News archive (1 / 2021)

In past few weeks, the most expensive Roomba models got a new firmware update - and it messed up the robots pretty badly.

All over the discussion forums and other venues, angry Roomba owners are complaining about the recent 3.12.8 software update that has rendered their expensive robot vacuums almost useless.

The update seems to somehow change the way how Roombas navigate and apparently, the update wasn't tested all that well. Problems caused by the update vary from Roomba not being able to find its charging dock to the extend where Roomba simply gets confused in opeen area and starts doing circles until its battery runs out.

Time lapse video of i7+ attempting to return to clean base after 3.12.8 update. After over 15 minutes of this, the roomba stopped due to low battery, failing to dock. from r/roomba

Problems are related to Roomba s9, Roomba s9+, Roomba i7, Roomba i7+, Roomba i6 and Roomba i8+ models - the very top-of-the-line of Roomba models (see our Roomba model comparison chart here). Also, the high-end floor mopping robot, Braava m6 is affected by this update.

Carl Pei founded the smartphone company OnePlus alongside Pete Lau in 2013, and it gained immediate traction with the affordable "flagship killers."

The company has since evolved from a start-up into a proper smartphone manufacturer that has offerings in nearly every price point. The change accelerated especially recently, and might have been either a result of Pei leaving the company or resulted from it.

Nevertheless, Carl Pei left OnePlus in October last year, and informed that he was looking forward to new adventures. Today, Pei announced a new company he has founded.

Nothing, is a London-based consumer technology company that has attracted very influential investors, including iPod inventor Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, YouTuber Casey Neistat, and iPod inventor Tony Fadell.

So far there's no clear cut picture of what Nothing will release but they've promised one of their smart devices in the first half of the year, and more is to come.

Pei aims to release devices in different categories and eventually create an ecosystem of devices.

When it comes to the name, there are a few things Pei and co. have to say about it. Firstly, they want to build devices from ground up, so much so that when they try to reach further, there's nothing.

Mozilla has announced today officially the release of the latest and greatest Firefox browser. There are a lot of updates to the browser but Firefox has made this one mostly about cracking down on supercookies and other user tracking.

According to Mozilla, the so-called supercookies, a more pernicious version of the rather mundane tracking method, are one of the greatest threats on the web for user privacy and security. The new version of Firefox combats this by disallowing cross-site tracking using partitioning.

The company has released an entire blog post about the new, and upcoming, measures to prevent the extensive tracking we experience on the web these days.

There are other changes too, though. Firefox 85 now finally removes Flash entirely and there's no longer an option to enable it. There also improved bookmark views with easy access to your bookmarks via a toolbar folder and bookmarks by default on newly opened tabs.

Another addition is the one click removal of all saved logins from the password manager that helps you clean your passwords faster.

More about the new Firefox 85 can be found in the official release notes. You can download the new Firefox 85 here.

Apple has published guidance on the official website to clarify some things surrounding the magnets and radios that are used in both the iPhone 12 series as well as MagSafe accessories associated with the phone.

According to Apple, the magnets and radios in iPhone 12, including all its different variants, as well as the MagSafe accessories (MagSafe Charger and MagSafe Duo Charger) can be dangerous near certain medical devices due to emitting electromagnetic fields that can interfere with other devices.

Most importantly Apple considers these devices to be a possible hazard near implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, and suggests you keep the iPhone or MagSafe accessory away from these devices.

The company says that you should keep the devices at least 6 inches (15 cm) apart or 12 inches (30 cm) apart if wirelessly charging.

Although the new iPhone 12 has more magnets than its predecessors, Apple believes that the impact of them is not greater than on previous iPhones.

This sounds like no matter the iPhone – or other phone if there are similar magnets – you might want to keep it away from your chest if you have a pacemaker.

World of the internet is a odd place for many reasons but perhaps the most eerie it becomes when a person passes away.

The social media accounts don't immediately, and definitely not automatically, disappear after the death, and I must not be the only one that often feels like there's still something alive when you can see past posts of the individual.

Microsoft is taking this another step further and has patented a technology for creating a chatbot from person's online presence, The Independent reported.

This post mortem chatbot would be constructed based on the digital footprint that the person left behind. If the AI behind the bot is intelligent enough and there's a large enough footprint to data mine, one could imagine pretty convincing chat partners.

In a simple text medium it would be easier to convince fellow chatters of the authenticity but a lot of people also have thousands of pictures and videos of themselves that could even be the basis for a realistic depiction.

Microsoft has made sure to cover all bases with the patent and it includes people both dead and alive, as well as fictional characters.

