HP Wants You to Print Magazines with Your Home Printer So You Can Waste More Paper and Buy More Ink [Printers]

By Casey Chan Oct 12, 2011 10:45 AM 4,254 36

Two wrongs don't make a right. I think I learned that as a 4-year-old. Apparently, HP and Condé Nast skipped out on that life lesson because they're combining two dying things—print media and printers—to create the unholiest of unions: your HP printer at home will print out Condé Nast magazines for you to read.

It sounds straight out of the webpages of the Onion but it's true, Condé Nast magazines like Wired, Details, Epicurious, Glamour, Allure, Golf Digest etc. will be "delivered" to people's personal HP web printers so that they can presumably read them without having to go to the magazine stand. This is real! You schedule when you want to read the mags and your HP printer starts spitting out the pages. (I'm assuming you have to staple the pages together yourself)

I guess this could work in a bizarro world where there is no such thing as tablets or laptops or computers or smartphones or the Internet or common sense but we're not living in that world! Instead, we live in an era where people are ditching their printers cause they're useless, people who have printers never print anything because printer ink is ass expensive and print media is dying (which is legitimately sad). But still, combining print and more print is the dumbest thing HP's done this... month, I guess.

But HP is serious about this. And since they want to revive the printer as some sort of news hub, they're offering a subscription service for printer ink delivery. It's like Netflix but for printer ink! Subscriptions for HP Instant Ink will start from $5.99 to $10.99 per month depending on the product line (shipping included). This will not end well. [HP, Image Credit: photographer2222/Shutterstock]

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Facebook Wants You To Watch, Listen, Read And Want Stuff, Too [Facebook]

Facebook may have some upcoming changes that'll add Watched, Listened, Read and Want buttons to its social network, according to a rumor from TechCrunch.

These buttons will fine tune your profile information and could replace or augment the Like button. They will also give Facebook even more personal information tit can use to violate your privacy, I mean build your social web. We should find out more about these and other changes during Facebook's big f8 conference next week. [TechCrunch]

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Yale Wants You To Unlock Your Door With Your Phone [NFC]

The Yale lock company has developed a household lock equipped with NFC technology. Just place your phone by the lock and wait for it to respond by locking or unlocking the door. It's that easy, says Yale.

According to Yale, the NFC lock is developed using electronic Mobile Key technology that passes information from the phone to lock and verifies the key is authentic.

Yale demonstrated these locks at the recent CEDIA 2011 Expo. NFC is only present in a few handsets, so it'll be a little while before these locks will land in a door near you. [CE Pro via Geeky Gadgets]

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The CIA Really Wants to Make Hollywood's Next Blockbuster [Military]

Are you an aspiring filmmaker who wants to produce a spy thriller? Well, you're in luck because the CIA has a pile of script ideas lying around.

Ironic, you say, that an organization known for secrecy is doling out helpful hints to Hollywood? The CIA doesn't think so. For them it's all about image control. And they're just the start of it. The Department of Defense and just about every branch of the military has an entertainment industry liaison similar to the CIA's.

If you want to make a war film and need a fleet of F-22s, a crowd of Marines, or a Navy aircraft carrier, just call up the Department of Defense's entertainment media office and they'll tell you if the Army can spare that M1A1 Abrams tank you've always wanted for a day or two of filming.

"The scripts we get are only the writer's idea of how the Department of Defense operates," Vince Ogilvie, deputy director of the Defense Department's entertainment liaison office, told Danger Room. "We make sure the Department and facilities and people are portrayed in the most accurate and positive light possible."

Hollywood has been working with government organizations to make more credible films for years (for instance, Jerry Bruckheimer and Paramount Pictures worked closely with the Pentagon when filming the 1986 blockbuster "Top Gun"). But the phenomenon is under newfound scrutiny. There was a bit of a kerfuffle recently when some in the press and in Congress speculated about whether the government will give Sony Pictures any pointers while they make a film about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In a letter to the Defense Department and CIA last month, Rep. Peter King expressed outrage at the Pentagon's relationship with the film's director, Kathyrn Bigelow. King claimed that she had already been made privy to sensitive information that could put American lives at risk. (King may have also have been thinking about the fact that the movie is scheduled to hit theaters one month before America decides whether or not to reelect President Obama.)

