News written by Matti Robinson (September, 2018)

Yesterday Facebook released a statement about a security breach that had affected tens of millions of Facebook users. According to the social media giant the hackers got some user information from up 50 million users.

Facebook is investigating the hack with authorities, including the FBI, but currently it is not certain what type of information was leaked. At least the "View As" pages and basic information such as age and sex were leaked.

Some have argued that the access tokens that were used to gain access to View As pages would give access to other more sensitive information as well, but there's no official word on this yet.

Those 50 million affected have been logged out from their Facebook account which cut any illegitimate connections. This also means that you have to log back in to your account to access Facebook. Facebook also logged out another 40 million users as a precaution even though believes they were not targeted.

Currently seeing if you've been logged out is the only way to check whether the hack affected your account or if you were one of the 40 million users that were suspect of a "View As" lookup and thus precautionarily logged out.

It is advised that you don't enter any details on possible forms or sites that claim they can retrieve information on whether your account was hacked.

Facebook has just revealed that it has detected a security issue that has affected tens of millions of accounts.

The statement posted on Facebook's official newsroom details that a total of 90 million accounts might have been affected by the security exploit.

50 million of the accounts are the prime suspects that Facebook has determined to have been affected but another 40 million accounts have been logged out as a precautionary step as they've been suspect to a "View As" lookup in that past 12 months.

The issue has allowed logins to users without their knowledge or consent. Facebook has now logged all those users out and they will need to perform a new log in next time requesting access to Facebook.

The breach has been fixed last night and faulty access should no longer exist.

According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook does not currently have information on whether the breach might have leaked any sensitive information like private messages. However, the hackers have gained access to users' "View As" profile information.

Facebook has removed "View As" pages temporarily.

The page shows what the user's profile looks like to someone else and could includes information such as age, sex, and home town.

Elon Musk, the visionary behind Tesla, SpaceX and most recently The Boring Company, has been sued by the U.S. government over tweets posted last month.

The Security and Exchange Commission is accusing Musk and his privatization tweet on August 7 of fraud by false statements that could hurt investors.

Musk's original tweet that now got him to hot water was "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." According to S.E.C. Musk had done no securing of the funding and was recklessly falsifying the state of privatization.

Later in the month Musk retweeted Tesla's tweet titled "Staying Public" linking to a statement by Musk himself explaining why he and the Board of Directors have decided to stay public.

The lawsuit is trying to bar Musk from serving as an executive or a director of publicly traded companies, obviously including Tesla. Tesla is the only one of Musk-lead companies currently public.

In response to S.E.C.'s lawsuit was Musk said: "This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed."

He continued to explain that he has always tried to pursue truth and transparency. It remains to be seen how the courts find the accusations.

Oculus VR, one of the foremost pioneers of virtual reality headsets, has announced a new product. Facebook-owned, since 2014, Oculus' new headset is called Quest.

At Connect 5 keynote Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to announce the new Oculus Quest. Oculus Quest is the social media giant's next-generation VR headset that offer wireless connectivity and familiar motion controllers.

The main improvement over the current generation is the ability to use the product in almost any situation thanks to the wireless nature of the headset. The location tracking is found in both the controllers as well as the headset with four wide angle cameras placed in each corner.

As there is no wires, Oculus Quest includes a battery and all the necessary computing units inside the headset. This also means that the processing power is nowhere near a PC powered VR headset.

Oculus expects over 50 games to be shipped with Oculus Quest but didn't name any games.

Oculus Quest will cost $399. They'll hit the market next spring, but Oculus doesn't have a firm release date for the headset yet.

Sony was ferociously attacked over Fortnite cross-platform for months, but the company did not budge. They've been adamant that crossplay between PS4, Xbox One and Switch is not something they want to do.

Now, something has changed since Sony has officially confirmed that cross-platform support is in fact on the way.

Perhaps Sony didn't realize how important it was to unite platforms with titles as massive as Fortnite. Perhaps they were flooded with bad press and unhappy Xbox and Switch users' critique (read: rage).

The new Google Chrome released early in September brought a few important changes, one of which was the updated user interface and look.

There also was a not-so-noticeable lesser feature change that Google has been getting lots of flack for.

See Google changed the Google account login so that when you log in to your Gmail or other Google products you'll automatically also log in to the browser. Previously browser log in was separated from whenever you used other Google services in the browser.

