News written by Matti Robinson (December, 2016)

New Year's celebrations often continue to the wee hours and nothing is more annoying than trying to get kids to bed while they want to continue partying with the adults. Well, Netflix has you covered this time around.

The streaming company has released some videos that might make the chore a tad easier. New countdown videos will let kids do the counting with popular characters from the TV and then head off to bed.

There are a total of 10 videos which are mostly covered in the trailer below. Characters range from Madagascar's King Julien to Fuller House cast and from Luna Petunia to Trollhunters. The videos are just a couple minutes long so you'll be able to insert the countdown to whatever situation you might have.

You can find the links to all 10 videos below.

A group of hackers that recently took down Tumblr have threatened to attack gamers next. The group called R.I.U. Star Patrol has said that the next targets are online console gaming services from Microsoft and Sony.

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Tumblr earlier this week took the service down for a couple hours. R.I.U. Star Patrol, a group that is apparently newly formed or not previously active in hacking, took credit for the attack. Now the group told in a YouTube interview with Gaming news site 7421Max that it is planning to shut down Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.

Not only are they attacking two extremely popular gaming services, they plan to execute the attack on Christmas day. The group says there are no motives outside of just having a little bit of fun.

If the DDoS attacks do take down the services it is certainly not going to be fun for thousands of people opening their presents and finding a new online game. One can only hope that Sony and Microsoft have taken all the necessary measures to ensure working services to the best of their abilities.

PlayStation Network and Xbox Live were taken down on Christmas 2014 by a group called Lizard Squad.

Apple latest and greatest laptop, the new MacBook Pro, is obviously lighter and more powerful than ever but there might be some caveats you should be aware of. Many have been mesmerized by the new Touch Bar but there might be a problem under the hood that you didn't expect.

Many early adopters (or reviewers) have complained that the battery doesn't meet the expectations. Some have said that it doesn't improve the battery life from the previous model, as you would expect with an Apple product, others have gone as far as saying that it is way worse than with the predecessor.

Now Consumer Reports have declined a recommendation for the MacBook Pro because it found severe problems with the battery life. In the same test all the MacBook models they tested (both 13" and 15" and with or without Touch Bar) got hugely varying results.

For example on Touch Bar enabled 13 inch model, you could get a fairly good 16 hours but later with the same test not even finish four hours of testing.

Customers Reports explains that its test includes only visiting websites on default settings (and default browser, Safari) for as long as the battery lasts. It's certainly should not be CPU or battery intensive so results on the upper end are expected.

Microsoft's unofficial podcast Windows Weekly had a surprise guest in Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela. In the podcast he reviewed the year for the Redmond giant.

Even though the year was very successful to the company – and in some fronts not, *ahem* smartphones *ahem* – there definitely were things that could've been done better. One of the things was how Windows 10 was marketed and pushed to customers. Mr. Capossela admitted that Windows 10 update procedure went too far in terms of pushing the update, Softpedia reports.

According to Capossela the exact moment when Microsoft crossed the line was when the red X in the dialog box no longer cancelled the update but instead ran it in the background. He said it was clear fairly soon that they went too far but backpedaling and releasing another update took some time.

Some people said that the update was pushed on to their systems even when they didn't want this. This was painful to hear, said Capossela.

Even though there was a lot of criticism towards the pushy updates, Microsoft knew all along that being aggressive and pushing the envelope is going to be needed in order to get update numbers they were aiming for. Windows 10 was adopted far faster than its recent predecessors.

There probably isn't a smartphone company that has not been in patent disputes with a rival. However, Apple is especially plagued with the lawsuits, possible because it is reaping all the profits of the industry.

For years it seems like Samsung and Apple have been fighting over patents but a new name has entered the courtroom. Well, not a new name per se, but let's say a newly reformed name.

Apple is being taken to court by Nokia. Yes, Nokia, the company that sold its smartphone business years ago to Microsoft – which has already pretty much killed it off too. Actually the patent case is an old one which the companies resolved in 2011. Now that the contract is expiring Apple has declined to continue paying for using the patents, Nokia claims.

Nokia is now suing Apple in 11 countries, including the US, and a total of 14 different districts. The dispute is over 40 different patents and cover such technologies as display, user interface, software, antenna, chipsets and video coding. In the US the cases will be handled by Eastern District of Texas (18 patents) and International Trade Commission (8 patents).

One of the more anticipated movie relaunches is definitely Blade Runner. The sequel to the 80s cult classic sci-fi flick has been in the works for quite some time and now we've been presented with the first bite sized trailer.

Blade Runner 2049 continues the story of the original movie 30 years later, as the name suggests. This time the story follows a new blade runner, a police special operative, that has been sent to seek for a lost blade runner, original movie's Rick Deckard.

The new blade runner is played by Ryan Gosling and Deckard is again starred by Harrison Ford. As the trailer shows, the dark alleys, neon signs, and what seems like a endless rain of the original are back. The director of the original movie, Ridley Scott, is the executive producer this time around and Denis Villeneuve (of Arrival fame for example) is directing Blade Runner 2049.

There's still quite a bit of time before we'll see whether the movie will be worthy of a true Blade Runner sequel or not. The premiere is set to October 6 next year but I'm sure we'll be treated with more trailers during the coming months.

As for now, just play this one back a few dozen times.

Even when Microsoft was focusing on smartphones more than ever Windows Phones were barely staying afloat. After Microsoft discontinued manufacturing both dumb and smart phones this summer it was clear that there is really no future for Windows phones in current form.

