Xpertfeed

Summary: Rocky times at Cyanogen turn for the worse. The open source project and source code will remain available, but there will be no more nightly builds. Cyanogen late Friday  announced  all services and nightly builds will be discontinued no later than December 31.  The open source project and source code will remain available for personal development. The move, "part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen," comes after it named a new CEO and laid off a huge portion of its staff. While it once wanted to offer a better version of Android, Cyanogen will now focus on building Android OS "mods" for OEMs. Owners of smartphones running Cyanogen OS, like the OnePlus One, will have to  switch  to the CyanogenMod ROM. As TechCrunch  points out , this isn't a commercial OS, rather managed by a community of developers. We have reached out to the Cyanogen folks to learn more about its future with the latest LineageOS.

Summary: Remote code execution bugs in Apport, an Ubuntu Linux default file handler, has opened a door to attacks and crashes. Donncha O'Cearbhaill, an Irish security researcher, found a  remote execution bug in Ubuntu . This security hole, which first appeared in Ubuntu 12.10, makes it possible for malicious code to be injected into your system when you open a booby-trapped file. This can be used to crash your system or run malware. It does not -- a small blessing -- enable attackers to become the root user. Apport in turn generates a crash file with the unusual ".crash" extension and a  magic byte  sequence.  Magic bytes are the unique sequences  meant to identify a file. For example, a PDF document without a PDF extension can still be identified as PDF by its hexadecimal magic byte sequence: "25 50 44 46."O'Cearbhaill found that Ubuntu will open any unknown file with  Apport  if it begins with "ProblemType: ". Apport is Ubuntu's ...

Summary: This year was a big one for Microsoft, across the company, in expanding its AI footprint. Microsoft officials talked up the company's momentum across its various AI projects and initiatives at its AI day in San Francisco on December 13. A week ago, word leaked that Microsoft was providing early access to users on Kik to Zo. Zo is a successor to Microsoft's ill-fated Tay.ai chatbot, which the company revoked shortly after its launch earlier this year after users got it to spew racist, hate-filled comments. Users last week found Zo to be a lot more limited and locked down than Tay, which is unsurprising given how quickly Tay spiraled out of control. Microsoft officials said today there are already 115,000 Zo.ai users, just a week after its unofficial soft launch.In September this year, Microsoft created a combined AI and research group of about 5,000 people under the direction of Executive Vice President Harry Shum. Today, Microsoft took the wraps off a...

Summary: Workers spend a quarter of their day dealing with email, making it the second most time consuming activity in their jobs. A new app aims to streamline our inboxes. In 2015, people sent and received more than 205 billion emails each day. It is hard to wade through the deluge of emails to focus on what is important to you. Artificial intelligence startup  Notion  thinks it can solve your communications overload. Notion's neural network was built to "positively impact the way we manage our relationships through emails."It analyzes the history of your relationship with each person and gives insights for that relationship to help you manage your email. The cloud based AI analyzes the relationships behind communications and predicts what is important to you. It claims to have over 95 percent accuracy. The AI learns which emails you are most likely to remove from your inbox and groups emails together. As you scroll through your inbox, less important emails...

Summary: Top analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that the iPhone 8 could break sales records set by the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in 2015. According to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, it's OLED displays, an all-glass design, and wireless charging. In a note to clients, Kuo predicts that the iPhone 8 will kick off an "unprecedented replacement demand" resulting in 120 to 150 million units being shifted during the second half of 2017, beating the approximately 120 million record that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus set for the second half of 2015. Much of this demand, claims Kuo, will be driven by a new high-end iPhone 8 that features a new design, low-energy OLED display, and other "notably superior specifications" that will differentiate it from the "less exciting" 4.7- and 5.5-inch iPhone handsets. Kuo sees two drivers: Our rationale is as follows:  (1) the OLED model may trigger replacement demand among high-end users given its complet...