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Google has banned apps from the Play Store that are used to mine cryptocurrencies.

Having previously banned Chrome extensions that mine cryptocurrency, Google has banned apps from the Play Store that mine cryptocurrency using devices they are installed on. "We don't allow apps that mine crypto-currency on devices," an updated developer policy reads.

Apps that manage mining on remote systems like cloud computing platforms will still be allowed on the Play Store, however.

Mining cryptocurrency is a process-intensive task that can max out computing hardware. On portable devices like smartphones, this can cause overheating and drain the battery very quickly.

Cryptocurrency mining has also been adopted by malware distributors, using computing resources of infected devices to carry out mining operations out of sight. This tends to have a debilitating effect on overall system performance.

Source: BBC News

There are now 83 million Spotify customers paying for premium service as the Swedish streaming firm holds its lead in face of competition.

Spotify had previously reported crossing 70 million paid subscribers globally in January. Having jumped now to over 83 million paid subscribers, Spotify is continuing its impressive growth even though it faces increasing competition in the streaming marketplace.

In April, Apple announced that its own Apple Music streaming service had crossed over 40 million paying subscribers. Some analysts have predicted that Apple will catch up to and surpass its Swedish rival, having reportedly passed Spotify's U.S.-based subscriber tally by July of this year. At the end of this year, Apple may have around 3 million more U.S. subscribers than Spotify.

A lot of eyes are on Spotify's revenue as the streaming giant filed to go public in January of this year. The service has yet to make a profit.

via: The Verge

In several European countries, Google has recently raised its minimum age limit to 16 years. This means that minors under 16 cannot create new Google accounts at all, if their country of residence is one of those in Google's list.

The change is happening because of the European Union privacy legislation called GDPR that came into force in May, 2018. Legislation sets 16 as the minimum age when a child is capable to sign a contract that allows companies to handle their personal details.

GDPR gives EU member countries freedom to set lower age limit, but most EU countries are currently just in process of adjusting their own country-specific laws, thus, the universal age limit of 16 applies to such countries.

The list of countries that now require the age of 16 or more in order to create a new Google account include Finland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, have already amended their own country-specific legislation and have different age limit than the GDPR standard is.

According to the Washington Post, Twitter purged more than 70 million accounts from the service since May.

The purge is part of Twitter's effort to fight against bots operating on its network, and also against "trolls" who abuse the company's terms of service. According to the report, many of the suspicious and fake accounts are remotely controlled bots that present all kinds of problems and threats.

A Twitter spokesperson told the Post that the purge was nothing new and was part of work to improve the health of the public conservation on Twitter.

He added that Twitter also took action against 142,000 applications responsible for spammy tweets on the social network.

As services like Twitter and Facebook take action against fake accounts, those responsible for them tend to change their ways to avoid detection. As new technologies including conversational AI become more widespread, it will be a much more difficult task to determine if an account represents a real individual or not.

Apple has pushed the latest iOS update, including USB restrictions aimed at countering accessories that can crack passcodes.

Such USB accessories are sometimes used by law enforcement and others to allow for infinite guesses at a device's passcode, then cracking it by using brute force techniques. In order to counter this method, Apple said it would change settings in an update that disables USB accessories entirely after an hour without the phone being unlocked.

Previously, this time frame was set to a week. With the release of iOS 11.4.1, the USB restriction change is the default. However, you can also disable it. Under Touch ID, or Face ID, settings you will see a new option you can toggle on or off for "USB Accessories."

The description reads: "Unlock iPhone to allow USB accessories to connect when it has been more than an house since your iPhone was locked."

A second Erase Data option will erase all data on a device if ten attempts to guess the passcode result in failure.

Other things included in the iOS update are stability fixes and an improved Find My AirPod feature.

via: Engadget

The SD Association revealed the new SD Express standard this week, which brings PCI Express and NVMe interfaces to the SD interface for dramatic speed improvements.

Adopting the PCIe interface pushes top transfer speed to a theoretical 985 MB/sec. In addition, new SD Ultra Capacity (SDUC) cards bump the existing storage capacity limit of 2TB, to an eyewatering 128TB. You shouldn't hold your breath for an affordable and practical 128TB card any time soon though.

