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As the Elon Musk's company, SpaceX expands its Starlink satellite constellation, the need for traffic laws for space has grown significantly. Now, SpaceX and Nasa have agreed to create traffic rules for space.

SpaceX's Starlink satellite network requires unholy amount of small communication satellites, located in Earth's geostationary orbit. Company has applied permissions for a whopping 42'000 Starlink satellites to be deployed. Currently there are over 1'200 Starlink satellites in the orbit already.

Such massive number of satellites poses a potential disaster for other organizations operating in space. Thus, the agreement, dubbed as Joint Spaceflight Safety Agreement, was announced by both, Nasa and SpaceX.

Under the agreement, both parties agree that in case of an inevitable collision, it is SpaceX that will steer away, using the ion thrusters on each hStarlink satellite. Without such agreement in place, a situation could happen where both, Nasa and SpaceX try to avoid collision and direct their instruments to the same direction, causing the collision anyway.

As the world is littered with online streaming services, the habit of sharing streaming service passwords with your friends has become a standard practice for many. This has been the de facto status for Netflix for years now, but company hasn't cared much about it. Not until now, it seems.

Handful of people all across the world have seen lately a message from Netflix asking whether they live with the account owner or not. Message has stated simply:

If you don't live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.

To continue watching after this notification, Netflix has sent a confirmation code via email or SMS to the account owner. Only by entering the confirmation code, could the watching be continued.

Netflix has stated that this is a small-scale test it is conducting. Netflix's official Terms of service clearly states that sharing passwords to those who don't live within the same household is banned. Their ToS states that account is for "personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household".

The test might hint that company is about to end account sharing among friends somehow in near future. Spotify started cracking down on unauthorized family account sharing back in 2019, so it might be that Netflix has watched Spotify to do the dirty work - and realize that it didn't have any negative impact on Spotify.

Timelapse videos are getting more and more popular: you can see them in social media and in ads all over the world. We wanted to create a guide on how to make your own timelapse videos with free, open source apps, but with ease and with excellent video quality.

Timelapse videos are basically sped up videos, focused on specific object or scenery for the duration of the video. Most typical timelapse videos show a scenery, from dawn until dusk.

For the purpose of this guide, we went through tons of various timelapse apps and eventually found the best suited for our purposes: Open Camera app for Android. It is fully free, open source app that doesn't have any ads or doesn't try to make you buy more features. Furthermore, it allows full control of video quality, speed of the timelapse video and more.

Sure, many phones ship with manufacturer's own camera app that might have some kind of timelapse feature built-in. However, we feel that Open Camera provides much more flexibility than most stock apps we've seen so far.

1. What is needed for creating a timelapse video?
• Spare phone
• Phone stand or tripod
• Enough storage space
• Open Camera app
2. Open Cameran settings
3. Video mode and video settings
• Video speed - What does it mean?
4. Let's do it!
• Tips and tricks
5. Finally, finished video!

In German prison, a novel breach of security happened that mixed the old and new world quite beautifully.

An intern working at German prison shared picture of the prison's master key to his buddies through WhatsApp. After German Brandenburg's state justify ministry found out about the incident, they ordered all the prison's locks to be changed.

According to Brandenburg's justice ministry, a skilled locksmith could be able to reproduce the prison masterkey just from the shared picture, so they couldn't take the risk that such incident would really happen.

The intern now has to pay for up to 50'000 euros (appx. $59'600) what it costs to replace all 600 locks in the prison complex. Also, his internship was terminated immediately.

Source: The Local (paywall)

picture: Wikipedia

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a "crazy ideas" subsidiary that is simply called as X. Now, rumors say, X is developing something straight out of sci-fi comics.

Dubbed as Wolverine, as a nod to the X-Men character with superhuman senses, thhe device is aimed to enhance human hearing to superhuman levels. Several former Google employees have confirmed the project's existance to Bloomberg.

Wolverine is basically an ear-piece that is connected to extremely sensitive microphones, coupled with sci-fi level of algorithms and pinch of processing power. The aim is to create a device that would allow person to choose one person in a crowded area who they want to listen to. The device would mute out all other background noise and other people's voices, allowing person to listen to selected voice - even from a distance. Imagine a concert where you want to speak to a person standing 10ft apart from you and you might grasp the idea of how useful such device would be.

According to sources, X has worked on the project from 2018 and it has been personally approved by Google co-founder Sergey Brim. X's spokesperson has also hinted about a product related to "future of hearing", which would pretty much confirm the Bloomberg's findings.

Apple Inc has opened all of its 270 US-based stores for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Over the past year, Apple has been cautious and reactive in the operation of its stores in the United States. In order to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the iPhone maker has not had all of its U.S. stores open at any time.

Instead, Apple has relied on local information and public health policies. In some cases, Apple has decided to shut stores even when it is technically permitted to keep them operating under local health policies.

