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Video: Trump's Full Speech at NRA Convention in Atlanta 2017
President Donald Trump on Friday spoke at the 2017 annual meeting of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Atlanta, Georgia.
The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is an American nonprofit organization which advocates for gun rights. On May 20, 2016, the NRA endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The timing of the endorsement is unusual, as the NRA typically endorses Republican nominees towards the end of the general election.
Trump was the first sitting president to address the NRA since fellow Republican Ronald Reagan in 1983.
Watch the full speech from below.
Video: Trump’s Full Speech at NRA Convention in Atlanta 2017
Richard Browning, the British inventor dubbed “Wiltshire’s Iron Man”, successfully demonstrated his personal flight suit on the shores of Vancouver harbour, with mini jet engines on his hands.
Inspired by the Marvel comic superhero Iron Man, Browning flew in a circle and hovered a short distance from the ground using thrusters attached to his arms and back, captivating attendees at the Vancouver TED conference.
“The hypothesis was that the human mind and body, if properly augmented, could achieve some pretty cool stuff,” said Browning, an extreme athlete and engineer, at the gathering where he was representing his flight-suit startup company, Gravity.
The personal flight suit, called Daedalus, is capable of propelling wearers much higher and faster than demonstrated on the day, according to Browning. He said he had experimented with various numbers and arrays of the engines on his limbs, with some more successful than others. The current suit is capable of flying for around 10 minutes.
A test flight of the Daedalus from early April.
“The whole journey was about trying and failing, and learning from that,” said Browning . “I don’t think anyone is going to be going down to Walmart with it or taking anybody to school for quite a while, but the team at his Gravity is moving it along.”
A video of Browning’s first reasonably stable, six-second flight in Daedalus has logged more than million views since being posted on YouTube in March. The company has posted various videos showing flights and adjustments to the gear throughout the testing process.
A flight suit that could carry a wearer from the beach along the coast and into a mid-air helicopter for further journeys are a while away, said Browning, but the firm has already received interest from investors including some from those in the British military. They told him they had given up on the flight feature of an Iron Man-style suit until seeing his human-propulsion gear.
Google and Facebook were phished for over $100m, it has been reported, proving not even the biggest technology companies in the world are immune from the increasingly sophisticated attacks of online scammers.
Last month it was reported that two major tech companies were tricked by a Lithuanian man into sending him over $100m (£77m). Evaldas Rimasauskas, 48, was charged with wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft for impersonating Quanta Computer – a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that includes Google, Facebook and Apple as clients.
Now an investigation by Fortune has shown that the two firms Rimasauskas reportedly sent fraudulent invoices to were Facebook and Google, who both paid out over $100m.
Facebook said in a statement: “We recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation.” Likewise Google said it had “detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities. We recouped the funds and we’re pleased this matter is resolved.”
The case shows just how big an issue phishing and online fraud has become, with phishing attacks conning people and companies all over the world out of significant sums of money.
Where the age old Nigerian Prince scams still operate with bogus claims of money, techniques used by the thieves have become increasingly sophisticated. The National Audit Office warned in December that the UK was ill prepared for online fraud and that it cost UK consumers at least £14.8bn last year, of which £4.2bn is thought to be hidden and unreported losses from crime such as mass marketing fraud and counterfeit goods.
In January, accountants KPMG recorded the value of fraud committed in the UK last year reported to the court system to have exceeded £1.1bn – a 55% year-on-year rise highlighting a dramatic rise in cybercrime.
From costly conveyancing scams to fake IT support, it’s more important than ever to double-check anything asking for personal details or money. But when even Facebook and Google, who make technology that is meant to help protect against online scammers, get tricked, it paints a grim picture for your average user.
Having hit a home run with the smaller Galaxy S8, is Samsung’s Galaxy S8+ the bigger-screen phone to beat?
The Galaxy S8 and S8+ are practically identical metal and glass sandwiches, but the S8+ is 10.6mm taller, 5.3mm wider, 0.1mm thicker and 18g heavier than the S8, with a screen-to-body ratio of over 83%.
