News

Microsoft teases new Sticky Notes feature that supports images

Microsoft’s Sticky Notes, which is the handiest feature for writing down tasks and notes, has been getting a lot of attention since the major overhaul of the app with version 3.0.

Now, Microsoft’s Jen Gentleman has teased a new feature that will allow users to add support for images in Sticky Notes. This feature will be made available to Windows Insiders first most likely in the upcoming update.

What say you? ? #WindowsInsiders pic.twitter.com/FeUdYINvAi

— Jen Gentleman ? (@JenMsft) November 20, 2018

For those unaware, Microsoft had recently rolled out the new syncing feature on iOS and Android via the OneNote app. It also rolled out the new full-on Dark Mode that now use a dark grey background color for Sticky Notes.

Recently Apple Support has responded to a report of an exploding iPhone X, where the victim is claiming that while he was installing the new iOS 12.1 update the phone went hot and exploded.

The news is from the city of Federal Way (Washington) where a guy named “Rahel Mohamad” twitted about the incident.

@Apple iPhone X just got hot and exploded in the process of upgrading to 12.1 IOS. What’s going on here??? pic.twitter.com/OhljIICJan

— Rocky Mohamadali (@rocky_mohamad) November 14, 2018

He said that “This year early January I bought the iPhone and have been using it normally.” The iPhone X was in process of getting new iOS 12.1 update and when Mohamad put it on charging at a later stage, he observed a “Dark grey smoke started coming from the phone.

The update was completed and as soon as the phone turned on it immediately started to smoke and caught fire.”

He also said that he was using the official bundled Apple Lightning cable and a wall adapter to charge his iPhone(see the image below).

However due to some reason he had to stop the charging of his iPhone which is just before the explosion.

Mohamad said, “When I held the phone it was very hot and I drop the phone immediately on the floor. Then it started to smoke.” he added.”

He reached out Apple which wishes to investigate the incident further by getting Mohamad to ship the iPhone X to them. In reply to his tweet, Apple Support also said that this is definitely not expected behavior and would wish to resolve it soon.

This is not the first incident of smartphones exploding. A few years back Samsung had to recall its Galaxy Note 7 after several of its units exploded while in use.

Facebook Is the Least Trusted Major Tech Company Among Americans For Protecting Personal Data, Suggests Polls

Facebook, the social networking giant, has been voted as the least trustworthy tech company, according to a recent survey conducted by Fortune. Thanks to Facebook’s increasing scrutiny for its handling of data privacy, ad targeting, and propaganda that has made its users trust the company the least.

According to the survey, only 22 percent of Americans trust Facebook with their personal information out of all major tech companies. On the other hand, Amazon with 49 percent ranks the highest in terms of trust, followed by Google (41 percent), Microsoft (40 percent), and Apple (39 percent).

“Facebook is in the bottom in terms of trust in housing your personal data,” said Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema. “Facebook’s crises continue rolling in the news cycle.” The poll was carried out by Harris Poll on behalf of Fortune in mid-October that surveyed over 2,000 U.S. adults.

This obvious lack of trust is bad news for Facebook, which is mainly due to factors such as leadership, ethics, trust, and image. Also, the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year where up to 87 million Facebook users data was shared without their permission, along with the September data breach in which roughly 50 million of its users’ data was exposed through an attack on its network, has only attributed to Facebook’s low rankings.

Additionally, 48 percent of those who took the survey admitted to viewing Facebook more negatively than six months ago.

According to the survey, only 59 percent of respondents said they were “at least somewhat confident” in Zuckerberg’s leadership in the ethical use of data and privacy information. With 77 percent, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came in first, followed by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook at 72 percent, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella at 71 percent, and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai at 68 percent.

“That would be a C or D in grade school,” Gerzema said about Zuckerberg.

Facebook declined to comment on the poll. The company instead pointed to recent remarks made by Zuckerberg where he said that Facebook continues to invest in security and that its defenses are improving.

Not only the Facebook users, but some of the company’s major investors too are disappointed by Zuckerberg. Last month, several major public investment funds had proposed removing Zuckerberg as the company’s chairman of the board.

Source: PYMTS

Facebook launches Lasso, a short video app like competitor TikTok

Facebook on Friday quietly launched its stand-alone music app to rival popular short-video social network, TikTok, without any official announcement on its website, reports The Verge.