As you might imagine, people do not like when they are logged in to services without their knowledge or consent. And Google has done a 180 degree turn and agreed.

While Google originally argued, and still believes, that users do not always recognize that Chrome as a browser is different from their Gmail account, they've recognized the critique that this is not the best practice from security standpoint among others.

Google is still keeping the feature on by default but in the future version, upcoming Chrome 70, it'll allow users to disable automatic Chrome logins when logging in Google services with the browser.

One of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers, Qualcomm, has aired out fairly serious accusations towards Apple. The first trillion dollars company has stolen some of chip manufacturer's secrets, Qualcomm says.

Qualcomm took it to the courts and is trying to prove that Apple, a chip designer themselves, helped Intel, a major competitor to Qualcomm, with their modems with code acquired from Qualcomm.

Obviously sharing details such as this is against the software licensing agreement between Qualcomm and Apple, Qualcomm claims.

Previously Apple has used both Qualcomm's and Intel's modems in their iPhones, lately preferring the former, but this year all three new phones from Cupertino has Intel's modem chips in them.

Apple's side of this debacle is that they've been trying to get rid of Qualcomm's modems exactly because of unfair licensing practices.

Qualcomm's contention is that Apple should pay a percentage share of the end product to them, instead of what Apple thinks, and perhaps the most others think, is fair, which is obviously the price of the product they bought.

While Qualcomm claims that Apple has constantly been sharing confidential information with Intel for them to catch up to Qualcomm, there is no concrete examples shown, at least to the public of yet.

Current generation gaming consoles have one slight difference in I/O support. Sony's PlayStation 4 supports both USB and Bluetooth keyboard and mice while Microsoft's creation has support for none of those, until now.

Microsoft has confirmed that support for mouse and keyboard input is in the works. In fact the company is developing peripherals with Razer so you can expect perhaps some flashy gamer gear type Xbox keyboards and mice in the near future.

Currently the feature is still in testing and you'll get access to it only in the Xbox Insider program, but expansion to all consoles should come soon. However, games will not allow mouse and keyboard controls by default, that is dependent on developers to enable.

And to bring the support on par with the toughest competition, Microsoft has revealed that both wired and wireless, that is USB and Bluetooth, keyboards are supported.

Microsoft and Razer will have more news on November 10.

Firefox might not be on the top of the world anymore, or hasn't been for years now, but they are trying all kinds of tricks to turn the ship. The latest is a virtual reality browser by the name of Firefox Reality.

Obviously, as the the name suggests, the browser is a Firefox version designed for the virtual reality, and to be used with VR headsets. Mozilla is planning on further developing Firefox Reality to be compatible with AR glasses as well, perhaps thus the name that doesn't exclude any type of extended reality.

Currently Firefox Reality is only available for specific VR platforms, including HTC Vive, Oculus and Daydream headsets. You can download it from the app stores of aforementioned platforms.

Future installments are planned to support at least Microsoft HoloLens as well as the new competitor to that, Magic Leap One.

Most of the web is obviously two-dimensional, so that will be displayed as a sheet of paper if you will, but Mozilla says the browser supports also immersive web content.

Firefox Reality supports both virtual keyboard input, which is never optimal, as well as voice commands. The version number is currently only at 1.0 so expect improvement in terms of bookmarks, 360 degree videos and others coming in the future.

Nintedo unveiled a surprising product in 2016, a retro gaming console called NES Classic. The tiny NES-looking machine is a gaming console with 30ish retro Nintendo games, and it was a huge hit.

Even Nintendo didn't expect it, and it sold out immediately, and a few times again. It came back in 2018, and Nintendo released a sibling, the SNES Classic.

The success of these cheap little retro consoles sparked the interest of Commodore who released the C64 Mini. And now it's Sony's time to enter the game.

Sony has now unveiled that they'll be releasing a PlayStation Classic, a tiny retro version of the original PlayStation. According to Sony, this tiny console is 45 percent smaller than the original and it includes 20 classic games from PS one.

Google released last year a family-oriented app, called Family Link, which allows parents to control their kids' phones.

Previously Family Link has allowed parents to take control of their sub-13 year olds' phones only, now they've expanded the support to teenagers as well.

