Owners of Sonos devices were disappointed when they were told by the company that as of May 2020, there would be no more software updates released for older equipment. Sonos offered customers two options for "legacy products": keep using them without updates, or brick them by putting them in Recycle Mode in return for a 30 percent discount on a future purchase.

There was an understandable backlash from Sonos' userbase, and now the company's CEO has been forced to pen a letter in which he assures customers that devices will work for "as long as possible". Patrick Spence concedes that "we did not get this right from the start". He continues: "My apologies for that and I wanted to personally assure you of the path forward".

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Rocket League is one of my favorite PC games. Not only is it extremely fun, but it runs well on average hardware and is very easy to play. Seriously, folks, the learning curve is so low that almost anyone can just start playing right away. If you aren't familiar with Rocket League, please know it is essentially soccer with cars -- you drive into a giant ball and try to get it into the goal.

Another cool aspect of Rocket League? It is cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac, and even Linux. Sadly, this is changing, as the game's developer, Psyonix, is killing support for all desktop PC platforms that aren't Windows. That's right, if you are a Linux or macOS gamer (yes, they really exist), you will get one final patch before March -- when support officially ends. Sadly, this update will remove the ability to play the Mac and Linux versions online. And no, you cannot avoid the patch and continue to play online. In other words, you will soon be limited to offline play. Laughably, the game will continue to work fully on the now-unsupported Windows 7.

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Microsoft continues to roll out new test builds for future feature updates of Windows 10, and today sees the release of Build 19551.1005 to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring.

There’s not too much to get excited about here, although Microsoft is now conducting an experiment regarding how driver updates get delivered through Windows Update.

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Microsoft’s Your Phone app connects your Android smartphone to your Windows 10 PC, making it possible to view and reply to text messages directly in Windows, receive and manage phone notifications, and -- most recently -- make, receive, and decline phone calls directly on your PC.

One of the app’s more useful features is the ability to view and save copies of the most recent photos on your phone, but this did have one particularly annoying limitation.

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Taking a leaf out of Facebook's book, Twitter has added a new emoji reactions feature.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter reactions are only available for direct messages, not individual posts, but it still adds a new way to respond to messages. In all, there are seven emoji reactions: crying, surprised, sad, heart, flame, thumbs up and thumbs down.

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SMB network security specialist Untangle has released the results of a survey of its channel partners looking at current trends and barriers that they face when protecting clients against emerging threats.

It also examines how these companies will shape future strategic business decisions for Managed Security Providers (MSPs) and Value-Added Resellers (VARs).

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More than a third of AI and analytics projects in the cloud are failing due to poor quality data according to a new survey.

The study from data specialist Trifacta surveyed 646 data professionals across different industries and titles to examine how organizations are handling the accelerating transition of data to the cloud, the obstacles of data cleaning for analytics and the time constraints they face when preparing data.

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Apple's Safari web browser was found to have multiple security flaws that allowed for user's online activity to be tracked, say Google researchers.

In a yet-to-be-published paper, the researchers reveal issues in a Safari feature which is actually supposed to increase user privacy. The Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature found in the iOS, iPadOS and macOS version of the browser is meant to block tracking, but vulnerabilities mean that third parties could have accessed sensitive information about users' browsing habits.

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It can hardly have escaped your attention that Windows 7 has now reached end of life. For companies and enterprise customers unwilling to pay for Extended Security Updates, this means there will be no more updates. The average home user who has decided to stick with Windows 7 has been completely abandoned by Microsoft, leaving them with an operating system that could be found to contain an endless number of security vulnerabilities.

But, actually, there is another option for home users, and it does not involve paying any money to Microsoft. We're talking micropatches. Specifically, we're talking about micropatches from 0patch. We've covered the work of this company in the past, including its recent fix for the Internet Explorer vulnerability.

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Super Bowl LIV is a little more than a week away, airing on February 2 -- a Sunday, of course. If you are planning on watching the game at home, I hope your television is up to the task. True, no one needs a fancy TV to watch football, but having a quality picture definitely makes the big game more enjoyable.

But what if you didn't watch the Super Bowl on a TV? No, I don't mean actually going to the stadium and being a spectator -- tickets are insanely expensive. Actually, I am proposing a different alternative -- watching Super Bowl LIV with a projector. You see, BenQ has a new model that is hitting stores just in time for the "big game." Called "TK850," the DLP projector offers some impressive features, such as 4K resolution and HDR-PRO. It will put some televisions to shame. BenQ says the video the TK850 outputs will look great even in a very bright room -- a bold claim.

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At the end of last week, a serious vulnerability was discovered in Internet Explorer, affecting all versions of Windows. Not only is the bug (CVE-2020-0674) being actively exploited, but for Windows 7 users the vulnerability was exposed right after their operating system reached the end of its life.

Even for users of newer versions of Windows, and despite the severity of the security flaw, Microsoft said it would not be releasing a patch until February. Stepping in to plug the gap comes 0patch with a free micropatch for all versions of Windows affected by the vulnerability.

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A new report reveals how Microsoft exposed nearly 250 million Customer Service and Support records online late last year.

The security research team at Comparitech discovered five servers, each of which contained the same 250 million logs of conversations with Microsoft support agents and customers. The records, which spanned 2005 to December 2019, were accessible to anyone with internet access; no password protection or encryption was used.

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Over the last nine months Microsoft has been drip-feeding us new PowerToys for Windows 10. So far we've seen FancyZones, Shortcut Guide and PowerRename, and now the company is preparing to add another one.

PowerLauncher is -- or will be -- a quick launch tool for launching apps, and it's aimed at power users. Not only is it open source like the rest of the PowerToy collection, there is the promise that it will be extendible through the use of plugins.

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Anyone who has decided to stick with Windows 7 now that the operating system has reached end of support has probably seen the full-screen warning advising them that it's time to upgrade to Windows 10. But while this warning was known about in advance, some Windows 7 hold-outs are now reporting something peculiar post January 14 -- a black desktop.

On the last day of support for Windows 7 Microsoft issued one final update, and it seems that this update has been causing problems with desktop wallpapers.

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When it comes to running Windows applications and games on Linux and macOS, Wine is the go-to tool for many people. Now Wine 5.0 has been released and it includes significant changes that make it even more useful.

After a series of betas and release candidates, the stable version of Wine 5.0 is here. It features multi-monitor support, numerous fixes for problematic games and applications, Vulkan 1.1 support, and more.

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