News written by Matti Robinson (January, 2018)

Just as Mozilla updated their browsers, with new Firefox 58, Google answers with a new browser version of their own. Among other things Google's new Chrome 64 is said to be offering better protection against malicious or just plain annoying websites.

The most important improvement in the new Chrome version is probably the new, improved, and more efficient popup blocker. It should take care of all annoying windows or dialogs appearing in front that you did not initiate or ask for.

Lately Google has been focusing more and more to make the web experience more enjoyable probably in the hopes that people would allow the showing of fairly innocuous ads they themselves promote.

Obviously blocking annoying ads is good for Google, if it considers none of their own ads annoying. Especially if that means people will give up the ad blockers that would otherwise block even the less eyestrain-inducing ads that the king of online advertisement uses.

Many of the other improvements to Chrome 64 are focused on developers.

Apple has released a preview to what is their next major iOS update, the iOS 11.3. Apple's mobile operating system is going to get a fairly big update later this Spring but already they have released a beta version that reveals some of the updates.

For customers angered by the "batterygate" late last year, Cupertino-based tech mammoth will introduce an upgrade that will allow users with iPhone 6 and newer iPhones to keep track fo their batteries better. You can also turn off the feature that slashes the performance to protect battery and the device itself, if you so wish.

One of the major updates to iOS 11 itself include an updated ARKit. Apple's Augmented Reality platform is updated to version 1.5 and brings along item recognition and better control over inserting objects.

Previously you've only been allowed to drop items on horizontal surfaces, like tables or floors, but now you'll be able to use vertical ones as well. Objects to be placed on vertical surfaces include paintings and posters.

ARKit will also support Full HD -resolutions as well as automatic focus.

We've also got some good news for the people that thought animojis were the best new feature of iPhone X: iOS 11.3 update brings four new animojis to iPhone X. New characters include a skull, a bear, a dragon, and a lion. Animojis are of course animated emojis that can be controlled by your facial expressions and recorded to be shared with others.

Drones have been used by the professionals, including filmmakers and military, for a long time now, and even the consumer has a myriad of choices when it comes to quadrocopters. One manufacturer, however, has been above the others on both professional grade as well as customer drones: DJI.

Now the GoPro of drones has released yet another drone. The new one is called DJI Mavic Air and as you might imagine it is a sibling to the popular semipro, prosumer, drone called Mavic Pro. DJI believes that this new version is more accessible to the normal customer while bringing along some of the more professional features.

Mavic Air is a foldable, super light weight drone that is able to film 4K video. One could easily call it a cross between the more capable Mavic Pro and recently introduced tiny Spark.

It's half the size of Mavic Pro and costs a few hundred less at $799. You'll get footage in forms of 4K@30fps and Full HD@120fps video recording, 12 megapixel stills, 32 megapixel panoramas. The remote range is around 2.5 miles but maximum flight time around 21 minutes that is obviously a little less than you get with a Mavic Pro.

The lightweight Mavic Air is a fairly speedy drone, though, as it gets up to 42 mph in Sport Mode.

Once a force to be reckoned with on the browser markets, Mozilla, has been in slow decline ever after the inception of Google Chrome. Now the Norwegian company's Firefox browser holds just over 10 percent of the desktop/laptop market but maybe they are on their way up again after the latest updates.

Firefox was recently given a huge patch to version 57 and now we've got another performance enhancing update for all you browser rebels.

The new Firefox 58 is the first update to Firefox Quantum, as the company calls its largely revamped browser. It brings along many under-the-hood upgrades that speed up many facets of browser, including a JavaScript performance boost of up to a third.

More technically Mozilla has added support for Windows' Off-Main-Thread Painting which allows rendering to be done on a separate thread. Along with better multithread support Firefox 58 includes the previously used Tracking Protection tech that speeds up loading of pages potentially even more.

The updates also added support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) on Android.

If you want to give the new version a try, download Firefox 58 for Windows here.

Facebook has largely a monopoly on instant messaging in the West. In most countries in Europe and North America, the top 2, if not top 3, most popular messaging platforms are owned by Facebook.

The most popular of them all is WhatsApp that is slightly more commonly used than Facebook Messenger.

