On Monday, Yahoo is holding a press conference, according to TechCrunch. This comes after the company's recent buying spree, and it closely follows rumors that Yahoo is considering spending a billion dollars to buy Tumblr:

On Monday, it seems that we may get a better sense of what Yahoo plans to do with all these new acquisitions, as CNBC is reporting that Yahoo will be holding a “product-related” news event on Monday in New York City. Marissa Mayer will reportedly be speaking at the press conference, but that’s all we know about the contents of the event at this point.

I do get the sense that Tumblr could be a bigger deal than it already is—it's about one-third of a social network and two-thirds of a blogging platform, which seems like a good position to be in—but I'm not sure that Yahoo is the company to bring it to its full potential. But new CEO Marissa Mayer has accomplished what seemed like the impossible a couple years ago: She's got people talking about Yahoo again.

• P.C.
• Not allowed!

Well. It turns out the Slog drone and its kind are not allowed in Seattle's parks. So, while I did not violate Paul Constant's civil rights last month by spying on him with the Slog drone in Volunteer Park, I did violate park rules.

Specifically, Seattle Parks Department rule 18.12.265, which states:

It is unlawful to operate any motorized model aircraft or motorized model watercraft in any park except at places set apart by the Superintendent for such purposes or as authorized by a permit from the Superintendent.

At present, zero places have been set aside by the Superintendent for drone use. However, parks spokesperson Dewey Potter has kindly granted the Slog drone and its operator amnesty for the flights we took before we became aware of this situation.

What about a special "permit from the Superintendent" that would allow the Slog drone to fly in some section of some city park in the future? After some back of forth over the possibility of such a permit, Jeff Hodges, of the department's Event Management Office, has said no.

Writes Hodges:

We have authorized permits for new and currently prohibited activities in cases where it is clear there is an emerging public desire for the activity, or in cases where there is a special reason for approving an exception...

After the review of your request, we feel it does not meet either of these criteria. I suggest that if you want to pursue it, you try to put together a group of other drone users and make a case for the need, or provide Parks with a compelling reason to approve an exception.

I wonder if this might count as evidence of "emerging public desire" to fly drones in Seattle parks:

At the very least, there appears to already be some public desire to buzz the Great Wheel and fly over Lake Washington.

But apparently I need to be part of a group if I want the Parks Department to relax its drone rules.

So, if you have a drone and want to be part of a group petitioning the Seattle Parks Department for space to fly drones legally, put "DRONES!" in the subject line and e-mail me.

Meanwhile, let's check in with the High Court of Slog.

My Twitter was a-hootin' and a-hollerin' about the fact that there's a newly released lifecasting app called Saga. Here's the description:

Saga records your real life story, as told by the places you visited, and what you did there, automatically.

We make it easy and fun to look back on where you’ve been, what you’ve done, what you’ve said, and photos you’ve snapped, with little to no manual input required. Saga keeps up with your daily activities, automatically checking-in, and cataloging your travels in a beautiful lifelog....Saga is for the seekers, the quantified selfers, and life-adventurers, but at the end of the day, Saga is for everyone, including you. We believe everyone has a story worth telling, and today we’re making it incredibly easy to do.

Saga also integrates with a variety of popular services you’re probably already using to enhance your lifelog even more. Saga doesn’t just record your travels, but also your photos, personal notes, status updates, workout data, and more. Connect Saga with apps like RunKeeper, BodyMedia, Fitbit, Withings and Tripit and watch your timeline flourish.

I understand the whole fitness tracking thing—I use a pedometer when I go out on long walks—but lifelogging feels to me like the ultimate I-don't-give-a-shit experience. Are people really going to go back through and relive every little thing they did for every day of their lives? Is anyone else (besides, you know, overreaching law enforcement officers) going to give a shit about your lifelog? And can your phone's battery support a tracking app that is always on in the background? It's entirely possible that this is just plain not for me—I've always considered Foursquare, for instance, to be way to trick people into becoming unpaid billboards for businesses and brands—and other people understand the appeal. What do you think, Slog?