Some companies still believe that there is room for a third operating system, and many people agree. Can there still be a successful smartphone with Windows in it? Microsoft seems to believe so, after all, CEO Satya Nadella has recently promised that the company will deliver something unique in the future.

If you want to see what kind of traction a traditional Windows 10 powered smartphone with nothing unique creates then look no further than Moly X1. Moly X1 was featured on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo and the startup behind the concept was looking for $100,000 for its work oriented smartphone.

The campaign was a fiasco, and that's a kind way of putting it. A total of 30 funders managed to gather a total of $2,569, that's under 3 percent of the goal. Only 14 backers wanted to invest the products value, around $180. The rest were struggling to give five dollars for a case or a mere digital booklet.

If you don't count The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents might be the most notorious torrent site around. Or used to be until it was closed by the U.S. officials in July. Well, now the site has come online again.

To be clear, the site was already online before but only hosted forums. Now it is providing links to torrent files again but tells TorrentFreak that it is operating according to the U.S. law and features a valid DMCA takedown procedure.

KickassTorrents' admin Ukranian Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland and the domain seized in July after Homeland Security and Department of Justice had started an investigation on the world's most popular torrent site at the time.

In August the DOJ indicted three Ukranian individuals, one of which was Mr. Vaulin. The three suspects had been linked to other illegal websites, including Leechmonster.com, Solarmovie, iWatchfilm.com, and Hippomovies.com.

Yahoo released a statement yesterday saying again that its servers have been hacked. This time unauthorized third party was able to collect data from up to one billion user accounts.

In September Yahoo revealed that in 2012 its service was hacked and data from as many as 500 million users had leaked. At that point it was considered the largest hack in history.

Now it was surpassed by another attack that gave hackers access to user data including usernames, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

According to Yahoo this attack was done in August 2013 and no credit card information was leaked. The company said that credit card information are stored on a different server.

Yahoo is currently in talks with Verizon about its acquisition. One can see Verizon second-guessing that deal especially after this second revealment.

One of the most anticipated features of all time on Netflix must have been offline viewing. This feature that has been largely shrugged off by Netflix and even been denied of any viability finally made it and was made official last week.

Now, what this means is that you can enjoy your favorite movies and TV shows even when you don't have an internet connection, given that you've downloaded the content beforehand. There are some limitations as Netflix is rolling it to more content over the coming months but if the show or movie is downloadable it has a Download link right next to the "Add to My List" button on movies or next to the play button of each episode in shows.

One thing that needs to be remembered though before downloading all 52 episodes of House of Cards in case you need to take a flight at some point. Downloading TV shows and movies takes up a lot of space.

Netflix has done their home work and know how to encode and package their content for offline viewing, but there's a some oddities too. During the fall the company tested both HEVC and VP9 with a sample size of over 5000 videos grabbed from over 500 shows and movies.

Google released the version 55 of Chrome browser this week and it has one of the biggest updates in recent history. The new browser no longer plays Flash videos on default.

Google has for a long time been a proponent of HTML5 video and this has been evident especially in its video platform YouTube. Now the company has decided to reduce Flash on all three major desktop browsers to an even less meaningful status.

Flash will still be used if that is all the website offers, 9to5Google points out, but defaulting to HTML5 video will reduce dramatically which video technology the majority will use. This will be remembered as one of the final nails in the coffin for Adobe Flash.

This is an extremely good thing for users in many ways. HTML5 is far more secure, power efficient, and especially offers performance that is leaps and bounds beyond Flash, and this update will force many web developers to switch away from the old technology.

Chrome users will now be prompted if they want to enable Flash when entering a site with Flash content. However, the top 10 sites (YouTube.com, Facebook.com, Yahoo.com, VK.com, Live.com, Yandex.ru, OK.ru, Twitch.tv, Amazon.com, and Mail.ru) in the world in addition to website that have no HTML5 support are exempt from the rule for the next 12 months.

A new video has surfaced that shows how simple it is to bypass the iPhone and iPad device lock activation. This means that a thief that got their hands on your iDevice could get in with a simple trick.

Apple's devices provide a device lock feature which allows to lock out the device even after it's been lost. The remote lock however seems to be far from perfect, because of a bug in device lock activation.

According to a video uploaded to YouTube this bug can be exploted so that the activation will be bypassed. Normally the device can be unlocked only with Apple ID and password.

To unlock the device user can join a WiFi network of choice. By entering network name and other fields that exceed a certain limit the software crashes and for a split second shows the home screen. If you are quick you can enter the device by pressing the power button or accessing Siri.

Both iOS 10.1 and 10.1.1 are vulnerable with this type of exploit, Security Week reports.

Apple's 2012 released Maps-application was early on a far cry from what its main competitor Google had to offer. After four years of development the service has improved immensely – certainly not making you drive to ocean as much – but is still playing catch-up to Google Maps.

According to Bloomberg< Apple is trying to take on Google Maps with new investments in few different technologies. The first one is to use drones to quicker update maps instead of using camera vans that move slower.

Drones would probably not replace the data coming from ground level cameras but the sources say that they could quickly see changes in roads, examine street signs and spot construction sites.

According to the sources the other way Apple intends to improve the maps is by adding indoor viewing to Maps with a technology bought last year. Known as indoor.io (previously What A Map) the indoor mapping project aims to guide iPhone users within high population density settings such as airports. It uses a variety of ways to determine the location, including pressure sensors, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.