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Apple TV with a new slashed price of $69 and a new HBO Now streaming service

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Apple’s “Spring Forward” event is still ongoing and it seems it will be full of announcements. The presentation kicked off with some interesting news on Apple TV and TV fans altogether. Apple’s own TV box will now retail for $69 instead of its $99 price tag.

Watching your favorite TV shows on Apple devices will also become significantly easier, well your favorite HBO shows, that is, thanks to HBO Now. The TV network’s new application will offer streaming shows exclusively on Apple devices. To use the new service you have to be in the US and on an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple TV, with broadband connection. This will set you back $14.99 a month, which is about what an HBO GO subscription currently costs, but still nearly twice as much as paying for a Netflix account. HBO now will premiere this April. Read more »

New Imgur iOS application offers browsing images in style

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Most of you have surely used Imgur’s services for instant and easy image sharing. The platform has come a long way since it was lunched, back in 2009. Today, Imgur is so popular that it is no longer merely an image hosting solution, it is now more or less representative of image sharing trends online.

Imgur has been capitalizing on that and it’s growing into a social network, rather than a simple image hosting website. A very logical step to further aid this development is to target the ever-growing mobile community in a proper matter and Alan Schaaf, the company’s founder and CEO, feels they might have finally achieved that with their new iOS application. Read more »

New “Freak” SSL exploit may be a major threat to online security

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The name “Heartbleed” will ring a bell to almost anyone. It was center stage in a quite significant security crisys in 2014. In its essence, it was a fault that plagued the widely-used TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol, used to protect HTTP connections. That problem was quickly dealt away with by an emergency patch to the OpennSSL cryptography library which contained the vulnerability.

News has come today that researchers have found another vulnerability in the same package, which could, once again, expose a lot of critical and personal data to malicious attacks. Just like Heartbleed, the new exploit, dubbed “FREAK attack” targets the SSL/TLS protocol, widely used for securing online connections. This new exploit, however is not solely limited to servers, but could put browsers at risk as well. Read more »

Google+ reimagined, Google Photos no longer part of it

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Google is apparently having a change of heart for its Google+ social network. For a long time the struggling platform was a top priority for the tech giant and one major consequence is that a lot of other Google services are still very intertwined with it.

Ever since Google’s decision to bind YouTube comments with Google+ the stage was set for a lot of controversy and polarizing opinion. And the discussion still rages on. The sad fact is that Google+ did not manage to catch on for a multitude of reasons and is mostly deserted compared to Facebook and other niche leaders. It seems the online giant has finally decide to back down on its push of the withering platform as a recent announcement made it clear that Google+ will be splitting into two separate services – Google Photos and “Streams”. Read more »

Samsung launches Samsung Pay service for mobile payments

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Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge were announced today in Barcelona. They both feature a new mobile service for payments called Samsung Pay and yes, you’ve guessed it right, is a competitor to Apple Pay.

Samsung Pay works with NFC and a newly developed technology called MST – Magnetic Secure Transmission. The MST will allow the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge owners to use their phones on most of the existing terminals and merchants won’t need to upgrade their payment solution. Read more »

Google reverses its stance to disallow sexually explicit content on Blogger

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Earlier this week Google announced that it won’t be allowing people to have sexually explicit content on its Blogger platform. Earlier such content would be marked as ‘Adult’ so as to provide a warning to viewers before the content was presented to them but then Google thought even that wasn’t enough.

However, it seems the company has received a fair amount of backlash on the decision, following which it has promptly reversed its stance on it. Read more »

WhatsApp web client now also compatible with Firefox and Opera

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When WhatsApp launched a desktop version of its messaging service last month, it worked only with Google Chrome. But that’s not the case anymore, as the company has announced that the client is now also compatible with Firefox and Opera.

The sign up process remains the same, which means Firefox and Opera users will also have to scan a QR code from within WhatsApp on their handset, something which can be done through a new Menu option, labeled WhatsApp Web. Read more »

Google launches Android for Work program

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Google announced Android for Work device program. The initiative will allow Android users to utilize the same device for business and personal use by making the search giant’s mobile OS secure and easily manageable.

The new platform unsurprisingly works best with Android 5.0 Lollipop devices due to the platform’s built-in support for work profiles. Read more »

Google Play Music ups cloud storage limit for your existing song collection to 50,000

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Since its launch, Google Play Music has allowed you to upload and store up to 20,000 songs in the cloud. This has been a key differentiator for Google’s service, since you don’t have to rely solely on its collection – if you’ve got some tracks that it doesn’t, just upload them and then you can stream them to any device.

This limit has now effectively been raised to 50,000 – that’s how many of your own songs you can store in Google’s cloud from today. So we assume very few people will not be able to upload their entire music collections to Google Play following this move. Read more »

Google to ban sexually explicit content on Blogger-hosted sites

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Google has announced that it is banning sexually explicit content on Blogger. According to the blogging platform’s updated adult content policy, starting March 23, the company won’t allow Blogger users to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity. Previously, such content was allowed if the blog was marked as “adult.”

Google won’t actually delete any blogs featuring such content, they’d instead be made private after that date – private content can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog and those who the owner has shared the blog with. “For any blogs created after March 23, 2015, we may remove the blog or take other action if it includes content that is sexually explicit or shows graphic nudity as explained in our content policy,” the search giant said. Read more »

Google will offer Inbox by Gmail to business customers

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Google’s innovative Inbox by Gmail will soon be available to business customers. Next month, The search giant will begin offering the solution to a “small group Google Apps customers.”

Administrators of Google Apps for Work will need to apply for an invitation to the program. Read more »

YouTube policy change prevents partners from including sponsored content

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For years, people have been doing sponsored videos on YouTube on top of having YouTube ads enabled for their account. This allowed them to earn money from their sponsors that they endorse during the video, along with the earnings from the ads that play before and during the video.

Unfortunately, Google is not quite happy with that. You see, when people have sponsors for their videos, it leaves Google out of the loop, unable to earn anything from the revenue that people are generating on YouTube. So Google has now decided to stop people from having sponsored content on YouTube with its new policy change. Read more »

Microsoft offers another 100GB of free OneDrive storage, this time only for Dropbox users

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Microsoft gave OneDrive users 100GB of free cloud storage (for 2 years) yesterday, today the company is shelling out another 100GB. This time it’s aimed at Dropbox users and lasts 1 year.

You’ll need to provide OneDrive with access to your Dropbox account. Read more »

Dropbox’s official Windows Phone app updated with the ability to create and manage shared folders

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Dropbox has updated its official Windows Phone app to version 1.1. The update brings along the ability to create and manage Shared Folders within the app, as well as some bug fixes.

The update is relatively minor, although the ability to manage Shared Folders, which are ideal for groups of people who would like to collaborate on the same files together, is definitely useful. Read more »

YouTube targets children with new dedicated app, launching on February 23

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According to a USA Today report, YouTube is launching a new app for kids. Appropriately dubbed YouTube Kids, the free app will initially be available for Android devices only, and will be released on February 23.

As one would expect, the app contains kids-friendly interface with big, bulbous icons and minimal scrolling. Its home screen features eight large tiles, each focusing on a popular kid-friendly video series, as well as five icons at the top that’ll take kids to TV shows, music, educational programming, and top-ranking videos. Read more »