Jack Mardack. "Our algorithms deconstruct the data and create a 'portable data format' (a cube) where you can swipe and tap to explore data in a unique and compelling way."

CEO of Chartcube Pankaj Tibrewal also sees a future that might be as seamless as users just inputing their Salesforce username and password into the app and having the data imported automatically.

"Across industries, enterprise data has a similar structure, and people have a similar mental model for reviewing. Chartcube serves this use case extremely well," Tibrewal explains. "We are starting with Excel, but very soon people will be able to access other data sources such as ERP, BI, or SaaS."

Chartcube, like some of the other startups in the productivity space, is aiming squarely at Microsoft's wavering dominance with its Office products. Quip, for example, was frustrated with the method for document collaboration and has also approached the problem from a mobile-first mentality.

So it might sound a bit silly, but Chartcube wants to be the Instagram of business data. "Just like Instagram and Snapchat has unlocked new use cases of sharing photos," says Tibrewal, "we hope Chartcube will unlock data sharing and open up use cases that have been suppressed for a long time because of the clumsy tools."

Some days I sit down to write and it feels like nothing particularly terrible has happened online in the last 24 hours, which is great of course, but I also can't help finding it professionally troubling. I may just not have been paying attention? I did watch this excellent mystery documentary set in the Galapagos and go to sleep early last night. But then I remember that some guy in Washington killed a woman and posted pictures of it on 4chan, and I wish it was 30 seconds ago when nothing much had happened.

Who hated The Giving Tree? Everyone right? I distinctly remember that book being my first childhood experience of total despair, so thanksShel. Beyoncé is just stunned that Taylor Swift sold 1.287 million albums in her first week. I had a bet with Vox's Kelsey McKinney about whether Taylor would outsell Beyoncé or not, and I was team Beyoncé so I lost that bet real bad. Never go up against a Millennial when pop music is on the line.

Also Today in Millennials: Thought Catalogstrikes back at notorious hater Tim Herrera and his so-called "Washington Post", and some Thoughts have definitely been Cataloged. "It's almost as if Woodward and Bernstein thought it would be hilarious to interject potty humor into the greatest American political crisis of all time, like two children in the bathroom at the White House, playing with doodoo in the toilet and smearing it all over the wall – writing stuff like "I love poop," and "I love to eat diapers." Then they kiss the poop and say the poop is good when actually poop is bad." This is one of the more comprehensible passages.

"How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" author Charles Yureviewed the Irvine, CA Buffalo Wild Wings for The Morning News. "I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the restaurant simultaneously managed to exceed, disappoint, and exactly meet these expectations." Last time I was in New York I went to the Manhattan Denny's, and if I were a better writer I would have described the experience exactly that way.

Amazon just announced a standalone Siri-thing, and I can't wait to not ever get one! In other self-surveillance news: Matt Haughey accidentally put his nudes in the cloud with a Dropcam. The Internet of Things That Are Always Watching You. Always Watching. Speaking of watching, Women, Action, and the Mediais working with Twitter to test a new high-priority harassment reporting tool. It is literally impossible for this to function worse than Twitter's existing harassment reporting system, so please try it.

A Discovery show called Eaten Alive plans to have someone swallowed whole by a giant snake, but NPR says "my anaconda don't." Star Wars Episode VIIhas a title. MST3K's Turkey Day marathon will be streaming live online to help you survive Thanksgiving. In Vanity Fair, Kurt Eichenwald asks "Are conservatives ever right?" No. The answer is no. In case you weren't sure. That's a big nope. N. O.

Wow! Tabs is just not very good today. Bijan, why don't you write something that will make everyone forget what garb work I'm doing here?

Damn. Good save.

Today's Song: Drake, "Girls Love Beyoncé" feat. James Fauntleroy

Today's Other Song: Earl Sweatshirt, "45" (please put out a new album soon Earl?)

~Tab, or tab not. There is no try.~

I'm excited to announce that tomorrow's Today in Tabs will feature guest-tabber Jaya Saxena of Dad Magazine and other written things! And I'm told she will have a surprise guest intern as well! So if you haven't already, subscribe by email, and we'll see them tomorrow on FastCoLabs as usual.

Keeping track of passwords is a challenge at every organization. But it's especially challenging in schools, where teachers can find themselves spending valuable computer lab time helping young students reset their passwords for various learning apps.

