Google has partnered with several security firms in forming a group that aims to detect and prevent malware-laden apps from getting onto the Play Store.
There are currently more than 2.5 billion Android devices in the wild. Most get their apps from Google's Play Store. While Google does have systems in place to find malicious apps and prevent them from being published to the service, some do slip through the cracks from time to time.
In order to fight back, Google has announced the App Defense Alliance. Its members include ESET, Google, Lookout, and Zimperium. Google's Play Protect detection systems will be integrated with the partner's scanning engines.
Apps queued for publishing will face intense scrutiny from the technologies of each member of the alliance. Their systems use a combination of machine learning and static/dynamic analysis to detect abusive behavior. Google's position is that more eyes are better for detecting problems ahead of time.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced when the company will show off its electric pickup truck.
Musk previously suggested that Ford's F-150 is a benchmark model for its electric pickup truck, which he says has a "cyberpunk" design. The goal, Musk said at a recent shareholder meeting, is that the Tesla pickup will meet or exceed the abilities of the Ford F-150.
The world will get a look at Tesla's take on an electric pickup on November 21 in Los Angeles. Musk announced the date and location on Twitter.
He went on to tweet that the date was strangely familiar, along with a link to the Opening Titles of the original Blade Runner, which is set in November 2019.
Disney's online streaming service is about to launch, and some of you might have already decided to subscribe, perhaps due to a persuasive deal that was in high demand.
There's going to be tons of stuff straight from day one, as the company has portrayed here in a three-hour marathon trailer spectacular. However, there's one film that will likely bring much more customers their way than all the old Disney cartoons combined.
We're of course talking about the blockbuster of all time, Avengers: Endgame.
It has now been revealed that Disney will release the movie earlier than previously suggested, perhaps to accrue more impressive early numbers for their streaming service. It was suggested earlier that the movie would hit Disney+ roughly a month after the service launched.
Avengers: Endgame joins launch titles, available immediately on November 12, alongside the likes of Star Wars show The Mandalorian and Captain Marvel. This is the case for the US and Canada, as well as the Netherlands.
A criminal investigation resulting from a data center raid almost five years ago has come to a close with no conviction.
In December 2014, police raided a data center in Sweden. The action brought down several major BitTorrent websites and pushed the notorious Pirate Bay offline for around two months. As part of the investigation, police targeted Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij.
Prosecutors reportedly had evidence against Neij, but as of now, the case is formally closed. Under Swedish law, the prosecution needed to reach Neij for "final serving", which gives a defendant a chance to review the evidence in a case.
In the five years since the December 2014 raid, the prosecution failed to reach Neij for final serving, and now the time has run out. The statute of limitations has expired and so no case related to the 2014 raid can be made against him.
"The investigation was closed because the statute of limitations expired," prosecutor Anna Ginner told TorrentFreak.
"The investigation was finished. However, we did not manage to contact the suspect to give him the possibility to review the investigation on final serving."
While the criminal case is now closed, the aftermath of the raid did result in a tug of war over the ThePirateBay.se domain, which ended up in possession of the Swedish state.
In our article series, we're digging into AfterDawn's news archive and looking what happened exactly 20 years ago. This article series also celebrates AfterDawn's 20th anniversary.
So, we're digging into our news archive and trying to figure out what was hot and what was not, back in October, 1999 when our site was only four months old. I'd like to remind you, our readers, that back then, AfterDawn was strictly focused on digital audio and video technologies and reporting events in those genres. More generic "all about tech" arrived to our site much later.
Our first ever stories about cell phones
As said, our focus back then, was strictly with digital audio and video. But the October, 1999 marks the first time in our history that cell phones were mentioned in our news. Looking at our (and everybody else's) news coverage nowadays and it seems that smartphones and related technologies are the thing that nowadays makes the headlines. Things have changed, truly.
Well, anyway, back in October, 1999 we published a press release from a Finnish mobile phone manufacturer. No, not Nokia. But another one, called Benefon. Company had just launched the first-ever GSM phone that had a built-in GPS navigation in it. Pretty revolutionary 20 years ago. It actually took several years until GPS navigation became a commonplace with phones.
Exactly 50 years ago today, on 29th of October, 1969, the first message was sent over something that we nowadays recognize as the Internet. Basically, today marks the date when the first ever message was successfully (more about that later..) was over a long distance computer network.
On 29th of October, 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, a graduate student at the UCLA, tried to send a message to Stanforrd University, to Charley Kline ja Bill Duvall.