Called “Lasso”, the music app is directed at teens which allows users to create short music videos similar to TikTok, the short 15-second video app that had recently merged with Musical.ly. Lasso is available on both, iOS and Android. Currently, the app is available only for users in the U.S.

Apparently, almost half of teenagers in the U.S. say they use Facebook, which is a decrease of 20 percent from 2015, according to Pew. In comparison, nearly 69 percent of US teenagers use Snapchat, 72 percent say they use Instagram and 85 percent say they use YouTube. Hence, it is believed that Facebook has introduced Lasso app to lure the teenagers and gain its lost hold.

“Lasso is a new standalone app for short-form, entertaining videos — from comedy to beauty to fitness and more. We’re excited about the potential here, and we’ll be gathering feedback from people and creators,” Facebook told The Verge.

With Lasso, users can record themselves dancing and lip-syncing to music and also record short clips. It allows users to add music and text to their videos, add cool effects, etc. Users can also find popular hashtags, follow creators, and browse videos.

Users can sign in to Lasso through Instagram or create an account using Facebook. They can share their videos directly from the app to their Facebook Stories, with the feature to share them as Instagram Stories coming soon. All profiles and videos on Lasso would be public, which means you cannot keep anything private.

Currently, it is unclear when Facebook would be releasing the app globally.

Dark Mode on Android smartphone helps save battery life, admits Google

Google finally confirmed that the Dark Mode uses less power and helps increase battery life on Android smartphones, SlashGear reported. During a presentation at the 2018 Android Dev Summit, Google urged its developers to use darker colors in their apps to get the best battery life on the end user’s phone.

Generally, when you increase the screen’s brightness, it affects the battery life of the device. Also, the color displayed affects the power consumption of the display.

The Dark Mode basically reverses the color theme of an operating system (OS) or applications by replacing the white background with black. The Dark Mode for long has been associated with better battery life on devices, especially mobile devices.

According to Business Insider, Dark Mode draws 43% lesser power at full brightness compared to “normal mode” in the YouTube app, which normally uses a lot of white. The white color indirectly utilizes more power than darker colors.

Google also admitted their past mistake of encouraging app developers to use the color white for their applications and interfaces, including its own apps with their official Material Design specification for the last few years. The search giant said that they have plans to roll out a Dark Mode for all the Google apps in the future.

Please note that changing to Dark Mode only changes the user interface (UI) color to black background. You may have to manually enable Dark Mode on different applications.

For instance, to enable Dark Mode on your Android smartphone, you need to follow the below steps:

1. Go to Settings on your phone.
2. Tap on Display > Advanced > Device Theme.
3. Tap on Dark.

Similarly, you can enable Dark Mode for YouTube application as given below:

1. Launch YouTube app on your phone.
2. Then, tap on your profile icon that appears on the right top corner.
3. Go to Settings > General.
4. Tap on the toggle for “Dark theme” to enable it.
5. Tap on the back button, the theme is automatically saved.

HSBC confirms 1% of bank customers affected by the data breach

HSBC Bank, one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world, on Tuesday confirmed it suffered a data breach last month, which it believes affected less than 1% of its bank customers in the U.S.

In a Notice of Data Breach to customers, which has been filed with California’s Attorney General’s office, the bank says: “HSBC became aware of online accounts being accessed by unauthorized users between October 4, 2018 and October 14, 2018.

“When HSBC discovered your online account was impacted, we suspended online access to prevent further unauthorized entry of your account.”

The information that might have been possibly accessed includes full name, mailing address, phone number, email address, date of birth, account numbers, account types, account balances, transaction history, payee account information, and statement history.

HSBC has not provided exact details as to how many people were affected by this breach nor it is immediately clear if any money was stolen.

“HSBC regrets this incident, and we take our responsibility for protecting our customers very seriously. We responded to this incident by fortifying our log-on and authentication processes, and implemented additional layers of security for digital and mobile access to all personal and business banking accounts,” Rob Sherman, U.S. head of media relations, HSBC External Affairs said in a statement.

The bank is also offering a one-year free subscription with credit monitoring and identity theft protection service by Identity Guard to its affected customers.

“We have notified those customers whose accounts may have experienced unauthorized access, and are offering them one year of credit monitoring and identity theft protection service.”

Although the bank’s official statement does not specify how did hackers gain access to their customers’ data, it is believed that hackers gained access via the HSBC online app.

