Now that the year 2014 is almost in the past, it is time to take a quick look at the past year and wish all of you a happy new year for 2015!
Mobile revolution is reality
It has been evident that some of the most interesting technological development during the last few years has happened in mobile technology or in closely-related cloud services. This year finally underscored this fact for traditional online publishers, too, when suddenly, all over the world, websites started to realize that their audiences are rapidly moving to mobile.
For some of AfterDawn's services, this is already the reality -- one of our sites already has more than 50 percent of its traffic from mobile. And this trend is not going to end, but rather, will accelerate in the future. Thus, all websites must decide if they want to be relevant in coming years and adapt accordingly: responsive design, mobile apps, etc. are going to be even more important in future.
HIGH.FI news aggregator service
Our biggest new service of the year was a news aggregator service called HIGH.FI – a service that aggregates and categorizes news headlines from all over the world and presents those in chronological order.
Chinese smartphone startup Xiaomi has raised $1.1 billion in funding at a massive value of $45 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable private technology companies.
Among the new investors are All-Stars Investment, DST Global, Hopu Investment Management, Yunfeng Capital and GIC.
Xiaomi has risen from unknown to the world's third-largest smartphone maker in under five years, overtaking veteran companies like LG, Lenovo and Sony.
The company sells extremely cheap but high quality smartphones and other devices (including fitness bands and tablets) and is working on building an ecosystem of apps and other services. Xiaomi currently only sells devices in China, which some believe has stunted some of their potential for profit.
According to Sony Pictures, 'The Interview' made $15 million in revenue in online sales and rentals during its first 96 hours of availability.
After the major theaters balked at playing the film on the big screen, Sony decided to release it on Christmas as a $6 rental or a $15 purchase via Xbox Video, Google Play and a few other proprietary on-demand pay streaming sites.
The studio said there were about two million transactions in total but Sony did not break down how many were sales versus rentals.
While the majors did not release the film, a few independent theaters played the movie on about 300 screens, generating an additional $3 million from Christmas until Sunday.
Sony Pictures' controversial comedy The Interview was released a couple days ago on Google Play and Microsoft's Xbox service after Sony themselves released the movie online. Now Apple jumps on the bandwagon a couple of days later, reports Recode.
The movie starring James Franco and Seth Rogen was given the green light by Sony after cancelling the premiere because of threats. Hackers who obtained confidential data in a security breach have been threatening Sony and the theaters for possible releases. The threats have not materialized.
The reason behind Apple's reluctance to add the movie immediately after Sony had contacted the online distributors to release the film was not revealed. The prices are the same $6 for rental and $15 for purchase as they are in the competing services.
One-time photo giant Kodak, newly out of bankruptcy, will try its hand in the mobile device arena starting with the launch of an Android smartphone at next month's CES event.
The company has teamed up with the Bullitt Group for the devices, which will eventually include a line of tablets, as well.
Reads the press release: "Aimed at - but not exclusively for - consumers who want a high-end experience but aren't always as comfortable using increasingly complicated mobile devices as they would like to be, the range of smartphones and tablets will come pre-loaded with bespoke image capture, management and sharing features to offer a rich user experience.
In addition, advanced remote management software will be pre-installed, allowing family members and friends to provide help and support if needed."
Besides the smartphone and tablet, Kodak also says it will launch a Web-connected camera.
Last year, the MPAA seemingly shook up the file sharing industry when they announced they had won a suit against once-popular file hosting site Hotfile and agreed to an $80 million settlement.
According to a new report, however, that headline figure was way exaggerated, and that the cyber locker really settled for just $4 million.
The news comes via a leaked Sony Pictures email. "The studios and Hotfile have reached agreement on settlement, a week before trial was to start. Hotfile has agreed to pay us $4 million, and has entered into a stipulation to have an $80 million judgment entered and the website shut down," read the email from Sony's SVP Legal.
Hotfile was allowed to continue operating after the settlement was entered, but they had to implement an MPAA-approved filter that would supposedly remove all unauthorized content from the their servers. Instead, Hotfile just shut down.
It does appear that the payment was made, in full, but it is unclear how much the MPAA paid out in attorney's fees for the high-profile case.
Since the launch of iOS 8, Videolan's popular media player VLC has been silently absent from the App Store. It appears after three months of silence, it may be returning.
Videolan has not given any update to the disappearance of the app except to say that they did it and not Apple. There was word that the app would return eventually but with no clear timetable.
Felix Paul Kuehne of Videolan says your wait is most likely almost over, however, as the app will return "but probably early next year due to the iTunes Connect holiday shutdown."
Most likely that means the app has been submitted to Apple for approval and that the code is ready to run.
The annual shutdown is in effect from December 22nd to the 29th so iOS fans could see the best media player app available in time for the new year.
According to Kim Dotcom himself, the larger-than-life founder of MEGA helped save Christmas for gamers.
Yesterday we reported that hacking group 'Lizard Squad' had taken down both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network through a large DDoS attack. Late in the evening, however, access to the networks was slowly being restored, as new console owners finally got a chance to try out their multiplayer gaming.
Dotcom was able to get the DDoS to stop by pretty much bribing the attackers with potentially lifetime free vouchers to Mega's encrypted cloud service.
The Mega founder sent out 3000 free subscriptions that normally cost $99 each, so that he could get back to gaming and so that Lizard Squad would not attack the networks again in the future.
Amazon has made over $200 of apps free as long as you download the Amazon App Store for Android.
There are games and apps from all over the spectrum, and we have a picture of all the apps, below.
"The Muscular System Manual" is the biggest "savings" of all the apps, down from $65 to free, but there is little doubt that it is one of the more unpopular apps and probably had a hard time selling at its original price tag.
Additionally, Amazon has some nice discounts on ebooks, Instant Video titles and most of their hardware devices.
Amazon says the free apps promo will end on December 26th.
A group of hackers calling themselves the 'Lizard Squad' have taken down both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network today, denying gamers access to multiplayer gaming and other online downloads.
The Lizard Squad confessed to hitting both networks with DDoS attacks, and is using the attack to gain followers on Twitter. The group was asking for favorites and retweets to bring the networks back online, and have done so multiple times before shutting them down again.
Sony confirmed the service issue, but did not mention the DDoS. Microsoft did not acknowledge.
Whatever demands the group wanted, they do not appear to have been successful in getting what they wanted. "Lizard Squad" first issued the threat of taking down both networks on Christmas last week.
A rival group, "FinestSquad," has been working on getting Lizard Squad off Twitter, and is also giving advice to Sony and Microsoft on how to avoid the DDoS attack.
As of 1pm today, Sony Picture's satirical comedy 'The Interview' starring James Franco and Seth Rogen is available online for rental and purchase, hours before a few independent theaters release the film on the big screen.
The controversial movie is available via Google Play, YouTube Movies, Xbox Video and Sony's own SeeTheInterview. A rental will set you back $5.99 or you can own the movie for $14.99.
Sony's online rollout, the day before the film was originally set to be released in theaters, is easily the highest-profile film to make its debut on the Web. Depending on its success, it could also be a harbinger for the future of film releases.
Google added a little statement with the release: "Last Wednesday Sony began contacting a number of companies, including Google, to ask if we'd be able to make their movie, "The Interview," available online. We'd had a similar thought and were eager to help--though given everything that's happened, the security implications were very much at the front of our minds.
Of course it was tempting to hope that something else would happen to ensure this movie saw the light of day. But after discussing all the issues, Sony and Google agreed that we could not sit on the sidelines and allow a handful of people to determine the limits of free speech in another country (however silly the content might be)."
According to an angry email from music publisher Sony/ATV CEO Marty Bandier, Pharrell and other music artists are not being paid properly for their popularity on the Internet Radio giant Pandora.
In fact, superstar Pharrell made just $2700 in publisher and songwriter royalties from his 43 million streams of the hit "Happy" for the first quarter of 2014, a measly $63 per million streams.
"This is a totally unacceptable situation and one that cannot be allowed to continue," Bandier wrote. "We at Sony/ATV want these digital music services to be successful because they are a great way for music fans to listen to music and have the potential to generate significant new revenues for everyone. However, this success should not come at the expense of songwriters whose songs are essential for these services to exist and thrive."
Others in the industry pointed out that Bandier's numbers did not include performance rights royalty rates, and that Pharrell's earnings were likely around $25,000 - although that figure is nothing to be too proud of either.
Sony Pictures has confirmed that the now infamous 'The Interview' will get its Christmas release date, after all.
CEO Michael Lynton added in a statement: "We have never given up on releasing The Interview and we're excited our movie will be in a number of theaters on Christmas Day. At the same time, we are continuing our efforts to secure more platforms and more theaters so that this movie reaches the largest possible audience."
Independent theater chains will show the films although it appears as of now that only about 200 screens will be playing the comedy.
Most notably, THR says that Sony will almost definitely release the movie on VOD simultaneously, meaning consumers will able to download and watch the film from home.
"I want to thank our talent on The Interview and our employees, who have worked tirelessly through the many challenges we have all faced over the last month," Lynton added. "While we hope this is only the first step of the film's release, we are proud to make it available to the public and to have stood up to those who attempted to suppress free speech."
Last week, we reported that Apple shut down their Russian online store due to the "extreme" depreciation of the Russian currency, rubles.
At the time, Apple said: "Our online store in Russia is currently unavailable while we review pricing. We apologize to customers for any inconvenience."
The store is now back up in the nation, but consumers will have to pay up heavily to get their new iPhone. Apple has raised the price of the iPhone 6 by 35 percent, with the base model now selling for 53,990 rubles (about $1000 USD). In November, Apple raised the price 25 percent and the combined price jumps now make Russia one of the most expensive places in the world to get an iPhone.
Russia's national currency, the ruble, has been demolished in recent weeks against the strength of the US Dollar, and it now takes 54 rubles to get one USD. More much of the last five years, the rate was about 20:1. The currency has recovered somewhat in the last week, when it touched 80:1.
Disney has confirmed that Walt Disney World Resort in Florida will begin accepting Apple Pay and Google Wallet tomorrow.
Any guest with an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, and the upcoming Apple Watch will be able pay quickly and securely using any card they have linked to their Apple Pay accounts. Any Android device with NFC and Google Wallet will also be able to make payments, although Wallet has been much less popular among consumers.
Disney also confirmed that most other contactless payments services, like contactless RFID credit cards, will also work.
Most stores, bars, ticket sales booths and quick-serve restaurants or snack stations will accept the payments.
Finally, in a few months, Disney says the Disneyland Resort in California will get contactless payments.
According to multiple reports, North Korea is having its second day of intermittent Internet blackouts.
Yesterday, most of North Korea's Internet network was down for a good portion of the day, but was restored during the evening.
There has been rampant speculation about the source of the downtime, with many accusing the U.S. of retaliating for the attack on Sony Pictures. Other reports had claimed China was to blame, but the Chinese government has denounced any such reports.
Earlier this week, the FBI formally blamed North Korea for the devastating hack on Sony Pictures that led to 100 terabytes of sensitive data being stolen. President Obama promised a "proportional response" to the alleged hackers.
Even with widespread downtime, it is unclear how many are really affected. Most citizens only have access to a government-approved intranet, while North Korean officials and other "trusted elite" have access to the true World Wide Web.
The team behind Popcorn Time has made a few changes to their Mac and Windows versions of the software and made a strong promise for the upcoming iOS update.
First, the Windows version has been updated to beta 5.1:
After learning about how awesome beta 5.0 is, but also what's not working so well in it, we worked hard on solving the issues and we believe we managed to fix many bugs that were bugging you guys!! First of all, Chromecast should work well again for those who experienced issues with it recently... So go a head and enjoy a good movie on your TV screen again, no problemo!
Other than that we fixed many player issues, the cache folder bug and we increased download speed, enabled support of a bigger variety of torrents and in general we improved the watching experience, so go and watch something and tell us how it feels!!
The Mac beta has been updated to version 4.9.1:
First of all to the burning question you all are probably asking: Why isn't Mac on beta 5.X yet?
Well, with all that's been going on recently, we had to invest a lot of time making sure that Popcorn Time will not be shut down, and that time took a bite from the time we had for development.
Sony attorney David Boies has seemingly confirmed that the studio will eventually release 'The Interview,' although the when and the how are still very much unclear.
Boies stated that the now infamous comedy "will be distributed." He added, "Sony only delayed this. Sony has been fighting to get this picture distributed. It will be distributed. How it's going to be distributed, I don't think anybody knows quite yet. But it's going to be distributed."
This is a stark change from last Wednesday, when the studio said there were "no further release plans" for the film following its theatrical cancellation. There have been reports that Sony will release the film via their free streaming service - Crackle, but that is nowhere near confirmed.
The attorney also added to President Obama's recent comments about the attack. "I think that what we have to do is use the president's recognition of the importance of this issue as a rallying cry, so that all Americans can unite against what is really a threat to our national security," added Boies. "If state-sponsored criminal acts like this can be directed against Sony, it can be directed against anybody."
Amazon has dumped the price of their new Fire HDX 8.9 tablet, giving consumers a chance to get the device at 30 percent off.
The 32GB/Wi-Fi model is selling for $300 today, down from $430. If you need cellular data and more storage, the 64GB/LTE model is down to $414 from $594, a pretty decent deal given the specs.
Amazon's tablet has an 8.9" "HDX" display with 2560x1600 resolution, a 2.5GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM and an Adreno 420 GPU for smoother gaming and video playback.
In addition, Amazon has added free one-day shipping for all buyers of the tablets for the next day, ensuring you can get it by Christmas.
In 2012, social networking giant Facebook purchased photo sharing giant Instagram for $1 billion. At the time, many cited the deal as a sign that the tech world was in a bubble.
Just two and a half years later, the acquisition is looking like the steal of the century.
Large international bank Citigroup has raised their valuation of Instagram significantly, valuing the company at over $35 billion. Last year, the bank had placed a valuation of $19 billion on the company, in of itself a huge increase from the original purchase price.
Instagram now has over 300 million monthly active users and Citigroup believes the photo sharing service could eventually bring in over $2 billion in annual revenue.
Anonymous, the group behind some of the largest corporate cyber attacks in recent history, claims the FBI are wrong in claiming North Korea is behind the hack on Sony Pictures.
Last week, the FBI claimed that the North Korean government was responsible for the attack on Sony's servers, which netted the hackers as much as 100 terabytes of sensitive information. The hackers also then threatened movie theaters if they showed the comedy "The Interview," which was eventually forced to be canceled by Sony since no one would distribute it.
At the time, the FBI claimed that "technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks." Additionally, the FBI found IP addresses that were associated with Korean infrastructure that were communicating with the IPs hardcoded into some of the malware used during the hack.
Many saw an obvious connection, but there were quite a few doubters, as well. For their part, North Korea still denies any involvement and has proposed a joint task force to find the real culprits. Guardians of Peace, the group that took credit for the attack, also mocked the FBI's investigation, calling the officials 'idiots.'
Less than a week after Sony announced they were canceling the release of 'The Interview' and that they had 'no future plans for its release," we have some encouraging news this weekend.
Sources claim the studio will release the now infamous comedy for free on Crackle, their free streaming service that has a catalog of older content.
Sony canceled the release after their attackers threatened terrorist attacks against movie theaters and movie goers. The movie theater chains refused the show the film, and Sony says that streaming sites also refused to take the film for distribution.
It will be interesting to see if the studio will keep their original release date of Christmas, December 25th.
It appears that being the most powerful couple in entertainment is not enough to compete with Minecraft money.
Markus 'Notch' Persson, the creator of the blockbuster game, became a billionaire in September when Microsoft acquired Mojang AB for $2.5 billion. Notch is said to have owned 70 percent of the gaming studio, netting the developer $1.75 billion before taxes.
The dev is now the proud owner of a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills, California, outbidding Beyoncé and Jay Z, who were expected to win.
Curbed has an apt description of the ridiculous house: "It's outfitted with a candy room, a car showroom, vodka and tequila bars, a 54-foot curved glass door that opens onto the pool, eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, apartment-sized closets, and a movie theater, and even the listing called it 'an overwhelming sensory experience.'"
President Obama bluntly stated yesterday that Sony "made a mistake" in caving to the threats of hackers that have stolen terabytes of data and threatened movie goers.
The President says the U.S. "will respond proportionally" to the cyber attack, which the FBI has blamed on North Korea.
"We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States" he said. "Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don't like, or a news report that they don't like -- or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don't want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. That's not who we are. That's not what America is about."
"Sony is a corporation. It suffered significant damage, threats against some employees. I am sympathetic to the concerns they faced. Having said that, yes I think they made a mistake [in canceling the release of the film]," Obama added. "That's not what America is about...I wish they'd spoken to me first. I would have told them, 'Do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks'."
Another major retailer has confirmed a security breach, this time with 1.16 million credit and debit cards compromised from office supply giant Staples.
Says the company: "Staples' data security experts detected that criminals deployed malware to some point-of-sale systems at 115 of its more than 1,400 U.S. retail stores. Upon detection, Staples immediately took action to eradicate the malware in mid-September and to further enhance its security. Staples also retained outside data security experts to investigate the incident and has worked closely with payment card companies and law enforcement on this matter.
Based on its investigation, Staples believes that malware may have allowed access to some transaction data at affected stores, including cardholder names, payment card numbers, expiration dates, and card verification codes. At 113 stores, the malware may have allowed access to this data for purchases made from August 10, 2014 through September 16, 2014. At two stores, the malware may have allowed access to data from purchases made from July 20, 2014 through September 16, 2014."
Staples is offering anyone affected a free year of identity theft protection including credit monitoring and identify theft insurance.
Steam has begun their annual holiday sale, letting gamers get thousands of games and DLC packs for as much as 90 percent off normal prices.
Over 15 days, the deals will be available to anyone with a Steam account and there will be sets of "featured deals" that rotate every 24 hours and will include what Steam considers to be the best deals of the day.
More example, today's Featured Deals include:
Dark Souls II - 63% off
Metal Gear Solid V – Ground Zeroes - 33% off
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth - 40% off
Total War: ROME II – Emperor Edition - 75% off
Sniper Elite 3 - 50% off
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - 85% off
State of Decay - 75% off
Space Engineers - 50% off
Rocksmith 2014 - 66% off
The Steam Holiday Sale will run until 10AM PST, January 2nd.
Check out the sale here, which includes some very, very recent games like Telltale Games' 'Game Of Thrones': Steam Holiday Sale
National Geographic (NatGeo) has announced the winners of their annual Photo Contest, a stunning 19 images from lucky amateurs and seasoned professionals.
There were over 9200 submissions from 150 different countries, and all the winners were chosen from three categories: people, places and nature.
The grand prize winner won $10,000 and an all-expenses paid trip to Washington D.C.
Here are 12 of my favorite shots, in no order except for the top photo of the year - "A Node Glows in the Dark" at the top:
Social networking giant Facebook has been auto-enhancing your photos, and will continue to do so unless you opt-out.
The auto-enhance began with the most updated iOS app, but will likely expand to other operating systems in the near future.
Facebook seems to think that if your picture needs some help in the brightness or contrast areas, it can do a pretty good job at helping you out. The first time you upload an image, Facebook will give you a pop-up message letting you know it's being enhanced.
