Thursday 20 August 2015

'The Voice' Season 9 (2015) Spoilers: Justin Bieber's Ex Girlfriend Selena Gomez to Join Show

"The Voice" USA Season 9 (2015) is all set to return in a few weeks with some new faces who are expected to join the hit talent show. Spoilers have it that the organisers of the show have made a few changes, including bringing in Selena Gomez, ex-girlfriend of Justin Bieber.
"The Voice" Twitter account has confirmed that Selena Gomez will team up with coach Gwen Stefani on Season 9 of NBC's popular show. She will join John Fogerty, team advisor for Adam Levine, and Brad Paisley for Blake Shelton.
Interestingly, news of Selena Gomez's participation in the show came a few weeks after several reports suggested that her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber will join the show.
It was announced earlier that Rihanna will be the key advisor for the season. However, advisor for Team Pharrell is yet to be announced.
NBC had already announced that Brad Paisley will join "The Voice" as Team Blake's advisor.
"He's really been good to me, and so the fact that I was able to get him here and and advise my team made perfect sense to me because he was actually a mentor for me," Shelton told People magazine. 
"If you know anything about country music, you know who Brad Paisley is. He's entertainer of the year. He's male vocalist of the year. He's sold millions of albums, and sold out tours. He's just one of the more respected singers. and just [among] people in the music industry and Nashville."
Paisley also said that he would love to work with Shelton.
"I wouldn't want to do this with anyone else – he's a blast to be around," Paisley said of Shelton. "We debuted [in country music] roughly around the same time ... And we toured together in the struggling years. We have some great memories that I wouldn't trade for anything."
Adam Levine, Blake Shelton, Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani are coaches for Season 9 of "The Voice" USA. Stefani is returning to the show after being replaced by Christina Aguilera in Season 8. Carson Daly will return as the host.
"The Voice" Season 9 will start on 21 September at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.

Demi Lovato follows former BFF Selena Gomez on Instagram AGAIN and fans are having a meltdown

 

Demi Lovato has started following her former bestie Selena Gomez on Instagram again - and fans have gone into meltdown at the possibility of Delena making a return.
The pair fell out for reasons none of us can really remember - but could they be back on track at last?
One fan couldn't help but express her happiness when she wrote "DELENA is back everyone! I miss them :)" under a screenshot of Demi following Justin Bieber's ex.
Another supporter of the starlets wrote: "Demi Lovato just followed Selena Gomez on IG and that just makes me really content".
And the love for the pair didn't stop there with a fan claiming that Demi clicking the follow button was the best moment of her year.
She wrote: "Demi followed Selena on Instagram. This is the biggest moment of 2015 thus far".
But is their friendship on the road to recovery or are fans just too quick to jump to conclusions?
The Disney stars friendship has had more ups and downs than a rollercoaster and last year it seemed that their best friend status had been scrapped for good.
It looked like there was no repairing their rocky relationship when Demi broke fans hearts by unfollowing Selena on Twitter which put an end to their BFF status.
During the game she was asked some scandalous questions but host Andy Cohen took the opportunity quiz the star on her relationship with Selena.
AKM-GSISelena Gomez and Demi Lovato shared a dinner together tonight at 'Craigs' Restaurant in West Hollywood, CA
Disney stars Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato
Cohen said: "You recently unfollowed your BFF Selena Gomez on Twitter. So much speculation about this! Can you tell us why?"
To which the 22-year-old replied: "I think it's just one of those things where people change and people grow apart.”
So it could be that Demi misses her ex bestmate and is throwing out an olive branch in hope that the pair can put aside their differences and reconnect but will Selena be so forthcoming.
AKM-GSI / Splash NewsSelena Gomez and Francia Raisa seen leaving 'The Nice Guy' bar hand in hand
Selena Gomez and Francia Raisa seen leaving 'The Nice Guy' bar hand in hand
They had been friends since they were seven-years-old until last year but up to now the pop beauty hasn't followed Demi back on Instagram and the pair are yet to comment on the situation.

New internet routing method allows users to avoid sending data through undesired countries

internet
Censorship is one of the greatest threats to open communication on the Internet. Information may be censored by a user's country of residence or the information's desired destination. But recent studies show that censorship by countries through which the data travels along its route is also a danger. 

Now, computer scientists at the University of Maryland have developed a method for providing concrete proof to Internet that their information did not cross through certain geographic areas. The new system offers advantages over existing systems: it is immediately deployable and does not require knowledge of—or modifications to—the Internet's routing hardware or policies.
"With recent events, such as censorship of Internet traffic, suspicious 'boomerang routing' where data leaves a region only to come back again, and monitoring of users' data, we became increasingly interested in this notion of empowering users to have more control over what happens with their data," says project lead Dave Levin, an assistant research scientist in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).
This new system, called Alibi Routing, will be presented on August 20, 2015, at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communication (ACM SIGCOMM) conference in London. Levin teamed with associate professor Neil Spring and professor Bobby Bhattacharjee, who have appointments in UMD's Department of Computer Science and UMIACS, on the paper.
Information transmitted over the Internet, such as website requests or email content, is broken into packets and sent through a series of routers on the way to its destination. However, users have very little control over what parts of the world these packets traverse.
Some parts of the world have been known to modify data returned to users, thus censoring content. In 2012, researchers demonstrated that Domain Name System (DNS) queries that merely pass through China's borders are subject to the same risk as if the requests came from one of the country's own residents.
To evaluate their Alibi Routing method, the researchers simulated a network with 20,000 participants and selected forbidden regions from the 2012 "Enemies of the Internet" report published by Reporters Without Borders—China, Syria, North Korea and Saudi Arabia—as well as the three other countries with the highest number of Internet users at the time of the study—the United States, China and Japan.