Now the Facebook owned behemoth of a messaging platform is releasing a new product, which it hopes will create the desperately needed revenue. Even though when first introduced, WhatsApp was warning people that after a year of use it would require a monthly fee, it never really started asking money from its individual customers.

However, for a while WhatsApp has been trying to figure out how to create some revenue from the business world. The answer, the company hopes, is a new app called WhatsApp Business.

WhatsApp Business, as the name and perhaps the past four paragraphs might suggest, is an app for the business oriented folks who want to create an official presence in the WhatsApp ecosystem.

Even the WhatsApp Business is free, at least if you are a relatively small company. Larger companies need to pay a fee to get the full feature list and get all the advantages they perhaps need.

As popular as the world's largest music streaming service, you can only attract that many paying customers with music. For some people radio on the way is more than enough, and even then it might be talk radio.

Well, Spotify is looking straight at these people when trying to diversify their offerings.

As we await for Spotify to list they've revealed that a newly added section of the app will offer news related content. Provided by eight different services, the new Spotlight section includes news, podcasts as well as audio books.

The Spotlight partners are BuzzFeed News, Cheddar, Crooked Media, Lenny Letter, Gimlet Media, Genius, The Minefield Girl, Refinery29, and Uninterrupted. At least the first mentioned will provide audio news that are spiced up with infographics and other visual elements.

It is definitely a step into radio's lane, challenging perhaps the talk radio for audio advertisement. For now, Spotify's Spotlight will be only available in the United States, but Spotify has obviously plans to expand.

As companies are trying to recover from what were, and still are, perhaps the most severe CPU bugs in the history of the computer, people are wondering how exactly does this affect them.

Both manufacturers and platform developers have been patching the problems Spectre and Meltdown entail, to the extent that they can be prevented, but there's one new problem that appears after you've patched your system.

See, Microsoft talked recently about how the software patches might make your computer slow down a little bit, and Intel seems to agree. The world's largest CPU manufacturer has released test results on how much you can expect slowing down after the patch.

On Windows 10 machines the overall office productivity performance declines around 5 to 10 percent on Intel's Core chips. The exact percentage depends on many factors including, but not limited to, generation of the CPU, the version of Windows, as well as even the computation type.

On Skylake CPUs, that's the 6th generation of Core chips released couple years ago, the drop is around 8 percent while newer 8th generation chips (Kaby and Coffee Lake) slow down less than 6 percent. Mostly the slowdown was reported in the responsiveness section, which took a hit of up to 14%. The office productivity tests were done with SYSmark 2014 SE.

WhatsApp became quickly the world's largest instant messaging platform, and for a good reason. The company has offered early on such important features as end-to-end encryption.

Security features are near and dear to WhatsApp's heart, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have any problems. Facebook owned messaging platform has been hacked by a group of researchers that say they've found a way to join seemingly private conversations, Wired reports.

The researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany showcased their finding at the Real World Crypto security conference held in Switzerland. At the Zurich conference, German cryptography researchers explained how a person breaching into WhatsApp servers could add new members to group chats without the administrators approval as is the case normally.

The chat room members, however, see this new member as approved by the administrator, and he can see the encrypted conversations between all group members. According to the researchers this will not allow the newly, and fraudulently, added member to see previously sent messages.

Fortunately the exploit does require access to WhatsApp servers, which isn't exactly the easiest task. One could also expect more harm from access to WhatsApp's servers than snooping local crochet club's trending patterns.

While many of the leading smartphone manufacturers were on the show floor of the Consumer Electronics Show of 2018 in Las Vegas, not a lot of new top products were launched. Year after year, CES has become less of a mobile trade show as MWC and independent releases are getting more popular.

However, just so happens that many of the biggest smartphone manufacturers develop also other consumers electronics, and that of course includes Samsung. Even though rumors had it that Samsung was going to release the newest iteration of Galaxy S line earlier this year, we didn't see a Galaxy S9 at CES.

This isn't completely unexpected and at least we heard from the head of Samsung mobile division DJ Koh, who revealed that the unveiling of Galaxy S9 is imminent. Like last year, Samsung is going to announce new Galaxy S flagship phones at Mobile World Congress, or MWC for short, late next month.

