Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

A report from Reuters, citing two sources close to Amazon, says that the online retail giant is about to launch a music streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify. The as-yet-unnamed service is expected to launch towards the end of summer or beginning of fall, pending negotiations with record labels.

With a rumored monthly fee of $9.95, the streaming service does nothing to compete with its rivals financially, but Amazon will still be hoping that it will help boost its Echo product. The paid-for streaming service will sit alongside the free one currently available to Amazon Prime subscribers. Amazon believes its ecosystem will help it stand out from Google Play Music, Apple Music et al.

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An eagle-eyed Reddit user has noticed that code run through Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler make calls to Microsoft's telemetry services. Microsoft has already upset a large number of people with the privacy and telemetry issues in Windows 10, and there is now a busy thread on Reddit discussing the company's thinking behind including this 'feature'.

Coders have expressed concerns that Microsoft appears to be inserting calls to its telemetry service into binaries as they are compiled. Calls to telemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger raised a few eyebrows having been found in both debug and release versions of the software. The good news -- maybe -- is that telemetry can be disabled.

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The original Chromebooks launched back in 2011 are reaching the end of their support cycle. With Google offering a fairly generous five years (*) of support and updates, users have had a good run, but the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is the first device to drop off the support list.

Having been launched in August 2011, Acer AC700 Chromebook will be in a similar position in a couple of months. But it's not entirely clear what will happen. Google says that after five years, automatic updates are "no longer guaranteed", but the company has continued to provide updates for its own devices that originate from 2010.

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Google's plans to gather Street View data in India have hit a brick wall after the country rejected the company's proposals.

Indian security agencies expressed concerns about plans to send Google Street View cars around the country, taking 360-degree photos along roadways. This is certainly not the first time Google Street View has faced problems, with numerous cases relating to privacy resulting in changes being made to the service.

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In recent days the internet has been abuzz with news that credentials for millions of Twitter accounts have been put up for sale on the Dark Web. Despite the online chatter about what many people assumed to be a security breach, Twitter chose to remain silent. Now the company has spoken out after an investigation and denies that the password leak was the result of Twitter being hacked.

Dismissively referring to the "purported Twitter @names and passwords", the company says that the leak is probably a combination of data gathered from previous breaches as well as credentials gathered by malware. Twitter has identified a number of accounts directly affected by the leak and has reset the passwords to protect the owners.

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It looks like the next big movement in smartphone design is going to be physically customisable handsets. The latest company to do more than just add bigger screen, ramp up the processor speed and chuck in a bit more RAM is Lenovo. Today the company announces the Moto Z family with Moto Mods.

At the moment, the 'family' comprises just two phones: the Moto Z, and the more powerful Moto Z Force. Things get off to a promising start with the handset boasting impressive specs, and measuring just 5.2mm thick (which Lenovo boasts is 'The world's thinnest premium smartphone'). Which is just as well because, as you'll see, the available Moto Mods -- snap-on modules that clip to the rear of the phone to add functionality -- make it a whole lot thicker.

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Interactivity is the name of the game these days, as illustrated by the explosion of interest in VR. Facebook may not have gone quite as far as bringing virtual reality to your newsfeed, but it does now support 360-degree photos -- or 360 Photos as it has been dubbed.

Starting tomorrow, you'll be able to upload either 360-degree photos, or panoramic photos. On the web, these become interactive images that you can scroll around using a mouse, but on a smartphone you have a couple of options. You can either tap and drag your way around an image, or hold up your phone and move it around, taking advantage of the accelerometer. If you want to get really fancy, you could don a Samsung Gear VR headset.

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An Android update is rolling out that makes it easier to take full advantage of location-aware apps. You might be somewhere for which there is the perfect app to enhance your visit, but if you don’t know of its location-specific capabilities, you just might never use it. Enter Nearby from Google.

Google offers a number of example scenarios in which Nearby might be useful. Walk into a CVS, and you could be notified of the in-store photo printing service. Visit a key landmark, and you could enjoy a virtual tour, or learn more about it. Developers are being encouraged to deploy 'beacons' which, when triggered, will either call up a web site, fire up an app, or offer an app download when users are in particular locations.

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The name PDFium might not be immediately familiar, but if you're a Chrome user there's a high chance you're using it to view PDFs. The PDF viewer is built into Google's browser, and a vulnerability has been discovered in the jpeg2000 library which could allow for malicious code to be executed.

Unearthed by Aleksandar Nikolic from Cisco Talos, the heap buffer overflow vulnerability could be exploited by simply getting a user to open a PDF document with an embedded jpeg2000 image. The National Vulnerability Database entry warns that the security flaw affects versions of "Chrome before 51.0.2704.63 [and] allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted PDF document".

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Tinder is updating its terms of use, preventing people under the age of 18 from using the app. The dating app experimented with allowing teenagers from 13 to 17 to hook up with people from the same age group, but as of next week this will no longer be possible.

This sub-section of user represents just 3 percent of Tinder's user base, but the company feels that tightening up on access is "the right thing to do".

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A Google search for "three black teenagers" seems innocuous enough, but the company has come under fire after throwing up seemingly racist results. Images returned by Google included police mugshots when 'black' was included, but similar images were not present when conducting a 'white' search.

This is certainly not the first time Google has found itself in the firing line for apparent racism. Google Photos offended many people when its AI-powered auto-tagging feature labelled images of black people as gorillas. Flickr has suffered from similar problems with its own labeling system

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Apple has announced a series of major changes to the App Store including speeding up the app review process to get developers' product out there faster. This is something that benefits both developers and users, but developers also have improved subscription rates to look forward to.

The current 70/30 split is changing so that after the first year Apple will take just 15 percent of subscription fees. Subscriptions are also opening up to the full gamut of apps, rather than being restricted to particular categories. But it is the changes that are being made to app discovery that will be the most apparent.

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The controversial Snooper's Charter -- or the Investigatory Powers Bill as it is officially known -- has been voted into law by UK MPs. An overwhelming majority of politicians (444 to 69) voted in favor of the bill which has been roundly criticized by both the public and technology companies.

The Investigatory Powers Bill grants the UK government, security, and intelligence agencies greater powers for monitoring internet usage, as well as permitting bulk data collection and remote hacking of smartphones. The law allows for the kind of mass surveillance that Edward Snowden warned about, and while the bill may have passed a majority vote, there are still those who fear not enough has been done to safeguard individuals' privacy.

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To keep enterprise users happy, Windows 10 includes both Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. Internet Explorer may be included for legacy support, but just like non-enterprise customers, Microsoft is keen to get everyone shifted across to Edge or at least ensure the two browsers work well together.

To help encourage this migration, Windows 10 Anniversary Update brings support for a number of new management policies in Microsoft's newest browser. There's a clear need to continue to support legacy line of business (LOB) applications, but Microsoft also wants to make management as easy as possible.

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People are possessive and precise about their social media. Any change that may be introduced will be scrutinized, criticized, bemoaned, and suffered -- something we've seen time and time again with changes made to Twitter and Facebook timelines. Now Instagram is going down a similar route and introducing algorithmic timelines.

While the move will disappoint -- even infuriate -- many Instagrammers, the announcement has not come completely out of the blue. Just a few weeks ago the social network started testing algorithm-powered timelines and it seems the tests went well. Starting next month, Instagram will ditch the reverse-chronological timeline in favor of one that shows the "moments you care about first".

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