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Integral Memory will ship the largest capacity microSD card commercially available in February, with its new 512GB microSDXC V10.

That would be one hell of a storage boost for a device, granted it supports microSDXC.

"The need to provide extended memory for smartphones, tablets and a growing range of other mobile devices such as action cams and drones has been answered." said James Danton, marketing manager, Integral Memory. "As a company, we are very proud to be the first to achieve the 512GB capacity milestone in microSDXC, worldwide."

Press information about the new card cites tests with a range of smartphones showing speed of up to 80MB/s, which is certainly not the fastest you could find but should be adequate for most media tasks like recording 4K video and such.

It will be available next month but there was no information given on how much one of these babies will cost.

Streaming giant Netflix added a record number of new subscribers to its service in the fourth quarter of 2017, which it has credited to investment in original content.

Netflix now has more than 117 million paying subscribers for its service, the majority of whom are now located outside the United States. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Netflix added a record 8.3 million subscribers, of which 6.36 million were international subscribers.

The firm recorded revenue of $3.3 billion during the quarter which is up almost a third compared to the same period of 2016. Profits were reported at $186 million, up almost 300 percent year over year.

Netflix is crediting the good news with its investment in original content. New seasons of hit shows including Stranger Things, the Crown, Black Mirror and investments in new films such as Bright (starring Will Smith) provided Netflix with a strong line up for the past few months. It also has to be noted that Netflix did increase its prices during the quarter.

The service is now available in more than 190 countries around the world and is investment more in local content.

Intel is now advising customers not to install previously released patches to address serious CPU flaws that were disclosed publicly this month.

Meltdown and Spectre have been demonstrated to put sensitive and private information at risk, if exploited successfully. The flaw exists in hardware and so there was never going to be easy ways to mitigate. Meltdown is a flaw that is exclusively only to Intel CPUs, whereas Spectre affects chips from Intel, AMD or ARM-based chips.

Intel began pushing out patches to mitigate the issues earlier this month, but is now advising the users stop installing them. The new advice comes after users and firms reported reported dramatic slowdowns and unpredictable behavior, including constant reboots or a failure to boot at all.

The chipmaker says it understand what has caused the unpredicted outcomes and is now advising that customers start testing early versions of new patches that it is putting out, and has apologized publicly for the disruption its change of advice has caused.

News site Boing Boing is defending itself from a lawsuit brought by Playboy alleging copyright infringement because the site linked to Playboy centerfolds.

A blog post on Boing Boing contained a hyperlink to a gallery of Playboy centerfolds and another to a YouTube video with similar content. Playboy alleges that this amounts to copyright infringement and is suing the popular news blog.

It is important to point out that Boing Boing had nothing to do with the creation of the Imgur gallery, or the YouTube video, it merely linked to both in a blog post.

"The world can't afford a judgment against us in this case -- it would end the web as we know it, threatening everyone who publishes online, from us five weirdos in our basements to multimillion-dollar, globe-spanning publishing empires like Playboy," Boing Boing warns.

It is not alone in its fight against the lawsuit however. Daniel Nazer, Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney, argues that Boing Boing's use of the hyperlinks is protected under fair use principles.

"Boing Boing's reporting and commenting on the Playboy photos is protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. We're asking the court to dismiss this deeply flawed lawsuit," he said.

Founder of the file-sharing website Megaupload is suing the government of New Zealand for billions of dollars.

Megaupload allowed users around the world to upload files to its service which could be later downloaded by others with the same link. In January 2012, New Zealand police raided the home of founder Kim Dotcom while investigating alleged copyright infringement offenses.

In the six years that has passed since the raid, the Kim Dotcom saga has dragged on as he has fought extradition to the United States on copyright infringement charges.

Kim is now suing the government of New Zealand, claiming up to $6.8 billion in damages due to all lost business opportunities since 2012, his legal fees, the damage to his reputation and more.

At the core of his defense is the assertion that the warrants used for the raid on his mansion in January 2012 were based on Section 131 of the 1994 Copyright Act of New Zealand. Technically, under that copyright act, online copyright infringement is not a crime.

Source: BBC News

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.

Users report that Google devices with the Cast features are causing network connectivity problems on their home WiFi networks.

Devices that seem to cause issues once connected to some networks include Chromecast and Google Home devices. The issue appears to affect some routers from ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, Synology and TP-Link. It appears that the issue is due to the devices flooding the router with data packets when recovering from a sleep state.

TP-Link linked the problem to MDNS multicast discovery packets. Under normal circumstances, these packets normally sent in a 20-second interval, but TP-Link determined the devices will sometimes broadcast a large amount of these packets at a very high speed in a short amount of time.

This occurs when the device is awakened from its "sleep" state, and could exceed more than 100,000 packets. The longer your device is in "sleep", the larger this packet burst will be.

TP-Link has issued some firmware updates for affected devices, which you can find here. Mean while, Google is also looking for a solution to the problem which it says affects only a small number of users.

(via: Engadget)

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.