In a very weird row, Australia is proposing a legislation that would force online giants Google and Facebook to pay for local news publications. Basically, every time an article from Australian news site would appear in Google search results or in Facebook feed, that news site would get paid.

Similar proposals have been suggested - and even executed - in the past. Spain, France and Germany have all demanded money from Google to local news sites, but in those cases, the demands have been focused on Google News, Google's own news aggregator. In Spain, government enforced such law in a way that all news headlines shown in local Google News were eligible for payments from Google.

The result?

Google simply shut down Spanish version of Google News. And Spanish news sites lost huge chunk of their traffic immediately.

In Australia, the law would be even tougher - all news headlines shown in traditional Google search results would be eligible for payments, too. The proposed legislation doesn't put any weight on the fact that both Google and Facebook actually direct readers to such news sites. According to Google, they send "billions of clicks" each year to Australian news sites.

According to Korean sources, electronics giant LG is planning to sell its phone manufacturing division to Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup.

LG's phone business has been making losses for some time now and company has announced plans to restructure its operations. If the proposed deal happens, LG would retain its phone R&D and outsource the actual manufacturing to Vingroup's facilities. LG currently has phone manufacturing facilities in Vietnam, China and Brazil.

The outsourced model for phone manufacturing wouldn't be a very big shock to anyone - after all, companies like Apple have oputsourced their phone manufacturing to third party operators years ago.

Vietnamese government is supporting the deal, hoping it would expand country's high-tech sector significantly. The deal hasn't been approved yet, but according to Korean sources, it seems likely to happen.

Trump administration has issued more restrictions to Huawei before leaving the White House. According to a Reuters report, Trump admin is now denying licenses that Huawei was required to work with American companies.

After May 2019 and the addition to the U.S. government's "entity list", Huawei's road has been a rocky one. While specific licenses made it possible for it to continue buying technology and products from U.S. based companies, it has had to get rid of Google services on its phones.

Now it seems that other products and technology from the United States might not be anymore available to the Chinese smartphone and wireless powerhouse.

Just before leaving office, Trump admin has started denying the licenses Huawei needs to buy products from the U.S. companies. This includes companies like Intel, whose chip shipments to Huawei will cease.

A total of eight licenses to four different companies have been denied and the source expects this to continue. Not only is this tough for Huawei, it's affecting the companies that are losing business and a massive customer at that.

Steam has revealed their 2020 figures in a post they call "2020 Year in Review." The company's fifth annual review includes some stats, including player numbers and most popular games.

The service broke new records with a whopping 120 million monthly active users and 62.6 million active users every day on average.

Steam recorded a peak to 24.8 million concurrent players, which happened during the bug-ridden Cyberpunk 2077 launch.

The situation the world has been for the past year has no doubt tremendously increased the usage of this online platform as well. A total game time recorded was 31.3 billion hours which is a massive 50.7% increase to the previous year with around 20 billion hours.

Perhaps the most serious competition to Google's search engine comes not from Microsoft and Bing but a different perspective altogether. DuckDuckGo promises to keep browsing private and search results untailored.

The 2008 launched website has gained traction in recent years due to privacy issues with the Silicon Valley giants. Now, SearchEngineJournal has spotted that DDG has managed to break a new one-day record.

A week ago on January 11, DuckDuckGo was used to search a total of 102 million times. This is the first time the search has passed 100 million searches in a single day.

Just last fall DDG was hovering at around 40 million searches a day. Average in January will be around 90 million likely, unless the site gets a huge bump in the latter half.

DDG is a small player still, considering even Yahoo and Bing still clearly outrank in marketshare, and for a comparison Google's searches per day are counted in trillions.

However, people are becoming more privacy oriented my the minute, so who knows if DDG will start trending soon in the same vein as Signal just did.

The Pentagon has designated nine companies to their black list for being associated with the Chinese military, Reuters reported. Among the added are the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, Chinese aircraft manufacturer Comac.

This is a separate black list from the one Huawei is in, and has the specific distinction to being controlled by the Chinese military. This also means that the companies on this list aren't necessarily barred from cooperating with U.S. companies, so Xiaomi should be able to continue using the Google ecosystem on their phones.

What they are barring is shareholding from U.S. individuals and companies. Holdings in these companies have to be divested by November 11. The list previously included companies like the Chinese chip maker SMIC.

There's a possibility that Xiaomi will be added to the entity list that makes it harder to work with U.S. companies and technologies, too. This happened to the Chinese oil company CNOOC which was on the military black list and was according to FT just recently added to the entity list.

Samsung announced today the new Galaxy S21 lineup that includes, as expect, the Galaxy S21, S21+ and S21 Ultra. As has become a custom, the company also refreshed their earbuds.