When an image might require auto-enhance, a small wand will appear in the lower-left of your app, allowing you to adjust the enhancement or even turn it off.
If you don't like Facebook messing with your photos, you can turn off the "Enhance Automatically" setting forever.
Amazon has confirmed the launch of Prime Now, a service in NYC that promises delivery in as quick as an hour between 6am and midnight. Right now, there are 25,000 eligible items and 9 eligible zip codes, which will continue expanding into next year.
You must have a $99 per year Amazon Prime subscription to use Prime Now, and the expedited delivery will cost just $7.99 for one-hour delivery and free for two-hour delivery.
For the past few weeks, Amazon has been testing the service with bike couriers in downtown Manhattan. The e-tailer has leased a building across from the Empire State Building for merchandise and office space.
To use Prime Now you must download the Prime Now mobile app, which allows you to search and order in seconds.
Former Anonymous and LulzSec hacker Hector 'Sabu' Monsegur does not believe North Korea had the capability to commit such a cyber attack as the one that was perpetrated against Sony Pictures.
"For something like this to happen, it had to happen over a long period of time. You cannot just exfiltrate one terabyte or 100 terabytes of data in a matter of weeks," Monsegur added. "It's not possible. It would have taken months, maybe even years, to exfiltrate something like 100 terabytes of data without anyone noticing."
Sabu led some of the most brazen attacks on corporations in the U.S. before he was eventually arrested and flipped as an informant for the FBI.
"It could be [North Korea]. In my personal opinion, it's not," Monsegur said. "Look at the bandwidth going into North Korea. I mean, the pipelines, the pipes going in, handling data, they only have one major ISP across their entire nation. That kind of information flowing at one time would have shut down North Korean Internet completely. They don't have the technical capabilities. They do have state-sponsored hackers very similar to China, very similar to Russia and very similar to our good old USA."
Following yesterday's decision by Sony to cancel the release of 'The Interview,' Paramount Pictures has blocked theaters from playing the decade-old 'Team America: World Police' in its stead.
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a popular independent theater chain, had planned to replace The Interview with Team America but now says the cancellation is "due to circumstances beyond our control" and that screenings have "been canceled by Paramount Pictures."
Team America was a supermarionation film that focused on ex-North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il's plans to take over the world and "Team America"'s plan to stop him.
The last 24 hours mark a sad time for Hollywood, which has bowed to the demands of cyberterrorists.
The Xbox One continues to improve its entertainment capabilities, adding Pandora and few other new apps to its repertoire.
Reads Pandora's release statement: "Pandora for Xbox One is a best-in-class application native to Xbox One and loaded with really exciting and innovative new features. We customized our HTML5-based Pandora for TV interface specifically for the Xbox One, and also stayed true to Pandora's mission of being the effortless source of music for Pandora listeners. Pandora on Xbox One takes advantage of all the functionality the platform has to offer and our team built the application to look amazing on the biggest screen in your home."
Xbox gamers will be able to "Snap" Pandora, meaning they can still play music even while gaming. Additionally, the app uses Kinect Gestures and Voice Commands and the app will also have a "persistent mini-player, which provides quick access to playback controls while browsing within the application."
According to Pandora, the move was a natural fit. 76 percent of their young male users who also game were using Pandora in the background while they were playing games anyway.
Over the last 11 days, Microsoft has been running their "12 Days of Deals" promotion for the holidays, offering discounts on everything from games and consoles to PCs and more.
For the final day (tomorrow), the company is slashing the price of their 12-month Xbox Music subscription to $49.90 from its usual $99.90. If you live near a Microsoft Store, you can get the annual pass for just $29, a very good deal even if you are not a fan of Microsoft.
Xbox Music works similar to other unlimited streaming services like Spotify and Google Play All Access, allowing you to stream a catalog of over 30 million tracks and listen from your console, mobile device and Windows computer.
Microsoft says the deal is limited to 3 per customer, and you will receive a code via email to sign up. The deal starts at 8am EST on December 19th.
Earlier this week, Madonna's yet untitled 2015 album was supposedly leaked to the Internet.
The artist quickly took to Instagram to let fans know that the tracks were from "unfinished demos stolen long ago" and also urged fans to not download and listen.
Madonna later made another post that called the leak "artistic rape" and a "form of terrorism," but that post was deleted almost immediately and thankfully for the artist as it was a huge over-exaggeration and completely insensitive.
The upcoming album, likely to be called 'Iconic,' will feature production from big name acts like Avicii, Diplo and Ryan Tedder. A few of the leaked songs, including 'Rebel Heart' and 'Bitch I'm Madonna,' feature sounds that could certainly fit in with what we know about the legitimate album.
Interested parties can likely find the album on YouTube before it is taken down.
A little over a month after Plex released an app for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, the personal media streaming company has released apps for the Sony PS3 and PS4.
Reads the company's post: "We noticed this meteoric rise just a week ago [to fan requests for the support], and--jolted out of our usual slack-jawed complacency--we set ourselves up with some intravenous caffeine drips and coded for three days straight. In less time than it took to create, well, the Universe, we had the app running on the PlayStation®3 and PlayStation®4, so we took the rest of the week off and played a bunch of hacky sack.
OK, in all honesty, it did take us a bit longer than that. Like, we actually started working on it before the Xbox One app. But we're finally done, and we're super happy to tell you that it's launching today in Europe and most of Asia. The US launch will happen in the near future (along with other locations), but we don't have a date for you yet. And let's be real, hasn't your spouse been bugging you about moving to Italy since they watched A Good Year? Now might be the perfect time. Crush grapes with your bare feet, get fleeced by an opera-singing gondolier, and use Plex on the PlayStation® before ze Americans."
According to numerous media outlets, U.S. government officials will announce tomorrow that North Korea was indeed behind the devastating hack on Sony Pictures.
The accusation certainly raises questions, as the attack by a foreign government could be considered an act of war, especially given the damage caused and the alleged reasons for the hack: embarrassment and monetary damage.
Investigators suspect the attack was carried out by North Korea's elite government "Unit 121" hacking team, the same group that had been linked to other large-scale attacks against South Korean targets.
The U.S. officials do have concerns that blaming North Korea outright could put their ally Japan in danger, given their closer geographical proximity.
Despite the expert routing of the traffic away from the original attackers, there were still plenty of links back to North Korea from the offset. The group claiming the hack, "Guardians of Peace," used broken English and skeleton graphics in their initial warnings matching similar warnings from previous attacks on South Korean banks and telecoms. The attack code was also written in Korean and written during Korean working hours.
Sony Pictures has now decided against ever releasing 'The Interview' in any form, almost guaranteeing themselves a $100 million loss on the film.
A spokesman made the quick and blunt statement tonight that "Sony Pictures has no further release plans for the film."
The studio made the decision tonight to cancel the release of the Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy, after the major movie theater chains in the U.S. decided to not show the film following terrorist threats against movie theaters and movie theater patrons.
By never releasing the film in any kind of media, the studio will guarantee themselves a nearly $100 million loss on the production of the movie, marketing and promotion expenses, and broken contracts. The budget of the film itself was $42 million.
Sony could still sell the rights to the film to another studio, but there are likely to be few suitors unless the price is so low that it potentially worth the risks.
While a minority praised the move, which was made because the cyber criminals threatened terrorist attacks on movie theaters, most of vocal Hollywood seems to be outraged by the decision.
Here are a few of the most notable tweets on the decision:
Just hours after major U.S. theater chains said they would not screen the film following terrorists threats, Sony has canceled the release of 'The Interview,' a comedy in which Seth Rogen and James Franco are sent to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un.
The movie had been scheduled for release on December 25th.
Earlier today we reported that Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas, and Cineplex Entertainment all blocked showings of the new film, which would have accounted for 23,000 screens in North America.
Reads Sony's statement: "In light of the decision by the majority of our exhibitors not to show the film The Interview, we have decided not to move forward with the planned December 25 theatrical release. We respect and understand our partners' decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theater-goers.
Sony Pictures has been the victim of an unprecedented criminal assault against our employees, our customers, and our business. Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails, and sensitive and proprietary material, and sought to destroy our spirit and our morale – all apparently to thwart the release of a movie they did not like. We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public. We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome."
Due to be released on December 25, The Interview has been dropped or delayed by the five largest theater chains in the United States, according to reports.
Regal Entertainment Group confirmed on Wednesday to The Hollywood Reporter that it would not be showing The Interview from December 25 as planned.
"Due to the wavering support of the film The Interview by Sony Pictures, as well as the ambiguous nature of any real or perceived security threats, Regal Entertainment Group has decided to delay the opening of the film in our theatres," the chain said in a statement.
THR also cited knowledgeable sources in reporting that AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment also have decided against screening the movie.
The Interview stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as two journalists recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. After the movie was announced, it was condemned by North Korea as an "act of war".
Following the devastating data breach at Sony Pictures, the hacking group claiming responsibility for the attack - Guardians of Peace (GoP) - allegedly demanded that Sony cancel the release of the movie.
BlackBerry is back in business! The new BlackBerry Classic smartphone retains the time-tested physical QWERTY keyboard, and packs a 3.5-inch touchscreen.
Running the latest BlackBerry 10 OS, the new BlackBerry Classic features a 720x720, 3.5-inch, 294 PPI touch screen, and an 8-megapixel rear camera that can record 1080p video at 30fps. There is also a front-facing 2-megapixel camera supporting 720p recording.
Under the hood, it packs a Qualcomm MSM 8960 1.5GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. For storage, the BlackBerry Classic comes with 16GB internal storage, and using a MicroSD card this can be expanded up to 128GB.
It promises up to 22 hours mixed battery life from its non-removable 2515 mAh Lithium-ion battery.
It retains BlackBerry's time-tested physical keyboard with a 35-key backlit QWERTY pad, one of BlackBerry's most adored features in its past smartphones when it ruled the roost in the business world.
BlackBerry refers to its new classic as a "no-nonsense" smartphone built to meet the needs of productive people who appreciate the speed and accuracy that can be found with a physical QWERTY keyboard, leaving no doubt that it's main goal with the Classic is to return its loyal business users and perhaps regain some who have moved to other platforms.
Ebola, Ukraine, Gaza, Malaysian Airlines MH370 & MH17, Terrorism, Mass Protests, Robin Williams' suicide and plenty other things were beamed into our skulls in 2014, but Bill Gates is ever the optimist.
Being exposed to the media, you can be forgiven for thinking that things are constantly getting worse and worse. Simply put, fear sells. If it bleeds, it leads. It is very easy to be cynical and have a negative outlook on the future, but Bill Gates is far more optimistic as he looks back on 2014 and toward the future... and not just because he's insanely rich.
No, instead Gates has reminded us that a lot of good things happened in 2014 too, even if it doesn't make the headlines. Just as he did at the end of 2013, Gates is drawing attention to some of the highlights from 2014, and some of it is pretty great.
In 2014, for the 42nd year in a row (at least), the child mortality rate has fallen. "More kids are living to see their fifth birthday than ever before," Gates asserts, as he highlights the drop in the number of children dying globally from preventable causes. In fact, the child mortality rate is falling faster than ever anticipated, and Gates highlights an article in The Economist showing that over 13.6 million children's lives have been saved since 2001.
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is refusing to block access to the Pirate Bay website as several large media firms have dragged it to court.
Website blocking is becoming a common practice, particularly in Europe. Entertainment industry players have put a lot of focus on ISPs, forcing them through legal channels to block access to unlicensed sources of content and most have done as they have been told by courts in their respective states.
Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget has decided it won't just comply however. It was subject to legal action in November from several major entertainment companies to force it to block the Pirate Bay. The notorious BitTorrent site was operational at the time, but has since been taken down in a raid in Stockholm.
"Bredbandsbolaget's role is to provide its subscribers with access to the Internet, thereby contributing to the free flow of information and the ability for people to reach each other and communicate," the ISP said in a statement, reports TorrentFreak.
"Bredbandsbolaget does not block content or services based on individual organizations' requests. There is no legal obligation for operators to block either The Pirate Bay or Swefilmer. There are other legal means to stop infringement of rights, but there is no provision in Swedish law that forces an Internet provider to block its subscribers' access to services and content."
Google has made further improvements to the security of your GMail contents by blocking "bad" extensions from loading unsafe code.
Specifically, Google has added support for Content Security Policy (CSP) for GMail on Desktop. It aims to protect users from bad browser extensions loading code that interferes with a GMail session, or even worse malicious extensions that compromise the security of your private e-mail.
The search giant has warned however that some legitimate extensions may need to be updated to work correctly following the change, but noted that most legit extensions you will use with GMail already implemented support for CSP.
Google is very security conscious about GMail. It requires that HTTPS be used by default and even serves images through secure proxy servers.
Any improvements to security and privacy are always welcome.
We've been waiting for Netflix to finally give a verdict on the possibility of Offline Playback and the streaming firm finally has.
Speaking with TechRadar, Netflix's director of corporation communications and technology, Cliff Edwards, has ruled out the possibility of Offline Playback, or "cached playback". Other streaming service offer users the ability to download and temporarily store programming, and Netflix has been asked repeated by its customers for the same privilege.
"It's never going to happen," Edwards told TechRadar.
The reason, according to Edwards, is that Netflix views it as a short term fix for a wider problem. That problem is a lack of access to speedy wireless coverage. However, Netflix expects that in the coming years, wireless access will greatly improve in most places, making Offline Playback features obsolete.
Are you a Netflix customer? Do you think that Offline Playback should be enabled by the service?
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Netflix: offline viewing is 'never going to happen': www.techradar.com
The Sony Pictures hack saga took a nefarious turn yesterday when an apparent terrorism threat was made against move theaters that show 'The Interview'.
The note - which even referenced the 9/11 terrorist attacks - warned movie goers to stay clear of locations where the movie is being shown. Sony Pictures said it would not pull the movie from distribution, but would understand if individual theaters decided not to screen it.
One such cancellation that was surprising is a New York premiere of the comedy. It was scheduled to be screened at the Sunshine Cinema in Lower East Side, New York, on Thursday, but Landmark has confirmed its cancellation. It didn't, however, directly attribute the cancellation to any threat of violence.
Carmike Cinemas, which operates in 41 states, also will not show the film.
Sony Pictures was the target of a massive attack in which terabytes of data were stolen. That data has been leaking to the Internet slowly ever since, and has caused turmoil at the studio. A lawsuit has already been filed against Sony Pictures for failing to protect data by former employees.
All in all, the data breach could cost Sony Pictures in excess of $100 million.
A popular video streaming site has disappeared leading to some speculation that it was shut down by authorities.
Icefilms is a very popular site that streams movies and TV shows. It has been down for about 24 hours with visits to its homepage only showing up an Icefilms logo, or perhaps nothing at all. The presence of the Icefilms logo on an Amazon server surprised some users of the site.
However, there's nothing to be concerned about for users of the portal, as the site is just experiencing some hosting issues and expects to be back online and fully operational in the news few days.
That's according to TorrentFreak, citing a source familiar with Icefilms.
Icefilms doesn't even show up in Google results anymore which probably led to more panic from its regular users, and some ISPs block access to the site at the request of the entertainment industry.
Apple has stopped online sales of its products in Russia today citing the "extreme" depreciation of the Russian national currency, the ruble.
Russia's currency has been decimated in the past few months, and fell as much as 19 percent today against the US Dollar, falling to as low as 80 ruble per USD, before settling at 67.
"Our online store in Russia is currently unavailable while we review pricing," said Apple in a curt statement. "We apologize to customers for any inconvenience."
The ruble had traded at about 20 ruble per dollar for the better part of the last five years.
Last month, as the collapse of the ruble was gaining steam, Apple raised the price of its iPhones by 25 percent to protect themselves, but the depreciation has gotten too steep now.
NBCU has joined CBS, HBO and others in offering live streaming of their broadcast programming online and on mobile devices.
Unlike the aforementioned company's service, however, you will need to have a TV subscription to get access to the live streaming.
The online service will launch this week while mobile viewing will launch early next year. In addition to the broadcast live streams, there will also be additional video-on-demand content.
Just like with other services, to access the content you will have to login with your pay TV credentials (usually your email and password) and then authorize the device.
Massive photo sharing service Instagram has added two new filters this week, the first additions to the service since December 2012.
"Photography trends have evolved," said Instagram in a statement. "We've seen tremendous creativity within the community, not only in the moments they share, but in the time spent carefully composing and editing photos and videos to bring out emotions and make them beautiful."
Slumber, Crema, Ludwig, Perpetua, and Aden are the new filters, and each offers "less dramatic" changes to your photos.
Instagram has two dozen filters, but you have the option to re-arrange your favorites and hide ones you may never use to keep the list smaller and more manageable.
Back in September, Square Enix released a trailer for the upcoming Final Fantasy XV (aptly named because it is the 15th game in the series), but there was one problem for us in North America: The trailer wasn't in English.
Three months later the trailer is now available in English, and gamers can get pumped again (the last version did have subtitles, so you could follow it).
The trailer promises to be a "sneak preview" of the game which is still likely over a year away, but Square Enix has promised a demo will launch sometime in 2015. For now, enjoy the preview and the four protagonist's roadtrip through some fantasy sci-fi world.
Google has noted this week that Android or iOS smartphone users will now be able to control their Nest smart thermostat with voice controls via the Google widget or via Google Now.
For example, using the "OK Google" command will allow you to say additional phrases like "change the temperature to.." or "set Nest to..." and your device will adjust accordingly.
In addition, there will be a new Google Now card that will display when the system had adjusted itself.
As with most apps, you will need to opt-in to give Google access to your Nest account, and to enable the Nest Google Now card. Just like with many voice commands, the abilities are limited, at least for the time being, but it is still very cool to be able to change the temperature without having to get up.
After being in custody for almost a week, a man allegedly linked to the Pirate Bay website was released from custody in Sweden yesterday.
It is believed the man may have been a moderator on the Pirate Bay site but this hasn't been confirmed. In any case, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad stated that the individual is suspected of copyright law violations.
"The suspicions relate to a violation of copyright law. Everything is being analyzed now and new hearings may possibly be held," he said.
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a raid last week in Sweden, and there was reportedly just one arrest in connection to the site so far. It has remained officially offline ever since, but there has been some efforts to keep its database alive and well until it may eventually return.
There appears to be a new investigation into the site and its operators, and TorrentFreak claims to have seen evidence that one of the original founders, Fredrik Neij, remains a suspect. Neij is currently in prison serving a ten month sentence after being arrested by Thai immigrations in November.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Pirate Bay-misstänkt satt på fri fot: www.idg.se (SWE)
PIRATE BAY SUSPECT RELEASED AFTER RAID ARREST: torrentfreak.com
Grand Theft Auto 5 Online Heists have been known to be in the works for some time now, and today we finally have gotten a trailer to look at.
In Early 2015, players will be able to take part in four player heists online. The update will provide over 20 hours of additional gameplay and 20 total missions. The missions will require players of rank 12 or higher, and one will have to be a leader, according to GTA Online producer Imran Sarwar, who gave an interview about the update to IGN.
The leader will be required to have an apartment with enough room for a planning board, and will have to do a lot of prep work such as assembling a team and determining a plan and so on.
Alternatively, you can take on another role in the heist.
The nightmare continues for Sony Pictures as it now faces a lawsuit from former employees alleging that it failed to protect their data, which was exposed in November's massive breach.
