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Microsoft updates Bing logo as it reasserts commitment to search

The “B” is now capitalized, the yellow has been dispatched in favor of a more readable green, and the ascending bird visible in the negative space has had its tail clipped. Say hello to the new Bing logo. Microsoft is set to reveal a new visual identity for its search service today, and it’s given Advertising Age an early preview of what it will look like.

The current update is mostly a refinement of the logo introduced in late 2013, with Microsoft telling Ad Age that the changes were motivated by the desire to display well “across Windows devices and services.” Rik van der Kooi, Microsoft’s chief of search advertising, has also reiterated that the company is “all in on search” and working to expand Bing’s reach and audience. The…

CloudMagic is the Mac email app I’ve been waiting for

Over the years, the Mac has played host to two weirdly contradictory trends: it has had the nicest, best designed text editors in the world but also some of the worst email apps. Until now, no one had really designed a Mac mail client with the minimalist purity of its dedicated word processors. But CloudMagic, already a popular iOS email app, has arrived on the Mac this month and it’s finally bridging that gap in quality. The Mac’s newest email app is also my new favorite.

The things that make any writing application successful are consistent and predictable. You prefer clarity over clutter, intuitiveness over irritation, and speed over sluggishness. On each of those sliding scales, CloudMagic’s Mac app veers strongly to the positive…

We are wasting the upside-down face emoji on sarcasm

The upside-down face emoji is headed for trouble. Approved as part of Unicode 8.0, it rolled out to iOS 9.1 and Android Marshmallow earlier this year, and in the past three months, the meaning has become remarkably consistent. Dropped at the end of a sentence, the face typically suggests the previous statement should be taken in jest, like so:

Penthouse magazine ends print edition after 50 years in publishing

It’s another notch on the internet’s bedpost: Penthouse magazine is ending its print edition after more than a half a century on the newsstand. The publication will continue in a digital format only, with parent company FriendFinder Networks saying the change is necessary to “keep Penthouse competitive in the future.”

“Reimagined for the preferred consumption of content today by consumers, the digital version of Penthouse magazine will combine and convert everything readers know and love about the print magazine experience to the power of a digital experience,” said FriendFinder Networks in a statement reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Last year, Playboy announced it would stop publishing fully-nude images

The move follows Playboy‘…

Twitter goes down in widespread outage

Twitter is down for the count at the moment, with the service apparently suffering widespread problems on both mobile and desktop. The company confirmed on its status blog at 03:44AM ET that “some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter,” and that it’s “working towards a resolution.” Trying to access the network over the web just returns the standard “something is technically wrong” error screen, and the service is also suffering outages on apps and software like TweetDeck. So far the world doesn’t seem to have ended because of the outage, but without Twitter working, who would know if it had?

Update January 19th, 2:10PM ET: Twitter says this morning’s issue was due to “an internal code change,” which has since been…

Univision just bought a major stake in America’s finest news source

Area husband told to pick up onions accidentally returns home with media empire.* According to NPR, Univision has bought a 40 percent controlling stake in The Onion, with the right to later buy the media company in full. The Onion, which in addition to its eponymous site includes serious pop culture outlet The AV Club and bastion of painful truth Clickhole, has been on market since at least November 2014.

For Univision, the company has another avenue through which it can potentially reach a younger demographic, a strategy it is explicitly pushing with its co-venture Fusion. NPR notes that its “formidable — but in many ways unrealized — aspirations” for Fusion was a key reason that Univision sought an additional source of millennial…

An Instagram performance art stunt is making its way to London’s Tate Modern

Over the course of several months in 2014, a woman named Amalia Ulman amassed more than 50,000 Instagram followers. In and of itself, this was not exceptional. She was young and conventionally attractive; her posts featured images signifying a normal, if slightly enviable, life: kittens swaddled in blankets, matching striped pajama sets, rain-dappled rose petals, elegant latte art, and post-shower selfies. But this wasn’t the real Amalia Ulman, and not in the way Instagram’s inherent curation makes it a not real thing — this was performance art. In a piece she called Excellences & Perfections, Ulman, born in Argentina, was playing a role: that of a young woman who moves to Los Angeles from a small town, trying to make it big.

This year,…

Sina Weibo drops its 140-character limit as Twitter ponders similar move

Chinese social network Sina Weibo is removing its 140-character limit. According to a report from China’s Xinhua News, the company’s CEO confirmed the plans today, with the new format — reportedly allowing posts up to 2,000 characters in length — set to roll out to “senior users” on January 28th and hitting all other accounts exactly a month later.

The change follows rumors that Twitter is planning to drop its own character limit, originally implemented so that tweets could be made via text. The company has already dropped the limit for direct messages, but it’s still not clear how it might introduce longer tweets. Rather than simply extending the character limit, it’s possible that the social network will allow users to simply embed…

Read the searing story of the Kickstarter drone that went down in flames

Kickstarter surprised everyone last month when it hired technology journalist Mark Harris to look into how one of the most funded projects in the platform’s history, the palm-sized Zano drone, combusted after less than a year. The result of Harris’ work, sent first to backers and then published on Medium, is proof Kickstarter got its money’s worth. Harris’ investigation totals 13,000 words and describes in excruciating detail how the team behind the Zano, Torquing Group, ended up collapsing under the weight of its campaign’s success.

Torquing raised more than £2.3 million ($3.6 million) in November 2014 to produce 15,363 finished Zano drones within just six months’ time. By October 2015, the company had shipped only 600 units to…

Netflix fires first shot in battle with VPNs

A cat and mouse game between Netflix and its users over geo-blocked content has begun in Australia. Last week, Netflix announced it would be cracking down on customers who use software to watch content only available outside their own country, blocking proxies and virtual private networks (VPNs). Now, an Australian VPN named uFlix says that the video streaming service has indeed started blocking some of its users, with Netflix apparently delivering this message to infringing customers: “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy. Please turn off any of these services and try again.”