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According to Engaget and other sources. So yea, the US is to blame for all the pirated un-patched installs of XP in China. Russia has purportedly Russia 64 percent. Isn't it strange that the NSA would code such and exploit. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Mir was announced in March 2013

Verizon does not sell personal web browsing histories and has no plans to do so in the future

Picture in Picture mode isn't quite exactly what you're thinking, I don't think. I believe it allows *developers* to do this easier, or something? link with a bit more information

Declining sales seem to indicate otherwise.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/31/apple-q1-2017-earnings/ : Same source now admits they were wrong. Oooops.

only 35 percent of taxpayers demand that their preparers use two-factor authentication to protect their clients' personal information. Less than a fifth (18 percent) use an encrypted USB drive to save important documents like tax worksheets, W-2s, 1099s or 1040s. And another 38 percent either store tax documents on their computer's hard drive

This article's security advice is very questionable. What's wrong with storing sensitive data on a hard drive? Why should an encrypted USB drive be used? Is there something wrong with paper documents or even unencrypted USB drives? And why is two-factor authentication considered necessary? Two-factor authentication is only one of many different strategies for ensuring security.

Worse yet, the article doesn't even mention last year's fiasco with the IRS e-filing PINs.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/... Happy?

If you really read TFA, you should know that it is a state law, not a city law [news]. Even AirBnB appears to disagree with the type of activity in TFA (though, I don't know for sure if they really care).

Airbnb offered an alternative to the legislation, saying it would crack down on hosts with multiple listings who essentially run illegal hotels and provide a registry of hosts to local regulators to make it easier for them to enforce existing housing rules. The company also emphasized that it had already removed nearly 3,000 commercial operators from the service.

Add to this, the question about the elephant in the room:

"Free," is paid for, precisely how?

Google provides a free lunch if you agree to buy the plate.

They scan their docs to fine-tune advertisement delivery.

And they are not bullet proof:

Google announced Tuesday that it had been the target of a “highly sophisticated” and coordinated hack attack against its corporate network. It said the hackers had stolen intellectual property and sought access to the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. The attack originated from China, the company said.

Hackers are trading millions of Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo logins

5 million Gmail passwords leaked

It's not a matter of, "if," it's, "when."

Tantrums? You mean like the one Trump threw when less people showed up for his inauguration than Obama's? I'm sorry, but Trump is behaving a lot more like a petulant child than presidential. I mean, things like science must be vetted by political appointees now? Or how about the fact that his national security council is now headed by Steve Bannon, a guy who loves pushing conspiracy theories. I mean, politically, the most Trump accomplished before being elected was getting Obama to show his birth certificate. So if you want to talk about sanity, the presidency is not a reality TV show.

Trump was mostly projecting about Hillary. After all, he won't give up his unsecured personal cell phone, and he and his senior staff use a private email server, the same one where 22 million emails mysteriously disappeared and that US intelligence services believe was compromised by the Russians.

... fought so hard to put data on Irish soil:

... mainly due to its fast-growing cloud computing business.

Microsoft knew that its client base would bolt if the US could have unfettered access.

The chips from Sensory date back to around 2010, at which point they were all of two bucks each. I don't recall which Android phones do or do not have chipset based hotword detection, but suspect that it's all but ubiquitous these days.

The iPhone 6/6S build "Hey Siri" recognition into the same co-processor (really a subprocessor as it's part of the M9 CPU) as the step counter and other always-on features, so even when sleeping it is always checking the stream from the microphone for the hotword.

This reduces power consumption significantly, and only starts spooling audio to a buffer in RAM after the hotword is detected. Once the possible command is in RAM, some phones will at least attempt to do speech recognition locally, while others always ship the audio buffer up to a cloud service for analysis

The "San Francisco bicyclists can breathe a sigh of relief" comment surprised me until I saw that Uber has a problem with turning right across bike lanes. This certainly isn't a problem for all self-driving cars. In the South Bay I've seen a self-driving car do exactly the right thing: signal, merge into the lane when it turns from solid to dashed, stop at the red light, and then turn. That's a lot better than the average human at the same intersection; seeing someone signal and merge and stop would be quite unusual.

This story presents facts about Russia's troll factory in St. Petersburg, just as I have done in numerous previous postings and got hammered by the Russian trolls. Go ahead, check my most recent postings to see how the trolls mindlessly mod me down for reporting facts about this troll factory, about the continuing shipments of cargo 200 from Ukraine (i.e. dead Russian soldiers), the terrorists in Ukraine who openly admit Russian soldiers are fighting there and supplying them with arms and munitions, or the Russian soldiers who state they have been sent to Ukraine and have fought there, and finally, the law which Putin signed which bars Russian mothers from talking about their sons who have died while fighting in Ukraine or even talking with other mothers about these deaths. Or course the graves of these dead Russian soldiers say otherwise, as do reports from eyewitnesses and families.

