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Microsoft’s Windows 10 nagware campaign has entered a new phase, with all options to evade or escape an upgrade finally blocked. Recently, Microsoft’s policy had been to throw up a dialogue box asking you whether you wanted to install Windows 10. If you clicked the red “X” to close the box – the tried-and-tested way to make dialogue boxes vanish without agreeing to do anything – Microsoft began taking that as permission for the upgrade to go ahead. Now Microsoft is changing gears. It has eliminated the option to re-schedule a chosen upgrade time once you’ve confirmed it while also...

Over the weekend, astronauts aboard the orbiting International Space Station added a module like none other. Think an RV that expands out the back with extra space for sleeping quarters. In the case of the ISS, it was an inflatable Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). It’s made of a material stronger than kevlar and could be a game-changer. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports. HARI SREENIVASAN: The first inflatable room in space was attached to the International Space Station by NASA on Saturday. It’s the beginning of a two-year test period for this expandable habitat. Correspondent Miles O’Brien reports on this...

Synopsis: The US Patent Office invalidated two of the three in suit patents on selling digital software online held by SmartFlash LLC. A third similar SmartFlash digital selling patent was invalidated in March in another case. The Patent Office judges held that the patents were for abstract concepts, just mere ideas, and should never have been granted patents in the first place. — Swordmaker link only due to copyright considerations

<p>I remember when Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for being a normal human being, I was sort of bummed that I was going to stop browsing with Firefox. I'm not really the organized boycotting type, but I am someone who simply refuses to participate in idiocy. If some anti-American Hollywood liberal wants to fight against a normal civilization, then I just stop watching their movies and buying their music. If a coffee establishment tells their baristas to engage with me about race when I'm trying to get my morning triple venti soy latte, then I go elsewhere. If one of my favorite conservative-leaning talk show hosts starts supporting a liberal for President, then I turn the dial. It's not that I keep a list, but if it's seared into my brain deep enough, then I certainly alter my habits as a consumer of products, services, and content. Conversely, if someone is under attack by Marxists, then I tend to overly support them, like the Chick-Fil-A scenario, where I was stuffing my face with spicy chicken sandwiches several times per week for months. Thank goodness that died down. Anyway, I knew whatever Eich ended up doing, if it was a product or service, I was going to be a customer. I have no idea what Eich's politics are, but I know he is someone worth supporting.</p>

Video campaign in Germany, France, Italy, South Korea, Turkey and Japan is altered by company whose boss is openly gayApple has removed an image of a same-sex couple with their two babies from its Mother’s Day advertising in France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Turkey and Japan. The video advert, which uses photographs pulled from social media that have been “shot on iPhone”, has been shown in the run-up to Mother’s Day in each country. The version of the 30-second ad that played in the US, Australian, Canadian and Mexico included an image of prodigious Instagram users Melanie and Vanessa Roy...

A Windows zero day vulnerability granting hackers deeper access to compromised machines is being sold for US$90,000. The local privilege escalation vulnerability is being sold on crime forum exploit.in and promises to help attackers who already have access to hacked machines. Seller BuggiCorp claims in a sales thread and proof-of-concept videos that the local privilege escalation works on Windows systems from version 2000 to the considerably more secure 10. It works in the presence of Microsoft's lauded enhanced mitigation toolkit which introduces many security features baked into Windows 10 to older platforms. Researchers from Trustwave's Spiderlabs team, who found the...

At its Computex Taipei keynote today, Microsoft announced sweeping plans to build off its HoloLens experiment by creating a fully-fledged Windows Holographic platform for hardware partners. The platform is aimed at VR and AR headset makers; Microsoft demonstrated an HTC Vive working in tandem with a HoloLens on stage. After the presentation, Windows chief Terry Myerson and OEMs VP Nick Parker took questions on the initiative in a meeting with reporters. "The framework with which we're approaching this... we have a Microsoft HoloLens device where we're going to push hard on what's possible with Microsoft HoloLens," Myerson said, when asked...

Writing your will and making an estate plan no longer just involves who gets your money and your physical possessions after you die. Now it will also include who gets your pictures, e-mails and other data stored on your smartphone, desktop computer or in a cloud. "You can specifically say I want folks to have access to my digital account or I don't," says Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center. Hilstrom authored a bill to help Minnesotans preserve their "digital assets" after they die. The governor signed the legislation into law as part of a larger bill dealing with probate issues....

Apple will likely take three years between full-model changes of its iPhone devices, a year longer than the current cycle. In a typical two-year term, fall 2016 was supposed to see a major upgrade. But the changes on the model to be launched this autumn will be minor, such as improved camera quality... These include a KGI report last month stating that the design would be largely unchanged and that it would not have ‘many attractive selling points.’

