News written by James Delahunty (January, 2018)

Devices running the latest Android Oreo release will now give you an idea of the speed of a WiFi network before you connect to it.

Public WiFi is offered by local governments and private businesses for their customers everywhere now. However, the performance of public WiFi varies widely and sometimes public WiFi can be worse than even a poor cellular connection. Sometimes you might find yourself trying multiple public networks to find one that has enough speed for your task (streaming from youtube etc.)

Oreo will make this task a little bit easier. When it scans for nearby WiFi, it also will assess what kind of speed you can expect from it. It won't tell you a detailed result of its test, but will instead describe the speed as "slow" if its under 1Mbps, "OK" if it between 1Mbps and 1.5Mbps, "fast" if it is between 5Mbps and 20Mbps and "very fast" if it exceeds 20Mbps.

The change is rolling out now with Android Oreo 8.1.

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Integral Memory will ship the largest capacity microSD card commercially available in February, with its new 512GB microSDXC V10.

That would be one hell of a storage boost for a device, granted it supports microSDXC.

"The need to provide extended memory for smartphones, tablets and a growing range of other mobile devices such as action cams and drones has been answered." said James Danton, marketing manager, Integral Memory. "As a company, we are very proud to be the first to achieve the 512GB capacity milestone in microSDXC, worldwide."

Press information about the new card cites tests with a range of smartphones showing speed of up to 80MB/s, which is certainly not the fastest you could find but should be adequate for most media tasks like recording 4K video and such.

It will be available next month but there was no information given on how much one of these babies will cost.

Streaming giant Netflix added a record number of new subscribers to its service in the fourth quarter of 2017, which it has credited to investment in original content.

Netflix now has more than 117 million paying subscribers for its service, the majority of whom are now located outside the United States. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Netflix added a record 8.3 million subscribers, of which 6.36 million were international subscribers.

The firm recorded revenue of $3.3 billion during the quarter which is up almost a third compared to the same period of 2016. Profits were reported at $186 million, up almost 300 percent year over year.

Netflix is crediting the good news with its investment in original content. New seasons of hit shows including Stranger Things, the Crown, Black Mirror and investments in new films such as Bright (starring Will Smith) provided Netflix with a strong line up for the past few months. It also has to be noted that Netflix did increase its prices during the quarter.

The service is now available in more than 190 countries around the world and is investment more in local content.

Intel is now advising customers not to install previously released patches to address serious CPU flaws that were disclosed publicly this month.

Meltdown and Spectre have been demonstrated to put sensitive and private information at risk, if exploited successfully. The flaw exists in hardware and so there was never going to be easy ways to mitigate. Meltdown is a flaw that is exclusively only to Intel CPUs, whereas Spectre affects chips from Intel, AMD or ARM-based chips.

Intel began pushing out patches to mitigate the issues earlier this month, but is now advising the users stop installing them. The new advice comes after users and firms reported reported dramatic slowdowns and unpredictable behavior, including constant reboots or a failure to boot at all.

The chipmaker says it understand what has caused the unpredicted outcomes and is now advising that customers start testing early versions of new patches that it is putting out, and has apologized publicly for the disruption its change of advice has caused.

News site Boing Boing is defending itself from a lawsuit brought by Playboy alleging copyright infringement because the site linked to Playboy centerfolds.

A blog post on Boing Boing contained a hyperlink to a gallery of Playboy centerfolds and another to a YouTube video with similar content. Playboy alleges that this amounts to copyright infringement and is suing the popular news blog.

It is important to point out that Boing Boing had nothing to do with the creation of the Imgur gallery, or the YouTube video, it merely linked to both in a blog post.

"The world can't afford a judgment against us in this case -- it would end the web as we know it, threatening everyone who publishes online, from us five weirdos in our basements to multimillion-dollar, globe-spanning publishing empires like Playboy," Boing Boing warns.

It is not alone in its fight against the lawsuit however. Daniel Nazer, Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney, argues that Boing Boing's use of the hyperlinks is protected under fair use principles.

"Boing Boing's reporting and commenting on the Playboy photos is protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. We're asking the court to dismiss this deeply flawed lawsuit," he said.

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Founder of the file-sharing website Megaupload is suing the government of New Zealand for billions of dollars.

Megaupload allowed users around the world to upload files to its service which could be later downloaded by others with the same link. In January 2012, New Zealand police raided the home of founder Kim Dotcom while investigating alleged copyright infringement offenses.

