Google Inc. 179,86 -2,42 -1,33% has settled with 40 US State Attorney Generals for tracking Android users since 2014 without their knowledge or permission. All said and done Google will pay out $391 Million USD. Besides the monetary payout, Google has also agreed to make changes to Android privacy settings to make it easier for users to opt-out. While Android users were misled into thinking disabling the “Location History” in the device’s settings would disable location tracking, another account setting—turned on by default and named “Web & App Activity”—enabled the company to collect, store and use the customers’ personally identifiable location…
November 2022
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Today is Sunday, November 13th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week! The Good In a rare instance Microsoft has made it into ‘The Good’ category this week. Microsoft’s newly released tablet computer, Surface 9 Pro has been found to be much easier to repair than previous models. Furthermore, Microsoft is providing repair manuals and expect to have a large availability of parts on the market in the first half of 2023. The Bad Most people are not aware Flash is dead (replaced by HTML 5) and Adobe Flash…
Elon Musk’s hope to getting Twitter back in the black (and potentially avoid bankruptcy) was to generate revenue with ‘new and improved’ Twitter Blue subscriptions (he admited ‘Twitter can not rely on advertisers’). The $7.99 USD a month service would offer the user a Blue Verified checkmark and a slew of other features (most of which are still ‘coming soon’). However, the new subscription option is only available to Twitter users who had created their Twitter account before November 9, 2022 AND sign- up within the Twitter App on iOS. This means Android and web users are unable to sign-up…
Late last month Microsoft Corporation 426,89 +1,69 +0,40% release the next generation of their tablet computer. The Surface Pro 9 release on October 25, 2022, has been re-designed to make it easier for consumers to repair (instead of having to replace) the device. Microsoft will also make more parts available for purchase by consumers and repairs shops during the first half of 2023. That improved stance is reflected in the company’s latest designs. Microsoft says repairability [sic] was a “major focus” in the Surface Pro 9’s construction, and iFixit has confirmed as much in its independently run teardown of the…
Sometime in the near future Windows 11 users will be able to Filter for processes within the Windows Task Manager. Currently this feature is being tested on the Windows 11 Insider builds and no word yet when it will roll out to all Windows 11 users. “This is a helpful feature if you want to single out a process or a group of processes and want to take action or just monitor the performance of the filtered processes.” While there is some lag to the input and the text field needs to be a bit bigger, from BleepingComputer’s tests, the…
It has been two weeks since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 Billion and took on $13 billion debt in the process. Since then, advertiser have fled, Twitter Blue was revamped with less features and higher price (which includes a very worthless verification badge which they attempted to resolve with yet another badge) several key executives keep leaving (which could put Twitter in danger of violating an FTC decree from 2011 resulting in massive fines) and he gutted half the workforce…plus the remaining half which survived the massive layoff last week are being told working remote is no longer an…
Yet another Twitter Executive has left. Chief Consumer Officers (business ad sales) and CMO Leslie Berland left shortly after Chief Twit took-over Twitter. Today comes news, Twitter chief information security officer Lea Kissner has also departed. I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we’ve done. I’m looking forward to figuring out what’s next, starting with my reviews for @USENIXSecurity 😁 — Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner) November 10, 2022 Also chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief compliance officer…
Chief Twit had this to say Wednesday morning… Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022 Well, at least he is being honest. However, why do we get the feeling it is going to me more like ‘We will keep what doesn’t work & change what does. To his credit though he did change Twitter Blue due to the verification not working as planned….by suspending new subscriptions.
A couple quick updates. We have been working with our hosting provider to improve the performance of the blog. Some users have been experiencing slow load times. We’ve enabled some new caching features which should help boost the speed. We have fixed an issue with Tweets embedded within the blog posts were not being formatted correctly. However, this not an automagically retroactively fix, so we are manually going through the posts and fixing the embedded tweets.
Just days after the re-launched of Twitter Blue (and all the new ‘fake’ accounts that followed), Twitter has temporally blocked new users from being able to subscribe to Twitter Blue. Twitter has altered the rules for its $8 Blue subscription service to prevent new accounts from getting a blue checkmark. Yesterday evening, the company edited the service’s help page to add that accounts created on or after November 9th, 2022 “will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time.” The website also added that Twitter Blue is only available on iOS for users in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the…