Dos conciencias

El sistema de pagos integrado en Facebook Messenger del que ya habíamos hablado en algún instante sobre cómo funcionaba, ha conseguido finalmente su implementación en todo el territorio de Estados Unidos, una importante expansión que hace pensar que no está muy lejana su integración en otras regiones.

Lo único necesario es disponer de una tarjeta débito, conectar la información con la cuenta de Facebook Messenger y empezar a compartir dinero con solo mensajes dentro del chat. El destinatario también tendrá que contar con una cuenta conectada a Messenger para que el sistema efectúe el pago. No se aclara el límite específico del monto a pagar pero la idea es aprovecharle para no muy grandes envíos.

Lo interesante es que entra a competir con otras pasarelas de pago populares siempre que consiga una buena promoción pues no es sencillo hacer que todo el mundo conecte su información financiera a una app, pero con ofertas tan llamativas como el prescindir del pago de comisiones -así es, nada de fees, al menos por ahora-, seguramente no serán pocos los que considerarán probarle.

No sobra recordar su funcionamiento específico: Desde Facebook Messenger basta mencionar una cantidad de dinero dentro de una conversación, cantidad precedida por el símbolo pesos ($), para que se active una pequeña interfaz que sombreará la cantidad comentada con un tono gris y permitirá añadir tal pago o editarlo; Restará proceder a su realización con una tarjeta que con los detalles del pago y como confirmación se desplegará de inmediato.

Para mostrar lo simple que es usarlo, David Marcus, vocero de Facebook y expresidente de PayPal, ha compartido un video promocional del sistema de pagos.

Enlace: Video de presentación | Vía: TNW

El capturador web de Evernote, una extensión para navegadores que permite guardar páginas web o contenidos específicos de ellas en el servicio de notas multimedia Evernote contando para ello con opciones rápidas de edición y etiquetado, se ha actualizado para ahora incluir un mejor modo de captura para sitios web populares, más opciones para resaltar y compartir lo encontrado, y un reconocimiento más eficiente del uso para ofrecer sugerencias más acordes a lo deseado.

Lo anterior es anunciado en el blog oficial de Evernote donde explican los detalles de la actualización. La novedad más importante, por supuesto, es que ahora el web clipper o capturador web da un tratamiento especial a lo capturado desde sitios populares como Gmail, Linkedin, YouTube y Amazon.

Así, al intentar capturar una nueva nota desde tales servicios, la interfaz del capturador explotará sus detalles para, por ejemplo, conseguir de forma estructurada y convertir en contacto una página en Linkedin posibilitando la elección de las secciones del perfil a incluir; Por su parte, capturar desde Gmail permitirá en instantes almacenar los ficheros adjuntos del mensaje.

Otra función llamativa del capturador es el ofrecer herramientas de edición rápidas para enriquecer una captura destacando regiones específicas dentro de ella; Pues bien, ahora se dispondrá de más flechas especiales y llamadas a la acción para resaltar tales regiones de las capturas ofreciendo al destinatario una explicación más clara de lo que se le ha querido compartir. Lo restante son mejoras en las sugerencias de etiquetas y libretas para categorizar rápidamente una captura dentro de la cuenta de Evernote, una opción que se optimizará con el uso continuo.

En fin, bastará esperar la actualización de forma inmediata si es que ya se tenía la extensión instalada en Chrome, Opera y Safari, los únicos navegadores que ya la incorporan. Si no se cuenta con ella, hará falta visitar la página de la extensión para obtener el enlace de descarga e instalación.

Enlace de descarga: Capturador web de Evernote

“Real name” on Facebook does not mean legal name, says Zuck.

Facebook

Facebook has no plans to end its controversial "real name" policy, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the policy can work for those in the trans community advocating for its removal.

In a Tuesday Q&A with the public on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg addressed the policy, suggesting it has been misinterpreted in some cases.