Like the S8, it is unusually tall for its width when compared to the competition (a radio of 18.5:9 rather than 16:9). At 73.4mm wide, S8+’s body is noticeably narrower than rivals despite having a larger 6.2in QHD+ screen. Compared to the 77.9mm wide iPhone 7 Plus, the S8+ is 4.5mm narrower, it’s 2.3mm narrower than the 75.7mm Google Pixel XL and 1.3mm narrower than the 74.7mm OnePlus 3T – all of which have 5.5in screens. The usual ratio means the S8+ is also taller than most of the competition, including the iPhone 7 Plus, being 159.5mm from top to bottom.
This means the top of the device is almost unreachable one-handed, though that isn’t too much of an issue most of the time thanks to some clever software. The bigger problem for some will be physically fitting it in a pocket. In some men’s straight Gap jeans, which have relatively generous pockets, the top of the phone is almost uncomfortably close to poking out. If you wear tighter jeans or trousers with smaller pockets you may find the S8+ just too tall.
The best screen. Full stop.
Full-screen video on the Samsung Galaxy S8 (top) and the S8+ (bottom).Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The display of the S8+ is, frankly, epic. At 6.2in it’s one of the biggest screens available on a top-end smartphone and with its inky blacks, rich colours and large range of brightness, it shines in almost any condition. Watching HDR video is particularly luscious, and the screen is big enough to make you question whether a tablet’s really needed.
Like the S8, the S8+ is set to the equivalent of full HD resolution, not the full QHD+ resolution the display is capable of showing. Users can switch between QHD+, FHD+ and a 720p equivalent to save battery life at the detriment of display crispness.
The home button is now virtual with a pressure-sensitive spot on the screen, acting as both a software and hardware button in one. Samsung’s usual capacitive back and recent apps buttons are now also virtual, in line with most other Android devices.
The S8+ is water resistant to depths of 1.5m for 30 minutes with an IP68 rating, and Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5, which should hopefully make both front and back more scratch and shatter resistant.
Press hard where the square home button is displayed to activate the pressure-sensitive action.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
Specifications
Screen: 6.2in quad HD+ AMOLED (529ppi)
Processor: octa-core Samsung Exynos 8895 or octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
RAM: 4GB of RAM
Storage: 64GB + microSD card
Operating system: Android 7.0 with TouchWiz
Camera: 12MP rear camera with OIS, 8MP front-facing camera
Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC, wireless charging, Bluetooth 5, GPS and Iris sensor
Dimensions: 159.5 x 73.4 x 8.1 mm
Weight: 173g
30+ hours battery life
The always-on display helps keep you up to date, but consumes between 5 and 10% of battery a day.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
I tested the European Exynos 8895 version of the Galaxy S8. US Galaxy S8 buyers will get a version that uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 instead.
The Galaxy S8+ has the same processor, same amount of RAM and same amount of storage as the S8 and behaves the same. The S8+ also supports the new cat 9 LTE – the fastest of 4G technologies currently available in large urban areas only through EE – and the brand new Bluetooth 5.0 standard, which will provide much more advanced and robust support for wireless headphones among other things in the near future.
The S8+ has a slightly larger battery than the S8 and it shows. Using it as my primary device, browsing and using apps for four hours with hundreds of push emails, 90 minutes of gaming, and listening to around five hours of music via Bluetooth headphones, the Galaxy S8+ lasted over 30 hours between charges. That was with the screen set to QHD+, the always-on display (AOD) active and no power-saving modes activated.
Setting the screen to FHD+ and turning off AOD the S8+ managed another 2-3 hours between charges, while the battery saving modes could easily make the S8+ last two days of fairly heavy use.
The S8, which has a slightly smaller battery, lasted just over 24 hours in a similar scenario.
TouchWiz
One-handed mode makes managing the big screen a little easier.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The S8+ runs the latest version of Samsung’s customised Android, TouchWiz, based on Android 7.0 Nougat, not the latest 7.1. It’s the same version as the S8. For more on TouchWiz, please see the Galaxy S8 review.