This story need to be modded down in like fashion. Wouldn't want the Russian trolls to have to see the facts of their dear leader's propaganda industry.

What part of " to lead government-wide efforts to identify propaganda and counter its effects." don't you understand?

They are not restricting anyone's right, even foreigners such as the Russian troll factory to lie their asses off.

What they are doing is the same thing anyone else would do if repeated lies and falsehoods were put forth: countering the lies.

Oh, and speaking of the Ministry of Truth, Putin has that covered. He has made it illegal for Russian mothers to speak out about their son's deaths in Ukraine, including contacting other mothers to form groups and compare notes on how many soldiers Russia has lost during its invasion of Ukraine.

Not sure why the mention of no discount is even relevant. You're still using AT&T's data, at the same rate you agreed to in your contract. You'd just be using less of it while watching video, meaning you'd have more data available for other usage.

It's going to be the default. You'll need to change it to get HD video. More than few people may go over on data but most don't. Fewer still will know how to change the defaults. Translate that to a net gain for AT&T, a net lost for average users and all with no reduction in price. Does it seem relevant now?

Perhaps they comply because they had a a court order about this in India.

I was not aware of the Apple IIe cards but always got a kick out of the DOS Cards I always wanted to take one of my buddies macs that had one (I think it was a 100MHz one) and see if I could have a machine the used both the PowerPC processor and the x86 one on the card.

NEGLIGENCE. The omission to do something which a reasonable man, guided by those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do. or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do. It must be determined in all cases by reference to the situation and knowledge of the parties and all the attendant circumstances.

Hillary's email server was secured the same way that the "reasonable predecessor (aka C. Powell https://www.engadget.com/2016/...)" used. While you can say that slashdot users know better, average joe blow or a braindead politician would not know how to secure an email server, so by definition of law there is no negligence here.

Removing the audio port for profit when its the most popular way of connecting speakers is Tim's work.

Wireless! Wireless is critical, We need wireless computer access for ou wireless phones, Land lines and wierd wired ethernet ports are so last year,

But speakers,the only acceptable connection is wired, Nothing but wires.

And you know, I knew Windows PC users who were just as pissed off about Macs losing floppy drives as you are with your fake outrage about removint the phone jack. http://www.everymac.com/system...

Jobs was ridiculed for removeing the floppy drives - https://www.engadget.com/2010/...

Fucking crazy bastard removed Firewire as well, causing more of your type of outrage! http://appleinsider.com/articl...

How in the name of God were people going to access their fine fast firewire devices? The death of Apple, no doubt, and a really stupid move

Now I might not get an iphone 7, although switching from Apple to android would lose me some nice features. But as a deal breaker, the headphone jack is right down there with the color of the home button, especially since my entire family uses bluetooth. It's handy, no wires to get in the way, and otherwise, we don't think about it at all.

I only ever used the headphone jack once, long enough to tell me that my future was using bluetooth. Kinda nice to have a wireless phone that didn't depend on wires. So if for some weird reason I would ever think to connect an amp and speakers to my telephone, I'd use one of any of the fine Bluetooth devices available for purchase.

Has nayone looked at Amazon's actually free apps to see if they're typical malware? Sure, there's a different compensation model for the devs, but my cynical assumption is that they also harvest everything they can. Would be pretty cool if they didn't though?

Where's the GOG of apps, anyway? The "one price upfront, guaranteed no data collection or in-app purchases"?

Who needs hardware inputs for when software fails.

You can say that again.

It's true that Tesla has never had a recall affecting 4.3 million vehicles. It's also true that Tesla has not produced 4.3 million vehicles over its entire history. Here are some recalls that Tesla has had:

Tesla recalls 90,000 Model S sedans to check possible seatbelt defect: https://www.engadget.com/2015/...
Tesla Recalls 2,700 Model X SUVS to Fix Third-Row Seats: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Tesla Model S Gets Official Recall For Possibility of Fire Associated With Charging Adapter: http://insideevs.com/tesla-mod...

The last of those was a software problem that was fixed by an over the air update. So Tesla's record on software is not flawless.

Got a 5 when they first came out. When is the crippling update supposed to happen?

Next week, isn't it? If history is anything to go by.

I mean, it wasn't quite 5 seconds, but I think that Belkin has you covered here, per this Engadget post.

[Why suddenly do we need water-proof phones?]

