“Packed with new features, this Creative Cloud release reimagines the creative process through a set of ‘CC’ desktop applications and sophisticated cross-device collaboration and publishing capabilities,” a spokesperson for Adobe tells WebProNews. “Additionally, Behance, the online creative community, is now integrated with Creative Cloud, so customers can showcase work, get feedback on projects and gain global exposure.”

“We’ve added a ton of new innovation to all our CC desktop apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. These apps include new features that increase productivity, streamline the effort to build mobile content and showcase some stunning new imaging and video science. And in addition to the traditional areas of innovation these apps are now connected to the powerful publishing and community features integral to the Creative Cloud experience,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “And with even more great updates coming to Creative Cloud throughout the year, we can’t wait to see the incredible work our customers are going to deliver.”

Core features of the offering include: a new desktop app, Behance integration, the ability to store, share and collaborate between the desktop cloud and mobile devices, and the ability to publish personalized portfolio sites.

Adobe has also launched Create Now, which the company calls “a celebration of creativity”. It’s a program that will showcase collaborative art projects using Adobe tools.

More on the update here.

The app, Hell Is Other People, leverages Google Maps and Foursquare API to help users avoid all contact with people that they know. Since social networking is all about connecting people, I guess we can call this a truly anti-social networking app.

The app uses your friends’ Foursquare check-ins to generate an “avoidance map,” complete with orange dots representing your buddies’ locations and green dots representing “optimally distanced safe zones.” It also shows you pathways to each safe zone, so you can take a stroll around your city with a low probability of running into anyone you know.

Having a bad face day? A little too hungover? Looking to actually relax or get some work done without the distraction of human interaction? This app’s for you.

“This project is partially a satire, partially a commentary on my disdain for ‘social media,’ and partially an exploration of my own difficulties with social anxiety,” says the app’s creator Scott Garner.

Hell is Other People: Walk One from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

Just dump all of the episodes at once – that’s the Netflix way. They did it with Lilyhammer, House of Cards, Hemlock Grove, and Arrested Development. You might have assumed that all streaming services would follow suit, releasing all of the episodes of their own original series at the same time. And you wouldn’t have been wrong to assume that.

But apparently, your assumption is wrong. According to the producers of a new Amazon original series, that’s not the way they’re going to play it.

Back in April, Amazon debuted 14 pilots, put them up for free, and took user feedback. From that feedback, Amazon made some cuts and decided to greenlight five new series: Alpha House, Betas, Annebots, Creative Galaxy, and Tumbleaf.

Jonathan Alter, former Newsweek columnist and author, is an executive producer on one of those series – Alpha House. That show stars John Goodman and was written by Doonesbury‘s Garry Trudeau. It’s about four U.S. Senators who live together in a rented house in Washington D.C. Alter recently told The Wrap that Amazon was not going to release all of the new Alpha House episodes at the same time.

“It hasn’t been entirely determined how they’ll put it out. But it will be a different model than the one used by Netflix,” he said.

That’s interesting and it shows that Amazon isn’t afraid to buck the trend set by Netflix – even if that trend is proving popular with viewers. Binge watching has its benefits – mainly the absolute lack of any sort of forced delayed gratification. But it also can have its drawbacks, as some argue that the immediate availability dampens the buzz for any particular show by failing to keep it in the pop culture eye for more than a few weeks.

Alpha House is set to debut in the Fall.

Ars Technica reports that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed into law a bill that requires local and state law enforcement to obtain a warrant when snooping through email. The law is the first of its kind as no other state has tried to stop the warrantless email snooping that came to light last year with the ECPA debate.

For those unaware, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, is a 1986 law that allows law enforcement to obtain emails without a warrant. More specifically, the law only requires a subpoena if the email in question has already been opened, or if it’s 180 days old. There have been numerous attempts in Congress to pass an ECPA amendment that would require federal officials to obtain warrants when snooping through emails, but chances of passage don’t look good.

Without a revision to federal law, the Texas bill lacks any real bite. Sure, it protects emails from the snooping of state and local police, but it doesn’t apply to federal agents. Those same state police work hand-in-hand with federal agents on a variety of cases so it’s not hard to see how state police could exploit that loophole by having somebody in the FBI obtain emails for them.

Even worse, a revision of federal law might not stop anything. It was recently revealed that the NSA gathers tons of information, including emails, from online service providers. Google, Facebook and others have all denied the claims, and even released transparency reports to prove that the government is going through the proper channels. It still doesn’t change the fact that many people can’t trust the government or the secret FISA courts anymore.

In short, Texas gets an A for effort. It’s a nice gesture, but it probably won’t accomplish anything.

[Image: jmtimages/flickr]

• Afrikaans
• Amharic
• Basque
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Estonian
• French (Canada)
• Galician
• Icelandic
• Khmer
• Lao
• Malaysian
• Nepali
• Persian
• Sinhalese
• Spanish (Latin America)
• Swahili
• Urdu
• Zulu

This brings the total to sixty-five supported languages. You can see the rest here.

