News written by Petteri Pyyny (April, 2019)

You know the feeling when you're at the office, working with your PC and your phone beeps about some incoming notification and you couldn't be bothered to find and open the phone? No worries, Microsoft has a solution for you!

Latest version of Windows 10, accompanied with the Microsoft's Your Phone app installed on your Android, can now bring all your Android notifications to Windows 10 notification area. This will help, especially with those mobile apps that don't have a web or Windows counterpart at all - SnapChat for example.

The feature relates to Your Phone concept the Microsoft launched last year. At first, installing a Your Phone app and connecting it to your Windows PC would allow one to browse through images and text messages stored in the phone via PC. Since then, the concept has evolved and nowadays, if your phone is in the supported devices list, you can actually mirror your entire phone to your desktop, in its own window.

Now, the latest version of Your Phone now also brings the Android notifications to Windows 10 and ties them into Windows 10's own notification area. The feature is already available to Windows Insider users, but should roll out to all of us in next couple of days. In order to get the notification mirroring, you need to have Android phone with Android 7.0 or newer and Windows 10 with at least version 1803 update available (released in Spring, 2018). More about the Your Phone and its notification mirroring can be found in Microsoft's blog entry. You can download the Your Phone app for Android here.

Women using dating apps are more than familiar with the concept of receiving unsolicited pictures of male genitalia. To the point that one of the biggest dating app developers, a company behind Bumble, Badoo, Chappy and Lumen is developing a technology to block those.

Bumble, the parent company, is developing an AI-based solution that detects such pictures when users send them to other users. If detected, the picture will be blurred and the recipient will be alerted about the image. Recipient will have the ability to show the image, if he/she wants to, but also an ability to report the sender automatically to the company's moderators.

"The safety of our users is without question the number one priority in everything we do and the development of Private Detector is another undeniable example of that commitment," founder of the company said in a statement emailed to Mashable.

Feature, dubbed as "Private Detector", will roll out in June, 2018 to all Bumble's dating apps.

During the past year, the Pc gaming giants have been fighting to dominate the gaming marketplace sector. The war started when Epic Games' got tired of paying an industry-standard 30 percent cut for various platforms, including those of Steam, Google Play and others.

Epic, who has the most cuccessful game of 2018 in its portfolio, Fortnite, has declared an open war against all major app stores and marketplaces. First of all, company has refused to add the Android version of Fortnite to Google Play store and instead, encourages users to download the game from it own servers. By doing this, Epic avoids handing out 30 percent cut of all subsequent in-game purchases to Google.

More importantly, Epic has expanded its own PC gaming store, Epic Store, to host other developers' games, too. And to infuriate gamers - and Valve, who owns Steam . Epic has managed to get several big brand games to be exclusive to its Epic Store. Epic's store takes only 12 pecent cut from developers, which is an extremely lucrative deal for most developers, despite missing out Steam's enormous existing audience.

To put the fight into context: Fortnite has been dubbed as the game with most revenue in a single year, ever. It generated a whopping 2 billion dollar revenue in year 2018. IF Epic would deliver the game only through Steam, Google Play and Apple App Store, it would mean the company would hand out a cool 600 million dollars to marketplaces. Now, other developers with potentially massive hits, understand this and they've been happy to use Epic Store rather than Steam. But the thing that has caused most annoyance among gamers has been the exclusive titles available only through Epic Store.

Tesla just hosted its Tesla Autonomy Day today where it addressed its plans for autonomous driving. Company has massive plans for the near future, if everything goes as they hope fot.

Firstly, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk said that the company expects their autopilot to achieve the "Level 5" autonomous driving by end fo the year, meaning that it would be capable of driving without a human driver in nearly all possible scenarios imaginable.

Secondly, company outlined its plans for the year 2020 with its robotaxi service. Tesla recently changed the lease contracts of its new customers by stating that after the lease period is over, Tesla wont allow the lessee to buy the car, but instead, Tesla will own it. Now, according to Musk, company will use these previously leased cars, mostly Model 3 vehicles, as the core of its planned fully autonomous ride hailing service, dubbed as Tesla robotaxi.

Telsa expects, in company slides, to get first regulatory approvals for the fully autonomous ride hailing service by end of the year 2020.

