The past two years have been good for retro gamers. First, we got NES Classic Edition from Nintendo back in 2016. In 2017, arrived SNES Classic. And now, probably the biggest legend of them all, Commodore 64 is making a return.
USC-powered mini computer, dubbed as The C64 Mini, will be available in March, 2018 with suggested retail price of 79,90 € in Europe, appx. $70 in United States.
The retro gaming kit will include a miniature version of Commodore 64 chassis (unfortunately the keyboard is just for the authentic look and is not functional), a USB joystick (for those too young to remember, joystick is a gaming controller with one stick and two buttons..) and pre-installed 64 licensed games.
Device has HDMI output that sends out 720p video in correct 4:3 aspect ratio, two USB ports for joysticks or a USB keyboard and internal storage for saved game states and game records.
Google just updated its free (and ad-free) file manager for Android devices, Files Go.
Files Go is Google's solution to Android's ever-present problem of storage memory being full. Files Go can analyze the device's storage and find duplicate files, unused installed applications and old cache files that take up space - and allow deleting such files in order to free up some resources.
App that was originally launched back in 2017 was recently updated to a new version that now supports also SD cards for scanning and has better UI for tablet-sized devices. App is also pretty good file manager and in that area, things have improved too: users can now choose default apps for each file type (regardless of the Android's internal default selections).
Just as Mozilla updated their browsers, with new Firefox 58, Google answers with a new browser version of their own. Among other things Google's new Chrome 64 is said to be offering better protection against malicious or just plain annoying websites.
The most important improvement in the new Chrome version is probably the new, improved, and more efficient popup blocker. It should take care of all annoying windows or dialogs appearing in front that you did not initiate or ask for.
Lately Google has been focusing more and more to make the web experience more enjoyable probably in the hopes that people would allow the showing of fairly innocuous ads they themselves promote.
Obviously blocking annoying ads is good for Google, if it considers none of their own ads annoying. Especially if that means people will give up the ad blockers that would otherwise block even the less eyestrain-inducing ads that the king of online advertisement uses.
Many of the other improvements to Chrome 64 are focused on developers.
Apple has released a preview to what is their next major iOS update, the iOS 11.3. Apple's mobile operating system is going to get a fairly big update later this Spring but already they have released a beta version that reveals some of the updates.
For customers angered by the "batterygate" late last year, Cupertino-based tech mammoth will introduce an upgrade that will allow users with iPhone 6 and newer iPhones to keep track fo their batteries better. You can also turn off the feature that slashes the performance to protect battery and the device itself, if you so wish.
One of the major updates to iOS 11 itself include an updated ARKit. Apple's Augmented Reality platform is updated to version 1.5 and brings along item recognition and better control over inserting objects.
Previously you've only been allowed to drop items on horizontal surfaces, like tables or floors, but now you'll be able to use vertical ones as well. Objects to be placed on vertical surfaces include paintings and posters.
ARKit will also support Full HD -resolutions as well as automatic focus.
We've also got some good news for the people that thought animojis were the best new feature of iPhone X: iOS 11.3 update brings four new animojis to iPhone X. New characters include a skull, a bear, a dragon, and a lion. Animojis are of course animated emojis that can be controlled by your facial expressions and recorded to be shared with others.
Drones have been used by the professionals, including filmmakers and military, for a long time now, and even the consumer has a myriad of choices when it comes to quadrocopters. One manufacturer, however, has been above the others on both professional grade as well as customer drones: DJI.
Now the GoPro of drones has released yet another drone. The new one is called DJI Mavic Air and as you might imagine it is a sibling to the popular semipro, prosumer, drone called Mavic Pro. DJI believes that this new version is more accessible to the normal customer while bringing along some of the more professional features.
Mavic Air is a foldable, super light weight drone that is able to film 4K video. One could easily call it a cross between the more capable Mavic Pro and recently introduced tiny Spark.
It's half the size of Mavic Pro and costs a few hundred less at $799. You'll get footage in forms of 4K@30fps and Full HD@120fps video recording, 12 megapixel stills, 32 megapixel panoramas. The remote range is around 2.5 miles but maximum flight time around 21 minutes that is obviously a little less than you get with a Mavic Pro.
The lightweight Mavic Air is a fairly speedy drone, though, as it gets up to 42 mph in Sport Mode.
