Google employee goes on Facebook rant after cafe bans him from wearing Google Glass - and demands the manager be fired

Nick Starr refused to take off the glasses when he was asked by the manager at a Seattle restaurant

Restaurant owner said the glasses, which take photos and videos, are invasive

Starr ranted on Facebook hoping for sympathy but most users seem angered by his demand for restaurant manager to lose their livelihood    

 By Daily Mail Reporter

A Seattle restaurant has chucked out a customer who refused to take off his Google Glass.
Nick Starr was at the Lost Lake Cafe in the city and was wearing the glasses, which allow users to take pictures and record audio or video, when he was asked to remove them.
After refusing to take them off, he was eventually asked to leave.
He complained about the incident on his Facebook page and suggested the restaurants' owner considers the employment of its night manager.

Dispute: Nick Starr left a Seattle restaurant after he was ordered to remove his Google Glass

'She tells me that the owner's other restaurant doesn't allow Google Glass and that I would have to either put it away or leave,' he wrote.

'I asked to see where it was policy for Glass to be disallowed at Lost Lake. She said she couldn't provide any and when asked to speak with management she stated she was the night manager.'

Starr says he's eaten at Lost Lake with his $1,500 headset before and asked to see where the restaurant's anti-Glass policy was posted. He and his specs eventually left.

  

The episode has raised the debate about how invasive the gadget is.

After refusing to remove the glasses, Starr and his boyfriend left the venue.

He vented on his Facebook post, demanding an apology from the restaurant and calling for the woman's termination.

He added that he thought it was bizarre that the restaurant asked customers to shares images on social networking sites of their experiences there, but banned the Glass.

Scene: The manager at the Lost Lake Cafe asked him to remove the glasses in accordance with their policy

Anger: Restaurant owner David Meinert, pictured, said he thought the glasses were invasive

The Lost Lake Cafe has refused to apologize, saying that they have other customers' interests in mind. They shot back at Starr with their own Facebook post, outlining its policy.
'We recently had to ask a rude customer to leave because of their insistence on wearing and operating Google Glasses inside the restaurant,' the statement said.
'We kindly ask our customers to refrain from wearing and operating Google Glasses inside Lost Lake. We also ask that you not videotape anyone using any other sort of technology.
'If you do wear your Google Glasses inside, or film or photograph people without their permission, you will be asked to stop, or leave. And if we ask you to leave, for God's sake, don't start yelling about your 'rights'. Just shut up and get out before you make things worse.'

Night out: Starr was out with his boyfriend, Brian (left), when they were approached by the manager

Fan: Starr said he wears the glasses everywhere and argued you can also take pictures with cell phones

Owner David Meinert, who banned Google Glass at another one of his restaurants earlier this year, said he felt uneasy about the device.
'I think they're invasive and they make people uncomfortable,' he told KOMO News. 'More than that they make me uncomfortable, and it's my place.'
But Starr countered that he believes Google Glass is no more intrusive than cell phones with cameras that are also capable of taking images.
'I think privacy is vapor now,' Starr said. 'There are cameras everywhere. There are recording devices everywhere.'
'I would love an explanation, apology, clarification, and if the staff member was in the wrong and lost the owner money last night and also future income as well, that this income be deducted from her pay or her termination.'

Take it off or get out: Seattle may be home for tech giants Amazon and Microsoft, but Google Glass isn't welcome in one local diner

Starr's request for the managers termination has been met with vitriol on his personal Facebook page which has remained public throughout the controversy.
'What kind of pathetic loser asks for someone to be fired because they asked him to put his toy away? What kind of overly indulged manchild throws a hissy about something so inconsequential? Grow up loser!' writes one poster.
'People like you give tech people and people in your generation a bad name. You don't have the RIGHT to use technology any way you want, anywhere you want. Maybe we need to stop worrying so much about our RIGHTS and more about doing what is right.
That woman is a real, flesh-and-blood person struggling to earn a living at an exhausting profession, who will not be able to pay her bills if she is fired. Balance that against....what? Your thwarted desire? That is low,' wrote another angry user.

Australia’s CoinJar gets $455,000 to build bitcoin wallet and exchange

CoinJar, a startup that launched a bitcoin wallet with 10,000 registered users in Australia, has secured a A$500,000 ($455,000) seed round led by Australian venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures, which put in $228,000.

