Attorney General Harris forged the agreement with six companies whose platforms comprise the majority of the mobile apps market: Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Research In Motion. These platforms have agreed to privacy principles designed to bring the industry in line with a California law requiring mobile apps that collect personal information to have a privacy policy. The majority of mobile apps sold today do not contain a privacy policy.

Links to privacy policies will be in consistent locations within the App Store and other marketplaces, offering users the ability to view the policies at a glance. Developers who do not comply with these requirements can be charged under California law, and Apple and the other companies signing on to the agreement have pledged to educate developers about privacy policy requirements and help them to meet the standards.

Finally, the agreement requires that the companies provide simple methods for users to report apps that do not comply with privacy requirements, as well as systems for dealing with those reports.

Following publicity about location-tracking and privacy on mobile devices last year, U.S. Senator Al Franken sent letters to Apple and Google specifically asking if they would be willing to require clear privacy policies for apps distributed through their stores.

Apple's Bud Tribble had noted during a Senate hearing on mobile privacy that privacy policies from developers would not go far enough in protecting users' information, arguing that Apple's own efforts to provide visual indicators of information sharing such as an icon becoming visible when the user's location is being transmitted are more effective at policing privacy issues.

Read Original Article

What is it about video game worlds that etch themselves so vividly in our mind’s eye? A fun new user-generated blog aims to unearth the latent digital cartographer in you.

Mapstalgia is the brainchild of Josh Millard, a self-described “nerd-type” from Portland, OR. It’s a Tumblr where readers submit video game maps they’ve drawn from memory. The idea for the site came out of idle discussion on the message board Metafliter, where Millard works as a moderator.

“It occurred to me that there’s millions of people walking around with potent memories of common fictional game worlds,” Millard tells Mashable. “I asked a few friends to draw some maps, started up a simple blog for it, and here we are.”

The response since he launched the site in January has been substantial. “I was banking on a few dozen [submissions] by the end of the first month. Instead, I’ve received more than three hundred so far and they’re still coming in,” says Millard. “Folks [realize] this is not just neat to look at, but something they can actively participate in. Total lightswitch moment: ‘Oh, hey, wow, I bet I could do a map of Mario/Zelda/Doom/Zork…’ ”

SEE ALSO: 10 Classic Video Games You Can Play Online for Free

The site currently has 3,245 followers on Tumblr, according to Millard, and the submissions — sometimes several dozen a week — keep coming in. And the content is varied. “Everything from the world maps to single-screen vignettes, from rough folk art to serious draftsmanship. It’s wonderful seeing all the different ways people can approach the same basic idea. And to approach what is essentially improvised amateur cartography at the same time — few of us are artists, but fewer still are mapmakers.”

One might look at some of them more impressive offerings and question whether they were really produced from memory, as the terms of the site suggest. Right now, Millard is working on the honor system. “Someone certainly could pretend to remember … [but] I don’t lose sleep over it,” he says. “I’ve known enough people with remarkable visual or spatial memory (and spent enough time replaying specific video games myself) that I have no trouble believing the more ambitious renderings are the genuine article.”

That may be why a project like this tickles the fancy of gamers. There’s something about world immersion that allows us to recall spatial details of games in very precise ways. “In a game, you’re not just going for a walk — you’re exploring with a purpose,” Millard says. “There’s an instinctive need to keep yourself oriented. And there’s a cost to getting lost or being surprised — you get hurt, you die, you have to start over and do it again.”

“After the third rock is the bad guy, so you count rocks. The secret weapon is two screens over and one screen up, so you draw a map in your mind,” he goes on to explain. “You’re not just looking at a map, you’re living through it. That’s a potent experience.”

If Mapstalgia continues gaining readership and submissions, Millard says it may outgrow Tumblr. “Tumblr has been great for the zero-effort launch of this, but it’s not really designed to accommodate the museum sensibility that I think would serve Mapstalgia well in the long run.” Millard is also thinking about options for creating posters or coffee table books, but acknowledges the hurdles in securing the rights to user generated content. For now, the Tumblr-based DIY museum continues to feed gamers’ appetites for nostalgia.

What’s your favorite classic video game? Do you think you could draw the map from memory? Check out a few of Mapstalgia’s best submissions below for inspiration.

Read Full Article at Mashable.com

The new trailer for Borderlands 2 released by 2K Wednesday showed off new playable characters, new skill tree selections, and environments that look radically different from the original game. Borderlands 2 will be a similar style to the original, with RPG character leveling combined with First-Person Shooter elements to make what the developers call a shooter-looter. The game will again be set on the planet Pandora, and should have a similar Western feel to the original, where players pick up quests through non-player characters and bounty boards.

The sequel will also support four-player network multiplayer as it did in the past, as well as split-screen play for local players.

Along with the release date, 2K announced Borderlands Premiere Club will be available to those who preorder the game from retailers. It will include a new Golden Gun Pack, a Vault Hunter’s Relic which will help boost a player’s loot, and a Golden Key that unlocks a mystery in game.

Borderlands was originally released in 2009 for the 360, PS3 and through Steam for Mac and PC. It has sold 4.5 million copies since its release.

