News written by Petteri Pyyny (August, 2020)

Following many other countries' suit, Finland, launched today its official COVID-19 tracking application for iOS and Android platforms. App is called Koronavilkku (literally, coronavirus blink).

App, much like its many siblings in other countries, uses Apple's and Google's joint API that was created to track and trace novel coronavirus infections and alert about them.

Privacy?

App requires no registration or login details whatsoever and its privacy details were audited (link in Finnish) by Finland's National Cyber Security Centre, which found no privacy problems with the app.

App is anonymous and it wont pass any identifiable details of the user to the authorities, as its purpose is simply to alert the user if there user has been in close contact with a person who has COVID-19 infection.

How does it technically work?

To put it simply: through Bluetooth.

App doesn't use GPS or any other location data, but relies on close proximity of other Bluetooth devices.

Basically the app generates a random string for each device and distributes that data through Bluetooth data to other devices that have the same app installed - and vice versa. This random value is recreated every few hours to ensure privacy.

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In a rather surprising move, Netflix has opened its service to be watched for free. Of course, this doesn't include everything Netflix has listed, but some of its hit series and original movies are now available for free.

There's no word whether the campaign is temporary one or permanent, but it is available globally as of now. Titles that can be watched for free include hits such as Stranger Things and Bird Box.

And no, registration is not needed in order to watch the titles. However, series have been limited to the first episode of each season, but movies can be watched in full.

Bird Box trailer

Free offering is available at here:

Netflix: Watch free

Obviously, the idea is to demonstrate how much good quality shows Netflix has and hope that people get hooked and subscribe to the service.

As middle-aged (and older) people have flocked to Facebook-owned Instagram, teens have escaped the service and seem to have landed to Chinese social media superstar, TikTok.

According to ComScore United States usage stats, TikTok had half the monthly audience of Instagram's in July, 2020. But.. The service clocked more than 2x usage minutes compared to Instagram. According to latest stats, TikTok had appx. 100 million active monthly users in United States.

Apparently one of the very reasons for this difference is the TikTok's praised recommendation algorithm that tends to deliver "more to watch" features that people actually want to watch after one reel has finished.

According to Comscore data Americans spent 5 billion more minutes with TikTok from June to July. While TikTok has half the audience of Instagram its users spend DOUBLE the amount of time on the platform.

-- Flora ESPN Research (@ESPNFlora) August 25, 2020

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Most of us know that movies and TV series can be downloaded from those shady corners of the Internet, like from various BitTorrent websites, etc. But how the movies and TV series arrive to such services?

Nope, typically the latest movies and TV shows aren't put online by "entertainment wants to be free" enthusiasts, but actual, organized groups, belonging to something that is collectively called the "The Scene" or even more precisely, "The Warez Scene" or "The Pirate Scene".

That "scene" is built from various groups that are more or less organized in order to have the capacity to get the latest movie / TV show releases as soon as possible and then to distribute those movies, illegally, as quickly as possible to specific online services.

Now, some of the core groups of that world have been hit by law enforcement agencies in several countries. Police have raided individuals and servers in at least United States, Norway and Sweden in order to tackle operations of a group dubbed as SPARKS and its affiliated groups called b>GECKOS, DRONES, ROVERS and SPLINTERS.

It seems that the main target of such raids has been the so-called topsites, (S)FTP servers belonging to SPARKS or its affiliates. Such servers are basically extremely private online services where individuals can "drop" the latest pirated movies and where distributors then collect the latest loot and share it to wider audience through better-known services, such as The Pirate Bay et al.

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One of the most talkked about games of this year must be Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Its ability to recreate landscapes, buildings and entire cities by combining AI, machine learning and actual scenery footage is simply amazing.

Sure, it has its flaws, but that seems to be part of the lure - online communities have been filled with Flight Simulator screenshots from landmarks and regular homes all over the world.

Now, a Reddit user has set his virtual flight's coordinates to 38°15′00.5″N, 122°24′38.9″W and managed to take a photo there.

Those coordinates mark a significant piece of computing history, as there is the spot where the original Windows XP background photo was taken. The photo - taken in Napa Valley, Northern California - that once was the background image on more than one billion computers has a history of its own, as you can read from here. News about the MS Flight Simulator image was first spotted at Chinese ITHome website.

original Windows XP background image

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The fight between Epic Games and Apple has grabbed the headlines lately. And Epic is making sure that the legal case wont be forgotten.

Company is now launching a short, one-day tournament dubbed as #FreeFortnite. Prizes include "everything that is not made by Apple" and players using Apple products to play Fortnite aren't eligible to participate.

All of your friends. Fabulous prizes. And one bad apple. We're droppin the #FreeFortnite Cup on August 23.

Check out our blog for full info: https://t.co/BFpiMQoWID

-- Fortnite (@FortniteGame) August 21, 2020

Prizes include OnePlus 8 phones, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One X and Playstation 4 consoles and more. Furthermore, players can also win new skins to the Fortnite game - that obviously mock Apple and its products. Tournament will be held on 23rd of August, 2020.

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World's most popular email service, Google-owned Gmail is in serious problems. Thousands of people are reporting outages worldwide as of now.

Problems seem to be widespread and affect different users differently. For most users, sending emails through Gmail seem to be failing. For others, using file attachments is failing. And for those who are using Gmail mobile app to connect to other email providers, aren't getting their messages downloaded.

Pic 1: When I hear gmail is down
Pic 2: When I realize I won't get work mails now.#gmaildown #Gmail pic.twitter.com/28ZDdLjXrZ

-- Rahul Panwar (@therahulpanwar) August 20, 2020

We tried Gmail just a moment ago here in Finland and our problems were related to the IMAP account that was being polled by Gmail's mobile app: message headers came through (that is, subject line and the sender name), but the message itself was missing. Google has announced that it is aware of the outage, but hasn't informed yet what has caused the problem.

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Tinder, the world's most popular dating app, has introduced a new subscription tier, dubbed as Tinder Platinum. The new subscription level adds on top of the existing tiers (Tinder Gold and Tinder Plus), introducing two important new features to the app.

First and foremost is the feature called Messages without a match, which basically allows one to send a short message (max 140 characters) to the recipient even when there's no match between the two.

In order to send such message, sender must be subscribed to the Tinder Platinum. Message is then attached to a super like that user sends to the recipient. The recipient sees the superlike, along with the message and then decides whether to like the sender or not.

If the recipient doesn't like the sender back, sender wont be able to send further messages. If recipient likes the sender back, a new Tinder match is formed and the two can then continue chatting as normal Tinder matches.

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One of the most important privacy court rulings in recent history was delivered two weeks ago when EU Court stroke down the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement. Privacy Shield agreement between EU and the United States allowed American companies to store and process EU user data within the United States.

But EU Court ruled that because United States allowed its intelligence agencies to access such data, the agreement between EU and US had to be terminated immediately. Since then, basically all American companies that maintained the user databases in U.S. soil and had EU users, were breaking EU legislation.

Problem is massive: Companies wishing to maintain unified user database must basically move it out of the United States - or United States as a country to change its national laws that permit its intelligence agencies to do surveillance on its own soil. Obviously the latter option is highly unlikely to happen.

Technically splitting user database into two separate sets, with separate rules, processes and data location would be a massive technical challenge to the Internet gients like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

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