Download Free Stuff From Reddit’s Favorite Websites

Download Free Stuff From Reddit’s Favorite Websites

https://ift.tt/2K3YgkM

“What are some cool websites where you can download free stuff?” asked redditor howtoadvanced. He got over 5,000 answers. We’ve gone through and categorized the best ones, identifying each resource. You could spend the rest of your life just entertaining and educating yourself with the free books, music, games, apps, and other freebies available on the sites listed here. (Don’t go cancelling your Netflix, but maybe stop paying Amazon for books that Project Gutenberg hands out for free.)

Unless noted (and with the possible exception of some “abandonware” sites) these are legal and legitimate resources, but some are only for personal use. Always check before you use a resource commercially or publicly.

Books

Data

(special thanks to redditor chinchalinchin)

  • Quandl: Free and paid financial data
  • American FactFinder: Searchable data from the U.S. census
  • Last10K.com: SEC filings, including annual and quarterly reports
  • BEA: Economic data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
  • NASA’s Open Data Portal: Every public NASA dataset
  • OECD Data: International economic data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
  • Sexualitics: Performance data from a large portion of uploads to porn sites xHamster and Xnxx
  • Project EUCLID: Mathematics papers
  • arXiv.org: Academic papers in the sciences
  • Vertex42: Spreadsheet templates for Excel and Google Sheets

Video Games

Design and Art

Development

Music

Apps

Etc.

  • XOWA: Download all of Wikipedia
  • Archive.org: A motherlode of collections of music, videos, images, games, and written materials from non-profits, schools, government organizations, and the public domain. See top collections on the front page. Also home to the Wayback Machine.
  • NYPL Digital Collections: Digitized ephemera from the New York Public Library
  • Library of Congress Digital Collections: Digitized ephemera from the Library of Congress
  • Library of Babel: Technically contains every book up to a certain length—because it contains every combination of characters, almost all of them gibberish, only generated the moment you load the page

Basically Just Pirating

Probably illegal. Proceed with caution and/or guilt.

Find more free (and legal) resources at allOPEN.org, a collection curated by redditor corydave.

What are some cool websites where you can download free stuff? | AskReddit

Tech

via Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com

May 8, 2018 at 08:01AM

Equifax Now Says Over 56,000 Driver’s Licenses, Passports, and Other IDs Were Stolen, Too

Equifax Now Says Over 56,000 Driver’s Licenses, Passports, and Other IDs Were Stolen, Too

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Credit-reporting agency Equifax has revealed new details this week about the personal data of customers exposed in last year’s data breach.

In response to questions raised by members of Congress, Equifax released several figures related to the stolen information, which had not previously been reported. In addition to the 145.5 million Americans whose Social Security information was exposed by the breach, the company said, tens of thousands may have impacted after images of their driver’s licenses, passports, and other identifying papers were accessed.

According to a report filed by Equifax on Monday, the hackers responsible accessed data collected through the firm’s online dispute portal, which provides customers a means to dispute inaccuracies in their Equifax credit files. The portal requires users in some instances to upload photocopies of identity papers and Social Security information.

The breached dispute portal database, according to Equifax, contained as many as 38,000 driver’s licenses; 12,000 Social Security or taxpayer ID cards; 3,200 passports or passport cards; and 3,200 other government-issued identification documents, such as military IDs, state-issued IDs, and resident alien cards.

In total, as many as 182,000 US consumers images uploaded to the dispute database. However, the documents do not identify any additional consumers affected, Equifax said, and the company previously made attempts to notify the customers through direct mail.

Equifax additionally released to Congress a table breaking down the different data elements stolen and the approximate number of Americans affected.

Last week, Equifax shareholders voted to re-elect the agency’s board members, including three who served on the company’s technology committee at the time of the breach. Although the board members retained their positions, more than a third of the shareholders voted for them to step down.

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

May 8, 2018 at 09:48AM

Google reportedly plans Android tools to help you manage screen time

Google reportedly plans Android tools to help you manage screen time

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Nevena1987 via Getty Images

Google keeps dropping announcements ahead of tomorrow’s I/O event, including bringing more Assistant features to Wear OS, new web site mute features in Chrome, Google Pay to the web and supporting even more devices with Google Assistant. Now, according to a report in the Washington Post, Google will be announcing more controls for its Android operating system that will help individuals manage the time they spend on mobile devices.

The idea here is that people may need some technological help to limit the amount of time they spend on their smartphones. Adding more control over screen time can only help the company avoid the same fate as Apple, which has been warned by its own investors that kids are overusing iPhones. Apple responded with a commitment to improving its mobile parental control systems.

Google already has Family Link, a set of mobile tools that let parents manage the time their kids can spend on apps, including an option to lock their children’s devices, a feature Apple’s OS does not have. Expanding similar options to adults can only help manage the public perception of Google as a mobile device maker. According to the Post’s sources, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is set to focus on the theme of responsibility instead of straight technology (though surely there will be plenty of that).

Tech

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

May 7, 2018 at 08:21PM

Report: Butterfly MacBook Pro keyboards require more frequent, more expensive repairs

Report: Butterfly MacBook Pro keyboards require more frequent, more expensive repairs

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Enlarge /

The keyboard on the 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro.

An AppleInsider article has stoked some consumer frustration over Apple’s butterfly keyboards. In it, AppleInsider combed through a limited dataset of warranty events from participating Apple Genius Bars and third-party repair shops. The site determined that, in that data, the 2016 MacBook Pro’s keyboard accounted for twice the percentage of all warranty events in that machine’s first year on the market as its predecessors from 2014 and 2015 did.

