Fail

The testing of the downvote button continues with a limited number of Facebook users, but now this feature rolls out to those in Australia and New Zealand. Just as before, this button allows the users to provide feedback about the comments on public posts, so the dislike button remains nothing more but a wish that Facebook continues to ignore for the time being.

Barclay's analyst Blayne Curtis is predicting that Apple will stop bundling the Lightning to 3.5mm audio adapter with the iPhone released this fall. If this prediction comes true, iPhone users that want wired audio would have to separately purchase the adapter at a small (but annoying) additional cost.

Although the new XPS 15 2-in-1 (9575) was supposed to begin shipping more than a week ago, Frank Azor has just confirmed that many early adopters still have to receive their machines due to a delay that has been caused by "a small bad batch of the Mag lev keyboard." Even more, the i9 processor upgrade for the XPS 15 9570 is not available yet but will be added on May 10.

Apple is taking flak for its current-gen MacBook Pro keyboards from its usually loyal community. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has labeled it “one of the biggest design screw ups in Apple history,” while others are calling it “defective” and suggesting it should be recalled.

The ZTE Iceberg concept that surfaced on the iF World Design Guide might have seemed nothing more but another over-the-top design, but now a patent showing a similar device has been spotted online. Now, it only remains to see if ZTE can still launch a dual-notch phone, since the Chinese company has been sailing some rough waters lately.

Although Skype for Business will remain alive and well on the iOS and Android handsets, as well as on Mac and Windows desktops, Microsoft decided to stop supporting it on Windows Phone. In addition to it, Microsoft Teams and Yammer for Windows-driven handsets will no longer be supported starting next month as well.

According to a leak, Leagoo is set to release a new flagship device—the Leagoo S10. Going by renders, this device, eh, borrows its design elements from smartphones like the Galaxy S9, Essential PH-1, and P20 Pro. An archetypal case of the saying: "Fake it till you make it."

The last two Windows 10 Mobile handset available in the Microsoft Store, namely the HP Elite x3 and the Alcatel Idol 4S, are no longer in stock. This can be considered the final nail in the coffin of Windows for smartphones and phablets since no other such devices are expected to launch anytime soon.

After getting hit with a 7-year ban barring them from buying anything from a U.S. company, ZTE released a new statement today. The statement calls the Department of Commerce's ban unfair and says that it will not only severely damage ZTE but will harm ZTE's partners, including some U.S. companies.

According to a report, Intel is planning on closing down its New Devices Group. This particular division of the chip-making giant was involved in developing wearable projects. One of these projects was called “Superlight” but was better known to the outside world as the Vaunt smart glasses. It seems the state of the smart-glasses market prompted Intel’s withdrawal.

The New York Times has published an article detailing Cambridge Analytica’s plans to create its own virtual currency (VC). The British consulting firm is now deeply embroiled in the Facebook data breach. In other cryptocurrency news, a VC known as Verge has agreed on a potentially lucrative partnership with one of the world’s most popular websites.

Law enforcement agencies in the US and UK have accused Russia of attempting to hack routers on a global scale. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has released an alert today entitled “Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices.” Apparently, millions of network devices have been targeted.

A study by Tech.pinion has shown Facebook's ever-dwindling fortunes in the eyes of the public. According to the study, 17% of the population has deleted the app from their smartphones since the details of the recent privacy violation case were brought to light a few weeks ago. A further 9% has deactivated their accounts altogether.

The United States Department of Commerce has banned all American companies from selling components to Chinese phone manufacturer ZTE. This includes Qualcomm and Dolby, both of whom have made major contributions to previous ZTE phones. The loss of Qualcomm-made SoCs is sure to damage the salability of ZTE phones.

An internal memo warning Apple employees about the consequences of leaking information has been leaked. The tech giant has suffered from a considerable number of leaks in the past, and the memo warns that leakers face losing their jobs and may be fined and even imprisoned. Apparently, the Cupertino-based firm caught 29 leakers in 2017.

A report from Bloomberg has stated that Apple has had to cut manufacturing orders with Inventec in regard to the HomePod. Apparently, the smart speaker has not been selling in huge numbers and Apple workers have commented that store inventories are simply piling up with the device. A number of factors are being accused for the HomePod's sluggish sales, including the relatively high price of US$349.

