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  AI-f

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 so far has been mixed. O

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 Zoho. The

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