Xpertfeed

  It's time to update all of your iOS devices. Apple on Monday held an event, where it announced several new services. One of those services, Apple News Plus, launches  alongside the release of iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4. Apple also announced Apple Card, a credit card that lives inside Apple Pay, a new Apple TV app for users to subscribe to individual channels, and Apple TV Plus, the company's subscription service for original programming. Shortly after the event ended, Apple released iOS 12.1 for iOS devices and the changelog reveals the update includes more than just Apple News Plus. Some of the highlights included the ability to use Siri on your iPhone to play a video or show on an Apple TV. There are four new Animoji -- an owl, boar, giraffe, and shark. Also included are improvements to Apple Pay Cash, and the ability to multitask while AirPlaying a video from an iOS device to an AirPlay device without interrupting the audio or video stream. You can read through the  ...

  Google’s upcoming Android version, currently referred to only as Android Q, will arrive later this summer with a trove of privacy enhancements. Details about these new additions have been revealed earlier this week after Google published  blog posts  and  new Android support pages  for Android Q following the release of a first beta version earlier this week. Below are all the privacy-focused features that are expected to land in the stable version of Android Q at the end of August. Access to clipboard data Android apps can no longer access the Android operating system’s clipboard data unless they are in focus (running in the foreground aka on screen). Apps can access clipboard data while in the OS background if they are also the default input method editor (IME) –aka the default keyboard apps. MAC address randomization on by default Google introduced  MAC address  randomization  in Android 6.0 , but devices broadcast a random MAC addr...

  Google, along with researchers at Stanford University and Brown University, have extended the open-source Snorkel tool to make it industrial-strength for enterprise machine learning. The work points the way to a path beyond traditional data integration. There's always been a rich market for software tools that clean up enterprise data and integrate it to make it more useful. With the mantra that "data is the new oil," there is more than ever a very good sales pitch to be made by vendors large and small, from Oracle to Talend. But what if nothing needed to be cleaned up, per se? What if, instead, the most valuable parts of the data could be transferred, in a sense, into machine learning models, without altering the data itself? That notion is implied by a new technology introduced Thursday by Google's AI team, in conjunction with Brown University and Stanford University. The code, which goes by the somewhat ungainly name "Snorkel DryBell," builds on top of ...

  5G is not the be all and end all, Cisco has said, with Wi-Fi 6 needed to enable indoor coverage and nano-satellites necessary for ensuring the entire world is connected. With 90 percent of the world's landmass and 3.7 billion people still without access to connectivity, Cisco Australia and New Zealand CTO Kevin Bloch has argued that while 5G is the hottest buzzword, nano-satellites are what is really needed right now. "Nobody here is going to benefit from 5G yet, and it's going to take a long time, because the speed on 4G is pretty good right now already," Bloch told at Cisco Live 2019 in Melbourne. "There might be a very small percentage of consumers who may want to ... buy the latest and greatest gadget, [but] 5G handsets will cost a lot more for only an incremental speed increase." On the other hand, Cisco is currently helping a lot of farmers in Australia who have no access to connectivity. "Yeah, the NBN is going to swing around, but there's ...

  Thanks to the rise of streaming, Samsung is discontinuing its Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray player lines. That's lousy news for people who love older TV shows and movies. Over 10 years ago,  Samsung   released the first commercial Blu-ray video disc player. Within a few years, Samsung and other Blu-ray OEMs had defeated their rival HD DVD manufacturers. They were set to dominate the video world. Then,   streaming came along   and everything changed. Blu-ray is dead. It's not often that an industry's leading OEM quits, but that's what Samsung has done. Samsung had 37 percent of the market, followed by Sony at 31 percent and LG at 13 percent, according to market research firm  NPD Group . On Amazon, Samsung had four of Amazon's  10 best-selling Blu-ray players  including the most popular model. With its demise, Blu-ray follows Laserdisc, BetaMax, and VHS VCRs into the second-hand stores. DVDs may soon follow. Ted Sarandos,  Netflix 's longtime head ...

  The hacker this time is selling an additional 93 million user records from eight companies on a Dark Web marketplace. The hacker who earlier stole and posted data of close to 750 million users of various popular websites on a Dark Web marketplace has now put up the third set of nearly 93 million hacked databases for sale. According to a report on popular news website late Sunday, the hacker this time is selling an additional 93 million user records from eight companies, including GfyCat which is a popular GIF hosting and sharing platform. "The hacker is selling each database individually on Dream Market. Together, all eight are worth 2.6249 bitcoin, which amounts to roughly $9,400," said the report. The stolen information mainly includes account holders' names, email addresses and passwords. The hacker, who goes by the name Gnosticplayers, earlier posted a batch of 16 websites containing the data of 620 million users and a second batch of eight portals with the data of ...

  Russia's internet contingency plan gets closer to reality. Russian authorities and major internet providers are planning to disconnect the country from the internet as part of a planned experiment, Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK) reported last week. The reason for the experiment is to gather insight and provide feedback and modifications to a proposed law introduced in the Russian Parliament in December 2018. A first draft of the law mandated that Russian internet providers should ensure the independence of the Russian internet space (Runet) in the case of foreign aggression to disconnect the country from the rest of the internet. In addition, Russian telecom firms would also have to install "technical means" to re-route all Russian internet traffic to exchange points approved or managed by Roskomnazor, Russia's telecom watchdog. Roskomnazor will inspect the traffic to block prohibited content and make sure traffic between Russian users stays inside th...

  Right now   Microsoft   is flourishing. The rejuvenated giant is in the race to be technology’s most valuable company and (quite rightly) there is widespread praise for Satya Nadella’s leadership. But Windows 7 owners are about to learn this new lean and mean Microsoft still knows how to make unpopular decisions…   Despite its massive popularity, Microsoft has no plans to extend support of Windows 7 past January 2020. That is unless you pay a new annual fee which will double in price every year. Citing partners and having obtained screen grabs of pricing, reveals Microsoft will charge Windows 7 Pro users $50 for the first year of additional support, $100 for the second year and $200 for the third year. Windows Enterprise volume licensing customers will pay half these rates, but the cost of maintaining a lot of PCs will get very expensive very quickly. Furthermore, there’s no point opting in late. If you only join in the second year, you still have to pay for t...

  Japan is cracking down on vulnerable   IoT   devices.   Japanese government recently approved a law amendment that will enable government workers to hack into people's Internet of Things devices as part of a survey. The outlet says that employees of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) will be carrying out this survey starting next month under the supervision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.  Over 200 million IoT devices for both in-home and enterprise use will be tested, starting with routers and web cameras. Default passwords and password dictionaries are all fair game to hack into Japanese consumers' IoT devices, as NICT employees compile a list of insecure devices that authorities and Internet service providers can access to send alert notifications to consumer and take steps to secure the devices. “Russian nation-state hackers deployed the Olympic Destroyer malware before the opening ceremony of...

  Old school but effective, hackers are shifting aware from in-your-face ransomware to attacks that are much more subtle. Trojan malware attacks against business targets have rocketed in the last year, as cyber criminals alter their tactics away from short-term gain and in-your-face ransomware attacks towards more subtle, long-term campaigns with the aim of stealing information including banking information, personal data and even intellectual property. Figures from security company Malwarebytes Labs  in a new report  suggest that trojan and backdoor attacks have risen to become the most detected against businesses – and the number of trojan attacks has more than doubled in the last year, increasing by 132 percent between 2017 and 2018, with backdoors up by 173 percent. Malwarebytes classifies trojans and backdoors separately, describing  a trojan  as a program "that claim to perform one function but actually do another", Meanwhile, a  backdoor  is def...