"There is some confusion about what our policy actually is," Zuckerberg said in response to a question from BuzzFeed News. "Real name does not mean your legal name. Your real name is whatever you go by and what your friends call you,"

The policy has been a target of criticism for some time. Many members of the trans community go by names different than those given to them at birth and have been kicked off Facebook for using them.

"If you're a marginalised person, such as a trans person, you may be left with no way to get back on," a former Facebook employee named Zip wrote in a recent post to Medium. "Facebook [has] handed an enormous hammer to those who would like to silence us, and time after time I see that hammer coming down on trans women who have just stepped out of line by suggesting that perhaps we're being mistreated."

On Tuesday afternoon, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook does allow names other than legal ones. "If your friends all call you by a nickname and you want to use that name on Facebook, you should be able to do that," he said. In this case, he said, the policy "should be able to support everyone using their own real names, including everyone in the transgender community."

The operative word in the sentence is "should." Though Zuckerberg articulated Facebook's official policy, the execution of that policy has been uneven, according to multiple accounts, including that of Zip.

Zuckerberg also mentioned an internal effort to improve the current system. "We are working on better and more ways for people to show us what their real name is so we can both keep this policy which protects so many people in our community while also serving the transgender community," he said.

BuzzFeed News' question.

The "real name" policy became a focal point of protests at this past weekend's Pride celebrations in San Francisco. Activists circulated a petition to ban Facebook from the celebration and some marchers walked with "Shame on FB" signs. Zip urged people to #LogOffForPride and stop using the platform during pride celebrations.

"It's an insult that Facebook is sponsoring Pride in SF, marching and flying the rainbow flag and helping everyone change their profile picture, when they cannot fix this simple thing," Zip wrote.

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We convened a panel of passionate experts to get to the bottom of this one mystery.

A major new music product from Apple raises all kind of big questions, many of which our colleagues in music and tech journalism are busy answering right this minute. How does it stack up against the big players in streaming music that have stolen business from Apple over the past decade? How do its revamped 24/7 radio stations compare to XM and Pandora? Will the new artist discovery features give music fans a one-stop shop and push SoundCloud out of the burgeoning star game?

These are all worthy things to wonder on the day of the Apple Music launch, and wise words will be written and shared.

And yet isn't there an even deeper, more elemental question? An ur-query, white-hot and pure, from which all other lines of inquiry flow like so much spurting magma?

Is it… fucking… metal?

Of course, Apple Music has oodles of heavy metal; it also has dance pop, "chill" electronic, and "workout anthems". But having metal is a box to tick, an obligation; being metal is a calling, a state of mind.

BuzzFeed News gathered its resident metalheads in the most metal of all collaborative productivity environments — Slack, of the integrated metal emoji — to determine whether the brainchild of Eddie Cue, Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, and the overlords of entertainment technology are committed to the righteous cause of metal, or just pretending.

joe [11:38 AM] ok @channel

joe [11:38 AM] i am about to start looking at how metal apple music is but

joe [11:38 AM] before i start

joe [11:39 AM] let's get predictions from everyone: how metal will apple music be?

ellencushing [11:39 AM] what is our scale

joe [11:40 AM] i'll start with mine— apple is a giant, terrifying, powerful, inscrutable and crushing beast with a bottomless thirst for expansion and the will to power

joe [11:40 AM] that is metal as shit

joe [11:41 AM] on the other hand it's called "apple", which sounds like a twee indie pop band from north carolina

joe [11:41 AM] i'm going with 7 on a scale from 1 to METAL

ellencushing [11:41 AM] that said, EL CAPITAN could definitely be a metal band

ellencushing [11:41 AM] well, maybe

pczki [11:41 AM] My guess is just barely metal enough. I expect unforgivable omissions.

ellencushing [11:41 AM] a bad one:

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Unicode Consortium

The Emoji Council Of Elders is about to get a little bit bigger.

As of today, Swiftkey, the predictive keyboard app for iPhone and Android, is officially part of the Unicode Consortium, the 24-year-old text encoding standardization committee that oversees and governs the evolution of emoji. As an associate member, Swiftkey will join companies such as Twitter, Apple, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in helping the Consortium with the development of emoji in the coming years.

