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Following yesterday's announcement of the Pixel and Pixel XL, Google has officially killed off the 'Nexus' line of products that has encompassed a handful of phones and a handful of tablets.

The Nexus devices, which started with the Nexus One in 2010, have always been marketed as developer devices, but the Pixels are primed for mass appeal. Many of the Nexus devices were built to showcase the latest version of Android and have never been huge sellers (despite low prices) but that changed with the launch of last year's Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P.

As of writing, all Nexus phones and tablets have been removed from the Google hardware Play store, replaced by Pixel and other Pixel-related hardware.

900 million Facebook Messenger users can now opt-in to end-to-end encryption for their conversations, with the tech giant dubbing the program "Secret Conversations."

Adds Facebook: "Your messages are already secure, but Secret Conversations are encrypted from one device to another," meaning nobody can read them except the people talking, not even Facebook.

To use, when you select "New Message" you will see a "Secret" option on the top right-hand side. In addition to the encryption, you can also set expiration times for the messages (from 5 seconds to one day) if you want to send more sensitive information than usual.

Secret Conversations uses Signal for encryption, the highly-regarded system that is also used in Google's Allo messenger.

During their Pixel launch yesterday, Google also announced that each Pixel phone owner would get 24/7 live support, either via phone call or live chat.

Today, we have some more information on the service, which even includes screen share, allowing Google support reps to see exactly what the issue is on your device as you do in real-time. This is very similar to Amazon's Fire support and is great news for consumers that may not be as tech-savvy.

To access the support, go down go directly to the MadeByGoogle website and toggle the support tab: Here

A bombshell Reuters report today claims that Yahoo was secretly scanning your emails to provide information for U.S. intelligence officials.

The report claims that Yahoo scanned hundreds of millions of emails at the behest of the NSA or the FBI, the first known time that a U.S. Internet company has agreed to a demand to search all incoming messages. In the past, other companies, such as Google and Apple, have agreed to examine stored messages following a crime (for example), but it appears that Yahoo gave the U.S. government carte blanche access.

For now, it is unknown what the officials were looking for "only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters." it is also unclear what data may have been found or handed over.

According to ex-employees, the decision to follow the classified demand led to the resignation of CIO Alex Stamos, who believed that the directive would lead to massive privacy issues.

Google and Microsoft were quick to deny that they had also been asked by US officials for the same access. "We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way'," added Google.

Samsung has proudly announced that the Galaxy Note7 is available worldwide, again, after the company was forced to recall millions of headsets that were at risk of exploding.

"Along with the several other experience zones showcasing Samsung's latest product, guests have crowded our Galaxy Note7 experience zone since this morning," said Junghyun Kim, Manager of the Seoul-based Samsung D'light shop. "We found that many people are excited to check out the iris scanner, the new S Pen features, such as S Translator, and the camera. Many existing Galaxy Note7 users have already visited and exchanged their phones for a new Galaxy Note7 or other Galaxy devices, and more and more people are inquiring about purchasing the Galaxy Note7."

So far, the Note7 has relaunched in Korea and a few other nations, but is rolling out in earnest in the coming weeks.

The company also "strongly encouraged" consumers who own a recalled Note7 to exchange theirs immediately.

Motorola (now part of Lenovo), has confirmed that 15 of their Android devices will be upgraded to Android 7.0 Nougat at some point.

While most of the phones on the list make sense given their recent releases, there are a couple of 2015-edition devices that did not make the list including the Moto G and Moto e3 Power, although it is unclear why.

Motorola says the rollout will begin this month and continue throughout the quarter.

Full list:

Yesterday, Google launched their Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, the latest in their annual reference devices created to show off the best of Android.

Today, DXOMark has already crowned the phone with having the best smartphone camera of all-time.

After completing a full review, including different lighting sources, environments, and hardware tests, the company concluded that "Simply put, the Pixel raises the bar for what is possible with a smartphone camera. Image quality continues to improve, and the increased use of HDR+ to render scenes that have previously been difficult for small sensors such as those in smartphones broadens what is possible with these ubiquitous devices. While we have reviewed other smartphone cameras that matched the Pixel's numbers in a few categories, the Pixel is uniquely capable of capturing outstanding images under a wide variety of conditions, and is also among the best we have tested for video capture."

Check the full review here: DXOM

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has noted that there will be an uphill battle in Japan for the streaming service, a nation where CDs remain king.

The company has just expanded to the world's second-largest music market - bringing 40 million streamable tracks, but in Japan 84 percent of sales are of physical discs (CDs and vinyl) compared to just 39 percent globally.

Record labels in Japan have been slow to offer their music through streaming services, and most industry watchers believe that Spotify will only be able to launch with half (or less) of the songs that currently populate Japan's Oricon Top 100. Shockingly, digital sales in Japan are actually half of their peak, which was seen in 2008 and is now less than $500 million annually.

In an effort to attract Japanese consumers, Spotify has integrated the service into Facebook (hoping for word of mouth posts) and has also added lyrics to tracks for Spotify Japan, hoping to get fans of karaoke more involved.

Google unveiled the new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones in an event in San Francisco today.

The Pixel smartphones are thought to be the first in a line of Google products to replace the popular Nexus series, and start at $649.

They both pack a quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 SoC, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, a 12.3 MP camera and 8 MP front camera, Bluetooth 4.2 support, a USB-C connector and a fingerprint sensor.

The Pixel features a 5-inch 1080p HD AMOLED display and comes with 32GB storage, and a 2,770 mAh battery. The more expensive option, the Pixel XP, upgrades the screen to a 5.5-inch Quad HD display, comes with 128GB of storage and packs a 3,450mAh battery.

