Showing posts with label News. Show all posts


Amazon now has its own version of Spotify and it's called Amazon Music Unlimited. The subscription music streaming service is similar to what's offered by Spotify, Apple, Google and all the others. You can instantly stream any song you want on-demand starting at $10 a month but Amazon has a twist on the price. If you are a member of Prime, the monthly fee is knocked down to $8 a month and if you want to go cheaper, there's also a $4 a month option but for that crazy low price, there's a catch. You can only listen to songs on Amazon Echo smart speaker. 

The integration with Echo is the real hook here. Echo's assistant Alexa now understands new voice commands to play songs. You can ask to play a mix of genre or mood bass tracks from a specific decade or year and if you don't know the name of the song, well Alexa can still play it if you can rattle off some of the lyrics. If you're thinking, wait didn't Amazon already have a music service? Well, not exactly. Prime subscribers had access to a limited library of music that was complimentary with a Prime membership but it doesn't have access to many songs.
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According to the Washington Post, Facebook's trending news story algorithm is still serving up fake stories. After a six-week survey, the post found a number of Linked stories that were categorically false, in addition to many links to items that simply weren't news. It seems Facebook still has plenty of work to do.
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It's official: the Galaxy Note 7 is dead. Samsung has finally pulled the plug on the Note 7 with a second recall, telling all owners even those with replacements to shut off the phone and exchange it for a different model. The company has permanently stop production of the premium phone that's prone to catching fire. 

The nightmare of recalling two-and-a-half million phones globally escalated into a mortifying disaster for the brand after so-called safe replacement models also started catching fire. Even though the phone is dead, the drama isn't over yet. Customers now have to deal with the headache of getting refunds or getting carriers to exchange the phone again. 

The whole recall also raises some big questions that Samsung still has to answer. For starters, what is the source of the battery fire malfunction? After the first recall, Samsung pin the blame on a production error from one battery supplier, but there are doubts over that reasoning when safe replacement phone still have the problem even though they had batteries from a different source. Was the rush to produce batteries quickly the cause for more errors at a different factory? There's another layer to the mystery. Several Note 7s phones in China also caught fire even though the Chinese models were said to have batteries from a different supplier. 

For consumers to trust Samsung again, the south Korean company need to break down exactly what went wrong and what steps it is taking to avoid this from happening in the future. There's also a question of how much damage this has done to Samsung financially. Some analysts have estimated to Reuters that it could cost the company as much as 17 billion dollars and then there's the matter of repairing consumer trust. Will Samsung ever make a Note 8 or is this disaster so bad that it won't make anything called a Note again?
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South Africa gets a lot of Sun. So much so that the country is investing in solar powered airports and already has one that's fully operational. George airport in southern South Africa last year became powered entirely by solar energy. According to AFP, this move lowered its carbon dioxide emissions by more than a thousand tons. The hub runs on energy garnered by some two thousand solar panels. These power everything from the atms, restaurants to the check-in desk ans airport control tower. Excess energy is transferred to nearby homes on a local power grid. South Africa is already working on to other solar powered airports elsewhere in the country. The airport is Africa's first to run on solar energy alone and one of only two in the world.
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The U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations during the campaign for the Nov. 8th presidential election. According to Reuters, U.S. officials have said in the past few months that they believe cyber attacks were orchestrated by hackers backed by the Russian government, possibly to disrupt the election. Russia has dismissed allegations it was involved in cyber attacks on the organizations. A statement by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said, "We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." The statement did not blame the Russian government for hacking attempts against state election systems. However, it said "scanning and probing" of those systems originated in most cases from servers operated by a Russian company.
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Samsung has halted production of the ill-fated Galaxy Note 7. An anonymous company official told the Korean Yonhap news agency. After batteries in some Note 7s caught fire following the phones release in August, Samsung issued a global recall last month, but some replacement handsets have reportedly suffered from similar overheating issues.
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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to using samsung phones, we got ourselves another note 7 catching fire. This time on an airplane but the burning battery was actually one of the supposed good replacement phones. Here's how the nightmare situation went down. According to local news reports, a Southwest Airlines flight at Louisville International Airport was getting ready to take off when a passenger Brian Greene powered down his note 7. That's when the phone began making a popping noise and started smoking. He took it out of his pocket threw it on the ground and then the no7 burned through the carpet and smoke seeped into the cockpit leading to the evacuation of the entire flight. At least it was before takeoff. 

Brian Greene's Note 7
The man confirmed to the verge that he got the replacement note 7 on September 21st and he showed a photo of the box that has a black square it indicates the battery supposed to be safe. Samsung is skeptical that it was a new note 7 saying that is working with authorities and southwest to recover the phone and confirm what happened. The problem with Samsung's batteries is not limited to the note 7. Remember last month, a different samsung phone, a galaxy core caught fire in the hands of a six-year-old boy in New York while he was just playing a game on the phone but Samsung has not issued a recall for any other galaxies models. 

Samsung recalled the note 7 worldwide due to the faulty lithium-ion batteries and the Federal Aviation Administration issued an advisory about not using the phone on flights if you get on a plane with a samsung phone, even if it's a replacement note 7, don't be surprised if you get suspicious looks or are told to shut it down because until we know why this guy's phone caught fire, how can you know for sure that replacement phones are safe. 
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Is it time to ditch your Yahoo account? Yahoo reportedly has been spying on its users emails and even wrote a special program for the u.s. government to scan through messages. That alarming report comes from Reuters, warning people to aware of the email scanning program. The report says, Yahoo built this spy software last year and it was designed to search all incoming emails for specific information at the request of the national security agency or the FBI. If this is true, this will be the first time an Internet company agreed to such a request from an intelligence agency by building a program to scan all incoming mail in real time as opposed to just looking at stored messages or scanning select accounts.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Yahoo is not confirming or denying the report, only saying that it complies with the law. Reuters reports that when Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer chose to obey the request instead of fighting it, her chief information security officer quit the company. Of course, this is in contrast to Apples fight with FBI earlier this year when it refused a request to create a program to break into an encrypted iphone. So why didn't Yahoo who fight back? Well, back in 2007, Yahoo did fight back against the government's request and lost. Reuters reported that, Yahoo thought it would lose again and it wasn't worth the fight.

Representatives from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple all said, they never received such a request from US intelligence and if they did, they would fight it. Microsoft also said it never scanned emails in this manner. A problem is that these government requests have gag orders prohibiting the companies involved from revealing to the public that they got the request. So if this Reuters report is accurate, it is likely that the government did ask other tech companies to scan user messages.

Yahoo is still recovering from the world's largest data breach, losing info on half a billion Yahoo users. It happened in 2014, but it was just revealed this month and between the hack and this unsettling surveillance news, hard to imagine Verizon still wants to buy Yahoo with all that baggage and hard to imagine how anyone can still trust Yahoo with their privacy.
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If you use Yahoo in 2014, your login information is likely in the hands of hackers. Yahoo reports that a security breach compromise the login information for at least a half a billion users. Among the stolen information includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birthdays and in some cases unencrypted security questions and answers. If you have not changed your password since 2014, now would be a good time to do so.

Yahoo is prompting affected accounts to change their passwords and those old security questions and answers no longer will work to retrieve your account, because they were part of the data breach but even if you change your password, you still have to worry about identity theft with birthday, phone number and security answers out there and it could also be used to access other accounts on other services.

So who is responsible, Yahoo says it was done by someone paid by a government agency, although which government isn't said. It's always hard to really be sure in these kinds of incidents. The hack was first revealed in august but it's only now after a two-month investigation that we're learning how many accounts were affected.
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