While the Unicode Consortium is a deeply technical and somewhat secretive organization, Swiftkey’s inclusion makes sense: The company plans to use its vast store of data, culled from Swiftkey use on more than 200 million devices, to give the UC a better understanding of global emoji use. Swiftkey appears to have been angling for this role for a while now and has issued numerous data-jammed emoji reports over the past year, analyzing 1.5 billion emoji across 30-plus languages. It’s a notable move for the Consortium, which, despite its influence, remains small and selective, and it’s one that will undoubtedly influence the evolution of one of the world’s fastest growing mediums of online expression.

Swiftkey’s induction to the Consortium comes at curious time for emoji. Since coming to the U.S. in 2007 as an official UC standardized character set, emoji have burrowed deep into our cultural sensibilities and linguistic habits. They’re used with dizzying frequency and by a broad swath of the globe, leading some, like Instagram data team member Thomas Dimson, to declare emoji’s popularity as “the rise of a new language.” Emoji occupies a powerful space in our collective ability to communicate across any pixelated medium, which makes its evolution a matter of deep cultural importance. The emoji alphabet’s inclusion and exclusion of certain ethnicities, sexual orientations, family structures, and cultural symbols — even mundane objects like tacos and champagne bottles — become stand-ins for their place in society at large.

This is all to say that the Unicode Consortium is in the rarefied and hard-to-comprehend position of presiding over the formation of rapidly growing means of global communication. From some angles, that's an odd undertaking for an organization the UC, which is, at its core, a technical group concerned with the standardization of character encoding schemes across dozens of languages, both dead and alive.

In a conversation with BuzzFeed News, Unicode Consortium co-founder and President Mark Davis, a longtime text software specialist and a current employee at Google, was the first to poke fun at this very fact, joking that, at first glance, “this is a very nerdy operation!” But, Davis promised, “everyone involved is here because they want to advance the ball, to make sure what whatever someone's language is, they can use Unicode on computers to write it."

That said, Davis was cautious to overemphasize emoji’s role in the way we communicate. “I wouldn't call it a language,” he said, suggesting a more subtle influence. “It's really to give a kind of flavor to our language, especially online and in social media. In some situations, [emojis] fill a gap that's covered in direct ​conversation ​by gestures or tone of voice. In conversation, smiles and facial expressions make our interactions a ​far richer."

The nuances of emoji and its evolution are more reason that the Consortium-Swiftkey partnership makes sense. The organization plans to take Swiftkey’s data — not just how frequently different characters are used, but how they’re used (positively, negatively, for religious expression, etc.) — to track emoji’s changes inside different cultures. Similarly, this data will play a large role in Consortium deliberations as it considers releasing new emojis — which Davis said it will continue to do at a rate of 50 to 100 per year. Currently, the UC uses data and suggestions from membership companies like Apple and Google as inputs to create new characters. “[Emoji] are not necessarily universal across cultures​​,​ ​​as ​some might think,” Davis told BuzzFeed News. “Take the infamous eggplant​ in the US​​—you won't find that association in most countries of the world. Some of the pictures and some of the icon images were very specific to Japan and since, they've developed completely new meanings outside ​of ​Japan."

Algo importante para aprender a programar es contar con los recursos educativos suficientes para hacer de la tarea algo muy cómodo, y por fortuna, en forma de libros digitales, se encuentran por montones en la red.

Pues bien, para facilitar la búsqueda, en el portal de recomendaciones Six Revisions han compartido una selección de infaltables títulos gratuitos online -con versiones físicas de pago- enfocados en la programación básica pero con una calidad que podrá resultar de ayuda tanto a novatos como a expertos. En fin, aquí los compartimos también, eso sí, exceptuando el sexto libro mencionado, todos están en inglés:

1. Cómo diseñar programas, esto es, software de escritorio, webapps y aplicaciones móviles en un enfoque general.

2. 97 cosas que todo programador debería saber, una colección con casi un centenar de artículos especializados repletos de consejos y datos de interés.

