Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has officially launched the Contract for the Web, a set of principles designed to “fix” the internet and prevent us from sliding into a “digital dystopia,” The Guardian reports. The Contract lists nine core principles for governments, companies, and individuals to adhere to, including responsibilities to provide affordable, reliable internet access and to respect civil discourse and human dignity.

At launch, the initiative has received the backing of over 180 organizations, including tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, DuckDuckGo, and Facebook, and nonprofit groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Guardian initially reported that Amazon and Twitter were absent from the list of backers, however now Twitter’s logo appears on the Contract’s homepage. Twitter’s increasing role in political discourse was recently brought into sharp focus after it chose to ban political ads on its platform, citing the “challenges to civic discourse” that they create.

The contract’s launch comes as tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced mounting pressure around both the amount of user data they collect and how they collect it. The Contract for the Web includes principles designed to prevent this, including a requirement for companies to respect people’s privacy and personal data. If companies do not show that they are working to support these aims, they risk being removed from the list of the project’s endorsers.

It’s not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now,” Berners-Lee said. The Contract, which includes 72 clauses alongside its nine principles, offers a shared vision for the web that Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation wants to see built, as well as a roadmap for action. Finally, it also provides a tool to try and hold companies and governments to account.

The governments of Germany, France, and Ghana have also signed up to the Contract’s founding principles. The Contract calls on governments to ensure everyone can connect to the internet, and to keep the internet available all of the time. This latter point feels especially timely in light of the Iranian government’s recent decision to shut down the internet in an attempt to prevent protests from spreading.
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“The forces taking the web in the wrong direction have always been very strong,” Berners-Lee said, noting that it will be vital for citizens to hold governments and companies to account if the situation is to improve.

The Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress in China has passed the cryptography law on Saturday, and it will be effective on January 1, 2020, according to a Chinese media report.

The announcement came one day after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call on the country to seize opportunities in blockchain technology.

While China still bans cryptocurrency trading and its national digital currency is yet to be introduced, cryptography, as an integral underpinning of blockchain technology, could be critical to the country’s push to be more competitive in the blockchain space.

The new law aims to tackle emerging regulatory and legal challenges in commercial cryptography use-cases as they play an increasingly important role in developing the Chinese economy, according to the law’s latest draft proposal before approval.

According to the proposal:

“Clear guidelines and regulations are needed to evaluate commercial cryptography technologies used in the major fields related to the national interest as the current ‘loose’ system is not suitable for the industry anymore.”

China’s national congress said the new law will encourage research and development on commercial cryptography technologies while building up an inclusive standardized regulatory system for the market.

The Chinese congress released a draft proposal for the new law last July, soliciting public comments.

The proposal includes a range of issues from how compatible the industry standards should be with other international cryptography systems to whether companies should voluntarily verify their commercial use-cases with authorities.
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According to the Chinese congress, the new law will also encourage nationwide educational efforts, such as public exhibitions, to promote cryptography among government officials, companies, and social groups.

Want to put Microsoft’s Office software on an iOS or Android device? Soon you won't have to download individual versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to use them. 

In an announcement from its Ignite conference in Orlando, Microsoft revealed that it's beginning to publicly test a new version of the Office app that will combine the three popular apps into one primary, centralized Office app. 

Reviewers have been quite impressed with how much you can do with your phone camera from this app. It’s quite easy to turn one or many pictures into a PDF or a Word document. When scanning a table from a user manual to turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, the text recognition was spot on.

The Lens mode also has special sub-modes for whiteboard and document scanning. So, if you attend a lot of lectures or meetings, this app could make it easier to grab notes without much effort.

Plus, the app also lets you take notes, kind of like you would in Google Keep. You can jot down text, create lists, and attach images. So, even if you’re not immersed in the Microsoft Office world, the app can help you in many situations where you need to send or sign a document quickly.
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In the new app – which is available now as a public preview on Android or as a beta through Apple's iOS Test Flight program– you'll be able to create new documents, presentations or spreadsheets as well as edit and view existing documents. You'll also be able to "snap a picture of a document" and make it into an editable Word file, create and sign PDFs or "transform tables from a printed page into an Excel spreadsheet."
Microsoft's individual apps have been popular on mobile. All three rank in the top 25 productivity apps on iOS' Top Charts for the category, while each app has been downloaded over 1 billion times on Android. 