The trailer also promises “870 Gazillion more guns,” and features Borderlands mascot/tutorial robot Claptrap dancing to dubstep, so it’s definitely worth a watch to fans of the series.

What do you think of the Borderlands trailer? Let us know in the comments.

Read Full Article at Mashable.com

The influx of social media apps brings this portable gaming system into tablet territory. The 5-inch OLED screen really steals the show and apps are easy to access with the impressive touchscreen. Vita gamers will have to wait longer for Facebook or Foursquare apps to surface.

The Sony Twitter application is LiveTweet, built specifically for the Vita. It works as well as any other Twitter clients. Twitter streams run on the middle-right of the screen, with icons for mentions, lists and direct messages available next to it. The app also allows you to attach pictures taken from your Vita’s camera to your tweets.

The Netflix application looks very similar to other mobile incarnations. It allows you to browse movies and access your instant queue. Vita users can also fast-forward and rewind with the analog stick. Simply, pause with the X button. Note: The movies will look bright on the system’s OLED, but drain battery significantly.

SEE ALSO: PlayStation Vita: Everything You Need to Know

Photography fans will be able to view Flickr pictures on a beautiful interface that allows you to view photos in full screen. The Vita’s huge screen makes photo viewing, commenting and tagging a breeze.

The applications are accessible in the PS Vita store, under the “Applications” header on the left menu. The Playstation Vita connects to the system’s app store over WiFi and 3G networks. The wifi-only model is $249.99 and the 3G/wifi-capable model is $299.99.

Tell us in the comments what you think of the social media apps on the PlayStation Vita mobile gaming system? Do these apps enhance your gaming gadget experience?

Read Full Article at Mashable.com

The free OnLive Desktop App, currently available on iPad—and coming soon to Android, PC, Mac, TVs and monitors—delivers no-compromise, media-rich, instant-response Windows applications including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint software, and as of today, Adobe Reader for PDFs, along with 2GB of cloud storage. OnLive Desktop Plus, available for $4.99/month at www.desktop.onlive.com, provides all OnLive Desktop Standard features plus OnLive’s gigabit-speed accelerated browsing experience with full Flash player capability. With OnLive Desktop Plus, the iPad not only becomes 100% Flash compatible, it becomes the world’s fastest mobile Flash player.

As with the original OnLive Desktop service, there is some lag in responding to touch input and visual artifacts when moving quickly through documents or web pages. The lag made it somewhat difficult to work with interactive Flash-based content such as games in our testing, but the service does allow for decent viewing of Flash video content on the web.

While that slight lag is a function of the time needed for data to transfer between OnLive's servers and the user's iPad, OnLive's PCs themselves are connected to the Internet with gigabit connections, making for very fast loading of content and data transfers, which is then optimized for the iPad's display and passed along to the user.

OnLive is planning yet another tier of service, a $9.99/month "Pro" level that will offer additional PC applications for use from the iPad and an upgrade from to 50 GB of storage, up from 2 GB on the regular and Plus levels.

Read Original Article

Five years ago, a photograph captured University of New Hampshire student Griffin Kiritsy as a seemingly happy-go-lucky freshman. In mid-2011, the image got the familiar white-text-over-photo meme treatment on Quickmeme: “Hangs 20 beer signs in dorm. Only ever tasted Miller Lite.” The “College Freshman” meme has since been whipped into countless variations to poke fun at all things relating to first-year students.

“The worst part is that 90 percent of those memes don’t apply to me,” Kiritsy recently told his school’s student newspaper, The New Hampshire.

The newspaper’s story delved into the history of the original photo and featured a new picture of Kiritsy striking the same pose but this time as a senior.

The new image immediately caught the attention of Reddit users, who cleverly wasted no time turning it into a “Successful College Senior” meme (see gallery above). A “Lazy College Senior” meme already exists.

SEE ALSO: Bug-Eyed Student’s Basketball Face is Internet Famous

Memes involving college humor tend to resonate universally as students and alums across the globe can easily relate to the content. This month alone, college-specific memes are spreading at an unusually rapid pace on social channels, particularly on Facebook where students are creating Facebook groups just to showcase their schools’ memes.

“People feel plugged in to this production of laughs based off school culture,” Northwestern University student Gabe Bergado recently told Mashable.

Can you create a funnier “Successful College Senior” meme than the ones in our gallery? Take a stab at making your own at Quickmeme and share a link to yours in the comments below.

Read Full Article at Mashable.com

In a post titled “Google: Please Don’t Kill Video on the Web,” Microsoft says Motorola (which Google is in the process of acquiring) has broken its promise on the contribution it made to developing standards for streaming video and connecting devices to the Internet via Wi-Fi. The post alleges that Motorola is making unfair demands for compensation on the patents it holds for technologies like H.264, a standard video format.

In a searing example, Microsoft says Motorola demands $22.50 on any $1,000 Windows laptop sold to satisfy its 50 patents on H.264. To use the standard at all, Microsoft says, it must satisfy 2,300 other patents, which costs the company a grand total of two cents. Microsoft says Motorola’s demands not even “remotely close” to reasonable, and it’s hard to disagree.