Clever, a startup focusing on account management for students and teachers, says market research has shown teachers spending up to a quarter of their computer lab time just getting logged in.

"The problem is exacerbated when you're working with a really young student population," says Clever CEO Tyler Bosmeny. "You have third-graders who are just learning to type who are being expected to remember 10 different usernames and passwords."

Clever's system lets them remember just one set of credentials which automatically logs them into a wide range of compatible educational apps. If schools already have students logging into a system like Microsoft's Active Directory or Google Apps for Education, Clever's APIs can translate those existing logins to accounts on other apps, he says.

And Clever can integrate with a number of popular student information management systems to keep track of things like when students move from one school or class to another and need accounts on new apps, he says. Those kinds of changes may seem rare, but they're common enough in large school districts to present administrative challenges, he says.

Similar technologies do exist in the enterprise space, but Clever addresses challenges that are particular to the K-12 world. As difficult as remembering passwords can be for office workers and online shoppers, it's even worse for kindergartners who are still learning their letters and numbers.

"The reason I see this [growing] faster in education than anywhere else is just because the need is so much higher," says Bosmeny. "The problem is exacerbated when you're working with a really young student population."

And as school administrators and parents have become more conscious of the need for student privacy, school systems are anxious to move away from ad hoc solutions that involve writing down passwords or passing around spreadsheets of login information.

Since Clever's focused purely on account management, and not part of a larger company selling other educational software, it is quickly expanding its network of supported software. Earlier this week, GlassLab announced that Clever's instant login would become available for its SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge game this year.

"There's an incredible network effect when more and more developers support the common way of doing things.," says Bosmeny, who credits much of the company's growth to the work its coders have done facilitating integration with schools and software vendors.

"You've got to make it easy," he says he'd advise other entrepreneurs building identity systems for other markets.

Notifications were fun, at first. Now it's becoming a countless barrage of status updates, "breaking" news alerts, not to mention that texts and chats that keep your phone buzzing. Even regular websites are adapting push notification-style alerts. Short of shutting off your phone and missing everything, there is no escape.

Or is there? From Ilwon Yoon and Woonyong Choi, here's Shhhh, "a mobile application that turns off all notifications and alarms to stay tuned with friends and family when we are spending time together."

The app, which is still mostly a concept, allows you to manage a myriad of settings for all your various social media and phone notifications from a single control center. It offers a custom approach to individuals and the ways they try to contact you, modulating just how much you need to be left alone, by whom and for how long.

And, as a concept emphasizing the value of unplugged quality time with your loved ones, it does this in a very, very polite manner. Once you activate Shhhh, it will let you ignore your stream of notifications without offending anyone by responding to them for you.

The app can also be set to turn on automatically once it senses that your GPS coordinates nears those of your friends or family or your house, if that's what you'd like.

Shhhh goes beyond a classic away message capability by guilting you softly for thinking about going back into your phone.

It even aspires to establish a certain etiquette made extinct with instant communication technology by letting you check if your Shhhh-ing friends are "available" or not.

Do you want to ignore a particular individual more than others? Shhhh lets you sets those parameters with timers. Go away, Jane.

It also rewards you for not being a dick. Finally.

Shhhh's design is complete, and the development process is now underway. No word on when the beta will be available.

The November 7 arrival of Disney's Big Hero 6 is as much a supercomputing triumph as it is an animated feast. It's the coming out party for Hyperion—a cutting-edge light rendering software shaped by both Disney artists and engineers working in concert for two years.

The system hauled 200 million computing hours, spawned a number of companion programs, and enabled animators to imbue the film's fantastical settings, elements, and characters with a realism and dimension that would have otherwise been impossible.

"It allows us to put more on the screen with the same number of artists, creating a richer world that better supports the story," says Disney Animation chief technology officer Andy Hendrikson.

The Japanese influenced film—directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams from an obscure Marvel property—chronicles of a group of social misfits and ingenuous robot as they attempt to save their city of San Fransokyo (a mash-up of San Francisco and Tokyo) from an evil technologist. Hyperion was also used for the Disney short, Feast, that will precede BH6 screenings during its theatrical run.

