Google has this week announced that a new responsive design will be rolling out to their Gmail service with an aim of providing a more optimised layout for every screen. The new support is expected to roll out in the coming weeks, and will remove the different formatting is that can sometimes be a hindrance when you start reading an email on your desktop...
When WhatsApp, the messaging app, launched in 2009, it struck me as one of the most interesting innovations I’d seen in ages – for two reasons. The first was that it seemed beautifully designed from the outset: it was clean, minimalist and efficient; and, secondly, it had a business model that did not depend on advertising. Instead, users got a year free, after which...
Investigation of an online printer ink retailer shows that HP has programmed a date in its printer firmware on which unofficial non-HP cartridges would fail. Thousands of HP printers around the world started to show error messages on the same day, the 13th of September 2016. On that date HP printers with non-HP cartridges started to show the error message, “One or more cartridges appear...
Mozilla officials say they’ll release a Firefox update on Tuesday that fixes the same cross-platform, malicious code-execution vulnerability patched Friday in the Tor browser. The vulnerability allows an attacker who has a man-in-the-middle position and is able to obtain a forged certificate to impersonate Mozilla servers, Tor officials warned in an advisory. From there, the attacker could deliver a malicious update for NoScript or...
What a difference 15 years makes. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was busy branding Linux “a cancer” during the height of the software giant’s domination of desktop computing. Fast forward to 2016 and you’ll find Microsoft confessing its love for everything open source and Linux. It’s a stunning turnaround that’s now backed up by Microsoft’s serious attention to the open source...
Is the Macbook Pro headphone jack next? First Apple killed the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Now Apple has their eyes set on the MacBook Pro. Currently a survey is circulating asking if users are making use of the headphone jack on their MacBook Pro. This comes less than two weeks after the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 plus made it’s debut to...
Microsoft researchers have reached a milestone in the quest for computers to understand speech as well as humans. Xuedong Huang, the company’s chief speech scientist, reports that in a recent benchmark evaluation against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task, Microsoft researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3 percent, the lowest in the industry. In a research paper published Tuesday, the scientists...
Facebook makes value judgements about what can appear in News Feed and what’s censored, but insists its a tech company not a media editor. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, writer Josh Constine sat down with Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook and head of News Feed, to hear more about how policies control what you see. The talk started with Constine asking Mosseri much content people consume daily on...
Facebook and Twitter have joined a network of over 30 news and technology companies to tackle fake news and improve the quality of information on social media, the group said on Tuesday. First Draft Coalition, formed in June 2015 with the backing of Alphabet Inc’s Google, said it would create a voluntary code of practice, promote news literacy among social media users, and launch a...
Samsung will limit the batteries of South Korean Note 7 smartphones to 60% of their capacity following a recall of the devices. The firm asked for Note 7s to be returned following cases of phones that exploded during or after charging. An ad announcing the move appeared on the front page of the JoongAng Daily newspaper. The software update to limit batteries seems intended...
Recent Forum Activity