Many are familiar with YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, but there was a third co-founder, Jawed Karim. He was the very first person to upload a video to the site, titled “Me at the Zoo” and uploaded April 23, 2005, which has been viewed over 65 million times as of April 2019. How did Karim meet Hurley and Chen? During his time working at PayPal, where he designed many of the core components including its real-time anti-internet-fraud system. Read more to watch the video and for a few more interesting facts.
Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world from 2005 to 2009, and it once hosted more than 50 million songs from 14 million artists, but it has just lost all of that content today, due to a server migration issue. That’s right, every piece of music uploaded between 2003-15 was lost, which means all links to those tracks no longer work. “As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Dr. Jana Jentzsch,” said the company. Read more for a video explaining what happened to everyone’s MySpace friend Tom and additional information.
Photo credit: TheseIncrease via Peta Pixel
Courise.sg is a website by GovTech (Government Technology Agency of Singapore) that uses deep learning artificial intelligence to colorize black & white photos. The colors may seem off for some photos because the system was trained by engineers specifically for old Singaporean photos, unlike Algorithmia, which pulls from a 1.3-million photo ImageNet dataset to produce even more vibrant results. Try it out here yourself. Read more for five more examples.
Created by security expert Troy Hunt back in 2013, Have I Been Pwned? is a website that lets you check if your personal data has been compromised by data breaches by collecting and analyzes hundreds of database dumps. It allows users to search for their own information by entering their username or email address, with the option to sign up to be notified if they’re detected in future dumps. One thing you may not know is that a password like “ji32k7au4a83” is more commonly used than you think, according to Robert Ou, and it’s a simple reason actually, as it’s comprised of characters from the Zhuyin Fuhao system for transliterating Mandarin. Read more to see a picture of the Chinese keyboard, and how the characters come about.
Marc Köhlbrugge launched Expensive.chat as a social experiment, and it’s basically a web-based chat service where every letter typed costs $0.01. This chatroom has somewhat been gamified with a leaderboard showing users who have spent the most money up top. As you scroll through the messages, you’ll realize that most of them are just advertisements for services, and there’s a box at the bottom to post your own. The website accepts Stripe, debit, and credit cards for payment. Read more for a Tweet showing how to get more than your money’s worth.
Remember Angelfire, Geocities, Lycos, Excite and Microsoft FrontPage? If so, Captain Marvel’s official website should bring back some memories. How did they manage to pull this off? Well, the answer is a lot simpler than you think. According to Marvel software engineer Lori Lombert: “We built this in FrontPage and host it Angelfire.” For those who have no idea what this is? Angelfire, founded in 1996, was originally a combination website building and medical transcription service. Eventually the site dropped the transcription service and focused solely on website hosting by offering only paid memberships. Read more to see what the Captain Marvel page looks like and for a link to check it out yourself.
Google official announced the shut down date for its troubled Google+ social network: April 2. On that day, all Google+ accounts and any pages created will start being deleted. However, any photos and videos that were also backed up in Google Photos will not be affected. The search giant has posted directions on how to download an archive of your Google+ content. Read more for a video explaining why the service is shutting down and for additional information, including how to download your archive.
Google partnered with its sister company, Jigsaw, to create a quiz that can be used to help detect phishing emails and scams designed to steal your personal information. It shows you eight suspicious email templates to see whether you can tell the legitimate emails apart from those intended to gain access to your personal information. In a recent study, it was discovered that internet users receive on average 16 malicious emails a month. Read more for a video and a link the the quiz.
Photo credit: TNW
For those who have never used or heard of Slack (an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”), it’s basically a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services. It began as an internal tool used by his company, Tiny Speck, in the development of Glitch, a now defunct online game. Today, they have just unveiled an all-new logo, created by Pentagram Design, that “uses a simpler color palette and, we believe, is more refined, but still contains the spirit of the original,” said the company. Read more for a short Slack office tour video and to find out why they had to change the logo.
Photo credit: Nicohlash
Netflix is officially raising its U.S. prices by 13% – 18%, the largest annual increase since the company launched its streaming service 12 years ago. Its most popular standard plan, which offers high-definition streaming on up to two different internet-connected devices simultaneously, will see the biggest hike, from $11 to $13 per month. The extra revenue will go towards Netflix’s large investment in original shows and films. Read more for a video of the most anticipated Netflix originals of 2019 and additional information.