3. Fundamentos de Ciencias de la Computación, un referente vigente a pesar de haber sido publicado en 1992.

4. Introducción a la Computación -Informática-, también con conceptos de Ciencias de la Computación aunque con contenidos relacionados con Python y Scheme.

5. Produciendo software Open Source, una revisión a la cultura y desarrollos Open Source junto a proyectos exitosos que le han aprovechado.

6. El código sin código -The Codeless Code-, un compendio de fábulas ilustradas que hablan del trabajo y arte de programar. La mayor parte de historias se encuentra tanto en inglés como en español, francés, italiano y alemán.

7. La arquitectura de las aplicaciones Open Source, más ayuda para aprender sobre el mundo de las creaciones Open Source recopilada en tres libros útiles para principiantes como para experimentados programadores.

8. Fundamentos de Programación, un amplio documento con guías técnicas y buenas prácticas compartidas por el desarrollador de software y especialista Karl Seguin quien se enfoca en .NET.

9. La naturaleza del código, un libro que habla de la presencia de la programación en la naturaleza enseñando así, con guías interactivas, simulaciones básicas de partículas, fractales, células y redes neuronales.

10. Patrones de software, otra selección de historias de la comunidad desarrolladora. Se trata la labor de los programadores, en especial, dentro de la sociedad.

11. Aprende Regex de la manera difícil, para empezar a trabajar con las expresiones regulares, el manejo avanzado de cadenas de texto cuyos conceptos se mantienen aún después de medio siglo.

12. La pequeña introducción a la programación, para repasar conceptos fundamentales de la programación, aprender sobre estructuras de datos, crear programas básicos y conocer detalles generales de diversos lenguajes.

13. Cómo pensar como un Científico de la Computación, una “biblia” de la programación con ejercicios realizados en Python y explicaciones muy claras para aquellos que inician con la codificación y su lógica.

14. Teoría de códigos esencial, una mirada matemática y muy técnica al tema de la codificación. Claro, un buen fundamento científico puede ser de gran ayuda para comprenderlo y sacarle provecho.

15. Desarrollando habilidades en programación, 20 capítulos para conseguir habilidades en programación con ejercicios prácticos en Python. Muy útil para principiantes.

Today is the day you do yourself a favor and unfollow someone how has been driving you nuts.

Ya tenemos más opciones para personalizar nuestra cuenta de Gmail y darle un toque divertido a la comunicación que mantenemos con nuestros contactos.

Al consultar Gmail encontraremos dos novedades con su última actualización en la web: cientos de nuevos temas y emojis.

Se han sumado muchísimos más temas de alta definición para darle un toque especial a nuestra cuenta, según nuestras preferencias. Para ello, se cuenta con la participación de diferentes fotógrafos, algunos de ellos que conocemos por el trabajo que comparten en Google+.

Además, al momento de escoger un tema encontramos un pequeño editor que nos permitirá darle unos toques extra a la imagen que escojamos.

Y como plus, ahora encontraremos emojis para cada ocasión, tal como lo mencionan en el blog de Google. Los tendremos divididos en diferentes categorías tal como los encontramos en diferentes aplicaciones populares.

Todas estas opciones las veremos en los próximos días, a medida que se extienda la actualización a todos los usuarios.

When everyone can put millions of songs in your pocket, the trick is helping you figure out what to listen to.

Touchstone Pictures

In 2003, two years after the introduction of the iPod and six months after the debut of the iTunes Music Store, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told Rolling Stone that music subscription services were going to fail. "People don't want to buy their music as a subscription," he claimed. "... The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful."

A dozen years later, Apple is betting billions of dollars on Apple Music, a streaming music service conceived around the very subscription model Jobs once dismissed, and the second coming at hand is that of a vision of a music consumption that made Apple the world's biggest music retailer. In that sense, Apple Music isn't the new iTunes, it's the new iPod. But instead of offering 1000 songs in your pocket, it's offering damn near every song — and not just in your pocket, but pretty much wherever you feel like listening to them (your car, your computer, your home stereo, your bluetooth speaker on the top the mountain).