Once a force to be reckoned with on the browser markets, Mozilla, has been in slow decline ever after the inception of Google Chrome. Now the Norwegian company's Firefox browser holds just over 10 percent of the desktop/laptop market but maybe they are on their way up again after the latest updates.
Firefox was recently given a huge patch to version 57 and now we've got another performance enhancing update for all you browser rebels.
The new Firefox 58 is the first update to Firefox Quantum, as the company calls its largely revamped browser. It brings along many under-the-hood upgrades that speed up many facets of browser, including a JavaScript performance boost of up to a third.
More technically Mozilla has added support for Windows' Off-Main-Thread Painting which allows rendering to be done on a separate thread. Along with better multithread support Firefox 58 includes the previously used Tracking Protection tech that speeds up loading of pages potentially even more.
The updates also added support for Progressive Web Apps (PWA) on Android.
Devices running the latest Android Oreo release will now give you an idea of the speed of a WiFi network before you connect to it.
Public WiFi is offered by local governments and private businesses for their customers everywhere now. However, the performance of public WiFi varies widely and sometimes public WiFi can be worse than even a poor cellular connection. Sometimes you might find yourself trying multiple public networks to find one that has enough speed for your task (streaming from youtube etc.)
Oreo will make this task a little bit easier. When it scans for nearby WiFi, it also will assess what kind of speed you can expect from it. It won't tell you a detailed result of its test, but will instead describe the speed as "slow" if its under 1Mbps, "OK" if it between 1Mbps and 1.5Mbps, "fast" if it is between 5Mbps and 20Mbps and "very fast" if it exceeds 20Mbps.
The change is rolling out now with Android Oreo 8.1.
Integral Memory will ship the largest capacity microSD card commercially available in February, with its new 512GB microSDXC V10.
That would be one hell of a storage boost for a device, granted it supports microSDXC.
"The need to provide extended memory for smartphones, tablets and a growing range of other mobile devices such as action cams and drones has been answered." said James Danton, marketing manager, Integral Memory. "As a company, we are very proud to be the first to achieve the 512GB capacity milestone in microSDXC, worldwide."
Press information about the new card cites tests with a range of smartphones showing speed of up to 80MB/s, which is certainly not the fastest you could find but should be adequate for most media tasks like recording 4K video and such.
It will be available next month but there was no information given on how much one of these babies will cost.
Streaming giant Netflix added a record number of new subscribers to its service in the fourth quarter of 2017, which it has credited to investment in original content.
Netflix now has more than 117 million paying subscribers for its service, the majority of whom are now located outside the United States. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Netflix added a record 8.3 million subscribers, of which 6.36 million were international subscribers.
The firm recorded revenue of $3.3 billion during the quarter which is up almost a third compared to the same period of 2016. Profits were reported at $186 million, up almost 300 percent year over year.
Netflix is crediting the good news with its investment in original content. New seasons of hit shows including Stranger Things, the Crown, Black Mirror and investments in new films such as Bright (starring Will Smith) provided Netflix with a strong line up for the past few months. It also has to be noted that Netflix did increase its prices during the quarter.
The service is now available in more than 190 countries around the world and is investment more in local content.
Intel is now advising customers not to install previously released patches to address serious CPU flaws that were disclosed publicly this month.
Meltdown and Spectre have been demonstrated to put sensitive and private information at risk, if exploited successfully. The flaw exists in hardware and so there was never going to be easy ways to mitigate. Meltdown is a flaw that is exclusively only to Intel CPUs, whereas Spectre affects chips from Intel, AMD or ARM-based chips.
Intel began pushing out patches to mitigate the issues earlier this month, but is now advising the users stop installing them. The new advice comes after users and firms reported reported dramatic slowdowns and unpredictable behavior, including constant reboots or a failure to boot at all.
The chipmaker says it understand what has caused the unpredicted outcomes and is now advising that customers start testing early versions of new patches that it is putting out, and has apologized publicly for the disruption its change of advice has caused.
News site Boing Boing is defending itself from a lawsuit brought by Playboy alleging copyright infringement because the site linked to Playboy centerfolds.
A blog post on Boing Boing contained a hyperlink to a gallery of Playboy centerfolds and another to a YouTube video with similar content. Playboy alleges that this amounts to copyright infringement and is suing the popular news blog.
It is important to point out that Boing Boing had nothing to do with the creation of the Imgur gallery, or the YouTube video, it merely linked to both in a blog post.
