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Still no deal with Apple. Five of Australia's biggest banks have signed up with Google's Android Pay payments service as they continue to butt heads with Apple over Cupertino's own Apple Pay platform. ANZ Bank, Westpac, ING Direct, Macquarie Bank, St George, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of South Australia and Bendigo Bank will all support the Android payment service when it lands in Australia in the first half of next year. At launch, Android Pay will support Mastercard and Visa credit and debit cards, Google said in a blog post today. The company is currently "working with Eftpos" on similar...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO — Cortana's learning the neighborhood. Google's digital assistant can't tell a joke. And Siri apparently has a thing for the metric system.</p> <p>Those are just a few of the things I learned after staging a face-off between the three leading digital assistants. Apple's Siri and "OK Google" — they're not big on personification at Google — are now standard on smartphones; Microsoft recently added its Cortana service to Windows 10, so it works on PCs, too.</p>

Many people may be adding "find a new job" to their list of resolutions in 2016, and the good news is that it's a job-seekers' market. The national unemployment rate dropped to 5% last month, the lowest it's been since 2008. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 271,000 new jobs were created, many of which were in technology, health care, and retail, building on a trend that's been gaining steam this year, as twice as many employers are looking to fill jobs as there are candidates who are applying. To determine which jobs are most in demand heading into...

Security researcher @dfirblog has discovered what he calls a devastating flaw in Windows' Kerberos authentication system. The flaw cannot be fixed and the only solution is to introduce and use Microsoft's Credential Guard program to prevent passwords from being stored in memory, according to his extensive blog post. The flaw results from how the third-party authentication system creates secret keys: by using the password associated with a disabled username (krbtgt). That password is rarely changed, making it possible to bypass the authentication system altogether and allow an attacker to grant themselves admin privileges, as well as create secret passwords for...

Northrop Grumman has revealed a tantalising image of a new stealth 'superjet' capable of firing laser weapons. The so called 'sixth generation fighter' is rumoured to fly at supersonic speeds, although Northrop Grumman, who are developing it, say the specifications are still secret. The stealth craft is expected to use advanced cooling systems to help disguise its laser systems. Known internally as NG Air Dominance, the craft features laser weapons. The so called 'sixth generation fighter' is rumoured to fly at supersonic speeds, although Northrop Grumman, who are developing it, say the specifications are still classified. ==================================================================================================================== Chris Hernandez, Northrop's...

Last week when Microsoft and the Linux Foundation separately announced a partnership that would see Redmond issuing a Linux certification called Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate Linux (MCSA), Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols felt the need to add the words "not a typo" to the headline of his coverage on ZDNet. A couple of days later, when the story made the pages of The Register the headline included, "Do not adjust your set. This is not an error." We were just as surprised here at FOSS Force, and Larry Cafiero pulled no punches when breaking the story in Friday's Week in Review. "There's...

Samsung could be looking at introducing a pressure sensitive display on the upcoming Galaxy S7, The Wall Street Journal reports. The feature would be similar to 3D Touch on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, measuring the amount of force on the screen and performing different actions based on that. The iPhone has a "peek" and "pop" feature that allow a user to interact with apps different, showing a small amount of information on the home screen, for example. The design of the Galaxy S7 will also be similar to that of the S6, according to the report. The only...

Smartphone makers released a slew of new handsets this year with big screens and high-quality cameras. And more than a few were up for the top spot in this list. But when it came time to pick the absolute best handset of the year, I kept coming back to Apple's iPhone 6s. Let the hate mailing commence. Before you get yourself all worked into a tizzy about me being an Apple fanboy, you should know I use a Samsung Galaxy S6 as my personal phone. So why choose the iPhone 6s as the best smartphone of 2015 when it looks...

A great search engine that doesn't track you.

As if conning people out of money for a piece of scam ware that does nothing useful weren’t bad enough, a security researcher claims that extremely poor security has allowed him to access sensitive data for more than 13M MacKeeper accounts. I have recently downloaded over 13 million sensitive account details related to MacKeeper, Zeobit, and/or Kromtech […] stuff like names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, computer name, ip address, software license and activation codes, type of hardware (ex: “macbook pro”), type of subscriptions, phone numbers and computer serial numbers. The data was accessed by white-hat researcher Chris Vickery, who previously...

