Microsoft announced a range of financial rewards for cybersecurity researchers who uncover and responsibly disclose unknown vulnerabilities in Xbox Live. The online gaming network, which lets players connect to multiplayer services and download games, is now the focus of a new “bug bounty” program, it confirmed this week. Submissions that prove eligible can earn hackers […]
Samsung phones sold in the U.S. are notoriously difficult to root. Samsung Knox makes rooting especially annoying, and it tends to break a lot of things if you do manage to get root. Users in the U.S. can’t even unlock the bootloader to root their devices in the first place. Every once in awhile, though, […]
Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed the No. 2 smartphone vendor spot in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple. Both firms have similar global market share numbers for 2019, with […]
The danger of having artificially intelligent machines do our bidding is that we might not be careful enough about what we wish for. The lines of code that animate these machines will inevitably lack nuance, forget to spell out caveats, and end up giving AI systems goals and incentives that don’t align with our true […]
Google has developed or acquired a large number of useful apps over the years, unifying them all under your Google account. Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Waze, Android, Assistant, and many others are all available using the same login, making Google one of the best provider of free services in the world — free, of […]
Apple today has officially announced that its rollout of the redesigned Apple Maps is experience is now complete in the United States. Apple touts that the new Apple Maps design gives users faster and more accurate navigation, improved detail, better road coverage, and more. The release of the rebuilt Apple Maps design was essentially complete last […]
Google has been working on call recording for its phone app for a while now. Today, we’re finally able to see how it works due to the good folks at XDA Developers. The team managed to fully enable the call recording feature on beta builds of the Google Phone app, and it apparently works pretty […]
Google is testing a feature that can send Nest owners alerts about their furnaces when “unusual or unexpected patterns” are detected. The HVAC alerts will be automatically sent to subscribers of the Nest Home Report email list, notifying homeowners of any small issue in their heating, cooling, or ventilation system before it potentially becomes a […]
Microsoft’s November update for Windows 10 (version 1909) added a new quick-search bar to File Explorer that was meant to help users find files on their PC. The only issue is that it didn’t work very well at launch. Numerous bugs made using the search bar much more difficult than it needed to be. For […]
When the topics of Microsoft and global health overlap, one tends to think about the Gates Foundation, but the company itself is doing good work along these lines as well. The latest such effort is AI for Health, a $40 million, five-year outgrowth of Microsoft’s AI for Good program that aims to help apply the […]
All the major antivirus software makers plan to continue supporting their products past the Windows 7 end of life (EOL) date. Most vendors, with a few exceptions, have confirmed that their products will continue to run on Windows 7 systems for at least two years, until 2022, ensuring that Windows 7 users have security products […]
Facebook users just got a new glimpse into — and a little control over — the myriad ways the social network tracks what they do when they’re not using Facebook. If you didn’t already realize it, by the way, Facebook is tracking an astounding amount of what you do when you’re not using the platform, […]