The world has been hard at work, trying to find solutions to store the 100 zettabytes of data that are expected to hit the cloud by 2023. 

Microsoft and Warner Bros, for their parts, have just demonstrated why they think they are ahead of the game – in both protecting past archives, and in storing those to come.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella showed off a piece of quartz glass the size of a drink coaster. Within the glass was stored a 143-minute Warner Bros movie – fittingly, the film was Superman. 

The technology is the result of Microsoft Research's Project Silica, which was set up to design new storage systems for the cloud. 

Project Silica's researchers have been working on developing ultrafast laser optics, which they used to encode the entire film in glass.

Using an ultrafast pulse laser, they wrote 'voxels' inside the glass – that is, the three-dimensional equivalent of the pixels that make up an image. Each voxel, therefore, has its own orientation, depth, and size, making it a unique encoder for the movie. 

Because voxels are engraved at the nano-scale level, they can be written in multiple layers throughout the glass. A two-millimeter piece, for example, can contain more than 100 layers of voxels, making for high-density storage. 

According to Microsoft, the glass and the data it contains can resist being boiled in water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, and demagnetized. By permanently changing the structure of the glass, the laser ensures that the information is securely printed for potentially thousands of years.

Ant Rowstron, deputy lab director at Microsoft Research - Cambridge, said: "One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation."

"We really wanted something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it." 

To carry out Project Silica, Microsoft partnered with the University of Southampton in the UK, where scientists had already developed a laser-writing technology to record data back in 2016, which they claimed could have "a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature."

Peter Kazansky, who worked on the project, said at the time that this would open a new era of data archiving. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we've learned will not be forgotten," he said.

For a media company like Warner Bros, this could have huge implications. Storing its 100-year film and television archives is indeed currently causing it some headaches. 

The company keeps three copies of each asset stored in various locations around the world. It has plans in place in case an earthquake, a hurricane or a fire struck one of its storage locations. And every three to five years, it migrates its digital content to stay ahead of degradation issues.

The company's chief technology officer, Vicky Colf, said: "Imagine if a title like The Wizard of Oz or a show like Friends wasn't available for generation after generation to enjoy… That's why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously."

As intriguing as storing data on glass may seem, though, the technology is not made for users to be able to play films at home on a specially made quartz glass DVD player. 

The voxels encoded by the laser in the glass can only be read by a computer-controlled microscope that uses machine learning to decode and reconstruct the patterns that come out when polarized light is shone through the glass. 

So, the data stored in the new technology won't be information that needs to be accessed regularly. Instead, Microsoft spoke of it as 'cold data,' or archival data that companies are required to maintain but don't need to see for months or years. 

Cold data includes media archives like those held by Warner Bros, but also medical data, or legal contracts, or even urban building plans that cities have to retain.

"We are not trying to build things that you put in your house or play movies from," said Rowstron. "We are building storage that operates at the cloud scale."

In other words, Microsoft is interested in technology that exists exclusively for the cloud – something that it previously outlined in its mission statement for Project Silica, in which it said that its research was not concerned with the deployment of information outside the cloud, such as offices, homes, mobile phones or enterprise data centers. 

Microsoft cautions that there is much work ahead before physical quartz-glass archives can be used at scale. To do so, Microsoft engineers would need to speed up data encoding, as well as increase the data density.

Visual search – the ability to initiate a search query using an image captured by the camera lens on a mobile device – has increasingly become a channel that can drive consumers from becoming aware of a product to making a purchase.

Gartner classifies visual search as an emerging technology, which puts it right on par with findings from an eMarketer survey suggesting that few consumers "regularly" use it.

On average, only 3% regularly use visual search, and only 10% have used it in the past, according to the findings. On the other side of the spectrum, 7% are familiar with the technology, according to an eMarketer eCommerce survey conducted in June 2019 by Bizrate Insights and published in August 2019.