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney assured the media that the Pentagon does not discuss classified information and suggested that King could work on "more important things to discuss than a movie."

Ogilvie told Danger Room that until the Pentagon sees a completed script, they won't make a decision on whether they'll assist Bigelow. Standard procedure is to review the script, make notes on what the Defense Department would like changed, and kick it back to the producer. If the changes are made, the military will provide whatever help they can - declassified information, equipment, personnel, etc. - for a price. If an agreement can't be reached, the project is either scrapped or made without Pentagon help.

"We try to find a middle ground," said Ogilvie. "We want the portrayal of the military to show professionalism, cohesiveness, jointness, and dedication." He cited NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles, two shows the Pentagon has collaborated on, as examples of entertainment in which bad behavior in the military is often depicted, but at the end of each storyline, someone always takes action to correct it. In other words, the U.S. government wants us to know that the military is not made up of selfish rogues and the CIA doesn't exclusively employ people who look like Brian Cox.

"We want these movies to help us in terms of recruitment and retention," said Ogilvie.

OK, fair enough I guess, but why has the Defense Department recently partnered with 20th Century Fox to make an X-Men/U.S. Army ad or with explosion-enthusiast Michael Bay to make all three Transformers movies? In The Washington Post, David Sirota suggests entertainment like this is "government-subsidized propaganda."

Ogilvie assures Danger Room that the Pentagon's Hollywood ventures are much more innocent than that. Sure, they'd like to see a boost in military support, but it really all comes back to accuracy in terms of standard operating procedures - "whether it be a combat mission in Iraq or how we might fight a three-legged alien in outer space."

While our military is busy pondering defense strategies against Camaro-bots and aliens, I'll do something equally worthwhile and tweak one of the CIA's "inspirations for future storylines" into my first feature-length action flick: "The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence." I'm thinking early-20th-century religious allegory with lots of explosions, fedoras, and Mel Gibson. But if Mel's busy, I'll just start an indie band called "Robert Fulton's Skyhook and Operation Cold Feet," named after one of the Agency's canned movie treatments. Thanks, CIA! You're my heroes!

Wired.com has been expanding the hive mind with technology, science and geek culture news since 1995.

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Apple Wants to Halt All Motorola Patent Lawsuits [Patent Wars]

One of Apple 3rd Reich's patent war fronts is Motorola. Out of desperation, Motorola sued Apple first; then Apple sued Motorola. Now, Apple has asked the court to halt all Motorola patent suits, alleging they can't defend themselves.

Since Motorola is in the process of being acquired by Google, Apple says that they don't have standing to sue them anymore because that would be a job for the company buyer, Google. Right now, if the Google-Motorola deal goes through, Apple always loses. If Motorola wins, Apple would lose a lot of money in the process to a company that doesn't have a standing anymore. And if Apple wins, they could be sued by Google again. [TechCrunch]

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Someone Really Needs to Make a Good $100 Tablet [All Giz Wants]

Today we heard that the UK is getting jobbed out of its final shipment of $100 TouchPads, with only HP employees being eligible to buy them. Sozzlepops, UK chaps.

But that got us to thinking: With all the fuss over the TouchPad firesale the past few weeks, when will this very obvious demand for a good, cheap tablet be met?

First off, yes, there are a ton of reasons why a good, cheap tablet hasn't happened yet. For starters, there's cost. Building the TouchPad cost $306 in materials and manufacturing per tablet, and the 32GB model $328—plus whatever R&D went into it. That's a bloodbath. And no one's really in position to challenge Apple's incredible integration, from supply chain to retail, which allows it to keep its price lower than competitors.

But this can definitely be done, people. The Nook Color is the closest we have so far, but it's a measly 7 inches and still $250. It has also to be rooted to run Android at the moment. Any tablet that's going to make a run at the saliva-inspiring TouchPad price range is probably going to have to run stock Android by default.