It also took other measures such as its Express format, which allowed it to sell some items outside the store at sales counters protected by plexiglass.

With the recent opening of several stores in Texas, Apple now has all of its stores opened although some may still have limitations, such as a requirement to make appointments for in-store shopping.

Twitter has detailed how it will target users for misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines.

COVID-19 vaccines are rolling out around the world and central to most government's plans to curb their viral epidemics. With such large numbers of inoculations required to make an impact, it is not surprising there is a lot of confusion and questions about the new vaccines on offer.

Nowadays social media platforms will fill a void with information of varying quality and accuracy. The question of how to balance the rights of users to share information freely and protect against the spread of misinformation has been around long before the COVID-19, but the pandemic has focused attention on the problem.

Social media firms have already punished users for what they deemed to be misinformation regarding the pandemic itself. Since introducing its COVID-19 guidance, Twitter has removed around 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts.

Following Facebook and others, Twitter is now taking aim at COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on its platform. It will target infringing content with labels, strikes, suspensions, and permanent bans.

A tweet that is deemed to be spreading misinformation will be labeled in much the same way Twitter labeled tweets in the aftermath of the 2020 US President Elections. Tweets subjected to the label cannot be re-tweeted by others (but can be quote-tweeted) and will contain a link to authoritative information on vaccines.

One of the dreaded error messages with no apparent logical reason must be the AMD graphics adapters error about problematic signal.

The error message reads exactly like this: System has detected a link failure and cannot set the requested resolution.

We hit the same problem recently and had to investigate the problem bit further. Down the line, it is about DisplayPort connection from PC to monitor that causes this error message. More specifically, error relates to DisplayPort 1.2 connection.

We found out three different ways to debug and possibly solve the problem.

Power off your display completely

In most such cases, thhe right way to solve thhe issue is to unplug your monitor entirely. Remove its DisplayPort cable, its power cable and let it cool down a little bit. Then plug everything back and see if this helped. For most cases, this solved the problem.

Check your monitor cable connections

This is kinda no-brainer, but do it anyways. Check that the monitor cable is connected properly to both, PC and display itself.

Switch off DisplayPort 1.2 support from your display

Some displays allow you to switch off DP 1.2 support from its menu. This downgrades the display to use previous DisplayPort methods, but wont hinder the picture quality at all. Check your monitor's manual if this is possible - and test it.

Several people have complained during the past few weeks about an issue with Android phones and Google Chrome browser about weird hiccup.

The problem is this: When entering an address or a search term to Chrome's address bar, blank page appears, but nothing gets loaded. This might happen once, twice or three times, but after repeated tries, the search results or the page requested finally loads.

We have witnessed this behavious happening with several relatively recent phones, most notably, with two OnePlus Nord models with latest Chrome installed, running with Android 11.

After tweaking with settings, at first, nothing helped. The problem hasn't been related to the network used, as it happened whether we used mobile network or various WiFi networks.

However, we found a way to isolate the problem and to fix it. Here's how:

1. Open Chrome

2. Go to Chrome settings

OnePlus's entry to the mid-priced phones, OnePlus Nord, released back in summer 2020, finally gets its Android 11 update.

The Android 11 update, bundled with OnePlus's own Oxcygen OS 11, started rolling out through OTA update in several countries today. Thhe update brings Android 11 to the first Nord series phone of OnePlus.

The update is a whopping 2910 megabytes in size and should appear through System menu in Settings, if the phone itself hasn't informed about the available update yet.

Updater package also includes Google's latest security patches to Android, released on 1st of February, 2021.

Full changelog:

System

• Update to Android 11 version
• The brand new UI design brings you a more comfortable experience with various optimizations of details
• Optimized the stability of some third-party apps and improved experience

Ambient Display

• Newly added Insight clock style, a joint creation with Parsons School of Design. It will change according to the phone usage data (Go to: Settings – Customization – Clock on ambient display)
• Newly added the Canvas always-on display, which can extract the subject's outline from any photo and display it on your lock screen (Go to: Settings – Customization – Wallpaper – Canvas – Choose photo preview and it can be generated automatically)

Dark Mode

• Added the shortcut key for Dark Mode, pull down the quick setting to enable.
• Now supporting automatically turn on feature & customize time range. (Go to: Settings – Display – Dark Mode – Turn on automatically – Automatically enable from sunset to sunrise / Custom time range)

Shelf

• Brand new shelf UI
• Newly added a weather widget with smarter animation effect

Gallery

• Newly added the Story feature, which can automatically create the weekly stories by using your local photos and videos
• Optimized the loading speed to improve the image preview experience

Neato is one of the largest and oldest manufacturers of robotic vacuums. Company was founded back in 2005 and is based in California, United States. Company products are mostly manufactured in China, but designed in the U.S.