The bigger screen makes multi-window – where you have two apps side-by-side on the screen – more useful. Because the screen is so long, when landscape in multi-window mode, the apps are about the same width as the Galaxy S8’s screen, but they’re still a little pokey to use because they’re squat. I found it good for quick things or watching a video while replying to emails, but not much more than that.
One-handed mode, which shrinks the screen down to the left or right side of the phone, works well. Triple tap the home button or swipe in from the corner to activate it for when two hands aren’t available.
The S8+ also has Samsung’s new smart assistant called Bixby, which is designed as a Google Assistant or Siri rival, but isn’t quite as capable as Google Assistant.
The voice features aren’t available yet, the personalised news feeds, reminders and widgets aren’t any better than rivals, and the Bixby Vision object recognition is a bit hit and miss. Bixby may improve, but it doesn’t have access to quite as much data as rivals, which means it may struggle.
Biometrics
Iris scanning gives you another option for secure biometric authentication, when fingerprints don’t work.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The S8+ has a fingerprint scanner, iris scanner and facial recognition built in for unlocking the phone and authenticating purchases.
As with the S8, the fingerprint scanner is placed on the back next to the camera, but now the device is much longer. Despite being used to phablets with fingerprint scanners on the back I found it initially awkward and unreliable. I got used to it after a few days, adjusting my default holding position higher up the phone, but it would be much better placed below the camera.
The iris scanner on the front is a good alternative to inputting a passcode or pattern to unlock the device, if you’re not in direct sunlight. It came in handy when the phone was flat on the desk, but it will struggle with glasses and contact lenses.
Cameras
No camera lump on the back, just a bezel to help protect the lens and a fingerprint scanner on the right.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The S8+ has the same 12-megapixel rear and 8-megapixel selfie camera as the S8, which makes it one of the best on the market, particularly in poor lighting conditions.
S8+’s camera app is one of the best available with a new floating shutter button making selfies and one-handed photos much easier on the large device – put it where you can reach and not drop your phone while trying to get the perfect snap.
Observations
The Galaxy S8 (left) and the Galaxy S8+ (right).Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
There’s a notification LED that can be set to flash for various events
The S8 supports HDR video including that from Amazon Video
You can play the sound from two apps to two different devices at the same time, such as music to a Bluetooth speaker and game audio through the built-in speaker
The secure folder allows you to keep certain apps or duplicates of apps in a password or biometrically secured folder, handy for work-specific versions of apps you might want to use
Gaming on the large, extra-wide S8+ is brilliant – your thumbs are tucked out the way of the main action in the middle of the screen
The Adapt Sound function, which tunes audio using either a fully-custom sound profile or presets for people under 30, people over 30 and people over 60 actually made a surprising amount of difference (I’m over 30)
There was no red tint or any other issue visible
Price
The Samsung Galaxy S8 costs £779 with 64GB of storage in black or grey due to ship on 28 April.
There are two reasons to buy the Galaxy S8+ – an epic screen and solid battery life. Everything else is pretty much the same as the smaller S8, but it’s more awkward to hold and carry.
There’s no doubt it’s a great phone that’s practically unrivalled on the display front. Samsung has done a fantastic job of shrinking the rest of the device down, and it’s still more manageable than the tired designs used by some rivals, but I think a 6.2in screen is a stretch too far.
The S8+ is the king of massive phones, but it’s just not quite the best smartphone available.
Pros: 64GB + microSD card slot, wireless charging, IP68, brilliant screen, good battery life, great camera, iris scanner, pressure-sensitive screen, notification LED
Cons: fixed battery, only Android 7.0, no USB-PD, fingerprint scanner placement not great
The curved edges and polished metal sides make the Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy S8 the most tactile Samsung smartphones to date.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The fastest route is via Kandy-Mahiyangane-Padiyatalawa Highway which takes approximately 5 h 18 min (225 km).
About Sorabora Wewa
Sorabora Wewa is an ancient reservoir in Mahiyangana, Badulla District Sri Lanka. It is thought to have been constructed during the reign of King Dutugemunu (161 BC – 137 BC) by a giant named Bulatha. In the ancient past, this tank was known as the ‘Sea of Bintenna‘.