What probably needs to happen, though, is for tablets to make a much bigger impact than they have to this point. There's plenty of room: as of May, only 8 percent of Americans owned a tablet, even though 90 percent wanted one. If Amazon's Kindle tablet sells at a hurricane clip, it should go a long way toward pushing down supply chain costs across the board.

And if tablets can make that inroad, it's basically a waiting game for them to hit their sweet spot, like anything else in tech. The first iPhone cost an insane $500 and $600—on contract! Now you can get a 3GS for 50 bucks. And we don't really need anything near that level of price depression to see a good tablet for ~$100. We just need a few generations to go by to lower manufacturing costs to where the previous gen is both good and affordable. Would you jump on an iPad 1 for $150 next year? I think you would.

Know this going in: the TouchPad firesale is in all likelihood a singular event, and you're not going to get this class of hardware for ~$100 anytime soon. But obviously we're willing to make concessions—we're all drooling over the same chunk o' junk that we poo-pooed with lukewarm and disappointed reviews just a few months ago. But it also can't be so dumpy that it's basically one of the cheap ass Android tablets that are already available.

The reason the $100 tablet is so attractive is that every decent tablet to this point has been at least $500. So those of us who want a tablet to be a unitasker device (sorry Alton!), but don't necessarily want to pay handsomely for handsome performance in every other area are sort of stuck. I just want it to read comics; Sam Biddle only wants to watch movies on the subway; Matt Buchanan wanted an Instapaper and magazine machine. I suspect most folks fall into a similar category.

That list of tasks means it probably has to be around-or-about 10 inches, and pretty good quality. The TouchPad's screen was $69, so that's a good chunk of our budget straight away, but we can also probably skimp on accuracy a bit for the capacitive touchscreen to make up a few dollars.

As for what's important specs-wise, it's probably the classics: an above-average processor, a usable amount of RAM, and decent battery life. The TouchPad has 1GB of RAM, but the iPad 2 gets along just fine with 512MB. We could also probably tolerate a thicker profile, and the battery doesn't have to last all day—just long enough to get through a movie on a plane, and maybe catch up on news in the cab.

Whoever makes a run at this is going to have to have an established marketplace in place to reap the benefits of bringing in a huge amount of users with a low-maybe-negative-margin product—sort of like Sony did with PlayStations for several years.

Google seems like a possibility, since they've shown that they're willing to give stuff away just to get people on the internet and in their sandbox. But even with their recent acquisition of Motorola, they don't really have the infrastructure to make a big tablet push.

So it probably falls to Amazon. Again. They have the ecosystem in place to capitalize on a huge influx of users, they're already jumping into the tablet game, and they've already been rumored to consider straight up giving hardware away to funnel customers to their services. And actually, they might already be working on all of this.

Or I suppose the alternative is for us all to start hoping really hard for Samsung to go under so we can make a run on Galaxy Tabs.

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Dell Reaches Around and Wants HP's Sloppy Seconds [Computers]

Dell's Partner Portal is addressing a vital business development: PC industry changes. And by "PC Industry Changes" it means, "OMG, HP is totes WTFBBQ so you'd better buy a Dell, dude." Or at least, that was my takeaway.

Michael Dell tweeted that his company is to "woo" sales partners. But follow the link, and instead of wooing, I see a lot of scaring.

The landing page starts off not by extolling Dell, but by noting that HP is (charitably) in flux. It reminds you that HP is ditching WebOS hardware business and getting out of the PC business to boot and, oh yeah, that "there has never been a better time to Partner with Dell." The page finishes off with a bunch of links to stories in the press about what a state of disarray HP is in, and a prominent analyst quote that questions whether or not HP will service and support anything tomorrow that it sells today.

Dell is very explicitly preying on fears that HP could leave its current and potential customers high and dry. It's a great tactic, and a really smart play. Despite HPs assurances to the contrary, the company's actions over the past year have been amounted to one long series of unpredictable bad moves. Dell wants to remind you of that.

