Obama to meet again with tech leaders over surveillance

Last December, President Obama met at the White House with top tech execs including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

(Credit:Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Obama plans to meet with a select group of technology CEOs on Friday to discuss "issues of privacy, technology, and intelligence," a White House official told Politico.

A full list of chief executives was not made available by the White House, but industry sources told Politico that Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had been invited to the meeting. CNET has contacted those companies for comment on their participation and will update this report when we learn more.

It's the second such meeting Obama has held with Silicon Valley executives in recent months over controversial US electronic surveillance programs. During a meeting in December with the president over ways to improve the beleaguered Healthcare.gov Web site, a collection of tech leaders that included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo urged the president to move swiftly on reforming the federal government's surveillance programs.

One of the chief executives expected to attend Friday's meeting is Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who one week ago said he telephoned Obama to express his frustration over the National Security Agency's surveillance practices. Zuckerberg's call came after documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA uses an automated system called Turbine to hack into millions of computers.

A frequent critic of the NSA, Zuckerberg wrote in an update to his Facebook page that the company he founded was working to identify flaws in others' services to "keep the Internet strong" but said that the US government needed to be "much more transparent about what they're doing."

Related storiesGmail: Encryption is now mandatoryNSA top lawyer says tech giants knew about data collectionNSA can reportedly record every call made in a foreign country

"I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government," Zuckerberg said.

Google CEO Larry Page added his criticism on Wednesday during the TED conference in Vancouver, saying that it was "tremendously disappointing that the government sort of secretly did all these things and didn't tell us."

"I don't think we can have a democracy if we have to protect our users from the government

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GarageBand on Mac now lets you export songs as MP3s... again

As meaningful as GarageBand's mobile life is to Apple, the tune-making app is still considered a valuable piece of real estate on the desktop. However, last year GarageBand for Mac lost MP3 exporting as a feature, something which unsettled some of its users. The good news: today's release brings that back, once again allowing you to export those music creations as MP3 files. Additionally, Apple's thrown in a few Drummers and drum packs from various genres, including songwriter, rock and R&B. Who knows, these kits might play a part in you becoming the next Pharrell. Maybe, just maybe.

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Via: 9to5Mac

Source: Mac App Store

Tags: Apple, GarageBand, iLife, Mac, MP3, MP3s Next: Microsoft's Blink Windows Phone app gets a redesign, lots of new features .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Once Again, Down Wants To Hook You Up With Your SXSW Hookup

It’s a new year, and a whole new SXSW, but some things don’t change. Thanks to an endless stream of parties with open bars, the (relatively) warm nights, and a large population of web-curious visitors descending on Austin, the tradition of the SXSW hookup lives on. And Down wants to help keep that tradition alive.

Twelve months ago, Down was just a little web app called “Bang With Friends” which sought to help users find out which of their friends also wanted to bang them.

And for a little while, it was basically all anyone would talk about.

That was due to a number of things: There were the secretive founders, who spent months trying to keep their identities under wraps. There was the fascination and utter fear and horror of marking a friend as “down to bang” only to find them return the favor… There was, frankly, the totally forward name “Bang With Friends.”

Anyway, the app rode that notoriety into SXSW last year and launched Bang With SXSW, a separate site for attendees to find non-friends to bang with.

An app store ban by Apple, a “…With Friends” lawsuit by Zynga, and a founder unmasking by the press, and the Down team seems to have mellowed out a little bit.

It’s still trying to get people hooked up at SXSW, but this year it’s doing it the old-fashioned way. Rather than asking them to say who they’d like to hook up with in town — that’s what Tinder is for, after all — it’s telling attendees which parties they should go to. And get drunk. And find someone to hook up with.

The latest update to Down now lists a bunch of parties. Once users arrive, they can use the app and see who else is there and objectify them via app, instead of objectifying them wholly in person.

And when two people mark each other as “down”? Well, you know what has to happen next.

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I’ve Learned To Love (Wearables) Again

As a dedicated watch nerd, I felt that smartwatches were, on the whole, awful. A watch was a watch – if made correctly and correctly handled it’s a miracle of technology in its own right. The movement, the face, the metals, the design – all of these came together in a beautiful whole. There was nothing extraneous in a good watch, and most watch nerds know this.

So when watches like the Pebble, the Galaxy Gear, and the Omate came out, I was skeptical at best. Who needed these little wrist computers. Am I Dick Tracy in need of constant contact with base? I have enough screens in my face, I don’t need my watch to ping me with new emails.

I was wrong.

What changed? The Pebble got so much better. Before the Pebble could bring you text messages and had intermittent connectivity to your email account. I have a huge email box and I get about 400 emails a day. I needed more email notifications like I needed a hole in the head. In fact I turned off my notifications on my iPhone and even removed the unread badge from the mail icons. I just couldn’t handle the crush.

So a watch that reminded me that I had 1,000 unread emails was not something I wanted.

Then the new PebbleOS appeared in November. People raved. I almost didn’t upgrade. I had put the Pebble on my desk, uncharged, and figured it would join my SPOT watches and Palm Pilot watch in the box o’ dead smartwatches. Then, on a whim, I plugged it in and updated. I went to the Pebble app to find out how to add my email inboxes again and found nothing there – just a tutorial on how to update my notifications to make them appear on the Pebble. While I was busy grump using about how stupid wearables were, these guys had made some major changes.

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