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Samsung's has an upgrade program for smartphones, incidentally just like the one Apple has, for a while now. However, the company seems to have wanted a more comprehensive hold on their customers, and they've now introduces a new Access program.

Uncovered by the good folks at xda-developers, Samsung seems to have quietly added a new type of subscription service to their portfolio.

Samsung Access is a subscription service that allows you to every now and then switch to a new smartphone without having to pay for it separately. The service works similarly to Samsung Upgrade Program but has some new additions that might tempt you in.

It comes with Microsoft 365 subscription and 1 TB of cloud storage. This means that you can access Microsoft's wide variety of apps in Office Suite, including the likes of Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Teams. Another benefit is Samsung Premium Care, which allows the user to replace a broken phone for a $99 deductible up to three times a year.

Currently Samsung Access seems to be available only for the S20 family and starts at $37 a month for regular S20 and climbs up to $48 for the Ultra.

While HP isn't the one name you come up with when discussing VR, the company has been challenging more committed VR companies for some time now.

Their initial claim for VR fame was HP WMR that was released in 2017 but they stepped it up last year by introducing Reverb headset with visuals and features.

Now the company has come out with their newest VR headset. The second-gen Reverb, the Reverb G2. The company claims it offers the best resolution in a VR headset of this type, although it doesn't improve upon the predecessor.

Reverb G2 provides 2K resolution for both eyes like the originals Reverb, but they've improved upon the lenses which should provide much clearer picture.

It's been developed in cooperation with both Valve and Microsoft to seemlessly integrate with VR systems, including SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality. This should make it a better fit for both platforms.

The size of the displays are 2.89 inches with a resolution of 2160 x 2160 and a refresh rate of 90 hz. The headset, also like it's predecessor, supports six degrees of freedom but is now tracked with four cameras mounted on the headset instead of two.

Microsoft has yesterday announced that its long-awaited Windows 10 v2004 update has been given the green light.

While the May update, as they like to call it, includes numerous improvements, new features, and security buffs, one of the most anticipated upgrades is definitely the ability reset the operating system without using a local media.

Yes, Microsoft has officially released the cloud reinstall feature that it has been teasing us about. Reset this PC now has two options one of which is cloud download alongside local reinstall.

Obviously this requires an internet connection, and for the sake of it not taking longer than the same process in the nineties it should be fairly fast.

Windows reinstall was a meme before memes were even cool, and although Microsoft have reduced the pain of having to reset your computer over the years, this new feature can't come fast enough.

The update also includes an improved Windows Hello, new and improved Microsoft Edge browser, Cortana search with text, new DirectX features, WSL 2 for developers, and much more.

Windows 10 v2004 roll-out has begun but it might take days of even weeks for it to land on your device. You can check whether you are the lucky recipient by going to your Windows Update section and hitting Check for updates.

The United States President has attacked the social media after Twitter added the first fact check link to his tweet. President Trump threatened to regulate or even close social media if there isn't action to make them a better home for conservatives.

This comes after Trump tweeted about mail-in ballots being a hotbed for fraud. This was the first tweet by the president that was marked by Twitter for fact check link.

This linked to a custom Twitter page which highlighted opposing views to Trump's, headlined by the likes of CNN and other sources Trump probably considers "fake news."

Regulations on social media have been a hot topic for years now. Even the social media themselves don't know what to think. Many times they've welcomed regulation since it would make it easier for them to do business.

Facebook and Twitter often come on different sides of this issue, and this case was no different. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg made a statement that they wouldn't have acted in the way Twitter did.

Facebook CEO told Fox News that he doesn't think social media companies, or more specifically platforms, should not act as an arbiter of truth.

OnePlus has become one of the larger smartphone manufacturer, and for its size it has managed to gain significant momentum in the Android space. However, it all started in 2014 with an aggressive campaign that promised flagship killer specs for less than half the price.

Now years later, things are very different. Biannual price hikes mean that the current OnePlus flagship costs around $900, three times as much as the OnePlus One (pictured). However, the company has promised it hasn't forgotten where it initially started from.

In an interview with Fast Company, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau has confirmed that they are working on a more affordable smartphone to accompany this years OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro. Not many details are shared about the product, but it should arrive soon in India and later this year in Europe and the United States.

This will be the first time since OnePlus has taken the approach since OnePlus X in 2015, when even their flagships were still very cheap. According to the rumors, the new affordable phone will be called OnePlus Z, which would make it seem definitely like a successor to the first cheaper OnePlus phone.

As subscription services have become a mainstay in everything from music, movies, games and more, providers are trying to tempt everyone to join their monthly billed services.