Two former employees sued the studio in a class action after a hacking group called Guardians of Peace broke into its network and stole enormous amounts of data in late November. Ever since the breach, the hackers have leaked over a terabyte of information online, including personal details of employees and movies stars.
Even unreleased films showed up on BitTorrent sites and other sources after the massive data breach at the studio.
A lawsuit was filed on Monday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and it alleges that Sony failed to secure its network and protect employee data from hackers, making them liable to some extent.
It seeks compensation for any damages caused as a result of the exposure of sensitive information.
It's likely that Sony will face more legal complaints as a result of the breach, which could cost it over $100 million in the long run. This saga is likely to drag on for a while yet.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Ex-Sony employees sue, claim company failed to protect data: www.reuters.com
HBO Go has finally arrived on Amazon's Fire TV set-top-box for subscribers of HBO.
It is available right now for Amazon's Fire TV with an HBO subscription through participating affiliates, with integration of its full catalog into Fire TV's voice search. For HBO subscribers with Fire TV Stick, HBO Go will be available for streaming in Spring 2015.
"We're thrilled to add HBO GO, the most requested service, to Fire TV in time for the holidays. HBO has produced some of the most groundbreaking and award-winning TV shows and movies, and we are excited to bring this amazing content to our customers, all of which is accessible via voice search on your Fire TV remote," wrote Peter Larsen, Vice President Amazon Devices.
Larsen was eager to point out that the number of services available through Fire TV has quadrupled since it was launched. Over 700 apps and games are now available for the device, which typically sells for $99, but is reduced to $79 at the present time and will stay that way until December 28.
According to a report, Samsung may launch a competing payment service to Apple Pay during 2015.
Re/code cites sources familiar with Samsung's plan to allow owners of some smartphone devices to use them to pay for goods and services at brick and mortar stores, much in the same way as the Apple Pay service operates.
The sources tell Re/code that Samsung is in talks with LoopPay, a payments firm based in Burlington, Massachusetts, but that talks are at such an early stage and could still collapse before an agreement is possible.
Using a smartphone to pay for goods offline is not a new idea but it has been rejuvenated by Apple sticking its toes into the water with Apple Pay. Users of Apple Pay can use the fingerprint scanner on its iPhones to authenticate payments at point of sale.
Samsung's system would also likely rely on fingerprint authorization.
Apple can breathe a sigh of relief after a jury sided with it in a decade-old case relating to the copy protection system it had in place on older iPods and iTunes.
The Cupertino giant could have been on the hook for as much as $1 billion in damages if the eight person jury found it had violated antitrust laws by using enhanced security mechanisms on its iTunes software and iPod hardware. The case specifically focused on iPods sold between late 2006 and early 2009.
Apple stood accused of using its digital rights management (DRM) technology to effectively block out content purchased from competing music services. In fact, it had even been accused of deleting songs purchased from sources other than iTunes from its customers' iPods.
Apple disagreed and maintained that its security measures were a response to attempts to hack its DRM system, and that such a breach would put it in violation of contracts signed with major record companies to sell music on iTunes.
Today the case, which stems back to 2005, finally came to a decision when a jury decided Apple hadn't violated any antitrust laws.
LG Electronics has announced that it will showcase Quantum Dot Ultra HD 4K TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month.
The South Korean consumer electronics firm already provides Ultra HD 4K displays using conventional LCD technology and the more coveted organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, providing a stunning colorful display and complimenting 4K resolution very well.
However, while the cost of OLED displays is dropping, it is still a bit away from becoming affordable to most buyers and so LG wants to bring forth Quantum Dot to significantly improve its LCD.
The technology works by harnessing nano crystals that range in size from 2 to 10 nanometers, with each "dot" emitting a different color based on its size. A film of these quantum dots is combined with LG's current In-Plane Switching (IPS) LCD displays to provide a wider color palette and improved color saturation.
"The color reproduction rate in LG's IPS panels, which offers high color accuracy and extra wide viewing angles, is increased with the addition of the quantum dot film by more than 30 percent compared with conventional LCD/LED TVs," claims LG.
Sony already uses Quantum Dot technology in several of its high-end TVs and Samsung are reportedly about to unveil their own QD products.
Microsoft executive responds to November's sales triumph over the PlayStation 4 in the United States and the United Kingdom.
November was the first month that Microsoft managed to sell more Xbox One consoles to customers than Sony managed with its PlayStation 4 (PS4) console in the United States. According to NPD data, the Redmond giant sold about 1.2 million Xbox One units in the U.S. during the month.
Additionally, Microsoft's console outsold the PS4 in the UK, although it isn't clear how the Xbox One fared globally against the PS4.
Nevertheless, Microsoft immediately touted the NPD data. The sales victory was helped by price cuts and also by a decent software line-up approaching the holiday season.
Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg, who is boss of Xbox games marketing, said that the Xbox One is just getting started. The firm is extremely confident about its game line-up as the New Year approaches that it says it may even need to delay some titles to make room.
During November, Xbox Live also saw a new record of players signing on to the service, and game sales for the Xbox One also surpassed those of PS4 and Wii U.
Google has been given until February to change its management of data from users or else face a fine of up to $18 million.
The threat comes from the Dutch data protection agency which admits it is running out of patience with Google at this point. It has threatened to fine Google up to a max of €15 million - $18.6 million - if it does not stop violating Dutch users' privacy.
This all stems from a 2012 change in Google's privacy policies across services, intended to unify them into a single policy. The pooling of data across services ruffled a lot of feathers, particularly in the European Union where regulators at the state and European levels have raised questions about the change's compatibility with data protection and privacy laws.
"This has been ongoing since 2012 and we hope our patience will no longer be tested," said Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Dutch data protection authority.
The problem the regulator has with Google seems to boil down to the fact that users weren't properly informed in advance of the changes, and Google sought no consent to pool data from search, its email service, and other sites together.
Microsoft is pushing an out-of-cycle update to fix a problem caused by a previous Windows update distributed on Patch Tuesday in November.
The broken update in question - KB3004394 - was distributed last week and has caused numerous problems with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 installations. Problems range from preventing further Windows updates to preventing updates to drivers for graphics cards and more.
Microsoft quickly encouraged users to remove the stricken update and worked on a fix instead. In actual fact, the fix just removes the previous update.
The new update - KB3024777 - will remove the previous update from your installation and should fix any problems you have after a reboot or two. Depending on your Windows Updates settings you might already have gotten the update (and will have been prompted to reboot), or you may have been alerted to its availability instead.
You can manually download the update for your Windows operating system from support.microsoft.com too.
Connecting people across continents is old news, but breaking down language barriers between them is the new goal of services like Skype.
Cooperating with Microsoft's R&D, Skype has kicked off its Translator Preview with support for translating conservations between Spanish and English, and even offers us a video demo of two classrooms communicating using the technology to show off where they currently are.
The preview program is available to Skype customers who have signed-up via the Skype Translator sign-up page and are using Windows 8.1 on the desktop or device. For now it supports Spanish and English as spoken, and also 40+ instant messaging languages.
In the demonstration video below, two classrooms in North America use the new Skype Translator. Students in Peterson School in Mexico City, and Stafford Elementary School in Tacoma, USA play a game of "Mystery Skype", in which the children ask questions to determine the location of the other school.
As they speak, Skype automatically translates between English and Spanish for them.
Windows Phone owners can now download BBM 2.0 (BlackBerry Messenger), which offers a plethora of new features.
The key new features include "privacy and control features including timed messages and message retraction." Less important are the addition of BBM Stickers that can be used within chats.
Rather than go through all the new features, here are a few videos from the team at BlackBerry showing off what's new:
According to new figures from research firm Gartner, 301 million smartphones were sold in the Q3 2014, up 20 percent year-over-year.
Perhaps most notable in the report is the fact that Apple and Samsung's duopoly is starting to see some decline, with the two companies accounting for just 37 percent share, down from 44 percent last December.
Chinese startup Xiaomi managed to crack the top five, taking share from a struggling Samsung and taking 5.2 percent global share. Chinese giant Huawei gained slightly, taking 5.3 percent share, and third place in global share. Apple, on strong sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, increased to 12.7 percent share. Samsung remained the clear leader, but its share collapsed year-over-year from 32 percent to 24.4 percent.
"From a regional perspective, emerging markets exhibited some of the highest growths ever recorded, with Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Africa achieving the highest increase in the third quarter of 2014, with sales of smartphones growing almost 50% year-over-year," says Gartner director Robert Cozza. Developed markets, however, are almost completely saturated.
From an operating system standpoint, it is no longer a competition as Android had 83.1 percent share.
Eon Productions, the producers behind the newly announced James Bond 'SPECTRE' film have confirmed that an early version of the script was stolen as part of the 100 terabytes of data taken when Sony Pictures was hacked last month.
"Eon Productions is concerned that third parties who have received the stolen screenplay may seek to publish it or its contents," Eon added, also letting those who share it that the script would be protected by UK copyright laws.
SPECTRE just began filming with Daniel Craig returning as Agent 007, and the film is set for release next November.
Bond is one of Sony's biggest draws, and 2012's 'Skyfall' brought in $1.1 billion, the most ever for a movie in the franchise.
According to a new filing, the Chinese smartphone giant booked a profit of just $56 million last year, a shockingly low figure given the fact that Xiaomi is the fourth largest smartphone maker in the world.
The number reflects tiny margins for the company, which was founded in 2011 and now sells millions of high-quality but cheap devices in China.
Xiaomi had revenue of $4.3 billion for the year, but an operating margin of 1.8 percent. By comparison, Apple has margins above 28 percent. The company has long said that it sells the hardware almost at cost to get as many handsets out there so they can sell software and services. Amazon has tried a similar model, but they too were not successful.
Regardless, with a global smartphone market share of 5.6 percent, Xiaomi has certainly made a brand for themselves, and most in the industry value the company at over $10 billion.
Following further leaks of data stolen from Sony Pictures, hackers have promised the studio that a Christmas gift is coming soon.
"We are preparing for you a Christmas gift," the Guardians of Peace (GoP) said in a post on Pastebin.
"The gift will be larger quantities of data. And it will be more interesting.The gift will surely give you much more pleasure and put Sony Pictures into the worst state. Please send an email titled by 'Merry Christmas' at the addresses below to tell us what you want in our Christmas gift."
The hackers are reportedly making a bunch of demands of Sony Pictures. As we previously reported, the group apparently demanded that Sony Pictures cancel the release of "The Interview", starring Seth Rogan and James Franco as journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong un.
A Northern Ireland firm has apologized after a software glitch resulting in products being listed and sold on Amazon for just 1p.
The glitch happened on Friday between 19:00 and 20:00 and it affected firms using Repricer Express, which automatically adjusts the prices of items on sale on Amazon to keep them competitive.
Repricer Express chief executive Brendan Doherty said he was deeply sorry for the disruption. Most orders were cancelled after the error was spotted.
Repricer Express is investigating the cause of the issue and will attempt to prevent it reoccurring in the future.
"We managed to get the problem resolved so that any new prices going to Amazon were correct within about an hour of the problem being reported," Doherty said.
"It took a further few hours to get incorrect prices reverted to their original prices where possible. Amazon have assured us that seller accounts will not be penalised for this issue."
The BanHammer has been 'a-swingin', according to the Bungie website as it fights against players with modified consoles.
Banning players that use modified consoles is a fairly common practice usually justified with concerns about piracy and also modding that can lead to unfair advantages in online gaming. Destiny players that have logged in using modified consoles recently may not be able to do so again.
"We routinely review Banhammer actions to ensure that they are applied accurately and fairly," the official Bungie site reads.
"A review of the bans applied over the last week shows that all of the affected accounts had logged into Destiny on a modified console at some point."
For a limited time, you can pick up a Wii U (32GB) console with Super Mario 3D World and Nintendoland for a total cost of $250.
The promotion is being run by Target and it is not timed. However, it is only available while stocks last so if you want to take advantage of it then get up off your ass.
In fact, when we say get up off your ass we mean it literally because you cannot get the deal online, you need to visit a brick and mortar Target store and pick up the goods there.
You can use Target's website to find the nearest store and pre-pay for it however, and then go to pick it up.
Uber is offering free rides in Sydney as it seeks to make good after the cost of some car rides in Sydney spiked during the hostage siege at a cafe.
As you are likely aware, there is a terrible hostage situation currently underway in Sydney and it is dominating more or less all major media outlets at the moment.
It turns out that after this crisis started, the cost of using Uber drivers to get away from the central business district (CBD) in the city spiked, prompting criticism of the firm which promises typically to cost less than traditional taxi services.
The company found itself accused of exploiting the situation in Sydney for profit. For example, some drivers were quoted prices often more than twice the usual rate to get from the CBD to the airport.
It would appear that the increase in cost was simply down to the increase in demand in the area of the city. The algorithm used to set pricing for the service responded to the gulf between demand and available cars by pushing up the cost. The intention of this cost increase is to draw more Uber drivers into the area.
Uber has responded by refunding customers who were overcharged and by offering free rides out of the CBD to help people to get home safely.
Several major news media organizations have been threatened by a Sony Pictures lawyer and ordered to stop reporting details from e-mails stolen in November.
According to reports, a letter was received by the New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety from Sony attorney David Boies on the matter. The asserts that the stricken studio "does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading or making any use" of data leaked from November's massive breach of the entertainment firm.
The group responsible for the attack - Guardians of Peace (GoP) - has released more than a terabyte of stolen data since late-November, including personal information of employees and Hollywood stars. The data also includes hoards of e-mails that clearly were never supposed to be seen by the public.
"Any decisions about whether or how to use any of the information will take into account both the significance of the news and the questions of how the information emerged and who has access to it," said Eileen Murphy, spokeswoman for the New York Times, reports the Reuters news agency.
Following Verizon's sale of its share in Vodafone earlier this year, there had been speculation that the European carrier would be returning to the U.S. The company has now confirmed those plans.
The company has introduced wireless services for its "400 multinational (MNC) customers based in the United States and a further 500 Vodafone MNC customers that are based outside the United States but have a strong US presence."
-An unrivaled international wireless footprint, with networks in 27 countries (including 16 Vodafone markets with 4G LTE networks) extending to more than 75 countries through partner market relationships
-Proven total communications products and services for enterprise, from telecommunications expense management and security products to cloud services and Vodafone OneNet fixed-mobile converged products and services enabling employees to collaborate and communicate on any device on any network, anywhere
-Ongoing expansion of the world's most advanced IP-VPN global network, with 91 points of presence (PoPs) rising to 212 PoPs by the end of 2015 to span 67 countries
According to a new report, LG is preparing to unveil a new TV with 8K resolution at the upcoming CES event in Las Vegas.
The 55-inch TV has a ridiculous 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution and 'over 20 display driver integrated circuits installed. The TV also has 500 nits brightness because "unlike conventional displays that use RGB sub-pixels, LG added a W sub-pixel to increase the brightness."
LG built a prototype last month and was so happy that it decided to airlift it to Vegas for CES, which begins on January 5th.
For any demos, LG will use "3D images generated by an unnamed high-quality Nvidia GPU" as there are currently no video sources with support for 8K. While the TV seems out of this world for the current environment, the sources believe LG will move to add an 8K model to their lineup in 2015. "With the know-how acquired from making the prototype, if LG finds good grounds to commercialize the display for mass production, it will do so. LG has already finished up approving the technological viability of the 55-inch, 8K display, and is now starting preparation to commercialize it to make it a product,"reads the report.
Google has made their new Nexus 9 tablet available with LTE, just over a month after the tablet was released (sans cellular data).
Available at the Google Play Store for $599 with 32GB internal storage, the tablet is also available directly through T-Mobile for the same price or for $24.99 per month for two years with $0 down.
The HTC-built Nexus 9 has a 8.9-in. IPS LCD display with a 2048-x-1536 resolution (4:3 aspect ratio) which Google says is part of the company's "new focus on productivity." Under the hood is the crazy powerful Tegra K1 64-bit processor, and 2GB RAM. HTC has added dual front-facing stereo speakers for improved audio playback, and added their own BoomSound audio software enhancements. The 6700 mAh battery should give you 9.5 hours of active use.
Running on the new Android 5.0 Lollipop and all its features, Google has included a "tap to wake" option that was seen in the past on LG's tablets as 'Knock On." You have to tap the screen twice to turn on the display without needing to hit the power button.
Google has confirmed that while the Nexus 5 is on its last legs, it isn't totally dead yet.
The search giant says the year-old device will be available through Google Play and a few remaining retailers throughout the Q1 2015.
While Google is not saying goodnight to the device just yet, it is becoming increasingly hard to find one. The Google Play Store has removed all the additional colors that were available, with the exception of the standard black, which is still available in 16GB and 32GB models but supply goes in and out.
The Nexus 5 recently just received the Android 5.0 Lollipop update, which has been either a blessing or a curse depending on who you ask. Many have seen performance improved after the update, but many others have seen their devices freeze and reboot often and sluggish performance.
Sony Pictures has been forced to stop filming following the massive hack that has paralyzed the company in the past weeks.
Sources claim that glitches from the computer network that was taken down has led the studio to be unable to process payments. Most of the company's computers remain offline or unusable and the rest are experiencing significant technical glitches. Many at Sony Pictures have taken to using pen and paper while their systems are down.
Security experts have estimated the cyber attack will cost Sony nearly $100 million, but it is unclear if those experts took into account an extended freeze on shooting when creating their models.
Hackers got away with potentially 100 teraybytes of data in the breach, including pre-release movies, hundreds of thousands of emails, contracts for its stars and executives, and social security numbers and addresses for nearly 50,000 employees.
Besides the obvious monetary damages, the PR has been a nightmare for Sony. Many emails from executives have gone viral, showing that those with power at Sony Pictures often insulted, belittled or just generally disliked the actors, directors and producers their company was promoting.
Canadians who download and share musically illegally may end up getting notices from their Internet Service Providers due to a new law.
Up until now, Canadian ISPs had a choice of whether to notify a customer that had been identified by IP address for copyright infringement, but in January the system will change and become mandatory as the Copyright Modernization Act will take effect.
The ISP will not hand over personal details of the customer however, just act as an intermediary.
"So essentially a copyright holder will provide Sasktel with notification that an IP address has illegally downloaded some material...and then Sasktel is required to notify the customer with that IP address," said Michelle Englot, director of external communications at SaskTel.
Such communications are intended to deter users from continuing to infringe copyright and lead them to legal, licensed outlets instead.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare may be the best selling game of 2014, but its sales are down compared to last year's retail sales of Call of Duty: Ghosts.
This represents a third straight year that Call of Duty sales have declined year-over-year in the United States. The data comes from Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson, citing research from the NPD Group.
"This is disappointing data following first week Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare sales showing a year-over-year increase," Olson said, reports GI.biz.
"NPD data does not include digital copies or international sales, which, if included, would lessen the year-over-year decline, but we believe this data suggests potential for Q4 revenue upside is now very low."
Activision's total sales have decreased by 22 percent year-over-year.
Comparing Advanced Warfare's first month to Modern Warfare 3, released in 2011, U.S. sales have declined by 49 percent during the first month of availability on the market.
The IsoHunt team has put the old Pirate Bay search and data back online in a working site for users while the original site remains down.
