Farewell, January. We hardly knew ye. Let’s ring out the month with some gaming news—including an exploding golf game, a bunch of random trailers, and maybe some game recommendations for the weekend? Two excellent games are free to play on Steam this weekend, and they both have to do with ships. Boats. Sailing the briny. The games?
Check out the week's biggest Android app and game releases.
If you're in the market for an iPad, chances are you're not considering a refurbished model. Why would you want to inherit someone else's problems when you could buy new and be guaranteed that it's clean and trouble-free? That's where Apple's "certified refurbished" program comes in. According to Apple, before a model gets their "certified refurbished" stamp, it will undergo a thorough test and inspection process. The device is cleaned, the battery is replaced, and all parts identified in the testing process as problematic are swapped with new ones. After Apple deems it worthy, it gets a new serial number (indicating the refurbished status), and is re-packaged with a new box, cables, and documentation.
Of the three major browsers on iOS, only Safari still offers the Do Not Track (DNT) privacy option that discourages advertisers from tracking you online. Earlier this week, Google rolled out an update to Chrome for iOS that disabled several minor browser features, including DNT. Mozilla’s Firefox for iOS also doesn’t offer the anti-tracking feature. You may not see the change right away, as Google says it is rolling out the update to iOS users gradually. In addition to DNT, the new version of Chrome disables Data Saver, in-browser Cookie settings, auto-detect encoding, and enterprise support. The reason for the change is that Chrome recently switched over to Apple’s WKWebView API, which is only available in iOS 8 and up. Google decided to use the API, which was introduced in 2014 alongside iOS 8, because it puts third-party browsers on par with Safari. Previously, third-party browsers were forced to use an older, slower-rendering engine than Safari’s current one—putting alternative browsers at a disadvantage. Apple doesn’t allow third-party browsers to run their own rendering engines on iOS.
HP is adding another Taking a look at the device’s product page, it’s clear the new watch is aimed squarely at women—one of the few smartwatches to do that. The watch face is a standard, physical analog watch framed by a ring of Swarovski crystal. Below the watch hands is a small display that shows basic alerts for calls, text messages, calendar appointments, social media updates, and email. It also appears to come with an auto-follow to Isaac Mizrahi’s Twitter account, which you can hopefully disable.
The act of connecting Lenovo's Thinkpad Stack peripherals, one atop the other, each one clicking into place via magnetic couplers, is very satisfying. Maybe I'm easy to please, but it’s a pleasant tactile sensation. It's also a clever concept—handsome, stackable peripherals that tear down into miniature bricks that are super easy to store and travel with. With such a winning design idea, you’d think nailing the particulars would be easy. But as they say, the devil is in the details, and my satisfaction with the Stack was short-lived. The Stack system consists of four modules, identical in their measurements at three inches wide and just under six inches long. Thickness varies from about a half inch to a full inch, depending on function. Said functions are storing data (a 1TB hard drive), providing a personal Wi-Fi network (an 802.11ac router), powering the stack and charging your devices (a battery), and making noise (a Bluetooth speaker).
Over 50 years ago, Xerox introduced photocopiers based on a dry process called xerography that largely did away with the requirement of carbon copies of documents. So popular was the concept and the technology that in many markets users didn't ask for a photocopy but a 'xerox' of a document. Meanwhile, researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center developed technologies, such as Ethernet and the graphical user interface, that were the basis of many key subsequent technology developments. Xerox, which over the years diversified into a business services and document management company, is now under pressure to reinvent itself again, shedding some of the new businesses that it acquired or grew into such as business process outsourcing and related services.
LG has patched a security flaw in an application preinstalled on millions of its Android G3 smartphones that researchers found could be used to steal a variety of data. The application, called Smart Notice, is a kind of multifunctional widget, managing contacts, notifications, and weather and traffic alerts. Researchers from
The OpenSSL project has patched a problem in the cryptographic library but one that likely does not affect many popular applications. OpenSSL enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption. Most websites use it, which is indicated in Web browsers with a padlock symbol. It's an open-source library that is widely used in applications for secure data transfers. After serious vulnerabilities were found in OpenSSL over the last couple of years, the application has been under much scrutiny by security researchers. The latest vulnerability affects versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2. The updated versions are 1.0.2f and 1.0.1r.
Some movies are just entertaining; others dare to make you ponder all aspects of life.
Facebook has just given developers a year to stop relying on its hosted Parse services, announcing it will That's bad news for people who have come to rely on the developer platform for things like providing push notifications, analytics and a server back end for applications. On Jan. 28, 2017, Facebook will stop providing those services. Developers who don't want to rewrite their applications to work with a new back-end service provider can