Latest Technology News

For some time now, Apple has regularly released the source code for the shared iOS and macOS kernel. That the company has done so again might not be news, but Apple has, for the first time, released the source code for the ARM versions of the kernel.

Pushed to GitHub, the source code gives anyone who likes the idea of seeing exactly what makes iOS and macOS tick the opportunity to do just that.

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Google has announced changes to the requirements it places on websites that provide news on a subscription basis. With a large number of news sites locking content away behind a paywall, Google had required publishers to provide people with access to three free articles per day or face demotion in search results.

Scrapping what was known as the First Click Free Policy, Google is dropping any such requirement to provide free access to content. A new approach -- Flexible Sampling -- lets publishers decide how many, if any, free articles they provide.

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Amazon has been gradually expanding its range of Echo devices, and it has been possible to make free calls between Alexa-enabled devices for a few months -- now Amazon is extending the free calling capability even further.

Owners of any Amazon Echo device -- not just the latest batch -- can now make free calls to phones in the US, Mexico and Canada. No extra hardware or software is needed to take advantage of free calling.

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Nintendo has updated the terms of the Nintendo Creators Program so that members are no longer permitted to live stream games on YouTube. The program has been running since 2015, giving gamers the chance to earn a little ad revenue from videos featuring Nintendo games.

The change does not mean that gamers are not able to feature Nintendo games in their YouTube videos, but live streaming of game walkthroughs or other streams of gameplay are not allowed any more.

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It recently came to light that Google had killed off NFC Smart Lock in Android -- without telling anyone. Now the company has come clean about just why the feature was given the chop.

Google says that "in the case of NFC unlock, we've seen extremely low usage," adding that there are now many more ways of unlocking Android devices. But while Google points to features such as On-Body detection, fingerprint scanning and Trusted Places, fans of the missing feature say that none of these are comparable.

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It's now a little more than a year since Microsoft first brought extensions to Edge. After so long you would expect the selection of addons to be overwhelming -- but that's far from being the case. In all, there are only 70-odd Edge extensions available, and Microsoft has been moved to explain why.

In a blog post, the company almost apologetically explains that it is "building a thoughtfully curated ecosystem," citing concern over quality and a fear of diminishing the user experience. What some might describe as "slow," Microsoft refers to as a "purposefully metered approach" to new extensions, and you probably shouldn't expect things to speed up a great deal any time soon.

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Fans of the image editing tool Paint.NET have two big pieces of news to digest. While this is only a minor version number bump, Paint.NET 4.0.18 improves startup times by around 25 percent as well as improving portable mode and introducing per-user plugins.

But perhaps the biggest news -- as promised a few months ago -- is that Paint.NET is now in the Microsoft Store. While many people will welcome the arrival of the app in the Store, the fact that a price tag has been slapped on it will come as a surprise -- and a disappointment -- to some.

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Ransomware has been named as one of the most pressing threats to society by officers at Europol.

The force has released a new report which claims that ransomware is reaching "epidemic" levels, eclipsing other areas of cybercrime such as data breaches, pornography and card fraud.

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Chinese smartphone manufacturer Doogee seems to be on fire; the outfit, which is several orders of magnitude smaller than bigger names like Lenovo, Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi, has been pushing out new models like there’s no tomorrow. The vendor embraced a niche approach with the S-series (for secure), the BL series, the Mix (bezel-less), the Shoot series (for photography aficionados) and a few more.

After the Doogee Mix and the Doogee T5 and just before we review the S60 rugged smartphone, we’re taking a look at the BL7000 with the first two letters meaning "Battery Life" and 7000 representing the battery capacity (in mAh).

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The war against copyright infringement has always been a difficult one for rights holders. Aside from the scale of the problem, there are multiple platforms that make illegal downloads, streams, and sharing possible. For many years, the main target for anti-piracy bodies was BitTorrent, but in recent months a new number one enemy has surfaced in the form of Kodi, and in particular various companies and addons associated with the media center software.

While in Europe and the UK, sellers of "fully loaded" media center boxes seem to be the primary focus for Kodi-related lawsuits, in Canada and the US, it’s hosting site TVAddons and the ZemTV Kodi addon that are in the firing line. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was setup to "defend civil liberties in the digital world" and it has now weighed in on the Kodi situation, pointing out the shaky legal grounds these cases rest on.

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Blockchain technology is a key disruption enabler of established and, most importantly, trusted broker industries -- financial services being the biggest and most lucrative trusted broker service in the world. Trillions of pounds are moved around the archaic global financial system every day and billions of businesses and private individuals are serviced by companies that make up the vast industry. Still heavily reliant on manual processes, though dressed in a digital façade, finance system productivity is anchored with process delays, ever-rising expenses and is a relentless target for crime and fraud.

In an attempt to solve these ever-growing issues, blockchain, originally developed as the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, has been heavily invested in over the last few years. Investment to date has been primarily targeted at finance-focused blockchain start-ups and this focus of investment has lured many into the belief that the technology only has real potential in the world of finance.

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Mozilla has announced an update to Firefox's Privacy Notice which aims to better inform users about what data is collected and why.

As well as making its privacy policies more understandable, Mozilla is also trying to ensure that more people actually see them. For new installations, the Privacy Notice is automatically displayed in a tab. But it's the layout and accessibility of the updated document that's the real change.

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Rumors of BlackBerry's death may have been somewhat premature. The company just revealed its latest financial results, showing significant profits.

The former smartphone giant posted a stronger-than-expected second quarter, after, according to BlackBerry, its "complete transformation to a software company."

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As Android is based on Linux, the existing two-year lifecycle for Long Term Support (LTS) kernels is restrictively short. But, during a presentation about Android's Project Treble, Google's Iliyan Malchev announced that this is going to -- appropriately -- treble to six years.

This will address what has become a serious issue for chip-makers. During the production process, they need to pick the most recent LTS kernel to work with to ensure longevity, but the length of time it takes to design and produce chips means that much of the two years of support is used up by the time of release.

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Skype is an important communication service thanks to its cross-compatibility. There are clients for Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and even desktop Linux. It may not offer the best user experience, but it is passable, making it a solid choice for those that need to keep in touch across long distances.

Today, Microsoft releases a refreshed preview of Skype for Linux. There are both DEB and RPM packages available, making it easy to install on, say, Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora. In fact, I successfully installed it on Pop!_OS earlier today. Believe it or not, the new interface is quite nice, making it something I could possibly enjoy using on my Linux machine.

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