In order to prevent credential stuffing attacks, the bank is urging its customers to keep their accounts safe by regularly changing and using strong passwords, and use unique passwords at each site they visit. The customers should also monitor transactions in their accounts for any unauthorized activity.

TikTok is the most downloaded app in the U.S. in October

TikTok surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and SnapChat downloads in October, according to the latest report by app researcher, Apptopia.

For those unaware, TikTok, the immensely popular 15-second video-sharing app, which is owned by China’s Beijing Bytedance Technology Co., officially took over Musical.ly in August 2018 to enter the U.S. market and has since then has been growing substantially.

Since the merger, TikTok’s installation base has increased by 30%. The result of the merger and growth has also helped TikTok to beat popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in monthly installations. It managed to sit at the top in U.S. downloads for the Apple Store and Google Play by beating all the aforementioned apps in the month of October.

Tiktok’s number of monthly active users has increased from 100 million to 130 million in the last three months. Also, Bytedance’s huge advertising campaign for TikTok on Facebook and Google’s AdMob, besides utilizing the mobile game discovery and monetization platform, Chartboost, has attributed to the flourishing numbers to the Musical.ly/TikTok merger.

However, when it comes to active user engagement, TikTok is still lagging behind its social media competitors. For instance, Facebook has a 95.5% engagement rate, Instagram has a 94.99% engagement rate, YouTube has a 94.91% rate, and Snapchat has a 94.98% engagement rate. On the other hand, Tiktok just has a 28.56% active user engagement rate.

Despite the low engagement rate, Apptopia’s overall view is that TikTok “could be the first long-term successful social app in the United States owned and operated by an Asian company.

TikTok’s increasing popularity and a large number of downloads has prompted Facebook to build a stand-alone music app to rival TikTok. Facebook’s “Lasso” directed at teens aims to offer many of the same features as TikTok.

Intel being the leader in Chip manufacturing industry has recently announced it’s two brand new Cascade Lake and Xeon E-2100 processors lineups.

Where Cascade Lake is expected to deliver high-end performance and, Xeon E-2100 processors are for entry-level servers.

Talking about the availability, the Cascade Lake processors are due for release in the first half of next year whereas the Intel Xeon E-2100 processors are already available since 05 Nov 2018.

Lisa Spelman, Intel vice president, and general manager of Intel Xeon products and data center marketing had the following to say about the new products:

“We remain highly focused on delivering a wide range of workload-optimized solutions that best meet our customers’ system requirements. The addition of Cascade Lake advanced performance CPUs and Xeon E-2100 processors to our Intel Xeon processor lineup once again demonstrates our commitment to delivering performance-optimized solutions to a wide range of customers.”

Specifically talking about the Cascade Lake processor then it’s a very scalable processor which is aimed at high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure-as-a-service workloads.

It also includes 48 cores per CPU and 12 DDR4 memory channels per socket, according to the company.

In the Famous Linpack benchmark tests, its performance was 1.21 times better than that of the Intel Xeon Scalable 8180 processor and 3.4 times better than that of the AMD EPYC 7601.

Whereas talking about the Intel Xeon E-2100 series, these processors are aimed at small to medium-sized businesses and cloud service providers.

They offer hardware-based features which provide additional security for data and applications.

Intel also said that the new lineup is also capable of supporting heavy workloads suitable for entry-level servers.

Swedish ISP tells its subscribers how to unblock The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites

While many Internet service providers (ISPs) are blocking The Pirate Bay (TPB) to remain in compliance with the court order brought up by copyright holders, Swedish ISP Bahnhof has always remained against copyright trolling, invasive data retention laws, and website blocking.

In fact, the ISP in the past has provided VPN (Virtual Private Network) to use for customers to fight mandatory internet data logging.

Also Read– How To Unblock Torrent Sites

On Thursday, many were caught by surprise when Bahnhof issued a press release giving a detailed guide as to how sites such as The Pirate Bay can be unblocked, reports TorrentFreak. User-privacy and unrestricted access to the Internet are of utmost importance for Bahnhof.

“There are Internet providers who have been ordered by the Patent and Market Court to block DNS, of The Pirate Bay site for example, and that means you cannot access that page no matter how much you try,” Bahnhof states in the press release.

Last month, another Swedish ISP Telia decided to block large torrent and streaming platforms, such as The Pirate Bay, Dreamfilm, FMovies, and NyaFilmer following an interim ruling by Sweden’s Patent and Market Court.

