Microsoft is finally admitting Kinect is truly dead. After years of debate over whether Kinect is truly dead or not, the software giant has now stopped manufacturing the accessory. Fast Co Design reports that the depth camera and microphone accessory has sold around 35 million units since its debut in November, 2010. Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 even became the fastest-selling consumer device back...
Firefox Quantum is now available in Developer Edition, and this Firefox is fast. As a reader of the Hacks blog, you may be familiar with Project Quantum, our attempt to refactor, redesign, replace, and modernize the very core of Firefox. We’ve shipped many incremental improvements to Firefox in the past, but this release marks the first milestone where we believe Firefox fundamentally feels like...
Twitter’s 140-character limit died today after a long battle with Facebook. It is survived by brands, publishers and personalities, who will miss its insistence on wit and getting to the point. That’s right: Twitter is expanding its character limit on text posts to 280 characters from 140, starting with a subset of users. The company is describing the move as a test, but the...
In a supply chain attack that may be unprecedented in the number of downloads, servers hosting CCleaner, a popular tool for cleaning up the PC, has been delivering a version of the said software with malware. What happened? Threat actors have managed to change the files that were being delivered by Avast servers hosting CCleaner updates. In case you are wondering why they were...
Ed Foudil, a web developer and security researcher, has submitted a draft to the IETF — Internet Engineering Task Force — seeking the standardization of security.txt, a file that webmasters can host on their domain root and describe the site’s security policies. The file is akin to robots.txt, a standard used by websites to communicate and define policies for web and search engine crawlers....
Google today announced Chrome is going to war with autoplay. Starting next year, Chrome will only autoplay a given piece of content when the media won’t play sound or the user has indicated an interest in the media. Not all users have the same preferences for autoplay media, so Google has looked at letting users mute and unmute entire websites — we first heard...
Researchers say that a bug in the Windows kernel could allow hackers to perform malicious actions by tricking security products blindly relying on a Windows API. The bug affects a low-level interface, known as PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine, that notifies when a module has been loaded into the Windows kernel. The bug can allow an attacker to forge the name of a loaded module, a method that...
The next update of Windows 10, the Fall Creators Update, will be available worldwide October 17. With the Fall Creators Update we are introducing some fun, new ways to get creative. As part of the update we will deliver an evolution to the photos experience that will let you tell your story like never before using photos, videos, and 3D effects; enhancements in gaming,...
A federal appeals court in California ruled on Tuesday that an ad company responsible for so-called “zombie” or “supercookies”—bits of code that tracked the location and browsing habits of Verizon customers—could not dodge a class action lawsuit by invoking arbitration rules in the phone company’s contracts. The supercookies in question gained notoriety after the website ProPublica discovered the ad company, Turn, and Verizon were...
Shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July, the owner of the Brushes4Less store on Amazon’s marketplace received a suspension notice for his best-selling product, a toothbrush head replacement. The email that landed in his inbox said the product was being delisted from the site because of an intellectual property violation. In order to resolve the matter and get the product reinstated, the owner would...
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