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Twitter co-founder and board member Ev Williams had some choice words for rival social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Speaking during a recent interview, Williams said: "It's a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about? The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No one ever talks about, 'What is a [monthly active user]?' I believe it's the case that if you use Facebook Connect -- if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect -- you're considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean? It's become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we're on the wrong path.

If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it's pretty significant. It's at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It's this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter -- important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that's happening, I frankly don't give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."

Google has begun shutting down its operations in Russia, closing out its engineering office and relocating employees.

The search giant says the Russian government has become very restrictive, asking Google to remove over 250 links from its search results in the last six months. As with all tech companies in Russia, data about Russians must stay within the country's borders and it is unclear if Google has been complying.

Despite the shut down, some Google team members will stay around. "We are deeply committed to our Russian users and customers and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them," the company added.

With the move, Google has now pulled out of Russia and China and had their services restricted in Spain and other nations.

Seagate will start selling a hard disk drive (HDD) in January with a massive 8TB capacity and it is expected to cost $260 or below.

Designed for reliability rather than performance, the 3.5-inch Seagate 8TB Archive HDD has a reduced spindle speed of 5,900 RPM and the average read/write is only 150MB/s. That is significantly slower than modern HDDs and way slower than a decent solid state disk (SSD).

This drive is build simply for storage though so that doesn't matter all that much, and at $260 it would be a nice purchase for an NAS.

The hard drive will start selling mid-January.

The extra capacity and low cost are achieved with Seagate's SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Technology. Here is a video explaining it.

Instagram has announced 300 million monthly active users, a huge jump year-over-year, and a number that surpasses Twitter.

The huge growth and the large active base will likely help the company to attract advertisers. The company recently began allowing for video ads and sponsored posts.

"As Instagram gets bigger, we're focused on helping you discover photos and videos from people who you care about, whether it's a friend or your favorite musician," says Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom.

Additionally, users now share over 70 million photos/videos per day, a staggering figure.

In his blog post, Systrom also noted that celebrity and brand accounts will have new verification badges so you can ensure you are following the correct people. In addition, Instagram has been taking down thousands of spam and fake accounts in order to "do everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web."

The information spilling onto the Internet as a result of the Sony Pictures hack keeps making headlines, and this time it has exposed a rift between Google and the MPAA.

The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) is a trade group that represents movie studios in the United States. It speaks on behalf of those studios in copyright lobbying and in legal cases, and is essentially their face in the anti-piracy efforts targeted at the Internet.

In recent years it has been pressing more and more on Google to step up and fight piracy by removing links from its search index. Google responded by removing millions of links from its search index when it received DMCA requests, and lately went further to punish sites that are the target of a lot of DMCA complaints.

It had a significant impact too, with many torrent sites seeing a dip in traffic from Google, and the search giant was more than justified in feeling like it had done enough.

The MPAA disagreed however, and made a statement about Google that would turn their relationship sour very quickly.

"Everyone shares a responsibility to help curb unlawful conduct online, and we are glad to see Google acknowledging its role in facilitating access to stolen content via search," an MPAA press release opened with.

The malware that penetrated the cyber defenses of Sony and allegedly captured terabytes of data was a difficult one to deal with, says FBI official to the Congress.

Speaking to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee assistant director of the FBI's cyber division Joseph Demarest said that nine out of ten corporate cyber defenses would have been helpless against the malware.

Malware that the security company Sony hired to investigate called "unprecedented" did not penetrate because of lack of preparation. According to Demarest the attack could have posed serious threat even to state government security systems.

Ars Technica notes that there has yet to be any clarification on behalf of Sony, the security company Mandidant or the FBI what made the malware unprecedented and so dangerous. And even if Sony is let off the hook on cyber defense, it is still under question if they could have prevented a leak of such magnitude.

An original Apple-1 Personal Computer sold by Steve Jobs from his home to Charles Ricketts has sold at auction for $365,000 in New York.