Sure, it may be a little unseemly, but who cares. It's also effective and to the point. Selling against once-mighty HP's future is now officially a great business strategy.

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Rumor: Google Wants Hulu Really, Really Bad [Hulu]

All Things D's Peter Kafka says that Google is willing to offer significantly more than what Amazon, Yahoo or Dish Network would be willing to offer in the bidding war for Hulu. But they also want more than what's being offered.

Kafka doesn't have exact details from his sources, but he believes Google wants more exclusive content for a longer period of time.

Google seems to want something much more than that, and is willing to pay much more to get it. If you want to speculate, you could imagine Google asking for access to more content, for a longer period of time, and perhaps offering up a couple billion dollars more.

Since that's not what Hulu's owners have put on the table, "normally we would have thrown people out if they'd said that," says an executive familiar with the sales process. But Google "indicated that there's enough money" involved so that Hulu's owners are at least thinking about continuing the discussion.

But money alone won't guarantee a successful acquisition for Google. Studios and networks are notoriously gun shy about making their content freely available and given how new and unpredictable online TV still is, locking themselves into a long-term deal is something they probably don't want to do (hello Starz!). And though Google's willingness to toss cash at Hulu is promising, we still want Amazon to prevail in this fatal four-way. [AllThingsD]

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Music Needs ‘Connective Tissue’ and Facebook Wants To Build It [Facebook]

As details emerge about Facebook's plan to integrate with music services to let friends share their listening experience, one thing is abundantly clear: Music fans and the music industry desperately need this—or something like it—to happen.

Here's the core of the problem. When music fans use an online music service, whether that means free music on YouTube or a paid subscription from Spotify or another subscription service, they're more-or-less alone. If I use Spotify, you use Rhapsody, and our friend Bob uses MOG, the three of us might as well be in different universes when it comes to sharing and talking about what we're listening to. Our playlists, comments, and "likes" don't translate.

The inability to share music degrades the experience for all three of us—perhaps to the point that we won't renew our subscriptions, or would never sign up in the first place.

It reminds me of when I used to DJ a small room in San Francisco. We weren't too serious about it—this was basically a way for us to play music we liked over big speakers and showcase our friends' bands. Still, we had a problem: People would show up throughout the night, and leave when they saw a mostly-empty floor. Another group would do the same thing, and so on. If they all arrived at the same time, that night may have gelled.

Likewise, when people try a paid music service today, they are isolated. The chance that all of their friends will decide to subscribe to the same music service is virtually nil. If you share a Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, or other link on Facebook or Twitter, only your other friends who have that service can play it. YouTube is a cross-platform exception.

There's not much "connective tissue," as Reuters' anonymous source described Facebook's upcoming music strategy, to bring these paid services together. (See also "4 Ways One Big Database Would Help Music Fans, Industry.")

Facebook will announce an initiative to integrate tightly with multiple music services on September 22, according to various reports. Apparently, and here GigaOm's June 19th report is particularly instructive, the company plans to introduce new sections that show us what our friends are listening to, giving us something else to talk about, which is a reason to stay logged on. Nice move.

You can already share songs on Facebook with multiple services, but the upcoming reported integration would show you what I'm listening to in real time among other things.
We should be able to comment on what they've been doing, in classic Facebook style, and listen to their songs if we use the same service, which is already possible with Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, and others (screenshot to the right).

We might even be able to chat about the same song as we listen, which we've termed "synchronous group listening," and which is already possible on "Google+YouTube".

Hopefully for music fans, Facebook will also figure out a way for people to share songs across music services so more of us can hear shared tracks in full. Even if it doesn't, people will reportedly be able to track each other's listening and figure out how to hear stuff by searching on their own.

We've seen similar functionality elsewhere, but Facebook is massive. People use it daily. Prominent music sharing features there could bring to the mainstream all sorts of formerly nerd-like behavior—stuff like scrobbling music from Turntable.fm.

Social music on Facebook could be big. What will it look like?