Gartner Analyst Mike McGuire points to artificial intelligence (AI), which sits high on the list of transformational trends, as an important technology that supports visual search platforms like Google Lens and Prism.

Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, and other augmented reality vendors continue to invest in visual search. Their platforms use computer vision and AI to identify the image.

ASOS, a U.K. online fashion retailer, already uses visual search. Its search tool, Style Match, integrates into the ASOS mobile app, so customers can zoom in on a man’s suit in a magazine picture, for example, and receive suggestions on similar suits, McGuire explains.

McGuire calls visual search a tool that will enhance the customer experience, benefiting brands most in e-commerce, content marketing, product, and search marketing. Amazon also supports this media.

Recently, Mondo released a study showing that 21% of the 1,000 marketers surveyed cite visual search as an essential marketing strategy for their organizations through 2020. Visual search fell in line behind strategies such as experiential marketing, micro-moments, and motion design.

Gartner rated visual search as an “on the rise” strategy, along with over-the-top TV advertising, consent and preference management, and personification.  
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At the peak are advanced supply-side bidding, customer journey analytics, real-time marketing, conversational marketing, artificial intelligence for marketing, and customer data platforms.

If you're sick of hearing about dark mode on smartphone apps, I hear you. Now that both Android and iOS have the option to turn your interface darker, not a day goes by without this or that app adding support for dark mode. 

But beyond aesthetics, there's a real-world reason to turn on dark mode: increased battery life. According to a recent test, conducted by PhoneBuff, switching to dark mode can extend your iPhone's battery life by 30%. 

In the test, identical tasks were performed on an iPhone XS Max in Twitter, YouTube, Message, and other apps, first with the phone running light mode, and then with dark mode on.  

The result is quite spectacular. When the battery on the iPhone running light mode died, the other iPhone still had 30% battery life, which should give you several extra hours of service.  

Things aren't that simple, though. The test phones were set to 200 nits of brightness; you might see different results with other settings. Furthermore, during the test a single app was used for several hours at a time, which is (hopefully) not how most users use their phones.
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And there's a one big caveat: Only smartphones with OLED screens will see the battery life improvement. That’s because on OLED screens, black pixels are turned off instead of being backlit. So, users who are running an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will get the benefit. However, those with an iPhone XR and iPhone 11 won't get the benefits.

You can now bring your old whiteboards into the 21stcentury with Rocketbook Beacons. These four restickable, reusable Beacons convert your writing surface into a smartboard by integrating with popular cloud services in the free Rocketbook app. 

Brainstorm the next great mission with your crew, capture and share your ideas, and then take your Beacons with you to your next adventure. The Beacons Go-Pack is $15.
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• Set of 4 Beacons
• 2.5-inch triangles
• Fluorescent orange
• Restickable Yupo adhesive 
• Wash with soap and water
• Free Go-Pack carry case

Rocketbook Beacons allow you to capture, organize, and broadcast important notes, diagrams, and big ideas on any whiteboard or wall surface in real-time. Just four restickable "beacons" for any sized surface and one smartphone app that connects with many of the popular cloud services you already use.
Using Beacons involves four easy steps:

1. Place the four Beacon quadra-triangles in each corner of a whiteboard or your preferred writing area. Do your best to make it straight, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Now document your ideas and discussions on the whiteboard the way you usually would.
2. Got an iPhone or Android? Use the free Rocketbook app to configure popular cloud services as your scan destinations. Rocketbook has partnered with some of your favorite services, such as Evernote, One Note, Dropbox, and Google Drive. You can also use regular email if you wish.
3. For crucial missions with scattered participants, you can stream your whiteboard in real-time. Switch to “Snapcast” mode, share the unique URL, and collaborate with your team anywhere in the world. Your private, real-time page is updated every time you scan your whiteboard. Or prop your phone facing your whiteboard and set the app to auto-scan every 5 seconds. 
4. Is your next mission destined for a different whiteboard? No problem. Peel the Beacons off of the board and prepare for your next voyage. Beacons have a space-aged micro-suction surface that can not only be reused over and over but even cleaned with soap and water.