"The world can't afford a judgment against us in this case -- it would end the web as we know it, threatening everyone who publishes online, from us five weirdos in our basements to multimillion-dollar, globe-spanning publishing empires like Playboy,"Boing Boing warns.
It is not alone in its fight against the lawsuit however. Daniel Nazer, Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney, argues that Boing Boing's use of the hyperlinks is protected under fair use principles.
"Boing Boing's reporting and commenting on the Playboy photos is protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. We're asking the court to dismiss this deeply flawed lawsuit,"he said.
Founder of the file-sharing website Megaupload is suing the government of New Zealand for billions of dollars.
Megaupload allowed users around the world to upload files to its service which could be later downloaded by others with the same link. In January 2012, New Zealand police raided the home of founder Kim Dotcom while investigating alleged copyright infringement offenses.
In the six years that has passed since the raid, the Kim Dotcom saga has dragged on as he has fought extradition to the United States on copyright infringement charges.
Kim is now suing the government of New Zealand, claiming up to $6.8 billion in damages due to all lost business opportunities since 2012, his legal fees, the damage to his reputation and more.
At the core of his defense is the assertion that the warrants used for the raid on his mansion in January 2012 were based on Section 131 of the 1994 Copyright Act of New Zealand. Technically, under that copyright act, online copyright infringement is not a crime.
Facebook has largely a monopoly on instant messaging in the West. In most countries in Europe and North America, the top 2, if not top 3, most popular messaging platforms are owned by Facebook.
The most popular of them all is WhatsApp that is slightly more commonly used than Facebook Messenger.
Now the Facebook owned behemoth of a messaging platform is releasing a new product, which it hopes will create the desperately needed revenue. Even though when first introduced, WhatsApp was warning people that after a year of use it would require a monthly fee, it never really started asking money from its individual customers.
However, for a while WhatsApp has been trying to figure out how to create some revenue from the business world. The answer, the company hopes, is a new app called WhatsApp Business.
WhatsApp Business, as the name and perhaps the past four paragraphs might suggest, is an app for the business oriented folks who want to create an official presence in the WhatsApp ecosystem.
Even the WhatsApp Business is free, at least if you are a relatively small company. Larger companies need to pay a fee to get the full feature list and get all the advantages they perhaps need.
As popular as the world's largest music streaming service, you can only attract that many paying customers with music. For some people radio on the way is more than enough, and even then it might be talk radio.
Well, Spotify is looking straight at these people when trying to diversify their offerings.
As we await for Spotify to list they've revealed that a newly added section of the app will offer news related content. Provided by eight different services, the new Spotlight section includes news, podcasts as well as audio books.
The Spotlight partners are BuzzFeed News, Cheddar, Crooked Media, Lenny Letter, Gimlet Media, Genius, The Minefield Girl, Refinery29, and Uninterrupted. At least the first mentioned will provide audio news that are spiced up with infographics and other visual elements.
It is definitely a step into radio's lane, challenging perhaps the talk radio for audio advertisement. For now, Spotify's Spotlight will be only available in the United States, but Spotify has obviously plans to expand.
Users report that Google devices with the Cast features are causing network connectivity problems on their home WiFi networks.
Devices that seem to cause issues once connected to some networks include Chromecast and Google Home devices. The issue appears to affect some routers from ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, Synology and TP-Link. It appears that the issue is due to the devices flooding the router with data packets when recovering from a sleep state.
TP-Link linked the problem to MDNS multicast discovery packets. Under normal circumstances, these packets normally sent in a 20-second interval, but TP-Link determined the devices will sometimes broadcast a large amount of these packets at a very high speed in a short amount of time.
This occurs when the device is awakened from its "sleep" state, and could exceed more than 100,000 packets. The longer your device is in "sleep", the larger this packet burst will be.
TP-Link has issued some firmware updates for affected devices, which you can find here. Mean while, Google is also looking for a solution to the problem which it says affects only a small number of users.
As companies are trying to recover from what were, and still are, perhaps the most severe CPU bugs in the history of the computer, people are wondering how exactly does this affect them.
Both manufacturers and platform developers have been patching the problems Spectre and Meltdown entail, to the extent that they can be prevented, but there's one new problem that appears after you've patched your system.
See, Microsoft talked recently about how the software patches might make your computer slow down a little bit, and Intel seems to agree. The world's largest CPU manufacturer has released test results on how much you can expect slowing down after the patch.