Kleinrock tried to send a simple word from UCLA to Stanford: LOGIN.
But as these things go, the terminals crashed before the entire message was sent out.
So, the first message ever sent over the Internet was simply LO.
The team managed to sent the entire LOGIN word about an hour later, but history nowadays remembers mostly the "LO".
After that message, the development of the Internet's predecessor, ARPANET, started taking shape over the upcoming decades, finally, in 1990s, transforming into a mainstream medium that we know as the modern Internet. Nowadays, 29th of October is widely celebrated as the Internet Day.
Apple announced their smart speaker at the WWDC in 2017 in the boom created by Amazon and later Google. However, Apple's first smart home device didn't exactly take the world by storm.
Firstly, its official release date was set for December 2017, which meant that Google managed to get a much stronger hold on the market in the wake of Amazon's Echo speakers.
Secondly, Apple didn't even manage to release it in time, and had to postpone the launch until early 2018. By that time Amazon and Google had shipped tens of millions of devices.
This would seem like one of the products Apple probably should've abandoned completely, after all Siri isn't considered the best assistant to begin with.
Since HomePod's failure, we haven't heard any real news about a successor or any other smart home products.
However, Bloomberg now suggests, that Apple is far from giving up on smart home. In fact, according to their information, Apple is building up a new smart home team altogether.
In addition to Android, Google has a couple other operating systems for different type of devices.
Google has diversified their OS portfolio since the early days of Android by introducing Chrome OS for super-portable and inexpensive laptops as well as Wear OS (formerly Android Wear) for wearables, like smartwatches.
While there are actual Chromebooks by Google, ie. Pixelbook (most recent announced earlier this month), there are no official Google wearables.
For years, in fact at least ever since Android Wear was announced in 2014, we've been waiting for a Pixel watch. Now it might actually become a reality, if new rumors are indeed correct.
According to Reuters, Google – well, Alphabet, to be technically correct – has made an offer to acquire Fitbit, the pioneer of wearable tech.
The information doesn't include acquisition price, and the anonymous source notes that it's not written in stone that the acquisition will go through.
Neither of the companies have commented on the leak.
Fitbit is the leading wearable company in world. It is among the top 5 manufacturers for wearables in addition to Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
There are multitude of ways that you can differentiate Google's and Apple's mobile operating systems from each other. However, there's probably no other issue that is more dramatically in Apple's favor than the software updates.
Obviously Google has a harder time making third-party manufacturers abide by its standards of releasing software updates while Apple only has to update a few smartphone models themselves.
However, it is still amazing how Apple manages to update even the oldest devices to the degree that they do it. At some point, though, you run out of support.
That time is coming for the iPhone 5. If you own the device, and you aren't on iOS 10.3.4 you are soon running out of runway.
According to Apple, on November 3rd the iPhone 5 will go defunct if it isn't updated. After the date updating the phone requires manual restore on iTunes because the App Store and even the web browser stop working.
The problems are caused by GPS time rollover transition which prohibits the the phone to access the internet entirely. The bug is fixed in the iOS 10.3.4 version.
If you are still using an iPhone 5, you've probably already seen the dialog suggesting you update the phone right away.
As anyone familiar with the President's Twitter account knows, the tweets of Donald J. Trump are as controversial as they are all-encompassing.
While the official POTUS account rarely tweets – there's plenty of retweets of Trump himself – the personal account is full of hot takes on everything under the sun.
This time around the President of the United States has decided to give his two cents on the issue of iPhones. Trump and Tim Cook have had plenty of controversy, culminating to perhaps the funniest, most memeable moment of all, Trump calling Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tim Apple.
Now he has decided to give Tim Apple some advice on iPhone user experience. According to the serial tweeter in charge of the country, Apple should bring back the Home button.
Trump's simple tweet states that the button was "FAR better" than swiping. Some people are bound to agree with the President, but it is unlikely that Apple will bring back a feature that takes huge amount of space from the screen.
One aspect about "The Button" Trump might be getting back, though, is the fingerprint sensor. Apple might be thinking of bringing an in-screen fingerprint sensor, now that the technology has advance considerably, which could allow logging in to your phone with a simple press instead of a swipe.
The term WEB-DL relates to online piracy of movies and TV shows. It indicates the original source of the pirated movie or a TV show.