In a post-GDPR EU, where for example minors under the age of 16 can't have a Google account, the feature was obviously necessary, but elsewhere as well it gives long-awaited controls to parents of their offsprings' digital life.

Family Link was originally designed for minors under the age of 13 but with the new update teenagers are now included in the app as well. However, it does require both parties to accept the terms, but one could argue that should be easy to accomplish.

Since there is a bi-party consent, the teenager can break the connection at any point, but that will result in a 24-hour shutdown of the phone.

With Family Link the parents can monitor location and usage times on per-app basis, allow or ban downloads of specific apps, and even lock the device.

Google is also updating Assistant with Family Link features so you'll be able to ask Google Home or your Android phone's Assistant to lock your kid's phone or what have you.

Even the people that love Twitter the most have a few gripes with the service. One of the most common ones is of course not allowing users to edit tweets, but another, perhaps an even more common problem, is being fixed.

Twitter support has confirmed, reports TechCrunch, that the company is bringing back a chronologically, or more precisely reverse chronologically, ordered tweet feed. It must be one of the most requested features of the Twittersphere.

In 2016, Twitter started arranging tweets with their own algorithm that promised best Tweets first. This meant that some tweets, retweets and likes made it to the top and others seemed to disappear. Worst of all, the user doesn't really know the method to this madness.

Now, Twitter is bringing back the original idea which is to have a simple feed showing newest tweets first. You won't be seeing interesting things people liked promoted or anything like that. Which should be what people have opted in for when they unticked the setting for "Show the best Tweets first."

This wasn't entirely the case, though, but now the company is finally giving up the grand experiment, and letting users choose for themselves.

Google has officially apologized for an error that changed Android users setting without their approval. Users have noticed that their phone went on battery saving mode without any action.

A Pixel team representative has confirmed on a Reddit thread that it is indeed the case that Google had remotely changed some users' battery saving mode to on position. Obviously this is something that shouldn't happen, and many thought couldn't even happen.

According to the statement made on Reddit, Google had been testing battery saving features and it was mistakenly applied to users that are not part of the internal program. They've since rolled the changed back and users can now choose whether they want to have battery saving on or not.

Here's the statement:

Hi all, some of you may have noticed that battery saver turned on automatically today. This was an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended. We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion.

Apple's last week's iPhone event held in Cupertino included some highlights worthy of ovations, perhaps even standing ones.

The first ever over-the-counter ECG in form of a new and much improved Apple Watch was definitely one of them, and one could argue Smart HDR on new iPhones seemed like more than a simple evolutionary step in smartphone cameras.

Apart from Smart HDR, however, the new iPhone flagships very largely iterative upgrades over the previous year's iPhone X. And that was to be expected, after all it was the S year this time around.

Thankfully, Apple had "one more iPhone" to unveil.

Tim Cook and his buddies released the iPhone XR, that was expected as well. A middle of the road iPhone with a colorful aluminum design and powerful specs, including the new A12 Bionic chip found in the more expensive new iPhone models.

However, in all the attractive looks and promising tech there's a gaping hole in specs. The new iPhone XR comes with a large, completely 2018-ready 6.1 inch screen, but it is a LCD panel and a lousy one at that.

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus has been on the upswing for their entire five year lifespan. It began as the home of the "flagship killer" that provided very affordable smartphones with killer specs.

Now years later it has proven itself over and over again and gained a larger than its original cult following, especially in European markets. This year, the OnePlus 6T due in one month, OnePlus is bringing their smartphones first time ever to a major U.S. carrier, T-Mobile.

However, the company has even bigger, more radical, plans ahead.

The founder and CEO Pete Lau has posted at thread called "Intelligent Connectivity: Our Next Step Forward" on the official forums talking about a new product, and it's not a smartphone nor a tablet. In fact, it's doesn't seem to be anything mobile at all.

OnePlus' newest smart device will be a TV, they call it, aptly, OnePlus TV.

Unfortunately at this point Lau is not ready to reveal much about the device. Not even is it an actual TV or a media device like Apple TV, but the teaser photo seems to suggest it's the former.

Apple unveiled today the newest generation of iPhones. The flagship models carry the name Xs and Xs Max, and whatever you might think about the names they are beautiful craftsmanship, as you would expect.