Still, the SD Express upgrade is significant and good for data transfer intensive operations, like capturing super slow motion video, RAW continuous burst mode, 8K Video capture and playback, 360 degree cameras/videos and so forth.

"With SD Express we're offering an entirely new level of memory card with faster protocols turning cards into a removable SSD," said Hiroyuki Sakamoto, SDA president.

"SD 7.0 delivers revolutionary innovations to anticipate the needs of forthcoming devices and content rich and speed hungry applications."

The SD Association has released a white paper on SD Express: SD Express Cards with PCIe and NVMe Interfaces (PDF)

Redbox has struck a deal with Warner Bros to offer DVD and Blu-ray rentals through kiosks on the same day as a film's retail release.

Previously, Redbox could only offer films released by Warner for rental seven days after they hit retail shelves. Redbox already has agreements to offer DVD rentals for films from Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate on their retail release date.

It does not have any deal with Disney.

"We're thrilled to announce this day-and-date agreement with Warner Bros. that provides the consistently strong slate of Warner Bros. titles to consumers at their earliest physical retail sell-through availability," Redbox CEO Galen Smith said, reports Variety.

Under the new deal with Warner, new releases will also be available through the online Redbox On Demand service.

A jury has awarded $25 million to an ex-partner of Dr Dre (Andre Young) and Jimmy Iovine over the Beats headphone brand.

Steven Lamar and his company Jibe Audio sued the Beats co-founders alleging they had breached a contract to avoid paying royalties. The lawsuit was seeking $130 million in unpaid royalties, but Beats insisted that Lamar's involvement was in the early stages and paid for already. Specifically, Beats claimed Lamar was only owed for the original Studio model and had already been compensated for it.

Lamar's lawyers argued that the claimant had been involved in the development of twelve models.

In a 9-3 margin, the Los Angeles Superior Court found that Beats had breached a contract with Lamar, and awarded him $25.2 million. While this clearly falls short of the $130 million sought in the lawsuit, Lamar's lawyer welcomed the decision.

"The jury really validated our theory of the case, that Mr. Lamar was involved in the founding of Beats," Lamar's attorney Stephen E. Morrissey said, reports the Associated Press.

"It's not everything we were asking for, but we're happy."

According to reports, non-premium YouTube users are getting the picture-in-picture feature on their Android devices.

The PiP feature will keep a small window showing the YouTube video playing even as users navigate across other apps on their Android smartphone or tablet. It was introduced last November but was only available for users paying for premium service on YouTube - YouTube Red and YouTube Premium - but now seems to be appearing for free users too.

So far the feature only seems to be rolling out to users located in the United States. Since the uploader of a video can exclude its user with PiP mode, most major music videos don't work with the feature.

The rollout also seems to be limited only to those running Android Oreo 8.0+. To check if it is available for you, check to see if the option has become available in the YouTube settings as a toggle-on-toggle-off button. Once switched on, simply use the Home button when playing videos to minimize the video to small rectangle and navigate through other apps as you normally would.

Source: XDA-Developers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is trying to make e-mail more secure and private by helping webmasters deploy properly configured STARTTLS on SMTP servers.

E-mails sent over the Internet use the SMTP protol for the most part. SMTP is older than the HTTP protocol, and like HTTP it was not developed with encryption and data privacy in mind. As the online environment changed and called for more secure e-mail transit, STARTTLS was developed to add a layer of security to protocol.

STARTTLS provides for hop-to-hop encryption that means e-mails are not sent in plaintext in transit. It should be noted that STARTTLS does not encrypt the e-mail on the server itself, just while in transit.

While STARTTLS is deployed on most mailservers these days, unfortunately it is not always configured properly and has some problems. The EFF notes that most do now not validate certificates. Just like in HTTPS, certificates are what a server uses to prove it really is who it says it is. Without certificate validation, an active attacker on the network can get between two servers and impersonate one or both, allowing that attacker to read and even modify emails sent through your supposedly "secure" connection.

Uber users in London can relax because the service will continue to operate for at least 15 months following a Magistrate's decision.

Uber had been appealing to the Westminster Magistrates' Court this week after it was denied a five year operating license for London in 2017. Transport for London (TfL) claimed that Uber was not "fit and proper" when it refused to renew its license to operate in the British capital.