Apple Inc. (AAPL) has long been thought of as the king of the tablet space. After all, it was responsible for popularizing the tablet with the release of the first iPad, and years later, the device remains an important source of revenue for the company. Yes, more than 60% of AAPL revenues still come from the iPhone, but AAPL investors can't afford to ignore the importance of the iPad, with roughly 10% of sales last fiscal year coming from that product line. Interestingly, iPads were Apple's worst-performing product line in FY 2015, as net sales actually fell 23% year-over-year. Believe...

Flickering lights, sleeplessness leave Redmond's typoslabs feeling drained Microsoft has apologised for the "less-than-perfect experience" reported by many buyers of its new Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book computers, but has nonetheless beaten Apple in the tablet sales stakes. The Surface Book has suffered from flickering screens. Both machines have generated complaints of poor battery life, especially when machines are placed into sleep mode but still manage to deplete the power source. Users have also complained that machines are slow to wake from sleep mode, that they run hot and/or slowly. Microsoft's offered some updated drivers to address the issues...

No longer trusted. Google's products will no longer trust Symantec's digital certificates used to secure internet data communications, the company said. Starting 2 December Australian time, Symantec's Class 3 Public Primary Certificate Authority (CA) root certifcate is no longer trusted by Google in its Chrome web browser, Android mobile operating system and other products. Google software engineer Ryan Sleevi explained (https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.nz/2015/12/proactive-measures-in-digital.html) over the weekend Symantec intended to use the root certificate for reasons other than creating publicly trusted credentials. The certificate also no longer complies with the industry Certificate Authority/Browser Forum baseline requirements for best practice, Symantec said. As a...

The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn’t want to call them backdoors and it doesn’t want to dictate what they should look like.FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d been in talks with unspecified tech leaders about his need to crack encrypted communications in order to track down terrorists and that these leaders understood the need.In order to comply, tech companies need to change their business model – by selling only communications gear that enables law enforcement to access communications in unencrypted form, he says, rather than products that only the parties...

Microsoft just released Cortana for iOS and Android this week, but it's planning much bigger features for its future Windows integration. Cortana first arrived on Windows 10 earlier this year, and now Microsoft is planning and building major updates, codenamed Redstone, to the operating system that will make Cortana a lot more powerful. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company is experimenting with having Cortana float around Windows 10. This floating mechanism would allow Cortana to appear on top of documents, contextually, and provide information and assistance. We're told it's more of a powerful search tool,...

Unlimited storage still going away though Microsoft has apologized to OneDrive users upset by the unexpected removal of their 30GB free storage - and is offering existing users a chance to keep their free storage if they click a special link. "In November we made a business decision to reduce storage limits for OneDrive. Since then, we've heard clearly from our Windows and OneDrive fans about the frustration and disappointment we have caused. We realize the announcement came across as blaming customers for using our product. For this, we are truly sorry and would like to apologize to the community,"...

2016 is set to be a huge year for Microsoft. Its first HoloLens kits will hit the market, Build 2016 will provide more evidence of the company's shift to the cloud and mobile, and a new Microsoft phone may surface. Following on from the first full calendar year with CEO Satya Nadella at the helm, Redmond is moving on from a year where it revamped almost all of its major business lines. Windows, Surface, Lumia and Office all made the headlines with huge launches. Column after column has been written about Microsoft's newfound confidence, redefining both hardware and software categories....

I see so many clever graphics on FB and I have an idea I'd like to develop

The Consumer Reports survey of 56,000 subscribers established, without a doubt, that MacBooks are more reliable than Windows machines. Is it because MacBooks cost more? I asked CR. Here's what they said. Apple sold over $25 billion worth of Macs in their 2015 fiscal year, giving an average selling price of $1,237, quite a bit higher than the average Windows notebook price. Is that why MacBooks have half the rate of serious problems? That average price includes a tiny percentage of Mac Pros, and a larger percentage of iMacs, but something like 75 percent of all Macs are MacBooks. Looking...

Microsoft took a gamble when it gave every Windows 7 and 8 license holder a free upgrade to Windows 10 and it looks to be paying off. Within less than six months of the release of the new operating system, Microsoft has secured a near 10 percent stake of the OS market with its new system, edging ever closer to that billion-install number Microsoft wants so badly. These numbers come from a new NetMarketShare report which still has Windows 7 as the most popular operating system in the world, with a 56.11 percent share. However Windows 10 has cemented itself...