News written by Petteri Pyyny (April, 2018)

WhatsApp will soon start banning users who are under 16 year old. The change is related to European Union's GDPR legislation and how WhatsApp has decided to implement it.

The change will affect only those who live in European Union. Previously the age limit in Europe has been 13. The upcoming GDPR privacy legislation doesn't require companies to raise the age limit, but it has special clauses aimed at protecting minors. Thus, Facebook - who owns WhatsApp - has decided that it is easiest to simply raise the age limit across Europe.

Ibn coming weeks users of WhatsApp within European Union will be faced with a questionnaire asking for their age and also to agree with new, GDPR-compliant terms of service.

GDPR is one of the biggest privacy legislation changes in the World, giving EU citizens rights to their data and restricts how companies can use the data they have collected.

GDPR gives EU member states the right to choose the age of data handling consent (when the person is deemed capable of giving consent for companies to have his/her data collected) to be between 13 and 16 years, but apparently Facebook/WhatsApp has decided that it is easier to simply raise the age limit to 16 all across European Union rather than to deal each country's age limit separately.

For many years, the Autumn release of new iOS operating system update has also meant that at least one of the iPhone models will be cut off from receiving the latest OS version, officially killing the product's support.

As the inevitable iOS 12 update is approaching, the next in line to be retired would be iPhone 5S, released back in 2013.

However, it seems that there's going to be a change to the familiar pattern and none of the iPhone models would be cut off this time around. At least if believe this Reddit discussion where a redditor had found out that latest WebKit tests specifically state that iPhone 5S running on iOS 12 is part of the test suite.

If true, the change would make iPhone 5S the most updated iPhone model ever. It has gone through five major iOS updates and if iOS 12 really comes to it, it would be the phone's sixth major iOS version.

iPhone 5S was released in September, 2013. If the iOS 12 really supports iPhone 5S, the model's lifespan would be more than half a decade.

Russia has banned popular messaging app Telegram and tries to block it as well as it can. This week, Russia blocked tens of thousands of IP addresses in order to block its citizens' access to Telegram - and failed.

At first, Russia's communication authority Roskomnadzor blocked tens of thousands of IP addresses that belong to Amazon's cloud services. Later, Roskomnadzor blocked yet another bunch of IP addresses, thus time those that are used by Google's cloud services.

The result?

Now Russians cannot access to thousands of unrelated web services, online games and more. Even some Russian banks are on the block list.

And yes, Roskomnadzor own website was hosted on one of the blocked IP addresses, too, so it wont work either..

Things that @roscomnadzor successfully blocked:
✔Their own website
✔and their monitoring devices (Ревизор)
✔Google Cloud
✔Amazon AWS
✔Payment processors
✔Retail store chain
✔Gett ridesharing app
✔National social network OK

What @roscomnadzor didn't block:
❌Telegram

— Manual (@CatVsHumanity) 18. huhtikuuta 2018

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Samsung has released a weird, weird little phone. Company's latest smartphone doesn't have any form of Internet connectivity at all.

The phone, Samsung Galaxy J2 Pro simply cannot be connected to the Net. It has decent 2600mAh battery, 1.5GB RAM and 16GB internal storage and decent 8Mpix camera (and 2Mpix front camera).

Oddity is aimed at Samsung's home market, Korea. Company targets elderly people with the product, trying to make the phone easier to grasp than most smart phones. Samsung also suggests that the phone could be perfect for students who want to avoid interruptions through social media and instant messaging.

Phone retails for appx €150 / $185, which seems bit steep for a phone without any form of online capabilities. But there's a unique option there, too: Samsung promises to give full refund to those who purchase a more expensive Samsung phone after the school year in Korea ends.

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AfterDawn's own official Android app has been updated. The new version, v1.10, is now available.

After the initial launch of our own app, we've focused on fixing bugs that have crashed the app in certain cases. Thus, the new version is mostly a quick bugfix to known problems.

The app's stability rate has been bit over 99 percent, but we obviously aim to make the app as stable as possible.

Furthermore, the new version also improves both, search and "news by tag" listings, making them "infinite". Being infinite means that once you reach the bottom of the news list, the app will load more (older) content for the results, allowing you to search through our entire news database of 19 years.

The app is free, doesn't require any specific persmissions and includes all of our news ever released - ever since 1999.

Get it now:

AfterDawn app for Android

Hackers that call themselves Prosox and Kuroi'shi have successfully hacked YouTube. They managed to remove the most successful music video of all time, Despacito.

Before removal, hackers managed to change the video's thumbnail images to gang members from the show Casa de Papel.

Despacito, a song by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee was the first video ever to reach more than 5 billion views in YouTube.

Also some other music videos were removed by the same group - all of them were added to YouTube's VEVO music video service.

WhatsApp is the de facto messaging app in most countries around the world. Only the United States, Canada and handful of other countries prefer Facebook Messenger over WhatsApp. In China, WeChat is the king, but for the rest of the world WhatsApp is the number one messaging app.

Alright, headline might be overstating the issues. WhatsApp doesn't suck, it is actually a brilliant little app. But it has problems that frustrate a lot of its users.

It is naive to think that people could simply switch to a better platform. Forcing all your relatives, coworkers, etc to switch to something else is next to impossible, when they also have their relatives, coworkers, and friends using the same app.

Thus, it is better to think what are the biggest problems with WhatsApp and hope that Facebook - who owns WhatsApp - does something about those issues.

So, my two cents on what I think are the biggest problems with WhatsApp:

Platform lock-in

While you are free to transfer almost all data between Android and iPhone nowadays, WhatsApp is the huge, even monstrous, exception to that rule. There's simply no reasonable way to move your thousands, even hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp messages from iPhone to Android and vice versa.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted in an interview with VOX that company scans through all private messages people send through Facebook Messenger.

Company tells that all the private messages are being scanned by automated systems to detect contents that violate Facebook's Terms of Service. Furthermore, some of the messages detected - or reported by users to Facebook - will be read by human moderators in order to see if the message violates Facebook's TOS.

According to Facebook, the very same tools and methods are used to monitor both, public Facebook posts and seemingly private Messenger discussions.