The Pirate Bay went down on Tuesday as a result of police action in Stockholm, and since then many proxies and mirrors have been mistaken for the official site. OldPirateBay.org is not a resurrection of the official site, but it will be something Pirate Bay users will be happy with.
It is the old Pirate Bay search and the archived data from the notorious BitTorrent site, and on top of that new torrents are appearing in "Recent Torrents" too. It is not intended as a replacement for the Pirate Bay however.
"As you probably know, the beloved Pirate Bay website is gone for now. It'll be missed. It'll be remembered as the pilgrim of freedom and possibilities on the web. It's a symbol of liberty for a generation of Internet users." a note reads on the site.
"It its honor we're making the oldpiratebay.org search. We, the IsoHunt team, copied the database of Pirate Bay in order to save it for generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten. Keep on believing, keep on sharing."
Nintendo has confirmed that its Amiibo line is a huge hit in the U.S.
Amiibo is a set of toys that use NFC to communicate with Nintendo 3DS and Wii U games, allowing characters and other data to be transferred across platforms.
Nintendo says that sales of the toys nearly matched Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, which puts the figure in the 700,000 range.
Additionally, Nintendo reported that their new Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire games also saw 1.5 million combined units sold, leading to one of the best months in quite some time for the Japanese game maker.
Ford has announced that its new in-car entertainment system, newly updated to version 3, has replaced Microsoft with BlackBerry for the underlying operating system.
Sync 3 uses a variant of BlackBerry's QNX operating system, after the first two versions ran on a variant of Windows.
While Microsoft has often boasted of its in-car system and its partnership with Ford, but QNX offers more modern features. A few examples are capacitive touchscreen support, pinch and zoom gestures, Wi-Fi OTA updates, and support for Siri.
A few of the launch apps that are supported are Spotify, iHeartRadio and NPR One.
Ford said that "hardware and software decisions were based on identifying the technology that would best meet the expectations for performance by our customers."
Twitter co-founder and board member Ev Williams had some choice words for rival social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Speaking during a recent interview, Williams said: "It's a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about? The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No one ever talks about, 'What is a [monthly active user]?' I believe it's the case that if you use Facebook Connect -- if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect -- you're considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean? It's become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we're on the wrong path.
If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it's pretty significant. It's at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It's this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter -- important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that's happening, I frankly don't give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."
Google has begun shutting down its operations in Russia, closing out its engineering office and relocating employees.
The search giant says the Russian government has become very restrictive, asking Google to remove over 250 links from its search results in the last six months. As with all tech companies in Russia, data about Russians must stay within the country's borders and it is unclear if Google has been complying.
Despite the shut down, some Google team members will stay around. "We are deeply committed to our Russian users and customers and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them," the company added.
With the move, Google has now pulled out of Russia and China and had their services restricted in Spain and other nations.
Seagate will start selling a hard disk drive (HDD) in January with a massive 8TB capacity and it is expected to cost $260 or below.
Designed for reliability rather than performance, the 3.5-inch Seagate 8TB Archive HDD has a reduced spindle speed of 5,900 RPM and the average read/write is only 150MB/s. That is significantly slower than modern HDDs and way slower than a decent solid state disk (SSD).
This drive is build simply for storage though so that doesn't matter all that much, and at $260 it would be a nice purchase for an NAS.
The hard drive will start selling mid-January.
The extra capacity and low cost are achieved with Seagate's SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Technology. Here is a video explaining it.
Instagram has announced 300 million monthly active users, a huge jump year-over-year, and a number that surpasses Twitter.
The huge growth and the large active base will likely help the company to attract advertisers. The company recently began allowing for video ads and sponsored posts.
"As Instagram gets bigger, we're focused on helping you discover photos and videos from people who you care about, whether it's a friend or your favorite musician," says Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom.
Additionally, users now share over 70 million photos/videos per day, a staggering figure.
In his blog post, Systrom also noted that celebrity and brand accounts will have new verification badges so you can ensure you are following the correct people. In addition, Instagram has been taking down thousands of spam and fake accounts in order to "do everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web."
The information spilling onto the Internet as a result of the Sony Pictures hack keeps making headlines, and this time it has exposed a rift between Google and the MPAA.
The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) is a trade group that represents movie studios in the United States. It speaks on behalf of those studios in copyright lobbying and in legal cases, and is essentially their face in the anti-piracy efforts targeted at the Internet.
In recent years it has been pressing more and more on Google to step up and fight piracy by removing links from its search index. Google responded by removing millions of links from its search index when it received DMCA requests, and lately went further to punish sites that are the target of a lot of DMCA complaints.
It had a significant impact too, with many torrent sites seeing a dip in traffic from Google, and the search giant was more than justified in feeling like it had done enough.
"Everyone shares a responsibility to help curb unlawful conduct online, and we are glad to see Google acknowledging its role in facilitating access to stolen content via search," an MPAA press release opened with.
The malware that penetrated the cyber defenses of Sony and allegedly captured terabytes of data was a difficult one to deal with, says FBI official to the Congress.
Speaking to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee assistant director of the FBI's cyber division Joseph Demarest said that nine out of ten corporate cyber defenses would have been helpless against the malware.
Malware that the security company Sony hired to investigate called "unprecedented" did not penetrate because of lack of preparation. According to Demarest the attack could have posed serious threat even to state government security systems.
Ars Technica notes that there has yet to be any clarification on behalf of Sony, the security company Mandidant or the FBI what made the malware unprecedented and so dangerous. And even if Sony is let off the hook on cyber defense, it is still under question if they could have prevented a leak of such magnitude.
An original Apple-1 Personal Computer sold by Steve Jobs from his home to Charles Ricketts has sold at auction for $365,000 in New York.
The "Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer" is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented to have been sold by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs from his parent's home to a customer. Of the few hundreds Apple-1s that were made, only 50 are thought to survive and less in working condition.
The Apple-1 was put up for auction by Christie's as part of the auction house's inaugural Exceptional Sale in New York yesterday, held at the Rockefeller Center. It was estimated at between $400,000 and $600,000 so it actually sold for lower than expected.
Steve Jobs sold the Apple-1 to Steve Ricketts (whom it is now named after) from his parents' garage in July 1976.
"The Ricketts Apple-1 is fully operational, having been serviced and started by Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen in October 2014. Mr. Cohen ran the standard original software program, Microsoft BASIC, and also an original Apple-1 Star Trek game in order to test the machine," a press release from before the auction reads.
Max Sound Corp has sued Google and its YouTube subsidiary for patent infringement relating to streaming H.264/AVC video content.
It filed a lawsuit in the District Court of Mannheim, Germany against Google Inc in the United States, Google Commerce Ltd, in Dublin, Ireland, Google Germany in Hamburg and YouTube LLC in San Bruno, USA. At the center of the lawsuit is the EU 2 026 277 patent, held by Max Sound Corp.
"Max Sound Corp. claims that all products on the market that use the format H.264 for video compression infringe the asserted patent," a press release reads.
"This allegation comprises, in particular, current versions of the Google operating system Android, which is installed on many mobile phones and tablet devices. The complaint addresses the current Google Products: Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9 Chromebook and Chromecast."
Max Souhnd Corp also alleges that Google's YouTube video service infringes its patent. Max Sound requests information about profits and damages for each video streamed to Germany in one of the relevant formats.
It expects the case to come to a ruling in less than 12 months.
For just a few more days, it is possible to get all three Batman Arkham games and DLC for just $10 in the United States, or €9.79 in Europe.
The offer applies to PC gamers using the Steam platform. It is being offered by Bundle Stars for just $9.99 in the United States, or €9.79 in Europe (not sure in UK) and it includes the Batman: Arkham collection as it stands. For this ridiculously low cost you get:
Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition
Batman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition
Batman: Arkham Origins
Batman: Arkham Origins: Season Pass - DLC
Batman: Arkham Origins: Black Mask Challenge Pack - DLC
Batman: Arkham Origins: Online Supply Drop DLC
There's less than five days left to take advantage of the offer so head over to Bundle Stars now if you are interested.
According to data from research firm NPD, Microsoft's Xbox One console finally outsold Sony's PlayStation 4 (PS4) after more than a year on the market.
The small victory in the month of November was made public by Microsoft very quickly. It said that in November, more than 1.2 million Xbox One consoles were sold in the United States, which apparently beat sales of its rival but we haven't seen any sales figures for the PS4 yet.
According to Microsoft, the Xbox One also outsold the PlayStation 4 in the United Kingdom during the same period.
Whether the Xbox One sold more globally in November is not clear, but Microsoft will take the win in the U.S. gladly in any case. The console was helped greatly by a price cut and by a decent software line-up heading into the busy holiday period.
Microsoft's console has been trailing PS4 in the year that both have been available on the market, and in the meantime went through some major rethinks affecting its hardware and services. The biggest change was the unbundling of the Kinect motion sensor system from the Xbox One, immediately cutting $100 off the price.
In addition to topping the sales charts in the UK and U.S. at least, Microsoft also said that more users logged on to Xbox Live than any other month in the history of the Xbox brand.
The Pirate Bay has been down since Tuesday following a police raid in Stockholm, but since then there have been many reports of it resurrecting elsewhere.
On Wednesday, we reported that claims of the Pirate Bay moving to Costa Rica and taking up a .CR domain were false. At the time, only the frontpage would load and the search didn't work at all, which you would expect given that the .CR domain was being used as a Pirate Bay proxy/mirror that relied on the .SE website for its results.
However, since then the search does bring up results that are light on detail and mostly old. This led to further speculation that the Pirate Bay had resurfaced in Costa Rica after all.
Initially, it seemed to be redirecting to a .EE domain, but that stopped later, and now is reportedly using some combination of old cached results and pulling torrents from other sites like Kickass. The constant changes are arousing quite a bit of suspicion, and clearly the .CR site is not the official Pirate Bay resurrected.
As for the .EE domains, one of them went offline in the past day or so (piratebay.ee) and another one (thepiratebay.ee) reportedly is using old cached data too, and some users reported that it was trying to get money from users.
YouTube has quietly added a neat little animated GIF creator to some of its YouTube videos.
Spotted by Andy Baio, YouTube added an option to create a GIF to the share options of a select few channels. For example, the PBS Idea Channel seems to be covered by YouTube's experimental GIF creator.
It allows you to create an animated GIF of up to five seconds in length from any consecutive five second portion of the video. It also allows you to add text to the top and bottom of the resulting GIF, which will be hosted on YouTube's own servers and which you can embed elsewhere just as you can with videos.
YouTube hasn't revealed what its larger plan is for the GIF creator; will it come to all videos that can be shared? Will it have to be opt in on behalf of the content creator.
If it does end up being available for the majority of all YouTube videos, then you'd better be prepared to see a lot more GIFs around than you already do!
In December 2009, a relatively unknown Finnish game developer called Rovio Entertainment released the first 'Angry Birds' title for iOS and the game quickly became a hit.
For about three years, the game was the top paid app in iTunes, and all new titles in the series all jumped to #1 quickly after launch. The game has also been a top hit for Android since launch, where most of the titles are freemium.
In its branding, Angry Birds has expanded to "Seasons," "Rio," "Space," "Star Wars," "Friends," "Star Wars II," "Go!," "Epic," "Stella" and most recently, "Transformers." Additionally, the developer released "Bad Piggies" as a spinoff from the series in 2012.
Rovio has struggled in recent times, with interest waning for each new game. The developer had to fire 110 employees earlier this year to continue its profitability and streamline operations.
Google has unveiled their Google Play 'best stuff of the year' report for 2014, showing off the most downloaded and most popular apps of the year.
The lists include top news app, top entertainment app and even the most downloaded movies and TV shows.
iOS device owners saw a similar list earlier this month and many of the same names and titles are on that list, as well.
Take a gander:
APPS
Most Downloaded Apps by Category in 2014 Education: Duolingo
Health & Fitness: MyFitnessPal
Music: Pandora
Photography: Flipagram
Social: Facebook
Entertainment: Netflix
Sports: NFL Mobile
Travel: TripAdvisor
GAMES
Top Downloaded Games in 2014 Candy Crush Saga
Don't Tap The White Tile
Farm Heroes Saga
Subway Surfers
Clash of Clans
MOVIES & TV
Movie of the year: Frozen
TV show of the year: The Walking Dead
Comeback Movie: Toy Story
Most searched actor on Google Play: Robin Williams
MUSIC
Album of the Year: Frozen: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Song of the Year: Dark Horse by Katy Perry
Song of the Summer: Fancy by Iggy Azalea
Fastest Growing Genre: Soundtracks (fueled by Frozen, Guardians of the Galaxy, Despicable Me 2, The Lego Movie and The Great Gatsby soundtracks)
We just released our first-ever mobile app, HIGH.FI News Reader. The app is a "preloaded Feedly" kind of app for following news from thousands of different news sources.
To put it simply, the app presents news from selection of >2000 news sources in chronological order, categorized and spiced with their popularity data.
Unlike traditional RSS readers, HIGH.FI already indexes and categorizes most important news sources. This saves you the hassle of figuring our what to follow, where to find RSS feeds to add to the app, etc.
As the app tracks the popularity of the headlines from all of the app's users, the "Most popular" lists can be a useful source to find new stuff to read too.
Microsoft has set a date to show off the consumer experience of Windows 10, ahead of its scheduled launch in Autumn 2015.
The Redmond giant has alerted media and Windows enthusiasts that it will hold an event at its campus on Wednesday, January 21 to show off the consumer side of its upcoming Windows 10 operating system.
Among those in attendance that we will hear from will be senior leaders from the Operating Systems Group including Terry Myerson, Joe Belfiore and Phil Spencer. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella will also show up to say some words.
The event will be broadcast live from the Redmond campus and details of a webcast will be provided in due time.
Windows 10 represents something of a reboot for Microsoft as it fights to recover from a disastrous Windows 8 era, and from declining interest in Windows Phone. It will also take another stab at gaining ground in smartphones and tablets, an area in which its competitors Apple and Google have dominated for years.
So set your reminders for January 21, and let's see what Microsoft has in store for us all next.
Microsoft has continued its new trend of releasing apps outside of its own ecosystem, unveiling a slew of MSN-branded apps for iOS, Android and Amazon.
The apps are all free and were originally developed for Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices.
Among the new apps are News, Weather, Sports, Food & Drink, Healthy & Fitness, and Money.
MSN's portal page still receives 400 million users per year, and the name still resonates with consumers. Previously, the apps were branded as Bing, which has less recognition despite being more modern.
Each of the apps are newly coded for their respective platforms, and not just ports, says Microsoft.
Have you ever posted embarrassing photos of yourself and friends on Facebook after you've had just one drink too many?
Facebook's AI labs is working to make sure that doesn't happen to you so often. It is working on a system that can tell the difference between pictures taken of you when sober, and pictures taken of you when drunk.
If it determines that you are drunk, it will try to make you think twice before uploading.
Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?" it reportedly will prompt a user.
Yann LeCun, head of Facebook's AI research, detailed the plans to Wired magazine and said that the labs are working on a digital assistant that will be able to carry out many similar tasks with photos and content uploaded to Facebook.
The social network already uses facial recognition software to correctly tag images and also to better target content to users based on their behavior.
This has led to some backlash from digital rights activists, who want customers to have the option to opt out of such AI systems.
According to e-mails, Seth Rogen was asked by Sony Pictures Entertainment to tone down a particularly gruesome scene in "The Interview", but the comedy actor refused to remove objectionable content.
The movie is at the center of the Sony Pictures hack in November. Rogen and James Franco star as two journalists who score an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong un and are recruited by the CIA to assassinate him. Almost immediately after details of the movie became public, it was condemned by North Korea as an act of war, and of sponsoring terrorism.
While the FBI does not have hard evidence to link the mysterious state to the attack, security experts have found links and coincidences that suggest it. The group responsible for the attack also reportedly demanded the movie be cancelled.
Before this all happened however, Sony Pictures Entertainment boss Amy Pascal reportedly wrote to Seth Rogen by e-mail and asked him to tone down one particularly gruesome scene. The e-mails were first revealed by Bloomberg.
Rogen was resistant, even stating that "this is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy, that is a very damning story."
Sony will release its PlayStation 4 (PS4) console in China in January next year, as the rapidly growing market is allowing console sales for the first time in 14 years.
The consoles will sell for 2,899 yuan - about $468 - each as Sony looks to profit from the appetite for gaming in the emerging economy. Microsoft is also offering its Xbox One console in China after the communist regime loosened the rules on video games systems.
However, that same regime may prove to be an obstacle on the software side since every single game will need to be approved before it can go on sale.
"Cooperating with the government, we'll provide a broad range of content for our users in China," Hiroyuki Oda, head of Asia business at Sony Computer Entertainment, said according to the Reuters news agency.
Several games have already been approved for sale after more than 30 have been submitted for licenses.
Microsoft's Xbox One is selling in China for 3,699 yuan - about $598 - and has ten titles currently on sale.
Chromecast has gotten a new Guest Mode that will allow Android device owners to cast to a TV with Chromecast without connecting to the WiFi network.
Either you don't want your friends connecting to your WiFi network or you don't want the hassle of finding the WiFi key, either way you can now make it very easy for others with Android devices to cast to your television.
You simply have to open the Chromecast app on your Android phone or tablet and select "Devices" from the navigation drawer. Choose your Chromecast device, tap the "Guest mode" setting and then turn the slider to "on."
Now your Android-wielding friends can fight over who casts the funniest YouTube video the TV.
The update has started rolling out, so make sure to keep your Chromecast app up to date. More information is available from chromecast.com/guestmode.
Here's a promotional video from Google showing off Guest Mode.
Uber has decided to halt all operations in the Indian Capital New Delhi after a driver allegedly raped a female passenger.
Head of communications in South Asia for Uber, Karun Arya, said that the San Francisco-based firm is conducting an assessment of its driver screening process. The alleged rapist in this case had been out on bail after being imprisoned for sexually assaulting a woman in his cab.
"We are evaluating additional screening options to include background checks on all our driver partners in India above and beyond what is currently required," wrote Arya.
He also promised that Uber will work closely with organisations that are championing women's safety in New Delhi and around the country.
"Safety is our top priority. We are fully committed to partnering with and are in discussions with the government, other transportation organisations and safety experts in India to implement robust solutions to ensure a safe ride."
It has been a difficult week for Uber as multiple cities in several countries either banned or sued the car service.
Microsoft has come along with another insane promotion through its Music Deals app, this time literally giving away popular albums for free.
User with the Xbox Music app or Xbox Deals app in the United States can take advantage of the freebies for a limited time only. In the Music Deals app, browse "Holiday Freebies" and you will find the albums in there.
Among the albums on offer are Eminem's 2013 chart topper The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Dr Dre's 2001, Kanye West's Graduation, Rihanna's unapologetic, U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind, Swedish House Mafia's Until Now and many others.
The deal is in place until December 15 so remember to go grab what you want legally for free before then.
The Music Deals app launched back in October and since then it has offered some really surprising deals. It offered Taylor Swift's 1989 for 99c for a short time and an additional 101 albums were priced at $1.99.
While the Pirate Bay remains offline, other torrent services that went down as an indirect result of the Pirate Bay raid have started to come back online.
