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A popular Android application for pirate TV streams will shut down completely at the end of the month, its developer has confirmed.

In a notification pushed to the users of the app, Terrarium TV developer NitroXenon explained that the service will be shutting down completely at the end of the month. It was a very popular app that used file locker services to stream TV shows to viewers.

It didn't require any significant knowhow from users to watch content on the app, as is not always the case with some other forms of streaming options.

Dear all,

It has always been a great pleasure to work on this project. However, it is time to say goodbye. I am going to shut down Terrarium TV, forever.

I know this day will come eventually. I know it would be hard to let go. But it is really time for me to move on to other projects.

Thank you for all your support through the years. Thanks to all Terrarium TV supporters and communities. Thank you, Nic, and all the people around the world who care about this project.

Please note that you will not be able to open the Terrarium TV app after the end of September as the app will close itself automatically. Please NO NOT try to click the Update button because it will not download any new version of the app.

Rockstar has explained why its upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2 does not allow you to switch between multiple protagonists like Grand Theft Auto V.

The latest in the Grand Theft Auto series, GTA V, was released in late 2013. It allows users to switch on-the-fly between three separate protagonists whose stories criss-cross throughout the campaign. GTA fans were wondering if Rockstar's hotly anticipated Western, Red Dead Redemption 2, would feature the same multi-character setup.

Josh Bass, art director at Rockstar San Diego, has poured cold water on any multiple protagonist hopes.

"Sticking with a single character felt more appropriate for the structure and narrative of a western," Bass told the Hollywood Reporter.

"Arthur lives with and fights alongside the other members of the Van der Linde gang, and they are a group of fully realized characters with relationships to each other and to Arthur, but this is Arthur's story and we are placing players firmly in Arthur's boots as he and the gang deal with a rapidly changing world,' he added. 'We think people will really love the feeling of being in the gang. It isn't like anything we've done before."

The upcoming Nintendo Switch Online service won't support cloud saves for all games due to concerns about cheating.

The official page for the Splatoon 2 starter pack was found to have a message at the end saying, "this game does not support Save Data Cloud backup." Later on, more pages were found to have the same information, including FIFA 19, Dead Cells, Pokemon Let's Go! Pikachu, Pokemon Let's Go! Eevee and Dark Souls: Remastered.

Nintendo explained the lack of cloud save for some titles as follows.

"In certain games, this feature would make it possible to, for example, regain items that had been traded to other players, or revert to a higher online multiplayer ranking that had been lost," the statement reads.

As for Splatoon 2, the lack of cloud saves was "to ensure that Save Data Cloud backups cannot be used to unfairly affect online multiplayer rankings."

Nintendo Switch Online is launching this month for a monthly fee of $20. It will be the only way to backup saves for Nintendo Switch titles.

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

A Kodi Addon developer in the UK may be facing a judgment of almost $2 million in a lawsuit brought against him by U.S. satellite provider Dish Network.

The developer, Shani, had been sued by Dish because his ZemTV addon offered unauthorized streams of television channels. While Dish claimed that the addon was responsible for the unauthorized broadcast of thousands of infringing works, it focused on just thirteen for the lawsuit.

It is not seeking a default judgment of $150,000 per work, amounting to $1,950,000. The request comes as the Kodi Addon developer has given up defending himself, citing high costs.

Last week, Dish Network dismissed its lawsuit against the founder of TVAddons.

"Defendant infringed DISH's copyrights on a massive scale by retransmitting the Protected Channels without authorization on ZemTV. Defendant transmitted the Protected Channels on ZemTV for at least 16 months from February 2016 through June 2017," Dish informs the Texas federal court.

"Defendant's clear willfulness and the strong need for deterrence, as shown by ongoing infringement in the face of numerous notices of infringement and intent to operate his service on the basis of stealing others' intellectual property, justifies an award of $150,000 per work. The Court should grant this motion and hold Defendant liable for damages in the amount of $1,950,000 and enter a permanent injunction, which is necessary to protect DISH's copyrights from further infringement."

Reports had suggested that the U.S. Air Force was looking into Elon Musk's marijuana use on a podcast with Joe Rogan on Thursday.

Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, which is a U.S. government contractor and has launched classified payloads for the United States government. As such, Mr. Musk has a security clearance. On Friday, news reports suggested that the U.S. Air Force was looking into Musk's marijuana smoking on Joe Rogan's podcast as its use is prohibited by those with government security clearances.

Responding to the reports of the review by Fox Business Network and CNBC, U.S. Air Force spokesperson Captain Hope Cronin denied that Musk's security clearance is being reviewed over his appearance on the podcast.