We don't, except for some people who do. And if it didn't involve a tradeoff, it'd be worthless at worst, with most people agreeing it's good.

The real problem here, isn't that they made a tradeoff. Tradeoffs are a fact of life. It's that there are many tradeoffs, and their relative values are all subjective, and no manufacturer has the product diversity to be able to make the best-fit product for more than a small fraction of the market.

Taking away the ability to use headphones isn't necessarily stupid, because some people don't use headphones anyway. Taking away the ability to last a long time on a battery charge isn't stupid, because some (most, it seems; I never even knew I would become one of them) people are ok with plugging in often. Taking away the ability to change batteries isn't stupid, because some people just throw their computers away after 2-3 years. Taking away the ability to be part of a software free market isn't stupid, because most people need little more than a web browser. Having the OS not be auditable isn't stupid, because some people don't care about security. Having it be expensive isn't stupid, because some people are fine with spending lots of money. Taking away the ability to use USB cables isn't stupid, because .. well, I gotta admit, I'm simply unable to adopt a viewpoint where that isn't hilariously over-the-top astoundingly stupid, but maybe that's just me.

There's lots of not-stupid things happening, but if you add them all up, then from the perspective of nearly any particular user, there's something about it which is going to seem stupid.

Now, this isn't an Apple-only problem. Samsung has only so many products too, and the chances that any particular one of them is right for you, are just as small as the possibility that the iPhone 7 is right for you. Samsung might have a little more diversity, but even if you add up everything they have, they all have certain things in common.

But that's not a big problem either, because if you don't like Samsung's products, then just try LG, or Huawei, or Asus, or ... (Pretty much the only thing we're missing is are standard form factors (analogous to ATX, mini-ITX, etc) so that we advance to the build-from-parts stage, where everyone can get exactly what they want. That's something I'd love to see, but we're still not there yet.)

But if you're locked into iOS, you only have one option: change yourself and your expectations. Not everyone is cut out for that, but to be fair to Apple's eggheads, the fraction is a lot higher that I would have estimated. Maybe that's why they're at a multi-billion dollar company and I'm not.

I go into an Apple store, pay about as much as I would for a standalone battery, and it's replaced...

Or at least that's theoretically how it would work since I've never had to replace an iPhone battery, even after using one for over two years. In the meantime I have essentially a waterproof phone... which has a lot more utility to me than a battery I'll never replace anyway.

1) The Department of Homeland Security wants to secure our elections for us, aka power grab.

That's a pretty bad article that strains credibility. It's an article about and an interview with the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, who thinks there's no danger, and because there's no danger, a power grab is the only plausible explanation. She says:

“It seems like now it’s just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked — they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp, a Republican, told POLITICO in an interview. “And that’s just not — I mean, anything is possible, but it is not probable at all, the way our systems are set up.”

Oh it's not? Really? We've been warning for years about shitty voting systems that even a monkey can hack. We still hear about Internet Voting being pushed despite it being the worst idea ever. China has owned nearly every multinational corporation out there, and we have reason to suspect Russian involvement in the DNC hack. But oh, no one outside the country would dare mess with our Presidential elections! Of course not!

I thought Republicans were the ones who were extremely interested in the idea of securing elections. Boy oh boy, it seems like we just have to totally change our story when Clinton or Obama are involved. Or maybe they only in favor of election security when that security has the side-effect of putting hurdles in the way of poor people voting?

MacBook Air was last updated last spring (2015).

This spring, the base 13" Air got updated to 8GB RAM as standard rather than 4. Or, if you prefer, $100 got knocked off the 8GB model, Like I say, a minor bump.

This is a really bad idea, if you consider what emoji are.

Emoji are the idea, not to send tiny graphics, but to have a standard codepoint for smileys. Everyone can implement them and use their icon set for display. Either to have a strong brand, or to allow users to theme them or just because they have no rights on the graphics from other vendors.

Now there already were problems. Take the pistol icon, which had the problem that it had different directions in different sets. I do not know which set it was, but let's assume its apple vs. google.
Now they take it a step further and apple replaces the pistol with a water gun, while google did not yet do this.

Here a smiley example:
(smiley)(pistol)(female smiley)

Apple interpretation: I shoot with water on my girlfriend (and we have fun)
Google interpretation: I shoot with a pistol in my head where she's there (maybe because we have trouble)

Considering, that smileys were the idea to convey emotions words cannot, its not only silly to have smileys for objects, but even more stupid to use non-matching icon sets. Remember the hairy heart trouble?
https://www.engadget.com/2014/...