Whether you love paper and pen or prefer to live paper-free, you still probably need to take notes, read PDFs, or maybe even illustrate an idea with a sketch. Smart notebooks help bring ideas typically captured on paper into a digital format. Some smart notebooks also involve real paper.

Smart notebooks don’t really conform to a firm definition. There’s still a lot of interpretation as to what a smart notebook is. That said, they are different from tablets: Tablets usually have color screens, like the Retina display on any recent iPad. Smart notebooks use some other kind of technology for the interface.

Some smart notebooks work best as digital tablets for writing and sketching. Others are paper-based notebooks with either a pressure-sensitive pad behind them to capture what you write or a companion app you use to scan pages.

Also included is one unique product that is something of an “honorary” smart notebook even though it’s a pen. It’s so smart, however, that it turns any notebook into a smart notebook.

Here are five of the best options listed in alphabetical order:

LiveScribe Echo 2GB ($179). It’s not a smart notebook per se, but the LiveScribe Echo pen turns any notebook into a smart one. This special pen has the unique ability to remember what you write or draw, the order in which you did so, and any audio that played while you wrote. That means you can take lecture notes while also recording the speaker. Or you can write your notes and dictate additional thoughts. When you’re done with your work, you can sync the memory from the LiveScribe Echo pen to a macOS or Windows computer and see all your notes reappear in the order that you took them on screen in a digital notebook.

Onyx Boox Max 3 ($859). It may seem like you need a money-is-no-object attitude to buy the Onyx Boox Max 3, and maybe you do. But the key thing to know about this smart notebook is just how much it’s capable of. It’s a big, 13.3-inch e-reader with E-Ink Mobius (making reading easy on the eyes) running Android 9 that’s Wi-Fi-capable, so you can also use it to surf the web or connect to digital libraries. About the only thing it can’t do is display color since it’s grayscale only. The Onyx Boox Max 3 is especially useful for anyone who spends hours a day pouring over PDFs and needs to make notes on the pages, mark them up, highlight passages, or even translate text. It ships with 4GB of RAM, a stylus, charging cable, HDMI cable, and protective sleeve.

reMarkable ($499). ReMarkable is billed as the digital notebook for people who don’t want to give up paper. It’s designed to feel like paper as you read, draw, and write on it. This 10.3-inch smart notebook not only feels like paper but also sounds like it when you write or draw on it with the included marker. The pressure-sensitive marker never requires charging or pairing. This notebook doubles an e-reader. The surface contains the company’s own Canvas technology, which uses black ink particles to reflect natural light. When you buy a reMarkable tablet, it ships with not only the marker but also with eight replacement tips and a cable for recharging.

Rocketbook Everlast ($32). The Rocketbook Everlast Notebook is a smart and reusable paper notebook. The predecessor version of the Rocketbook had users write with a special pen and then use a microwave oven to remove the writing. In the 2019 version, you write on special waterproof pages with a Pilot Frixion pen and wipe the pages clean with a damp microfiber cloth when you’re done. So, what makes it a smart notebook? Using a companion app, you scan your pages to turn them into digital notes. At the bottom of each page are a few icons. You assign each symbol to a destination in one of your cloud storage services, such as a particular folder in Google Drive or a notebook in Evernote. Whenever you write on a page, you put color in the corresponding icon, and the app files your pages accordingly when you scan them. The app works with Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and email, with support for a few other services in the works. The book comes in four colors (black, red, midnight blue, and teal) and two sizes (8.5 X 11 inches with 32 pages or 6 X 8.8 inches with 36 pages).

Wacom Bamboo Folio ($199). The Wacom Bamboo Folio is for people who love to write on paper with a pen but also want the benefits of digitized notes. Wacom has long been a leader in digital tablets, especially those for drawing and sketching. The Bamboo Folio puts an exciting twist on the concept of a smart notebook, however. It’s a paper pad tucked into a little folio case, and the back of the case is a smart surface. When you write or draw on the paper, the smart surface records your marks. It stores them and later transfers them wirelessly to a companion app. You never have to scan your handwritten pages, but you get the same result as if you did.
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Wacom also sells a less expensive Bamboo Slate ($129.99). It works similarly, but it’s a slab rather than a folded folio.