While Samsung seems to be fairly open about their launch schedule, a somewhat unorthodox approach, they haven't revealed the shipping dates. However, if previous years are any indication, and they usually are, one can expect to see the new Galaxy S9, and probably Galaxy S9+, to hit the stores in March.

Huawei is the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer, right behind Apple and Samsung. In fact, it even surpassed Apple in the second quarter last year. However, it is not a popular brand in the U.S., and there are a few hurdles before it'll succeed here, at least if AT&T are concerned.

America's second largest mobile carrier, AT&T, has just backed out from a deal with Huawei, Wall Street Journal reports. According to reports, the Chinese manufacturer was ready to unveil the partnership with AT&T at the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, in Las Vegas this week.

Instead, AT&T cancelled last minute which left Huawei at the trade show just showing off their Mate 10 Pro (pictured) flagship without a major announcement. Huawei's press conference was held and the company still announced Mate 10 Pro availability in the US but without the help of AT&T or any other carriers for that matter.

Neither of the companies have commented on reasons why AT&T backed out but reports say that it was due to data security concerns that have loomed over Chinese manufacturers.

Many of you probably remember Kodak as the savior of your scuba diving trip with their disposable cameras. Or perhaps you've owned one the company's less iconic cameras. The company has a long history in cameras, but it's been closing in on bankruptcy for years.

Now, they've decided to take a bit of a detour from cameras and announced their own cryptocurrency.

Yeah, didn't expect that, did you? Except for the headline for the story, no one would have expected that. Unless you look at the current climate surrounding the blockchain technology and more specifically cryptocurrency.

Everyone seems to be chiming in and wants to get a piece of that action, whatever it will be worth in a few years. Now that Kodak's old technology and patents have largely been sold to the highest bidders, the company is trying to revive itself as a new type of company.

It still does, however, see itself very much in the photography space, so their new blockchain based platform KodakOne is meant for the photographers and media agencies. The KodakOne uses a proprietary cryptocurrency, I guess you could call it altcoin, called KodakCoin. So essentially you can buy and sell rights to use photos for KodakCoins.

Fingerprint sensors are one of the best ways to authenticate in a smartphone, and in recent years they've become a staple that provides fast, secure and efficient way to unlock your device. However, in the past year or so, smartphone manufacturers have adopted a new type of technology that has made it harder to deploy a fingerprint reader in the phone.

Bezeless displays are have been the craze ever since people fell in love with the original Xiaomi Mi Mix. Now Apple, Google, Samsung, LG, Huawei, OnePlus, and others have their own nearly bezeless flagship phones. That means that you've had to move your fingerprint sensor from the front, where many like it the best, to the back, or, as is the iPhone X's case, remove it completely.

However, maybe you prefer fingerprint sensor over even a state-of-the-art face unlocking like Face ID, and you definitely want it in the front because you need to unlock the phone a billion times a day while it's laying on the desk, and you still want a huge display that takes up nearly all the room from the front face of the phone.

Well, Chinese manufacturers showed a prototype of an in-screen fingerprint sensor even before the iPhone was out, but it was slow and not really where it needed to be to hit the markets. Last month, though, Synaptics, the company behind many of your laptop's trackpads and other input devices, unveiled an in-screen fingerprint sensor called the Clear ID (pictured). It promised a top tier manufacturer to showcase it at CES 2018.

The Consumer Electronics Show, perhaps more commonly known as CES, started in Las Vegas earlier this week, and electronics manufacturers have been showing off their most impressive new, upcoming, or often even concept products.

As expected, many of these are TVs, as CES is the TV trade show. While LG showed their OLED display that bends, which isn't anything new really albeit bigger and better, Samsung decided to focus on size.

Samsung's top of the line TV is called The Wall. The Wall is a modular television that dwarfs anything else on the show floor. The diagonal size of this behemoth of a TV is 146 inches. That is something you would only expect from a projected screen.

Because it is modular you can actually make it even bigger by connecting more displays into it. Makes sense to call it The Wall, doesn't it?