Even the unicode consortium recommends to find better long term solutions:
http://www.unicode.org/reports...

> The longer-term goal for implementations should be to support embedded graphics, in addition to the emoji characters. Embedded graphics allow arbitrary emoji symbols, and are not dependent on additional Unicode encoding. Some examples of this are found in Skype and LINE—see the emoji press page for more examples.

Windows 10 has ~21% but I guess MS had to force upgrades to even get those numbers.

Nice to see Windows 7 holding steady at 42%

The funny thing is MS had a 20 years head start on mobile with WinCE and consumers STILL didn't want it. Apple and Google come along and they accomplish in less then 5 years (Android was released on Dec 6, 2010) what MS couldn't do in 20 years!! LOL

Microsoft still has a ways to go when 2 years ago Linux run on over 1 Billion Devices and 99.4% of the Top 500 supercomputers run Linux; hell even iOS had 800 million back then.

But keeping MS, because you're (slowly) becoming irrelevant.

Nvidia did this with FusionIO almost 5 years ago...

        https://www.engadget.com/2011/08/09/nvidia-fusion-io-and-hp-drive-a-dozen-1080p-streams-on-four-dis/

useful for some small set of specific workloads, probably mostly video-editing-related. otherwise, whoop-dee-doo...

I remember reading something from Tesla saying they found autopilot was not on, and had it been it would have stopped the car.

That was the incident in Pennsylvania, not Florida.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/...

You might want to tell the movies that were scanned to 8k from film (search for 8K) that they don't exist, as well as this mainstream movie that's being filmed in 8K. Or this company that the videos they record on their cameras don't exist. Hell, Youtube has an 8K video already.

8K video availability is very limited, but not no-existant. 8K displays have been shown at CES since 2012. 8K broadcasts were tested during the 2012 Olympics. But even without commonly available video for mortals, 8K video isn't the only thing that you can display with a video card that can display 8K. You can drive four 4K displays, which is an amazing coincidence that these cards have 4 ports for output!

AND... an update to the Engadget story says they're not selling it. Presumably it's being used in their in-house ad system. All better now?

Certainly this happens and has most likely happened every single day for more than a decade. Honda, Mercedes and Toyota offered brake assist in 2003, but it has spread to more or less all even remotely premium brands (list from Collision avoidance system):

• Audi
• BMW
• Cadillac
• Chrysler
• Fiat
• Ford
• General Motors
• Honda
• Hyundai
• Mazda
• Mercedes-Benz
• Mitsubishi
• Nissan
• Peugeot
• Renault
• Skoda
• Subaru
• Tesla
• Toyota
• Volkswagen

Also, there is a signed agreement among most major OEMs that all new cars should have automatic braking as a standard feature by 2022. I am quite certain that Volvo reached that goal several years ago, and I suppose Tesla is already there as well since they do not have that many models.

Musk is grasping at a false dilemma for his own profit here: if automatic braking does good, then the counterpart has to agree that all automated driving aids are good, independently of their implementation or maturity. Of course it does not follow logically, but he will only back down on his previous statements on the "autopilot" programs if the authorities straight out force him.

In my view, Musk is on a crusade to gather an enormous amount of driver data for autonomous drive by pushing the technology to customers in a too early stage (at least in the "autopilot" sense -- I am one of those who find themselves very critical to the branding). Yes, it is a very "agile" approach, and perhaps the fastest way towards reliable autonomous drivers, and might thus even be a net life-saver in the long run. The problem is that the initial cost is actual extra human lives and injuries today, which should be a bit hard to swallow for most people.

an ad blocker for edge. last time I tried it they didn't have any ad blocker (please no host file APK spam) I refuse to run a browser without ad blocking because of malware.

Yes, the ad blockers so far released for Edge are "Adblock" and "Adblock Plus"
https://www.engadget.com/2016/...

They're for the anniversary update, currently available on the insiders program, due for general release on August 2nd.

Well, what do you expect when you're not winning the apps?

Microsoft Office/Exchange is still huge in the office.
DirectX-only games like Overwatch make a killing.
Professional tools like Adobe CC don't support Linux.

Gnome, KDE etc. aren't going to make or break the Linux desktop though from all the drama you'd think so. I'd settle for an interface roughly like Win95 if only it ran the applications I needed. The rest would just be bonus. And we'll see now that Android apps runs on ChromeOS. It looks very impressive and might give Windows a run for the money.

DONE.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/...

I thought the Chromebook Pixel was already some kind of high-end hardware, am I wrong? What more could you want from a $1000+ laptop that runs an android-flavoured OS?

You may have conflated the Chromebook Pixel, which runs Chrome OS, with its successor the Pixel C, which runs Android. To which did you refer?