While blockades such as these are ideally supposed to stop people from visiting pirated sites, but Bahnhof thinks otherwise.

“This is how it’s supposed to work. Someone surfing to a blocked site thinks ‘damn, now I can’t access it, no more movie downloading for me’. But, of course, it does not work like that in real life. It’s easy to get around a blockade if you are using a VPN or change your DNS servers. Let’s explain.”

On the other hand, Bahnhof encourages its customers to use VPNs to unblock The Pirate Bay in its detailed guide to avoid censorship.

For those unaware, VPN links the private network over the internet using encryption methods allowing users to maintain their anonymity and protect themselves from being snooped. It can be used to access region-restricted websites, shield user’s browsing activity from prying eyes on public Wi-Fi, and more.

Additionally, it also states that one can bypass simple site blockades by changing DNS (Domain Name System).

Apparently, Bahnhof has been ordered to block a series of domain names, including Sci-Hub and Libgen among others, following a lawsuit from academic publisher Elsevier.

While the company can’t escape the blocking order itself, it can definitely guide its subscribers how they can do so, which is mentioned in their press release.

Also Read-

• The Pirate Bay is Down- 10 Best Torrent Sites To Download Free Movie
• 10 Best Torrent Search Engine To Download Free Torrents -2018
• 10 Best Torrent Clients or Torrent Downloader for Windows
• Best Torrent Sites- 2018

Pornhub launches mirror site after Indian government revives porn ban by blocking 827 adult sites

Last week, the Indian government issued a directive asking the internet service providers (ISPs) to block around 827 porn websites, including Pornhub, the largest adult entertainment site. However, Pornhub has now launched a mirror site to bypass this porn ban.

The popular adult site has created a new separate domain – ‘.net’ instead of ‘.com’ – specifically for the Indian internet users who want to access their site.

“In response to Pornhub getting censored and blocked in India, our fans there can now fully access the site at Pornhub.net,” the company said in Tweet. According to Pornhub’s yearly review of 2017, India is listed as the third largest consumer in terms of traffic.

For those unaware, back in August 2015, the Department of Telecom (DoT) in India had directed ISPs to block 857 adult websites on grounds of decency and morality. While the list of blocked websites included Pornhub, it surprisingly also included the likes of College Humor, a popular comedy website, and 9GAG, a social sharing website.

The government received a backlash from the public after the list of blocked websites was released. As a result, the Government lifted the ban after just a few days. However, last month, the Uttarakhand High Court reinstated the blockade, which directed all ISPs in India to abide by the Union government’s order to ban hundreds of pornographic sites.

While the Uttarakhand High Court has asked to block 857 websites, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) found 30 portals did not host any pornographic content. Hence, the list was cut down and Meity asked the DoT to call for a blockade of remaining 827 domains.

“… all the internet service licensees are instructed to take immediate necessary action for blocking of 827 websites as per the direction from Meity and for the compliance of the Hon’ble High Court order,” the Department of Telecom said in an order issued to telecom Porn Sitescompanies and ISPs.

Expressing discontent on the blockade, Corey Price, Pornhub’s Vice President said,

“There are no laws against pornography in India and watching adult content privately. It’s evident that the Indian government does not have a solution to a very serious and systemic problem in the country, and is using adult sites like ours as a scapegoat.

“While we are anti-government censorship here at Pornhub, and ultimately disappointed in the ruling, we are willing to work alongside the government to address any concerns they have and help rectify the situation.”

The company also criticized the government of blocking popular sites like Pornhub and not blocking other dangerous sites that host banned content.

“This is apparent by the fact that they only banned large sites like Pornhub’s, and didn’t block thousands of risky porn sites that may contain illegal content,” Price added. “For the government to ban sites like ours that have compliant parental controls, a non-consensual takedown page and a strict Terms of Service is a disservice to the people of India, who have become one of the largest connoisseurs of adult content.”

With the launching of the mirror site Pornhub.net, the company has provided an alternate method for their Indian consumers to get their content.

“In the meantime, to provide our Indian users with Pornhub content again as quickly as possible, we have set up a mirror site. We understand this has been a hard time for our fans and hope this will provide them with an outlet to help alleviate some of their stress,” Price said.

Besides a mirror site, there are also other methods such as using VPN (Virtual Private Network), Tor web browser, a different DNS server, or similar methods to bypass local ISP-level block.