With Apple Music, Apple is actually delivering on the promise Jobs made when he first announced the iPod — "it lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go." In October of 2001, that claim was pure Reality Distortion Field hyperbole. Today, services like Spotify, and even iTunes Match, combined with fast phone networks make it a near-truism. Which is simultaneously great and terrible.

Great, because these collections give us access to vast libraries of music — Spotify's catalog boasts more than 30 million songs. Terrible, because 30 million songs is more of a Borgesian library, than collection. Daunting and tough to navigate, it's a library where earnest searches for a new song to play often conclude with listening to a familiar song because it's just easier. OK, sure. I'll just sit here in the basement eating Cheetos while Freedom Rock plays again, I guess. It's a great library with a lousy UX.

Apple Music is an argument. It posits that we want to listen to something new, but we don't know what that is. It claims that music discovery is about more than finding music that simply sounds like other music we already like. It's not about algorithmically generating a list of "related artists." It's about finding music we never knew or expected we'd like, the stuff that takes us by surprise. In that sense, Apple Music is also Aquarius Records — or rather, it aspires to be Aquarius Records.

Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco, and drawing a parallel between it and Apple Music is, perhaps, blasphemy — but the comparison is apt. Because Aquarius is a music store run by curators — people who understand music deeply and sift through a ton of it to uncover the best stuff. With staff faves lists and "Records of the Week," Aquarius is the kind of music store you visit intent on purchasing one thing, and leave with something different because the guy behind the counter convinced you it was the right move (it was). It's a music store that understands the power of serendipitous music discovery, and the personal emotional connection that often goes along with it.

This is something Apple claims to understand as well. Certainly, it was part of the messaging around the unveiling of Apple Music at the company's annual WWDC conference earlier this month. Onstage at that event, Apple's Jimmy Iovine touted Apple Music's human editors as the service's killer feature and a key differentiator from its streaming music rivals. "Algorithms alone cannot do curation; you need a human touch," he said. "These people are going to help you with the biggest question in music: What song comes next?"

That's a very tough question, and current streaming music services have largely failed to answer it. But independent record stores like Aquarius and others have been doing it for years, entirely by hiring people who have both excellent taste, and the ability to understand what will appeal to other people. So, it can be done. The question now is, can it be done at the scale Apple is undertaking?

Apple clearly believes it can. And if it's able to pull it off, it may well have another disruptive music service on its hands. Certainly, with more than a billion iOS devices in people's hands around the world and some 800 million iTunes accounts — most with associated credit card numbers — Apple has the makings of what could someday be the largest paid music streaming service around. But to get there it has to answer that very important question. And it has to do it again, and again, and again. Every time you walk through the door.

Pinterest comienza desde hoy a mostrar Pines comprables para los usuarios de iPhone e iPad en los Estados Unidos. Para que puedan identificar cuando un Pin pertenece a un producto que podrán adquirir, el mismo contará con su respectivo precio, que aparecerá en color azul.

Los usuarios podrán encontrar Pines comprables en la página inicial de sus cuentas de usuario, en tablones, e incluso a través de las búsquedas, y si están buscando productos concretos, podrán comparar productos de características parecidas, e incluso podrán establecer filtros por precios. En caso de que no se decidan a realizar la compra de un producto en concreto, podrán añadirlo a favoritos para su posterior acceso. En cualquier caso, sabrán cuando tendrán acceso a los Pines comprables cuando reciban un mensaje de correo electrónico.

La compañía señala que los Pines comprables son una forma segura de comprar los productos favoritos en Pinterest, señalando que en las próximas semanas, estarán disponibles más de 30 millones de Pines comprables en todo Pinterest pertenecientes a diferentes marcas. Los usuarios también tienen la oportunidad de ver los Pines comprables de una marca determinada simplemente accediendo al perfil que disponga la misma en Pinterest y presionando el botón de tienda.