I visited Sorabora wewa on the month of April 2017. Thanks to Mr. Vivek we were able to capture some awsome images.
Let’s Go….
This rock cut deep canal acts as the sluice for the tank. Currently the tank and this ancient structure have been declared as archaeological protected monuments.
This dam covers vast acres and while we walking through we found very unique trees with heavy timbers. These type of tree could find in Mahiyanganaya only.
Decrying how addictive and attention-sapping smartphones have become was an unexpected way for an executive at Facebook, a company that profits off your attention, to open a talk. But that’s exactly how Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook’s innovation skunkworks Building 8, started her presentation at the company’s developer conference F8 on Wednesday.
Smartphones have been a powerful force in the world but they have had some “unintended consequences” she said.
“[The smartphone] has cost us something. It has allowed us to connect with people far away from us too often at the expense of people sitting right next to us,” she said. “We know intuitively and from experience that we’d all be better off if we looked up a little more often.”
Angrily telling people to put down the “addictive drug that is your smartphone” and honor the conversation in front of them is the “wrong narrative”, she said. “It’s a false choice. This device is important.”
So what is the answer to this very modern affliction? Mindfulness apps? Yoga? A digital detox?
Nope. According to Facebook it’s developing technology to read your brainwaves so that you don’t have to look down at your phone to type emails, you can just think them.
Facebook has assembled a team of 60 people, including machine learning and neural prosthetics experts, to enable such a system. Facebook is currently hiring a brain-computer interface engineer and a neural imaging engineer. Its goal? To create a system capable of typing one hundred words per minute – five times faster than you can type on a smartphone – straight from your brain.
“It sounds impossible but it’s closer than you may realize.”
She highlighted the example of a woman with ALS who had a pea-sized implant that could pick up on signals in her brain to allow her to type eight words per minute using the power of thought.
Facebook will have to develop a system that doesn’t require surgery to implant electrodes.
“That simply won’t scale,” said Dugan.
Regina Dugan: ‘It sounds impossible but it’s closer than you may realize.’Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters
Instead, Facebook plans to develop non-invasive sensors that can measure brain activity hundreds of times per second at high resolution to decode brain signals associated with language in real time. “No such technology exists today; we’ll need to develop one.”
Facebook is looking at using optical imaging – using lasers to capture changes in the properties of neurons as they fire – to glean words straight from our brain before we say them. If these signals can be read, they can be transmitted silently to other people.
If the thought that a company that makes almost all of its money from harvesting your personal data could also have access to your thoughts is scary, that’s because it is.
Dugan attempted to assuage people’s fears by pointing out that Facebook would only decode the words you were going to say anyway. “It’s not about decoding random thoughts,” she said. “We’re talking about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain.”
Quite how consumers would know whether the privacy of their “random thoughts” was also being violated remains be seen, but Dugan remained upbeat, describing the concept as having the “convenience of voice but the privacy of text”.
“You can text a friend without taking out your phone or send a quick email without missing a party. No more false choices.”
But this is a false choice. Just because you aren’t typing into a phone doesn’t mean you aren’t distracted by its underlying capabilities. You are still composing an email with your mind even though you might be face to face with a friend. Arguably being present but distracted is worse than taking a moment to type a message into a device. At least the other person knows what’s going on.
Another reason why Facebook wants to read our brain activity is to develop the equivalent of a “brain mouse” for augmented reality. She painted a picture of a future where everyone wears augmented reality glasses that supplement our field of vision with additional information such as directions, and enhanced capabilities such as real-time translation of people’s voice or the ability to “mute” specific people and noises from your soundscape. What’s lacking in this augmented future is a user interface. When we don’t have a smartphone or a computer mouse, how can we select and click on a piece of digital content?
That’s where the brain-computer interface comes in.
Another problem Facebook wants to solve is how to input those thoughts to another person’s brain. It’s all very well being able to think an email into existence, but the other person still has to read it. Facebook wants the recipient not to read the email, but to feel it.