Back in 2017 Neato was sold to a German Vorwerk, but continues to operate as an independent company, despite being fully-owned by Vorwerk. Neato's current product line consists several different robot vacuum models and it is quite confusing to know what is the difference between each model.

In this article we try to clarify how different Neato models differ from each other. And also to shine light to some oddities in product names found globally with Neato's products. We have reviewed and tested most current Neato models, so this analysis is based on tech specs and our own review findings.

1. Similarities
2. Difference with Neato filters
3. WiFi frequency
4. Sidebrush
5. Boundary markers
6. Turbo / Eco mode
7. Main brushes
8. Battery life differences
9. Number of floorplans supported
10. Zone cleaning
11. Price
12. Neato D3 vs Neato D4
13. Neato D4 vs Neato D5
14. Neato D5 vs Neato D6
15. Neato D6 vs Neato D7
16. Neato Plus models (Neato D4+, etc)
17. Comparison chart of Neato models
18. More to read

Users of Android TV and Google TV set-top devices can use Amazon Music properly from today.

Amazon Music is now available for set-top boxes and other devices running Android TV or Google TV from today with the release of an updated app. Until now, Amazon Music on Android TV has been restricted to the Nvidia Shield TV, while more limited casting could be performed from Android mobile devices.

For now, the rollout of the app is limited to the U.S., U.K., Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, Japan, and Australia. It is available for both premium and free users. Premium users have full ad-free access to their library, similar to rivals like Spotify.

Users with no premium account can access ad-supported playlists and radio stations.

You can get the Amazon Music app for Android TV and Google TV from the Play Store.

Niantic has targeted more than five million players identified by its anti-cheat system, some of whom have received permanent bans.

The developer has provided details on actions it has taken against players of Pokemon Go, Ingress, and Harry Potter Wizards Unite. In total, more than five million have been targeted since last year, and of them, around 20 percent have been banned permanently for persistent offenses.

"More than 90% of users who received their first warning, stopped cheating afterward. This is quite encouraging for us, as we continue to find the right balance between punishing casual cheaters versus the more egregious ones," the developer wrote on a blog.

"We are committed to ensuring fair gameplay across our game portfolio. Every day newer forms of cheating or spoofing tools are made available on the internet, and we are continuously working to combat these cheaters and focus on improving our detection and enforcement; as they have no place in our games."

Niantic has also reminded players only to download the official versions of its games from Google Play, the Apple App Store, and Samsung Galaxy Store. Furthermore, it stresses that jailbroken and rooted devices are unsupported.

Samsung used to be the pariah of Android world for many years, as it was reluctant to deliver Android updates to even its relatively recent phone models. Since last year, company has improved dramatically - and now pushes the envelope even further.

This week, Samsung announced that most of its Android phones and tables will receive Android security updates for four years after their initial release. This, coupled to the fact that Samsung made a huge change to its Android major update policy last fall, will make the Korean manufacturer much more competitive in Android world.

Furthermore, Samsung promises to deliver four years worth of security updates to even select models from 2019. Company previously had promised only two years of security updates, even for its most expensive phones.

To summarize Samsung's new Android update and security patch policy:

• Galaxy S series, Galaxy Fold series, Galaxy Tab S series, Galaxy A series and Galaxy Note series will get three major Android operating system updates during their lifetime. This means, for example, that Samsung Galaxy S20, which launched with Android 10, will get Android 11, Android 12 and Android 13 updates.
• Most of the Samsung's mid-priced and high-end phones will get four years of Android security patches. These include Galaxy S series, Galaxy Fold series, Galaxy Tab S series, Galaxy A series, Galaxy M series, Galaxy Xcover series, Galaxy Tab A series and Galaxy Note series. Only the low-end phones will be excluded.
• High-end phones will get security patches monthly, while mid-priced phones will get quarterly patches.

Samsung is obviously hoping that long support time and fast Android updates will benefit its marketing - and they probably will. As of now, Samsung is doing pretty well in our Android 11 update tracker.

Microsoft announced that it will release a new feature for its new console that will probably make gamers quite happy.

The new Xbox Series X|S console will run select Xbox One titles more smoothly that Xbox One was ever capable of. The new feature, dubbed as FPS Boost will do the magic here.

FPS Boost will improve game smoothness by increasing significantly the frames per second the console outputs to the TV. For most FPS Boost enabled titles the increase will be double, but for some titles, the framerate will increase by 4x, when compared to Xbox One.

Obviously, such feature is most sought-after for first-person shooters and other heavy, graphic quick action games. This is highlighted by the list of titles that will get the FPS Boost first: ar Cry 4, New Super Lucky's Tale, Sniper Elite 4, UFC 4, and Watch Dogs 2.

Microsoft plans to bring FPS Boost to more games over the spring. Each game that will get the feature will have an option within game's settings to turn on the FPS Boost feature. If it is in use, the info will also be shown on game screen when game is paused.