The most popular service that was hit in the crossfire was EZTV, and its main domain isn't working at the moment but proxy links, such as eztv-proxy.net, are connecting to the site's backend IPs. EZTV torrents are also being uploaded once again in other places, including Kickass Torrents.
TorrentFreak confirmed with operators of EZTV that servers are coming back online again and that the site is expected to recover fully.
Another BitTorrent site that has since fully recovered is Zoink. It is currently back operating a torrent storage service. Meanwhile, the Superbay forum is still offline, as is Torrage and the Istole tracker is still down.
There were some reports that the Pirate Bay is back up and running, but in reality the links are to proxy sites that are only offering up some cached older search results. Some of them may also be scams and thus better off avoided.
Whether the Pirate Bay can make a full and prompt recovery as it did back in 2006 remains to be seen, but co-founder Peter Sunde thinks it is time for the service to die.
In an ironic twist, Sony Pictures is apparently trying to halt the spread of hoards of data stolen by hackers in November using a tactic commonly used by cyber criminals.
According to a re/code report, Sony Pictures is essentially carrying out denial of service attacks aimed at torrents being used to share the leaked data. BitTorrent users trying to get their hands on the stolen information are being linked with fake seeds that disrupt the sharing of data by slowing it to a crawl.
Re/code cites sources in reporting that the entertainment company is utilizing Amazon Web Services to carry out this counterattack, with the servers being located throughout Asia.
The group behind the Sony Pictures attack, self identified as the Guardians of Peace (GOP), are estimated to have stolen up to 100 terabytes of data and have made at least six dumps of stolen data already, including copies of unreleased films like Fury.
The leaks went from being financially damaging to downright embarrassing for Sony Pictures and associated Hollywood personnel, and who knows what the hackers still have in their possession.
Microsoft is planning to release the Windows 10 operating system a bit later than it had previously predicted, but in line to coincide with the third anniversary of the Windows 8 launch.
Windows 10 is Microsoft's bid to adapt to changes in modern computing as consumers have rapidly adopted smartphones and tablets for work and play. The previous Windows iteration - Windows 8 - largely failed to impress consumers and Microsoft is keen to bury the previous three years below the dirt and start fresh.
Previous comments from within Microsoft indicated that Windows 10 could launch during the summer next year, but Microsoft COO Kevin Turner says it is more likely to be during the Autumn, perhaps an early fall release. He made the updated prediction to the Nikkei news service in Japan.
There is a notable milestone around that timeframe for Microsoft; August 2015 will be the 20th anniversary of the launch of Windows 95.
Windows is still used by an estimated 1.5 billion users on Desktops, but in mobile computing Microsoft really dropped the ball years ago and watched Apple and Google gobble up the market.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Microsoft exec sees autumn release for Windows 10: www.reuters.com
Microsoft is endorsing the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, letting customers use it to pay for apps, games, music and videos across its digital services.
In a welcome boost to Bitcoin, Microsoft is endorsing the cryptocurrency by accepting it as payment for content across its services. You can use it now to add money to your Microsoft account so that you can buy apps, games and content from Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox Games, Xbox Music and Xbox Video.
To use bitcoin for Microsoft's digital services, sign into your Microsoft account and go to billing -> payment options -> Microsoft account -> redeem bitcoin. Select the amount you want to add and click Next, then review the amount of Bitcoin you will need and use your bitcoin digital wallet to complete the transaction within 15 minutes.
If you are using a smartphone, you can simply scan the QR code displayed on the page to pay from your mobile wallet app. On a Desktop, select Pay with Bitcoin and then pay from your Bitcoin wallet on the same device. If your wallet is on another device you can copy the receiving address and BTC amount to the wallet on your device or the Web and then make your purchase.
Large media outlets, local media sources and bloggers will be furious as a law about to come into force in Spain has pushed Google News out of the country.
Google News will remove Spanish publications from its service and will shut its Spanish site on Tuesday, December 16, and it's all the result of a misguided law that will come into force in Spain in the New Year.
After that point, Spanish media outlets will be forced to charge services like Google News for using even just snippets of information from their sources. Believe it or not, Spanish media outlets don't even have a choice not to charge these services, they are mandated to under the law.
Google can find no wiggle room to keep Google News operating in Spain and so it will shut the service there next week.
Google News - The best of intentions punished
Google News was actually born shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Krishna Bharat, a Google engineer, searched the term "World Trade Center" following the attacks and was shocked to find that the results didn't include any information on how the iconic skyscrapers were destroyed
That's how Google News came to be. It is a source of news information that now ranges from the world's largest media outlets, to local media and even to bloggers. It displays a headline, a small description (or the opening lines of an aritcle) and a thumbnail of the image associated with the article.
Microsoft has proudly announced the launch of Minecraft Pocket Edition for Windows Phone 8.1 today.
Reads the press release: "Windows Phone users can join the vast community of more than 100 million Minecraft players today with the launch of Minecraft: Pocket Edition for Windows Phone 8.1. Now available on Windows Phone, iOS and Android, Minecraft: Pocket Edition lets players bring their Minecraft worlds with them virtually anywhere.
Minecraft: Pocket Edition includes Minecraft's Survival and Creative modes so players can craft, create and explore on the go – as long as they have thumb strength and battery to burn. With a local Wi-Fi network, players can engage in multiplayer gameplay and team up with friends to explore new biomes, fight monsters, and craft infinite new worlds together."
The game will cost in line with other editions of Minecraft, selling for $6.99.
Two months after they were unexpectedly pulled from Apple's online and brick-and-mortar stores, audio products from Bose are back on the virtual shelves.
It still remains unclear why the products disappeared without a word in October, but the timing coincided with the recent closing of the company's acquisition of Beats Electronics.
Bose had a lawsuit against Beats over the tech used in noise-cancelling headphones but the case settled in early October, just before Bose's products magically disappeared from Apple's stores.
Beats offers many similar products, so the dropping of the Bose inventory could have been a way for Apple to boost sales ahead of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, or potentially the product of behind the scenes negotiations.
Nokia's HERE navigation app is now available to all on Android as following months as a closed beta.
The company says there had been over a million downloads of the beta for the operating system, with a good portion of the "testers" coming from the U.S. and Germany. Now, everyone with access to the Google Play Store can download the application.
Previously, interested parties had to sideload the app after downloading the APK from here.com.
Says Nokia: "The app you can download from Google Play brings voice-guided navigation for 18 new countries and territories: Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Iraq, Libya, Mauritania, Mauritius, Nepal, Paraguay, Saint Helena, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Zambia, Zimbabwe. The addition of these 18 new countries brings the total number of freely navigable countries to 118. Additionally, we improved the stability and performance of the app, and fixed a voice-related navigation bug."
Project Maelstrom envisions a web that works the way BitTorrent works, rather than the standard model of centralized services you connect directly to.
BitTorrent Inc. has launched an invite-only alpha as it seeks to bring its vision of a distributed / decentralized web to life. There's no question that P2P technologies like BitTorrent can be very efficient at spreading large files around the web or on a local network (Sync), but can it be relied upon to drive a decentralized web where content can be published and accessed as easily as the world wide web?
That's what BitTorrent is hoping to find out, and you can apply for an invite to the Alpha as a tester, academic/researcher, agency, artists, developer or publisher here.
So why is it necessary to build a web browser to power a decentralized web? BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker provides a variety of good reasons for trying. To start, he argues that such a decentralized web can keep the Internet open, and keep access to the Internet neutral.
The crowdfunding campaign for the open-source Jolla Tablet has come to an end this morning.
Jolla fans were able to take the funding high enough to reach the company's second stretch goal, meaning the Sailfish OS will add split screen support in addition to the microSDHC slot (expandable to 128GB) that was reached with the first stretch goal.
Sadly, the device will not be getting a 3G radio for cellular data, as the campaign needed to hit $2.5 million to "unlock" that reward. The campaign closed at just over $1.8 million.
The Jolla Tablet has a 7.85-inch display with 2048x1536 resolution, a 64-bit quad-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, dual 5MP/2MP cameras, 32GB internal storage (expandable via microSD) and a small-ish 4300mAh battery.
Jolla is expected to start shipping the tablet in May. See more of the device via the official page.
SimCity 2000 - the classic city-building PC game, is available for free for a limited time letting you re-live the 90s all over again.
Normally priced at $5.99, the game is free on EA's Origin platform for the time being, as part of EA's "On the House" promo.
Reads the page: "One of the most beloved retro EA games is now available On the House on Origin. Now you can step back in time absolutely free.
This classic title goes way beyond building a city. You'll be laying down districts, assuring everyone has power and water, acting as the mayor, and making sure to keep your citizens happy, healthy, and wealthy. The game's iconic art style will transport you back in time.
Want to play now for free? Just log in to Origin, head to the On the House page, and download SimCity 2000 to your "My Games" library. You'll be able to play it whenever you want."
The game available is the "Special Edition" version, released in 1995 for Windows and DOS gamers.
One of the original founders of the Pirate Bay hopes that yesterday's raid on the service will bring about its permanent end, saying the site lost its soul.
Peter Sunde was one of the original founders of the BitTorrent site and spent some time in prison recently for his part in bringing about the Internet phenomenon. You would think that given his personal sacrifice (his freedom) he would be devastated to see the site down, but on the contrary he is relieved to think it might be gone forever.
Sunde (aka brokep) explains that he did not like what the Pirate Bay had become in recent years. It "become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further," he wrote.
"The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse."
According to Sunde, the original plan for the Pirate Bay was to shut it down on its tenth birthday, but instead the birthday had what he clearly found to be a tacky party in its honour in Stockholm. He references the 2006 raid that brought down the popular BitTorrent site and how people took to the streets to protest, but that now there is no public outcry because the site has no soul anymore, and no cause. According to Sunde, the site has long served its original purpose to push BitTorrent.
You can get a $50 discount off the red, black and blue Nintendo 3DS XL handhelds, but the offer expires this weekend.
Best Buy is selling the red, black and blue 3DS XL models for $150, but the offer will expire on Saturday, December 13 so you may want to snap one up now if you're interested.
The offer is available in Best Buy stores, or alternatively you can take advantage of free shipping if you order one online.
GameSpot also notes that Best Buy is currently running a Buy 2 Get 1 deal on games that will also expire on December 13. The offer applies to any Xbox, PlayStation or PC titles, but it does not apply to Wii U, 3DS or PSVita, nor does it involve pre-orders.
Like the 3DS offer, you can take advantage of it in store or online.
You can get a OnePlus One smartphone without an invite for a limited time, and the OnePlus website says they will be delivered before December 25.
It's not clear how long it will be before the offer ends, there is no time limit visible. However, to be on the safe side if you really want one of these you should order it as soon as possible. Previous promotions that allowed consumers to buy one without an invite only lasted for an hour.
The 16GB Silk White model sells for $299 and the 64GB Sandstone Black model sells for $349.
To remind you of some specs, the OnePlus One packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Quad-Core 2.5GHz CPU with integrated Adreno 330 GPU, 3GB LP-DDR3 RAM at 1866MHz, a 13 Megapizel Sony Exmor IMX214 and a 5 Megapixel front facing camera. The 3100 mAh battery will power the device all day long even with plenty of apps in constant use.
The OnePlus One features a 5.5-inch 1080p full HD JDI screen with LTPS technology for a higher pixel density and sharper picture, with Gorilla Glass 3 to protect the screen against scratches.
Lenovo has announced a recall of more than 500,000 power cords sold with IdeaPad products that have been deemed a safety risk.
The defective power cords were sold with IdeaPad computers between February 2011 and June 2012. The recall comes after consume complaints about the power cords overheating, and in cases melting, burning and throwing sparks.
The IdeaPads these defective cords were sold with include products in the B, G, S, U, V an d Z series, and some other Lenovo notebooks potentially were sold with the defective cord.
One quick way to tell if you might have a defective cord is to disconnect the cord from the AC adapter (power brick) and check to see if it has LS-15 stamped into the molding, as shown in the picture.
If so, then go to the Lenovo recall page and verify that you have a defective cord, then apply for a free replacement from Lenovo.
Sony is running a limited offer for PlayStation Store customers with PayPal that can get you $10 store credit to use later this month.
To qualify, you will need to use PayPal to add $60 to your SEN wallet before Tuesday, December 16. The offer applies to the United States and Canada. You will be sent a code by December 23 to redeem $10 credit to spend in the PlayStation Store. The code will be delivered to users who qualify via XMB message on PS3, system messaging on PS4 or the e-mail account associated with your Sony Entertainment Network account.
There's some things to remember about the promotion. Firstly, it is limited to $10 credit per account, so using PayPal to add $120 to your PS Store wallet will not result $20 credit. Secondly, you will need to add the $60 or more to your SEN wallet or using PayPal through their PS4 or through the web store at store.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com.
SEN wallets can only hold a maximum of $150 USD at a time so a balance at or below $90 USD is required to participate.
And last thing to remember, you must redeem the code by January 22, 2015.
Netflix has been increasing their portfolio of tv shows steadily during the past couple of years. The pace is only going to get higher says the Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos in an interview at a media conference.
Sarandos said that customers will be able to expect as much as 20 premieres a year from Netflix in five years. These premieres would be either brand new Netflix original tv shows or new season premieres. That would mean that in average there would be a new premiere almost every two weeks.
Sarandos also made it clear that it is always in Netflix's interest to increase the availability of its service and new regions will be added in the future.
In addition to increasing its tv show production the streaming giant is launching more original movies to further reduce the dependence on Hollywood studios and their content.
Contrary to reports, the Pirate Bay is not back online and operating out of Costa Rica just one day after a Stockholm raid took the torrent giant down.
The notorious BitTorrent site has been offline since Tuesday afternoon after police action took it offline. Also reportedly down are a number of other sites including EZTV. However, despite the Pirate Bay's history of prompt returns after legal action, it has not come back online just yet.
Reports suggested that the Pirate Bay is not operating out of Costa Rica, specifically using the domain ThePirateBay.cr. These reports are inaccurate however. Sure, when you load the page it looks like the Pirate Bay (although at time of writing it was providing an internal server error), but it is actually a Pirate Bay proxy and relies on the original Pirate Bay site for access to content. In other words, it does nothing.
There are several other proxy and mirror sites of the Pirate Bay that will load a homepage, but these aren't operational, you can't really use them for anything.
Whether or not the Pirate Bay will return remains to be seen. It did recover from a very similar police action in 2006 relatively quickly, so we'll just have to sit back and see if history does repeat itself from time to time.
The decision by two Australian retailers to pull copies of GTA V from shelves has been blasted by Take-Two president Karl Slatoff as an affront to the values of a free society.
GTA V publisher Take-Two had previously expressed disappointed with the decision by Target Australia and KMart Australia to drop the controversial game from their stores across the country in response to a petition that decried the depictions of violence against female characters in the game.
However, at the BMO Capital Markets 2014 Technology & Digital Media Conference, Slatoff was a bit more blunt with his reaction to it, finding it to be incompatible with a free society.
"It's one thing for someone to not want to buy a piece of content, which is completely understandable, and that's really the solution. If you don't like it and it's offensive to you, then you don't buy it," Slatoff reportedly said, reports GI.biz.
"But for a person or a group of people to try to make that decision for millions of people... We have 34 million people who bought Grand Theft Auto, and if these folks had their way, none of those people would be able to buy Grand Theft Auto."
The Chinese love their slim smartphones. The world's thinnest smartphone has been a three horse race between Oppo, Gionee, and Vivo – all of which are from China. Now the latter has introduced the newest king of the hill.
Called Vivo X5Max the slimmest smartphone on the planet is just 4,75 millimeters thin. Regardless of its thinness the phone is packed with almost everything you'd expect from a modern smartphone. It has a 5.5 inch Full HD display, 13 and 5 megapixel cameras, 16 gigs of microSD expandable memory and 2 gigs of RAM.
The phone is powered by the mid range Snapdragon 615 chip that is a quad-core SoC with 64-bit capabilities that can be taken advantage of as soon as the phone gets updated to Android Lollipop.
The battery is "only" 2200 mAh due to the thinness but Vivo has managed to retain the 3.5 mm audio plug unlike its competitor Oppo.
Vivo says that X5Max packs the audio experience you'd expect from its siblings, and even surpasses them. Also the karaoke function gets a mention.
Vivo begins selling the phone in China this Friday for what is just under $500. There is no word on European or US variants.
Comcast has been sued by a mother and daughter for the practice of using home WiFi routers as part of its plan for a nationwide hotspot network.
Under Comcast's plan to create an Xfinity WiFi Hotspot network, newer home WiFi routers of customers will activate a second WiFi signal intended to be used by house guests or by Comcast subscribers who have a mobile device in proximity to the router.
In a lawsuit filed by Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Comcast is accused of exploiting their customers for profit, reducing the performance of connection / WiFi network and costing customers more money on their electricity bills.
To be fair, the service can be disabled by customers, but the lawsuit alleges that the provider turns it on without their permission and so forces customers to pay the cost of powering its national hotspot network. It cites research from Speedify that finds that Comcast's secondary Internet channel will cost its national users tens of millions of dollars on their electricity bills.
Tests showed that under heavy use, the secondary channel adds between 30 percent and 40 percent more to a customer's electricity bill than the typical cost of powering the router for home use.
Google has begun sending out e-mails to customers informing them that they may be entitled to a refund for in-app purchases made previously, as part of a settlement with the FTC.
Google reached the settlement with the FTC over the issue of in-app purchases, and how many parents may have been charged for in-app purchases made by their children when they didn't have permission to make them. Any user who made an in-app purchase between March 1, 2011 and November 18. 2014 could be eligible for a refund.
"We understand some parents might have been charged for in-app purchases made by young children who did not have permission to make those purchases," Google writes.
"As a result, we've added tools to help parents avoid unauthorized in-app purchases by their young children. We are also offering refunds in certain cases in line with our agreement with the FTC."
Customers can request a refund request until December 2, 2015.
Microsoft unusually instructed users running the Windows 10 Technical Preview to uninstall Microsoft Office products before attempting to install a required patch.
According to Gabriel Aul, users had to uninstall Office before applying a needed patch or else the installer would fail. He made the revelation by Twitter, but then later on encouraged users to try to install the patch without removing the firm's Office software.
"We have a security update going out today, and the installer fails on 9879 if Office is installed. Rather than rolling a new fix (losing several days in the process) we're going to publish it as is." Aul wrote.
"The workaround is painful: uninstall Office, install the hotfix, reinstall Office. Sorry. We're working hard to fix."
Later on he changed his advice and instructed users to try to install the update - identified as KB3022827 - before removing office. "It will work for many, no harm if not."
Many users responding to his tweets said they didn't have a problem installing the patch with Office on the system.
It is usual for Microsoft to recommend that software be uninstalled before a patch is applied, but that's the risk you take if running on a pre-release version of an options system. It may be nice to on the edge of emerging software, but it comes with its own drawbacks and risks.
The Pirate Bay has been down since Tuesday evening after a reported raid in Stockholm aimed at the notorious BitTorrent website, but it may not be the only casualty.
It is notable that two other popular BitTorrent-related sites including EZTV and Zoink also went down at the same time and remain down. Torrage was also reportedly down following the raid but seems reachable now, but the Istole tracker is apparently still having issues.
UPDATE: The services seem to be coming back online gradually, read more here.