WEB-DL simply means that the pirated material in distribution was originally copied from a web download source, such as from Netflix, Hulu or similar service. As such services use various video resolutions and bitrates, the term itself doesn't tell how good or bad the quality of the pirated video is.
The WEB-DL file has been typically "ripped" or copied from a online streaming service, either by capturing the video file from stream or by copying the offline download of the video, removing its copy protections. As the source material is in a digital format, the original quality is deemed good, depending of the web download resolution and bitrate.
As mentioned, the term WEB-DL itself doesn't indicate what resolution the file is in, so the term is typically associated with another acronym, telling its video resolution. Such terms include 720p and 1080p(=FullHD).
Pirated video files in WEB-DL format are distributed either in their original file format or converted to another file format, depending on person who originally copied the material and his/her preferences for the file. If the video is distributed as-is, in the same format as it was streamed or downloaded, the resulting, distributed file is lossless (compared to the original stream/download), meaning that its quality is 1:1 to the originally downloaded file.
The term HDRip is often used in online video (TV shows, movies) piracy. The term indicates the source of the pirated TV show or a movie.
Term HDRip is used to describe video that has been "ripped" from a HDTV broadcast, by one mean or another. As HDTV broadcasts vary with the used resolution, the term itself doesn't necessarily indicate what resolution the ripped video is in.
"Ripping" process itself means simply a way to copy the material, digitally. In HDRip's case, the "ripping" has been done either by a digital capture card, recording the broadcasted TV show or by, for example, copying the material from a DVR device that has stored it without copyright protection flags. This also means that a digital source has been the source material for the video, meaning that the original material is pretty good / near perfect.
HDRips, however, can be either distributed as-is (in the very same bitrate and resolution as they were ripped in) or by compressing them to another format or smaller resolution. Thus, often, the term HDRip is paired with a term indicating the resolution the video is in, like 720p or
1080p.
You should also check these commonly used acronyms for pirated video material:
Avast has detailed how it prevented a suspected supply chain attack on the popular CCleaner software product.
CCleaner had been targeted in such an attack in 2017 and led to Piriform unknowingly distributing malware with the installer for the better part of a month. Attackers had successfully breached the development environment and made malicious modifications before distribution.
Avast has confirmed that it has prevented a similar incident from occurring. It has detailed "Abiss" in a blog post; a suspected supply chain attack on the CCleaner product. The most important detail is that the attempt was unsuccessful and no users of the product were exposed to malware as a result.
The clues that something was amiss started with a false positive in the form of a MS ATA alert of a malicious replication of directory services from an internal IP belonged to Avast's VPN address range. Further analysis found the attacker was attempting to gain access to the network through the VPN as early as May 14, 2019.
The user, whose credentials were apparently compromised and associated with the IP, did not have domain admin privileges. However, the attacker managed to gain domain admin privileges through a successful privilege investigation.
Today, Elon Musk has send his first tweet using a satellite connection established by his other company, SpaceX. The satellite constellation responsible for delivering the digital messages is called Starlink.
Musk and SpaceX have been working on this literally out of this world technology for a while now. It is a promising step towards getting internet connectivity more cost-efficiently to even the most remote places on Earth.
While the tweet doesn't really say how far away we are from an actual product, it is a recognition that they are able to move data at this point.
SpaceX is planning on launching 12 000 satellites into orbit and furthermore has requested permission for another 30 000. Starlink's mission is to launch a low-cost and high-perfomance internet connectivity that reaches everywhere.
Just a few days ago we told you about an odd behavior in Google Photos, which allowed iPhone users to use the service to their heart's content, for free, a feature that isn't available even to new Google Pixel owners.
Now Google has acknowledged that it is indeed a fact that iPhone users can use Google Photos unlimited backups at original quality for free. But it is not because Google has determined that it can't improve upon the compression of iPhone's HEIC/HEIF photos.
Instead, Google says, it is because there is a bug in the system, Android Police reports. Google has also made clear that it intends to fix the problem.
They haven't, however, states how the issue is to be resolved. One has to imagine, that there's a way for Google to compress the images to save space. Likely it's just a matter of finding the sweet spot of losing detail and managing storage space.
Unfortunately for iPhone users, it is unlikely that Google will let the original quality uploads continue for much longer.
Google has partnered with several security firms in forming a group that aims to detect and prevent malware-laden apps from getting onto the Play Store.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced when the company will show off its electric pickup truck.
Disney's online streaming service is about to launch, and some of you might have already decided to subscribe, perhaps due to 
