News written by Petteri Pyyny (January, 2019)

AfterDawn will celebrate its 20th birthday this year. As you might imagine, 20 years in Internet business means that we have changed our site's concept, services and focus quite a few times over these years. Now, it is time to shut down one of those old services.

Originally, when we launched AfterDawn back in June 1999, one of our goals was to provide information about MP3 technology, including guides on how to use it and also to support indie artists without record label contracts. To achieve this, we set up a news section, guide section and also a section for indie artists to distribute their music through our site, for free.

This royalty-free MP3 service was at the very core of AfterDawn during our first years. But very soon it became clear that the most sought-after content was about MP3 technology and guides related to it. With the arrival of the Millennium, MP3 had become a mainstream topic. To tap into this trend, we launched our own MP3 search engine that allowed users to search through various MP3 services, FTP sites and more. Very quickly, we decided to move the MP3 search engine to its own domain, and thus, MP3Lizard.com had born.

Microsoft has finally said out loud what everyone else knew already: Windows 10 Mobile operating system is dead.

Company tells in its support pages that the support for last remaining Windows-based mobile phone operating system, Windows 10 Mobile, will cease on 10th of December, 2019. After that point, there wont be any security updates or patches to the operating system.

Microsoft also tells that those still using the Windows phones should switch to either Android or iPhone before the said date.

Company itself has already moved on, having ceased the active development of the Windows Mobile back in October, 2017. Since then, Microsoft has released tons of apps for both, Android and iOS, with great success. Both, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, both have been downloaded more than 500 million times on Google Play.

According to Microsoft, existing customers can continue to use their phones even after the December deadline, but with caution, as the security problems wont be patched anymore. It is unclear whether the app store for Windows Mobile stays online after the deadline.

Troy Hunt has set up up a searchable database that contains a whopping 773 million breached login details. The data has been put together by combining various high profile data breaches from the past years, including the data breaches to LinkedIn and Adobe

The database that he calls "Collection #1" includes email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. Yes, you got that one right, more than two and a half billion details. When all the duplicates removed, it still leaves more than one billion login details (email address and password combination) to the database. And there are more than 700 million unique email addresses there, so some email addresses were breached in more than one data leak, with different password.

Mr. Hunt, who works as a regional director for Microsoft got the data from popular anonymous file sharing service MEGA and its origins, according to him, point to a popular hacker forum where the set of files is distributed openly among the hackers. Dataset in question is 87 gigabytes in size and has more than 12'000 files in it. He details the project in his own blog.

Tesla has launched its Model 3 configurator page to those living in left-hand driving European countries. The configurator page allows potential buyer to tweak the Model 3 options and see how the changes effect the price in his/her country. Page has been open in selected European countries since December, but now it seems that almost all European countries where Tesla operates, are included.

As the value-added tax (VAT), various subsidizes and possible car taxes vary from country to country, the pricing varies quite wildly across Europe. In Finland, for example, the cheapest Model 3 configuration will cost €63,070 (appx. $71,800) while the same car costs only $49,000 in some parts of the United States. In France, the prices start from €53,000 and in Germany, from €57,900.

European Model 3 will have a different charging port in Europe, opting to use European CCS Combo charging port instead of its own proprietary port. Tesla will be retrofitting its existing Supercharger stations in Europe to accept both connectors.