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People all over the world mail their broken iPhones to microsoldering specialist Jessa Jones. Aided by powerful microscopes and precision soldering irons, experts like Jessa pluck tiny chips off logic boards, swap them for new ones, and resurrect devices over which AppleÂ’s Genius Bar would say a eulogy.Jessa can fix practically anything. But these days, she spends most of her time fixing just one thing. Because every single month, more and more iPhone 6 and (especially) 6 Plus devices show up at her shop, iPad Rehab, with the same problem: a gray, flickering bar at the top of the display...

iPhone fans are not going to like hearing this, but Samsung's Galaxy Note7 (yes, there's no space) is the best smartphone money can buy right now. I don't make that statement lightly. I've been a devout iPhone user who has owned four iPhones as his main everyday-carry phone for the last six years. Against all odds, Samsung has made the most impressive smartphone ever created.

SUMMARY Half of Android users are stuck on software platforms from 2013 or earlier. This translates into a performance pitfall and major security flaw for Android users. As a result, Google is at risk to a major security breach, resulting in a exodus of users to Apple's iOS platform. Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Android 7.0 is finally here! It looks smooth and makes several improvements, but does it actually matter? Most Android users won't see this update for quite some time, as Android updates typically have a very slow adoption rate. Demonstrated below, half of Android users are running their devices...

Researchers Andrew Reece of Harvard University and Chris Danforth of the University of Vermont collected survey information and 43,950 Instagram photos from 166 volunteers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which pays people small amounts to perform tasks. Each participant was asked to complete a standardized clinical depression survey to assess depression level, answer demographic questions and share information about their use of social media, including their Instagram usernames. They also were asked to self-report their history of depression diagnosis. ... The key finding in the new study has to do with the curious relationship between mood and color. It turned...

There’s always a very interesting period of smartphones comparison whenever a manufacturer introduces a new device into the market. The majority of non-technically au fait consumers will simply make their decisions based on the manufacturer of the hardware or the underlying operating system, but there’s always another particular subset of enthusiasts.Such users are not only passionate about how a new device performs, but also how it performs in comparison to the competition that’s already available. With that in mind, it was inevitable that Samsung’s latest 2016-released Galaxy Note 7 was going to be compared with Apple’s 2015 iPhone 6s range.The recently...

Microsoft is coy about it in places, and estimates vary. (The time to make a Windows 10 recovery drive is before your PC dies. Grab a USB drive—you might need a big one!—and we'll show you how it's done...) Attila Balaton bought an 8GB USB key to create a Windows 10 Recovery Drive only to find out 16GB was required. Mea culpa: Answer Line was partly to blame, as my former colleague wrote that Microsoft suggests “at least a 4GB USB key.” It’s not his fault, though, as on this support page Microsoft says in order to create a Windows...

How do you connect the current host of the Summer Olympics, Rio de Janeiro, and the next, Tokyo? Send in Super Mario, of course — with a little political help. SNIP a video showed Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who announces he won't make it to Rio in time. So Abe turned into the Japanese video game plumber Mario and then popped up in the flesh out of a huge green pipe in the stadium that he allegedly used as a shortcut to get from Tokyo to Rio. SNIP

A small library in New Hampshire sits at the forefront of global efforts to promote privacy and fight government surveillance — to the consternation of law enforcement. The Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, a city of 13,000, last year became the nation's first library to use Tor, software that masks the location and identity of internet users, in a pilot project initiated by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Library Freedom Project. Users the world over can — and do — have their searches randomly routed through the library. Computers that have Tor loaded on them bounce internet searches through a random pathway,...

Well, my Internet "Service" must be back on or I wouldn't be able to post this. I pay nearly $200 a month for Internet/Phone/Cable to Optimum/Cablevison a month. Ans sometimes it works. It reminds me of the stories I used to here from folks at a worksite in Yugoslavia. The electricity there was on from about 1 PM to 4 PM almost daily. I tried to call Optimum Friday night to complain when my Internet (and phone) went out. Fifteen minutes of annoying PRESS ONE FOR ENGLISH, ENTER YOUR PHONE NUMBER FOLLOWED BY THE POUND SIGN, WOULD YOU LIKE TO...

City of Melbourne, population four million, placed in the wrong hemisphere Microsoft has misplaced Melbourne, the four-million-inhabitant capital of the Australian State of Victoria. A search on Bing Maps for “Melbourne, Victoria, Australia” says the city is at 37.813610, 144.963100 which we've screen-captured above (or here for those reading our mobile site). The co-ordinates are right save for one important detail: Melbourne is at 37.8136° South. Bing's therefore put it in the wrong hemisphere. The Register's Australian outpost has tried searching for a few other major cities in Victoria and beyond and believes this is an isolated and probably-fat-fingered error....

