On Sept. 16, 2015, Apple released iOS 9, which enables users of iPad and iPhone to disable ads. The company claims the capability improves the overall user experience. As someone covering the tech industry for more than two decades, I perceive it as something else, too: Competitive assault against Google and means of pushing publishers to iOS 9's new News app. There is nothing friendly about Apple's maneuver. It is aggressive and tactical. But does it really matter?

Stated simply: More than 90 percent of Google revenue comes from contextual and search-related advertising. Apple derives about the same figure from selling devices and supporting services. At the same time, mobile is the future of Internet advertising and the battleground where the two meet. The entities' respective mobile platforms, Android and iOS, long ago put the tech titans on a collision course. Conceptually, what Apple can't gain from iPad and iPhone sales, it can take by shaking pillars supporting its rival's business.

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CyberLink has announced the latest versions of its Director multimedia range.

Video editor PowerDirector 14’s new template-based Express Projects module makes it quick and easy for anyone to produce quality videos.

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iOS 9 may be just out of the gates, but it is already causing problems. Some people who have made the upgrade are complaining that the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system is laggier than the previous version, but some people have found they are not even able to complete the installation.

Upset users have taken to forums to complain that their iPhones have bricked by iOS 9. Many people found that their phone became stuck on the Slide to Upgrade screen with no obvious way past the roadblock. Apple refers to the symptom as "the Slide to Upgrade screen won't go away after you update to iOS 9", and there is a solution.

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Malware writers may feel as though they've hit the jackpot after a slip-up by D-Link. The networking company released open source firmware that revealed the private keys used to sign D-Link software.

It was discovered that the firmware for a D-Link DCS-5020L security camera included D-Link's private keys as well as the passphrases needed to sign software. Windows users could have been at risk as malicious software could have been signed allowing for the installation without alerting security software.

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Microsoft has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10547 for testers on the Fast ring. The build comes with a number of new features and tons of improvements to Start, Microsoft Edge, and Tablet Mode, among others. Let's dive into it.

Beginning with Start, the company is now allowing users to add a 4th column of medium-sized tiles to it. Until today, users could only have three medium-sized tiles. This adjustment will also allow users to add two large-sized tiles side-by-side if that's what they want.

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Here at BetaNews we depend on ads to continue creating fabulous content. It is for that reason I have not been supportive of ad blocking on iOS 9 or any other platform. I'd be lying, however, if I said I'd never used such a plugin in the past.

I was quite dismayed, therefore, when the Peace content blocker for Safari rocketed to the top of paid apps on the App Store. This meant consumers were willing to pay to not see ads, but weren't willing to pay for content by viewing those ads -- counter-intuitive. Today, Marco Arment, the creator of Peace, announces he is pulling his popular app from Apple's App Store. Shocking! Apparently, he has a guilty conscience .

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Samsung’s mobile payment system Samsung Pay has hit the ground running in South Korea and the results show a lot of promise as the company prepares to launch the service in the United States.

Only last Wednesday did the media report that Samsung Pay has 25,000 subscribers but now -- less than a week after -- Business Korea reports 500,000 users.

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The Bitcoin virtual currency could be used by some of the world’s biggest banks. Nine banks that include Barclays and Goldman Sachs, are considering adopting the blockchain technology to log who spends which virtual coins.

The primary reason why these banks want to use blockchain, is because it is hard to fool it, which makes fraud more difficult. Besides just fraud, the technology can also help banks carry out transactions even faster and also helps make processes more transparent.

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You would think that, as Windows 10's adoption takes off, Bing's market share would follow suit. The search engine is an integral part of the new operating system, being used, for instance, in Cortana and the new default browser, Microsoft Edge. Yet, since Windows 10's debut on July 29, Bing is no more popular than before.

According to a new report by comScore, Bing's US market share has seen only a modest increase on a sequential basis, rising to 20.6 percent in August 2015 from 20.4 percent the month before. The volume of queries increased by just one percent in that time-frame.

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My colleague, Mark Wilson, just posted a list of the seven things he "still hates about Windows 10". And while I feel his pain -- I have my own pet peeves with Microsoft’s latest and greatest -- I found many of his complaints are misguided and/or shortsighted.

In a lot of cases he's just nitpicking and I think he’s missing the bigger picture.

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Upgrading to Windows 10 from either Windows 7 or 8.1 should go smoothly and be relatively painless afterwards, but we know from the enduring popularity of features such as How to fix Windows 10's worst problems that it often isn’t the case.

Microsoft also knows that upgraders are encountering all sorts of issues with the new OS, and so has put together a selection of automated troubleshooters designed to fix problems you might be having post-upgrade.

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AVG has thrown down the gauntlet to other technology companies, challenging the rest of the industry to produce open, truthful privacy policies. AVG has done just that, and you might not like what you read.

The antivirus company has published its own brutally honest privacy policy that clearly sets out how it tracks users' activity, gathers data, and shares that information with others. Unsurprisingly, despite the fact that nothing has changed but merely been brought out in to the open, people are not happy. Is honesty about a disagreeable policy better than living in blissful ignorance?

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If you’ve ever been to Germany, you know it’s more likely you’ll stumble upon the World Cup trophy somewhere along the way, than to find a Wi-Fi internet connection in a cafe or a hotel somewhere.

Germany has very strict rules regarding internet piracy and has, until recently, held the providers of the Wi-Fi network responsible for any illegal activity such as piracy conducted on the network.

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"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away". That was the mantra my colleagues and I adhered to when I was leading Intel’s PC benchmarking efforts in the early 2000s. As the resident "HOC" (Highly-paid Outside Consultant) to the company’s Desktop Architecture Labs (DAL), my job was to help Intel’s engineers design the most complex desktop runtime environments possible for the purpose of showcasing the performance advantages of each new PC chip generation. And thanks to a steady stream of increasingly CPU-hungry Windows and Office releases, our thirst for new and interesting stuff to stack atop our shiny new Pentium III and IV test rigs was always satiated.

Then came Windows Vista, and for the first time the CPU demands of Microsoft’s software stack outpaced the average performance of even state of the art Intel designs. Suddenly, Windows was "too fat" to fly, and the subsequent backlash saw the long overdue departure of Vista’s architect Jim Allchin, the ill-fated rise of Steven Sinofsky to Windows development boss, and the much anticipated emergence of Windows 7 as the anti-Vista: A new version that was actually less demanding (in terms of CPU, memory and disk footprint) than its predecessor.

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Ford has updated its MyFord Mobile app and gave it support for both the Apple Watch and Android-powered smartwatches.

According to a report by T3, the app doesn’t actually let you drive the car with your watch, but instead offers a handful of nifty features to make your driving experience more enjoyable.

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