These keyboards already have plenty of detractors. They have very short travel, which serves two functions: it frees up a tiny bit of space in the machine for other components (every nanometer counts), and it can make typing considerably faster since not as much effort is needed to register a key press. I like these keyboards, but a lot of other people feel strongly that they’re terrible to type on.

The AppleInsider report has resulted in Apple customers expressing frustration in forums and on Reddit. Detractors have even started a Change.org petition asking Apple to recall all MacBook Pros from 2016 and later and replace their keyboards with a new design that is less prone to failure. That’s not likely to happen—partly because it’s not practical and partly because the data is not as conclusive as it might seem.

The article claims that “the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard is failing twice as often in the first year of use as the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro models,” but that’s not exactly what the data shows. That’s because the “twice as often” conclusion is based on the percentage of all tracked repairs that the keyboard constituted, as Daring Fireball notes. The 2016 MacBook Pro had fewer warranty events over all, so while the absolute number of keyboard-related events didn’t double, the percentage of all repairs that were keyboard-related did. Further, the 2017 model’s slightly revised keyboard saw significant improvements on this front, so as usual, it’s the earliest adopters who are dealing with the most problems.

The numbers

In AppleInsider’s data, the 2014 MacBook Pro (inclusive of both the 13-inch and 15-inch models) “saw 2,120 service events in the first year” it was on the market. 2015’s MacBook Pro saw 1,904 service events. The 2016 MacBook Pro saw only 1,402. AppleInsider found 165 keyboard-related incidents (excluding those related to the Touch Bar) in its data for the 2016 MacBook Pro’s first year on the market. There were 114 in 2015 and 118 in 2014—two prior years that used the older chiclet keyboard design. That’s an increase of about 45 percent and 40 percent, respectively, but not double.

There’s another wrinkle, though: return visits. Out of the 2015 model’s 114 keyboard-related repairs in the dataset, six returned for a second repair for the keyboard, and none did for a third. In 2015, it was eight out of 118 for a second repair, and once again no third round of repairs. In contrast, 51 customers out of the 161 who initially sought repairs for their 2016 MacBook Pro keyboards returned for a second round of repairs, and of those, 10 returned for round three. That’s still not quite twice as many repairs as with the prior models, but it’s close.

Why did people return for another round? Was it because the keyboards failed again or because they were improperly repaired to begin with? We don’t know, so we have as many questions as we have answers after seeing this data.

AppleInsider found that a slight redesign of the keyboard that was included in the 2017 models (and that is now installed in 2016 models when servicing them) seems to be resulting in repair numbers moving a little closer to the 2015 and 2014 numbers, although a full year of data for that model is not yet available.

The data suggests that the newer MacBook Pro keyboards require repairs a little more often. And they’re much more difficult and expensive to repair than prior models. That creates a dilemma for consumers.

The high cost of repair

My own 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro keyboard failed about two months ago. The “Z” key stopped working. I took the computer to an Apple Store, and Apple determined that some kind of dust or similar matter had gotten into the keyboard and caused a problem. Apple replaced it with the updated keyboard found in the 2016 MacBook Pro. My computer was working again the next day, and it cost me nothing because I had AppleCare. If I hadn’t, the repair would have cost me more than $700 according to the repair sheet the company gave me when it returned my computer.

That’s because Apple has designed the MacBook Pro such that fixing even one key requires replacing the entire keyboard apparatus, as well as part of the metal enclosure and some other components as well. This is the real consumer’s dilemma with the MacBook Pro keyboards—not their failure rate.

AppleInsider’s own reporting on the cost of the repair is right on the money with my experience:

The keyboard isn’t replaceable by itself. Break one key switch, and you need to replace the whole assembly, consisting of the keyboard, the battery, and the upper case metal surrounding the keyboard and Thunderbolt 3 ports.

We’ve seen out-of-warranty pricing with labor and parts exceeding $700 for the job, and it isn’t an easy repair, necessitating a complete disassembly of the machine. This same repair is $400 on the 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pro—cheaper, but still a lot of money.

Making these kinds of serviceability sacrifices allows Apple to produce some striking designs, and it frees up space for other features, better heat management, and so on. But for customers who don’t purchase AppleCare, those benefits can come at a very high cost when components in the computer fail. The default, one-year warranty just isn’t enough—and in many regions, either AppleCare isn’t available at all, or it is, but no Apple Stores are close enough to make the service practical.

That leaves quite a few customers hanging. And it’s not just Apple anymore; other laptops, like Microsoft’s Surface Pro, are just as difficult to service. It’s not great for tech consumers that buying an expensive service plan is the only way to have peace of mind when buying a $2,500 device.

Tech

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

May 8, 2018 at 06:31AM

Fans Are Trying To Build Valve’s Version Of Half-Life 2: Episode 3

Fans Are Trying To Build Valve’s Version Of Half-Life 2: Episode 3

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When former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw released his synopsis for the rest of the unfinished series’ plot last August, Half-Life fans were given a glimpse at something they’d been waiting years for: closure.

Reading a plot summary is a long way from actually playing through Half-Life 2’s final act, of course, but it’s better than nothing, and nothing is all we’ve had since October 2007.

Some fans are now trying to turn it into something more. Project Borealis is an attempt to take what little we know about Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and turn it into a playable game, with an international team of modders now at work building the episode in the Unreal Engine.

It’s still very early days—aren’t they always, with these kind of things?—and like most fan projects, it may end up as unreleased as the actual Episode 3. But then, we’ve been down this road before with a Half-Life fan project and it actually turned out OK, so who knows.

In terms of what’s been accomplished so far, here’s the first in-engine footage:

And here’s some concept art for Alyx’s winter look:

You can follow the project at its official site and Reddit page.

Games

via Kotaku http://kotaku.com

May 7, 2018 at 06:38PM