The well-known video-game tracking website Steam Spy will be shutting down after Valve announced changes to Steam’s privacy settings. The specific change that has affected Steam Spy’s operations is the default hiding of a user’s game library. Steam Spy scraped data from public profiles on the software distribution platform to estimate overall game sales.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed one of the worst abuses of personal information by a corporation in history, trust in Facebook's handling of private information has plummeted. This is evidenced by a new survey run by Recode and SurveyMonkey, where 56% of those surveyed stated they trusted Facebook the least. The next choice was Google at a mere 5%.

According to PCPowerPlay, Dell's marketing for its new laptops in China involves hailing the ability of the devices to enhance cheating in PUBG. Players in the region have become notorious for their blackhat gameplay, so this isn't surprising. Update: Dell has issued an official statement on the issue.

Hackers have managed to deface or delist many popular YouTube videos, including the highly popular 'Despacito' by Fonsi and Yankeee. Some videos have entirely disappeared while some had their titles changed. The affected videos were uploaded to the artists' YouTube Vevo accounts.

Three South Korean video-game developers have been severely punished by the country’s Fair Trade Commission in regard to the use of loot boxes in some of their games. Nexon, Netmarble, and NextFloor are the companies facing fines totaling the equivalent of US$945,000. The fines were imposed because of an apparent lack of information offered by the firms involved.

There was some excitement among JRPG fans in February when a PC port of Chrono Trigger unexpectedly turned up on Steam. However, that excitement soon turned to exasperation as many gamers complained about the graphics and the user interface. The company behind Chrono Trigger, Square Enix, is aiming to release a series of patches to address the most common issues.

If you are looking for a Facebook alternative, then Arbtr might be your thing. Returning to the basics of social networking, this Kickstarter project aims to create an "anti-feed" where users can share a single thing at a time. The project has just been posted and there are 30 days left to meet the US$32,551 goal.

This seems serious, although there is a slim chance for it to be an April Fool's Day joke. However, the Facebook privacy-related scandal is not something to joke about, especially when an emerging targeted social network decides to delete its page which has an impressive number of 1.5 million fans.

After being around for less than a decade, Google's URL shortener goo.gl — initially used for Feedburner and Google Toolbar — will go down in three stages. Support for it went down yesterday, from April 13 only existing users will be able to create short links, and the service is scheduled to go down for good on March 30, 2019.

Although Apple also had some problems with inflated batteries lately, the class action lawsuit involving no less than 63,767 South Korean customers has been filed to seek damages because of the company's intentional CPU throttling on older models to increase their battery life. The amount Apple might pay is the equivalent of almost US$12 million.

Bitcoin has suffered yet another turbulent day in regard to its market value. Within the last 24 hours the virtual currency’s worth has dropped from a high of US$7382 to a close of US$6822, reaching a low of US$6660 at one point. The leading cryptocurrency was valued at US$11,645 on March 5, so its considerable drop in the space of just a few weeks will be disconcerting for investors.

Dell's much-awaited 15-inch convertible, the XPS 15 9575, went on sale yesterday. Although Dell originally touted up to 32GB of RAM, it seems that this configuration is impossible to attain for the time being. The XPS 15 9575's RAM is all soldered, and the 32GB SKU will not be available for some time.

The popular fitness app MyFitnessPal has suffered a data breach that has affected the accounts of an estimated 150 million users. The company behind the food and nutrition application, Baltimore-based Under Armour Inc., has issued a press release in regard to the unauthorized acquisition of user data. The hack apparently took place in February, with MyFitnessPal workers noticing the breach on March 25.

The ground floor of a tarpaulin store in Letchworth was destroyed when a HP laptop that was left for overnight charging exploded. The explosion and subsequent spreading of flames was caught on a CCTV camera and while there were no luckily no casualties in the incident, it does serve to remind us of the latent danger in leaving devices to charge overnight.

There has been a reported malware attack on a Boeing production plant involving the infamous ransomware cryptoworm WannaCry. A spokesperson for Boeing described the event as “a limited intrusion of malware” as there were concerns about the worm affecting production and even airplane software. The destructive WannaCry attack of 2017 affected computers in over 150 countries.

Firefox has released an official extension designed to put a stop to Facebook's user-tracking. The extension puts all Facebook-related tabs into a sealed "container", preventing any tracking to be conducted beyond the site itself.

AMD GPU prices may finally be coming down, but will the company’s stock follow suit? According to analyst Christopher Rolland, that may indeed be the case. A new Ethereum ASIC miner from Bitmain may threaten Team Red’s financial outlook, as Ethereum mining is estimated to be responsible for about 20% of AMD’s sales.