Alibi Routing works by searching a peer-to-peer network to locate "peers"—other users running the alibi routing software—that can relay a user's packets to its ultimate destination while avoiding specified forbidden regions. The peer is called an "alibi." The alibi provides proof—calculations that exploit the fact that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light—that at a particular time, a packet was at a specific geographic location sufficiently far enough away from the forbidden areas that the data could not have entered them.
If successful, users receive proof that their information reached its desired destination and that it did not traverse the forbidden regions. Alternatively, the response could indicate that the packets may have traversed forbidden areas.
Levin says the success rate for Alibi Routing depends on a few things, including how close the source and destination are to the forbidden region and how central the forbidden region is to Internet routing.
"There's also a safety parameter that we use. Basically, it's a way for users to select a desired level of confidence that the packet absolutely does not traverse the forbidden region," Levin says. "The larger the safety parameter, the harder it is to find an alibi. The smaller the safety parameter, the easier it is to find an alibi."
Based on simulated deployments, the system successfully found an alibi more than 85 percent of the time. With a small safety parameter, the success rate rose to 95 percent. The results suggest that users can typically avoid the part of the world they wish to route around, according to Levin.
Users do not always need an alibi, though. If two users are in the same room in Maryland and they want their information to avoid China, they don't need an alibi to help them; they can just send the data directly to one another and measure the time it takes to do so.
"For some of the countries we tested, we only needed an alibi about one-third of the time" says Levin.
The team plans to release a version of Alibi Routing—likely as an Internet browser plug-in—for users to test by the end of 2015.
"The more participants this type of peer-to-peer system has in different geographical locations, the more useful it will be," says Levin.

Apple suffers a blow in its patent war against Samsung

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is reexamining one of the key patents in the battle between Apple and Samsung. Specifically, it is claiming that design patent D618677 — essentially the front of the iPhone 3G — was not sufficiently described by Apple. The decision could affect the size of the damages that Samsung is supposed to pay Apple, but a final number won't be determined for a while as the case is still with the courts awaiting a third trial.
Apple originally submitted this patent in November of 2008, but in the filing the company leaned heavily on two of its previous patents in order to give D618677 a "priority" protection date of January 5th, 2007. By doing this, the company essentially gave the patent two extra years of life that it could use to challenge competitors with similar designs. The new decision from the USPTO is that Apple did not sufficiently describe the D618677 patent enough to enjoy that protection, and so now the protection only extends back to the filing date of November 2008.
That's a big problem for Apple because, in that almost two-year gap, a number of competitors' phone designs ("prior art" in patent parlance) are so obviously similar to the design spelled out in D618677. In a legal sense, it's now as if Apple tried to file a patent in 2008 on a design that — by that time — was so common that the patent would never have been awarded in the first place.
By losing that protection date of January 5th, 2007, the company could also lose a major part of its foundation for the massive $1 billion in monetary damages it was originally awarded in 2012. That $1 billion has already been challenged, too — just a few months ago, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit cut into it by a few hundred million, and a third trial is now necessary to determine the final amount.
Correction: This article originally stated that the USPTO had invalidated patent D618677. The patent is only being reexamined and has not been completely invalidated. The article has been updated to reflect this.

Google launches new 'smart' WiFi router for $199

 


Google has unveiled a new WiFi router that is aimed at increasing the ease and speed at which people's increasingly indispensable smartphones and tablets connect with its services at home.
The Internet giant has billed OnHub, manufactured in partnership with networking product major TP-LINK, as a "different kind of router for a new way to WiFi." OnHub is supposed to be easy to set up and manage, have high performance, and be able to tie together smart home accessories.
"Instead of headaches and spotty connections, OnHub gives you Wi-Fi that's fast, secure, and easy to use," Google said in a blog post.
OnHub's key selling point seems to be that it's easy to set up and painless to troubleshoot. It connects to iOS and Android phones through what appears to be a clean and stylish app that tells owners how many devices are connected to OnHub and what speeds they're getting.
According to Google, the router's circular design should allow it to have better penetration throughout a home (OnHub has 13 antennas inside). The router will automatically detect the best channel to broadcast on and includes support for 802.11ac and 5GHz Wi-Fi.
Google has promised to bring new features to the OnHub over time.
Unlike existing home routers, OnHub is expected to handle firmware updates automatically, similar to over-the-air updates on smartphones. The router does not have any other unique software features now, but Google may add other experimental features like integration with smart home devices.
Among the more interesting features that Google mentions in the blog is that OnHub supports Bluetooth LE and Weave - Google's new smart home language – which could eventually allow the router to serve as a smart home hub.
Smart devices – from heating and cooling system regulators to fire and security alarms – are a booming business. Google last year bought Nest, a smart home device maker for more than $3 billion.
OnHub is priced at $199 for online pre-orders and will go on sale in stores in the US and Canada from August 31.