Dugan showed a video of experiment her team had set up where basic words were communicated via a sleeve worn on the arm that vibrates in specific patterns.
“Frances is an electrical engineer. She can hear through her skin,” said Dugan.
What does it mean to “hear” through one’s skin? Just as blind people learn to read braille, Frances had learned a vocabulary of nine words that correspond to different sensations delivered by the sleeve. With an hour of practice she now feels the words.
In the future, said Dugan, “it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and you to feel it instantly in Spanish”.
Dugan acknowledged there were a lot of hard problems to solve first, but said “success matters, so if we fail it’s gonna suck”. However, that’s one of the risks associated with doing work that matters.
“The risk of failure and that slightly terrified feeling that comes with it is the price we pay for the privilege of making something great,” she said.
If Facebook does succeed, however, it won’t just be its research and development teams who feel “slightly terrified”.
Huawei hopes that its latest flagship smartphone, the P10, will help secure it as the world’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer. But has this Leica dual camera-equipped device got what it takes to compete?
The P10 is Huawei’s most attractive and best made smartphone yet, with a very solid and smooth feel in the hand in an interesting variety of colours.
It has a 5.1in full HD LCD display, which is 0.1in smaller than last year’s P9, making it one of the more compact flat designs. The screen looks good, but not spectacular. It has good colour and viewing angles while the bezels on each side are pretty small. The screen sits under a single uniform piece of glass, which has a small indentation where the fingerprint scanner lies under.
The sides of the handset are rounded and the buttons are solid with a pleasing red accent on the power button. The back is a single metal sheet, with Huawei’s glass window containing the dual cameras and other bits at the top.
The power button has a subtle red colour on its chamfered edge.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The design is certainly iterative and refined, but perhaps a tad boring compared to the bezel-less phones that are being launched in 2017. The most interesting design element is actually the finish on the back of certain colour variants.
The “dazzling” blue and gold colours have a diamond texture etched onto the back, which makes it look like a highly polished finish, but instead has a textured, gripping and, most importantly, fingerprint proof surface. It’s really quite stunning.
Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fiac, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, USB-C and GPS
Dimensions: 145.3 x 69.3 x 6.98mm
Weight: 145g
HiSilicon
The matt black back is attractive, but not a patch on the dazzling blue.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The P10 runs Huawei’s latest octa-core chip, the Kirin 960, which also runs within the Mate 9. In fact, the P10 has pretty much the same specifications as the Mate 9 with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage and performs very similarly.
It feels snappy. No lag within any games or apps was perceptible, and it handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. It’s certainly as high performing as any smartphone released in the last six months, but also has solid battery life, making it through a hard day of use.
Using the P10 as my primary device, snapping about 10 photos, listening to four hours of music a day via Bluetooth earbuds, browsing and using apps for three hours and with hundreds of push notifications and emails coming in through the day, it would last just over 24 hours per charge. Standby time was particularly impressive and there are various power-saving modes for extending battery life. Quick-charging technology means a full charge takes around 90 minutes in my testing – a significant improvement over last year’s P9.
EMUI 5.1
The fingerprint scanner can double as a multi-purpose home button.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
Huawei customises Android with both underlying changes to the core system as well as visual changes collectively called Emotion UI (EMUI). The P10 has the latest version, EMUI 5.1, which is the best version yet based on Android 7 Nougat.
It is streamlined and well optimised, meaning most actions are fast to perform with a minimal number of taps. Coming with a cool black, white, grey and electric blue colour scheme, there are also hundreds of different themes to choose from. There is also an option to either have an iOS-style home screen or a more standard Android look with an app drawer.
Under the hood, Huawei has made changes to the operating system with much greater control over power-hungry apps, which helps extend battery life greatly, but has also implemented a system to locally learn user behaviour and optimise the system to launch the apps that it predicts you’ll want faster at any given time.
In my testing, common apps do indeed launch very fast and are ready to go almost instantly. The final big tweak Huawei has made is a system that cleans itself, promising to keep out cruft and make sure the phone runs as fast 18 months down the line as it does on day one. That’s not something that I can test, however.