How it Works

Hyperion tracks how light rays bounce off multiple objects in an environment before they enter your eyes. When a ray hits an object with a diffuse surface—say, something with a satin sheen—it scatters in many directions. Each of the scattered rays continue bouncing off other objects until they all ultimately lose energy and dissipate. The result is softer, diffused light, more nuance and shadows, creating a more realistic look.

But getting there is a unique kind of hell. Tracking those hundreds, possibly millions, of rays in all directions would overload computers' random access memory (RAM), which stores quick-retrieval data during operation.

"Before, we'd been hampered by the level of computation needed at any one time, the amount of memory needed to store it, and the cost," says Hendrickson. "Ten years ago, the level of investment would have been greater than the cost of two to three films. Hyperion allowed a 100-fold increase in image complexity for a fraction of the [undisclosed] cost."

Hyperion solves the storage and computational problems by condensing the number of algorithms to be calculated in a given amount of time, while increasing the number of light rays traced per second. The software winnows the light scatter into six main directions. As each ray hits another object, the program divides that scatter into another six directions, and so forth, until the light rays disappear. Each time a ray hits and refracts off an object, it's called a bounce. Hyperion carried out most of its scattered light vectors to 10 bounces.

From there, Hyperion applies another set of algorithms, called filtering passes, that interpolate the additional rays that, in reality, would have occurred between the six directions, giving the appearance of infinite light bounces and a more nuanced glow. Without Hyperion, animators would have rendered this manually, which, given the image complexity in this movie, would have been impossible in the allotted production time.

Ten bounces was also crucial for the translucent look of one of the film's main characters, a soft robot named Baymax. "If we kept it to two bounces, he ended up looking like hard plastic," says Hendrickson. "But 10 light bounces taking place inside his body, before the light finally emerged, gave him his translucence."

Disney Animation increased its processing power by connecting four rendering farms—three in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco—into a giant supercomputer of nearly 4600 computers running 55,000 cores—microchips containing CPU processors. (By comparison, Frozen used 26,000 cores). The division's previously developed automated management system, Coda, guided the information flowing between the four rendering farms, enabling it to process 400,000 rendering jobs overnight for the next morning.

People, buildings, trees, and microbots

Complementing Hyperion, Disney coders created additional automation software to expedite and enhance other areas of rendering. One process extrapolated algorithms describing San Francisco and Tokyo architectures to create city buildings. Another, code named Denizen, created 16,000 unique city occupants by recombining portions of thousands of different base characters in a variety of textures, fabrics, and colors. (This is different than crowd simulation software that simply replicates 10 body types.) Another in-house program, Bonzai, automated the creation of the city's 250,000 trees. The process involved interspersing the building and rendering layers of trees, people, and architecture.

"It was easy enough to use so the animators could make avatars of themselves and place them in the city as extras," says Hendrickson. "So a lot of folks in the studio are also in the movie."

Still another custom process directed the movement of the microbots, spindle-shaped micro-computers—some 20 million onscreen in a given shot—that both swarmed in tandem and hurdled over one another in circuit-like waves, eventually organizing into structures. (This is more algorithmically complex than the flowing motion of the iconic birth of Sandman scene in Spider-Man 3.)

Co-Creating with Animators

Disney Animation embarked upon the BH6 story four years ago, but only started working on Hyperion two years ago, gleaning constant input from a user base of 400 artists and programmers. Sometimes, the artists would ask the programmers to attempt a tool enabling them to realize a certain look; other times, the programmers achieved a simulation that gave the artists new ideas for visualizing the film.

"It's pretty aggressive building something up that fast, but we were trying to make a world that supported an awesome story," says Hendrickson, who hopes the collective software will facilitate a film a year. "We were exploring the art and algorithms simultaneously, riffing off each other, building the renderer at the same time they were using it to make art. But without these methods, we couldn't handle the complexity of this world. We consider our in-house software to always be in beta, because we want it to always be evolving."

P.S. When you see the film, stay till the very end, past the credits.

Tabs is brought to you today by guest-tabber Jaya Saxena. Take it away Jaya. I mean that. Please take it away. –Rusty

The first time I heard about Today in Tabs, a friend frantically emailed me to say an essay I wrote had "made it into tabs." I immediately responded with "huh?" and then "this seems dumb." Who would've thought that, just a few months later, I would get to make a mockery of this venerable institution? Thanks, Rusty!