“You can switch back and forth as often as you like, and many of these languages are also supported by Drive’s spellchecker,” writes Google Localization project manager Ian Hill on the Google Drive blog.

To switch languages on the desktop, just go to the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner, select Settings, and select a language under General. From mobile, go to your device’s settings.

Vladimir Bulatov, a 3D graphics research scientist at Shapeways, came to Google recently to be a bit more realistic about 3D printing. His talk – 3D Modeling for 3D Printing – focuses on what he’s doing at Shapeways to improve 3D modeling:

We discuss technical challenges of creation of 3D printable models and what Shapeways team is doing to help developers and regular users to create unique and customizable 3D pieces. In particular we will pay attention to use of AbBab3D – open source software for 3D voxel based modeling library developed by Shapeways.

Of course, Google is no stranger to 3D printers. The company even outfits its chefs with 3D printers so they can create custom pasta for employees.

The Hill reports that Reps. Justin Amash and John Conyers have introduced the Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act, or LIBERT-E for short, into the House. The bill would amend the PATRIOT Act to prevent the NSA from being able to collect this “incidental data” and focus the agency exclusively on collecting information on foreign threats.

The bill doesn’t just rewrite the PATRIOT Act though. It requires the Attorney General to brief all of Congress on the government’s data collection programs. As of now, the Attorney General only has to answer to the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.

The Attorney General would also be required to hand over unclassified summaries of FISA court opinions and orders to Congress for review after 180 days. As of now, FISA court orders are kept secret from everybody not on the Intelligence Committees.

Don’t get me wrong – stopping the collection of incidental data is a good thing, but it would be all for naught without more transparency. That’s why the bill’s call for increased transparency is by far the most important part about this bill. It would be better if the bill called for the kind of transparency that would reveal NSA information to the American public, but starting with Congress is a good baby step. Besides, there’s something seriously wrong with our system if we have to keep FISA court orders secret from the majority of our lawmakers.

Oh, and if you were wondering, a few Senators are pushing for a similar bill that would introduce transparency into the FISA courts. Unlike the above House bill, however, the Senate bill, penned by Sen. Jeff Merkley, would require the FISA courts to declassify its “significant opinions” for all.

Unfortunately, neither bill has much chance of being signed into law. Most lawmakers on the Intelligence Committees are hardline supporters of the secret FISA courts, and President Obama, despite saying he wants to be more transparent, seems like he’s still in favor of keeping everything hush hush as well.

Yahoo reports between 12,000 and 13,000 individual requests in the past 6 months – those figures include national security requests as well as requests from law enforcement for Yahoo to aid in kidnappings, homicides, and other types of investigations.

Here’s the short statement of “commitment to users’ privacy” that Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell just issued:

We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it.

To that end, we are disclosing the total number of requests for user data that law enforcement agencies in the U.S. made to us between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. During that time period, we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests. The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations.

Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue.

Democracy demands accountability. Recognizing the important role that Yahoo! can play in ensuring accountability, we will issue later this summer our first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year. We will refresh this report with current statistics twice a year.

As always, we will continually evaluate whether further actions can be taken to protect the privacy of our users and our ability to defend it. We appreciate – and do not take for granted—the trust you place in us.

Like Facebook and Apple, Yahoo is simply letting us know the total number of governmental requests for user data it received – not the specific amount of national security-related requests. Those FISA requests are still classified. Of course, Yahoo joins Facebook and other is demanding that the federal government allows tech companies to reports specific figures on national security requests.

Last week we learned that back in 2008, Yahoo fought the good fight but failed against PRISM. Redacted FISA documents reveal that Yahoo challenged the surveillance program, calling it a violation of users Fourth Amendment rights.

In short, he is still defending the NSA spying program. He argues that it’s needed to protect the American people from terrorism. It’s a noble cause, but can we really trust the Obama administration with its recently revealed spying powers?

Are you comfortable with the NSA spy programs? Do you think Obama is right to defend it? Let us know in the comments.

So, let’s start with a breakdown of Obama’s interview with Rose. You can watch the interview here, and BuzzFeed has a transcript up of the important NSA bits from the 45 minute interview. First up – Obama says that the NSA spy programs are all about tradeoffs. In other words, he argues that it’s fine to give up a little freedom in exchange for security:

Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe, is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice. That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn’t the case…. And so that’s a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, “Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.” To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom. I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.

Obama is quick to point out that there is a balance in place to ensure that the spy programs don’t go too far:

The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life, which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I’ve said is “Let’s examine and make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs.”

Going even further, Obama reiterates that the NSA can’t spy on an American citizen:

What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they — and usually it wouldn’t be “they,” it’d be the FBI — go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause….

So point number one, if you’re a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your emails unless it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule. There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden, allegedly, since there’s a criminal investigation taking place, and they caused all the ruckus. Program number one, called the 2015 Program, what that does is it gets data from the service providers like a Verizon in bulk, and basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there. Now, if the NSA through some other sources, maybe through the FBI, maybe through a tip that went to the CIA, maybe through the NYPD. Get a number that where there’s a reasonable, articulable suspicion that this might involve foreign terrorist activity related to Al-Qaeda and some other international terrorist actors. Then, what the NSA can do is it can query that database to see did any of the — did this number pop up? Did they make any other calls? And if they did, those calls will be spit out. A report will be produced. It will be turned over to the FBI.