The new model carries the name Galaxy Buds Pro and, according to the company, they also provide audio experience that even professionals would appreciate.

One has to doubt that any serious audio professional is going to switch their monitor headset for there but there are some improvements that should provide better audio.

Samsung has developed a two-way design that allow two difference elements, separate woofer and tweeter, inside the tiny shell. It remains to be seen how much this actually improves the audio quality.

The new design also features a more streamlined profile and a new addition of a wind chamber should capture most of the wind that is trying to get to the microphones to ruin your phone calls.

Samsung announced today three new Samsung Galaxy S21 models, as expected. At the first Unpacked event of the year Samsung introduced the Galaxy S21, the Galaxy S21+, and the Galaxy S21 Ultra.

The lineup hasn't really changed from last year in terms of the trio of devices hitting different price points and specs preferences but there are some important upgrades to the last year's models.

All the new Galaxy S21 models have a new and improved display panels that offer better peak brightness and now also offer 120 hz refresh rate at maximum resolution.

The S21 and S21+ feature a Full HD+ display and the Ultra has a QHD+ panel. All of them feature a more durable Gorilla Glass Victus on top of the panels, and peak brightness hits 1300 nits on S21 and S21+, and 1500 nits on the Ultra.

As you might guess, there are some size differences. The S21 display is 6.2" while the S21+ display is 6.7" and the Ultra measures at 6.8", which means that S21 and S21+ display size remained the same while Ultra got tiny bit smaller from last year. It is worth mentioning, however, that the Ultra does now support S Pen.

Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and S Pen

Signal has been trending ever after Facebook announced in the new EULA that all WhatsApp users need to share their information with Facebook.

Elon Musk decided to give people a push they might need in order to switch from a messenger to another by tweeting simply "Use Signal." And people most definitely have been switching according to App Store and Google Play ranks.

Signal is now number one app on both platforms, and there's probably a lot of people that are yet to switch. The non-profit running Signal are certainly trying abuse the fact that they've seemed to catch lightning in a bottle.

They've not announced on Twitter a few new features that will be soon landing on Signal. According to the tweet in a few days you'll get:

• Chat wallpapers!
  
• About field for your Signal profile
  
• Animated stickers
  
• For iOS: Media auto-download settings and full-screen profile photos (to match Android)


Signal added a "Good morning India!" at the end of the tweet which might mean that the rollout will start from India. It's a little unclear, here's the tweet:



Here's a sneak peek at some new Signal features that will start rolling out in a few days:

• Chat wallpapers!
• About field for your Signal profile
• Animated stickers
• For iOS: Media auto-download settings and full-screen profile photos (to match Android)

Good morning 🇮🇳! pic.twitter.com/KEAbhMswRI

-- Signal (@signalapp) January 12, 2021

Nvidia has announced their newest addition to their RTX graphics card lineup at the virtual CES that runs this week. The most budget friendly of the new 3000 series cards will be available late next month.

The new 3060 fills the gap that Nvidia left last month when they announced RTX 3060 Ti. Now with the regular 3060, they've got a fairly affordable new generation card, that a lot of people have been waiting for.

GeForce RTX 3060 features 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, 3584 CUDA cores, 192-bit memory interface, and a clock of speed of 1.32 GHz (boost at 1.78 GHz). Nvidia recommends a 550 watt PSU for the GPU that uses up to around 170 watts.

Nvidia compared the new card to the latest GTX predecessors, the GTX 1060, and specifically their ray tracing capabilities. A rather odd comparison, considering that it has been well established that ray tracing is pretty much the one trick the new RTX cards have to offer.

Nonetheless, the new RTX 3060 can provide up to 10 times the ray tracing performance to GTX 1060. Nvidia also promised 60 fps, ray tracing enabled, in new games.

As mentioned, RTX 3060 will be available late February, although expect stock to be limited, starting at $329.

Flash has been dying for a while now. Ever since HTML5 video over a decade ago people were ready to give up their Flash Players for the less resource heavy option.

Now after years of scaling down, Microsoft being among the last to remove Flash, Adobe has finally pulled the plug.

The company has fought for the unoptimized, resource-hogging security problem for long enough. It is time to let it go.

As of today, 12th of January, 2021, Adobe Flash asks you to uninstall itself from your computer. Furthermore, all Flash content will refuse to work after this day.

In the release notes, Adobe thanks all customers and collaborators for the 30 year lifespan of Flash Player.

There is some sort of social media purge going on right now. After President Donald Trump was ejected from Twitter, other platforms have followed suit with bans of their own.

