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When we look at how many PCs across the globe run Windows 10, we see Microsoft's latest operating system having a relatively modest usage share of around 10 percent. That is even though it is offered as a free upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, both of which have remained more popular so far.However, things are quite different in US, where a new IDC survey claims that nearly 30 percent of PC users have embraced Windows 10. That figure may not accurately represent the entire PC user base in the country, due to the nature of the survey, but...

Chrome simply stopped working for me today. Rebooted three times, it simply will not load. IE is fine but I dislike it and I want to avoid the hundreds of vulnerabilities. Changed firewall security settings (don't like that either) and reloaded Chrome. Nada. Anyone else?

Android accounts for 81% of China's smartphone sales in 4Q15 According to a report from Stifle, Google's (GOOGL) Android accounted for 81% of overall smartphone sales in China (PGJ) for the quarter ended December 2015, compared to 82.5% in 4Q14 and 88% at the end of 3Q15. Enlarge GraphAs seen in the above chart, non-Android smartphone shipments increased substantially to 24.3 million units in 4Q15 from 18.3 million units in 4Q14 and 14.5 million units in 3Q15.Apple's (AAPL) flagship product, the iPhone, makes up the majority of total non-Android phones sold in China. According to Kantar WorldPanel, BlackBerry (BBRY), Windows...

There's money in chips.Photo: Cult of Mac Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), a.k.a. the world’s largest contract chip maker and one of Apple’s two suppliers for the present-gem A9 chip, has announced that its 2015 earnings were the highest in its 29-year history. Contrasting with reports of developers said to be suffering the effects of weakened Apple orders, TSMC has thrived on the back of the iPhone 6 and 6s — with $9.15 billion in net profits this year alone, representing a 16.2 percent annual increase. TSMC said that net profit, earnings-per-share, and consolidated sales all broke the company’s past...

Live Photos to appear on new Samsung’s? Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Android Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S7 will reportedly deliver with a new feature called “Vivid Photo,” which will be a clone of the Live Photos function on iPhone 6s, allowing users to shoot images that come alive when they are pressed. We already know that Samsung is planning to rip off Apple’s new 3D Touch feature for its latest Galaxy smartphones. Normally we’d be annoyed with the South Korean company for copying more of Apple’s moves, but Force Touch is so good, we want to see it everywhere. Now Android...

VMware sysadmins, get patching: the virtualisation outfit has released updates to its ESXi, Fusion, Player and Workstation software to block out a privilege-escalation vulnerability. The patch applies to VMware Windows Workstation versions before 11.1.2, Player and Fusion versions prior to 7.1.2, and various ESXi versions depending on their patch level: VMware ESXi 6.0 without patch ESXi600-201512102-SG VMware ESXi 5.5 without patch ESXi550-201512102-SG VMware ESXi 5.1 without patch ESXi510-201510102-SG VMware ESXi 5.0 without patch ESXi500-201510102-SG CVE-2015-6933 is a kernel memory corruption vulnerability in the tools' Shared Folders feature that can be exploited by software to escalate its privileges within a guest....

A zero-day vulnerability in the FFmpeg open-source multimedia framework, which is currently used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems and software applications, also for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms, was unveiled recently. The vulnerability was discovered on January 12, 2016, by Russian programmer Maxim Andreev in the current stable builds of the FFmpeg software, and it would appear that it allows anyone who has the necessary skills to hack a computer to read local files on a remote machine and send them over the network using a specially crafted video file. The vulnerability is limited to reading local...

OpenSSH developers have patched a serious flaw in the popular open source remote access protocol that could compromise encryption keys, with users urged to upgrade their OpenSSH installations straight away. According to the advisory, the vulnerability has been blamed on an experimental roaming feature, aimed at resuming SSH connections, in OpenSSH versions 5.4 to 7.1. Attackers who control servers could use the vulnerability to discover a client's private encryption keys, the OpenSSH developers said. "The matching server code has never been shipped, but the client code was enabled by default and could be tricked by a malicious server into leaking...

A software bug that caused Nest's smart thermostat to stop working has left many users both cold and angry. Some of those affected took to Nest's own forum and social media to vent their anger about the problem. Nest said that it was aware of the issue and that it had been fixed for "99.5%" of users. It recommended that, for those still experiencing problems "performing a manual reset should help". It also published a nine-step fix. "We are aware of a software bug impacting some Nest Thermostat owners. In some cases, this may cause the device to respond slowly...

This is like the Night of the Living Dead Microsoft's relentless campaign to push Windows 10 onto every PC on the planet knows no bounds: now business desktops will be nagged to upgrade. When Redmond started quietly installing Windows 10 on computers via Windows Update, it was aimed at getting home users off Windows 7 and 8. If you were using Windows Pro or Enterprise, or managed your machines using a domain, you weren't supposed to be pestered with dialog boxes offering the free upgrade. Until now. According to Microsoft on Wednesday, the controversial try-hard "Get Windows 10" nagware is...

