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Microsoft's Surface Book. (credit: Nathan Fitch)

Microsoft is continuing to expand. At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Microsoft announced new ways that its all-important partners can sell not just the company's software but also its hardware as it seeks to grow its Surface business.

At Surface's initial release, it was sold strictly as a consumer offering, available only from consumer retail outlets. As the product has grown more successful and better defined, Microsoft has expanded its sales channels to include a wider range of retailers, business suppliers, and earlier this year, the "Surface Membership Plan" rent-to-own offering. Today, the company added "Surface as a Service," a new leasing scheme that allows Surface hardware to be bought alongside Office 365 and Windows 10 subscriptions. The company says that customers of this scheme will have access to the latest hardware and faster device refresh cycles.

The expanded availability and better products have already seen the Surface business grow; Microsoft says that it has gone from generating $1 billion a year in revenue to $1 billion a quarter.

(credit: Shawn Campbell)

If you've ever tried to post a GIF to Twitter only to be told that the file size was too large, you're in for a pleasant surprise. According to Twitter's Help Center, the company has increased the maximum GIF size to 15MB on the web, a much-needed change from the original 5MB limit.

Twitter didn't mention this change on social media, nor did it make a big announcement about it. Rather, its Help Center page detailing image, video, and GIF-posting regulations reflects the change under the "size and file type requirements" section. "Photos can be up to 5MB; animated GIFs can be up to 5MB on mobile, and up to 15MB on web," the page states. That means you'll only be able to take advantage of the higher limit if you're posting to Twitter from your computer—you'll still have to live with smaller GIFs if you're posting from your smartphone.

While Twitter's inherent limits have been a large part of its popularity, the company has recently been loosening some of the restrictions. It stopped counting images, polls, and usernames as part of the service's 140-character limit, and it has also relaxed the rules of its quick-video platform Vine by increasing the video length limit from six seconds to 140 seconds.

(credit: University of Hawaii)

By the time European explorers reached the islands scattered across the vast distances of the Pacific Ocean, most of the voyaging done by the Polynesians was among local island groups. But the locals seemed to know of places well beyond their shores, which suggested their ancestors not only colonized far-flung islands, but returned to share knowledge of them. Eventually, it became clear that trade had distributed goods among Polynesian communities that later became isolated.

In recent years, modern techniques have revealed the staggering geographic extent of this trade, which included a visit to South America for some takeout sweet potatoes, which were later grown on islands throughout the Pacific. But the temporal extent of the trade remained the subject of debate, with some arguing for a brief burst off exchange, and others suggesting extended trade networks persisted for a while. Now, a paper published in PNAS uses another modern form of analysis argues for at least four centuries of trade.

The work relies on a site in the Cook Islands, which provided a rare archeological resource: an extended series of deposits that contained enough material that researchers could carbon date various layers. Also included were some traditional Polynesian stone adzes, tools made from a specific type of volcanic rock. The researchers behind the new paper obtained small samples from these tools, and used them in another type of modern analysis called mass spectroscopy.

(credit: Kim Dotcom)

Kim Dotcom, the flamboyant Web baron, is planning to relaunch his once popular Megaupload file-sharing website in 2017—five years to the day after the US government shut it down amid accusations of piracy.

In a series of tweets posted over the weekend, Dotcom hinted that the new Megaupload would involve Bitcoin, while he also promised "big announcements" would be coming regarding partners for the site. Previous users of the site will apparently have their accounts reinstated with premium privileges.

I can tell you that Megaupload and Bitcoin had sex. There is a pregnancy and I have a feeling that the baby will be such a joy.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 10, 2016

At its peak, the site had more than 150 million registered users, and more than 50 million daily visitors. However, the FBI shut down the Megaupload servers in 2012 working in concert with the New Zealand authorities, who raided Dotcom's Auckland mansion and seized his assets.