In the six years that has passed since the raid, the Kim Dotcom saga has dragged on as he has fought extradition to the United States on copyright infringement charges.

Kim is now suing the government of New Zealand, claiming up to $6.8 billion in damages due to all lost business opportunities since 2012, his legal fees, the damage to his reputation and more.

At the core of his defense is the assertion that the warrants used for the raid on his mansion in January 2012 were based on Section 131 of the 1994 Copyright Act of New Zealand. Technically, under that copyright act, online copyright infringement is not a crime.

Source: BBC News

Users report that Google devices with the Cast features are causing network connectivity problems on their home WiFi networks.

Devices that seem to cause issues once connected to some networks include Chromecast and Google Home devices. The issue appears to affect some routers from ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, Synology and TP-Link. It appears that the issue is due to the devices flooding the router with data packets when recovering from a sleep state.

TP-Link linked the problem to MDNS multicast discovery packets. Under normal circumstances, these packets normally sent in a 20-second interval, but TP-Link determined the devices will sometimes broadcast a large amount of these packets at a very high speed in a short amount of time.

This occurs when the device is awakened from its "sleep" state, and could exceed more than 100,000 packets. The longer your device is in "sleep", the larger this packet burst will be.

TP-Link has issued some firmware updates for affected devices, which you can find here. Mean while, Google is also looking for a solution to the problem which it says affects only a small number of users.

(via: Engadget)

HP is recalling batteries for some notebook or mobile workstation products after numerous reports of overheating, property damage and a burn injury.

It estimates that about 50,000 batteries are involved, sold with products between December 2015 and December 2017. HP received eight reports of battery packs overheating, melting, or charring, including three reports of property damage totaling $4,500 with one report of a minor injury involving a first degree burn to the hand.

The batteries were shipped with or sold as accessories for HP ProBooks (64x G2 and G3 series, 65x G2 and G3 series), HPx360 310 G2, HP Envy m6, HP Pavilion x360, HP 11, HP ZBook (17 G3, 17 G4, and Studio G3) Mobile Workstations.

HP is providing battery replacement services by an authorized technician at no cost. Additionally, HP is also providing a BIOS update that places the battery in "Battery Safety Mode" so that the notebook or workstation can be safely used without the battery by connecting to an HP power adaptor.

If the validation process identifies a battery as being eligible for replacement, the BIOS update should be applied and the system should be rebooted. During the reboot process, an option will be presented to enable Battery Safety Mode.

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Amazon is reportedly set to bid for a Premier League streaming rights package next month, to bring English Premier League matches to Amazon Prime customers.

It had been expected that a digital player would jump in and compete for streaming rights for Premier League football matches at auction. Sky and BT Sports dominated the previous auction in 2015, which generated more than £5.1 billion ($6.9 billion) in revenue for the Premier League.

Amazon views the acquisition of more sports content as a way to boost subscribers to its Prime service. It tells investors that the service also tends to produce more loyal shoppers overall than non-Prime customers.

One of its more recent exclusive features is a documentary series about Manchester City football club, which is currently leading the Premier League division at just over half way through the season.

Ed Woodward, chief executive officer of Manchester United, had previously hinted to shareholders that he expected to see digital giants come in and compete against the traditional broadcasters to bid on match packages, which will range from 32 matches to 20 matches.

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Apple has confirmed that its Mac and iOS devices are affected by CPU flaws disclosed this week, and that it is patching to mitigate the threat.

Apple confirmed on its tech support website that all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time. The Cupertino giant has already issued fixes to address the threat of Meltdown, specifically iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2.

Apple Watch is not affected by Meltdown.

Spectre is a potential threat for Mac and iOS devices but requires a malicious app (or a benign app acting maliciously) to exploit the flaw successfully. For that reason, Apple stresses that customers should only acquire apps from trusted sources.

There are other ways for Spectre to be exploited in Apple devices however, with the most obvious being a malicious webpage opened in the Safari browser. To address this possibility, Apple has pledged to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre.

Meltdown and Spectre affect almost all CPUs sold in consumer devices for a couple of decades.

Read More: Meltdown & Spectre: Serious CPU bugs affect Desktops, Servers and Smartphones

More than 70 million users now pay a premium subscription fee for unlimited music streaming from Stockholm-based Spotify.

Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world, fending off competition from Apple Inc. and from Amazon and others. The Apple Music service counts 30 million subscribers as of September, but its launch in June 2015 did not significantly impact Spotify as had been anticipated. Instead, Spotify has gone from strength to strength, rapidly adding millions of paying subscribers.