Now, this is where the narrative starts to diverge. Edward Snowden, the whisteblower that leaked the NSA spy programs to the press, said in a Q&A with Guardian readers that the NSA can listen in on the content of American’s phone calls. More worrisome, he said that this communications content can be obtained without a warrant:

NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons… The reality is that due to [a 2008 federal law known as FAA 702], Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications… If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time — and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.”

Later on in the interview with Rose, Obama addresses PRISM – the spy program that allegedly gathers data from Internet companies like Google, Facebook and others. He asserts that this program, like the aforementioned phone tapping program, doesn’t target Americans:

There is a second program called the 702 program. And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity. It can only be narrowly related to counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber hacking or attacks, and a select number of identifiers — phone numbers, emails, et cetera. Those — and the process has all been approved by the courts — you can send to providers — the Yahoos or the Googles, what have you. And in the same way that you present essentially a warrant. And what will happen then is that you there can obtain content. But again, that does not apply to U.S. persons. And it’s only in these very narrow bands. So, you asked, what should we do? …What I’ve said is — is that what is a legitimate concern — a legitimate critique — is that because these are classified programs — even though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it — despite all that, the public may not fully know. And that can make the public kind of nervous, right? Because they say, “Well, Obama says it’s okay — or Congress says it’s okay. I don’t know who this judge is. I’m nervous about it.” What I’ve asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program, number one. And they are in that process of doing so now so that everything that I’m describing to you today, people, the public, newspapers, etc., can look at because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they’re not getting the complete story.

Obama’s statement echoes what we’ve been hearing recently from tech companies that were allegedly involved in PRISM. Google and Facebook both released statements last week saying that the leaked slides were inaccurate, but highlighted a need for more transparency to prevent customers from leaving them for others that promise security and privacy.

Do you believe Obama will make the NSA more transparent? Or is just an empty promise? Let us know in the comments.

Now then, President Obama and the tech companies aren’t addressing the elephant in the room – incidental data collection. In the original PRISM leaks, it was revealed that the NSA would collect data on non-targeted American citizens. It can’t go through this data without a warrant, but it’s worrisome nonetheless to know that the NSA is collecting information on American citizens without a warrant.

So, how are they are able to get away with it? In a recently revealed court case from 2008, it was shown that Yahoo fought against a court order to hand over data that included incidental data. In the case, the secret FISA court ruled “that incidental collections occurring as a result of constitutionally permissible acquisitions do not render those acquisitions unlawful.” The court also said that the Bush administration assured it “that it does not maintain a database of incidentally collected information from non-targeted United States persons, and there is no evidence to the contrary.”

Something must have changed between 2008 and now, however, as the government outright admitted over the weekend that it does keep a database of the information it collects. It doesn’t say whether or not that includes incidental data, but Snowden has said that it does. The government maintains that this information is destroyed every five years, but it still may have incidental data from American citizens on its servers for five years.

So, where do we go from here? At the end of his interview, Obama says that he understands the concerns from civil liberty proponents, and that he wants to initiate a national debate with these groups about the NSA and other programs involving the collection of data:

I’ve stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board, made up of independent citizens including some fierce civil libertarians. I’ll be meeting with them. And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities.

Do you think Obama will really start a national debate on NSA spy programs and data collection? Will it actually accomplish anything? Let us know in the comments.

[Image: White House/flickr]

The Tianhe-2 (or “Milky Way-2″), which became fully operational two years ahead of schedule, clocks in at an astounding 33.86 petaflops per second. A petaflop is one trillion calculations. The Tianhe-2 is over 20 billion times as fast as the first supercomputer ever built, the CDC 6600, which was created in 1964

Tianhe-2 is nearly twice as fast as the Titan, a Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennesee. The Titan, which has enjoyed the top spot on the list for some time, now moves into second place. The third place computer, dubbed Sequoia, is installed in at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and runs at 17.17 petaflops per second. In fourth place is Fujitsu’s K Computer, which runs at 10.59 petaflops per second and can be found at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan.

The Tianhe-2 has 3.12 million processor cores. It was designed and built by the National University of Defense Technology, which is run by the Chinese government. Now that it is online, the computer is reportedly bound for the National Supercomputer Center, which is in Guangzhou in the Guandong province.

The Top 500 list is, as the name suggests, a list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet. The list is compiled twice a year by Professor Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Professor Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennesee, Knoxville, and Erich Stromaier and Horst Simon of the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory.

As with previous lists, the United States dominates the field in terms of the sheer number of systems. There are 252 American supercomputers on the list, up from 250 on the previous list. China has 66 systems on the list (down from 72), and Japan has 30 (down from 32). The UK has 29 systems on the list, France has 23, and Germany has 19. The remaining 81 systems are scattered in countries throughout Europe and Asia.