The "Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer" is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented to have been sold by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs from his parent's home to a customer. Of the few hundreds Apple-1s that were made, only 50 are thought to survive and less in working condition.

The Apple-1 was put up for auction by Christie's as part of the auction house's inaugural Exceptional Sale in New York yesterday, held at the Rockefeller Center. It was estimated at between $400,000 and $600,000 so it actually sold for lower than expected.

Steve Jobs sold the Apple-1 to Steve Ricketts (whom it is now named after) from his parents' garage in July 1976.

"The Ricketts Apple-1 is fully operational, having been serviced and started by Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen in October 2014. Mr. Cohen ran the standard original software program, Microsoft BASIC, and also an original Apple-1 Star Trek game in order to test the machine," a press release from before the auction reads.

Max Sound Corp has sued Google and its YouTube subsidiary for patent infringement relating to streaming H.264/AVC video content.

It filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Mannheim, Germany against Google Inc in the United States, Google Commerce Ltd, in Dublin, Ireland, Google Germany in Hamburg and YouTube LLC in San Bruno, USA. At the center of the lawsuit is the EU 2 026 277 patent, held by Max Sound Corp.

"Max Sound Corp. claims that all products on the market that use the format H.264 for video compression infringe the asserted patent," a press release reads.

"This allegation comprises, in particular, current versions of the Google operating system Android, which is installed on many mobile phones and tablet devices. The complaint addresses the current Google Products: Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 Chromebook and Chromecast."

Max Souhnd Corp also alleges that Google's YouTube video service infringes its patent. Max Sound requests information about profits and damages for each video streamed to Germany in one of the relevant formats.

It expects the case to come to a ruling in less than 12 months.

For just a few more days, it is possible to get all three Batman Arkham games and DLC for just $10 in the United States, or €9.79 in Europe.

The offer applies to PC gamers using the Steam platform. It is being offered by Bundle Stars for just $9.99 in the United States, or €9.79 in Europe (not sure in UK) and it includes the Batman: Arkham collection as it stands. For this ridiculously low cost you get:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition
• Batman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition
• Batman: Arkham Origins
• Batman: Arkham Origins: Season Pass - DLC
• Batman: Arkham Origins: Black Mask Challenge Pack - DLC
• Batman: Arkham Origins: Online Supply Drop DLC

According to data from research firm NPD, Microsoft's Xbox One console finally outsold Sony's PlayStation 4 (PS4) after more than a year on the market.

The small victory in the month of November was made public by Microsoft very quickly. It said that in November, more than 1.2 million Xbox One consoles were sold in the United States, which apparently beat sales of its rival but we haven't seen any sales figures for the PS4 yet.

According to Microsoft, the Xbox One also outsold the PlayStation 4 in the United Kingdom during the same period.

Whether the Xbox One sold more globally in November is not clear, but Microsoft will take the win in the U.S. gladly in any case. The console was helped greatly by a price cut and by a decent software line-up heading into the busy holiday period.

Microsoft's console has been trailing PS4 in the year that both have been available on the market, and in the meantime went through some major rethinks affecting its hardware and services. The biggest change was the unbundling of the Kinect motion sensor system from the Xbox One, immediately cutting $100 off the price.

In addition to topping the sales charts in the UK and U.S. at least, Microsoft also said that more users logged on to Xbox Live than any other month in the history of the Xbox brand.

The Pirate Bay has been down since Tuesday following a police raid in Stockholm, but since then there have been many reports of it resurrecting elsewhere.

On Wednesday, we reported that claims of the Pirate Bay moving to Costa Rica and taking up a .CR domain were false. At the time, only the frontpage would load and the search didn't work at all, which you would expect given that the .CR domain was being used as a Pirate Bay proxy/mirror that relied on the .SE website for its results.