If you count Spotify users who stream for free on the ad-supported platform, then Spotify counts around 140 million active users.

Last year, Spotify was valued at around $19 billion and has started 2018 with a confidential filing with a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO. Spotify is targeting a direct listing at some point in Q1 2018.

Spotify is also the target of a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Wixen Music Publishing, alleging that the music streaming service failed to obtain necessary "mechanical licenses" for many songs in its catalog.

Intel says it will have released patches to address major CPU security flaws for 90 percent of recently-released chips by next week.

The chipmaker is working with rivals AMD, ARM and others in an industry response to the revelation of serious CPU security flaws disclosed recently. Meltdown and Spectre break the isolation between memory used by applications, and even applications and kernel-mode memory, posing a significant security risk if exploited.

Meltdown appears to only affect CPUs released by Intel, whereas Spectre also impacts processors from AMD and ARM-based chips in mobile & entertainment devices.

Intel has already issued updates for all types of Intel-based computer systems, including personal computers and servers, to address the flaws. It is focusing primarily on products released in the past five years, for the time being. By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past five years.

Operating system vendors including Apple, Microsoft and Google are also pushing out fixes to mitigate the flaws, and software developers are working on patches to address the threat posed by Spectre.

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Nintendo has revealed that sales of its Nintendo Switch games console have broken the previous record held by its Wii home console in the United States.

In its first 10 months of availability, Nintendo's iconic Wii entertainment system sold more than four million units in the United States. Nintendo's Switch launched on March 3, 2017, and in the ten months since launch it has sold 4.8 million units, easily surpassing the record held by its Wii system.

The Japanese electronics firm nodded to the popularity of the games line-up for the Switch system to explain the unprecedented demand in the United States. In the U.S., more than 60 percent of Nintendo Switch owners have Super Mario Odyssey, and over 55 percent own The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

There are more than 300 third-party games also available for the Switch console.

"Fans across the country have experienced the joy of playing their favorite games at home or on the go," said Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's President and COO.

"Now that many more people have received Nintendo Switch systems for the holidays, we look forward to bringing them fun new surprises in 2018 and beyond."

The world's leading music streaming service has filed for an initial public offering with U.S. regulators, eyeing a direct listing in Q1 2018.

The Reuters news agency cited sources familiar with the matter in reporting that Spotify made the confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. Last year, Spotify was valued at around $19 billion.

Spotify counts more than 140 million users, 60 million of whom are paying customers, as of mid-2017.

It will proceed with the direct listing despite being the target of a whopping $1.7 billion copyright lawsuit. Wixen Music Publishing Inc filed the lawsuit against the Swedish streaming service last week in a California federal court.

The lawsuit alleges that Spotify failed to negotiate a direct or compulsory license that would allow it to reproduce and distribute songs for which Wixen is an exclusive licensee.

Spotify offers a catalog of more than 30 million songs to subscribers.

AT&T has announced that it will rollout its initial 5G cellular network services in the United States in 2018.

The announcement comes weeks after international wireless standards for the network technology were finalized by 3GPP. With vital elements of the standard now settled, device manufacturers can now begin development of compatible equipment.

AT&T has committed to rollout its initial 5G network services to its customers in a dozen cities in the United States, some time later this year. It will also trial 5G technology with businesses of all sizes across industries.

5G promises significant improvements in speed and in latency for cellular users over the LTE network technology that is now standard in most developed countries.

"5G will change the way we live, work and enjoy entertainment," said Melissa Arnoldi, president, AT&T Technology and Operations.

"We're moving quickly to begin deploying mobile 5G this year and start unlocking the future of connectivity for consumers and businesses. With faster speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G will ultimately deliver and enhance experiences like virtual reality, future driverless cars, immersive 4K video and more."


Img Src: Att.com

Operating system vendors, cloud storage providers and other tech firms are scrambling to mitigate the affects of serious CPU vulnerabilities affecting servers, desktops and even mobile devices.

The hardware bugs have been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown is named for the metaphorical melting of security boundaries that are taken as a given because they are enforced by hardware itself. Spectre is named based on the root cause of the bug; speculative execution.

Both are very serious and are almost certain to affect you. Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) breaks the isolation between user applications and the operating system. Applications that exploit the hardware bug can access the OS / System memory and the memory of other applications. In essence, this means a malicious (though seemingly benign) application can steal sensitive data from memory. Applied to cloud services, this brings up the possibility of sensitive information being stolen from other customers, though cloud providers have already addressed the issue for the most part.

Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) breaks the expected isolation between different applications. If exploited, it allows a malicious application to trick error-free programs into leaking sensitive information. What makes it even worse is that the discoverers of Spectre say the safety checks of said best practices actually increase the attack surface and may make applications more susceptible to Spectre.

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SpaceX is preparing to finally test its Falcon Heavy rocket later this month, and has released a video showing the powerful vehicle sitting on the pad.

Falcon Heavy is SpaceX' super heavy-lift launch vehicle based on its Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon Heavy features a strengthened Falcon 9 rocket core and two additional Falcon 9 boosters as strap-on stages. It will produce 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, or the equivalent of 18 Boeing 747s on full power.

Max payload to low-Earth orbit reaches 140,700 (63,800kg) maximum. The core and side stages are designed to be reused to bring costs down considerably per launch.

Here it is:

With more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff--equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft at full power--Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two.

A post shared by SpaceX (@spacex) on Jan 2, 2018 at 6:03pm PST

The test flight will go ahead this month provided Falcon Heavy passes all pre-flight checks, including a static fire of its 27 Merlin 1D engines. If successful, it will blast off with Elon Musk's own Tesla Roadster electric vehicle, which will be put on course to orbit Mars. However, even Musk himself has warned that there is a very real possibility that the initial launch will fail.

The World Health Organization is set to class gaming addiction as a mental health condition for the first time.

The classification is part of the organization's 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD) that will be published this year. It refers to gaming habits so severe that they take complete precedence over other life interests.

Abnormal gaming behavior should persist for more than twelve months for a diagnosis to be made, except if symptoms were severe. Associated symptoms would include impaired control over gaming frequency, intensity and duration, as well as escalating gaming habits even as negative consequences mount.

Some countries around the world have already been treating excessive gaming as an addiction problem and responding with public policy, including time limits enforced on online gaming for minors.

In the UK, some private addiction clinics treat patients for digital addiction.

Music streaming giant Spotify was hit with a $1.6 billion copyright lawsuit for allegedly streaming thousands of songs without permission.

Wixen Music Publishing Inc filed the lawsuit against the Swedish streaming service last week in a California federal court. The lawsuit alleges that Spotify failed to negotiate a direct or compulsory license that would allow it to reproduce and distribute songs for which Wixen is an exclusive licensee.

Among the catalog of songs that Wixen alleges Spotify illegally distributed are "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and "(Girl We Got A) Good Things" by Weezer.

According to the lawsuit, Spotify outsourced work to a third party, Harry Fox Agency, which Wixen alleges was ill-equipped to obtain all the necessary mechanical licenses.

Spotify counts more than 140 million users, 60 million of whom are paying customers, as of mid-2017. It is planning a stock market listing this year.

The South Korean consumer electronics firm will put its new 88-inch screen with 16 times more pixels than Full HD on display in Las Vegas.

It is the largest OLED display in the world with the highest resoltuion, packing 33 million pixels onto the 88-inch display. To put that into persective, it is sixteen times more than Full HD (1920x1080) and four times more than Ultra HD (3840x2160).

To increase the resolution of the display it is necessary to reduce the size of each pixel and in turn aperture ratio, which results in a reduction of brightness. However, self-emissive OLEDs are less affected by aperture ratio and so are optimal for higher resolution.

By contrast, an LCD display would need improved backlights to compensate for the drop in brightness, increasing material cost and power consumption.

OLED displays also remain comparatively light when the resolution is kicked up, whereas LCD screens can be anticipated to increase in weight.



"The successful development of the world's first 8K OLED display is a milestone for the 8K era and underscores the exciting potential of OLED," said In-Byung Kang, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at LG Display.

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Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter can be hit with fines of up to €50 million if they fail to remove 'hate speech' in Germany.

The Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) has been in effect since October last year, but there has been a grace period up until now. Under the law, social networks face fines of up to €50 million for failing to remove posts that contain 'hate speech' within 24 hours.

For 'complex cases', the networks have up to seven days to comply.

The law has prompted concerns about censorship in Germany and throughout Europe, with critics worrying about the impact on free speech and the potential for content being removed accidentally. The task could also be staggering for social media platforms to comply with.

Germany is not the only country that is pushing social networks to do more about certain types of content on their networks.