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EFF files a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Google collected and data mined children's personal information.

Google has rejected the Electronic Frontier Foundation's concerning claims with regard to how it collects and uses data when child students use school-issued devices, like Chromebooks, and Google's own Google Apps for Education (GAFE) core and non-core services.

Key among the EFF's complaint is the Google Sync service used by the Chrome web browser, and how Google utilizes student's information when using non-Core (or "consumer") services, including YouTube, Maps and Books.

We'll now take a look at the EFF's allegations about Google's practices, and the response from the Search giant, based on the information available publicly at this time.

EFF's Spying on Students campaign

The FTC complaint has arisen as a result of a noble cause, which is the EFF's "Spying on Students" campaign. Its goal is simply to raise awareness about privacy risks associated with devices and software provided by schools to children as young as 7 years old.

As part of this program, the EFF examined Chromebooks sold to schools by Google, and also examined its GAFE Core services (including email, Calendar, Talk/Hangouts, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Contacts and the Apps Vault) and non-Core services as used by students.

Early last year, when Microsoft completed its purchase of Nokia's handsets division, the company decided it was in their best interest to cancel a number of devices the company was preparing to release.

Among those sent to the 'graveyard' were Lumia phones, tablets and even some smartwatches.

Thanks to prolific leaker Evan Blass (@evleaks), we have a leaked render of the Nokia Mercury tablet, although we have very slim details about the device.

Basically, the tablet looks like an enlarged Nokia phone although the bezels seem to be extremely thin and the tablet looks like it had a SIM slot and possibly a PureView camera.

According to multiple sources, YouTube is seeking streaming licenses for movies and TV shows for its new YouTube Red subscription service in an effort to better rival Hulu and Netflix in the increasingly competitive industry.

The move is unsurprising given who is currently running YouTube. Robert Kyncl, formerly of Netflix, is YouTube's chief business officer; Susanne Daniels, former programming head at MTV, is a top exec and Kelly Merryman, formerly a Netflix content executive, is also a high-level executive for YouTube.

YouTube Red costs $9.99 per month and offers ad-free YouTube video watching, background and offline playback and streaming music playlists and channels. Additionally, the company will have 10 of its movies and series starring YouTube stars and other actors.

If YouTube wants to compete it will need to put down a ton of money. Hulu will spend $1.5 billion this year on content, as will Amazon. Netflix is expected to spend $3.3 billion this year on licensed and original content.

Source:
WSJ

Struggling tech pioneer Yahoo! is considering selling itself, and the company's board of directors has met to consider a number of options.

The company, which mainly has value due to a large stake in Alibaba, has been looking to spin-off the stake, but there could be significant tax consequences for doing so. The board is also discussing whether to sell off their web businesses, which have seen significant declines in recent years, even after the high-profile hiring of CEO Marissa Mayer.

Mayer and the board are also facing a battle from activist investor Starboard Value, which is demanding that Yahoo sells their search and display advertising businesses and has threatened a proxy battle if Mayer does not change her plans to sell the Alibaba stake.

Currently, Yahoo has a market value of $33 billion, $31 billion of which is tied to the company's stake in Alibaba meaning its core business are worth $2 billion, a major decline from when Microsoft tried to buy the whole company in 2007 for a grossly overpriced $45 billion.

At Microsoft's most recent shareholder meeting, former CEO and major shareholder Steve Ballmer called out Microsoft's new reporting guidelines, call them in no uncertain terms, "bulls***."

Since his departure, the company has consolidated most of its departments and now does not report revenue or margins for its individual businesses in hardware sales and cloud computing. Instead, it uses a "revenue run rate," which is a projection moving forward if all current sales remain on pace. Ballmer was pissed about the lack of margin reporting.

"It's sort of a key metric -- if they talk about it as key to the company, they should report it," Ballmer added.

Additionally, the former executive said Microsoft has failed in the mobile space and will need to add Android app support to be able to stay relevant.

Regardless of his anger, Ballmer has nothing to be upset about. Since his departure, Microsoft's stock has jumped 96 percent as investors were grateful that he was gone and approved of new CEO Satya Nadela's decisions.

