Recognizing this, YouTube Go combines clever video compression tech to give even those with the worst connections fairly solid and reliable streaming. Like with the western mobile app, Go allows viewers to download videos in different qualities in order to reduce users’ bandwidth, even showing users the data demands of streaming each video. Following in the footsteps of Google Maps offline, YouTube Go has also been designed to function without an internet connection, allowing users to save videos that infinitely improve their commute and even share their favourite clips over Bluetooth.

While a launch date for the full app has yet to be announced, you can download YouTube Go’s beta app from the Indian Google Play Store now. The tech company will also be holding events in Udaipur “over the coming weeks” to glean info on how users have been interacting with the app. The timing couldn’t have been better, as now Indian viewers can rest comfortably knowing that wherever they are – they’ll be able to catch Coachella.

“Crash Override“, its summary reads, “offers an up close look inside the controversy, threats, and social and cultural battles that started in the far corners of the internet and have since permeated our online lives.” The rest of the book focuses on Quinn’s work with the tech industry and the government to make the internet a safer place.

She discusses what she and her partners have done thus far to curb online harassment, which of their efforts worked and which didn’t. To make the book useful on a more personal level, she also included practical guides on what to do if you’re getting a lot of online hate. If these sound like something you’d love to read, you can pre-order Crash Override through Amazon or Barnes & Noble right now. It’ll start shipping when the book officially becomes available on September 6th.

GUESS WHAT NERDS my book is now available for preorder!!

🖤Out on 9.6.17🖤https://t.co/yfVgN64llvhttps://t.co/Z4QC6TChz5 pic.twitter.com/YTlm8s0Awk

— LaCroix b4 Boys (@UnburntWitch) April 4, 2017

The award also pays tribute to Berners-Lee’s efforts in the years after getting the web off the ground. He fostered the early web by distributing open source code, and he shaped groups like the World Wide Web Consortium (the standards body), World Wide Web Foundation (promoting the web as a basic right) and Web Science Trust (which studies the web’s social effects). The web “is what it is today” because of him, according to the ACM, and he’s still involved in supporting it.

The prize isn’t just about the honorifics — Google also offers $1 million. And it’s safe to say that it’s well-earned in this case. While the internet certainly existed before Berners-Lee fired up the first public web server in 1991, it wasn’t until then that it found a simple framework that could catch on with the mainstream. Modern commerce, news and politics almost certainly wouldn’t be the same without him.

Verizon’s Chip Canter believes that the deal is a great opportunity to “attract users” to the platform with genres that have “performed well for Go90.” The deal includes seven shows in total, with Almost Human (detective flop starring Karl Urban), Believe (supernatural flop starring Kyle MacLachlan) and Stalker (crime flop starring Dylan McDermott) rounding out the list.

The network, which owns Engadget’s parent company, came under fire for offering Go90 to its customers as a zero-rated service. That, according to the FCC at the time, was a violation of the principles of Net Neutrality that ensured an open and fair internet. With the appointment of Ajit Pai as commissioner, however, the commission ended its investigations into potential violations by T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon.

New FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has said he thinks the FTC should build a framework for privacy rules, while the ISPs and their lobbyists argued the FCC restrictions put them at a disadvantage against companies like Google or Facebook and were confusing for customers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other consumers right groups disagreed, saying that “The rules—which codified and expanded on existing online privacy protections—were passed by the FCC in October of last year and set to go into effect later this year. They would have kept ISPs from selling customers’ data and using new invasive ways to track and deliver targeted ads to customers. Additionally, the rules would have required those companies to protect customers’ data against hackers.

Tens of thousands of people called on lawmakers to protect those rules, but Republicans in Congress repealed them by narrowly passing a Congressional Review Act resolution.

That measure not only repeals the rules, it also prevents the FCC from writing similar rules in the future, throwing into question how much the FCC can do to police ISPs looking to trade off their customers’ privacy for higher profits. Because of the current legal landscape, the FTC can’t police ISPs either, leaving customers without a federal agency that can clearly protect them in this space.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai:

President Trump and Congress have appropriately invalidated one part of the Obama-era plan for regulating the Internet. Those flawed privacy rules, which never went into effect, were designed to benefit one group of favored companies, not online consumers.

American consumers’ privacy deserves to be protected regardless of who handles their personal information. In order to deliver that consistent and comprehensive protection, the Federal Communications Commission will be working with the Federal Trade Commission to restore the FTC’s authority to police Internet service providers’ privacy practices. We need to put America’s most experienced and expert privacy cop back on the beat. And we need to end the uncertainty and confusion that was created in 2015 when the FCC intruded in this space.”

Imagine sending a direct message to your carrier when you have a problem with your phone. The brand manager will get your permission to receive your location data and then they can direct you to the closest store. This could make getting your needs met much faster than searching around your mapping app or Yelp.

Twitter has been beefing up its customer service features for a while now, including single-link feedback buttons and other tools. Wingstop even has an order form built into its direct messages for frictionless ordering. So far, restaurants TGI Fridays and Wingstop are using the location-based APIs, while other brands are sure to follow suit.

It’s (ugh) that time of year again. That magically obnoxious season wherein every tech startup, thought influencer and blog worth its weight in snark attempts to pull a fast one on the rest of us with a clever April Fool’s Day prank. Only problem is, they’re rarely clever, usually terrible and almost assuredly obvious to anyone with a functioning brainstem. Don’t believe me? Here are 17 of the weirdest prank pitches to come through the Engadget tip box this year.

What Is Gender and Why Does It Matter to Emoji?
Paul D. Hunt, Emojipedia Blog

Here’s a look at what goes into designing the tiny graphics we love so much from a member of the Unicode Consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee.