Google is kicking off Cybersecurity Awareness Month by rolling out new tools that give customers greater control over their privacy when using Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Assistant. The company has confirmed that it’s launching incognito mode for Maps, which will debut on Android this month before expanding to iOS “soon.” 

When you turn on incognito mode in Maps, your Maps activity on that device, like the places you search for, won’t be saved to your Google Account and won’t be used to personalize your Maps experience,” Google’s Eric Miraglia wrote in a blog post. 

As for YouTube, Google is introducing the same rolling auto-delete feature that can already automatically clear out your location history and web data at an interval of your choosing. “Set the time period to keep your data — 3 months, 18 months, or until you delete it, just like Location History and Web & App Activity — and we’ll take care of the rest,” Miraglia wrote. Pretty straightforward.

And last, Google is letting you wipe recent voice commands or questions to Google Assistant without having to open an app on your phone. Now you can say “Hey Google, delete the last thing I said to you” or “delete everything I said to you last week” and that data will be erased. Unfortunately, you can’t delete more than a week’s worth of Google Assistant history using your voice. For that, you’ll still have to dig into the Assistant’s settings menu. 

Assistant is also now better prepared for a question like “Hey Google, how do you keep my data safe?” According to Miraglia, the answer you get “will share information about how we keep your data private and secure.”
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Alongside these new options, Google is also building a password checkup feature right into its password manager, which syncs logins across Chrome and Android. You’ll be able to quickly check if your password was compromised in a third-party breach, find any passwords you’re reusing in multiple places, or replace weak, easy-to-guess passwords you might have in place for some accounts.

You hear the warning every time you fly: Please set all devices to airplane mode. But what happens if you don't?

It’s not that long ago that airlines stopped telling passengers to keep their mobile phones, tablets, e-readers and other devices turned off throughout the flight. 

Why Airplane Mode. We’re asked to turn our devices off or to put them in Airplane Mode because of electromagnetic interference from phones, tablets, e-readers, electronic headsets, and more. Since some planes were built before these became a thing, it took a while for the industry to make sure it was entirely safe to use them.

These days, you’ll even see iPads and other tablets in the flight deck, which pilots use to store paperwork instead of lugging around big bags with actual paper in them. You’ll see flight attendants using tablets and big phones too, either instead of or in addition to those reams and reams of dot-matrix printed paperwork. All those devices have been tested extensively to make sure there’s no interference.  

That testing happened during the rigorous qualification process to enable airlines to offer inflight internet. Part of that testing process is creating enough electromagnetic interference to represent an entire cabin full of devices of a variety of sizes, including some that are malfunctioning. Pretty much every airliner-equipment combo operated by a major international airline has now been tested.

So, what happens if I don't put my phone on airplane mode? 

For years, safety regulators, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and everyone else in the industry has known that there are dozens of devices left out of airplane mode on every flight. In a way, the fact that planes haven’t fallen out of the sky willy-nilly because someone left their Kindle on is the best demonstration that, for the most part, most devices don’t affect most planes.

But “most” isn’t good enough for aviation. Some folks don’t know that their Kindle even has 3G, or that the Bluetooth on their watch or headphones or other device counts as needing to be put into airplane mode. Some forget that they’ve packed one of those devices in the overhead bin. Some even blatantly ignore the rules, assuming that their vital email on that BlackBerry isn’t going to make their plane start to plummet. And it probably isn’t. 

The real reason to be sure your phone is put into Airplane Mode is to be sure that you don’t accidentally connect to the in-flight roaming network and get billed for time on that network. This is also true if you are in a foreign country. Airplane Mode keeps your cellular devices from roaming on a local network which could generate huge charges depending on how long you are in-country. That’s also true for cruises.
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The other big reason to use Airplane Mode while on aircraft is that the effort your cell phone goes through to keep scanning and tower hopping at fly-by speeds can drain your battery in a big way.