The EZTV twitter feed hasn't updated since yesterday at time of writing either. Superbay.org, Bayimg.com and Pastebay.org are also down since the raid.
Some news sites have linked the action taken by Swedish authorities to a wider investigation resulting from the Sony Pictures hack in the United States. Following an unprecedented breach at the entertainment company, several unreleased films appeared online and were available on the Pirate Bay, including Fury starring Brad Pitt, and Annie.
However, whether that is based on any substance or is just mere speculation due to the proximity of the two events is unclear, and this certainly isn't the first time that the Pirate Bay has been the subject of a police raid in Sweden.
According to a new report, HBO will release its standalone streaming service in April, right alongside the premiere of the new season of "Game of Thrones."
The service will be different than the current HBO Go streaming service, and the technology backing the software will also be different. The new tech will supposedly keep outages and lag to a minimum, even during episodes of extremely popular shows like "Game of Thrones" and "True Detective."
HBO's current CTO, Otto Berkes, resigned today as HBO decided to outsource its work to a tech firm called MLB Advanced. Reportedly, Berkes knew about a memory leak in HBO Go that was leading to downtime of the service when server loads were high, but did not care to fix it.
"Recently HBO's management decided to partner with a third party to assist HBO in bringing our OTT service to market in 2015," Berkes wrote in his resignation. "This is a change in direction from what I planned with HBO and the approach will not utilize my overall capabilities. Therefore, I feel that this is the right time for me to move on from HBO so that I am able to fully pursue my passion building world-class technology teams, products and businesses."
According to cybersecurity experts, Sony Pictures could be looking at a loss nearing $100 million from the massive hack that took down their network and exposed terabytes of sensitive data.
Sony, as a company, knows well the price of such a breach. In 2011, the company had costs above $170 million following the breach of the PlayStation Network that exposed data on over 100 million people.
While the latest attack did not expose customer data, over 50,000 employees and former employees have had their social security numbers and other data leaked. The company also had a few of its films leaked to the Web months before they hit theaters, which could lead to "an impairment charge of $83 million" for lost ticket sales and more.
In addition, there will be a major cost to investigate the hack, repair all damaged servers and PCs, and upgrade systems to avoid future attacks. For a few days, productivity at the studio even stopped completely as employees had to use pen and paper since their computers were unusable.
Sony has not estimated their costs, yet, as it assesses the full impact of the breach. The company did have insurance, by cybersecurity insurance will likely only cover a small portion, especially if it finds that Sony was negligent.
The crowdfunded Jolla Tablet is near the end of its funding campaign, and just within reach of their next $1.75 million stretch goal.
Based on the Sailfish OS, the Jolla Tablet has a 7.85-inch display with 2048x1536 resolution, a 64-bit quad-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, dual 5MP/2MP cameras, 32GB internal storage (expandable via microSD) and a small-ish 4300mAh battery.
Earlier this week, Jolla hit the first $1.5 million stretch goal, which was to add 128GB mciroSDHC support. As the page read at the time: "Once we reach the first goal, every Jolla Tablet will be upgraded to support microSDHC cards up to 128GB! You'll never have to worry about running out of space again. Currently Jolla Tablet supports cards up to 32GB, besides having 32GB internal storage."
At $1.75 million, Jolla will add Split Screen capabilities to Sailfish. Says Jolla: "Split screen allows you to view and use two apps simultaneously, enhancing Sailfish OS' multitasking capabilities even further. Split screen is the most wanted Jolla Tablet software feature by our community at together.jolla.com, and we're thrilled to offer it to you as one of the goals! Split screen will be available to you as a software update during Q3/2015."
Infamous torrent tracker The Pirate Bay has been taken down today following a raid by Swedish police in which servers, computers and other equipment were seized.
Other torrent sites and even Pirate Bay's forum Suprbay.org is down too.
"There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law," read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement in Sweden.
It is unclear if the raid was aimed at The Pirate Bay, although it seems very likely given the high profile of the site and its ire in the global anti-piracy community.
According to a new report, luxury Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer is preparing to unveil a smartwatch at next month's CES event.
CES 2015 starts on January 5th and there is expected to be a plethora of new wearables revealed for release in the Q1 or later.
The new rumored watch will run on an Intel processor and it expected to be able to measure steps, burned calories, and sleep patterns.
It is unclear if the watch will have a touchscreen, but it is not expected to, with the design rumored to be similar to the Withings Activité or the HP Chronowing.
The Twitch app for Xbox One has gotten a major update greatly improving search, and also adding video-on-demand and a Home screen revamp.
The search now allowed you to use Xbox Live's new ability to associate real-time gameplay stats with broadcasts, which enables a massive array of search options. The filters could include player stats, game modes, maps, player skill level, in-game activity, progress, and so on.
"Want to search for the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare broadcaster with the highest kill/death ratio? How about instantly queuing up a Halo match from whoever has the highest rank in Slayer mode, or finding Forza Horizon 2 players who are driving a specific class of car?" writes Larry Hryb.
The update means that up and coming broadcasters can find an audience because if they are very good at games they could quickly attract an audience.
Additionally, Xbox One is the first platform which brings a full-featured Twitch app including video on demand. You'll begin to see highlights and past broadcasts available to watch at any time, even when the broadcaster is offline.
The Home screen has also been updated to provide a more personalized experience while broadcasters can take advantage of new profile pages.
Several media organizations are trying to get Steve Jobs' deposition video from the antitrust trial currently under way released for the public to view.
The two hour video was recorded six months prior to Jobs' death in 2011, and thirty minutes of it was shown in court last week during an antitrust case. The video caught the attention of the media very quickly, as it's one of the last videos recorded of the Apple founder before his death.
"Given the substantial public interest in the rare posthumous appearance of Steve Jobs in this trial, there simply is no interest that justifies restricting the public's access to his video deposition," attorney Thomas Burke, representing the Associated Press, Bloomberg and CNN, wrote in a filing.
The video is not technically sealed evidence, but it could be sealed retroactively if the judge chose to do so. Apple does not want the Jobs' video released.
The case is almost a decade old. Apple stands accused of harming competition by using its FairPlay digital rights management system to tie iTunes-purchased music to its iPods, which generally sold for a higher price than rival's hardware.
The video player that Microsoft bundles with Windows 8.1 has finally gotten support for MKV files, meaning users will no longer have to rely on third party applications for every video.
The MKV support was added in the latest version of the app (Xbox Video v2.6.0432.0) and it means that users will not longer have to use third party apps like VLC in some cases to play MKV files. However, when it comes to MKV files, simply supporting the container doesn't provide guarantees of success.
MKV is popular because of the flexibility of the container, it can contain a wide variety of video streams, audio streams, subtitle streams and so on. Therefore, you could run into problems playing MKV files correctly if the content streams in the container format aren't supported by the player - in other words if it doesn't have the appropriate codecs for them.
So perhaps it is better to stick to VLC for now, rather than the bundled Metro Xbox Video app.
Other than the MKV support, the update only provides a few minor bug fixes and nothing really major. It is available at the Windows Store.
The group claiming responsibility for the massive Sony Pictures breach in November have demanded that the release film starring Seth Rogen and James France be cancelled
The Interview stars the pair as journalists who have been recruited by the CIA into a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea has condemned the movie as an act of war and of sponsoring terrorism, though North Korea has denied any involvement in the Sony hack.
Despite denying involvement, North Korea did describe the hacking and later leaking of massive amounts of data from the entertainment company as a "righteous deed."
A message from the group calling itself the Guardians of Peace has demanded that the film be dropped. "Stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism which can break the regional peace and cause the War," the demand reads. The group also denied that it sent e-mails to Sony Pictures employees last week threatening them and their families.
Amazon has announced that some content is now available to Amazon Prime members in Ultra HD, but the selected is limited for now.
Customers will not have to pay any additional fee for the resolution upgrade, which is always nice. The selection for now is very limited, including Amazon Original Series including the sophomore season of fan-favorite Alpha House, the critically-acclaimed Writers Guild of America nominated series Transparent, and children's series Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street, and more content from Amazon Studios.
BBC America's Orphan Black is also available, and several films from Sony Pictures Entertainment including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Funny Girl, Hitch and Philadelphia are available in 4K.
The video will be streamed at a resolution of 3840 x 2160, or 8.3 million pixels, and are available through the Prime Instant Video app or on supported Smart TVs from LG, Samsung and Sony.
"We want to deliver the best entertainment experience, and offering Ultra HD movies and TV shows raises the bar on quality and innovation that customers have come to expect from Amazon," said Michael Paull, Vice President, Amazon Digital Video.
"We're also excited that Ultra HD is the latest benefit of the Amazon Prime membership, giving members instant access to great movies and TV shows in a premium picture resolution at no additional cost."
Sony has confirmed that its systems are back online and operating as normal after the PlayStation Network and PlayStation Store were inhibited by a DDoS attack.
The Japanese firm has insisted that there are no indications of a wider hack that would involve any sensitive user data. A group called Lizard Squad took credit for downing the services and promised there would be more disruption for gaming services during the holiday period.
The same group took credit for an Xbox Live outage recently.
There is no link between this cyber attack on Sony's gaming services, and the massive breach of Sony Pictures in November.
The pressure is piling on Uber overseas, and now it is facing more domestic opposition as the City of Portland, Oregon has filed a lawsuit against the app-driven car service.
The lawsuit alleges that Uber has started operating private-for hire transportation services in the city, and it wants the court to declare that the San Franciso firm is subject to and in violation of the Private for Hire Transportation Regulations and Administrative Rules of the city.
It seeks an injunction to force Uber to stop operating the service in the city until it complies with the safety, health and consumer protection rules that apply to it.
"I am hereby directing that Uber Technologies Inc.... or any other Uber affiliate entity immediately cease and desist operating within the City of Portland until such time as appropriate permits are obtained and Uber is in full compliance with the requirements of Portland City Code Chapter 16.40," Transportation Director Leah Treat wrote in a cease and desist letter sent to Uber.
"Please alert all Uber-affiliated drivers that they are to cease and desist."
After two years, VLC for Android is out of beta and it comes with bug fixes but not with Chromecast support just yet.
VLC for Android 1.0 is now available and officially puts the project out of beta. Specifically, it fixes known bugs with devices with ARMv8 processors and also some bugs when running under Android 5.0.
Unfortunately, it would appear that Chromecast support that was announced earlier this year still evades this release, but hopefully it will be coming along soon.
VLC is one of the most popular multimedia players for Desktops because it supports a very wide range of multimedia content natively, and doesn't rely on external codecs for playback. When it was announced for Android in 2012 it excited a lot of Android tablet and smartphone owners, but its journey out of beta has been longer then anticipated.
Other apps, such as MXPlayer, have gained a lot of support on Android. VLC for Android is available for free of course to download from Google Play and supported by Android 2.1 and newer.
NOTE: It has just been updated so the latest update might not be visible for everyone yet.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon will trial one-hour delivery of goods via bike messengers starting in New York City.
"Amazon Prime Now" aims to cut delivery time of products to customers in order to cut more into the benefits of shopping at physical stores, according to sources cited by the WSJ.
They also revealed that Amazon has been experimenting with three separate courier services to determine the fastest and most careful option for the trial.
Amazon will use its West 34th Street location as a base for bike messengers, who will earn around $15 an hour and work eight hour shifts.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Amazon Tests Bike Messengers for One-Hour Delivery in New York City: www.wsj.com
You can now get your hands on an 'innovator edition' of Samsung's Galaxy VR headset for $199.99 in the United States.
However, you should remember that you need a Galaxy Note 4 in order to use the device, and no other smartphone or devices will work with it. In fact, at this current time, even the Verizon version of the Note 4 will not work, but Samsung has promised support is coming soon.
Some high-quality gaming apps may require the use of an Android game controller to offer control capabilities in addition to the Gear VR's integrated touchpad and tracking sensors.
"The Galaxy Note 4's amazing screen and processor makes it all possible. Samsung's industry leading Super AMOLED display technology and cutting-edge Oculus-driven software fuse to create an experience that you have to see to believe," Samsung's Gear V4 product page reads.
"With the Gear VR Innovator Edition, users can explore new worlds, be on-stage at a performance with full 360 degree video, and can enjoy gaming in a way that's never been done before – all with just your Galaxy Note 4 and Gear VR Innovator's Edition."
This device is targeted at developers and early adopters who typically just want to be ahead of the rest when it comes to newer technology, so most people will want to wait a while to see where this goes.
Under copyright law reform proposals in Australia, access to piracy websites could be blocked by Internet users, but downloaders would escape further punishment.
The proposals are the latest part in an ongoing debate in Australia over how to tackle Internet piracy in the region. Internet providers and content owners already attempted to come to terms face to face, but issues such as who pays the cost of enforcement led to talks largely going nowhere.
Now Attorney-General George Brandis and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull have come up with a minimalist set of reforms for debate, and it means that downloaders will avoid harsh penalties, such as the throttling of speeds by the ISP.
The copyright lobby is likely to be unhappy with the proposals, despite opening the door to blocking access to websites overseas that provide access to illegal downloads.
"We have a very high rate of internet piracy in Australia, particular in film and TV product. At the same time – and Malcolm Turnbull himself has commented on this – I think we need to see more being done to make content more readily and more cheaply available," said Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus, reports The Age.
According to new reports, Vimeo Pro users can now upload their content in 4K and make it available for others to download.
For the time being, streaming in 4K is being blocked by Vimeo but it is not out of the cards for the future. Vimeo CTO Andrew Pile noted that "It's pretty early for streaming but the new iMac is gonna be a turning point." Apple's latest device has the capability of streaming 5K content, which is way beyond what any mainstream service currently offers.
Vimeo On Demand is where you will find the most content in the future, as users have been able to upload 4K videos to the service, but Vimeo was transcoding it to lower resolutions.
With the move, Vimeo joins Amazon, Netflix and YouTube in offering limited 4K content.
Grooveshark, the music streaming service that has been almost completely destroyed by copyright lawsuits, is looking to reinvent itself next year with a legal radio service.
If accurate, the reports claim the radio service will launch as soon as next month, and cost just 99 cents per month for streaming without ads.
Grooveshark will call the service "Broadcasts" and it will be a direct rival to Pandora, the $4 billion public company with strong ties to the music industry. Grooveshark has 30 million users and Pandora has 80 million.
Broadcasts will get to use the government-mandated royalty rates for Internet radio stations, and will not require direct negotiations with the labels that have been trying to shut them down.
Sony has announced an interesting new concept to sell its PlayStation 4 console: a bundle where you get to pick which game you want.
Starting today, Sony is offering a 500GB PS4 with a digital download voucher that can be used for either Destiny, Far Cry 4, LittleBigPlanet 3, or NBA2K15.
Called the "Four Games. One Pick. PlayStation 4 Bundle," Sony is making the bundle available for $399.99, the normal price of the console without a game included.
Here are Sony's description of the games:
Destiny – The ultimate Destiny experience is on PS4, with exclusive content including an additional multiplayer map, Strike mission, an expanded repository of exotic weapons and gear, and player ships. Don't forget, the first Destiny expansion, The Dark Below, is coming out on Dec 9, and it includes exclusive content for PlayStation gamers: a new Strike, The Undying Mind, and an exotic shotgun, The 4th Horseman. Destiny Expansion I: The Dark Below will be available for $19.99.
Far Cry 4 – A game many are calling a contender for game of the year, Far Cry 4 will take you on a breathtaking adventure through the perilous and wild region of the Himalayas struggling under the regime of a despotic self-appointed king. PS4's exclusive "Keys to Kyrat" feature allows you to send up to 10 keys to your PSN friends, so they can join you in Kyrat for a two-hour online co-op session, even if they don't own a copy of the game.
Analysts seems to believe Nintendo has turned a corner and will return to strong profitability this year on the back of popular first-party titles.
The most recent bullish analysts believe Nintendo can see its profits reach $305 million for the year, a huge improvement over last year's $193 million loss.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has stuck by his guns for the last couple of years, as the industry begged the company to start releasing their most popular IP for mobile devices and for other consoles. New hits like Super Smash Bros. and Mario Kart have boosted Wii U sales significantly this year, and the latest hit - Amiibo - has seen sales of over $1 billion in the U.S. alone.
Shockingly, despite being on the market for two years, the Wii U only has 53 games available and the small catalog is a big reason why the company has only moved 7 million units over its lifetime.
Last week, we reported that the new Capcom Street Fighter V would be a PC and PlayStation 4 exclusive, leaving Xbox One gamers in the dark.
This week, Microsoft's Phil Spencer responded via Twitter to the news, simply stating that Microsoft cannot be a part of every business deal for exclusive games, and that the company would rather invest in its own "Killer Instinct" title.
Reads the tweet: "Business deals happen. We won't do all of them. When we have a 1st party franchise in a genre I'd rather invest in ours."
Of course, Microsoft does invest in third-party games, as well, recently making "Rise of the Tomb Raider" a timed exclusive when it launches next year.
Apple has a new commercial for the iPad Air 2 that shows multiple owners using an iPad Air to assist with all kinds of projects.
The ad is titled "Change" presumably because of how it shows the iPad Air as a tool that can be used to change the way you do things. For example, one user is using it to help build a new surfboard, another is sketching a fish mask and another actually builds an iPad into his motorcycle.
Sales of iPads were down 13 percent last quarter when compared to the same period of 2013, and the Cupertino giant will be hoping for a strong holiday performance from the product to make up for it.
YouTube is reportedly offering some of its best and most famous video makers bonuses to commit to the platform as rivals have been attempting to lure them away with tempting incentives.
The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube is offering some of its biggest names bonuses if they sign multiyear deals that gives YouTube timed exclusivity on content before it can be uploaded to rival's websites. YouTube's move comes as other web firms have reportedly been trying to lure YouTube videomakers away. Facebook and Vessel are among those trying to bleed YouTube of good and popular video makers.
YouTube has already been offering to fund some of its video makers content for months now, according to the WSJ's sources.
They say that YouTube is particularly concerned with Vessel, a video start-up that has raised $75 million in venture capital and was founded by Jason Kilar, the former chief executive of Hulu. Vessel has reportedly already offered to pay some users an advance based on how well their content is doling on YouTube and has been pushing the benefits from a subscription model from the content creator's point of view.
The teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens has been out for a week, but the creator of the enormous franchise still hasn't watched it.
George Lucas was asked for his reaction on the teaser trailer during an interview with Page Six, when he admitted he still hasn't sat down to watch it yet. "I don't know anything about it, I haven't seen it yet," he reportedly said.
Lucas went on to explain that he avoids early footage because he enjoys going to the theater and seeing the entire movie without seeing parts of it beforehand. Lucas is credited as a creative consultant on the film, so it is unlikely he will be able to keep in the dark that much.
I wonder if Lucas will be pleased with JJ Abrams new direction for the Star Wars franchise when he does go to see it in December 2015.
Here's the teaser trailer if, like Lucas, you haven't taken the time to watch it yet.
Having not even shipped yet, Sony's limited 20th anniversary grey PS4 consoles are being resold for thousands of dollars on eBay.
Sony sold 12,300 of the limited edition units for $499. Needless to say, they were sold out very quickly when they became available. Now the only way to get one in the United States is to attempt to buy it online, but you'll be shocked at just how much you are expected to pay.