Patent expert Florian Mueller of Foss Patents definitely appears to agree with Microsoft’s point of view, describing Motorola’s behavior as “FRAND abuse terrorism,” calling out Samsung on behaving similarly. (FRAND stands for fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory.)

“I can see what Apple and Microsoft are complaining about,” Mueller wrote in a blog post. “If every owner of standard-essential patents behaved like Motorola, this industry would be in chaos, and grind to a halt.”

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Wants $15 for Each Android Handset Samsung Sells

There’s a lot of noise over this issue since the patents in question are key to industry standards, affecting potentially thousands of products and some of the fundamental abilities of those products (like accessing the Internet). That’s why Microsoft says Motorola broke a promise: that it would make its patents available on reasonable terms — basically, that it wouldn’t be jerk about them.

That might sound more than a little ironic when you factor in that Microsoft holds many patents on the technology behind Android, and could be making as much as a $1 billion on all those phones Google sells every year.

Google certainly sees the irony, with a spokesperson telling Mashable that “Microsoft’s complaint is just another example of their attempts to use the regulatory process to attack competitors. It’s particularly ironic given their track record in this area and collaboration with patent trolls.”

Regardless, Mueller says he’s confident the European Commission will make clear to Motorola that its attempts to cash in on its standards patents won’t succeed: “As a European consumer, I don’t want to be held hostage by companies that use industry standards as a nuclear weapon and restrict choice,” he wrote.

What do you think? Is Motorola behaving worse than others who have asserted intellectual property rights? Or is this just business as usual for patent law? Let us know in the comments.

Read Full Article at Mashable.com

We noted last November that Apple had filed a business registration certificate for Apple Retail Sweden, offering support to rumors that Apple was looking to open a retail store in Stockholm.

While the new listings do not specify Stockholm as the location for the forthcoming store, Stockholm's metropolitan area is easily the largest in Sweden and with previous rumors having cited Stockholm as the focus of Apple's interest, it seems likely that this is the intended market.

Read Original Article

Zipcar has led a $13.7 million round of funding in a peer-to-peer car rental startup called Wheelz.

Like similar startups Getaround and RelayRides, Wheelz runs an online marketplace (there’s also an iPhone app) on which neighbors can browse and rent each other’s cars. It’s distinguishing feature is that it focuses on college campuses and restricts members to those with campus email addresses. Students who don’t have cars can rent them from students who do.

“This investment is our first step in the direction of potentially offering a broader array of mobility services,” said Zipcar Chairman and CEO Scott Griffith, who will join Wheelz’s board of directors, in a statement. “We believe our strong brand and first to scale advantage put us in a unique position to exploit the network effects and business synergies Zipcar can bring to the broader mobility space.”

Although Zipcar brought in about $63 million in 2011, its net income was only $4 million. In order to scale, it currently needs to add and maintain new fleets of vehicles — an expensive affair. A peer-to-peer model like Wheelz’s, however, could help it scale more quickly and with much less capital by relying on other people’s vehicles. It could also allow Zipcar to enter rural markets that were previously not viable for its business model — and to do so while taking a cut of rental fees for vehicles it doesn’t even own.

The arrangement could also benefit Wheelz. Building a marketplace doesn’t do much good if nobody uses it, and Wheelz has plenty of competition. Zipcar’s cash and brand could help it beat similar services to new areas.

Zipcar has only announced that it will fund Wheelz, not that it will somehow incorporate its peer-to-peer model under its own brand. But we wouldn’t be surprised if Griffith’s suggestion of the transaction indicating a “first step” in “potentially” offering new services eventually becomes more concrete.

Read Full Article at Mashable.com

The reason? In its post, the Vatican says that while some Catholics view Lent as a time to volunteer, give something up or study the Bible, others have abandoned the season:

“In our increasingly secular societies, many young people no longer keep the Lenten season in any special way – that’s why the Pontifical Council for Social Communications has come up with a new idea to focus hearts and minds on the challenges contained in Pope Benedict’s Lenten message for 2012.

‘Starting on Ash Wednesday, themes from that papal message will be posted on Twitter each day during Lent and over the coming months other papal speeches and documents are likely to be tweeted in a similar way, hoping to attract the media-savvy generation and entice them to find out more.’”

In other words, the Pope is hoping the Vatican’s Twitter presence can attract those who are not currently engaged with religion.

SEE ALSO: The Pope Sends His First Tweet, From an iPad

Msgr. Paul Tighe, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, says Twitter is the ideal medium for religious messages because “many of the key Gospel ideas are readily rendered in 140 characters.”

The Pope’s relationship with social media has been mixed. The Vatican has launched a YouTube Channel, iPhone app and web portal during Benedict XVI’s papacy.

While he is on Twitter, and recently lit a Christmas tree using an Android tablet, the Pope also issued a statement asking social media to quieten down, in favor of listening.

Do you think social media is an appropriate forum for religion? Do you follow any religious figures or use any religious apps? Let us know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, catholicism

Read Full Article at Mashable.com