Apple Pay y las tarjetas de crédito son las formas de pago con las que cuentan los usuarios para realizar sus compras. En este sentido, desde Pinterest se señala que la información personal será guardada al objeto de evitar introducirla en futuras compras.

Los usuarios de Pinterest en equipos de escritorio y en dispositivos móviles Android tendrán que esperar a futuras versiones, según el anuncio, donde se ha indicado tan sólo que se está trabajando duro para que esta disponibilidad sea posible.

In a presentation to investors, the company said onboard Wi-Fi will hit broadband speeds within five years, and be available on many more flights.

Peter Bartsch / Via Flickr: peterbartsch

The Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi service offered on the majority of U.S. domestic flights will soon get dramatically faster, the company has told investors, with speeds ten times faster than today expected to arrive in the coming five years.

The company's current service isn't fast enough to handle things like streaming video, and can only work over land, not water — and even when it's working, it can slow to a crawl if too many users sign in. But that, the company says, will change as it transitions to satellite antennas and ditches its old air-to-ground technology. That transition, and other lofty goals Gogo has for its service, are planned to be completed in next five to 10 years, according to the presentation, which was filed to the SEC on Monday.

Gogo

On its mission to conquer what it calls the "last frontier of internet connectivity", Gogo has had its fair share of challenges.

There were accusations that the provider—the largest by far in the U.S. aviation market—held an illegal monopoly due to lengthy contracts with the country's largest airlines. Not to mention a barrage of customer complaints over the years that Gogo was too expensive, too slow, and too spotty.

Gogo costs around $16 per day or $59.95 per month, and is available on most of the 80% of domestic flights that have Wi-Fi capability. The company said the satellite system will be much cheaper to operate than current services, but did not specify whether those cost savings will ultimately be passed along to air travelers in the form of cheaper inflight Wi-Fi service.

Among the promises Gogo's CEO Michael Small and CFO Norman Smagley made in their presentation, prepared for their address at the NASDAQ Investor Program, is Wi-Fi speeds of 100Mbps (up from today's peak of 10Mbps) rolled out within five years. Gogo expects those higher speeds, and the higher demand that will come with them, to be the platform for huge growth: it expects the number of planes using its service will rise by 150% by 2033.

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Bleeps by Dre.

Brendan Klinkenberg / BuzzFeed

As part of the debut of its new Apple Music streaming service, Apple on Tuesday launched Beats 1: a 24-hour global radio station run by three DJs in three different cities around the world. Early on in his first broadcast, DJ Zane Lowe — a former BBC Radio 1 DJ — queued up a song he touted as "a classic that changed my life": "Let Me Ride," the third single from Dr. Dre's 1992 studio debut, The Chronic — now streaming exclusively on Apple Music.

But it was hardly the "classic" version of the song. It was a sanitized version of the expletive-ridden original. By my count some 30 curses had been scrubbed.

Beats 1 24/7 radio is censoring the music it plays, and it's doing it 24/7.

Reached for comment, Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it is censoring explicit content on Beats 1, and it's doing it worldwide. The company declined to provide any further comment.

Apple's decision to globally censor music on Beats 1 is an interesting one, and hardly industry standard. Pandora, for example, offers a profanity filter, but it's an optional one.

As an online-only service, Beats 1 could broadcast uncensored. But it's not, presumably because Apple is positioning it and Apple Music as a family-friendly service.

Dado el cada vez mayor uso que se hacen de los dispositivos móviles, tanto para aspectos personales como aspectos profesionales, al objeto de facilitar la gestión de los medios sociales, Hootsuite ha lanzado la versión 3.1 de su aplicación para la plataforma móvil Android, donde se han tenido en cuenta aquellos temas que los usuarios han ido exponiendo desde que se lanzara la anterior versión hace unos meses, que supuso una revisión a fondo de la misma.

Hootsuite destaca tres novedades principales: la simplificación a la hora de compartir imágenes en las redes sociales abarcando desde el momento en el que son seleccionadas hasta que son publicadas, los ajustes realizados en la herramienta de programación de contenidos, que cuenta con nuevas funciones para la visualización y publicación de los contenidos, las mejoras en las notificaciones sociales, así como la incorporación del soporte para la reproducción de vídeos y archivos GIFs disponibles en los mensajes.

