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Twenty-five years ago, the first "official", illegal MP3 rip was released to public. The honor goes to Metallica's Until It Sleeps which was released back in 10th of August, 1996.

First publicly availably MP3 tools were just released back in 1996, with WinPlay3 being the only Windows-based player at the time and l3enc being the best tool to actually convert music from CDs to MP3 format.

Surely, ripped songs were produced even begore August, 1996, but the first release by a scene group is being dated to that specific date, as shown by the associated .nfo from those days. The release group was called Compress Da Audio, a relatively short-lived MP3 ripping group, who just managed to get the fame of being the first group to enter into the wonderful world of MP3 music.

The MP3 phenomenom grew rapidly from those days, with the advent of better ripping and encoding tools appearing during the winter of 1996-1997 and with the first version of WinAMP player. Coming years, MP3 became the synonum to illegal music, as P2P networks became a commonplace and people didn't have to rip their own music to MP3 format anymore - but could simply download songs from P2P networks.

Consolidation among antivirus vendors continues, as American NortonLifeLock acquired Czech-based Avast for appx. $8bn. As part of the deal, Avast-owned CCleaner is now also part of NortonLifeLock's portfolio.

NortonLifeLock offers two options for Avast shareholders to pay for the purchase: first option includes 31 percent cash and 69 percent stock, while the other option pays 90 percent of the acquisition in cash and 10 percent in stock. In both options, the valuation of Avast is appx. $8bn, appx. 7.2 billion euros. Avast, while based in Czech, has been listed in London stock exchange.

Both companies have focus on cosumers and small businesses. NortonLifeLock was previously a subsdiary of Symantec, but was spun off as its own company after Broadcom acquired Symantec's enterprise business. Avast, meanwhile, has always focused on consumers and small businesses.

Avast expanded its own portfolio back in 2017 when it acquired Piriform, the maker of popular PC cleanup tool CCleaner.

NortonLifeLock has expanded recently through acquisitions: back in December, 2020 the company bought Avira for $360 million.

For those old enough to remember the times when PC wasn't the best gaming computer, the name Amiga brings back many good memories. The iconic home computer which had its peak at the beginning of the 1990s was superior to most of the other computers of its time - and this was true also with its gaming selection.

Now, Amiga is coming back. Well, not exactly, but a retro, miniature version of the computer is arriving to stores in 2022. Dubbed as TheA500 mini, the officially licensed miniature clone of the iconic device is meant for gaming - and only for gaming. As its predecessor, TheC64, the machine is a smaller version of its original ancestor, but looks the same.

TheA500 mini can run original Amiga games as well as games built for later Amiga versions, namely, the ECS and AGA chipsets. So, despite being named after the most successful Amiga, the Amiga 500, the retro computer can actually run games made for Amiga 1200, too.

TheA500 ships with 25 pre-installed games, including classics like Kick Off 2, Pinball Dreams and Speedball 2. It can also run any Amiga game available if you copy Amiga game image to an USB stick and run it from there. TheA500 ships with mouse that resembles the original Amiga mouse and a gamepad to play the games with.

Dark mode has arrived to phones and computers during the recent years - as a huge wave. The prpoponents of the dark mode have always emphasized the fact that using dark mode saves battery compared to traditional light mode. But is it really true?

Rsearchers at Purdue University put the claim into a real test, using six of the most popular Android apps, in various usage situations, In order to test the dark mode's superiority, researchers installed six most popular dark mode-enabled apps from Google Play store: YouTube, Google News, Google's own Phone app, Google Calendar, Google Calc and Google Maps.

All of the tested apps are pre-isnatlled in millions of Android devices and each of them have more than 500 million installs each on Google Play store.

Dark mode does not save battery if your phone display uses old technology

First and foremost, the dark mode wont save any battery if the phone's display is old. Specifically, phone's display must use OLED (or AMOLED) technology in order to benefit from dark mode, at all.

In OLED screens, when a specific area in display is black, the display in that particular area is actually switched off, completely. So, if majority of the screen is showing completely black color, the vast majority of the screen is actually switched off - thus, saving battery.

Once the champion of speedy Android updates, the rollout of Android 11 has been a struggle for HDM Global who manufactures Nokia branded Android phones. After missing deadlines one after another, Nokia 5.3 finally gets its official Android 11 update.

Many people have reported that Nokia 5.3 is finally getting its Android 11 update through an OTA update. Originally the update was supposed to be delivered in H1 of 2021, so the timeline has slipped dramatically.