There are many active listings for the limited consoles on eBay and they are finishing for quite a markup of ~300%. One particular listing from a seller in Bellflower closed at $21,100. Another from a New Jersey seller finished at $15,000, and the seller has since confirmed that the buyer paid in full.
The other listings are going for significantly less on eBay but there does appear to be quite a lot of sellers looking to make a very quick and juicy profit from the limited console.
Those who managed to pre-order the consoles from Sony can expect them to be shipped out on December 21 in the United States. Sony will also be selling the limited units in Europe and in Japan.
Indian's Capital City has reacted to news of an alleged sexual assault on a woman by an Uber driver by banning the service from operating in the city.
Uber India has been operating illegally in New Delhi, according to Special Commissioner of Delhi Transport Department, Satish Mathur. He told the Economic Times that the victim in this case was provided an All India Permit Taxi which is not allowed to ferry customers from point to point in the city.
"We will also be issuing a public notice saying Uber is not authorised to provide any taxi services in the capital so that customers are aware which are the authorised radio Cab services," he said.
"Uber is not a authorised radio cab service and has been operating illegally."
The service is now active in more than 250 cities in 50 countries, and has aggressive expansion plans for the coming year. It recently raised $1.2 billion in a financing round, valuing the firm at a whopping $41 billion. The extra resources will be used partially toward investing in the Asia Pacific region.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is so confident in Uber's ability to grow that he predicts it will generate more than 1 million jobs in cities all over the world in 2015.
Sony's PlayStation Network and Store are having problems on Monday as a group called Lizard Squad takes credit for their downtime.
The same group took credit for an Xbox Live outage last week. While there are reports that PSN is up and working for some users again, at this time visiting the PlayStation Store still returns an error reading: "Page Not Found! It's not you. It's the internet's fault."
UPDATE 1: Sony is continuing to work on getting its services back to normal this morning, and has urged anybody who has experienced difficulties with PSN to try it again. We will update with any further information. Original article continues below.
The group Lizard Squad, which has a website based in Russia, tweeted this following in reference to the outages:
James Franco was the host of this week's 'Saturday Night Live' sketch show, and the actor tried to make light of the recent Sony Pictures hack in which the entire company's network was taken down and terabytes of data was stolen including contracts, social security numbers, addresses, internal passwords and full-length screeners of movies like 'Annie' and 'Fury.'
Joking, Franco said: "Something pretty crazy happened this week. I have this movie called 'The Interview' coming out at Sony and this week Sony Studios got all their computers hacked. This is true. These hackers have leaked real personal information about everybody that works at Sony. Social security numbers, emails, and I know eventually they're going to start leaking out stuff about me. So before you hear it from someone else, I thought it would be better if you hear it from me."
"Soon you'll know that my email is CuterThanDaveFranco@AOL.com. My password is LittleJamesyCutiePie -- and this is all just a real violation of my personal life."
'Interview' co-star Seth Rogen then joined Franco and made a few more jokes. As part of the leaked documents, the world learned that Rogen was paid $8.5 million for the movie, and Franco was paid $6.5 million. The film is about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jung-un. North Korea publicly denounced the film.
Video sharing site Dailymotion has been fined €1.3 million after a court ruling by the Paris Court of Appeal confirmed copyright infringement.
The site had been accused by infringing copyrights of the private national French TV channel TF1 and the news service LCI.
Legal action was brought against Dailymotion in 2007, and TF1 initially won in 2012, but with a much lower judgement. The new fine is five times higher than the previous.
In its ruling, the court found that the video sharing site did not take any action against users that TF1 identified as unauthorized posters of their content.
Square Enix has managed to piss off an entire fan base this weekend, announcing that a port of 'Final Fantasy VII' is headed exclusively to the PlayStation 4 next year.
Gamers had been eagerly awaiting the announcement of an HD-remastered version, but it looks like the game will be exactly like the PC version, just released to have gamers pay again for the same thing on a different console.
Enix says the game will be available starting in March, but did not reveal pricing. The PC version costs $11.99.
'God of War' fans (myself included) were delighted to learn this weekend that Sony is actively working on the next title in the series.
Sony's Santa Monica Studio has confirmed the game is under development but also noted it is in early stages.
Creative Director Cory Barlog says the company will introduce more of the game in "the next year or two," suggesting PS4 owners will have to wait up to three years before they can get to killing mythical beasts and gods of legend.
Barlog also would not answer if Kratos would remain the protagonist of the new game, having starred in all the others to date.
The crowdfunded Jolla Tablet has reached its latest milestone, their $1.5 million stretch goal.
Based on the Sailfish OS, the Jolla Tablet has a 7.85-inch display with 2048x1536 resolution, a 64-bit quad-core processor clocked at 1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, dual 5MP/2MP cameras, 32GB internal storage (expandable via microSD) and a small-ish 4300mAh battery.
By reaching the stretch goal, Jolla will add 128GB mciroSDHC support. As the page reads: "Once we reach the first goal, every Jolla Tablet will be upgraded to support microSDHC cards up to 128GB! You'll never have to worry about running out of space again. Currently Jolla Tablet supports cards up to 32GB, besides having 32GB internal storage."
The next stretch goal is set at $1.75 million, which will add Split Screen capabilities to Sailfish. Says Jolla: "Split screen allows you to view and use two apps simultaneously, enhancing Sailfish OS' multitasking capabilities even further. Split screen is the most wanted Jolla Tablet software feature by our community at together.jolla.com, and we're thrilled to offer it to you as one of the goals! Split screen will be available to you as a software update during Q3/2015."
It is good to see the success of the tablet, as the open-source device has some interesting features.
An Egyptian security researcher has scooped the top payout for security bugs from PayPal for discovering a massive security flaw that exposed the accounts of over 150 million users.
Yasser Ali was able to get around PayPal's CSRF Prevention System and capture an authentication token that could be used to effect a customer's PayPal account. You could add, remove or confirm e-mail addresses, add fully privileged users to a business account, change security questions, billing info, shipping info, payment methods and so on.
He disclosed the bug to PayPal and received the firms top award incentive for bug hunters, pocketing $10,000 for his work.
He also detailed how he beat PayPal's security systems on his blog, and provided this proof of concept video.
A security firm has taken a look at offers of free codes for PlayStation Network and Steam spreading online to see what's really going on.
Nothing in the world is really free, and that applies as much to codes for PSN, Steam and other services as it does to any physical product. How many times did you see those "Get a free iPAD today!" or similar claims just browsing the web, or social media, or in your e-mail in recent years? It sounds so wonderful doesn't it? Just fill out some surveys and then recruit your friends to do the same and you get a free iPad, or some other seemingly incredible promotion.
As anybody over a certain age can testify from life experience, if something seems too good to be true it usually is. People are still going to be attracted to promotions and offers though, and sometimes we allow our critical thinking faculties to be numbed by emotion - we are human after all.
Avast decided to take a look at websites that claim to offer free codes for PSN and Steam to find out what really happens to those caught in the trap. The value of the codes being promised ranges from $20 to $50, and all you have to do is follow some steps to qualify.
An increase in the share of web traffic from Apple's iOS devices is likely down to the successful launch of the iPhone 6, while at the same time Android web traffic decreases.
Apple now claims a slightly larger piece of the mobile web traffic pie, increasing to a 61.4 percent share compared to 60.6 percent. The increase has been observed over the nine weeks since the launch of the iPhone 6 smartphone, and is at the expense of the share enjoyed by the Android mobile OS which decreased to 37.5 percent from 38.4 percent in the same time period.
The statistics were reported by Gene Munster, analyst at Piper Jaffray.
Munster identifies the popularity of the iPad as the likely reason why Android's dominance in hardware is not reflected in its share of web traffic. Additionally, the iPhone 6 threw Apple into the competition for larger screen smartphones, a space which had been dominated by Android devices previously.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Apple's iOS outshines Android in US mobile Web traffic: www.cnet.com/news
As the investigation into the massive breach at Sony Pictures proceeds, North Korea is sticking to a claim of innocence but that hasn't stopped it from applauding the attack against the entertainment company.
Over 11TB of data was allegedly stolen by the hackers who crippled Sony Pictures' systems, and later on hoards of personal information of employees was spread online. High quality copies of several movies, including Fury, leaked onto the Internet too and were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in a matter of days.
On Friday, it emerged that the FBI was looking into threats that had been made against Sony Pictures employees and their families too.
Amid the public humiliation of Sony Pictures, some experts started to point the finger at the mysterious state of North Korea - or the People's Democratic Republic of Korea - as a major suspect. Potential evidence that has been disclosed is really based on similarities between the Sony Pictures attack, and attacks against South Korean entities in 2013. Additionally, some clues were found in an analysis of malware used in the attack. You can read more details about it here.
Cox Communications was sued last week by two music publishers for not terminating customer accounts when they are declared repeat offenders by Rightscorp.
At the core of the lawsuit filed by BMG and Round Hill is the assertion that Cox has no protection under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. The DMCA's safe harbor provisions protect intermediaries from some copyright litigation as long as procedures are followed to qualify for them.
From BMG and Round Hill's perspective, Cox is not following the procedures and therefore is not entitled to use the safe harbor provisions as protection.
What is Cox Communication's failure according to the lawsuit? It alleges that Cox has failed to terminate customers' accounts when Rightscorp accuses them of being repeat infringers of copyright. That, it alleges, makes Cox liable for copyright penalties and it wants a federal court to declare as much.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has analysed the lawsuit and finds it lacking merit, to say the least. DMCA safe harbor provisions do not require that ISPs terminate users based on a mere accusation of infringement, or indeed even many accusations, according to the EFF. Rightscorp, it said, does not provide any evidence of the customer being a repeat infringer of copyright, and it doesn't disclose the means by which it identified the user.
Clothing retailer Bebe is the latest company to confirm a data breach of sensitive customer information.
Bebe says attackers managed to steal customer names, card numbers, expiration dates and verification codes for cards swiped in stores between Novembr 8th and November 26th of this year in the U.S. and U.S. Virgin Islands.
Online, mobile and international orders were not affected, at least, added the company. Bebe has 174 retail stores and an additional 35 outlet stores.
Security expert Brian Krebs was first to note the hack, and says the hackers likely exploited vulnerabilities in the cash register system and installed malware to steal mag stripe data from millions of cards.
"Our relationship with our customers is of the highest importance," said Bebe CEO Jim Wiggett. "We moved quickly to block this attack and have taken steps to further enhance our security measures."
In the past year, personal data on over 200 million Americans has been compromised thanks to lax security within retailer's systems.
The US Marshals Service has confirmed that only 11 bidders took part in their second Bitcoin auction for the currency seized from illegal online marketplace Silk Road.
In the first auction, 45 bidders took part in the auction, with a total of 63 bids. The latest auction may have reflected a lack of enthusiasm or an investor exhaustion, with only 27 total bids for the 50,000 coins with a dollar value of $19 million. The first auction was for 30,000 Bitcoins.
Last June, when the first auction concluded, there was only one winner: Thomas Draper, a venture capitalist. Draper is assumed to have paid above market price in order to win all the available coins, which at the time was $570. Draper has taken a wash in his investment so far, with prices down at about $370 as of writing.
In total, there were 173,991 Bitcoins seized from the Silk Road raid and from its alleged operator, Ross Ulbricht.
Yesterday, we reported that CBS pulled their content from Dish Network in 16 major metro cities after months of failed licensing negotiations between the two.
Today, the programming is back, as the companies have reached a "multi-year deal covering carriage payments, streaming rights" and ends the two's dispute over Dish's Hopper DVR and its ability to remove commercials.
The Hopper and its "AutoHop" feature was a big enough deal that CBS had sued Dish, and it seems that Dish has caved as part of the new deal. AutoHop is disabled for CBS programming for the first seven days after a program airs on CBS networks. Dish has long defended AutoHop, and its convenience for customers. The company says AutoHop does exactly what all TV watchers with DVR do anyway: fast forward through the commercials.
On Dish's end, the satellite TV company also gets rights to Showtime VOD content and Showtime Anytime, as well as all CBS programming and affiliate programming.
2014 has undoubtedly been a year to forget for retailers and customer data, as many prominent companies have seen severe security breaches leading to the loss of names, addresses, credit card numbers and other sensitive information of hundreds of millions of Americans.
The related fraudulent charges and the costs to replace credit and debit cards has led banks to lose over $400 million on just one single scandal this year (Target), and thanks to a early court ruling, the banks can now move forward with lawsuits against retailers that have been negligent with their security.
In the Target incident, nearly 50 million cards were compromised and in the past the banks have borne the costs of replacements but until this year, the breaches have never been so large. The new ruling allows banks to sue the merchants if there is enough evidence to prove that the company was "negligent" in securing their networks and customer data.
In the case of Target, a number of banks sued claiming that Target "ignored security software alerts and disabled some of its security features" before they were attacked, and the judge agreed.
"Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Target's actions and inactions -- disabling certain security features and failing to heed the warning signs as hackers' attack began -- caused foreseeable harm to plaintiffs," Judge Magnuson wrote in his ruling. "Plaintiffs have also plausibly alleged that Target's conduct both caused and exacerbated the harm they suffered."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into threats received by employees of Sony Pictures claiming to be from the hackers that targeted the entertainment company.
The threats were e-mailed to Sony employees, allegedly sent by the "Guardian of Peace" - or GOP - which previously claimed responsibility for a devastating cyber attack on the entertainment firm starting in late November. It included the theft of 11TB of data and leaking of movies and personal information of employees.
The FBI said it is aware of the threatening e-mails that have been received by some employees. While the e-mail hasn't been released publicly, Bloomberg reports that it threatens the families of recipients if they don't "sign their names" to some e-mail address.
"We continue to investigate this matter in order to identify the person or group responsible," FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell said in an e-mailed statement to the press.
It is very likely that the e-mails didn't come from the attackers at all, and were sent by other parties that obtained the e-mail addresses from the data released online.
As is becoming standard procedure in the industry, CBS has pulled its programming from the Dish Network in 16 metro cities in the U.S., including NYC, LA and Chicago following failed licensing negotiations.
"Dish has dragged its feet at our many attempts to negotiate in good faith," said CBS in an official statement. "Behavior like this is why Dish has a long history of depriving customers of the programming they have paid for." Dish has lost programming from CNN and other large content providers over past disputes. A dispute with AMC left 'Walking Dead' fans without their show for over 9 months.
The two companies have been in negotiations for at least the last six months, and CBS offered two extensions in just the last week.
Dish was quick to respond: "CBS has chosen to black out their local channels, but remain optimistic that the channels will return quickly as both sides are continuing to work tonight to finalize an agreement."
According to a new report, Google will launch a second-generation model of the Google Glass headset next year, one that is powered by an Intel processor.
The new model will offer increased battery life compared to the current Explorer Edition model, and will likely see other upgrades, as well.
So far, Google has tweaked the glasses to include compatibility for prescription glasses and also to increase the RAM, but otherwise little else has changed.
Reportedly, the new Intel chip will come with a partnership that includes Google marketing Glass to "hospital networks and manufacturers, while developing new workplace uses for the device" as it appears that Intel is looking to promote the device in the workplace.
It is unclear which low-powered Intel chip will power the new device, but it will likely be similar to the chip powering the company's new MICA bracelets.
Twitch, the undisputed king of streaming video game gameplay, now has a big-time rival.
Valve, the company behind Steam, has unveiled Steam Broadcasting, allowing gamers to watch their friends (or strangers) play and to allow their friends to watch them play, all with just one simple click.
You can visit any gamer's profile, see what they are playing and start watching; as long as they have made their gaming public. You have the option to be public, completely private, or have it limited to your Steam friends.
The service is currently in open beta so you can try it out now.
According to a new report, both Sony and Microsoft had great Black Friday weeks, moving consoles at record paces.
Sony sold over 550,000 units for the week ended November 29th in the U.S., stronger than any Black Friday week its predecessor PS3 had.
Microsoft, thanks to bundles and a price cut across the board, sold a whopping 720,000 units in the U.S., easily outselling its rivals.
The Xbox One's sales set a record in the U.S., outselling every console in history for the Black Friday holiday week, according to the site. Keep in mind, VGChartz is normally very shaky with their information, and even the sourced article has errors and typos, but the news would not be shocking.
Microsoft dropped the price of their consoles by $50 to $349 MSRP, and that included bundles like Assassin's Creed. Some retailers even dropped the price to $329 to move units. The PS4 also saw some discounts, but nothing along the lines of those seen by the Xbox One.
Microsoft has finally approved the app, and Windows Phone owners can download it now.
The massively popular desktop media player VLC is now available in an early beta form on Windows Phone devices, with an official launch likely due before the end of the year.
VLC has been around in different stages of completion for Android and iOS for some time now, and the apps are popular due to their ability to play MKV, AVI, MP4 and other popular media file types that the native media apps cannot. Apple removed VLC for iOS with the launch of iOS 8 and it has still not returned, giving Windows Phone users a big leg up on the operating system.
Windows Phone has been sorely lacking such an app, but with VLC, that time appears to be coming to an end.
The teaser trailer for the latest Star Wars took the world by storm last week and now we have what appears to be a firm date for the next one.
New reports claim that the next Star Wars trailer, expected to be more than just a teaser, will play ahead of "Avengers: Age of Ultron," which is expected to be the biggest Disney movie of the year (at least until Star Wars comes out).
Age of Ultron is slated for release on May 1st, 2015, and as geeks know, "Star Wars Day" is May 4th, so the timing seems right.
Many expected the next trailer to be on Super Bowl day in early February, given the audience of over 100 million that will be tuned in, and that likely remains a possibility. However, fans will definitely be getting a trailer in May.
Street Fighter V has accidentally been outed as a console exclusive to PS4, and will also be released for PC.
It appears that a trailer was released prematurely ahead of the PlayStation Experience event tomorrow, and has since been switched to private. The news is already out though (intentionally?) and it's good news for PlayStation owners, and not so good news for those who invested in Xbox One.
The trailer reportedly confirmed that the game will not be released for other platforms initially at least, it will only be available on PS4 and on PC. Whether that refers to lifetime of the title, or if it is just a timed exclusive, is unclear.
More details on Street Fighter V will probably surface at the PlayStation Experience event tomorrow.
Target Australia banned the sale of Grand Theft Auto V at its ~300 stores across Australia this week following a petition that decried the imagery of violence against women.
The initial petition had reached over 40,000 signatures when Target Australia agreed to stop selling GTA V at its stores. It claimed that GTA V encourages acts of sexual violence against women, and called out Target for claiming to be a family company, while also selling copies of the controversial blockbuster.
As you can imagine, some people expressed disappointment that Target would remove a product from its shelves that was only ever supposed to be sold to adults in the first place. Others note that Target sells other games, films, books and even music that depict violence of one sort or another; 50 Shades of Grey in particular was thrown around as an example as it had been criticized even by some feminists for portraying "abusive relationships."
We're dealing with gamers here though, so there was always likely to be some ironic push back against Target Australia's decision to drop the game from stores, and now it has come in the form of a petition for Target to stop selling The Holy Bible at its stores.
The ongoing international effort to block Internet users from reaching sites like the Pirate Bay is continuing, and now proxy and mirror sites are being dragged in.
A court in Paris has ordered French Internet Service Providers to begin blocking their customers' access to the notorious Pirate Bay website. Notably, the court also insisted that the ISPs block proxy and mirror sites designed to get around ISP blocks of the BitTorrent site.