La idea, como no podía ser de otra manera, es ser más eficientes a la hora de gestionar las redes sociales cuando se está en movilidad, fuera de los equipos de escritorio.

La nueva versión ya se encuentra disponible gratuitamente para su instalación o actualización a través de Google Play, siendo compatible con la mayoría de teléfonos y tabletas Android. Desde Hootsuite, como han venido haciendo hasta ahora, siguen atentos a las opiniones de los usuarios, cuyo feedback servirá para realizar más mejores que se podrán ver en futuras versiones.

Meduza’s exiles cover an authoritarian Russia.

Deputy editor-in-chief Ivan Kokpakov in Meduza's Riga office.

instagram.com

RIGA, Latvia — When Russia closes up, as it has often through the centuries, this Baltic capital becomes a listening post, a safe-ish remove from which to send and receive dispatches from an increasingly controlled society.

And if you are interested in dispatches Russia from right now, one of the best places to turn is a hectic second-floor pre-war apartment on an unprepossessing stretch of Valdemara Street, next door to the Latvian Statistical Bureau and a few blocks from where John F. Kennedy spent part of the summer of 1939.

There, a couple dozen young Russians in sweatshirts cram into a sprawling, seven-room residential apartment with slate blue walls, art nouveau molding, Mac laptops and cheap tables and chairs. The site they produce, Meduza, is a mix of hard news, features, and photography. It all trends a bit dark — but then, they cover Russia.

This could be a media startup anywhere, more or less, and — almost hallucinatory, in a moment when it seems impossible to do free Russian media — that's how the journalists running it see what they're doing.

"We are trying to build a normal startup," says Ilya Krasilshchik, the site's publisher. (One relatively normal startup feature: The site's office was until recently his own apartment.)

But Meduza didn't start in a typical way. Most of its staff were reporters and editors at Lenta.ru, named for the Russian word for "wire" and seen as one of the strongest independent news sites in Russia. Last March 12, as the site faced government criticism over its coverage on Ukraine, its editor, Galina Timchenko, was abruptly fired. She and the core of her team — now 22 reporters in Riga and 4 in Moscow — relocated to Latvia, the easiest place for a bunch of Russians to get a small business going in safety, and a tantalizing hour flight from Moscow. They launched Meduza last October, and quickly recaptured a share of their old audience, according to publicly available estimates, though Lenta remains much larger.

Now, against all odds, Meduza is having a moment: There are so few windows into Russian life that have its mix of true sourcing and proximity, and the freedom that comes from operating outside of Russia. Fewer still of them publish a good-looking English-language site. The Meduza crew worry, of course, that their site will be blocked in Russia, something the government there has done to the blog run by the dissident Alexei Navalny; but which hasn't extended to a Chinese-style broad closure of the internet. But Meduza's staff make an effort, deputy editor Ivan Kolpakov said, not to let that worry affect their coverage, in part because the government is so deliberately opaque, even whimsical. If they are blocked, it is as likely to be for something stupid as for something trenchant. (They were blocked in Kazakhstan, the day they launched, over an investigation of ethnic Russian separatists in the north of that country.)

Russia's power structure has its own online ambitions: Troll armies spread talking points across the web while Kremlin allies push independent voices out of the internet space. Kolpakov said he thinks the next step is building an alternative internet for "big propaganda" — online voices with the production value and investment that has been poured into state-linked Russian TV.

Meduza has found its audience among Russians who want to read independent news. Its biggest traffic days came after the murder of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov. Its coverage of Ukraine has drawn lines between Moscow and the nominally independent separatists there, and charged that fighters are coming back from the front to commit crimes in Russia. The site has also exposed, in richly personal terms, how the tightening propaganda regime works inside state media.