You can watch the entire presentation here:

European Union slapped Google a 4.3 billion euro ($5bn) fine last year for breaking EU's competition laws with Android operating system. Now Google has outlined its plans on how it will comply with EU legislation in future.

Google was fined for forcing manufacturers to bundle Google's search engine and Google's browser, Chrome, with the Android operating system if manufacturer wanted to have an access to other Google products. Company was also found guilty of preventing manufacturers to ship devices with modified Android versions, such as Lineage OS.

Basically this meant that if a phone manufacturer wanted to offer, say, Bing as the pre-installed search engine on its devices, Google wouldn't allow company to ship the device with certain Google products, such as YouTube. Most importantly, Google wouldn't allow manufacturers who didn't comply, to install Google Play to their devices, basically forcing users out of the de facto Android app store.

Now, to soften its grip on users, Google will provide two options for Android users in Europe: Firstly, it will ask whether the user would like to install another search provider to their phone. Secondly, Android will offer user to install other web browsers to their phones. If user installs another browser or search engine, Android will also guide user on how to set up the new installation as the system default. Furthermore, Chrome will offer user to choose an alternative search provider to be used within Chrome browser.

Most of the world knows Netflix only as a gigantic streaming service, but only few people outside the U.S. know that the company was founded as a DVD rental service back in 1998. It might come as a shock that this DVD rental service still exists - and is doing just fine.

Netflix's DVD rental service still works exactly like it used to work: the subscriber pays a flat monthly fee and for that fee receives one DVD by mail to his/her home, along with a pre-paid return envelope. Once the user is done with the DVD, he/she sends the DVD back prompting Netflix to send the user a new DVD in an envelope. The DVDs are shipped from user's "I want these" type of list, in priority order, if the DVD is available. If not, the next in line ships.

Pricing starts from $7.99 for "one DVD disc at a time" service and increases to $14.99 premier pricing, which allows user to have two DVDs rented at the same time - and to use Blu-Ray instead of DVDs. Netflix has revealed in its latest financials that a whopping 2.7 million people in the United States still use the Netflix's DVD.com service.

The reasons behind the decision for some people to stick with DVDs rather than jump the streaming service bandwagon are actually quite logical. In rural areas of the United States, there are still large areas where you can't get a fast-enough Internet connection to watch streaming content - or it simply costs too much.

All major Facebook-owned properties, including WhatsApp, Facebook itself, Instagram and Messenger are down all over the world.

The problem seems to be worst in Asia, but reports also from South American countries and Europe are pouring to Twitter about the issue.

Uptime detection site, DownDetector shows that the problems started sometime around 11am UTC today and are currently ongoing.

current status of Facebook at DownDetector.com

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London today, shortly after Ecuador removed his asylum status.

Assage has been hiding in Ecuador's embassy in London, UK since 2012 when he applied for a asylum status with Ecuador. Country granted him the asylum status, but UK stated that if he moves out of the embassy area, he will be arrested immediately. Thus, he has stayed within the embassy for the past seven years.

Ecuador removed his asylum status today, stating that Assange has breached international laws and should therefor lose his refuge status. Shortly after, he was arrested on warrant issued by London's Westminster magistrates court, issued in June, 2012, when he failed to surrender to the court.

Assange has refused to leave the embassy, stating that he would be extradited to the United States if he'd leave the embassy. In United States, he is likely to face charges related to WikiLeaks data leaks about U.S., including the leak of diplomatic cables back in 2010.

Netflix has supported Apple's AirPlay ever since 2013, but just recently dropped the support for the feature. Feature has allowed users to watch Netflix on devices such as Apple TV.

Now, that Apple has expanded the AirPlay to also 3rd party products, under a licensing deal, Netflix has decided to drop the support for it.

Netflix states that the very reason is they want to certify each Netflix-capable device on their own. With AirPlay in its current form, this is no longer possible, as the protocol doesn't let Netflix know which device it is using. Thus, the experience could be subpar with some devices - and Netflix wont allow that risk.

Surely, while Netflix doesn't admit this, the Apple's decision to get into subscription streaming business with its Apple TV+ isn't exactly helping Apple's case here.

Netflix has also dropped the option for Apple users to pay for their Netflix subscription via Apple's App Store, forcing users to pay directly to Netflix. This - and Apple TV+ service - have raised tensions between the two tech giants.

Tomorrow, 6th of April, 2019, marks a day when millions of navigation systems all over the world may go haywire, as the so-called Y2K19 bug hits them.