Musk joined Joe Rogan for an episode of the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience. During the podcast, Musk drank whiskey with the host and accepted an offer to take a hit from a blunt passed to him by Rogan. "I mean, it's legal isn't it?" Musk said before smoking. In California, it is legal but the federal level is a different story.

In a quite interesting podcast, Musk and Rogan talked about the dangers of artificial intelligence, the threat of digging ancient CO2 from the Earth and putting it in the atmosphere and oceans, the violent nature of chimpanzees, boring tunnels, the unsuitability of flying cars and so much more.

A fully redesigned Twitch Beta app is being rolled out to all Xbox Insides on Xbox One.

Among the new features and improvements for the designed app are:

• Live video previews – check out live streams while you browse
• Better support for past broadcasts – see chat on offline videos
• Improved stability – the Twitch app has been rebuilt from the ground up to improve your viewing experience

If you are an Xbox Insider, you can participate by launching the Xbox Insider Hub (or install the Insider Hub from the Store first if you don't have it), navigate to Insider content -> Apps -> Twitch Beta. Select Join. Once the registration process finishes you will be redirected to the Store page to install the Twitch Beta.

Netflix users are complaining about problems with streaming media from the service today.

Some users have taken to social media to ask if others are having issues with the service when trying to stream certain films. For example, one Twitter user posted a screenshot of their Netflix app informing them that The Purge: Election Year is currently not available to stream.

Netflix' own 'Is Netflix Down?' site doesn't appear to be showing any problems. Oddly, the Downdetector service is showing the United Kingdom mainland, and parts of Europe, as experience outage issues.

Elon Musk's Boring Company has shown how it controls a massive boring machine with an Xbox One controller.

The Boring Company is digging tunnels underneath Los Angeles as Mr. Musk looks for ways to ease traffic congestion in LA. What started off as a kind of joke became an actual company that made headlines by selling a 'not a flamethrower' product to thousands of consumers some months ago.

Boring's latest giant machine can apparently be controlled by a standard Xbox One controller, which is kind of interesting. It also makes sense as the Xbox One controller can easily map controls to the gamepad, so there's no need to design a new gamepad.

Here's a video posted by The Boring Company showing how it looks.

Apple has confirmed that it has also removed Alex Jones' InfoWars app from its app store, citing community guidelines.

Last month, several outlets including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube, removed Alex Jones' podcast content and associated accounts. The actions were clearly coordinated and the firms cited community guidelines and violations of rules as reasons for the actions.

At the time, InfoWars fans could still access the content by downloading the Infowars app from the App Store. Apple has now confirmed that it also removed the Infowars app permanently, citing community guidelines violations related to the content accessible in the app.

The Infowars Official app is still available to download from the Play Store for Android for the time being.

Last week, Twitter had also banned Infowars and Alex Jones from its platform. Initially, Twitter had not taken part in the coordinated actions, with CEO Jack Dorsey explaining that the accounts had not violated Twitter's rules. Some more recent tweets were seen to fall foul of the rules and Twitter reacted.

Source: Buzzfeed News

Biometric sensors have been one of the more innovated areas of smartphones in the past few years. Ever since we got fingerprint sensors, we have been looking at ways to unlock the phone with less effort, more precision and security.

Face unlock is one of the newer iterations of that development and can be either fast and not-so-secure or secure and no-so-fast. Also the latter configuration at this point requires quite a bit of notch space.

Fingerprint sensor would be nice, but you either have to place it in the back, or reserve space from the "chin" which isn't really up to par these days. Fortunately there's a new way to make a fingerprint sensor, and that is to embed it under the thin layer of display.

This application has been demonstrated by a few Chinese smartphone manufacturers, and even produced now in fairly high quantity for mostly their local market. However, it has not yet made its way to the West, and we aren't really expecting Google or Apple to change that with the new generation of smartphones.

Thankfully a Chinese manufacturer by the name of OnePlus, a lesser known entity here in the US but a growing force in the EU market, is bringing its upcoming OnePlus 6T to the US with a carrier partner, T-Mobile.

Mobile analytics firm tefficient has once again released its mobile data usage stats from all around the world. Monthly data usage continues to skyrocket, across the world. But there are massive differences between countries and operators.

The most mobile bandwidth hungry users can found from Finland, where all three major operators were ranked among the top 10 in terms of mobile data consumed per user. The #1 spot in the world goes to Finnish operator DNA. DNA's users used a whopping 19.8GB of data per user, per month, during the first half of 2018.

To put this into comparison, the top operator in the United States (in terms of mobile data used per month) was U.S. Cellular, whose users used, on average 2.1GB of mobile data each month.