Meduza is also willing to poke at the Russian president. One recent game offered readers the chance to help Putin — notoriously, perhaps deliberately late to meetings — make it to his meeting with the Pope on time.

And meanwhile, the site is trying to figure out the same things that every media startup is navigating at a moment of dramatic change. They worry about Facebook traffic. (One editor referred glumly to the network as "social Putin" — inscrutable and all-powerful, from their perspective.) They sell ads, which account now for 25% of the site's operating costs, they say; brands like McDonald's, for now, feel safe advertising there. They also rely on investments from liberal Russians with money, whose names they will not disclose — the risk to media proprietors is why they fled Moscow in the first place.

They also held talks with Mikhail Khodorkovsky about bringing him in as an investor, "but ultimately failed to reach an agreement on some key issues, such as editorial independence from the investors," said Kolpakov.

They are not flush, to say the least, and are "constantly trying to raise money," says Krasilshchik.

Riga is, meanwhile, driving them a bit insane. The Latvian capital has long been a practical, peaceable, commercial city. It is not, that is to say, a hub of the Russian intelligentsia. It's been, for the last 20 years, where you stash your money, not your ideas. The Meduza crew stop, at times, for selfies on the street with Latvians who admire their courage in the face of a Russian government that is, at present, investigating the legality of their independence from the Soviet Union; the local Russians, they say, have no idea who they are.

They are better known in Moscow, and not always for the better. Earlier this month, a pro-Putin parliamentarian (there is barely any other kind) wrote to the Prosecutor General, demanding an investigation of the site for running an interview with a Russophone recruiter for ISIS, based in Germany. (The German authorities opened an investigation into the militant himself, not in to the publication that exposed him.)

There are other concessions to Russian reality. Meduza has no comments, which for Russian sites have become a playground for paid trolls. The .io (Indian Ocean) domain leaves them free from Russian registrars, at least. And meanwhile, they are publishing like crazy, breaking news, ramping up translations, thinking about licensing their CMS, hoping a game — a version of Brickles that mourns demolished Moscow landmarks — blows up.

"It sounds fantastical," says deputy editor Ivan Kolpakov, "but we are trying to build a media business."

La plataforma de blogs Medium acaba de añadir soporte para el registro y acceso a su servicio sin necesidad de contraseñas, usando simplemente el correo electrónico. El funcionamiento es muy similar a la función que podemos encontrar los usuarios en el momento que olvidamos las contraseñas en diferentes servicios, en la que se nos enviarán un enlace especial de acceso por mensaje de correo electrónico que nos habilita poder iniciar sesión de nuevo.

Pues bien, el sistema de Medium también enviará un enlace especial, válido por unos quince minutos, que permitirá a los usuarios el registro o acceso a su servicio.

De momento el soporte se encuentra disponible tanto en la web como en iOS, llegando también pronto para los dispositivos Android. Desde Medium entienden que las contraseñas no son ni seguras ni simples, siendo difíciles de recordar o fáciles de adivinar, según el caso de cada usuario, donde también hay algunos de ellos que también utiliza los mismos en diferentes servicios. Además, la introducción de las contraseñas en el móvil no suele ser tan fácil como en equipos de escritorio.

Eso sí, aquellos usuarios que accedan a través de sus credenciales de Twitter o Facebook, podrán seguir accediendo como hasta ahora, que en este aspecto no cambia.

Este soporte se enfoca, sobre todo, en aquellos usuarios que quieren usar Medium pero no quieren o no pueden disponer de cuentas en Twitter o Facebook por diferentes motivos, como así se lo han hecho saber a la propia compañía. Quizás el aspecto que más puede incomodar es el hecho de tener que cambiar entre pestañas o abrir la aplicación de correo electrónico, pero se puede considerar un mal menor a tenor del beneficio de esta nueva vía.

El acceso sin contraseñas no es exclusivo de Medium, ya que otras compañías tecnológicas han adoptado soluciones similares, como es el caso de Instapaper hace unos años, o más reciente otras, que envían un código específico por SMS, de manera que tampoco usan enlaces especiales por correo electrónico.