On Windows 10 machines the overall office productivity performance declines around 5 to 10 percent on Intel's Core chips. The exact percentage depends on many factors including, but not limited to, generation of the CPU, the version of Windows, as well as even the computation type.
On Skylake CPUs, that's the 6th generation of Core chips released couple years ago, the drop is around 8 percent while newer 8th generation chips (Kaby and Coffee Lake) slow down less than 6 percent. Mostly the slowdown was reported in the responsiveness section, which took a hit of up to 14%. The office productivity tests were done with SYSmark 2014 SE.
WhatsApp became quickly the world's largest instant messaging platform, and for a good reason. The company has offered early on such important features as end-to-end encryption.
Security features are near and dear to WhatsApp's heart, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have any problems. Facebook owned messaging platform has been hacked by a group of researchers that say they've found a way to join seemingly private conversations, Wired reports.
The researchers from Ruhr University Bochum in Germany showcased their finding at the Real World Crypto security conference held in Switzerland. At the Zurich conference, German cryptography researchers explained how a person breaching into WhatsApp servers could add new members to group chats without the administrators approval as is the case normally.
The chat room members, however, see this new member as approved by the administrator, and he can see the encrypted conversations between all group members. According to the researchers this will not allow the newly, and fraudulently, added member to see previously sent messages.
Fortunately the exploit does require access to WhatsApp servers, which isn't exactly the easiest task. One could also expect more harm from access to WhatsApp's servers than snooping local crochet club's trending patterns.
While many of the leading smartphone manufacturers were on the show floor of the Consumer Electronics Show of 2018 in Las Vegas, not a lot of new top products were launched. Year after year, CES has become less of a mobile trade show as MWC and independent releases are getting more popular.
However, just so happens that many of the biggest smartphone manufacturers develop also other consumers electronics, and that of course includes Samsung. Even though rumors had it that Samsung was going to release the newest iteration of Galaxy S line earlier this year, we didn't see a Galaxy S9 at CES.
This isn't completely unexpected and at least we heard from the head of Samsung mobile division DJ Koh, who revealed that the unveiling of Galaxy S9 is imminent. Like last year, Samsung is going to announce new Galaxy S flagship phones at Mobile World Congress, or MWC for short, late next month.
While Samsung seems to be fairly open about their launch schedule, a somewhat unorthodox approach, they haven't revealed the shipping dates. However, if previous years are any indication, and they usually are, one can expect to see the new Galaxy S9, and probably Galaxy S9+, to hit the stores in March.
Huawei is the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer, right behind Apple and Samsung. In fact, it even surpassed Apple in the second quarter last year. However, it is not a popular brand in the U.S., and there are a few hurdles before it'll succeed here, at least if AT&T are concerned.
America's second largest mobile carrier, AT&T, has just backed out from a deal with Huawei, Wall Street Journal reports. According to reports, the Chinese manufacturer was ready to unveil the partnership with AT&T at the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, in Las Vegas this week.
Instead, AT&T cancelled last minute which left Huawei at the trade show just showing off their Mate 10 Pro (pictured) flagship without a major announcement. Huawei's press conference was held and the company still announced Mate 10 Pro availability in the US but without the help of AT&T or any other carriers for that matter.
Neither of the companies have commented on reasons why AT&T backed out but reports say that it was due to data security concerns that have loomed over Chinese manufacturers.
Many of you probably remember Kodak as the savior of your scuba diving trip with their disposable cameras. Or perhaps you've owned one the company's less iconic cameras. The company has a long history in cameras, but it's been closing in on bankruptcy for years.
Now, they've decided to take a bit of a detour from cameras and announced their own cryptocurrency.
Yeah, didn't expect that, did you? Except for the headline for the story, no one would have expected that. Unless you look at the current climate surrounding the blockchain technology and more specifically cryptocurrency.
Everyone seems to be chiming in and wants to get a piece of that action, whatever it will be worth in a few years. Now that Kodak's old technology and patents have largely been sold to the highest bidders, the company is trying to revive itself as a new type of company.
It still does, however, see itself very much in the photography space, so their new blockchain based platform KodakOne is meant for the photographers and media agencies. The KodakOne uses a proprietary cryptocurrency, I guess you could call it altcoin, called KodakCoin. So essentially you can buy and sell rights to use photos for KodakCoins.