These will be the first phones to feature Google's new Assistant and support rapid charging. Google estimates that 15 minutes of charging is enough for 7 hours.

Oh and for the record, they both have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack!

Mozilla has initiated what is called Project Mortar and aims to replace the current plugins with a new solution. It hopes to decrease the cost of development and maintenance of Firefox.

One of the ways is using other browsers' solutions and the company is already experimenting by porting a couple popular ones. It has ported already the PDF viewer PDFium and the Flash player Pepper Flash.

In order to enable stronger focus on advancing the Web and to reduce the complexity and long term maintenance cost of Firefox, and as part of our strategy to remove generic plugin support, we are launching Project Mortar.

Project Mortar seeks to reduce the time Mozilla spends on technologies that are required to provide a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform. We will be looking for opportunities to replace such technologies with other existing alternatives, including implementations by other browser vendors.Senior director of engineering at Mozilla, Johnny Stenback to Betanews

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved the new Ethernet standard proposed by the NBASE-T Alliance lead by Cisco and other industry leaders. The new standard improves the speed with current cables.

The standard IEEE 802.3bz allows up to 2.5 and 5 gigabit traffic in what are now one gigabit networks using Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables. According to Cisco, in the past 15 years, Cat5e and Cat6 cables have been installed in excess of an estimated 70 billion meters – that's more than 40 million miles.

The new standard allows networks to be upgraded without massive rewiring which brings obviously costs. As wireless connections have evolved to challenge the wired connections it is important to get wired connection a speed boost if they want to survive.

Even though the new standard doesn't require new cables, the networking equipment has to replaced with a new one that supports 802.3bz.

World's largest music streaming service Spotify has reportedly started talks about acquiring a competing streaming service SoundCloud. According to Financial Times, Spotify is closing in on a deal but there's no word on the price.

The Swedish streaming giant has tried to buy SoundCloud already twice but the companies haven't managed to agree on a price. Last summer SoundCloud finished another financing round with another 100 million dollars. Spotify attempted to buy SoundCloud quickly after but negotiation hit a wall quickly.

According to the new reports the negotiations have gone further this time but the deal is anything but signed.

SoundCloud has managed to create a lively community of creators which is probably Spotify's main interest. The co-founder of Spotify, Niklas Zennström, sees consolidation of independent streaming services almost inevitable to survive against the device manufacturers (e.g. Apple) that rely on other forms of revenue.

SoundCloud was valued at $700 million after the latest round of investments.

Modern web browsers offer amazing functionality, speed, and performance. One of the best features without question is the session recovery. This allows us to continue where we left of as if we never closed the browser, even in case of computer crashing. There is a definite drawback though.

Serve the Home's Sergei Bobik has noticed that especially Firefox likes to write excessive amounts of data on your drive in case recovery is needed. It can potentially amount to tens of gigabytes a day.

Also it not only eats your storage but slowly kills your SSD, if that is what you use. SSD's only allow certain amount of writes before they expire. Thus, having programs constantly writing on them is not good for their lifespan.

This seems to happen with Firefox even though it is not used. Bobik noticed that within 45 minutes of having Firefox open it had written over gigabyte of data to an SSD. At this pace tens of gigabytes per day can be accumulated. In his recent calculations the same problem seems to be in Chrome as well and it could backup restoration data more than 24 GB/day.

There's an easy fix to improve your SDD's lifespan and reduce storage used by Firefox. You can change the frequency of the data writeup, by default it is done every 15 seconds. Switch the browser.sessionstore.interval parameter by typing about:config in your Firefox address bar. Notice that the time is in milliseconds (15 000 = 15 seconds, 300 000 = 5 minutes).

Elon Musk has revealed new plans for his space exploration company SpaceX. For a while we have known that the mad scientist plans to get humanity to Mars but when and how?

Now Musk has told us some very (and others not so) specific steps SpaceX is taking in order to make it possible for people to travel to Mars and make it a place they call home. The aim is to make the travel as "cheap" as a median mortgage in the US and to take just a couple of months.

If you haven't been following Musk's obsession with space exploration this might sound completely crazy. However, even NASA's new budget allows it to explore more and further making human missions to Mars a definite possibility in our lifetime.

Musk also unveiled plans for the spaceship, and the rocket carrying it to space. The ship is called Big Fucking Spaceship, I kid you not. It is obviously currently only a vision of what it takes to make travel affordable enough, including room for hundred or more people.

The development will take decades but Musk believes that within from 40 to 100 years we'll be sending Matt Damon to grow some crops.

There's not a lot of places that can be more vile than a YouTube comment section. And every day thousands upon thousands of illegal videos are uploaded to YouTube. All this needs to be cleaned up while maintaining YouTube as a free and open platform to voice your views.

YouTube, though, knows that there's a problem with unmoderated nature of the comment section as well as videos that do not serve a purpose that YouTube was made for, and now they've come up with a solution. Enter YouTube Heroes.

YouTube has introduced an initiative which recruits community volunteers to police the comments and content. These people which will be given the moniker YouTube Heroes will gain more power as they've flagged more videos and comments, as well as entered more captions.

There's no money to be made here but YouTube promises some perks like exclusive videochats, workshops, and even personal contacts within YouTube. These are things that not even channels with millions of subscribers have access to.

Obviously there's a million different problems with giving a badge and a gun to seemingly random YouTube users. They even get to mass flag videos like it's a good thing that less effort goes into flagging a video.