Overall, EMUI 5.1 is refined and is worth giving a chance. I don’t like all of it, but it has its positives. How fast Huawei is able to update it as new versions of Android and security patches are release remains to be seen.
Fingerprint scanner
Fast, accurate but at the bottom of the screen.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The fingerprint scanner on the P10 is placed underneath the screen on the front of the phone in a little indent in the glass, instead of the back as with every other top-end Huawei model. As a way to unlock the phone, it’s fast, responsive and accurate – not once did it fail to unlock.
But Huawei has made the fingerprint scanner more useful with some new gestures that can replace the standard Android navigation buttons. A swipe left or right opens the overview of recently used apps, a tap acts as the back button and a tap and hold acts as the home button.
It works well enough, but it removes one of my favourite features of Android: a double tap of the overview to jump to the last used app and so I preferred the on-screen navigation buttons.
Camera
The camera app has enough options to keep most happy, but no automatic HDR mode.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The P10 has the latest iteration of Huawei’s dual-camera co-engineered with Leica, which essentially means it meets the German camera and lens manufacturer’s standards, marked with the firm’s Summarit brand.
It has one 12-megapixel colour camera on the back paired with a 20-megapixel monochrome camera, which work together to boost the amount of light and detail captured in each image, as well as providing a lossless 2x zoom.
The results are really rather good. The P10 was capable of images rich in detail and accurate colouring in good light, even without the HDR mode active. It performed well in low and challenging light conditions too, producing good if not quite spectacular images, while images captured at 2x zoom were best in class.
Images shot in monochrome were particularly sharp, and added another fun element to photography with the P10.
The Leica dual camera on the back is flush with the rest of the body – no camera bump to be seen.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The selfie camera also did a solid job, producing detail rich images. It has many beauty effects that some might find flattering, including a “perfect selfie” mode that allows you to automatically apply a set of modifications to your face using facial recognition.
One of the biggest new features is a dedicated portrait mode, that performs a couple of software tricks to improve pictures of people, including selfies. The first is a lighting adjustment, which highlights the face with a slider adjustment and works very well, enhancing detail and balancing colour in the face. The second is a bokeh effect, which works less well. Like most software effects, it struggles with hair and other bits and pieces that do not produce sharp edges or appear in the same focal plane. You can get good results, but more often than not I produced better images without it active.
Observations
The P10 is not compatible with Google’s DayDream VR headset
It has a similar antenna design as the iPhone 7
The phone has very strong signal performance, holding onto a reliable data connection in more places than many other smartphones on the market
Call quality was excellent
The smart gallery app performs similar functions to Google Photos, but performs the image processing on device
The machine learning systems store all data locally on the phone and do not send it to Huawei
The P10 has Google Now on Tap, not the newer Google Assistant for now
Price
The Huawei P10 costs £549 with 64GB of storage in a wide selection of colours. For comparison, the OnePlus 3T costs £399 with 64GB of storage, Google’s Pixel costs £599 with 32GB of storage, Samsung’s Galaxy S8 costs £689 with 64GB of storage and Apple’s iPhone 7 costs £599 with 32GB of storage.
Verdict
The Huawei P10 is the Chinese firm’s best phone to date. It’s well made, feels good, performs very well, has an excellent camera on the back and a good fingerprint sensor on the front.
If it had been released in 2016 it would have been one of the best phones of the year without a doubt, but in 2017 the goal posts have been moved. We’ve had not one but two smartphones released with a new, almost-bezel-less design already and they’ve changed what we should expect from a top end smartphone with a premium price.
The P10 is a great phone, and with smart systems I’m sure it will do very well, but it’s just not special.
Pros: fast and responsive, great standby, great, fun cameras, good build, nice feel, microSD card support, privacy features
Cons: boring compared to rivals, battery life could be longer, no Google Assistant
A future version of Google Chrome may include a built-in adblocker, designed to prevent the most intrusive online adverts from being displayed on users’ computers and smartphones by default.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google could announce the feature within weeks, but the specifics are not yet set in stone, and the company may yet scrap the entire plan.