Intel took a dig at Uber by claiming that its driver assistance technology can detect and prevent pedestrian impact more accurately than Uber's version. This comes in the wake of a tragic incident involving the collision of a self-driving Uber vehicle with a woman pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona last week.

A teardown of Facebook's user data archive has revealed the fact that the company collects private user data including well-detailed call logs and text metadata. The company has been involved in a number of cases pertaining to privacy issues, and this is just another icing on the cake.

The Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime 2 smartphone has shown up on the South Korean company’s Indian website. The specifications listed by Samsung for the 5.5-inch device include an octa-core 1.6 GHz CPU from the Exynos 7 Series, 3 GB RAM, 32 GB ROM, and 13 MP rear and front-facing cameras. It is believed the listing may have been posted by mistake.

HTC has announced the release of its two new budget devices, the Desire 12 and Desire 12+. Considering how much of a part the Desire series played in the journey of Android, it's a tad surprising to see the latest devices in the series fall so flat on their faces.

Holding the Surface Pro with one hand while drawing with a Surface Pen on the other is apparently enough to "break" the tablet. A small but annoying bug reduces the accuracy of the Surface Pen if the user is touching the screen at two or more spots simultaneously. Microsoft is offering no time table for when users can expect a fix.

The French multimedia conglomerate Vivendi has given up with its attempt at a hostile takeover of Ubisoft. Vivendi has been buying shares in the latter company for several years now, giving the impression that the mass media giant intended to buy out the famous independent video-game publisher. However, it has now been reported that Vivendi has decided to sell all the firm's shares in Ubisoft.

Researchers at a cyber-security consulting company in Israel have claimed that they have found 13 serious vulnerabilities in AMD processors. CTS-Labs has published details about the flaws after only giving AMD 24 hours to comply. More oddities regarding the previously unhead-of company are elaborated below and in the attached video.

Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency has been called “illegal” and “unconstitutional” by the country’s National Assembly. Bitcoin has suffered another fall in its current exchange value, with the virtual currency's latest closing price standing at US$9434. In Japan, the Financial Services Agency has been throwing its weight around and has issued business suspension orders to two cryptocurrency exchanges.

A report published by the highly respected journal Science has estimated that fake news is 70% more likely to be retweeted than true news. The study found that false information which was rapidly shared online through social media reached more people than the truth did. The research also pointed out that fake news travels much faster than real news.

Apparently, some Alexa-enabled devices have started laughing in a disturbing manner at their owners. There have been reports made of unrequested creepy chortles issuing from smart speakers and Amazon devices by a number of users, who cannot understand why their personal assistant has suddenly become so sinister. Amazon is currently working on a fix for this disquieting issue.

Oculus Rift virtual reality headset owners have been struggling to operate their devices today due to an issue with the Oculus Runtime Service. Users who have tried to open the app have faced an error message stating “Can’t Reach Oculus Runtime Service.” Technicians at the tech company are currently investigating the problem, which is possibly down to an expired security certificate.

Could central regulation for cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, be coming sooner rather than later? Canadian economist and current Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, brought up a number of issues about cryptocurrency during a speech at the Scottish Economics Conference held at Edinburgh University. These concerns included the current volatility of cryptocurrency values, the relation crypto-assets have with illicit activities, and the need for some form of regulation.

It appears the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued dozens of subpoenas to cryptocurrency companies in regard to the number of token sales and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that have been made recently. The SEC is looking for these cryptocurrency issuers to provide more information about their business practices and to dig out fraudulent activity.

A detailed report by Onphones has shown proof of Honor India running a subtle, clandestine social media campaign against Xiaomi's new Redmi Note 5 devices on Twitter.

Apparently the 911 emergency services communication center in Elk Grove, California has been receiving hundreds of calls coming from an Apple repair and refurbishing site in the vicinity. Since October, 2017 the total of 911 calls traced to the facility has reached over 1,600. The calls are believed to be accidental and possibly being caused by the SOS mode that the iPhone and Apple Watch feature.

At the end of last week, the Huawei Mate SE was listed on both Amazon and B&H Photo Video. Even more, it also got an official page on Huawei's website. However, all these listings of the rebranded Huawei Honor 7X were removed since then. The US$249.99 Mate SE apparently will come in grey and gold, but now it looks like we have to wait for it to get a proper release.