Technology and Body

The Pirate Bay Founders Acquitted In Criminal Copyright Case The founders of The Pirate Bay, arguably the world’s most visible torrenting site, were acquitted by a Belgian court Thursday of charges alleging criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications. “The Pirate Bay Four,” consisting of Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, have faced an almost comical amount of legal action related to their involvement with the torrenting site, which has proven to be an elusive haven for illegal copyrighted content online. The case here hinged on the founders’ claims that they had ceased their involvement with the upkeep of the site and could not be held liable. TorrentFreak reported : All four defendants deny having had anything to do with the site since its reported sale to a Seychelles-based company called Reservella in 2006. That has proven problematic, since the period in which the four allegedly committe...

A New User’s Guide To Understanding Snapchat Greg Galant Crunch Network Contributor Gregory Galant is co- founder and CEO of Sawhorse Media the company that runs Muck Rack and The Shorty Awards. Snapchat was the first social network I was too old to understand. I joined Facebook as it first rolled out on campuses when I was in my junior year of college. I joined Twitter and Instagram in the very early days and even snagged my first name @gregory as my username on both. I scoffed at people who didn’t “get” these services. Then Snapchat came around. I downloaded it, but none of my friends were on it so I found it impossible to understand the appeal. Most people could afford to adopt new social networks less quickly as they get older, but the company I cofounded, Sawhorse Media , runs The Shorty Awards which honor the best of social media and Muck Rack , a SaaS solution for PR and journalism with social media at its heart. It’s our job to understanding the lates...

It’s the little things in life. Like, you know, being able to tell if your keyboard is currently set to use capital letters or not. With iOS 9, Apple is finally fixing one of the platform’s strangest quirks: the keyboard will no longer appear to be all caps, all the time. If you’re an Android user, or someone who just doesn’t think about stuff like this all that much, you might have no idea what I’m talking about. You see, in all builds of iOS thus far, the keyboard always uses capital letters to represent each key — whether or not you’ve actually hit shift or have caps lock on. That works well enough on physical keyboards — for the most part, you’re holding the shift key when you want shift turned on. On a touchscreen keyboard, where you tap shift instead of hold, it’s not so simple. Sometimes you tap shift and forget, or tap it on accident. Sometimes the keyboard rolls into view with shift on by default. To date, iOS has shown you’re in shift/caps lock ...

The Six Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day  Part of being productive is to piggyback on the shoulders of greatness. So I decided to write down what six things I do every day that help me with productivity. They make work for you. Or not. They work for me, although I always need to improve. About six years ago I would say I was 100 percent unproductive. Everything I did would cost me in either well-being or money. By “well-being” I mean, competence, good relationships, and freedom. So when I say “cost me well-being” I would do things to specifically hurt the above three. So what is “productive”? Things that either increase my well-being: my feeling of growth or competence in a field I love (for instance, writing), my relationships with others, and my sense of freedom (which could (but not always) involve money). Using that filter you can easily decide what is productive and what is not. For instance, do you respond to that negative com...