Fingerprint sensors are one of the best ways to authenticate in a smartphone, and in recent years they've become a staple that provides fast, secure and efficient way to unlock your device. However, in the past year or so, smartphone manufacturers have adopted a new type of technology that has made it harder to deploy a fingerprint reader in the phone.
Bezeless displays are have been the craze ever since people fell in love with the original Xiaomi Mi Mix. Now Apple, Google, Samsung, LG, Huawei, OnePlus, and others have their own nearly bezeless flagship phones. That means that you've had to move your fingerprint sensor from the front, where many like it the best, to the back, or, as is the iPhone X's case, remove it completely.
However, maybe you prefer fingerprint sensor over even a state-of-the-art face unlocking like Face ID, and you definitely want it in the front because you need to unlock the phone a billion times a day while it's laying on the desk, and you still want a huge display that takes up nearly all the room from the front face of the phone.
Well, Chinese manufacturers showed a prototype of an in-screen fingerprint sensor even before the iPhone was out, but it was slow and not really where it needed to be to hit the markets. Last month, though, Synaptics, the company behind many of your laptop's trackpads and other input devices, unveiled an in-screen fingerprint sensor called the Clear ID (pictured). It promised a top tier manufacturer to showcase it at CES 2018.
The Consumer Electronics Show, perhaps more commonly known as CES, started in Las Vegas earlier this week, and electronics manufacturers have been showing off their most impressive new, upcoming, or often even concept products.
As expected, many of these are TVs, as CES is the TV trade show. While LG showed their OLED display that bends, which isn't anything new really albeit bigger and better, Samsung decided to focus on size.
Samsung's top of the line TV is called The Wall. The Wall is a modular television that dwarfs anything else on the show floor. The diagonal size of this behemoth of a TV is 146 inches. That is something you would only expect from a projected screen.
Because it is modular you can actually make it even bigger by connecting more displays into it. Makes sense to call it The Wall, doesn't it?
While the conference is dubbed Consumer Electronics Show, this piece of equipment probably doesn't land on many walls of traditional consumers. It might, however, be a for high-end solution in larger public events.
According to Samsung the TV uses what they call MicroLEDs. These smaller than normal LEDs provide the background lighting separately for each pixel, unlike in traditional LED backlit LCD TVs. This means that it offers excellent contrast, not unlike OLED panels, because you can turn off individual pixels with the backlight.
Wireless local area networks (WLAN) are going to get much, much more safe in the near future. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the new WPA3 standard for Wi-Fi was introduced.
WPA2 has been in use since 2004 and has been found to be less than optimal for the safety needs of modern Wi-Fi users. The largest differences between WPA2 and WPA3 are in open network security. Currently in an open Wi-Fi network the connections between devices are not protected in any way, and thus listening and manipulating traffic is very easy.
WPA3, however, introduces a specification for device specific encyption, which means that even if the network can be accessed without passwords you'll be able to securely transmit data without worrying about interception by other devices.
The new standard also includes a feature which allows network operator to deny access from a device to a network when the password has been guessed wrong multiple times. This protects against the so-called brute force attacks.
Wi-Fi Alliance expects the WPA3 standard to be released later this year.
The new 49-Qubit quantum chip is called Tangle Lake, and promises leaps in superconducting computing. Intel calls the new chip a major breakthrough and according to the company it truly starts quantum computing era. This even though we've seen 128-Qubit systems from a Canadian quantum computing company D-Wave Systems years ago.
The 125-Qubit D-Wave, originally unveiled in 2015, has since been surpassed by D-Wave 2X quantum computer that offers processing powers in the 1000-Qubit range.
Intel's breakthroughs are obviously still a big news in the space, after all, it is the largest CPU manufacturer in the world. Tangle Lake, as well as other quantum computing endeavors by Intel come from their Netherlands unit.
For years manufacturers have tried to bridge the gap between a smartphone and a computer by introducing proprietary docking technologies. You might remember Microsoft's effort with Windows 10 phones and computers or Samsung's DeX with their Android phones.
Obviously there have been others, and there will be more that try to breath life into a fantasy many of us are looking forwards to. The newest addition to the group is the gaming focused manufacturer Razer, who've shown off their concept at CES.
Razer's Project Linda is still, as mentioned, just a concept, but it is a seemingly well built and largely market-ready product. It's a Razer Blade-like laptop shell that needs the company's Android phone to power up.