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update for PCs started rolling out more than two weeks ago. While many have been happy with the new features and improvements it brings, thousands of others are reportedly experiencing critical issues, that are rendering their machines unresponsive. The news of the OS causing system freezes broke out a couple of days after the rollout of the Anniversary Update began, and now a new report suggests that the update has caused another frustrating issue for users around the globe. Brad Sams on Thurrott.com reports that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update broke millions of webcams. He states...

The world's second-largest economy aims to use the power of particle physics through photons to send the encryption keys necessary to decode information. The launch of Micius - named after a 5th Century BC Chinese scientist - took place in the early hours of Tuesday in the southwestern Gobi Desert, according to Xinhua, China's state news service. It will be used in experiments aimed at proving the viability of quantum technology to communicate over long distances. Unlike traditional secure communication methods, it is impossible to intercept the data held in the bursts of subatomic particles because any attempts at eavesdropping...

Lockheed Martin, the aerospace company, have filed a patent for a new kind of 3D printer. The patent, filed on April 4 by inventor David G. Findley, describes a new way of 3D printing which would use a pre-ceramic polymer and nanoparticle filler to create synthetic diamond objects of pretty much any shape you can dream up. “[The] method includes depositing alternating layers of a ceramic powder and a pre-ceramic polymer dissolved in a solvent. Each layer of the pre-ceramic polymer is deposited in a shape corresponding to a cross section of an object. The alternating layers of the ceramic...

(Notice the subtle difference in the two requestors. The one on the bottom is the fake one.— Swordmaker) No 9to5Mac reader is going to be at risk from malware that directs users to a scam website and asks them to download software, but Malwarebytes has discovered a previously unknown piece of Mac malware that could easily fool less technical users.Thomas Reed, lead researcher at Malwarebytes, told us that he found the malware on a scam page hosted on the official Advanced Mac Cleaner website … It does rely on a naive user approving a request to install Advanced Mac Cleaner on their machine, but...

We use yahoo messenger to video chat with Filipino family and ...

Although it's been out for just a month, Pokemon Go is already bleeding users. A new SurveyMonkey Intelligence report indicates that the game's user base has dropped by over 20% since its peak usage last month. The analytics company estimates that the game peaked at just under 40 million weekly average

The Bay Area now has a record number of technology jobs that surpasses even the peak of the dot-com years, a surge fueled by a hiring binge over the past four years. And despite worries about a potential slowdown, experts are saying a "Tech Bubble 2.0" doesn't appear to be on the horizon. The Bay Area now has 746,100 technology jobs, topping the record set during the dot-com era by 21,000 jobs, according to this newspaper's analysis of Employment Development Department statistics for the nine-county region. While the surge has brought more jobs, it also has added to the region's...

The research firm Gartner has crunched some numbers and found that Android and iOS accounted for a record 99.1% worldwide market share in the second calendar quarter of 2016, which is compared to 96.8% in the year-ago period. What some may view as even more shocking is that Android accounted for 86.2% of the market share in the second quarter, up from 82.2% a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS lost some ground as it dropped to 12.9% market share from 14.6% in the year-ago period. It's no surprise that Windows and BlackBerry have been losing market share. They dropped to 0.6%...

Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, now owns about $1.4 billion of Apple. Occasionally we hear about various “celebrity investors” taking positions in the company or exiting those positions. The last one I remember was Carl Icahn. He seems to have exited Apple before Berkshire entered. There are some who will act because of these decisions. You should not be one of them. Nor should the management of the firm act in response to investor decisions or concerns. Management is specifically distinct from ownership in the corporate construct precisely in order to bring professionalism to the role. The manager must set priorities...

Microsoft has published PowerShell, its scripting and automation platform, as open source under the permissive MIT licence, as well as porting it to Linux and Mac, with an alpha build now available on GitHub. PowerShell is built on Microsoft's .NET platform, and one of the enabling pieces here is .NET Core, the refactored fork of .NET which runs cross-platform. PowerShell "Core" has already turned up on Nano Server, the barebones edition of Windows Server 2016, and the newly announced release will run on .NET Core on Mac and Linux. The initial Linux support is for Ubuntu, CentOS and RedHat. "Others...