Rusty told me to run tabs like it was mine, which is funny because when I try to read the internet, I get exhausted and confused and just watch otter videos instead. So, we are all going to talk some more about this dude, who is going to put himself in a "snake proof" suit and get eaten alive by an anaconda on The Discovery Channel, for "Mega Week" and presumably Mega Educational Value.  "I'm Paul Rosolie and I'm about to be the first person to be eaten alive by an anaconda," he says,  as if you can just make an anaconda eat you by putting on an appetizing outfit and putting it on national television. What does that delicious snake-proof suit look like, anyway? A capybara? Jon Voight? I'm pretty sure I've never seen an anaconda just eat a glorified SCUBA suit before, so step up your game, dude. Anyway, PETA is claiming that the anaconda "was tormented and suffered for the sake of ratings." That's probably true so don't worry I will totally watch it for you.

What else? Toy Story 4 is being made, and everyone is making jokes about the plot (my money is on how Andy gets to college and can't get it up unless his partner dresses as a cowboy). I thought the last one did a pretty good job of reminding us that there's an American Girl doll in our mom's attic that's probably sentient and resentful. But it's going to be written by Rashida Jones! And Will McCormack, but Rashida Jones!

Sometimes fetuses turn into stone, which is metal as hell. Micropenises are officially a talking point. I cracked my chest yesterday and I'm still not over it. Nicole Cliffemade a monster playlist in honor/mourning of Benedict Cumberbatch's engagement, which includes "I Can't Make You Love Me" and "Being Alive" from Company so it's already guaranteed to make your girl cry. An intrepid commenter turned it into a Spotify playlist if you have no other plans tonight.

My name is Jaya Saxena and potatoes fit into my life. The moon has an angry sister. Idris Elba thinks RTJ2 has a "stupidly sick" flow and he is right. And if you're not delighted by this mashup of Taylor Swift's "Shake it Off" and a 1989 Crystal Light Aerobics competition then I don't know what to do with you.

I know everyone likes Bijan or whatever but it's my show now and I'm bringing in my own intern: Cat Ferguson!

"The world doesn't need two Bijans" indeed. (Arguably it doesn't even need one. —Rusty)

Today's Song: Speaking of Hitch, we're going to watch the title track from the Bollywood remake, Partner, and we're going to like it.

Today's Actual Song: "Please Please Please" by James Brown, because I watched Mr. Dynamite last night.

Today's Read: "Jeremiah Tower's Invincible Armor of Pleasure" by John Birdsall

Okay thank you Rusty, I hope I got everyone to unsubscribe! I'm going to go eat Oreo churros, "finally"!

~It's a tab's tab's tab's world~

Thanks so much to guest-tabber Jaya Saxena! She just quit her job to write so if you are an editor looking for new talent get in touch with her! We'll be back next week, in your email and on FastCoLabs.

Search is broken. That's because just when we figured out how to crawl and organize the infinite pages of the World Wide Web, we switched to a new way of accessing the Internet: apps. Now, nearly 2 billion smartphones later, humanity has one experience searching the desktop web and quite another when it come to finding things on the devices we carry with us everywhere.

The result? A fractured mess.

Quixey, a deep mobile search company, is trying to patch things up by changing the way search works on mobile devices. It's a tall order but they're making progress: The company recently struck a deal with Alibaba to be the Chinese giant's primary provider of deep mobile search. Now they've got their sights set on the phone in your pocket.

"We think Google is all the world's information, but it isn't," says Quixey cofounder and CEO Tomer Kagan. He rattles off a list of popular apps whose content is not indexed by traditional search engines: Uber, Foursquare, Kayak, even games. What if you want to play $3 a game of Texas Hold 'Em right this very instant?

"You can't really get that out of Google, because you can't crawl it effectively," he says.

Quixey's solution is to chip away at the walled gardens in which today's apps live and make the contents and functionality of each one easy to crawl, index, and search. Right now, Quixey exists primarily as an Android app that is one part semantic app store search ("Is there an app that can help me find a parking spot?") and one part universal search for your phone. A search for a person's name or another keyword will dig through not just your notes, calendar, and email, but any number of other third-party apps.

Say, for instance, that you search for your favorite Katy Perry song. Quixey will return actionable results from across apps, regardless of whether or not they're installed on your device. If you're a Spotify subscriber, it will give you the option to stream the song right now. But it will also show you a link to the video on YouTube, the lyrics on Genius, and any other relevant information.

