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...

Summary: Thanksgiving and Black Friday are delivering record online sales and a lot of that traffic is being delivered via smartphones and tablets. Black Friday and Thanksgiving shoppers increasingly relied on the small screen as mobile traffic dominated online sales, according to data compiled from various sources. Adobe reported that online sales hit a record $3.34 billion on Black Friday. According to ChannelAdvisor , 68.2 percent of Thanksgiving Day e-commerce traffic came via a smartphone. Toss in tablets and 77.8 percent of traffic on Thanksgiving came via a mobile device. And perhaps the biggest wrinkle is that mobile orders outpaced computer orders. Fifty-three percent of orders were driven through a mobile device. Mobile devices still struggled to deliver sales conversions (2.1 percent for smartphones), but traffic delivered the numbers, according to ChannelAdvisor. Walmart's mobile traffic was more than 70 percent of its Black Friday total, said ChannelAdvis...

Summary:  After banning dedicated fake news sites, Facebook must still explore alternative With Hillary Clinton having been favored by most pollsters to win the presidential election, there has been no shortage of soul searching and finger pointing by her backers. One target of  the blame game has been Facebook , which Clinton supporters have accused of keeping Trump supporters in an echo chamber of partisan and  fake news . These news items may have been driven by politics or simply profit by unscrupulous clickbaiters. But whatever the reasons behind them, fake news is a big problem that Facebook needs to address. On the other hand, he believes the company  must do more to ferret out fake news stories  including the  outright banning of dedicated fake news sites . Still, while the Facebook CEO admits that some stories are just outright fabrications, others have some elements of truth or are subject to interpretation.Mark Zuckerberg's reaction...

Summary: The Australian government is hoping to bolster the appeal of a career in cybersecurity by launching Academic Centres of Cyber Security Excellence . The federal government has announced it will be launching Academic Centres of Cyber Security Excellence in the hope of improving Australia's cybersecurity through education and research. For a cost of AU$4.5 million, the government expects the centres will help address Australia's shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals. Pointing to a survey released on Tuesday that found two-thirds of Australian young adults had never discussed a career in cybersecurity at high school, Tehan said Australia needs to work harder to encourage future employment in the sector as there is a growing demand for cybersecurity professionals.In a joint statement, Education Minister Simon Birmingham and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Cyber Security Dan Tehan said the centres will produce work-ready graduates to increase...

Zarget, a conversion rate optimisation and marketing automation software company, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India. Zarget, a SaaS company that provides web optimisation and marketing automation tools, has secured $6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Accel and Matrix Partners contributing to the round. This brings the total amount raised by the startup to $7.5 million. The latest round of funding will help  Zarget  scale its products and take on global competitors such as Optimizely. Four months after the launch of its platform, Zarget has attracted more than 1,000 customers in 10 countries, including Landesk in the US, BizTalk360 in the UK, and Buscape in Brazil. The startup was founded in 2015 by three ex-Zoho employees Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat, and Santhosh Kumar, who spent a decade building business productivity tools and customer relationship management software at Zoh...

Summary:  After building up the capabilities of its ID Graph, Oracle is making the tool a direct part of its Audience Builder UI. For more than a year, Oracle has been building up the capabilities of ID Graph, a tool in the Oracle Data Cloud that helps marketers understand consumer behavior across channels. On Wednesday, Oracle announced it's putting ID Graph directly into the hands of marketers with an enhanced version of Audience Builder, the user interface within the Oracle Data Management Platform. The updated Audience Builder makes it easier for customers to manage and select certain types of customer identities, in order to analyze audiences based on the device or platform within which the ID was created. "In the past, you weren't really able to manage all of these different identities and where they were going," Oracle senior product marketing manager Karen Kokiko. "Marketers knew customers were making these journeys across devices... A consume...

Summary: Hackers targeted the tech companies as recently as February 2016, but Foursquare denied a breach. Another day, another hack. Weebly and Foursquare are the latest in a long line of tech companies under scrutiny for their security practices. On Thursday, breach notification site LeakedSource posted details of the attacks  in a blog post  explaining what happened. More than 43.4 million accounts were stolen in the attack, thought to have been carried out in February. According to a sample of the data, each record in this mega breach contains a username, email address, password, and IP address. Stolen passwords were stored with bcrypt, a strong system for scrambling passwords. In a statement, the company confirmed the breach. "At this point we do not have evidence of any customer website being improperly accessed," said a spokesperson. "We do not store any full credit card numbers on Weebly servers, and at this time we're not aware that any cr...