In addition to several social media platforms removing Trump's accounts or restricting access, tech companies – or monopolies as the Congress addresses them – have joined in.

Google and Apple have removed the Twitter competitor Parler citing "public safety threat" and "insufficient measures to remove threats" respectively.

Parler was built to provide more free speech focused social media platform for those that do not appreciate Twitter's arguably rather selective and/or restrictive measures, or those that have no choice in the matter.

Parler CEO John Matze posted a statement to Apple banning Parler. He brought up Apple's hypocrisy with threats as Parler was banned while #HangMikePence was trending on Twitter.

In addition to the two mobile platform giants, Amazon, the provider of Parler's cloud computing, has decided to shut down their servers.

The not-so-successful short-form mobile streaming platform Quibi has found a new home. Perhaps a little surprisingly it's none of the traditional large media conglomerates, instead you can spot Chrissy Teigen now on The Roku Channel.

Roku has announced that is has acquired much of what is Quibi's show library. This includes both original shows and documentaries that were originally developed for Quibi.

The Roku Channel will be the new home to shows such as #FreeRayshawn, Chrissy's Court, Die Hart, Dummy, Flipped, Most Dangerous Game, Punk'd, Reno 911!, and Survive. There are a total of more than 75 shows and hundreds of hours of content.

Roku also namedropped some of the entertainment stars that join Roku's catalog, including Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, Liam Hemsworth, Anna Kendrick, Nicole Richie, and Chrissy Teigen.

According to the company, all this content is going to be available to you for free in the near future.

For years we've had rumors, or at least hopes, that Apple would enter the car market. Redefining the industry might not be as easy as it was before Tesla, but information that has been leaked in the past years suggests that Apple is seriously looking at the possibility of an iCar.

The Cupertino-based company bought an autonomous driving company Drive.ai in 2019 and has been seeking talent before – years before – and after that to compliment the automotive business they might engage in later on.

Even the respected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that an Apple car might be in the making for a release in 2023 to 2025.

Now the news comes from a Korean source that Apple has been in talks with Hyundai about their EV.

Major web browser vulnerabilities have been discovered this week. The two separate security problems are found in Firefox and Chromium that is the basis for both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

The former is a cookie-related vulnerability that makes Firefox a hazard for the entire system. The vulnerability is known as use-after-free and was notified about couple days ago by the Firefox team.

Use-after-free is a serious liability as the abuser can take full control of the computer, tablet or phone Firefox is installed on via the browser. Fortunately Firefox has already patched the problem and released an update. However, if you are using Android version 84.1.3 or desktop version 84.0.2 the vulnerability is still present, so update with haste.

The second exploit is found in open source Chromium browser that is the basis for Microsoft's Edge as well as Google's Chrome. Both browsers were affected by the security issue.

Both have also issued a patch to their respective browsers.

This one is serious too, and can be used to control the system. While the Android version of Chrome was fixed a while back, Linux, macOS, and Windows versions still had the vulnerability as recently as last week.

Over the years, Finnish Customs service has gathered a huge pile of cryptocurrencies that have been seized from criminals and smugglers.

Customs service has kept all the bitcoins in their possession as they are, but now the organization plans to sell them and convert them into more traditional euros. The current value of seized bitcoins is now around 60 million euros (appx. $74M).

Most of the bitcoins in customs possession have been seized back in 2016 with a so-called Douppikauppa (literally "dope store") case where customs raideda an illegal drug-selling site that operated in dark web. Originally the bitcoins seized were worth appx 700 000 euros, but now the value has risen to more than 50 million euros, as the bitcoin's value has risen dramatically over the past five years.

After the sale, customs will transfer the money to Finnish government. Customs has been criticized for holding on to its bitcoins, but for taxpayers, the holding on to the bitcoins has been extremely wise move.

The weird year of 2020 is finally past us and it is time to take a look at tech news, events and phenomenons that happened during this year. Obviously, the global lockdown affected the lives of millions, maybe billions, across the world. But it also caused changes to how work is done, how we entertained ourselves and more.

Remote work

Sometime in February and March, most of the world was locked down as the global pandemic was spreading like wildfire, causing fatalities that we haven't seen in decades in most parts of the world.

As of this, virtually all of those who could do their work from home, were ordered to do so. This, obviously, changed many things in the online world. First of all, it put massive strain to networks all over the world when suddenly hundreds of millions of people started doing work from home who had been working at the offices before the lockdown.

Secondly, it also introduced many of us to new software solutions and applications that helped us to do remote meetings, collaborate with our peers and more. Perfect example of such software is Zoom, a video conferencing software that very few had heard of before the pandemic, but which quickly became a synonym for online video conferences.