And according to a site that tracks Android's promised updates, there are still several Nokia models that are waiting to get the Android 11 update that HMD has promised for them.

As Android 12 release date approaches, the users of slow updating manufacturers have been frustrated. It is not just Nokia, but also Xiaomi's Android 11 rollout and Motorola's Android 11 updates have been slow.

As the list of phones that should get Android 12 grows, many people stuck with 2019 Android 10 might move away from manufacturers that seem to be delivering the updates late.

Google is expected to release new Pixel smartphones later this fall, and while that is still the case, we've already got some looks at the new devices.

The search giant seems to be anxious to show of their new phones that come with a brand new design as well as a first ever Google-designed mobile system-on-chip inside.

As mentioned, the actual release is still ways off, so this is more of a preview for the devices, probably designed to build hype throughout the late summer and early fall.

In addition to the new design and chip, Google has revamped the naming a little bit. There will be no XL model, although Google is back to producing two distinct Pixel phones. The larger, and better equipped, of the two is called Pixel 6 Pro

According to reports, Spotify is testing a new subscription model in the United States with limited user base. The new subscription model costs only a dollar/month, making it by far the cheapest music subscription service in the U.S.

But as the normal Spotify Premium costs $9.99 in the U.S., the super-cheap subscription model comes with handful of restrictions. First of all, the cheap subscription comes with ads, just like the free version of Spotify.

Secondly, unlike in free version, user can skip unlimited number of songs when playing the music. In free version, user can only skip six songs per hour. Furthermore, the new Spotify Plus model allows user to freely select what music is being player - in free version, user's specific song selection is limited to Spotify-curated playlists.

According to The Verge, the limited scale test is exactly that: a limited test. You can't opt in to the Spotify Plus subscription, as the users for the service have been pre-selected from Spotify's free users.

Ever since Valve started embracing Linux as a gaming platform back in 2012 when company added Linux support for its Steam platform, the Linux gaming has seen a dramatic increase. But now the time of the native Linux game ports is seemingly coming to an end.

And that is, actually, a quite good thing. Why?

Instead of manually porting their games from Windows / Xbox platform to Linux, several big name developers have recently announced that Valve's Proton emulation layer is now so good that there is no need to make separate Linux ports of the games.

Valve launched the Proton platform baci in 2018 and apparently it has gotten so good at running Windows games on Linux that several big name development companies have decided to cherish it. According to the developers, by using Proton, there is virtually no performance loss when running Windows games on Linux - and obviously, dropping native Linux ports completely frees up development resources for other tasks.

Proton itself is based on open-source Wine Windows emulator that allows running Windows software on Linux. But Valve has improved the Wine with its Proton, focusing solely on gaming experience and to ensure that games run on Linux - and that they actually run smoothly.

Ever since United States set up its trade ban against Chinese tech giant Huawei, company's phone business has been shrinking - rapidly. Recent figures show that Huawei's phone business is almost gone by now.

Few years ago Huawei managed to become the largest phone manufacturer in the world, but only very briefly. Ever since that, Huawei has been in deep trouble with its phone business. With no access to Google's services for its Android and lack of access to Western chip patents and manufacturing, it hasn't been properly able to build even phones for its own home market where Google's services aren't used.

According to the latest market share figures by IDC, Huawei has dropped out of top 5 even in China during the Q2/2021. Huawei's market share losses have been mostly taken by other Chinese manufactuers - both in China and abroad, too. According to IDC's stats, Vivo is now the biggest phone manufacturer in China, in terms of domestic unit sales. Vivo grabbed 23.6 percent market share in Chinese market, followed by Oppo which had 21.1 percent market share.

Sony's latest product manual for Sony Playstation 5 Digital Edition shows that the device has been revamped recently. The changes seem to be miniscule, but this marks the first hardware change to the PS5 launched in 2020.

According to the Sony's official manual, available on PlayStation's official Japanese website, the revamped model is about 0.7lbs / 300g lighter than the original model. Furthermore, the device seems to have subtle design changes for its exterior, too.

New model, dubbed as CFI-1100B isn't out there in the wild yet, so we don't know whether there are any other changes to the device. Sony has officially stated earlier this year that company is considering some changed to the inner hardware, too, in order to tackle the issues caused by global semiconductor shortage.

Sony's Playstation 5 as well as Microsoft's new Xbox line have been extremely hard to get, all over the world. In many countries, there are now official lottery systems where wannabe-console-owners can sign up for a chance to buy the new device when next shipment arrives. The slightly redesigned console was originally spotted by a Twitter user called @Renka_schedule.