While the conference is dubbed Consumer Electronics Show, this piece of equipment probably doesn't land on many walls of traditional consumers. It might, however, be a for high-end solution in larger public events.

According to Samsung the TV uses what they call MicroLEDs. These smaller than normal LEDs provide the background lighting separately for each pixel, unlike in traditional LED backlit LCD TVs. This means that it offers excellent contrast, not unlike OLED panels, because you can turn off individual pixels with the backlight.

Wireless local area networks (WLAN) are going to get much, much more safe in the near future. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the new WPA3 standard for Wi-Fi was introduced.

WPA2 has been in use since 2004 and has been found to be less than optimal for the safety needs of modern Wi-Fi users. The largest differences between WPA2 and WPA3 are in open network security. Currently in an open Wi-Fi network the connections between devices are not protected in any way, and thus listening and manipulating traffic is very easy.

WPA3, however, introduces a specification for device specific encyption, which means that even if the network can be accessed without passwords you'll be able to securely transmit data without worrying about interception by other devices.

The new standard also includes a feature which allows network operator to deny access from a device to a network when the password has been guessed wrong multiple times. This protects against the so-called brute force attacks.

Wi-Fi Alliance expects the WPA3 standard to be released later this year.

While Intel has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons, perhaps excluding the collaboration with a long time rival AMD, to open up Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas they unveiled a technological breakthrough in quantum computing that hopefully shifts the focus.

The new 49-Qubit quantum chip is called Tangle Lake, and promises leaps in superconducting computing. Intel calls the new chip a major breakthrough and according to the company it truly starts quantum computing era. This even though we've seen 128-Qubit systems from a Canadian quantum computing company D-Wave Systems years ago.

The 125-Qubit D-Wave, originally unveiled in 2015, has since been surpassed by D-Wave 2X quantum computer that offers processing powers in the 1000-Qubit range.

Intel's breakthroughs are obviously still a big news in the space, after all, it is the largest CPU manufacturer in the world. Tangle Lake, as well as other quantum computing endeavors by Intel come from their Netherlands unit.

For years manufacturers have tried to bridge the gap between a smartphone and a computer by introducing proprietary docking technologies. You might remember Microsoft's effort with Windows 10 phones and computers or Samsung's DeX with their Android phones.

Obviously there have been others, and there will be more that try to breath life into a fantasy many of us are looking forwards to. The newest addition to the group is the gaming focused manufacturer Razer, who've shown off their concept at CES.

Razer's Project Linda is still, as mentioned, just a concept, but it is a seemingly well built and largely market-ready product. It's a Razer Blade-like laptop shell that needs the company's Android phone to power up.

You dock the Razer Phone in the slot situated at the track pad, and as you might imagine the phone's display serves as one. You also use the phone's fingerprint sensor to authenticate and even the dual front-facing speakers because the laptop has no built-in speakers.

Project Linda laptop includes a 13.3 inch 120Hz QHD display with touch capabilities, 53.6 watt battery, 200 gigabytes of storage, USB-A and USB-C connections, a 720p webcam, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack that is missing from the phone.

The long standing rivals of the processor space, Intel and AMD, announced late last year that they would be doing a collaborative effort which would end in a new kind of chip that would include Intel's CPU prowess and AMD's graphics chips.

Now the chip medley has been officially announced, and it's called the Intel 8th Generation Core with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics – a mouthful, right?

Technically the CPU is an H series processor in terms of power consumption but Intel has created a new G series for the Vega powered chip. The G series can include processors with a TDP up to 100 watts, so they fit snuggly between desktop and mobile processors.

The 100-watt versions of newly announced G series processors include Core i7-8809G and Core i7-8709G while lower prowered 65-watt ones are called Core i7-8705G and Core i5-8305G.

All the CPUs have four Kaby Lake cores that run at around 3 GHz with a Turbo of approximately 4 GHz. AMD developed GPU features 24 computing units in 100-watt models and the lower-powered models have 20. Only the highest end 8809G is specced for overclocking.

To showcase how the new processors are optimally used, Intel announced a reference product called Hades Canyon (pictured). The NUC (Next Unit of Computing) form factor computer is a mini PC that has the power to run VR applications in addition to fulfilling other home entertainment needs.