Angel investors have also participated in the round, and they include entrepreneur Torsten Hoffman, RetailMeNot founders Guy King and Bevan Clark, game developer Rob Murray, and technology investor Chris Hitchen.
CoinJar’s wallet, available for the iPhone, has a couple of unique features. It is a ‘managed wallet’, which means it doesn’t require the downloading of the blockchain to work. The blockchain, which has exceeded 10GB in size, is a public ledger containing a record of all bitcoin transactions in history.
Security-wise, CoinJar is encrypted with SSL and has Two-Factor Authentication.
In conjunction with the wallet, the startup operates CoinJar Filler, a bitcoin exchange. Available only in Australia for now, it charges a two percent flat fee for buying and 1.1 percent for selling. It also has the ‘CoinJar Fair Rate’, a proprietary exchange rate purportedly reflecting the true price of Bitcoin.
This, it claims, enables it to offer bitcoin at prices and fees lower than that of other Australian exchanges like SpendBitcoins, Omnicoins, and Buy Bitcoin Australia. Since launching in May, the exchange is done over $1.82 million in trades.
Lastly, CoinJar also operates a payment gateway that enables merchants to accept payments in bitcoin without worrying about exchange rates and Bitcoin address handling. Online businesses are charged a one percent merchant fee, which is two to four times less than what PayPal charges.
The company, an alumnus of Melbourne startup accelerator AngelCube, is founded by CEO Asher Tan, a former market analyst, and Ryan Zhou, who previously started and sold bitcoin exchange Bitcoinica, which was later shut down after a series of hacking incidents that saw over $400,000 worth of bitcoins siphoned off.
Despite the cryptocurrency being mostly a speculation vehicle for investors, Asher believes that “it is only a matter of time until business and consumers take full advantage of Bitcoin as a solution to digital payments.”
While acknowledging to Tech in Asia that Bitcoin is “still an inefficient market leading to arbitrage opportunities and speculation,” he believes the growth in “exchanges, market makers, and wallets” will lead to more volume and liquidity but decrease margins for speculative behavior.
CoinJar has been doing its part by securing partnerships with goods and service providers to increase merchant adoption of the currency in Australia. As a result, crowdfunding site Pozible and utility vehicle producer Tomcar have begun accepting bitcoin through CoinJar’s payment gateway.
In Tomcar’s case, bitcoin prices are calculated in realtime and adjusted by CoinJar according to the exchange rate. This prevents its products from being sold at rock-bottom prices in the event of a bitcoin crash.
Bitcoin has been on a roll of late, soaring to over $1,100 a bitcoin. According to Bitcoincharts.com, the value of all bitcoins is now worth over $12 billion.
This has enriched many early investors, but has also caused other bitcoin miners to grovel in grief after accidentally throwing away millions in dollars worth of the currency.

Text message exploit can force your Nexus phone to reboot (updated)

Watch out if someone sends a flood of text messages to your Nexus phone -- they may be trying to break in or otherwise cause havoc. IT administrator Bogdan Alecu has discovered an Android bug that triggers exploitable behavior in the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 whenever they're hit by a large volume of Class 0 SMS messages, or texts that aren't automatically stored on the phone. The denial of service attack usually forces the handset to reboot, but it can also disable the network connection (if temporarily) or crash the messaging app. Non-Nexus hardware appears to be safe, although Alecu notes that he hasn't had a chance to test a wide variety of gadgets. Regardless of the problem's scale, affected users will have to be cautious for a while; Google tells PCWorld that it's looking into the exploit, but there's no word on just when we can expect a patch.
 Now, Alecu has built an Android app called Class0Firewall himself to help Nexus users avoid such kind of an SMS attack. Nexus phone users can then set a threshold for the number of flash messages they can receive successively before blocking Class0 messages. Users can also set how long the messages will stay blocked.

French court orders Google and others to block 16 video streaming sites

A Paris civil court has ordered search engines and Internet access providers to block sixteen websites that stream copyrighted content, handing a win to film and television producers' unions after a two-year legal battle.

The unions petitioned the court in 2011 after their requests to block allostreaming.com, allomovies.com and others sites went unheeded by Internet providers, including Orange and Vivendi's SFR and search engines Google and Yahoo , according to the court order issued on Thursday.