You dock the Razer Phone in the slot situated at the track pad, and as you might imagine the phone's display serves as one. You also use the phone's fingerprint sensor to authenticate and even the dual front-facing speakers because the laptop has no built-in speakers.
Project Linda laptop includes a 13.3 inch 120Hz QHD display with touch capabilities, 53.6 watt battery, 200 gigabytes of storage, USB-A and USB-C connections, a 720p webcam, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack that is missing from the phone.
The long standing rivals of the processor space, Intel and AMD, announced late last year that they would be doing a collaborative effort which would end in a new kind of chip that would include Intel's CPU prowess and AMD's graphics chips.
Now the chip medley has been officially announced, and it's called the Intel 8th Generation Core with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics – a mouthful, right?
Technically the CPU is an H series processor in terms of power consumption but Intel has created a new G series for the Vega powered chip. The G series can include processors with a TDP up to 100 watts, so they fit snuggly between desktop and mobile processors.
The 100-watt versions of newly announced G series processors include Core i7-8809G and Core i7-8709G while lower prowered 65-watt ones are called Core i7-8705G and Core i5-8305G.
All the CPUs have four Kaby Lake cores that run at around 3 GHz with a Turbo of approximately 4 GHz. AMD developed GPU features 24 computing units in 100-watt models and the lower-powered models have 20. Only the highest end 8809G is specced for overclocking.
To showcase how the new processors are optimally used, Intel announced a reference product called Hades Canyon (pictured). The NUC (Next Unit of Computing) form factor computer is a mini PC that has the power to run VR applications in addition to fulfilling other home entertainment needs.
HP is recalling batteries for some notebook or mobile workstation products after numerous reports of overheating, property damage and a burn injury.
It estimates that about 50,000 batteries are involved, sold with products between December 2015 and December 2017. HP received eight reports of battery packs overheating, melting, or charring, including three reports of property damage totaling $4,500 with one report of a minor injury involving a first degree burn to the hand.
The batteries were shipped with or sold as accessories for HP ProBooks (64x G2 and G3 series, 65x G2 and G3 series), HPx360 310 G2, HP Envy m6, HP Pavilion x360, HP 11, HP ZBook (17 G3, 17 G4, and Studio G3) Mobile Workstations.
HP is providing battery replacement services by an authorized technician at no cost. Additionally, HP is also providing a BIOS update that places the battery in "Battery Safety Mode" so that the notebook or workstation can be safely used without the battery by connecting to an HP power adaptor.
If the validation process identifies a battery as being eligible for replacement, the BIOS update should be applied and the system should be rebooted. During the reboot process, an option will be presented to enable Battery Safety Mode.
It had been expected that a digital player would jump in and compete for streaming rights for Premier League football matches at auction. Sky and BT Sports dominated the previous auction in 2015, which generated more than £5.1 billion ($6.9 billion) in revenue for the Premier League.
Amazon views the acquisition of more sports content as a way to boost subscribers to its Prime service. It tells investors that the service also tends to produce more loyal shoppers overall than non-Prime customers.
One of its more recent exclusive features is a documentary series about Manchester City football club, which is currently leading the Premier League division at just over half way through the season.
Ed Woodward, chief executive officer of Manchester United, had previously hinted to shareholders that he expected to see digital giants come in and compete against the traditional broadcasters to bid on match packages, which will range from 32 matches to 20 matches.
Apple has confirmed that its Mac and iOS devices are affected by CPU flaws disclosed this week, and that it is patching to mitigate the threat.
Apple confirmed on its tech support website that all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time. The Cupertino giant has already issued fixes to address the threat of Meltdown, specifically iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2.
Apple Watch is not affected by Meltdown.
Spectre is a potential threat for Mac and iOS devices but requires a malicious app (or a benign app acting maliciously) to exploit the flaw successfully. For that reason, Apple stresses that customers should only acquire apps from trusted sources.
There are other ways for Spectre to be exploited in Apple devices however, with the most obvious being a malicious webpage opened in the Safari browser. To address this possibility, Apple has pledged to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre.
Meltdown and Spectre affect almost all CPUs sold in consumer devices for a couple of decades.
More than 70 million users now pay a premium subscription fee for unlimited music streaming from Stockholm-based Spotify.
Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world, fending off competition from Apple Inc. and from Amazon and others. The Apple Music service counts 30 million subscribers as of September, but its launch in June 2015 did not significantly impact Spotify as had been anticipated. Instead, Spotify has gone from strength to strength, rapidly adding millions of paying subscribers.
If you count Spotify users who stream for free on the ad-supported platform, then Spotify counts around 140 million active users.
Last year, Spotify was valued at around $19 billion and has started 2018 with a confidential filing with a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO. Spotify is targeting a direct listing at some point in Q1 2018.
Spotify is also the target of a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Wixen Music Publishing, alleging that the music streaming service failed to obtain necessary "mechanical licenses" for many songs in its catalog.
Intel says it will have released patches to address major CPU security flaws for 90 percent of recently-released chips by next week.
The chipmaker is working with rivals AMD, ARM and others in an industry response to the revelation of serious CPU security flaws disclosed recently. Meltdown and Spectre break the isolation between memory used by applications, and even applications and kernel-mode memory, posing a significant security risk if exploited.
Meltdown appears to only affect CPUs released by Intel, whereas Spectre also impacts processors from AMD and ARM-based chips in mobile & entertainment devices.
Intel has already issued updates for all types of Intel-based computer systems, including personal computers and servers, to address the flaws. It is focusing primarily on products released in the past five years, for the time being. By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past five years.
Operating system vendors including Apple, Microsoft and Google are also pushing out fixes to mitigate the flaws, and software developers are working on patches to address the threat posed by Spectre.
Nintendo has revealed that sales of its Nintendo Switch games console have broken the previous record held by its Wii home console in the United States.
In its first 10 months of availability, Nintendo's iconic Wii entertainment system sold more than four million units in the United States. Nintendo's Switch launched on March 3, 2017, and in the ten months since launch it has sold 4.8 million units, easily surpassing the record held by its Wii system.
The Japanese electronics firm nodded to the popularity of the games line-up for the Switch system to explain the unprecedented demand in the United States. In the U.S., more than 60 percent of Nintendo Switch owners have Super Mario Odyssey, and over 55 percent own The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
There are more than 300 third-party games also available for the Switch console.
"Fans across the country have experienced the joy of playing their favorite games at home or on the go," said Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's President and COO.
"Now that many more people have received Nintendo Switch systems for the holidays, we look forward to bringing them fun new surprises in 2018 and beyond."
The world's leading music streaming service has filed for an initial public offering with U.S. regulators, eyeing a direct listing in Q1 2018.
The Reuters news agency cited sources familiar with the matter in reporting that Spotify made the confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. Last year, Spotify was valued at around $19 billion.
Spotify counts more than 140 million users, 60 million of whom are paying customers, as of mid-2017.
It will proceed with the direct listing despite being the target of a whopping $1.7 billion copyright lawsuit. Wixen Music Publishing Inc filed the lawsuit against the Swedish streaming service last week in a California federal court.
The lawsuit alleges that Spotify failed to negotiate a direct or compulsory license that would allow it to reproduce and distribute songs for which Wixen is an exclusive licensee.
Spotify offers a catalog of more than 30 million songs to subscribers.
AT&T has announced that it will rollout its initial 5G cellular network services in the United States in 2018.
The announcement comes weeks after international wireless standards for the network technology were finalized by 3GPP. With vital elements of the standard now settled, device manufacturers can now begin development of compatible equipment.
AT&T has committed to rollout its initial 5G network services to its customers in a dozen cities in the United States, some time later this year. It will also trial 5G technology with businesses of all sizes across industries.
5G promises significant improvements in speed and in latency for cellular users over the LTE network technology that is now standard in most developed countries.
"5G will change the way we live, work and enjoy entertainment," said Melissa Arnoldi, president, AT&T Technology and Operations.
"We're moving quickly to begin deploying mobile 5G this year and start unlocking the future of connectivity for consumers and businesses. With faster speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G will ultimately deliver and enhance experiences like virtual reality, future driverless cars, immersive 4K video and more."
Operating system vendors, cloud storage providers and other tech firms are scrambling to mitigate the affects of serious CPU vulnerabilities affecting servers, desktops and even mobile devices.
The hardware bugs have been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown is named for the metaphorical melting of security boundaries that are taken as a given because they are enforced by hardware itself. Spectre is named based on the root cause of the bug; speculative execution.