We already went through most of the improvements on paper, but let's not kid ourselves, what matters to many is what the iPhones look like. Apple has of course released their own press photos that are aimed to show the new devices in the most glorious of lights.

The official high-resolution press photos of the new iPhone Xs and Xs Max showcase the new and improved camera, the Super Retina displays as well as some of the more important new software features.

Without further ado, here are the iPhone Xs and Xs Max in pictures.

Apple officially unveiled today the new iPhone Xs, and the Xs Max, the new flagship smartphone. But they also had in store one more iPhone, as expected, the iPhone Xr.

This cheap, or rather cheaper, iPhone features a 6.1 inch LCD (instead of OLED in the less affordable models) display that Apple calls Liquid Retina, which, let's be honest, is probably just marketin jargon.

The resolution is a standard Retina definition at 1792 x 828 at 326 PPI which is a far cry from the 458 on the bigger brothers, and there is no 3D Touch found on the iPhone Xr. However, Apple has implemented a longer touch with haptic feedback, called the Haptic Touch, which should work fairly similarly.

The camera is neither on par with the more expensive Xs models, and offers only a single 12 megapixel camera. This camera however does feature an OIS and can even do Portrait mode thanks to some Pixel-like software trickery.

Apple has today unveiled the new generation of iPhones lead by the flagship models iPhone Xs and Xs Max, as expected.

The new models offer upgrades in most respects but most significantly in display, processors and camera. The displays are 5.8 and 6.5 inches OLED panels that offer a resolution of 1125 x 2436 (Xs) or 1242 x 2688 (Xs Max) pixels and a 458 PPI pixel density.

The new displays, Apple calls them Super Retina, also support HDR in both Dolby Vision and HDR10 and include a 120hz touch sensor.

The processor side of things is upgraded by the new A12 Bionic system-on-chip that includes an improved six core big.LITTLE style CPU that provides 40 to 50 percent improvement in efficiency.

The GPU, nowadays Apple-made as well, on the other hand increases the performance up to 50%, and even the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) has been upgraded to 8 cores with improved performance.

The A12 Bionic performance was demonstrated by Bethesda and their new game, Elder Scrolls: Blades, among others.

Camera specs haven't changed much, after all its still mostly the same 12 megapixel dual camera from iPhone X, but Apple promises that the changed under the hood and to the software make it worth the upgrade.

If Google's upcoming Pixel event if all about the Pixel phones it'll certainly be a snooze fest for some significant part of the population. Now that Google even killed the Pixel Watch rumors, there's one less product we were expecting on October 9.

Thankfully Chrome Unboxed has come to lift our moods with some leaked footage of supposedly an upcoming Pixel product.

According to the headline of the video the device shown is either Nocturne or Atlas, both of which as codenames for different versions of Pixelbook 2 in development. If it was just this footage we might not be too hopeful about the prospects of Google unveiling such a thing in four weeks.

However, there are some pictures, including the ones pictured above, that have shown a different version of an updated Pixelbook design. Unfortunately we have no clue which one Google is preparing for the October event and which one (if any) is just a forgotten prototype.

Well, all we're left with is four weeks to wait or, better yet, try and find more evidence for Pixelbook 2. We'll keep you posted.

Biometric sensors have been one of the more innovated areas of smartphones in the past few years. Ever since we got fingerprint sensors, we have been looking at ways to unlock the phone with less effort, more precision and security.

Face unlock is one of the newer iterations of that development and can be either fast and not-so-secure or secure and no-so-fast. Also the latter configuration at this point requires quite a bit of notch space.

Fingerprint sensor would be nice, but you either have to place it in the back, or reserve space from the "chin" which isn't really up to par these days. Fortunately there's a new way to make a fingerprint sensor, and that is to embed it under the thin layer of display.

This application has been demonstrated by a few Chinese smartphone manufacturers, and even produced now in fairly high quantity for mostly their local market. However, it has not yet made its way to the West, and we aren't really expecting Google or Apple to change that with the new generation of smartphones.

Thankfully a Chinese manufacturer by the name of OnePlus, a lesser known entity here in the US but a growing force in the EU market, is bringing its upcoming OnePlus 6T to the US with a carrier partner, T-Mobile.

In technology industry, especially the smartphone part of it, the upcoming month will be perhaps the most important 30 days of the year.