Most companies offer some sort of starter perk, usually a free or discounted membership for months, others, namely Netflix, are promising to kick you off the service is you are too inactive. Wait, what?!

Yes, you read that right. Netflix has announced that it will start contacting inactive users whether they'd like to cancel their service, and if they don't answer, they'll just go ahead, kick them off the platform and say goodbye to their income.

The company's product innovations director Eddy Wu has announced in a press release that they will start asking members that haven't watched anything for a year whether they'd like to cancel their subscription.

Nice approach from Netflix, who acknowledge according to the press release that nobody wants to pay for a service they don't use. According to Wu, these account represent around half a percentage of total subscribers and are "already factored into our financial guidance."

Yes, you read the headline right. The 8-bit computer back from 1980s is still very much alive. Sold mostly in Japan and in various European countries back in the day, the MSX hobbyist are making sure that the MSX will be relevant, also in 2020s.

So, to bring the almost 40 year old computer to modern times, there's now Instagram client for it: instagr8. Software itself works on both, the original MSX standard (dubbed nowadays often as MSX1) and on more modern MSX2 computers. As one might expect, the picture quality of Instagram photos is much better when used on MSX2 computers.

Here's a short demo of the software, running on original MSX1:

MSX1 specs aren't exactly top notch nowadays: mere 3.52MHz CPU (or, in modern terms: 0.00352GHz) and with 25kb of free RAM memory to run your own software. To make up this shortfall, most of the code itself has been shifted to server-side processing. Basically, the proxy server in between does most of the heavy lifting and converts the image to be better suited for the ancient computer model. But nevertheless, the project is quite awesome, as you can see from the videos here!

instagr8 is open source project and its code can be found from itse official Github page. As MSX1 standard doesn't include any form of network connectivity, the software also requires a cartridge called GR8NET that adds HTTP layer, network connectivity and more to the MSX1 device.

Microsoft's feeling towards open source community have taken a full U-turn during the past couple of years. Most notably, company acquired the beloved GitHub back in 2018.

Besides acquiring GitHub, Microsoft has also realized its own importance in history of technology and has open-sourced several of its historic products. Most notably, company released the source codes of MS-DOS operating system back in 2018.

Now, the trend continues, as Microsoft has decided to release the source codes for GW-BASIC, the BASIC programming language intepreter that originally shipped with MS-DOS 2.0, back in 1983. Intepreter has been developed with 8088 assembly, meaning that in order to tinker with it, you need to know assembly - not high-level programming languages, like C or Java. But the source is there, so anyone can get it and start developing even better BASIC intepreter, if they feel like it. And of course, the source code is available through GitHub. Obviously.

COVID-19 has been destructive on both the health of people of the world as well as the health of most economies. Obviously some have gotten it worse than other, and this is true in both realms.

In business, not many businesses have had it harder than the airline industry, and, as we all know, Zoom has become the new Kleenex of video conferencing. Merging financial data from these companies brings us to a very interesting tidbit.

An infographic shared on Twitter expands upon the market cap difference of Zoom and seven of the largest airlines. According to it, Zoom has outgrown all seven combined with $47.47 billion.

The largest of the airlines is Southwest with a market cap of $14.68 billion and it's followed by Delta at $12 billion, United at $6 billion, as well as IAG (including British Airways), Lufthansa, American Airlines and Air France with peanuts.

Figures have been calculated using May 15 stock prices, and even though Zoom's stock has gone up, so have the airlines, and they've overtaken Zoom eve so slightly.

At the time of writing this the combined value of the seven airlines is at just over $53 billion while Zoom's market cap is a pitiful 48.45 billion.

Although Zoom's rise has been impressive one wouldn't expect competition between Zoom and seven largest airlines to last much longer as travel rules are loosening.

Nintendo of America has filed two lawsuits targeting products that circumvent the technological protection measures of its Nintendo Switch devices.

It filed two lawsuits last week in the United States. One lawsuit filed in Los Angeles targets the operator of a website called UberChips, while a second lawsuit filed in Seattle targets anonymous defendants from numerous different websites.

At the core of the complaint are mod products created by the group Team Xecuter. In the lawsuits, Nintendo described the infringing products as providing an "unauthorized operating system." This OS circumvents the device's protection against unauthorized access and copying.

Makers of video game console devices tend to use systems that prevent or limit the running of third-party software. This prevents the devices from being tricked into running pirated copies of video games or to do other things like interfering with a running video game for the purposes of cheating and unauthorized modifications.

These systems can be breached by hardware or software modifications once a weakness is found. Team Xecuter is one group that has long developed modchips and tools that enable the modification of software and hardware video game devices, enabling them to execute what would otherwise be restricted.