After Finland's DNA, the number two operator in the world was Zain Kuwait. Zain's users in Kuwait used 15.7GB data each month, but that figure is based on 2017 data. The third place in the ranking chart goes to 3 Austria. 3's users in Austria used 18.4GB of data in H1 of 2018 (up from 15.4GB in 2017).

DNA, just like all other major Finnish operators, offers unlimited, unmetered mobile deals with fixed monthly fee. Typically only the bandwidth tier effects the price, with typical bandwidth tiers starsting from 100Mbps. As the monthly cost of mobile data connection is typically significantly lower than that of fixed DSL line, many people get mobile connections also as their primary home internet connections in Finland. Same is true also for most other countries making it to the top: fixed, relatively cheap prices and (virtually) no bandwidth or data caps whatsoever.

Roomba e5 is the latest robot vacuum cleaner from American iRobot. New line of Roomba robots promises better cleaning than its predecessors - and the problems with bristles getting stuck with rugs and carpets, shouldn't be a problem anymore.

iRobot launched the e5 and its more expensive sibling, Roomba i7+ just couple of days ago and shipments are starting on 12th of September, 2018. iRobot's Nordic partner sent us a test unit, which we will test in depth in next couple of weeks.

Roomba e5 is the cheaper one of the two new models, MSRP set to $449 in the U.S. Obviously, even at that price range, the e5 is much more expensive than some lesser known competitors. But as the term "roomba" is virtually a synonymous to the robot vacuum cleaners, it is also the device that all other robot vacuums should be tested against.

Despite the full in-depth review still in the horizon, we thought it might be a worth to take a quick look at Roomba e5 now that get our hands on it.

Roomba retail sale box

In technology industry, especially the smartphone part of it, the upcoming month will be perhaps the most important 30 days of the year.

Both Apple and Google are going to be introducing the newest generation of smartphones and probably some accompanying equipment like smartwatches and accessories.

While Microsoft is no longer really an entity in the smartphone race, and nowadays it just tries to spread its software wisdom as wide as possible, meaning both Android and iOS are getting more and more Microsoft-branded applications, it has squeezes itself in the 30 days period with its own hardware launch.

Redmond has sent out an invite proposing journalists and influencers give the company aptly a "moment of your time." They seem to realize that the press is going crazy after iPhones, iPads and Pixels over the next month, and they modestly just want a little bit of your precious time.

Microsoft's October event is held on October 2nd in New York City, just couple weeks after the iPhone launch and a week before Google's Pixel event. And it's not even that clear what Microsoft will unveil, although one could guess a new Surface Book 2 and a refreshed version of Surface Laptop.

Elon Musk sits down for a two and a half hour discussion with Joe Rogan, and it doesn't disappoint in the slightest.

It has been a strange few weeks for Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He has come under scrutiny for disparaging remarks about a British cave diver, has been the subject of an SEC investigation over a tweet and is targeted in multiple lawsuits from short sellers who blame him for the loss of millions of dollars.

That made it all the more surprising when Elon announced earlier that he would join Joe Rogan on his podcast this week. The Joe Rogan Experience is a long-form podcast that routinely hits the three-hour mark with guests from all backgrounds and disciplines. Marijuana has certainly helped the cause for the host over the years.

It was no surprise when Joe Rogan sparked up a fat blunt during the podcast, but it was a surprise when he passed it to Elon.

"You probably can't because of stockholders, right?" Joe asked, to which Elon responded, "I mean, it's legal right?" and then proceeded to take a hit. It is legal of course, in California. Later on, Musk starts receiving messages from friends on his phone asking him why he is smoking weed on Joe Rogan's show live on the Internet.

The latest official YouTube app for Android has gotten a new Dark Theme and you can easily switch to it.

Google previously revealed that it will release versions of its popular mobile apps with a dark theme. This follows a trend of mobile apps turning "dark", but of course it won't happen by default when the app updates are pushed out. Instead, you may be prompted to try out the dark side when you get an update.

If you were prompted to try out Dark Mode but declined for some reason, you can very easily enable Dark Theme in the latest official YouTube app in just a few steps.

How to manually enable Dark Theme in YouTube for Android:

1. Step 1: Open the YouTube app and tap your account/profile icon in the top right-hand corner as shown.
   
2. Step 2: From your account/profile options, tap the Settings option as shown.
   
3. Step 3: Tap on General Settings.
   
4. STEP 4: Toggle On "Enable Dark Theme" as shown and the app will instantly turn Dark.
   

What if I have no option for Dark Theme?
If the option to toggle Dark Theme on/off is not present in the Settings, then you are likely running an out of date version of the app. You need to have YouTube v13.35.51 for the Dark Theme. You can manually update directly from Google Play if an auto-update hasn't occurred yet.