Derek Jeter's new site promises unfiltered athletes

Fans apparently want to hear their athletes without the interference of journalists, and the now retired Yankee is giving it to them with a site called the Players' Tribune.

Derek Jeter's debut post-Yankees venture promises to deliver the absolute opposite of all the interviews he gave while a player. The Players' Tribune / Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk

When New York anoints someone a saint, you can be fairly sure that they're the sort of saint who enjoys money.

And so it is that Derek Jeter, godly essence just retired from the New York Yankees, is already launching a new enterprise.

It's called the Players' Tribune.

If that sounds like an old-fashioned local newspaper to you, it's possibly deliberate. For this site exists to deliver athletes' unfiltered views to the fans.

There must have been many who were desperate, in times gone by, to hear the unfiltered views of the likes of Metta World Peace and Michael Vick. Now, Jeter promises to make that happen.

He explained on the site: "I do think fans deserve more than 'no comments' or 'I don't knows.' Those simple answers have always stemmed from a genuine concern that any statement, any opinion or detail, might be distorted."

An athlete's life is, indeed, troubled. There is so much pressure to be everything that the image world wants you to be. Jeter has done a fine job of navigating that world by never saying much at all, but always looking dignified.

His real competition here, though, is surely Twitter. Athletes have, for some time now, offered their unfettered thoughts and spelling to hordes of fans in an instant.

For example, when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell two weeks ago was offering his entirely fettered and lawyerly thoughts in a press conference, players were immediately on hand to rebut on Twitter. Who could forget now-retired Seattle Seahawks and Minnesota Vikings receiver Sidney Rice huffing: "Boo this man"?

Is this the sort of fare we can hope for from the Players Tribune?

Jeter implies that journalists distort everything. He said on this site: "We all have emotions. We just need to be sure our thoughts will come across the way we intend."

Lately, athletes haven't always masked their intentions all that well. There are signs that too many are so pampered that they believe they can do anything. As former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis said in the wake of the Ray Rice domestic violence charges: "There's some things you can cover up and there's some things you can't."

This would be the same Ray Lewis who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice charges during a (still unsolved) murder investigation.

How unfiltered can and will the Players' Tribune really be? Will athletes be able to post directly without supervision?

All Jeter will reveal for now is: "Over the next few months, we'll be introducing a strong core of athlete editors and contributors who will shape the site into an online community filled with first-person stories and behind-the-scenes content."

That sounds like marketing to me. But Jeter insists that this will be a site where "we want to have a way to connect directly with our fans, with no filter."

I wonder how unfiltered that intention really is.

Chris Matyszczyk Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. See full bio

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Google promises speed, security with 64-bit Chrome on Windows

Only those who specifically download the 64-bit Chrome version will get it. Stephen Shankland/CNET

Google on Tuesday pushed its Chrome browser into the 64-bit software era -- on Windows, at least, and only for those who specifically download it.

The new version, Chrome 37, takes advantage of the transition over the last decade to PCs with 64-bit processors, which can handle vastly larger amounts of memory and that offer more data-storage slots called registers that can improve performance. Because of plug-in compatibility problems, though, only those who specifically download the 64-bit Chrome version will get it. And 64-bit Chrome for Macs remains a work in progress.

The new Chrome is 15 percent faster at decoding HD videos on YouTube as a result, said Chrome team programmer Will Harris in a blog post.

It also is less prone to crashes in the renderer -- the core part of the browser that interprets Web site programming instructions and paints the appropriate pixels on a screen. And the software can thwart some types of hack attacks.

Faster browsers are important -- people watch more videos, buy more products, and spend more time on Web sites -- so performance is a top Chrome priority along with security and ease of use. The recipe has worked so far: Chrome has seen steadily increasing usage since its launch nearly six years ago.

The new version, though, drops support for 32-bit plug-ins -- software like Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe Systems' Flash Player that extend a browser's abilities. Chrome has its own version of Adobe's Flash Player built in, which means the most-used plug-in isn't a problem, but others won't work. And the plug-in problem is mitigated by the fact that Chrome is scrapping support for most of them anyway by ditching the older NPAPI interface in favor its the company's own newer PPAPI.

Chrome 37 also brings a substantial change to text display, adopting Windows' DirectWrite technology that permits higher image quality and hardware-accelerated rendering. And another thing for Windows users: support for HiDPI, which means screens such as Apple's Retina models that have high pixel density, measured in dots per inch. It's increasingly common to find Windows machines that use this technology for crisp images and text, but adding support has been more complicated than it was for Macs, which feature a narrower range of models and simply quadrupled the number of pixels during the transition to simplify programming challenges.

And Chrome 37 also closes several security holes -- work for which Google paid $51,000 in bounties to security testers. More than half of that -- $30,000 -- was "a special reward to lokihardt@asrt for a combination of bugs" that could let an attacker run software that evades Chrome's protective "sandbox" system. It was a complicated attack though, using several Chrome subsystems: the V8 JavaScript engine, interprocess communications, the tool for synchronizing personal settings, and Chrome's extensions system.

Updated at 10:41 p.m. PT to add that HiDPI support also has arrived for Windows.

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