Quixey is attempting to solve two problems at once: First, that the content and data on our phones remains locked in these walled-off silos called apps, which makes running a device-wide search far less effective than it could be.

Secondly, there's app discovery. Finding new apps has long been cumbersome process, despite the incremental polish that Apple and Google have added to the experience.

"Do you put aside 15 minutes of your day and say "Hey, I want to go download some apps"?" asks Kagan. "That's not our behavior. Our behavior is contextual."

The company's vision is to let users run natural language searches for whatever they want to know, do, see, or hear and get a contextual list of relevant information and actions available across apps. Notably, the results Quixey is aiming to deliver are more than just static bits of information. On our smartphones, we are much more accustomed to taking actions—call an Uber, play that song, text somebody—than simply retrieving information. In this way, we use our mobile devices in a markedly different way than we use the desktop web. Accordingly, Kagan and his team envision research results with one-tap action buttons alongside snippets of information. No more blue links.

How Do You Index The Un-indexable?

"I've gotta tell you, technically speaking, this is insane," says Kagan. "Five years ago, we did not anticipate the complexity of the technology required to reinvent the app ecosystem in the way we're doing."

Specifically, the Quixey team has had to get creative about how to access and index information contained inside mobile apps. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the original Google search bot, they designed it to take advantage the open, linked architecture of the web: A massive network of text-based pages all coded in the same language and linked together with a single type of hyperlink.

Mobile is completely different. Not only are the "pages," many of which aren't pages at all, all structured differently, but the passageways between each one—the would-be "links"—are almost nonexistent. Trying to crawl such a network of data is unforgivingly complex.

To overcome this complexity, Quixey is doing three things. First, it's relying extensively on deep links; That is, the mobile app equivalent of URLs used to mark specific locations within an app. In fact, Quixey came up with the popular AppURL deep linking standard used by many developers to map parts of an app to equivalent pages on the actual web. By adding deep links, developers essentially give mobile apps the crawlability of the web.

Quixey works with developers to ensure their deep links are set up in as search-friendly of a way as possible, but this method will always have its limitations: Not all apps are going to be thoroughly deep linked and of those that are, not every web URL will be 100% up to date with its mobile counterpart.

To compensate, Quixey also teams up with mobile analytics companies to get sort of a gateway into the apps themselves. In China, Quixey is teamed up with analytics firm Uming, which exposes their crawler to about 65% of all mobile apps in the country. In the U.S., Quixey would need to partner with companies like Flurry and Mixpanel to achieve similar results.

Finally, Quixey provides tools for developers that let them optimize their apps and the deep links within to be as searchable as can be. Why would developers bother? For the same reason website owners SEO the hell out of their title tags and crave inbound links: Kagan says mobile devs are dying for a way to make their apps as discoverable as web pages are on the desktop.

"When we first started this, we wondered "How will we convince developers?" Some will say yes, some will say no," says Kagan. "We haven't had any pushback. Developers have been eager to find a replacement."

In fact, Kagan says the demand among developers to work with Quixey is much higher than they can currently accommodate, a fact he attributes to the sorry state of mobile app discovery, which essentially renders traditional SEO useless.

But millions of developers will have to wait. While Quixey is going all out in China with its Alibaba partnership, for now its only general purpose, consumer-facing presence is its Android app. As any seasoned iOS developer knows, Apple's mobile operating system isn't going to be all that welcoming to a service that attempts to tear down the walls between apps and tinker with the way the device works at the OS-level.

Kagan is eager to work with Apple, but for now he isn't stressing about it. If his hunch proves correct—and the product evolves as effectively as planned—this type of relevant, robust, and action-based mobile search could become another taunt leveled across the Android-iOS partisan divide. And if it works as advertised, it's the kind of functionality that could set a new standard in how we interact with our phones and force Apple to play along.

We'll see. For now, Quixey has its work cut out for it. Even though it has been hammering away at tough technical problems for five years, Kagan still describes the company's efforts as being in their "early stages." The Alibaba partnership will no doubt trigger a growth spurt.

"Search isn't just looking for information," says Kagan. "When you think of the power of software, search is accessing the remote control to the world around us. I think people just forget that sometimes."