Satellite navigation systems (using GPS) that have been sold as recently as 2014 or so, might go nuts due a bug that makes them believe it is year 1999 again. This could cause serious problems, not only to people using GPS for navigation, but for various infrastructure that relies on GPS satellite data.

The bug is caused by the fact that GPS tracks time by weeks, as weird as it might sound. And the "week zero" has been set to year 1980, the year when the first parts of the GPS system went online. And the system was designed to allow the week numbering to go as up as 1,024 weeks. And we'll reaching that number, again, tomorrow. At that point, the counters will reset to zero again, thinking it must be year 1999 again. As you might have calculated, yes, we have already resetted the counter once, back in 1999. But back then, navigation devices were a rarity rather than a norm.

Most experts don't expect serious problems to occur because of this, but major manufacturers, such as Dutch TomTom and Garmin have all issued emergency patches to their devices - at least in TomTom's case, even to pretty ancient devices, too. Companies have reached out to their product owners and asked them to update their devices. At least in TomTom's case, the update is available to most of its old models - and the update is free. Garmin states that its devices should behave normally, although the dates shown might be off.

Microsoft has announced that the next major Windows 10 feature update will be called Windows 10 May 2019 Update and as the name suggests, will start rolling out in next month.

The new feature update, known as version 1903 and codenamed "19H1" will be available in next week for those users who have signed up to be part of the Release Preview ring of Windows 10. Rest of us will see the update arriving sometime in May, depending on each user's geographical location and various other factors. As always, Microsoft tries to balance the roll out so that not all users will get the update at the same date.

Compared to previous feature updates, the May update will be very small one, at least for regular user. The update focuses mostly on improving existing Windows 10 features, the stability of the operating system and fine-tuning some OS elements.

Most visible changes will be the new "light theme", some improvements to the Start menu and the Action Center. For full list of changes, check this list.

Netflix will increase its prices for U.S. users in May, 2019. The price hike will also affect those users in Latin American countries that are being charged in U.S. dollars.

Some of the new subscribers are already paying the increased price and some of the old users have already seen their prices rise to the new levels. However, the remaining subscription base will change to the new, increased price level in May.

The basic plan is rising from $7.99 to $8.99, the standard package from $10.99 to $12.99 and the premium plan, with UHD/4K streaming, will cost $15.99 instead of $13.99.

Netflix has been pumping money into its original content and is preparing to challenge the upcoming Disney subscription service, as well as Apple's new subscription service. Netflix poured $12 billion in content in 2018 and is expected to spend $15 billion this year on content.

Google has created some of the most popular online services and products of modern era, ranging from its namesake search engine to Gmail, YouTube and others. But company is also notorious for killing off its own products - even those that users seem to love wholeheartedly.

This killing spree that has lasted for more than a decade has made some people very, very wary of falling in love to anything that Google has produced. And it might explain - to a degree - why some of the Google's products of recent years have failed to gather significant number of users.

Looking at the list of killed products in Google portfolio, it might be fair to say that the suspicious take is pretty granted. One of the biggest outrages was caused when Google shut down its Google Reader service back in 2013. Similarly, killing off much-hyped Google Glass AR product was also a disappointment to many people.

But looking at the entire list of killed Google products over the years is mind-boggling, as there are products that most of us have never even heard about - but some, which might have been useful - and even loved - to its users. Many people have hoped that Google would simply sell the products that it doesn't want to continue, but they have never done so, but prefer killing them instead.

April Fool's Day pranks might either annoy or amuse the observer, depending on your attitude towards "real journalists" going crazy for one day. But at least there's a solid benefit out of all this: Researchers at Lancaster University are teaching an AI algorithm to detect fake news from real ones - and they're teaching the AI with April Fool's Day pranks and variety of other hoaxes.

The soon-to-be-released paper from Lancaster University, dubbed as "Fool's Errand: Looking at April Fools Hoaxes as Disinformation through the Lens of Deception and Humour" has found that April Fool's pranks from news organizations and companies (via their press releases) can be used to teach AI on how to determine if the article is "fake" or not.

Some of the characteristics that help AI to find out if the article is a prank or not, include:

• April Fool's stories are generally shorter in length
• they also use more unique words than real articles
• they're easier to read than real articles
• they tend to use more first-person pronouns than real articles