The U.S.-based taxi app continued to operate in London while it was appealing against the decision. In Court this week, Uber insisted that it has changed its company culture and its ways, and changed its policies toward key areas like the reporting of alleged crimes to police.

Westminster Magistrates' Court, Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said that Uber can now be considered "fit and proper" for service in London over the next fifteen months.

"We will continue to work with TfL to address their concerns and earn their trust, while providing the best possible service for our customers," Tom Elvidge, Uber's UK general manager, said while welcoming the Court's decision.

YouTubers have used VidCon to vent their frustration at YouTube over declining viewership due to subscribers not being notified of new videos.

Starting last year, many YouTubers began to notice their average number of video views falling dramatically. It emerged that YouTube wasn't notifying their subscribers as often about new videos, and wasn't promoting them to subscribers as prominently as before.

Some of the drops were significantly steep. King Russell, who goes by the YouTube name "Kingsley", counts three million YouTube followers. He noticed that his views per video declines to around 100,000, compared to over one million per video in the previous years.

"It's unacceptable," he said, reports Reuters. "It's tacky, rude and needs to change."

YouTube justifies its actions by explaining that YouTube viewers can become overwhelmed by too many alerts, but YouTubers remain unconvinced. Many videomakers have resorted to asking their subscribers to click/press the "bell" notification button beside the subscribe button to get more notifications. In theory, this should result in a user being notified of ever video upload, but some viewers claim this doesn't always happen either.

The Wi-Fi Alliance has introduced Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3), providing wireless networks with their first major security upgrade in well over a decade.

WPA3 tackles some of the lingering vulnerabilities that have affected WPA2. For example, individualizes data encryption for each device protects against eavesdropping from within a protected network. Like WPA2, WPA3 comes in different flavors: WPA3-Personal and WPA3-Enterprise.

On WPA3-Personal, users will benefit from more resilient, password-based authentication even when users choose fairly weak passwords. Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) is also introduced, comprising a secure key establishment protocol between devices, to provide stronger protections for users against password guessing attempts by third parties.

WPA-Enterprise kicks up the security a bit further by providing the equivalent of 192-bit cryptographic strength. As suggested by its title, it is made for deployment when data is particularly sensitive, such as in government facilities or a corporate environment.

Also introduced is Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Easy Connect, which comes about in time for the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart homes. It makes it possible to securely add devices to a WPA3 protected network even if the device has limited or no display capabilities at all. It achieves this by adding the device using another device with a more robust interface, such as a smartphone, by simply scanning a product quick response (QR) code.

The Official Charts Company in the UK will begin counting YouTube video views in its singles chart ranking from Friday.

User-uploaded videos and user generated content will not count, but offcial videos played on YouTube, or on Apple, Tidal and Spotify within the United Kingdom will be counted. The first chart including video streams will be published on 6 July, and the album chart will remain unaffected.

Another change will affect the weight given to premium streams versus free streams. As things stand, every 150 streams is counted as if it's the equivalent of a sale. Starting from Friday, this will change dramatically to 600:1 for songs streamed for free on ad supported services like Spotify, and to 100:1 for premium streams.

Some have called for free streams to be excluded completely but the official charts company has resisted those calls so far, citing the music tastes of the youngest users who rely on ad-supported services and low-income listeners.

More info on the changes: BBC News

Uber is appealing against a decision to deny the company a license to operate in London in a UK court.

Last year, the Transport for London (TfL) group denied Uber a license renewal in the British capital, citing public safety and security concerns. Uber filed an appeal and has been allowed to continue operating while the appeal is underway.

"I know we got things wrong and that we have more work to do. But I promise Londoners we will keep listening and improving as Uber moves forward in a new direction," Uber's UK general manager, Tom Elvidge, said in May.

Uber has begun making its case this week in the Westminster Magistrates' Court. The hearing is expected to last throughout the week. It is detailing to the court the significant changes it promised to make including improved procedures for reporting criminal offenses.

According to a memo sent from Uber to TfL, as many as 1,148 London-licensed Uber drivers ranging from dangerous driving to stalking.

Source: BBC News