In Record Ruins pixels drift and screenshots melt before your eyes. If you look hard enough, you can recognize the melting, moshing remains of Microsoft Office error messages and Windows default backgrounds. That's because all the screenshots, computer schematics, and old graphics used on the page were sourced from the massive Internet Archive, then fed through custom algorithms and molded into abstract, shifting compositions by artist Adam Ferriss.

And there are many more where Record Ruins came from.

If you haven't heard of the Internet Archive, it is one of the most comprehensive resource of free media accessible online. The San Francisco-based library is home to 1.8 million moving images, 7 million e-books and texts, a giant microfilm collection, more than 400 billion web pages archived by the Way Back Machine and, most recently, over 900 classic, playable arcade games.

The Archive also hosted an artist residency program, created and run by volunteer community architect Ian Aleksander Adams, which has just concluded. The artists chosen for the program sourced the Archive's library for re-purposing, reorganizing, and remixing its bevy of digital information into single-serving digital projects hosted on Tumblr. A few of them are selected here.

Angela Smith glitched the Archive's images tagged "selfie", "self-portrait", "self", and "self photography" into a vibrant, data-bending collage mess, Entropic Me. Isaac Parker turned various artifacts into One Single Catastrophe, his own animated visual poem.

Other projects function as niche educational materials and specialized mini-archives, like Theodore Fox's introduction to the textscene and Steven Ovadia's History of Linux Websites. For Deadbased, Chris Markman collected the Archive's extensive library of Grateful Dead tours while Louise Barry curated some of the more interesting ephemeral films, home movies, advertisements, and vlogs from the video library for Adventures Close to Home.

Then there's Ben Valentine's "multimedia essay on information politics, digital privacy and data accessibility," A Fragile Archive, and Kelly Kietur's nostalgic celebration of historical software at 8-bit Riot.

The Internet Archive Tumblr Residencies demonstrated a solid range of creativity which can be enabled by this vast online resource.

"We're really proud of the diversity of work and viewpoints represented," Ian Aleksander Adams tells Co.Labs. "As always, the collections in a library only matter as much as what people get out of them. We hoped the program would highlight the potential of all the gathered information we have and think the projects showcase a very satisfying tip of the iceberg. We hope people will continue to send interesting projects made with Archive materials our way for us to feature."

If you're feeling inspired to create a project of your own, start browsing the video, audio, and software collections. If you have questions about the collections, Adams is glad to help you along at ian@archive.org. Enjoy your own trip down the rabbit hole.

When it debuted in 2011, iMessage was a game changer. The instant messaging app came pre-loaded as a lightweight alternative to traditional SMS texts, and made it easy for two (or more) friends with iPhones to quickly send texts, photos, and videos like they were firing off IMs on a desktop. You could even tell when the other person was typing, which added another layer of complexity/paranoia to the way we communicate digitally.

One problem: If an iPhone user were to, say, switch to an Android phone after using iMessage, he or she would run into a nasty bug. The Android owner's SMS texts would get mistakenly treated as iMessages, meaning untold volumes of texts would get sucked into the swirly drainpipes of Apple's data centers, and no one would ever know. It is annoying and frustrating, and some critics read it as a malicious way for Apple to keep phone owners confined to iOS. Getting the bug fixed meant calling AppleCare and dealing with customer service reps to deregister the device, which is its own special kind of headache.

But now it looks like Apple has (finally) rolled out an easy fix. As first spotted on Reddit, Apple has a new "deregister iMessage" page where non-iPhone owners can input their number to have their phone removed from the iMessage directory.

To use the new tool, simply input your phone number, wait for the text message confirmation, then type the six-digit code to complete your deregistration. Why it took Apple so long is anyone's guess. But it just got a little bit easier to jump between phones on a whim.

Check it out here.

[h/t: Reddit via The Verge]

In a press statement this morning, President Obama unambiguously endorsed "net neutrality," or the principle that Internet service providers should not be allowed to grant faster connections to web/technology companies, like Netflix or Google, that are willing and able to pay for online fast lanes.

More importantly, Obama called for the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify broadband access as a utility—like water or gas—to encourage a truly open Internet, and that the "same philosophy should guide any service that is based on transmission of information—whether a phone call, or a packet of data."

Obama continues:

So the time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do. To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act—while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services. This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations necessary to ensure the network works for everyone—not just one or two companies.