Facing the heat, with others

The court said the five unions representing film and TV producers had "sufficiently shown that the Allostreaming network of websites is entirely or almost entirely dedicated to the representation of audiovisual works without the permission of their creators" and break French intellectual property laws. The court, which also said the search engines or broadband providers should not have to pay for the cost of site blocking, did not spell out exactly how the work should be carried out by the companies and left that up to them.

The decision can be appealed by the companies affected.

Some of the defendants had argued that blocking the illegal streaming websites was unworkable because users merely posted mirror versions of the sites under different names and using forums to communicate locations of pirated content. The court dismissed the concerns, saying: "The impossibility of ensuring the complete and perfect execution of the decisions should not lead courts to ignore the content creators' intellectual property rights."

The unions who brought the case welcomed the decision and lauded the role that "judges can play to protect content". Google, one of four search engines targeted by the lawsuit, said it was disappointed and would evaluate whether to appeal. "We will continue to work with content owners to help them combat piracy across Google's services," said the company.

Google already operates a system where content owners can send in specific web addresses of pirated content for the search engine to remove. It got 57 million requests and acted on them in six hours on average last year. In the French case, Google argued that blocking entire websites was not suitable since it could also cut off access to legal content. It also said blocking entire websites was illegal and incompatible with free speech. Orange, France's largest Internet provider, said it would apply the decision despite concerns on "policing the Internet".

It also said the ruling had positive aspects, namely that Internet firms can carry out blocking by any technological means they choose and that judges must be consulted. "We remain convinced, however, that the only real effective solution against piracy is the development of attractive legal services for consumers," said Orange.

Comet Ison may have survived its kiss with the sun

 We humans can form curious attachments to non-living things, so when Comet Ison veered toward the sun, naturally we rooted for the plucky iceball. After seeing it mostly vanish after brushing the corona, though, scientists feared the worst. Cue the heroic music, though, as new footage released early today (after the break) shows that at least a small chunk of the 1.4 mile-wide comet has emerged from the brutal encounter. It's looking a bit ragged after all that, so scientists will have to wait a bit more to make a final call on its health. Hopefully it'll still be classed as "comet" rather than "scorched hunk of rock."

Half a million iPhone 5s units reportedly produced by Foxconn each day

Earlier reports have claimed that 90 percent iPhone 5s stock is back in stores and Apple has slowed down 5c production. Now a new report says the waiting time for the iPhone 5s has significantly dropped as Apple urged Hon Hai to ramp up production. Hon Hai also known by its trade name Foxconn, has ramped up production at the expense of the cheaper iPhone 5c, just like it did previously at another factory, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.

Foxconn reportedly has been running its factories round the clock and recruiting more workers. The company currently employs 300,000 workers at its Zhengzhou unit just for the iPhone 5s production. Around 600 workers work on each iPhone 5s production line to handle assembly work. The whole ramping up process has significantly reduced the waiting time for the iPhone 5s in the US and other locations from 2-3 weeks to 3-5 days.

An anonymous executive said that the company is churning out about 500,000 iPhone 5s units everyday, which is the highest daily output ever for an Apple phone. Moreover, the executive further said that the iPhone 5s takes longer time to assemble than the 5c, thanks to the aluminium body. The report also says that Apple is looking for newer manufacturing partners in Asia to further increase the production of its smartphones and tablets in the future.

Ever since Apple launched the new iPhone 5s and the 5c, the former as been heralded as the "best iPhone" that the company has ever made. But the 5c has seen lukewarm sales across the world. As the 5s quickly went out of stock soon after launch, the gold version faster than the others, the 5c languished on shelves as the hopes of seeing a budget iPhone were dashed.

Experimental 3D scanner creates clear images with almost no light

We've seen seen single-pixel cameras, and now MIT researchers have figured out how to create clear images of dimly-lit objects using single photons -- in 3D, no less. The technique doesn't involve any fancy new hardware, either, as the team worked with a standard photon detector that fired low-intensity visible laser light pulses at subjects. The magic happens from the algorithms they developed, which can pick out variations in the time it takes for individual photons to echo back. After that software separated the noise (as shown above) the result was a high-res image created with about a million photons that would have required several hundred trillion with, say, a smartphone camera. That'll open up new possibilities for low-energy surveying, for instance, or even spy cameras that could virtually see in the dark -- because no laser research project is complete with a sinister-sounding military application.