Valve's handheld gaming device has been in works for years and rumors have surrounded the project. But finally Valve has announced the final product: Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device that is able to play Steam games - and should be available just before holiday season of 2021.

Steam Deck is a Linux powered device running mostly on AMD chips. Device has a 7-inch display with 1280x800 resolution (60Hz refresh rate) and 400 nit brightness. According to Valve, Steam Deck is powerful enough to run latest so-called AAA games.

Steam Deck is powered by a quad-core Zen 2 CPU with eight threads and eight AMD RDNA 2 compute units and 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

Steam Deck will ship in three storage configurations:

• Basic versionhas 64 GB of eMMC storage
• Mid-range version has 256GB of NVMe SSD storage
• High-end version has 512GB of NVMe SSD storage

The lower spec version of the Steam Deck is priced at $399 in the United States and €419 in Europe, Steam Deck is expected to hit the store shelves just before the holiday season of 2021. The other versions are priced at $529 / €549 and $649 / €679, respectively.

According to rumors, Netflix is serious about expnading to new areas. Company has hired former EA exec to oversee its video game development department, paving way to Netflix's upcoming subscription gaming service.

Details are somewhat murky, but according to Bloomberg, Netflix is developing its own in-house game studio that is set to develop games for year 2022. The games would appear in Netflix lists, just like movies and TV shows do.

Big questions, like "what device you use to play the games?" are still completely open. But one thing seems to be clear: Netflix - for now - doesn't plan to charge extra for the games, as they'd be part of all Netflix subscriptions. But obviously, if the game part of Netflix becomes popular, it would help Netflix justify its future price increases.

Games would be streamed, which is the current trend set out by likes of Microsoft, Sony and Google's Stadia service. But as far as the controllers, etc go, nobody knows whether you're supposed to play with your TV remote or do the games need a computer and a browser in order to run them.

Android 11 was released in September, 2020. Only handful of phones in fall of 2020 were actually released with Android 11 operating system, but the list of phones announced that will get the update has grown significantly over the months.

In this list, we try to keep track of all promised, rumored and confirmed Android 11 updates to all major manufacturer phones. Some of the list is based on -Google's own list, some of the list is based on manufacturer's own announcements.

It should be remembered that even when specific phone model is promised to have an Android 11 update, it doesn't necessarily mean that your phone will get it. The models promised to get the update include typically only unlocked phones, not those customized to specific operator - it is up to operators to decide whether their custom models will get the said update or not.

Android 11 has already arrived or has been promised to arrive to these phone models:

• Google phones
• Samsung phones
• OnePlus phones
• Xiaomi phones
• Nokia phones
• Oppo phones
• Realme phones
• Sony phones
• Motorola phones
• Asus phones

Owners of OnePlus year 2018 models have been waiting quite some time these news. Company finally released the first official beta version of Android 11 for its OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T models.

OnePlus 6 was originally released back in May, 2018 with Android Oreo. Since then, the phone has received updates to Android P and Android 10 - and now, finally, the first beta version for Android 11.

According to OnePlus Android update policy, the Android 11 will also be the last major update for OnePlus 6 series phones.

OnePlus has been traditionally exceptionally good providing timely updates for its phones, but after the release of Android 11, company has failed to deliver. Currently, several OnePlus phones are still waiting for the official Android 11 update and to make matters worse, many OnePlus 7 series users have been very unhappy with the Android 11 they've received.

GitHub has released an AI-powered coding assistant that can actually write code for you. Dubbed as GitHub Copilot, the new AI tool might transform the way programmers do their work.

Jointly developed by GitHub and OpenAI, the Copilot uses OpenAI Codex AI platform. The AI has been pre-fed with thousands of open source code projects, drawing from vast code repository that GitHub itself is. By using the source material. Copilot has learned how to write code, entire functions and even entire algorithms.

Basically, Copilot can understand even very short hints, like a function call and determine what that function should do - and then write the entire function on its own. So, it is not your dad's old auto-fill service that is available on all code editors, but a really a tool that could take out the most mundane parts of any programming.

Copilot also supports basically all the known programming languages, as programming itself tends ot follow the same rules, regardless of the actual language used. GitHub says that currently it works best for most used languages, such as TypeScript, Ruby, Python, Go and JavaScript. What is even more impressive is the fact that Copilot adapts to each programmer's own programming style and tried to generate code that resembles the programmer's coding style - making the code more readable for its "main pilot".