Obama notes that the FCC is an independent entity that will have to make its own decisions. But Obama's ringing endorsement spells a clear victory for proponents of an open Internet. (If you need a refresher, John Oliver explained the concept rather clearly a few months ago.)

Nevertheless it has been a back-and-forth year for net neutrality. In April, even though it allowed for regulations that critics lamented would spell the death of the open Internet, the FCC went on the offensive and claimed that net neutrality wasn't dead; it was merely evolving. Critics said that claim was nonsense, of course: "Giving ISPs the green light to implement pay-for-priority schemes will be a disaster for startups, nonprofits, and everyday Internet users who cannot afford these unnecessary tolls," said Free Press president and CEO Craig Aaron in a statement. "These users will all be pushed onto the Internet dirt road, while deep pocketed Internet companies enjoy the benefits of the newly created fast lanes."

Read the rest of Obama's statement below:

An open Internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life. By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known.

"Net neutrality" has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation — but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted. We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas. That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.

When I was a candidate for this office, I made clear my commitment to a free and open Internet, and my commitment remains as strong as ever. Four years ago, the FCC tried to implement rules that would protect net neutrality with little to no impact on the telecommunications companies that make important investments in our economy. After the rules were challenged, the court reviewing the rules agreed with the FCC that net neutrality was essential for preserving an environment that encourages new investment in the network, new online services and content, and everything else that makes up the Internet as we now know it. Unfortunately, the court ultimately struck down the rules — not because it disagreed with the need to protect net neutrality, but because it believed the FCC had taken the wrong legal approach.

The FCC is an independent agency, and ultimately this decision is theirs alone. I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line rules include:

No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.

No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called "throttling" — based on the type of service or your ISP's preferences.

Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called "last mile" — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.

No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck in a "slow lane" because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet's growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.

If carefully designed, these rules should not create any undue burden for ISPs, and can have clear, monitored exceptions for reasonable network management and for specialized services such as dedicated, mission-critical networks serving a hospital. But combined, these rules mean everything for preserving the Internet's openness.

The rules also have to reflect the way people use the Internet today, which increasingly means on a mobile device. I believe the FCC should make these rules fully applicable to mobile broadband as well, while recognizing the special challenges that come with managing wireless networks.

To be current, these rules must also build on the lessons of the past. For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business. That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call, or a packet of data.

So the time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do. To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services. This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations necessary to ensure the network works for everyone — not just one or two companies.

Investment in wired and wireless networks has supported jobs and made America the center of a vibrant ecosystem of digital devices, apps, and platforms that fuel growth and expand opportunity. Importantly, network investment remained strong under the previous net neutrality regime, before it was struck down by the court; in fact, the court agreed that protecting net neutrality helps foster more investment and innovation. If the FCC appropriately forbears from the Title II regulations that are not needed to implement the principles above — principles that most ISPs have followed for years — it will help ensure new rules are consistent with incentives for further investment in the infrastructure of the Internet.

The Internet has been one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known. The FCC was chartered to promote competition, innovation, and investment in our networks. In service of that mission, there is no higher calling than protecting an open, accessible, and free Internet. I thank the Commissioners for having served this cause with distinction and integrity, and I respectfully ask them to adopt the policies I have outlined here, to preserve this technology's promise for today, and future generations to come.

On Friday the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on behalf of a veritable who's who of influential computer scientists, filed a brief with the Supreme Court asking it to rule that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

EFF's case is that APIs not being subject to copyright has been the foundation of progress and competition across hardware and software development.

The EFF is responding to a decision in Oracle's longstanding lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement over Java APIs in Android.

When Google built Android, it included its own implementation of 37 Java APIs, using the same conventions and naming schemes as Sun's original Java APIs (which were acquired by Oracle in 2010). These and other APIs included with Android are what allow developers to write apps that interface with the Android operating system. In other words, APIs are what allow your apps to actually do things with your phone.

After failing to reach a licensing deal with Google for the APIs, the two companies landed in court. A 2012 decision ruled those APIs were not copyrightable.

In the Spring, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned that decision, finding instead that the Java APIs are subject to copyright.

"We hope that the Supreme Court will review this case and reverse the Federal Circuit's misguided opinion which up-ended decades of industry practice and threatens the basic principles upon which our technology sector was built," said EFF Special Counsel Michael Barclay.