Also, any algorithm which ingests statistical and demographic data is bound to come up with unpalatable and/or spurious demographic correlations (since there is a causal link between poverty and crime and a historic link between race and poverty) which I wold rather have society refrain from codifying -- in law or in actual computer code).

As opposed to having the same bias encoded, consciously or unconsciously, in the minds of judges?

Doing this algorithmically at least raises the possibility of analysis and criticism (assuming it's transparent -- no argument there, transparency is critical), which means that if done with appropriate oversight and scrutiny, it may have significant advantages over human judgement. I would still want the human judge to be able to overrule the algorithm, though. And it would probably be good to add a review process that regularly evaluates the algorithm, both the cases where it gets overruled and a random sample of cases where it is not overruled.

Bottom line: Algorithmic sentencing offers opportunities to systematize and regularize something which in the past has been purely subjective. That's a good thing... if care is taken that it doesn't systematize injustice.

While the idea of using an algorithm to sentence a human being is bone-chilling, you might be able to justify this as a "formula" for sentencing -- which, of course, merits its own debate.

What is unconscionable about this is the fact that it's a SECRET algorithm. As in closed source. Essentially a secret law.

This has no place in democracy.

(Also, any algorithm which ingests statistical and demographic data is bound to come up with unpalatable and/or spurious demographic correlations (since there is a causal link between poverty and crime and a historic link between race and poverty) which I wold rather have society refrain from codifying -- in law or in actual computer code).

USB-C and Lightning headphones aren't great news for everyone:

Phones are digital devices, and headphones require analog input. To solve that, every phone has a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and an amplifier inside, which do exactly what the names suggest. The DAC converts the signal from ones and zeros to waves, and the amplifier makes those waves audible through a speaker or headphones.

The combination of these two parts (DSPs are also involved, but let's not overcomplicate things) is what makes phones -- or anything with a headphone port -- sound different from one another. If you listen to the same track, with the same headphones, on an iPhone 6S and a Galaxy S7, they won't sound identical, mainly because the two phones use different DACs and amps, which output slightly different analog signals through the devices' 3.5mm ports.

The DAC and amp, then, are the hidden link between your music app of choice and your headphones, and their importance can't be understated. The industry has gotten a lot better with DACs and amps in recent years, and the general standard of audio output from phones has risen, but there are still devices that are stronger and those that are weaker.

With the switch to USB-C (or Lightning) for headphones, your phone's DAC and amp (it'll still need one for the speaker) are being bypassed. That means this all-important component will now reside inside either the adapter (for your existing cans) or the headphones themselves (for USB-C or Lightning headsets).

Blizzard used copyright against their botting nemesis. Twitch doesn't have copyright on the streams themselves (just a license). So they have to fall back to the CFAA -- a legal argument that has not yet been successfully prosecuted.

He's also talking about that one incident where a Tesla ran over a chunk of metal on the highway, resulting in a horrible fire that was isolated to the engine compartment, and required that the driver pull over and shut the car down. (Rather than the much safer standard vehicle alternative of exploding, crashing, and suddenly ceasing to have a working engine while driving at high speeds on a crowded highway). Tesla's total dismissal of the incident is just typical of their head-in-the-sand tactics to ignoring real problems.

Wake up sheeple!

https://www.engadget.com/2012/...

and they want to charge $5 mo to rent a web cam.

I keep track of over 200 passwords, using a password manager. Why aren't you?

You mean a password manager like KeePass, where the developer has explicitly and publicly chosen ad revenue over security?

Or just one like LastPass, that "only" suffered a plain ol' fashioned data breach?

Hey, I'll admit carrying all those eggs in the same basket looks a lot more convenient than carrying them one by one. But some of us would rather only risk dropping them one at a time, than all 200 at once.

http://www.engadget.com/2016/0...

Android boomed because it could do what iPhone couldn't. Like copy&paste.

Boy, you really had to dig-deep for THAT one!

Let's see: How long was it before iOS included Copy & Paste?

Well, the first iPhone was actually Released for sale in June or July, 2007. iPhoneOS 3.0 (it wasn't even called iOS yet!) introduced Copy/Cut/Paste/Undo/Redo in March, 2009. So, essentially, there isn't an iPhone "alive" today that doesn't do Copy & Paste. Not for a long, long time.

Now, let's talk about something a little more important, like Android and its Permissions Model, vs. iOS'...

Well, um, they just produced some promotional fluff for snapchat... And before that there was that astronaut who did a David Bowie cover and some youtube videos: In Space!

Clearly a worthy investment.