The media personality, stand-up comic, UFC commentator and perhaps nowadays most importantly podcast host Joe Rogan has shared a huge announcement on Instagram. The host of Joe Rogan Experience has announced that the show will be soon on Spotify.

What's crazier, after the initial move on September 1 to Spotify in addition to other channels, JRE will become Spotify exclusive starting at some point late in the year. No more YouTube videos of JRE, except for short clips he assures are to stay on Google's video platform.

Both audio and video versions of JRE will be moved to Spotify only but Rogan made it clear in the post that Spotify will have no editorial control, he's not an employee of Spotify, and the show will remain free as always. No changes to the show are expected, except for the platform it is hosted on.

There's no word on how large of a purse full of gold coins the Swedish streaming giant had to offer Rogan in order to secure the licensing deal but it must be an all-time most influential move on the podcast market.

Joe Rogan Experience guests this year alone have included Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Robert Downey Jr. and host of other high-profile experts, comics, leaders, actors and other guests.

Ten years ago Markus "Notch" Persson founded the gaming studio Mojang and after a year Minecraft was released. After years and years of breaking records Microsoft bought the company, and the game with it, for $2.5 billion.

Everyone knows the game and it has become a social phenomenon in the nearly 10 years it's been around. More importantly it has continued to evolve and lure in new players.

Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Minecraft has never been in a better spot, and the main man of Microsoft might have been right.

Now Minecraft is celebrating a milestone no game has ever come even close to. The game has sold an unbelievable 200 million copies.

To give this achievement some perspective, the second-most sold game in history is GTA V with 120 million units and Minecraft has sold twice as many copies as the legandary Tetris at 100 million. And Minecraft is definitely not done selling, either.

Just recently, Mojang updated the graphics of Minecraft and now includes support for ray tracing.

To celebrated the milestone, Mojang has been renamed Mojang Studios, which encompasses all the studios. Also, the company received a brand new logo, that you can see above and is introduced in the video below.

The squabble between Huawei and the U.S. government has continued for years now, and there seems to be no end to it. the most recent changes to government rules renew existing restrictions and add some new ones.

Trump admin has added another three months to the Huawei ban, meanwhile also extending the exceptions to this rule. This means that there won't be Android on Huawei phones at least for another three months, and probably for the foreseeable future.

The exceptions that allow some specific cases, like some companies building networks in the U.S., to still do business with the Chinese company will remain in place. However, bipartisan pressure might make this the last extension.

Both aisles seem to believe that Huawei's connections with the Chinese government indeed endanger national security.

The most important part of the new rules are however, well, the new rules. These include a required license from all companies that are selling American-owned technology to Huawei.

Due to this the Taiwanese semiconductor powerhouse TSMC, who's been providing most of Huawei's smarpthone chips, has to acquire a license to continue manufacturing for Huawei. That hasn't happened, at least yet, and thus TSMC has had to halt production.

Apple is reopening more of its stores in the U.S. and Canada but it taking extra precautions to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

The Cupertino giant had closed all of its Apple stores worldwide in April as the world responded to a wave of COVID-19 cases. Now that the pandemic seems to be slowing in many places, Apple is responding in line with local circumstances and orders in reopening its retail stores.

According to reports, 25 stores are reopening next in California, Washington, Florida, Colorado, Hawaii and Oklahoma. However, it is not business as usual. For starters, all staff at the stores will be wearing face masks and all customers are expected to wear masks or face coverings too. If customers do not have a mask, they will be provided with one.

Additionally, customers may have their temperature checked and be posted health questions will screen for those with symptoms -- like cough or fever -- or who have had recent exposure to someone infected with COVID‑19. Overall level of service will depend on the status of the virus locally, so in some places there may be only pick up service. Stores may close just as quickly as they opened if circumstances change too.

Multiple reports of compromised high-performance computer systems across Europe surfaced in the past week, and clues may indicate a single actor behind the breaches.

Supercomputer systems are energy-hungry high-performance number crunchers that are used for everything from weather pattern modelling to simulating protein folding. That same raw calculation power can be used for mining cryptocurrencies, and cases have happened in the past where employees have been busted running unauthorized mining operations on HPCs.

Reports out of Europe last week suggests that for the first time hackers have successfully breached multiple HPCs and clusters to run a mining application. Last Monday, the ARCHER supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh was was shut down while a security exploitation was investigated. The same day, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, the bwHPC organization shut down five of its HPC clusters due to similar incidents.

Furthermore, later last week similar incidents was reported in Germany, in Barcelona, and also in Zurich. None of the organizations managing the systems gave detailed accounts of the breaches, but the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) for the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) provided malware samples and network compromise indicators from the multiple incidents.