Category: Featured

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Twitch sells video ads that cannot be ad blocked

Twitch, the Amazon-owned video streaming platform which is today used by over 2 million broadcasters, announced today its plans to begin selling video ads in its partners’ live streams. These ads will roll out this week, and will be delivered through Twitch’s new SureStream video technology platform, which also offers smoother and more reliable streams, including ads, the company claims. The goal is to offer...

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Facebook revenue increases by blocking ad blockers

Facebook’s recent workaround for Adblock Plus and other ad blockers is already earning it money. On today’s blockbuster Q3 earnings call, the company said desktop ad revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year this quarter compared to around 9 percent in previous quarters, and that thwarting ad blockers was largely the cause for that boost. While Adblock Plus announced it would circumvent the ban, and temporarily...

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Firefox 50 startup improvements land on November 15

Mozilla Firefox 50, the next release version of the web browser, won’t come out on November 8, 2016 but a week later on November 15, 2016 instead. Firefox ESR will be released a week later as well to come out at the same day as Firefox 50. The reason for the change is quite positive for users of the web browser: Mozilla wants to include...

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Web of Trust selling user browsing history

Add-on companies are selling the browsing history of millions of users to third-parties according to a report that aired on German national TV. Reporters of Panorama managed to gain access to a large data collection that contained the browsing history of roughly 3 million German Internet users. The data was collected by companies that produce browser extensions for various popular browsers such as Chrome...

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Lunarsoft SSL support is site wide

During the early morning hours of October 26, 2016 I spent time getting Lunarsoft SSL support across all of the domains. I’ve updated all of the links on the forums, wiki, and frontpage software. I’m also updating image links that were posted with websites like imgur to make sure https is in use. I’ve made sure that every page – whether it’s content or...

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Twitter discontinues Vine video sharing service

Twitter is shutting down video-sharing service Vine “in the coming months,” the company announced Thursday. Vine, which lets you share short video clips, debuted in 2013. Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 before the service had even launched. The news comes the same day Twitter announced it would lay off more than 300 workers, or 9% of the company’s global workforce, within the company’s sales,...

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Microsoft Teams will compete against Slack

Microsoft is holding an event in New York City on November 2 next week. It’s an Office event, but beyond that, the company hasn’t officially said what it’s about. Microsoft is also building a competitor to Slack, the Web-based IRC-like messaging app that has become the darling of millennial-infested newsrooms and software startups around the globe. It looked like it was originally to be...

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Google Fiber halts service in several cities, CEO steps down

Google’s ambitious plan to spread high-speed internet service across the US has hit a bump in the road as the group leading the charge scales back its operations and is roiled by a management shake up. Craig Barratt, the head of Google Access, is stepping down and the company is freezing plans to roll out the high-speed Google Fiber broadband service to 8 new cities, company announced on Tuesday. Access, which...

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Microsoft releases toolkit to build human speech recognition

Last week, Microsoft announced a speech recognition breakthrough: a transcription system that can match humans, with a word error rate of 5.9 percent for conversational speech. This new system is built on an open source toolkit that Microsoft already developed. A major new update to the toolkit, now called the Cognitive Toolkit, was released today in beta. Formerly called the Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK),...

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iPhone hack possible when opening jpg, pdf, or fonts

What’s worse than knowing that innocent looking JPEGs, PDFs and font files can hijack your iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Yes, attackers can take over your vulnerable Apple’s iOS device remotely – all they have to do is trick you to view a maliciously-crafted JPEG graphic or PDF file through a website or an email, which could allow them to execute malicious code on your...