The Verge says:

It's been long rumored that Amazon is working on a phone, but according to a new Wall Street Journal report, that phone may have a 3D display...Some sources have said users would be able to navigate through content with their eyes, and eye tracking could also improve the 3D effect, allowing the phone to tell where users are looking and refocus in response, rather than having a single "correct" viewing angle.

Anyone seen any 3D phones in the wild around South Lake Union? This seems like a weird way for Amazon to jump into the smartphone business, unless that 3D tech is really something transformative. Of course, this kind of reporting often has a touch of truth to it, in the form of prototypes being handed around that never get released to the public. But evidence is mounting that Amazon is going to come out with its own smartphone this year. Whether that smartphone has a 3D display or not is something we might not know until we see the thing in Jeff Bezos's hand at the launch press conference.

So, over the weekend I rented The Hobbit from a Redbox. I thought is was pretty blah. All I'm saying is I hope that CGI technology improves a whole yardstick before the next installment comes out, because it blew on this one, and this one would have been approximately five minutes long if you cut out all the scenes involving the shitty CGI. WHY DON'T YOU JUST PUT A CGI BABY IN ANGELINA JOLIE'S ARMS?

Anyhow, I bring this up because I have encountered a major modern-world/first-world problem. After beginning The Hobbit and then falling asleep, and then finishing it the next morning, I realized that my DVD player had decided to shit the tub. The Hobbit is stuck inside. Naturally, the only place I can turn for advice is the Collective Wisdom of Slog™.

Thus:

It's true! The official site for Day Against DRM has a handy list of things you can do to celebrate, including sharing links, buying from companies that don't use DRM, and links to places where you can complain publicly about DRM. If you don't know why this is such a big deal, you should visit the anti-DRM FAQ.

(Via Tele-Read.)

In a great post at Technology Review last week, John Pavlus explained that the future of technology like Google Glass—where instead of taking a picture by telling the glasses to take a picture, you simply wink—might get too close to the body for our comfort:

The assumption driving these kinds of design speculations is that if you embed the interface–the control surface for a technology–into our own bodily envelope, that interface will “disappear”: the technology will cease to be a separate “thing” and simply become part of that envelope. The trouble is that unlike technology, your body isn’t something you “interface” with in the first place. You’re not a little homunculus “in” your body, “driving” it around, looking out Terminator-style “through” your eyes. Your body isn’t a tool for delivering your experience: it is your experience. Merging the body with a technological control surface doesn’t magically transform the act of manipulating that surface into bodily experience. I’m not a cyborg (yet) so I can’t be sure, but I suspect the effect is more the opposite: alienating you from the direct bodily experiences you already have by turning them into technological interfaces to be manipulated.

The post is titled "Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface." Pavlus also quotes this terrifying article from Co.Design:

Think about this scenario: You see someone at a party you like; his social profile is immediately projected onto your retina–great, a 92% match. By staring at him for two seconds, you trigger a pairing protocol. He knows you want to pair, because you are now glowing slightly red in his retina screen. Then you slide your tongue over your left incisor and press gently. This makes his left incisor tingle slightly. He responds by touching it. The pairing protocol is completed.

I honestly don't know which future is more likely: The one where we recoil from wearable computers as a kind of sensation-based uncanny valley, or the one where we embrace wearable computers because they make everything more convenient. It seems that our bodies can become used to all kinds of modifications, but it also seems that we might appreciate our powerful computers better when they're at arm's length from us.

Via Gizmodo. The Slog done considers this to be a San Francisco people's problem.

You don't want to see headlines like this one, from the AP:

Research firm: PC sales plunge as Windows 8 flops

Apparently, PC shipments fell some fourteen percent in the first quarter of this year, which is the steepest they have ever dropped. The AP's Peter Svenssen analyzes the data like this: "Microsoft's Windows 8 software appears to be driving buyers away from PCs and toward smartphones and tablets..." Let's hope, for the good of the local economy, that Microsoft has something great up their sleeves.

