Apple enables iPhone users to become organ donors
Apple has announced that iPhone users will soon have the option to sign up as an organ, eye and tissue donor straight from their smartphone. With the public debut of iOS 10 this fall interested users will be able to register in the National Donate Life Registry using the new Health app.
The Health app will feature a "simple sign up process" for iPhone users who want to become nationally-registered donors. "It [...] takes just a few seconds and could help save up to eight lives", says Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams.
Android malware HummingBad generates $300,000 in monthly revenue
When we discuss mobile malware we usually look at the technological aspects, specifically how it's designed, how it spreads, what devices it targets, how it affects them after infection, and how it can removed. What we rarely get to talk about is the financial side of things, which in the case of certain types of malware is the primary interest of their creators.
Check Point has published a report on the HummingBad malware campaign, finding that it generates $300,000 a month in fraudulent revenue with a pool of 85 million infected Android devices across the globe at its disposal. In a year attackers are looking at about $3.6 million in revenue, assuming the number of devices does not expand considerably.
BlackBerry readying three new Android smartphones
In what might be a last ditch effort to regain some of its former glory, BlackBerry is planning to release three new smartphones running Google’s Android OS.
Last year, the Canadian company launched its first smartphone running Android, the BlackBerry Priv. While it was well-received by critics for its implementation of Google’s OS, the smartphone with a slide-out keyboard was unable to sell well enough to turn the tide for BlackBerry, which has steadily declined since the release of Apple’s original iPhone.
Monitor your CPU temperature with Core Temp
Core Temp is a powerful CPU temperature monitor which has been helping users watch their hardware since 2006.
The project seemed to have faded away in the past few years, but a series of updates in recent months has seen it roar back to life.
Identity fraud in UK targets under 30s
New figures reveal a 52 percent rise in young identity fraud victims in the UK. In 2015, just under 24,000 people aged 30 and under were victims of identity fraud. This is up from 15,766 in 2014, and more than double the 11,000 victims in this age bracket in 2010.
The figures from fraud prevention service Cifas -- which is calling for better education about fraud and financial crime -- are released alongside a new short video designed to raise awareness of ID fraud among younger age groups.
Video conferencing increases productivity
Video collaboration increases productivity and improves both business and personal relationships, according to video conferencing technology company Lifesize.
The company polled its users and says that 99.2 percent of respondents find video conferencing boosts relationships both in and out of the office. No word on how many people were polled, though.
Oracle will pay HP $3 billion over Itanium server software
Oracle has been ordered to pay HP $3 billion after losing a lawsuit with the company regarding the software development for its Itanium servers.
During the lawsuit, HP claimed that Oracle had violated a contract by continuing to develop support software for its Itanium chip. The trial ran for one month in a California state court in San Jose ending with HP being granted the original amount it claimed at the beginning of the case.
UK government websites will default to HTTPS
Starting October 1, all government digital services (GDS) websites will be required to use HTTPS encryption, according to new security guidelines.
All services will additionally have to publish a domain-based message authentication, reporting & conformance (DMARC) policy that will be applicable to their email systems.
Office workers find printers more important than PCs
If you’d asked me what the most used item in the office is, I’d probably tell you the watercooler. But, according to new research, the most important one is the printer.
Yes, the printer is more important than the computer. Or the pen. Or the stapler.
Icaros 3.0 extends and speeds up Windows Explorer thumbnailing
Icaros is a free FFmpeg-powered tool which extends Windows Explorer’s thumbnail support to just about any video format. The package can produce cover art thumbnails for Mkv, Flac, Ape, and Mpc files, and provides extended Windows Explorer properties for Mkv, Flv, Ogm, Ogv, Ogg, Flac, Ape, and Mpc.
Icaros was updated last month with the addition of its own cache, speeding up thumbnail display and ensuring you won’t be affected if Explorer deletes its own cache.
China bans the use of social media as a news source
Continuing its control of the internet, China has announced that news outlets may not use social media as a source of news -- at least not without official approval.
The Cyberspace Administration of China says that the move is part of a campaign to prevent the spread of rumors and fake stories, but most people will see it as the government continuing to flex its online muscles.
Katy Perry is the queen of Twitter -- first person to hit 90 million followers
Katy Perry is one of my favorite pop artists. Why? Longevity. Many such singers have very short shelf lives. Having just one hit song is rarified air, but Perry keeps them coming. Her long string of hits is quite remarkable, actually.
Not only is she wildly popular with music sales and YouTube views, but social media too. You see, Katy Perry is the first ever person to achieve 90 million Twitter followers. In other words, her Tweets can reach more people than the entire population of the UK!
More than half of Android phones are vulnerable to encryption bypass
A newly revealed vulnerability on Android phones is able to bypass the full disk encryption on over half of devices.
The attack, demonstrated by Israeli security researcher Gal Beniamini, can allow an attacker to break through the levels of trust and privileges that are intended to ensure only legitimate code can access secret material, such as DRM keys or disk encryption keys.
Straighten text in scanned documents with Deskew
Deskew is an open source package which can detect skewed text in scanned text documents, and output a straightened version. It’s a command line tool, which is, well, inconvenient, but don’t let that put you off entirely -- it’s still probably easier than you’d expect.
The program doesn’t force you to install Tesseract or any other bulky components, for instance. The single 4MB includes Windows, OS X and Linux binaries and you can run any of them right away.
Apple iOS 10 playing catch-up with Android
Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 13 in San Francisco, where Tim Cook and his team announced a wide array of new features and functionality across Apple platforms, including a major update to iOS, the renaming of mac OS X to macOS (the new version will be named Sierra) and updates to watchOS, and tvOS were also announced.
After reading about it though, I can’t help but think that we already have a lot of the features talked about in a number of Android devices and personally feel that Apple is merely playing catch-up to Android. That said, I will leave you to make up your own mind.
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