If it does go ahead, the company would outsource the definition of unacceptable adverts to the Coalition for Better Ads, an independent group set up by a consortium of major advertisers and agencies in March. Its standards were set in place after “comprehensive research” involving more than 25,000 participants.
On desktop, the group bans “pop-up ads, auto-play video ads with sound, prestitial ads with countdown and large sticky ads”. On mobile “pop-up ads, prestitial ads, ads with density greater than 30%, flashing animated ads, auto-play video ads with sound, poststitial ads with countdown, full-screen scrollover ads, and large sticky ads” fail to make the standards.
One element of the plan which has yet to be fixed is what form the block would take: the Wall Street Journal suggests that Google may choose to block all advertising on sites with any offending ads, rather than just blocking the offending adverts themselves. That would lead to a much stronger push to publishers to ensure that all adverts on their page comply with the Coalition’s criteria.
Blocking ads may seem like a counterintuitive move for Google, which makes 86% of its revenue from advertising but the move could help avoid users adopting more aggressive, adblockers.
The majority of adverts Google serves comply with the Coalition’s standards, and its largest single revenue source – keyword adverts on search pages – is already seen as the gold standard of advert acceptability by many external critics. Another “acceptable ads” board, created by adblock developer Eyeo (which makes the Adblock Plus plugin for Chrome and Firefox), similarly allows Google’s search adverts through. But Eyeo charges large companies a portion of their revenue for the privilege of being on the Acceptable Ads list, a fee which publishers like Google and Amazon begrudgingly pay.
Unlike Facebook, its largest competitor in the digital advertising sector,the majority of Google’s ad revenue comes from users on the open web, where adblockers are technologically unhindered in how much content they can filter out of user’s browsing experience. Facebook, with an audience increasingly using the company’s own mobile apps, is largely protected from the adblocking boom, though it has still taken a more aggressive stance towards the tools, actively seeking to bypass them on its desktop website.
Chrome does already block some adverts, though not directly. A feature enabled by default in the browser prevents pop-ups from being shown unless a specific site is whitelisted. But the feature will block pop-ups regardless of whether or not they’re adverts, allowing it to skirt round the conventional definition of an adblocker; similarly, Chrome requires any content served using the Flash plugin to be manually activated, which blocks many adverts in practice (though a declining number of adverts are served using the ageing technology, partially as a result of Google’s changes).
Even before Google’s entry into the space was rumoured, adblocking developers had already begun changing how they interacted with publishers. Companies such as Eyeo and Brave, which block adverts, both allow a proportion of adverts through if they’re deemed to fit their own standards of acceptability; and both developers also have systems in place to allow users to pay for content in other ways than through advertising, if the publishers are interested in playing along.
If it launches, the adblocker could have ramifications for Google’s ongoing struggles with EU regulators. The European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, said “We will follow this new feature and its effects closely.”
Google told the Guardian: “We do not comment on rumour or speculation. We’ve been working closely with the Coalition for Better Ads and industry trades to explore a multitude of ways Google and other members of the Coalition could support the Better Ads Standards.”
It was orange, the Citroën C3, zingy orange with its signature air bumps – bobbly side-panels, presumably in some part made of air – carved in black, so obviously I jumped straight in, and before I knew it I was on the M25 in the dark, rain driving towards my windscreen like pellets. It was the wrong time to find out that the wipers were a little lackadaisical, like twin teenagers who said they wanted to clean your car but really just wanted a fiver.
Let’s talk about the point of those air bumps, since they are unignorable, even more so on this than on the larger Cactus. They exist so that you can have a little ding and it won’t show. Then you can have another, and another, and when it starts to show, you can replace your panels at far less expense than bashing back the bodywork. So the obvious question is: how many times do you intend to crash this car? Because in my experience – and this is anecdata worthless to anyone but Michael Gove – it’s quite rare to go into the side of someone. And I can tell you from the one time I did it – in a Vauxhall Mokka, into a hairdresser who needs her car for work – that people don’t like it. Really, the only way to get the most out of a C3 and its USP is if everybody has one. If you’re going to design a car on the basis that everyone will have one, why not do something much cooler, like make it horizontally stackable or solar powered on a wireless multishare grid? Huh?