Because I am a completely unreasonable person, I'm constantly cursing at my computer for not knowing which application I want to be typing on. Or that it doesn't know that I want it to switch to whatever program I hover my cursor over when, say, I've got two monitors and I'm switching back and forth between multiple applications. Or that it can't just read my mind and then do all my work for me. Thanks to these hyper-nerds at Berkeley, computers are like three-quarters of one step closer to facilitating that stuff:

“Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password,” explains a UC Berkeley School of Information press release about new research that utilizes brainwaves to authenticate users instead of passwords of numbers and letters. With a $100 consumer-friendly brainwave-reading headset, the Neurosky MindSet, Professor John Chuang found that the mere task of concentrating on one’s breath was enough to uniquely identify them.

Brainwave devices, or Electroencephalograms, are not at all a new technology, although this application is obviously in early development. TechCrunch, who also points out that these systems are not immune to hacking, has this video that demonstrates a totally practical use: the Necomimi, which, according to the marketing guy in the video, means "cat ears" in Japanese. It's, like, the future, man. Only with furries.

At the time of this writing, exactly none of the nearly 400 Slog readers who participated in the Slog poll about the Facebook phone voted for the "Looking forward to it!" option. I've never seen anything like that in the long history of Slog polls. Maybe that's because everyone was thinking of the problems a Facebook-centric phone could present. Here's a video by Dartanion London that beautifully explains some of those problems:

There has been speculation for years about Facebook building its own phone, and at a press conference today, those rumors were proved to be kind of true: The First, a Facebook-centric phone, will soon be available from AT&T. But that wasn't the main reason Facebook was hosting the press conference: They were announcing Facebook Home, a suite of apps that will basically remake any Android phone into a Facebook-branded phone. David Pierce at The Verge explains:

Home is a family of Facebook apps that overhauls your entire device, turning it into a Facebook phone. An app called Coverfeed overhauls the homescreen and the lockscreen, giving you updates on what your friends are doing without you having to launch an app, or even unlock your phone. You can comment or like posts from your homescreen — it feels incredibly native. Everything is full-screen and incredibly visual, really looking nothing like Android...There are badges and notifications on every app that let you know when something new is happening, when someone is communicating with you. Notifications are sorted by friend, rather than app — it says when your friend is doing something, rather than letting you know that an app has something new for you. Instead of navigating through a list of apps, opening Photos to see photos and Calendar to see your events, Facebook wants to make your phone a lot more like your News Feed.

There's also a new chat feature that makes the phone more messaging-friendly. If you own an Android phone, your Facebook app will prompt you when Facebook Home is ready to be downloaded. Go read the full report at The Verge for all the details. And so?

Have you heard of The Magazine? It's a digital magazine that provides ten longish articles a month to subscribers. This month's issue features a long piece by Eli Sanders called "Ground Control."

Topics discussed in the article include:

• A trip to the "granddaddy of all drone-building competitions" in North Dakota.

• The fact that “You have to acknowledge in this day and age that stuff flies over your house.”

• Futuristic shooting sprees.

• A "university skybridge paid for by a potato farming magnate."

• What it is like to pilot a domestic drone. (Spoiler: It's fun.)

• The passionate argument against Seattle Police Department's drones, including the possibility that drones might record citizens “while [they're] naked, barbecuing!”

• The Terminator.

You should give The Magazine a try, and read Eli's thoughtful and funny article. I guarantee you'll come away with a ton of new information about a technology that is fundamentally reshaping our ideas of privacy and safety.

Nate Anderson set out to crack a single password in less than one day's work. By the end of that day, he had cracked 8,000 passwords. You should read his full report at Ars Technica.

Slog tipper Greg sent along this ad. It's definitely cute...

...but I'm not entirely sure print media should embrace a toilet paper ad as a convincing argument that their industry is absolutely necessary.