White House rickrolls citizens
Today the White House Twitter account decided it was time for a classic internet meme. The many who may think the White House is full of bureaucrats who can’t take a joke might want to reconsider. Earlier today, this was tweeted from the White House Twitter account “@wiggsd Sorry to hear that. Fiscal policy is important, but can be dry sometimes. Here’s something more fun: tinyurl.com/y8ufsnp #WHChat” in response to a complaint about the lack of entertainment found in Obama’s recent briefings.
The link leads to a Youtube video of Rick Astley’s famous “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Entertainment achieved.
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Google Music Beta limited release
Recently we were sent an invite to test drive Google’s new Music Beta service. As more cloud music services are appearing, you can be sure there will be lots of competition for Amazon and Google’s respective services in days to come. Cloud music services allow users to access their personal music library across computers, cellphones, tablets, etc. Needless to say, we were quite excited to be invited to the beta of the Google Music service.
As I proceeded to upload music from my music library via their Music Manager application, I noticed I was able to upload FLAC files (alongside the typical MP3, AAC, and WMA formats). Impressed by this feature, I decided it was best to figure out if the service could actually play FLAC files before I went and knocked on all my neighbours’ doors to tell them the great news (maybe that’s not a great idea after all…). As I suspected, there was a catch. Yes, the Music Manager application supports FLAC…but all FLAC files are transcoded to 320 kbps MP3 prior to upload. While this was quite disappointing, we have to give Google props for allowing their users to upload FLAC (kinda…) files without having to transcode them to MP3 files themselves. Then again, as the service is only in their beta release, we can expect possible improvements when everything is finalized.
The Music Manager application used for uploading your music
The Google Music Beta service
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Opera 11.50 Beta featuring enhanced password security
As you may already know, Firefox recently announced that they would introduce competitive release schedules to their popular browser, Mozilla. This was immediately followed by the release of Firefox 4 which claims to feature up to 6 times the performance of the previous v3.6.
After seeing Google Chrome and Firefox push for faster releases on their respective browsers, Opera has taken a stance – To release at the same speed (gotcha!). Nevertheless, they have managed to reach the 11.5 beta of the next major release which will probably bring joy to users who share bookmarks across computers with Opera Link. Along with the introduction of added support for HTML5 such as the dataset attribute, sessions history and navigation, the classList attribute, Opera is pushing for enhanced password security.
What this means is now Opera will allow Opera Link users to also synchronize passwords across computers as they are able to ensure such information will not be stolen.
This is achieved by using a randomly generated encryption key that is sent along with your password to Opera’s authentication service, where it is then retrieved onto your other computers and accessed by typing in your Opera Link password. When you input your password, it will check it against the encryption key created earlier, and if they match, you are provided access. This means not only are you protected by your Opera Link password, you are protected a second time by the encryption key which is matched against your password.
Aside from this amazing feature, they have also introduced the possibility of using extensions in your Speed Dial (yes, we know, more Opera jargon), allowing you to view weather, email, news as they update dynamically.
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