IntellectBeat

For its users, Adblock Plus stands as a bulwark against intrusive advertising. But websites dependent on advertising revenue to remain free-of-charge see the open source software as a scourge. Now the German firm behind Adblock Plus is taking a more conciliatory tack, reaching out to its adversaries to find an "acceptable" level and form of advertising on the net. Adblock Plus' owners, Eyeo, have dubbed the discussions surrounding its plans to set up an independent committee for acceptable advertising as "Camp David", alluding to a 1978 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. And that gives an idea of the scope of the difficulties in getting Internet publishers, advertisers and ad-blockers to sit around the same table and talk. The first such "summit" was held in New York in November and the second earlier this week in London. It brought together "the biggest European names in publishing, ad-tech, advertising, digital non-profits and conte...

The doodle on the Google home pages in many countries around the world shows Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in the act of setting down the logic of his periodic table (which reportedly came to him in a dream). Mendeleev had devised the periodic table - the comprehensive system for classifying the chemical elements. Dmitri Mendeleev was born on February 8, 1834 in the far west of Russia's Siberia. He was the youngest of the many children of his parents. According to Google's description of the doodle, in 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev made sense of the 56 elements known at the time, showing how they related to each other in a distinct pattern. His periodic table let elements fall into "periods" according to atomic mass and valence (the power that determines how they combine). Scholars had attempted to organize the elements into a table before, but Mendeleev's work extended beyond mere chart-making. Mendeleev used the logic of his table to argue for the existence of...

A Miami court on Friday imprisoned for life a US man who killed his wife and then splashed a photo of her bloodied body on Facebook, where he confessed to the fatal shooting. Derek Medina, 33, was found guilty last year of second-degree murder after he fired eight shots at Jennifer Alfonso in August 2013 in their home kitchen. Medina said he acted in self-defense after she threatened him with a knife and following years of abuse. But after six hours' deliberation jurors in November rejected that claim. The case attracted widespread attention because Medina photographed his 27-year-old wife's body, posted the picture on Facebook, and admitted on the social network that he had killed before surrendering to police. "I'm going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife, love you guys, miss you guys, take care Facebook people," he posted. "You will see me in the news my wife was punching me and I am not going to stand anymore with the abuse so I did wha...

In a recent study by the University of California, Irvine, researchers found that a lack of sleep is linked to a higher level of online browsing, including checking social media websites such as Facebook. Wanting to look at how sleep duration could affect internet use, rather than how internet use affects sleep, the team recruited 76 UCI students and monitored them for a one-week period. Using logging software the team could monitor participants' computers and smartphones to see how often they spoke on the phone, texted, or used applications. Sensors were used to measure their behavior, activities, and levels of stress. Participants were also asked to complete a survey every morning reporting on their sleep and to complete an end-of-day survey at night. The students also had to complete a general questionnaire and take part in an interview. The researchers collected further data by asking participants during the week about their mood, the level of engagement in their work, an...

An old bug called Error 53 is back and is troubling iPhone 6 users who have complained that their devices repaired by third-party repair shops are breaking. The bug resurfaced when a journalist, who broke his phone screen while covering a refugee crisis was forced to get it repaired in a third-party store. While the phone initially worked fine after the repair, a subsequent update of the iOS produced the Error 53 bug making the device useless. A report on The Verge notes that this isn't the first time the issue has popped up. However, the problem arises when the iPhone repaired by a third-party store gets a new version of the iOS. Once a phone is met with the error, there is nothing to do but send it back to the Apple headquarters. Following consumer complaints, Apple acknowledged the issue and in its statement said that the Error 53 was the result of security checks performed after installing an update, especially the ones that pair the TouchID to the internal Secure En...

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Saturday the social media website's stream of tweets will stay live and in real time, disputing a media report that a change was in the works. News and entertainment site BuzzFeed reported on Friday that Twitter was going to introduce a timeline based on an algorithm rather than a real-time stream. The report upset some users, who created the hashtag RIPTwitter to debate the change. But Dorsey took to Twitter on Saturday to dispute the report. "Twitter is live," he tweeted. "Twitter is real-time." BuzzFeed updated its report with Dorsey's response. Twitter is facing slowing user growth and has been trying to make its service more appealing with a feature called Moments, which compiles photos, videos and messages about big news events. It's also considering other changes. The San Francisco-based social media site reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday.

You must have heard about the famous “six degrees of separation” theory that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by six other people. Facebook has just upended this theory, saying that world is more closely connected than you might think. After studying 1.59 billion people active on the social networking website, the team determined that the number is actually 3.57 -- meaning thereby that there is actually “three-and-a-half degrees of separation” where each person in the world is connected to every other person by an average of three-and-a-half other people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is 3.17 degrees of separation from all Facebook users. According to researchers, our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk over the past five years. In 2011, researchers at Cornell University, the Università degli Studi di Milano and Facebook computed the average across the 721 million people using the website. “They and found...