Both Apple and Google are going to be introducing the newest generation of smartphones and probably some accompanying equipment like smartwatches and accessories.

While Microsoft is no longer really an entity in the smartphone race, and nowadays it just tries to spread its software wisdom as wide as possible, meaning both Android and iOS are getting more and more Microsoft-branded applications, it has squeezes itself in the 30 days period with its own hardware launch.

Redmond has sent out an invite proposing journalists and influencers give the company aptly a "moment of your time." They seem to realize that the press is going crazy after iPhones, iPads and Pixels over the next month, and they modestly just want a little bit of your precious time.

Microsoft's October event is held on October 2nd in New York City, just couple weeks after the iPhone launch and a week before Google's Pixel event. And it's not even that clear what Microsoft will unveil, although one could guess a new Surface Book 2 and a refreshed version of Surface Laptop.

Apple has quietly added a new page to their support site which issues a replacement program for iPhone 8 devices. The callback is issued specifically for a small percentage of normal-sized iPhone 8 models suffering from a defect in the logic board.

According to Apple, a very small percentage of iPhone 8 devices, not including any iPhone 8 Plus devices, contain logic boards with a manufacturing defect. The company will fix, by replacing, the faulty devices for free.

Devices with faulty logic board may experience sudden reboots and freezes or might not turn on. Apple's assessment about the percentage is easy to believe since we haven't had a massive outcry on social media about such problems.

If you've bought your device between September 2017 and March 2018 in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, or the U.S., you should head to the support page where you'll be able to enter the serial number to check whether yours might be affected by the defect.

Google's upcoming Pixel event has yet to be announced officially, so there is still time for some rumors and speculation. We of course already know that Google will unveil the new Google Pixel 3 phones, but what else might we be getting?

Rumors from few months back have suggested that Google would be releasing the Pixel Watch, a smartwatch to accompany Pixel smartphones. This wouldn't be a surprise at all, especially since Apple is planning to announce new version of theirs in less than two weeks.

Apparently this isn't the case after all. Google has put down the rumors for good in an interview with Tom's Guide. Google's Miles Barr has said that Google is not going to unveil their own smartwatch this year, and instead is just focusing on developing Wear OS.

Wear OS is of course Google's mobile operating system for wearables, so mainly smartwatches, activity trackers, and such.

According to Barr Google is not ready to join the race because there doesn't seem to be a way to make a single product for everyone. Reading between Barr's lines also seems to reveal that Google might want a more advanced Google Assistant before jumping into smartwatches.

Apple's upcoming iPhone launch event has been confirmed for September 12, and in fact we've already seen the first pictures of the upcoming iPhones.

However, there are more than iPhones to be released. Apple is preparing the launch of a new Apple Watch and perhaps even new iPads. The latter we haven't seen yet, but a leaked picture revealed what the upcoming new generation of Apple Watches has in store.

The picture doesn't reveal everything about the new device but it does give us a few details about the smartwatch. First of all is the most obvious difference: the display. Apple has enlarged the display to more or less meet the edges unlike the previous generations.

This means probably not only larger display but better resolution which is why the watch face looks so much more busy. There will be other watch faces, as we know, but thankfully this one gives us a glimpse of a new feature that we haven't seen before.

Apple seems to have implemented a UVI gauge into the watch face. UVI stands of course for UV index, or ultraviolet index, and measures how much ultraviolet radiation reaches the surface of the earth at any given time or place. UVI is an important tool to determine when it is necessary to apple sunscreen to avoid sunburn.

Microsoft is preparing another significant update to its desktop operating system. According to Microsoft's appearance at Berlin's IFA conference the update should be shipping in October.

The version, formerly known as Redstone 5, has been named, well what do you know, October 2018 Update. The aptly named update will be bringing all kinds of changes to Windows 10, including new features, some UI updates, and of course plenty of fixes.

We, of course, are most interested about the new features. Those include a long-awaited cloud-based clipboard, that helps you store clipboard contents and move them across devices. Another new feature is the dark theme for File Explorer, which is probably going to make a lot of people happy.

The Snipping Tool and Microsoft Edge will also get major updates, and the Xbox Game Bar will be improved with new performance details.

Microsoft has also already started developing the update after this one, which is codenamed 19H1, and is thus expected in the first half of 2019, aimed for a April release. There are, however, no details about what that might bring along.