India’s commerce and industry minister said Monday the government was discussing an application by Apple Inc. seeking a waiver of the country’s domestic sourcing rules, so it can open its own retail stores in the world’s second-most populous nation. The rules demand that any company from outside India that wants to open retail stores under a single brand must source 30 percent of the components locally. The regulations, drawn up by the finance ministry’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” initiative, provide an exemption for “cutting edge” or “state of the...

Samsung is advising customers against succumbing to Microsoft’s nagging and installing Windows 10. The consumer electronics giant's support staff have admitted drivers for its PCs still don’t work with Microsoft's newest operating system and told customers they should simply not make the upgrade. That’s nearly a year after Microsoft released Windows 10 and with a month to go until its successor – Windows 10 Anniversary Update – lands. Samsung’s customers have complained repeatedly during the last 12 months of being either unable to install Microsoft’s operating system on their machines or Windows 10 not working properly with components if they...

Many of the world’s largest Internet companies, like Google and Facebook, rely heavily on advertising to finance their online empires. But that business model is increasingly coming under threat, with one in five smartphone users, or almost 420 million people worldwide, blocking advertising when browsing the web on cellphones. That represents a 90 percent annual increase, according to a new report from PageFair, a start-up that helps to recoup some of this lost advertising revenue, and Priori Data, a company that tracks smartphone applications. The use of ad-blocking software has divided the online world. Supporters say it allows people to...

Do you feel strongly about Harambe, the hapless gorilla executed by Cincinnati zoo to protect the life of the four-year old child Isaiah whose stupid, irresponsible parents allowed him to crawl into the gorilla’s pen?Well I do too. Especially when you realise – at least by some accounts – that the gorilla was actually trying to protect the child not kill it. But I don’t think in the outrage stakes any of us can quite compete with the angry black people in social media forums who have been blaming the incident on entrenched white privilege.

It’s scary to hear that cellphones — devices that most of us have with us all the time — have been linked to cancer by a government study. But despite any headlines you may have seen, there’s still not enough information or evidence for the average person to be concerned by these findings. “I’m not going to stop using my mobile phone in the light of this,” Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at The Open University, said in a statement to the Australian and UK Science Media Centre. Here’s why you shouldn’t panicThe latest results that we have...

A Saudi man who claims he invented the concept of e-commerce during the early days of the internet says that he is talks with big firms who wish to avoid litigation for stealing his world-changing idea. “There are now undergoing negotiations with big companies inside [the kingdom] and abroad to find a solution without opting to head to international judiciary,” Faisal bin Fahd al-Osaimi told the local Saudi daily Okaz. Osaimi said he presented the concept of e-commerce to the late King Fahd in 1991, the same year the internet was born. The late king reportedly referred him to the...

Apple made a big deal about the advanced technology it developed to facilitate the 3D Touch feature on the iPhone 6s. But engineers at the University of Michigan have not only recreated the feature such that it can work on any smartphone, they have also improved it by enabling phones to detect when they’re being squeezed, too.A Simple Software Update Lets Any Smartphone Detect Squeezes and Forceful Touches So how can additional interactive features be added to any smartphone without adding sensors or upgrading its hardware in any way? ForcePhone is a piece of software simply relies on two...

A U.S. Federal Court jury finds Google didn’t need a license from Oracle for Android’s Java code, defeating Oracle's $9 billion claim. Oracle vows to appeal. Link Only Due To Copyright Issues From Bloomberg Article.

If confidence monitors [i.e., monitors placed in the speaker’s field of view but out of sight of the audience] are dangerous, a teleprompter is even more so. On the face of it, it’s a brilliant invention. It places the words on a glass screen invisible to the audience bu right in the speaker’s line of sight. So a speaker can read a speech while also maintaining constant eye contact with the audience. But its ingenuity is also its Achilles’ heel. If you use one of these you’re in danger of communicating to the audience, I’m pretending to look at you,...

Infamous patent troll VirnetX has formally asked a Texas court this week to order Apple to stop providing its FaceTime and iMessage features to customers. The request follows VirnetX’s victory in court earlier this year to the tune of $625 million, which the firm wants to see increased by $190 million or more, Law360 reports: At a post-trial hearing Wednesday, Texas technology company VirnetX argued that although an injunction blocking Apple’s popular video chatting and messaging features, along with a virtual private network on demand feature, may seem like a harsh remedy, it is necessary because of the irreparable harm Apple’s...

A big win for encryption, more efficient complex simulations Last week, computer scientist researchers at the University of Texas at Austin published a draft paper describing a new, more efficient way of generating truly random numbers that can be used everyday encryption situations like mobile banking, statistics, electronic voting and complex simulations, among other applications. At the university, computer science professor David Zuckerman and graduate student Eshan Chattopadhyay developed a method of taking two weakly random numbers and combining them into a single sequence of truly random numbers. In the past, the task of generating truly random numbers for encryption...