Source:
BBG

Nearly a year after Google acquired Songza, the search giant has confirmed the closure of the service.

On January 31st, you will no longer be able to use the Songza native app, but you can start using Google Play Music which has integrated the technology.

You can import playlists and your listening history into Google Play, but you will have to make sure that process is complete before the 31st of January.

"Thank you SO much for being a part of the Songza community over all of these years. We're really proud of the work that we've done on Google Play Music and we truly hope you'll join us there," adds the founders in a farewell video.

The MPAA may have had success in knocking out the most popular fork of the 'pirate Netflix' known as Popcorn Time, but as usual another fork has risen form the ashes.

The movie industry trade group managed to force PopcornTime.io development into uncertainly with lawsuits in Canada, forcing developers to back off. Other variants of the application were still available and working though, and efforts were made to force the PopcornTime.io application to work again.

Out of those ongoing efforts to keep that popular variant alive comes a new fork, Popcorn Time Community Edition (PTCE). It is parked at Popcorntime.ml, which provides downloads for the new PTCE fork for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The development team already lost two members due to legal action from Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN.

"We wish the two developers all the best and we really miss them, other than that we have no comment on that or the legal debate regarding this software," PTCE developers told the TorrentFreak site.

"Popcorn Time will probably never go away, despite the efforts made by organizations such as BREIN, the MPAA and others. Instead of fighting this great software they should embrace it."

Amazon has boasted today that the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend was the best ever for Amazon devices, with the e-tailer giant selling millions of tablets, set-top boxes and streaming sticks.

The top-selling item on the site was the Amazon Fire tablet, followed by the Fire TV Stick. The Fire TV set-top saw sales increase 600 percent year-over-year and the Amazon Echo assistant was the top seller for items above $100 on Black Friday.

Although Amazon did not reveal numbers, they also noted that the Kindle e-reader saw a nice boost in sales, thanks to price cuts.

"We're excited that millions of customers will be opening new Amazon devices this holiday season. This has already been the biggest holiday shopping season for Amazon devices, and we're energized by the year over year growth for all of our product categories," said Dave Limp, Senior Vice President, Amazon Devices. "With a sub-$50 price point for one or $250 for a six-pack, we've reached a tipping point with Fire--it is our fastest-selling tablet ever. We've already built millions--and we're ramping up production to build millions more."

Adobe has finally killed off Flash, although unfortunately it has only killed off the name and not the actual platform.

Flash Professional CC will now be known as Adobe Animate CC as part of the company's "ongoing commitment to evolve to support multiple standards," namely - HTML5.

Animate will include new features including high-quality stock art and vector brushes but the actual foundation for the development platform still exists and that means massive security issues and a generally horrible reputation.

Following the announcement, many in the industry asked why Adobe even bothers to support the platform given the fact that everyone has moved to HTML5. "There continues to be a huge amount of Flash content out there, especially video and gaming content, and we plan to do all we can to keep Flash Player stable and secure because it is the responsible thing to do," said the company in response.

According to Spotify, Drake was the world's most streamed artist in 2015, with 1.8 billion streams this year and 46 million listeners.

Rounding out the top five artists were Ed Sheeran, The Weeknd, Maroon 5 and Kanye West.

Rihanna was the most streamed female artist of the year, at 1 billion streams and 57 million listeners this year.

Of note, the "Most Streamed Song of 2015: Lean On (ft. MØ and DJ Snake) by Major Lazer," with 540 million streams and the most streamed album of the year was "Beauty Behind The Madness" by The Weeknd.

Check out some more interesting figures here: Spotify

The new console generation provides developers good tools to create powerful games for both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Even though the differences between the consoles have nearly diminished, the tools and the potential that developers have in use differ slightly.

Now it seems that Sony has released some additional power that developers – game developers in particular – have in their arsenal. According to the members of the Beyond3D forum, the new FMOD Studio documentation reveals that Sony has unlocked the seventh core for the use in game developers.

Eurogamer reports that PS4 will still use the seventh core for some of the operating system's functions and won't be wholly in the use of game devs. The eight core is still used solely by the OS.