How I Let Disney Track My Every Move
Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo

Gizmodo dissected (literally) Disney’s MagicBand to find out just how much of your privacy you’re sacrificing for convenience at its parks.

SoundCloud was already compatible with Sonos devices, and Android folks had Chromecast integration for awhile now too, but Friday’s update means iPhone users with a SoundCloud Go+ subscription can finally stream their entire catalog to a Chromecast connected to a TV or speakers. Multiple users can also control what’s on with a shared playback feature. SoundCloud also says they’ve upgraded their mobile apps across the board and streamlined the whole experience for more consistent playback.

The Blizzard eStadium, as it’s named, seats up to 250 fans. Our Engadget colleagues got a tour of the event center, which the company will use to host both local matches and international tournaments for the Asia-Pacific region. While we only managed to snag photos of the company swag up for sale at the venue’s shop, it’s a good bet that their snack bar will be stocked with jokey goods matching Blizzard’s particular sense of humor.

Blizzard will break in the eStadium on April 8th with the first games in the Overwatch Pacific Championship, the studio-run competitive league based in Taipei. Eight teams from Taiwan, Japan, Australia and Thailand will compete for 11 weeks, with the top three advancing to the playoffs and, eventually, this year‘s Overwatch World Cup. The venue will expand to host matches from other games in Blizzard’s competitive retinue, like Hearthstone and Starcraft 2. Maybe one day, we’ll even see the remastered Starcraft: Brood War grace its fresh gamer halls — a perfect mix of old nerdity and new.

The Twitter egg is a joke we never really got. The placeholder avatar for users without a profile photo was supposedly a reference to the bird on Twitter’s logo. “This was a playful way to reference how eggs hatch into birds that send all the Tweets you see on Twitter,” their design team explained. Get it? Neither did we.

After seven years, Twitter announced today that it’s finally ditching their flat design. Twitter’s design team explains in a March 31 blog post that they’re changing the default profile avatar because the egg has become a symbol of online trolling. “We’ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others—often they don’t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior….”

The evolution of Twitter’s default avatar. (Twitter)

Ars Technica‘s national security editor Sean Gallagher echoes Twitter’s observation. Surveying social media troll tactics, he writes:

“Egg” accounts—Twitter profiles that have the default “egg” avatar instead of a profile photo—are frequently associated with bots and throwaway accounts. But they’re also associated with people who just don’t post that often and may not know how (or care) to change their profile picture. A sure sign that there’s a normal user behind an egg is if geolocation data has been left turned on for the account.

In lieu of the tainted egg, the design team has come up with a generic head-and-shoulders “place photo here” symbol to make it clear to users that they should upload a unique image. The design team notes that they obsessed over creating a “gender-balanced” silhouette, tweaking the head shape (is that a woman with a bob or man with a wide jaw?) and the width of the figure’s shoulders.

(Twitter)

Twitter’s egg substitute mimics the head-and-shoulder placeholder graphics Facebook and LinkedIn are already using.

The avatar redesign is part of Twitter’s plan to combat the rise of online bullying. The platform has faced growing criticism for their lack of stronger action against president Donald Trump’s regular barrage of “bully tweets” and the militia of cyberbullies who routinely shame, stalk, and harass other Twitter users. In an effort to combat trolls and harassment, Twitter unveiled a new set of safety features in February, including preventing blocked users from creating new accounts and a notification filter flagging users with a default avatar.

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Set up a VPN in 10 minutes for free—and yes, Americans urgently need one, thanks to Congress

The new price caps won’t cover faster connections, which can reach 78Mbps and above thanks to G.Fast technology. However, the move is expected to benefit as many as 3 million customers, adding up to around £100 million of savings. The plan is to introduce a series of yearly savings from April next year, which will be completed by 2021.

The idea is simple: if Openreach makes less money from lower-tier broadband packages, it will be forced to invest in new technology and expand its G.Fast network to more of the country. “Our plans are designed to encourage long-term investment in future ultrafast, full-fibre networks, while promoting competition and protecting consumers from high prices,” said Jonathan Oxley, Ofcom’s Competition Group Director.

The announcement has been welcomed by BT’s rivals, but there are some reservations. In a statement, TalkTalk said that it supported price cuts and the continued commitment to improving Openreach’s service, but bemoaned the fact that customers must wait a year to see some savings and that only the slowest “superfast” speeds were included: “Ofcom’s decision to only regulate some products also risks entrenching a speed divide, with customers having to make a false choice between fair prices or higher speeds. Ensuring consumers enjoy low prices on all superfast products is the best way to maximise take-up and encourage investment in the pure fibre infrastructure of the future.”

Earlier this month, BT confirmed that it will finally split Openreach off into a separate company, following pressure from Ofcom to do so. It will continue to be part of the BT Group but it the new entity will be governed by an independent board, manage its own staff and set out its own strategy.

As part of the agreement, Openreach will also need to consult with Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone regarding future “large-scale” investments and the BT logo will be removed from all Openreach branding in order to reduce public confusion.

The Reserve with Google website allows you to use specific filters to narrow down the fitness studios nearby so you can find exactly what you’re looking for. It also serves up recommendations and lets you book a spot in the classes you already enjoy. If the location you choose has any special offers. you’ll be able to take advantage of those when you’re paying for classes, packages and memberships.

Right now, booking inside Google Maps is only available on the desktop, but you can schedule your sessions via Google Search on both desktop and mobile. When you find the studio you want to visit, simply click “Reserve with Google” to see what’s available and nab your spot. The company says it’s working with MINDBODY, MyTime, Genbook, Full Slate, Front Desk and Appointy to ensure that schedules and availability are updated in real time.