I have an idea for a brilliant, sarcastic Conservative phone app called "Happy Safe Space Filter" that would be a wonderfully hot ticket with Conservatives, and/or Sarcastic Teenagers. It could either be a freebie for the Cause, or in true Capitalist fashion, would probably sell well at 99 cents. (The joke works I a lot of ways, but would include a little body copy crediting Conservatives.) I claim the idea and would be willing to give it up for 10% of gross. It is a pretty simple thing. If you have App writing experience, please message me here on Free...

Firewall vendor FortiNet has denied that the FortiGate OS operating system that runs its devices comes with a backdoor, despite a researcher purportedly posting proof of concept code on a security mailing list. Over the weekend, a Python script was posted anonymously, which appeared to allow remote access to Fortinet devices over the Secure Shell protocol. The post disclosed a passord hard-coded into the FortiGate OS. The password is said to work on FortiOS version 4.x to 5.0.7, and a screenshot was posted on Twitter, allegedly showing that the script for the backdoor is working, providing remote access to Fortinet...

It's no secret that PC sales are shrinking, as everybody and their mothers turn to smartphones and tablets. That has led to miserable holiday PC sales, with worldwide PC shipments down 10.6% year-over-year in the final three months of 2015, research firm IDC announced on Tuesday. Sales of PCs for all of 2015 came in at the lowest level since 2008, IDC said in a press release. By the second half of 2016, IDC says, things should stabilize a little bit in the PC market: Enterprises and consumers alike will turn to Microsoft Windows 10, the latest version of the...

If you went and bought a smartwatch in the last year, there's a really good chance it was an Apple Watch.In all there were 17.1 million smartwatches shipped globally in 2015, according to new data out from Juniper Research on Tuesday. More than 50 percent of those shipments were Apple Watches, or roughly 8.9 million in all. That's even more impressive when you realize that the device was only released at the end of April. Android Wear shipments, on the other hand, made up less than 10 percent of sales for the year.The dominance of Apple surely has something to...

Most of the top Linux distributions are of the "easier to use" variety. Some observers might dispute this, but the fact is that most people not working in IT or software development will gravitate toward the easiest experience when it comes to Linux.In this article, I'll share my top picks for best Linux distro for newcomers. These selections are chosen based on their ease of use, not their potential for "learning Linux." I hope to put to bed once and for all that myth that all who use Linux need to have a strong familiarity with how Linux works. After...

A Survey of 1000 respondents in China by the Bank of America / Merrill Lynch has found that the Apple iPhone remains the most popular phone in China, and is still selling well, contrary to the negative reports being Fudded around Wall Street. Due to copyright prohibitions the New Zealand Herald content may not be posted on FreeRepublic so you will have to go to their website to read the article: Bank of America has good news for Apple, and it comes from China

It’s one of the much-awaited new games in the increasingly small — but highly lucrative — triple-A shooter market. This new Homefront comes out on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. It is rated mature. The title has both single-player and cooperative (four-player online) play. Its developer is Dambusters Studios. It debuts May 20 outside of North America. Xbox One owners can sign up now...

Piper Jaffrey's Gene Munster, one of the better-known analysts who covers Apple, has joined the ranks of his colleagues and competitors who are predicting a decline in iPhone sales when CEO Tim Cook reports his December quarterly earnings on January 26. Of the seven most recent analyst reports that Business Insider has viewed, all of them now predict an upcoming slump in the number of iPhone units sold. One group, Pacific Crest, all but accused Apple of shading the truth about its sales prospects in a previous earnings call, in a note that said, "Management's confidence now looks highly likely...

A Google Project Zero researcher has left security vendor Trend Micro with egg on its face, after discovering its software contains multiple, serious vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit without user interaction or notification. Tavis Ormandy of Project Zero noted that when Trend Micro antivirus is installed on Windows, the password manager component - written mostly in Javascript using the node.js framework that's included by default - allows any any website to run arbitrary code on users' machines. The flaw in password manager allegedly took Ormandy only about 30 seconds to discover. He said the vulnerability is trivial to exploit,...

I find it distracting to see those squiggles in a post. Usually, the ’ mark is the result of an apostrophe being inserted in the text. When you cut and paste from some articles, a different code (e.g., often Unicode) is used rather than ASCII code for the apostrophe. The †mark suffers the same fate, and is often associated with the "slight lean" that quote marks have in word processing documents. The fix is easy: when you preview your post, highlight the squiggle and replace it with the appropriate character as used in a Free Republic post. The squiggles...