Sony has yet to comment on this but it does seem like the future games might be able to use a bit more of PlayStation 4's processing power. Microsoft has made a similar change for the Xbox One earlier this year.

Samsung announced today three new Galaxy handsets that will update the midrange A series. The metal and glass design of Galaxy A3, A5, and A7 gets a facelift, but there are some specs changes to look forward to too.

The major upgrades are bigger batteries (albeit thicker, heavier devices), better cameras, and in case of A5 and A7, Samsung Pay enabling fingerprint sensors. Samsung didn't announce an A8, so the new A7 is the new top-of-the-line A series model for now. It features a 5.5 inch Full HD Super AMOLED panel, 3 GB of RAM, 16 GB microSD expandable storage and a new optically stabilized 13 megapixel shooter alongside 5 megapixel selfie camera.

A5's display is a tad smaller at 5.2 inches but retains the Full HD resolution. In addition to a smaller battery (3300mAh vs 2900mAh), the middle sibling loses a gig of RAM. In other aspects it is virtually identical to the A7. A3 is clearly a lower tier model with only a 720p HD display at 4.7 inches, 1.5 GB of RAM, less processing power, no optical stabilization and no fingerprint sensor. Also Fast Charging found on A5 and A7 is missing on the cheapest model.

Starting from China the new A series will come available in mid December. The pricing obviously depends on the market but European prices of 329 euros (A3) and 429 euros (A5) have been released. There is no official word on the price of A7 but an off contract price of $499 would not be a surprise.

Google's Chrome browser for Android is getting a new improvement that can save up to 70 percent of data usage while browsing the web.

The Data Saver mode is made to reduce the amount of data downloaded when you open a webpage, and by impeding the loading of images it can reduce data usage significantly and improve the experience on a slow connection.

A user can load the image by tapping on any individual image, or there's an option to tap to load all images.

Chrome users in India and Indonesia will be the first to get this expanded Data Saver mode, with additional countries in the coming months.

When available, it can be enabled in the Advanced Settings in the browser.


More Info: support.google.com

The Pinnacle of V mod touches on almost every aspect of the GTA V universe, including the weather, the vehicles, weapons, people and more.

The most striking and immediately noticeable changes are to the visuals, where almost everything gets some kind of improvement or change. Brand new 4K textures are added for Clouds, Water, Stars, the Moon, Plants and Grass, Blood, Fire Spries, Coronas, Rain Drops and Splash Textures, Cloud Noise and Vehicle Bottom Shadows.

Every car, truck, van, SUV, commercial, utility, transportation, water, and air vehicle has been modded to provide realistic deformation, top speeds, weight, handling, crash physics, avoidance control, AI control and more!

The mod brings the city to life too, with population levels changed to reflect areas of the city, the time of day, the day of the week etc., meaning that there are now rush hours in Los Santos if you use the mod. Relationships between characters are also altered, with gangs and police battling it out on the streets, and the player enjoying better encounters with animals.

Weapons have also been modified to have realistic recoil, bullet spread, tracer fx, muzzle flash fx, reload animation speeds and more. Bullets now will travel at a realistic speed rather than being instantly delivered to the target, while some materials in the game can now be shot through and destroyed with gunfire.

A recent and significant win in court for the Pirate Bay will face an appeal as media companies stay determined to have the torrent site blocked everywhere they can.

On Friday, the Diustrict Court of Stockholm refused to order ISP Bredbandsbolaget to block access to the Pirate Bay website. The block had been sought by entertainment and media companies that have been fighting to get rid of the Pirate Bay for more than a decade.

Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry wanted the court to force the Swedish Internet service provider to block access to the site and asserted that failing to do so bestowed culpability on the ISP for copyright infringement committed by subscribers.

There are similar blocks either already in effect or coming soon in most European countries now.

The loss in Sweden came as a shock to the copyright holders however, given that the block campaign has been successfully implemented almost everywhere else in Europe, and Sweden is the home of the notorious Pirate Bay.

The decision was unanimous however. "A unanimous District Court considers, therefore, that it is not in a position to authorize such a ban as the rights holders want and therefore rejects their request," said presiding Chief Magistrate Anders Dereborg.