However, since then the search does bring up results that are light on detail and mostly old. This led to further speculation that the Pirate Bay had resurfaced in Costa Rica after all.

Initially, it seemed to be redirecting to a .EE domain, but that stopped later, and now is reportedly using some combination of old cached results and pulling torrents from other sites like Kickass. The constant changes are arousing quite a bit of suspicion, and clearly the .CR site is not the official Pirate Bay resurrected.

As for the .EE domains, one of them went offline in the past day or so (piratebay.ee) and another one (thepiratebay.ee) reportedly is using old cached data too, and some users reported that it was trying to get money from users.

YouTube has quietly added a neat little animated GIF creator to some of its YouTube videos.

Spotted by Andy Baio, YouTube added an option to create a GIF to the share options of a select few channels. For example, the PBS Idea Channel seems to be covered by YouTube's experimental GIF creator.

It allows you to create an animated GIF of up to five seconds in length from any consecutive five second portion of the video. It also allows you to add text to the top and bottom of the resulting GIF, which will be hosted on YouTube's own servers and which you can embed elsewhere just as you can with videos.

YouTube hasn't revealed what its larger plan is for the GIF creator; will it come to all videos that can be shared? Will it have to be opt in on behalf of the content creator.

If it does end up being available for the majority of all YouTube videos, then you'd better be prepared to see a lot more GIFs around than you already do!

In December 2009, a relatively unknown Finnish game developer called Rovio Entertainment released the first 'Angry Birds' title for iOS and the game quickly became a hit.

For about three years, the game was the top paid app in iTunes, and all new titles in the series all jumped to #1 quickly after launch. The game has also been a top hit for Android since launch, where most of the titles are freemium.

In its branding, Angry Birds has expanded to "Seasons," "Rio," "Space," "Star Wars," "Friends," "Star Wars II," "Go!," "Epic," "Stella" and most recently, "Transformers." Additionally, the developer released "Bad Piggies" as a spinoff from the series in 2012.

Rovio has struggled in recent times, with interest waning for each new game. The developer had to fire 110 employees earlier this year to continue its profitability and streamline operations.

Google has unveiled their Google Play 'best stuff of the year' report for 2014, showing off the most downloaded and most popular apps of the year.

The lists include top news app, top entertainment app and even the most downloaded movies and TV shows.

iOS device owners saw a similar list earlier this month and many of the same names and titles are on that list, as well.

Take a gander:

APPS

Most Downloaded Apps by Category in 2014
Education: Duolingo
Health & Fitness: MyFitnessPal
Music: Pandora
Photography: Flipagram
Social: Facebook
Entertainment: Netflix
Sports: NFL Mobile
Travel: TripAdvisor

GAMES

Top Downloaded Games in 2014
Candy Crush Saga
Don't Tap The White Tile
Farm Heroes Saga
Subway Surfers
Clash of Clans

MOVIES & TV

Movie of the year: Frozen
TV show of the year: The Walking Dead
Comeback Movie: Toy Story
Most searched actor on Google Play: Robin Williams

MUSIC

Album of the Year: Frozen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Song of the Year: Dark Horse by Katy Perry
Song of the Summer: Fancy by Iggy Azalea
Fastest Growing Genre: Soundtracks (fueled by Frozen, Guardians of the Galaxy, Despicable Me 2, The Lego Movie and The Great Gatsby soundtracks)

We just released our first-ever mobile app, HIGH.FI News Reader. The app is a "preloaded Feedly" kind of app for following news from thousands of different news sources.

To put it simply, the app presents news from selection of >2000 news sources in chronological order, categorized and spiced with their popularity data.

Unlike traditional RSS readers, HIGH.FI already indexes and categorizes most important news sources. This saves you the hassle of figuring our what to follow, where to find RSS feeds to add to the app, etc.

As the app tracks the popularity of the headlines from all of the app's users, the "Most popular" lists can be a useful source to find new stuff to read too.

What does it look like?

Where to download?