First, it will be cool, because the non-stop hangout on Facebook would have a socially-customized soundtrack for those who want it. We can already sit near our Facebook friends at shows courtesy of Ticketmaster, so we should be able to listen together at home, too.

The Social Network makes no secret of letting app developers and outside marketers see what we do there. Earlier this year, we learned that our faces could end up in Facebook ads if we don't set our preferences right, among other seemingly-periodic issues. If Facebook's reported music plan succeeds, it will know who listens to what, who influences them, who they influence, what they did while they listened (to an extent), and more.

That might be fine. Apple won't even tell the Financial Times or any other app developer who their customers are. But for Facebook, that sort of user information appears to be the name of the game, and music is another way to get a lot more of it.

On the other hand, who cares? Many of us (present company included) like using Facebook today despite the privacy issues. Group listening among so many people can only add to the fun. Who knows, it might make more people pay—happily—for music.

Image: Flickr/Jason Steinschaden

Evolver.fm observes, tracks and analyzes the music apps scene, with the belief that it's crucial to how humans experience music, and how that experience is evolving.

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Spotify Wants to Bake Itself Into All Your iOS Apps [Spotify]

Spotify's been up for nearly two months, and it's shown amazing growth. Now it wants to find its way into everything else you do on your iPhone by handing developers and Premium users the new Spotify API.

Called libspotify 9, the code will allow the program to live inside any app developers can think of. Spotify sessions are already handled pretty well by iOS multitasking, but, as excellent as the app is, you tend to have to leave what you're doing to change playlists. By sticking the functionality into games, for instance, you won't have to jump out of what you're doing in the middle of a campaign. Pretty neat. [Spotify Blog via ReadWriteWeb]

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SEAL Team 6 Wants Special Remote Cameras for War Dogs [Weapons]

War dogs fight! War dogs get shot! War dogs cry! War dogs rappel down walls! And soon, war dogs will be feisty canine war cameras. Their human pals in SEAL Team 6 want mobile, furry eyes in battle.

DefenseTech reports that DEVGRU—SEAL Team 6's formal name—requested the following hookup from the Pentagon:

The contractor shall provide a a canine transmit and receive kit (1.0 - 1.5GHz) comprising of Transmitter/Camera Unit; including a battery and antenna. Includes Receiver includes battery and antennas. Six-way Battery Charger, Peli-Case, and user manual shall be included.

Send out your cameradog, and get ground-level footage beamed back to you from cover. Just strap the (presumably night vision) camera on a war dog's bulletproof back, and you've got recon that runs faster than a robot, and can bite people. A bot may be harder to kill, but it's certainly less multifarious than a dog sidekick, and much more intimate than a drone. Not bad! And we're glad the user manual will be included. This will also mean the advent of first person war dog video, which has me grinning like an idiot. [DefenseTech]

Image via U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Elizabeth Rissmiller

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Paul Allen Wants Your Legacy Hardware [Hardware]

Paul Allen, Microsoft's "Idea Man," is an aficionado of relic computing devices—the older and more obscure, the better. He collects them, along with rare WWII fighter planes, and shares this passion at his Living Computer Museum in Seattle.

The Living Computer Museum showcases machines, peripherals, and software from the era of interactive timesharing systems. Allen credits personal nostalgia as a motivator in his quest for these ancient systems. "They have a certain smell to them and a certain buzz when you hit the keys," Allen, told the Wall Street Journal. "It sure takes me back to those days." Those days being when he and Bill Gates used many of the same machines in their genesis of the Windows OS.

The appointment-only museum currently resides in a nondescript warehouse in downtown Seattle but has already attracted a following. In 2006, Allen launched PDPplanet activated a few old servers in order to host text-based games like Zork.

The museum routinely takes groups of both students and fellow tech enthusiasts. "We're going to try to bring a lot of students through so they'll get the sense of how things have proceeded so rapidly in the last 30 or 40 years from nobody having personal computers to now everybody's got one of those," said Allen.

Always on the search for more machines, the Living Computer Museum has a list of desired computers here.

[WSJ - Top art courtesy Bill Rupp/WSJ]

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