Both are very serious and are almost certain to affect you. Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) breaks the isolation between user applications and the operating system. Applications that exploit the hardware bug can access the OS / System memory and the memory of other applications. In essence, this means a malicious (though seemingly benign) application can steal sensitive data from memory. Applied to cloud services, this brings up the possibility of sensitive information being stolen from other customers, though cloud providers have already addressed the issue for the most part.
Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) breaks the expected isolation between different applications. If exploited, it allows a malicious application to trick error-free programs into leaking sensitive information. What makes it even worse is that the discoverers of Spectre say the safety checks of said best practices actually increase the attack surface and may make applications more susceptible to Spectre.
SpaceX is preparing to finally test its Falcon Heavy rocket later this month, and has released a video showing the powerful vehicle sitting on the pad.
Falcon Heavy is SpaceX' super heavy-lift launch vehicle based on its Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon Heavy features a strengthened Falcon 9 rocket core and two additional Falcon 9 boosters as strap-on stages. It will produce 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, or the equivalent of 18 Boeing 747s on full power.
Max payload to low-Earth orbit reaches 140,700 (63,800kg) maximum. The core and side stages are designed to be reused to bring costs down considerably per launch.
The test flight will go ahead this month provided Falcon Heavy passes all pre-flight checks, including a static fire of its 27 Merlin 1D engines. If successful, it will blast off with Elon Musk's own Tesla Roadster electric vehicle, which will be put on course to orbit Mars. However, even Musk himself has warned that there is a very real possibility that the initial launch will fail.
The World Health Organization is set to class gaming addiction as a mental health condition for the first time.
The classification is part of the organization's 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD) that will be published this year. It refers to gaming habits so severe that they take complete precedence over other life interests.
Abnormal gaming behavior should persist for more than twelve months for a diagnosis to be made, except if symptoms were severe. Associated symptoms would include impaired control over gaming frequency, intensity and duration, as well as escalating gaming habits even as negative consequences mount.
Some countries around the world have already been treating excessive gaming as an addiction problem and responding with public policy, including time limits enforced on online gaming for minors.
In the UK, some private addiction clinics treat patients for digital addiction.
Music streaming giant Spotify was hit with a $1.6 billion copyright lawsuit for allegedly streaming thousands of songs without permission.
Wixen Music Publishing Inc filed the lawsuit against the Swedish streaming service last week in a California federal court. The lawsuit alleges that Spotify failed to negotiate a direct or compulsory license that would allow it to reproduce and distribute songs for which Wixen is an exclusive licensee.
Among the catalog of songs that Wixen alleges Spotify illegally distributed are "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and "(Girl We Got A) Good Things" by Weezer.
The South Korean consumer electronics firm will put its new 88-inch screen with 16 times more pixels than Full HD on display in Las Vegas.
It is the largest OLED display in the world with the highest resoltuion, packing 33 million pixels onto the 88-inch display. To put that into persective, it is sixteen times more than Full HD (1920x1080) and four times more than Ultra HD (3840x2160).
To increase the resolution of the display it is necessary to reduce the size of each pixel and in turn aperture ratio, which results in a reduction of brightness. However, self-emissive OLEDs are less affected by aperture ratio and so are optimal for higher resolution.
By contrast, an LCD display would need improved backlights to compensate for the drop in brightness, increasing material cost and power consumption.
OLED displays also remain comparatively light when the resolution is kicked up, whereas LCD screens can be anticipated to increase in weight.
"The successful development of the world's first 8K OLED display is a milestone for the 8K era and underscores the exciting potential of OLED," said In-Byung Kang, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at LG Display.
Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter can be hit with fines of up to €50 million if they fail to remove 'hate speech' in Germany.
The Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) has been in effect since October last year, but there has been a grace period up until now. Under the law, social networks face fines of up to €50 million for failing to remove posts that contain 'hate speech' within 24 hours.
For 'complex cases', the networks have up to seven days to comply.
The law has prompted concerns about censorship in Germany and throughout Europe, with critics worrying about the impact on free speech and the potential for content being removed accidentally. The task could also be staggering for social media platforms to comply with.
Germany is not the only country that is pushing social networks to do more about certain types of content on their networks.
The past two years have been good for retro gamers. First, we got NES Classic Edition from Nintendo back in 2016. In 2017, arrived SNES Classic. And now, probably the biggest legend of them all, Commodore 64 is making a return.
Google just updated its free (and ad-free) file manager for Android devices, Files Go.
Just as 