Summary:  Details of a new Windows 10 Paint app have leaked ahead of Microsoft's supposed all-in-one Surface (Surface studio) launch later this month. Microsoft has been working on a major refresh of its Paint app for Windows, which introduces support for 3D objects, stickers, and other tools for creatives. A  video demonstration  and  tutorial  for the new Paint, found by Twitter user WalkingCat, details a complete overhaul and new features to support 3D creation,  sharing 3D designs with a community  of artists, and stickers. The new app is currently only available to invited alpha testers but it may get a wider showing at Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 event on October 26,  according to  Windows enthusiast site Thurrot.com. Microsoft watchers expect the company will unveil an all-in-one Surface PC and a possible Surface keyboard and mouse. The tutorial video shows new painting tools that support pen and touchscreen...

Summary:  Six days after delivering a failed Windows 10 update, Microsoft has offered a fix-it script and an explanation. Six days after it delivered a cumulative update that failed to install on some users' PCs, Microsoft has released a fix-it tool. In an email statement, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the update, which tries to install and then rolls back repeatedly, affects PCs that previously ran a build delivered through the Windows Insider Program and were later switched to the public Current Branch release. " We became aware of an issue with the recent Windows 10 cumulative update that impacted a small number of customers in the Windows Insider Program that were running a previous build of the OS. We have created a solution to resolve this issue, which is now live and can be accessed  here ." That link goes to the  Windows 10 1607 (RS1) Script fix to unblock update for Insider , a Microsoft Installer file that makes the same changes I desc...

Summary: G oogle has rolled-out new data-saving features targeting Android and Chrome users on slower mobile networks. Google's News and Weather app for Android is getting a new Lite mode, designed to save bandwidth for users on slower connections. The new Lite mode will do away with some of the extras found in the normal mode, while cutting images and other content to the bare essentials. Google says Lite will use less than a third of the data of normal mode. Besides saving on summary news information within the app, Lite mode also automatically optimizes the webpages that are opened. Google's  has said in the past  this feature helps load pages four times faster and use 80 percent less data. Lite mode will automatically detect when a device is on a slower network, or it can be manually set to always on or always off. The new mode is  rolling-out  this week to users in India, where mobile networks are largely 2G and 3G, and will arrive in Brazil, I...

Summary:  Microsoft's coming Skype Teams service may be available for beta testing by November. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and Microsoft are partnering on new training courses. Microsoft may be aiming to deliver a beta version of its  Skype Teams service  -- its intended Slack competitor -- by November, according to a new report. Sams' sources also said Skype Teams will likely be available as part of the various Office 365 business plans, and it will be integrated with other Office 365 services. Given there's also a free tier of Slack, I wonder whether Microsoft may opt for a freemium model, as it has with a number of its existing services, and offer an entry-level free version of Skype Teams with options to upgrade to unlock more features.Brad Sams of Petri.com provided an update this week from his sources on  what's happening with Skype Teams . Sams said Skype Teams has been under development for 18 months and that it's currently in private testing. An expan...

Summary: Google continues to make Google Maps more sophisticated, as Apple, Uber, and others work on their own mapping capabilities Google has acquired the two-year old startup Urban Engines to incorporate its location-based analytics into Google Maps. "Location analytics is an important focus for both Urban Engines and Google, and we're excited to combine forces to help organizations better understand how the world moves," said Urban Engines in a blog post . Google Maps has been improving and expanding its functionality, as Apple and other companies like Uber bolster their own mapping capabilities. Jen Fitzpatrick, who leads the Google Maps team, told Business Insider that they're trying to build "the richest, deepest, most detailed understanding of the real world that's ever existed". That includes incorporating the sort of rich traffic data that Urban Engines collects and...

Summary: Microsoft's late October hardware launch this year may be as much about its partners' Windows 10 devices as much as its own Surface-branded ones, sources say. Microsoft is holding a fall hardware launch in late October, where I'm hearing it will take the wraps off a Surface-branded device, which some of the contacts are saying is known as "Cardinal".(I don't know if "Cardinal" is a codename or a final name. I'm betting codename.) I've heard that Surface Cardinal could be positioned as a product that can turn your desk into "a studio". My bet: Cardinal is the rumored Surface All-in-One device running Windows 10, which may come in  one, two, and/or three different screen sizes (21, 24 ,or 27) , as first reported by Windows Central. This may be  the consumer-focused version of Microsoft's Surface Hub , as Windows Central speculated, using the Perceptive Pixel screen technology that's at the core of Surface Hub...

Summary: The delay comes amid a handful of reports of exploding batteries in the flagship device. Samsung is delaying shipments of the Galaxy Note 7 to conduct more quality control testing, the company  confirmed  to Reuters. The company did not elaborate on why it needs to conduct more quality testing on the new, large-screen flagship device, which has been available in the US since Aug. 19. However, the delay comes amid scattered  reports  of instances in which the battery of the device apparently exploded. While less concerning, there have also been some reports of substandard performance, and Matthew Miller reported on his experience with lag and performance issues. After performing a hard reset, though, Miller reported having a "flawless" experience with the phone. The Note 7, which features an improved curved glass design, water resistance, microSD expansion card, and usability improvements, has received largely rave reviews. D...