I suspect the air bumps are there to give you peace of mind for when you think you might crash: so we’re either talking about a driver who is gung-ho, or the fact that the handling is a little floaty, the body control is pretty loose, and the road conditions shoot through you, like reading the history of the tarmac in butt-braille. So often, you think, “I don’t have as much control over this vehicle as perhaps I would like. In fact I feel a bit like I’ve stumbled on to a motorway in what is really a toy devised for the child of an oligarch. But never mind! For anything untoward, I have my air bumps.”
The interior feels pricier than the drive. A lot of black leather, a seven-inch touchscreen, a superfluity of speakers, Bluetooth connectivity. I take a lot of these things as given, but I had a passenger who’d not been in a new car for a couple of years and she was astonished. I also went antiquing and got a curtain rod into it with no bother at all. So it’s not all bad; but nor would I say it was entirely good.
Citroën C3 in numbers
Price £19,330 Acceleration 0 to 62mph in 10.6 seconds Top speed 115mph CO2 emissions 95g/km Combined mileage 76mpg Eco factor 9/10 Cool factor 6/10
Dambana is a village within the Badulla District in Sri Lanka. It is closest to the town of Mahiyangana. It is known as the refuge of the indigenous Vedda people as well as their moribund Vedda language. It is well known for its eco-tourism projects, operated by Eco Team. 2010 it had population close 1000 individuals all belonging to Vedda families.
The closest town to Dambana is Mahiyanganaya. It is said that Gautama Buddha visited Mahiyanganaya on the full moon Poya day of January in order to settle a dispute arose between Yakkas and Nagas (two tribes then inhabited this area) and this was his first ever visit to Sri Lanka.
How to reach Dambana Wedi Gammanaya
There are two main routes to Dambana from Colombo by car,
Fastest is via Kandy-Mahiyangane-Padiyatalawa Highway – 5 h 57 min (234 km)
via Kandy-Mahiyangane-Padiyatalawa Highway – 6 h 3 min (211km)
About Vedda
The Vedda are an indigenous people of Sri Lanka who, among other self-identified native communities such as Coast Veddas and Anuradhapura Veddas, are accorded indigenous status. Most speak Sinhala and Tamil instead due to the near-extinction of their indigenous languages.
According to the 5th-century genesis chronicle of the Sinhala people, the Mahavamsa (“Great Chronicle”), the Vedda are descended from Prince Vijaya (6th–5th century BCE), through Kuveni, a woman of the indigenous Yakkha whom he married.
Anthropologists such as Charles Gabriel Seligman believed the Veddas to be identical to the Yakkha. Veddas are also mentioned in Robert Knox’s history of his captivity by the King of Kandy in the 17th century. Knox described them as “wild men”, but also said there was a “tamer sort”, and that the latter sometimes served in the king’s army.
We visited Damabana during April 2017. Thanks to Mr. Vivek we were able to take some great photos of their culture, religion and society.
Let’s start the journey….
Driving towards Wariga Mahagedara (Wedi Gammanaya) which means Village of Veddas .
One of the Vedda, selling their products. “Rings and pendants made by Elephant Horns, bee honey and some medicine timbers.
Dambana School
Wedi Naayakaya and Tourist Meeting Center
Below are the place present wedi Naayakaya uses to meet tourists. Unfortunately we couldn’t meet him cause He was out for cricket match in Kandy. However picture with Wedi Naayakaya is prohibited.
Previous Wedi Naayakaya’s Shrine
Pictures from the Museum
Vedda Marriage Ceremony
Vedda marriage is a simple ceremony. It consists of the bride tying a bark rope (diya lanuva) that she has twisted, around the waist of the groom. This symbolizes the bride’s acceptance of the man as her mate and life partner. In Vedda society, women are in many respects men’s equals.
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