The injunction was served by the court at the behest of anti piracy group La Société Civile des Producteurs Phonographiques (SCPP), which represents most than 2000 music labels including the big boys.
Microsoft is targeting a late summer, early fall release of the Windows 10 operating system, according to note from Kevin Turner at the Credit Suisse Technology Conference.
The Redmond giant previously said it would be releasing the updated operating system during the summer next year. According to the note from Turner, the RTM is likely to show up sometime in early Fall.
"The thing I want to tell you about on Windows 10 is in the Windows 10 timeframe, which we plan to talk about the end-user consumer experiences in the early spring, we'll have a developer preview and be able to talk to that in depth in the early summer timeframe. And then by next late summer and early fall we'll be able to bring out this particular OS. That's the current plan of record."
According to a Neowin source, Microsoft is targeting release for around August to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the release of the Windows 95 operating system on August 24, 1995.
A Chinese website has posted shots of the AnTuTu benchmark app allegedly showing the specs of the Samsung Galaxy S6 flagship.
Samsung hasn't even confirmed that the Galaxy S6 is coming, but there are widespread media reports of the South Korean consumer electronics giant working hard to get this iteration of its flagship smartphone right. It is fair to say that the Galaxy S5 was underwhelming, and reports suggest that Samsung is designing the S6 from scratch to breathe new life into the S series.
If the information published by cnmo.com is correct, the Galaxy S6 has the model number SM-G925F.
It will sport a 5.5-inch QHD (2560x1440) display with a 20-megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front camera. Under the hood, it is driven by a Samsung Exynos 7420 (Octa-core 64-bit) and an ARM Mali-T760 GPU. It packs 3GB of RAM and 32GB internal storage.
Of course, it runs Android 5.0 Lollipop.
The Galaxy S6 had previously been rumoured to pack a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, but recent reports of an overheating and speed problem with the AP led to speculation that Samsung would use its own Exynos option instead. Other reports predict a Snapdragon 810 model will come later.
Do you get annoyed with recaptcha prompts that require you to identify jumbled up text and type it into a field to prove you are not a robot? Google feels your pain and is trying to help.
The idea behind the recaptca system is simple; you are presented with distorted text and you type the text into a box. This task is possible for humans to solve (though some kind it more difficult than others) but it has been historically difficult for "robots" to perform the same pattern recognition and produce the correct text.
Things have changed however, and Google's own research into modern artificial intelligence showed that the technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy. Clearly, it is time for a change, and Google had come up with something far more simple.
Here it is.
Google's new API is called "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA" because for the majority of users will be able to prove they are not robots with a single click. The magic that can tell the difference between a human interaction with the captcha, and a robot interaction, happens in Google's new Advanced Risk Analysis backend.
Google has removed several popular apps from its Play Store that allowed Android users to access the Pirate Bay website, even if their ISP was trying to block access.
It removed four apps from the Android store today, including The Pirate Bay Proxy, Pirate Bay Premium, The Pirate Bay Mirror and PirateApp. Google cited violations of intellectual property provisions of its store as justification for removing the apps.
The apps only seem to provide a means by which to actually reach the Pirate Bay. They effectively act as browsers but use proxies to get to the Pirate Bay, avoiding ISP-imposed blocks.
Users with the apps installed can of course continue to use them, but new users will have to find them elsewhere and install manually. The Pirate Bay Proxy, for example, can be downloaded directly from the developer's website.
The developer, Gavin, told the TorrentFreak site that he is disappointed with Google's decision, and that Google's own Chrome browser can do the same thing as his app.
The app is no different from Firefox or Chrome in that it's a tool which provides access to TPB or any other web address," he said. He is appealing the decision and hopes to get the app back into the Play Store. It had clocked up over 900,000 downloads and was used by 45,000 people every day.
North Korea has denied any involvement in a devastating hack of Sony Pictures, the theft of 11TB of data and leaking of movies and personal information of many, many people.
Allegations of the involvement from the shady and mysterious state was met with denials from a North Korean diplomat, speaking with the understanding of anonymity to the Voice of America broadcast network earlier this week. The diplomat described the allegations as just another fabrication targeting the country.
The evidence that is publicly known suggests a tie to North Korea but of course it is circumstantial in nature. Sony Pictures had been blasted by North Korea for the planned release of a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco called "The Interview." They play journalists recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-un during an interview.
As you would expect, the details of the movie didn't go down well in North Korea. The state even sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon describing the film as an "act of war," and claimed it was "sponsoring terrorism."
Pirate streaming services that offer unauthorized access to movies and TV shows are being increasingly targeted by law enforcement.
In the latest round of action in this international cat and mouse duality, Spanish police targeted two very popular unauthorized streaming websites, peliculaspepito.com and seriespepito.com. Two men were also arrested as part of the investigation, and police officers allege they have made more than a million euros in illicit revenue from operating the services.
On Wednesday, the country's top Internet providers were ordered to block access to the two services by a court injunction. This action followed earlier complaints from the usual suspects in the entertainment industry: Universal, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Warner Bros, via an anti-pracy group "FAP".
Both services were allegedly owned by the same company; Zeniox Media SL, which generated approximately €1,085,000 in the previous three years while operating the sites.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
POLICE SHUT DOWN SPAIN'S TOP 'PIRATE' STREAMING SITES: www.torrentfreak.com (+Picture Source)
Having raised over $1.2 billion in funding, Uber is now valued at around $41 billion as the company seeks to continue its aggressive expansion while cleaning up its image.
The growth of Uber in just 12 months is very impressive. In December 2014, Uber was operating its car service in 60 cities and 21 countries. Fast forward a year, and Uber is now active in more than 250 cities in 50 countries. The San Francisco firm is six times larger than it was just a year ago.
It has no plans to slow down either. In fact, the $1.2 billion in financing will aid its investments in the Asia Pacific region. The firm's chief executive, Travis Kalanick, is so confident in Uber's ability to grow that he predicts it will generate more than 1 million jobs in cities all over the world in 2015.
He also has championed Uber as providing relief in congested cities, as the cheaper-than-a-taxi service may prompt millions more urban inhabitants to leave cars at home (or just don't buy one) and get around using Uber instead. If so, this will also ease parking issues in cities.
Despite its aggressive expansion in 2014, Uber has not had a perfectly pleasant year. In several countries it has been blasted by taxi drivers, unions and even by governments, but Uber maintains that services like it are necessary to provide some badly needed competition to the taxi industry in Urban areas.
A Member of the UK Parliament and former IP advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron believes that Internet Service Providers and web hosting companies have to shoulder some of the responsibility for leaked Sony movies, following a massive hack.
Speaking to TorrentFreak, Mike Weatherley gave his opinion on spreading blame and responsibility for the leaking of movies including Fury, and Annie, following a devastating attack on Sony Pictures last week. Over 11TB of data was allegedly stolen. Since then, a massive ~26GB dump of data including the personal details of Sony staff, including their names, addresses, social security numbers and more, has appeared online.
The hack coincided with the leak of several Sony Pictures movies, which have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times through torrent websites and other sources of pirated content.
An FBI investigation is currently under way into the extraordinary breach, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - aka North Korea - is near the top of the list of suspects, and you can read the reasons why that is the case right here.
The German High Court has decided not to permit the extradition of a man once described as the world's "number two" hacker to the United States to face prosecution.
Turkish national Ercan Findikoğlu, 32 years old, has alleged links to global cybercrime activity that generated millions of dollars in illicit revenue. He has been linked to the 2012/2013 attacks on EnStage and ElectraCard in India, two payment processing companies, and on partner banks including the the Bank of Muscat, Oman, and the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaima (RAKBANK), UAE.
All told, over $45 million was stolen by using cloned payment cards with stolen PIN codes to withdraw cash from ATM machines all over the world, including from some 140 machines in New York. In February 2013, over 36,000 illicit ATM withdrawals were made within a ten hour time frame.
Findikoğlu is also allegedly linked to a failed heist targeting over a million credit card numbers back in 2008, around the time he was described as the world's "number two hacker."
In August, a regional court approved his extradition to the United States, but now the Bundesverfassungsgerich (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany) has overturned the lower court's decision, citing the "extreme length" of the sentence being threatened by U.S. authorities, and the inclusion of a "conspiracy" charge which is incompatible with German laws.
HTC One owners will have a nice start to their Friday, as HTC will be rolling out Android Lollipop OTA update to One (M8) and One (M7).
This brings the latest and best of Android to HTC's flagship owners, whether the flagship was bought in 2013 or 2014. There's one catch: the OTA update will be available only to Google Play Edition phone owners. Others, especially those with operator-locked phones, will receive the update later (or in worst case scenario, never).
M8 GPE Owners! We just received TA from Google!! I am very grateful for all your patience. OTA to start at noon on 12/5 (working to pull in)
A week after hackers took down the networks of Sony Pictures and stole 11 terabytes of data, more personal data has been released today, including the social security numbers of nearly 50,000 past and present employees.
Among those with leaked information were celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, Rebel Wilson and Judd Apatow.
Besides the socials, hackers released much more info, as well. Credit card info, social media accounts, computer passwords, home addresses, salary information and contracts are also available now for all to see. Some of the leaked personal data comes from as far back as 2000. On the corporate side, there were passwords and logins for expensive research and data services such as Bloomberg, ComScore and Lexis Nexis leaked, and even the logins for Sony's Amazon and FedEx accounts.
Sony Pictures truly failed its employees with lax security as the documents were kept without encryption, and in plain text labeled files as obvious as "YouTube login passwords.xlsx," for example.
It is unclear where the destructive malware originated, but a handful of security experts have cited how similar the attack was to 2013 attacks by North Korea against South Korea. In fact, North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un promised "merciless retaliation" if Sony did not ban showings of its new film "The Interview," a comedy in which Seth Rogen and James Franco are sent to interview Un and then kill him. North Korea, for its part, has denied any involvement.
Spotify has gotten into the holiday spirit, discounting their premium package for new customers.
Anyone new to the service can get the Premium subscription for just $0.99 for 3 months, when it then reverts back to the normal $9.99 per month.
A premium account gives you unlimited, ad-free access to the entire Spotify catalog and it also gives you the ability to stream from mobiles and other devices. You can also save songs and playlists for offline listening.
Spotify also offers a free ad-supported service and a cheaper "unlimited" service that gets rid of the ads, but doesn't give you mobile access.
Google's excellent new operating system, Android 5.0, is currently on just 0.1 percent of handsets, meaning nearly nobody has gotten to test it outside of the tech media world.
By comparison, Android 2.2, released in early 2010, is still on 0.5 percent of handsets.
Of course, the numbers make sense given that Android 5.0 Lollipop was released to November 12th, and is still only available for a handful of devices. The Nexus 6, which we reviewed here, is still extremely hard to come by but the figure should pick up when all the carriers announce firm release dates.
Other notable devices that aren't in the Nexus line, like the LG G3 and the Moto X, also have seen limited rollouts of the operating system.
Android 4.4 KitKat remains king, with 33.9 percent share, followed by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean at 21.3 percent and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean at 20.4 percent.
Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have unceremoniously ended their partnership in the Nook digital venture of the bookstore.
Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $300 million for a stake in Nook, and today the deal is over, with Microsoft taking a significant loss and no real gains from the partnership.
Microsoft has sold "all of its $300 million convertible Series A preferred limited liability company interest in exchange for an aggregate purchase price equal to (i) $62,425,006.63 in cash and (ii) 2,737,290 shares of common stock."
With B&N shares currently at around $21, Microsoft will get to leave with $119 million in equity, down quite significantly from their original investment.
Of course, the company's stock could go much higher to offset the loss, but things are not looking good for Nook. YoY quarterly revenues decreased 41.3% from 2013 to just $64 million. Device sales fell 63.7% YoY.
A Los Angeles man has become the first person convicted under California's 'revenge porn' law for posting topless images of an ex-girlfriend to Facebook.
Noe Iniguez tried to hide behind a fake identity when he posted topless pictures of an ex-girlfriend to her employer's Facebook page, and also described her as a "drunk" and a "slut" while he urged the employer to let her go.
He had been the subject of a restraining order issued in November 2011 following their break up. They had been together for four years, and Iniguez had been sending her harassing text messages in the wake of their relationship.
Under the 'revenge porn' law in California, it is illegal to upload unauthorized nude or sexual images of a person with the sole purpose of causing them distress. It was enacted in October 2013.
Noe Iniguez will now go down in history as the first person convicted under the law. The 36 year old was sentenced to a year in prison and three months of probation. Additionally, he must keep away from his ex-girlfriend and attend counselling.
Hawking warns again that Artificial Intelligence could one day destroy humanity, while acknowledging that the early primitive forms of A.I. we currently utilize have been very helpful.
He reiterated his fear of the potential of A.I. to bring about the end of human civilization as we know it in an interview with the BBC. "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he warned, as a machine spoke for him.
That kind of A.I. - the primitive technology we use today to overcome obstacles - has been very useful to humanity, Hawking will submit, but he fears for the long term as A.I. becomes increasingly more powerful. Could humans lose their grip on intelligent machines one day?
The pessimistic commentators in this debate cite the potential for artificial intelligence to quickly surpass that of a human being, and could eventually lead to intelligence re-making itself in order to become more and more powerful, or that it may experience a form of "technological evolution" at a pace vastly more rapid than the biological evolution that developed human intelligence.
Such super-smart intelligences may find human affairs totally unimportant, and may even see humanity as a hindrance.
Arnold Schwarzenegger returns for the fifth Terminator movie, coming to movie theaters in July, 2015.
The movie also stars Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor, Jason Clarke as John Connor and Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese. The film is initially set in 2029 with John Connor retaining his position as leader of the resistance, forced to send Kyle Reese back to foil a SkyNet plot against him, and to save his mother's life.
As you'd expect, when Reese travels through time, things aren't quite what he expected to find.
According to attorneys representing consumers in a class action antitrust suit against Apple, the Cupertino giant was deleting songs from iPods that were bought from iTunes' rivals.
Consumers would purchase music from sources other than iTunes - Amazon for example - and then store it on an iPod. Later, when attempting to sync the iPod with iTunes, an error would reportedly occur instructing the user that factory settings must be restored.
If the user went ahead and restored the settings, songs purchased from rival sources would be lost, according to attorney Patrick Coughlin, who made the claim to jurors in the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California.
Furthermore, Coughlin asserted that Apple directed the system not to inform users of the problem, which occurred frequently between 2007 and 2009.
Attempting to explain the actions to the court, Apple security director Augustin Farrugia cited fears of hacking, and said it was a legitimate security measure. He said Apple didn't provide a more detailed explanation because they didn't want to confuse users.
Apple paranoid about iTunes / iPod hacking?
Farrugia even name-dropped "DVD Jon", referring to Jon Lech Johansen who was responsible for the DeCSS decryption tool that made it possible to rip the contents of retail DVDs back in the late '90s. Later, in 2004, Johansen got under Apple's skin with a tool called PlayFair, intended to be a solution for the "FairPlay" digital rights management Apple initially used to protect iTunes songs from piracy.
Complaints about depictions of violence against women has prompted Target Australia to remove copies of Grand Theft Auto V from shelves.
In a press release, Target General Manager of Corporate Affairs Jim Cooper said the decision to pull the critically-acclaimed title from its ~300 stores across Australia stemmed from extensive community and customer concerns over its content.
Ironically, just one day before releasing this statement, Cooper had told Australian press that Target was a "retailer for everyone," and cited feedback from customers wishing for the game to remain in Target stores.
The entire affair is linked to a Change.org petition which claimed that GTA V is a "game that encourages players to murder women for entertainment," and that "games like this are grooming yet another generation of boys to tolerate violence against women."
The petition received over 46,000 signatures. Take-Two has since responded to the decision from Target in a statement from chief executive Strauss Zelnick:
"We are disappointed that an Australian retailer has chosen no longer to sell Grand Theft Auto V--a title that has won extraordinary critical acclaim and has been enjoyed by tens of millions of consumers around the world. Grand Theft Auto V explores mature themes and content similar to those found in many other popular and groundbreaking entertainment properties. Interactive entertainment is today's most compelling art form and shares the same creative freedom as books, television, and movies. I stand behind our products, the people who create them, and the consumers who play them."
According to Google, PSY's 'Gangnam Style' reached a view count so high that it actually broke YouTube's view counter, forcing the company to upgrade its code.
Says the company:
"We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. "Gangnam Style" has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!
Hover over the counter in PSY's video to see a little math magic and stay tuned for bigger and bigger numbers on YouTube."
The new updated storage can support 9 quintillion views, even though that never will never be hit.
Sony is taking advantage of the 20 year anniversary of the launch of the original PlayStation console by launching a special edition PlayStation 4 in the gray colorway of its two-decade old predecessor.
Reads the press release:
20 years is a long time! In 1994, many outsiders thought that Sony was slightly crazy to launch the original PlayStation into an incredibly competitive gaming market. Who could blame them? Sony was (and is!) famous for engineering great electronics, audio equipment and many other consumer devices. But game consoles?!
Sony Computer Entertainment, founded by my mentor Ken Kutaragi, was a project borne out of sincere passion and deep admiration for the craft of game development. The mid '90s were an exciting time for game developers, driven by the explosion of powerful but affordable 3D graphics rendering hardware and the birth of many young and adventurous development studios. The original PlayStation was meant to embody that sense of adventure and discovery, that sense that anything was possible.
We sincerely thank you for joining us on our exciting 20-year journey. You have made every bump and scrape we took along the way worthwhile. And there's so much more to come! :D
Samsung started the trend years ago with its Galaxy Note, which was an experiment but quickly became one of their top sellers. Apple entered the ring this year with their iPhone 6 Plus, confirming that the "mass market" is finally ready for Apple to offer something without a tiny screen.
Most recently, Google released the Nexus 6, its first technical phablet, and the company's showcase for their latest Android operating system.
Each device offers strong performance, a massive screen, and a large price tag.
Check out the specs and key features of the year's most important phablets:
As they do every year, Google has launched a new Nexus device to showcase their latest and greatest Android iteration.
This year, Google decided to go big with the Nexus 6, a device firmly in the phablet category with its six inch display. Google also decided to step away from their low-end pricing for a high-end device model that had served them well with previous Nexus phones, starting the Nexus 6 at $650 unlocked, in-line (albeit cheaper) with unlocked prices for popular devices like the iPhone and Galaxy Note.
Google also decided this was the year that Nexus would become more than just a techie's dream phone, and struck deals with all the major U.S. carriers for retail launches of the device. In the past, only one or two of the majors every received or marketed a Nexus phone.
Today, we review the T-Mobile GSM version of the phone, as the carrier was the first to launch the handset in the U.S., even after a minor delay.
Now that the year 2014 is almost in the past, it is time to take a quick look at the past year and wish all of you a happy new year for 2015!
Chinese smartphone startup Xiaomi has raised $1.1 billion in funding at a massive value of $45 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable private technology companies.
According to Sony Pictures, 'The Interview' made $15 million in revenue in online sales and rentals during its first 96 hours of availability.
One quick way to tell if you might have a defective cord is to disconnect the cord from the AC adapter (power brick) and check to see if it has LS-15 stamped into the molding, as shown in the picture.
