Information is Wealth.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders that Windows 10 has now passed 600 million monthly active users, picking up 100 million since May of this year. This number counts all Windows 10 devices used over a 28-day period. While most of these will be PCs, there are other things in the mix there: a few million Xbox Ones, a few million Windows 10 Mobile phones, and special hardware like the HoloLens and Surface Hub. The exact mix between these categories isn't known, because Microsoft doesn't say. The company's original ambition (and sales pitch to developers) was to have one billion systems running Windows 10 within about three years of the operating system's launch. In July last year, the company acknowledged that it won't hit that target—the original plan called for  50 million or more phone sales a year , which the retreat from the phone market has made impossible. But at the current rate it should still be on track for somewhere in excess of 700 million use...

Building a cryptocurrency miner that  doubles as a heater  is cool, but one inventor has taken the concept of mining to a whole new level. A creative Tesla owner  managed  to fit a legitimate mining rig inside the trunk of his shiny Model S. But here is the best part: all the electricity needed to keep the mining rig running is coming from Tesla’s free  Superchargers  – or so the inventor says. The quirky setup went viral after the inventor took to  Facebook group  Tesla Owners Worldwide to share images of the Model S-fitted miner. For those unfamiliar with the term, mining refers to the process of solving series of cryptographic puzzles in order to verify transactions on the blockchain. One of the common issues with mining, though, is that it requires  a substantial amount of computing power  – which in turn results in bigger electricity bills. For this reason, miners are constantly seeking for  more environmen...

More than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party "tracker," according to a new analysis of hundreds of apps. The study by French research organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University's Privacy Lab analyzed the mobile apps for the signatures of 25 known trackers, which use various techniques to glean personal information about users to better target them for advertisements and services. Among the apps found to be using some sort of tracking plugin were some of the most popular apps on the Google Play Store, including Tinder, Spotify, Uber and OKCupid. All four apps use a service owned by Google, called Crashlytics, that primarily tracks app crash reports, but can also provide the ability to "get insight into your users, what they're doing, and inject live social content to delight them." Other less widely-used trackers can go much further. One cited by Yale is FidZup, a French tracking provider with technology that can "detect ...

countdown to launch creeps closer and there's still plenty for self-taught rocket scientist "Mad" Mike Hughes to do: Last-second modifications to his vessel. Pick up his flight suit. Leave enough food for his four cats -- just in case anything happens. Hughes is a 61-year-old limo driver who's spent the last few years building a steam-powered rocket out of salvage parts in his garage. His project has cost him $20,000, which includes Rust-Oleum paint to fancy it up and a motor home he bought on Craigslist that he converted into a ramp. His first test of the rocket will also be the launch date -- Saturday , when he straps into his homemade contraption and attempts to hurtle over the ghost town of Amboy, California. He will travel about a mile at a speed of roughly 500 mph. "If you're not scared to death, you're an idiot," Hughes said . "It's scary as hell, but none of us are getting out of this world alive. I like to do extraordinary things...

Uber's lawyers can't be trusted, an angry federal judge said Tuesday as he lambasted the ride-hailing giant for withholding from him a document full of explosive allegations amid proceedings for Waymo's trade-secrets lawsuit against Uber, new reports said. "I can no longer trust the words of the lawyers for Uber in this case," Judge William Alsup said in Northern California U.S. District Court, according to the New York Times. The document was a heavily redacted letter from lawyers for Uber's former global-intelligence manager Richard Jacobs, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Google's self-driving- car  spinoff Waymo sued Uber in February, alleging a former Waymo executive stole trade secrets and brought them to Uber, which allegedly used them for its own self-driving-car program. Read out in court, the letter said Jacobs knew that Uber had a team whose job was to "steal trade secrets at least from Waymo in the United States," according t...

Speedcast Upgrades Global Infrastructure To Create the Largest and Most Robust Network in the Maritime and Offshore Market -- Highly-Redundant Global Network Designed by Merging Infrastructure from Formerly Acquired Companies and Implementing Next-Generation Technologies SYDNEY -- Nov. 24, 2017 --  Speedcast International Limited  (ASX: SDA), the world's most trusted provider of highly-reliable, fully-managed, remote communication and IT solutions, today announced that the company has finalized upgrades to its global network in coverage and ground infrastructure, providing the most robust network serving the Maritime and Offshore industry today. Enhanced Global Ku-band Network Achieved by investments in Ku-band infrastructure and merging of network assets from previous acquisitions, Speedcast's new Ku-band network provides vessels and offshore assets access to the largest global system of satellites available, combining wide beam satellites for coverage and narrower higher...

SSH  is the most popular and secure method for managing Linux servers remotely. One of the challenges with remote server management is connection speeds, especially when it comes to session creation between the remote and local machines. There are several bottlenecks to this process, one scenario is when you are connecting to a remote server for the first time; it normally takes a few seconds to establish a session. However, when you try to start multiple connections in succession, this causes an overhead (combination of excess or indirect computation time, memory, bandwidth, or other related resources to carry out the operation). In this article, we will share four useful tips on how to speed up remote SSH connections in Linux. 1. Force SSH Connection Over IPV4 OpenSSH supports both IPv4/IP6, but at times  IPv6  connections tend to be slower. So you can consider forcing ssh connections over IPv4 only, using the syntax below: # ssh -4 username@example.com Alternativ...

HP has been caught installing a new telemetry-gathering system on its Windows 10 PCs without informing users it was doing or so requesting permission to gather data. In a recent update (it’s not clear if HP or Microsoft pushed out the software), multiple HP owners have reported the “HP TouchPoint Analytics Client” is connecting on a daily basis to upload various information to HP’s servers. Detlef Krentz contacted  Borncity  to report the software, writing: I noticed that HP secretly installed the program “HP Touchpoint Analytics Client” on all my HP devices on November 20, 2017. The program connects every day to HP. The files sent can be found under “Program Data/HP/HP Touchpoint Analytics Client/Transfer Interface”. Image by Detlef Krentz. Earlier reports posted on  BleepingComputer and  Reddit  date the installation to the middle of November. HP’s own website ironically states that it plans to  disable  TouchPoint Analytics because it’s rol...

Snapchat is rolling out a new ad format just in time for the holiday season: Promoted Stories, which will let advertisers pay to push their story to more users. A Story, for those who may have forgotten, is a collection of photos and videos stitched together into one extended thread with each part of the story disappearing 24 hours after it was shared. It's one of Snap's most popular products, and the same product that Instagram successfully copied a little over a year ago. Anyone on Snapchat can create a Story, including brands or businesses, but they are only visible to the account's followers. Promoted Stories, though, are country-wide, which means a brand could push their ad to all Snapchat users in the U.S., for example. The new ads will appear on the Stories page inside the Snapchat app. The new ad comes at an important time for Snap. The company has been public for just nine months and has already missed on its first three earnings reports. The company's busi...

Uber's admission that it took more than a year to disclose the theft of personal data from 57 million customers and drivers has now drawn two lawsuits and a federal probe. Compounding the ride-hailing titan's woes are news reports that it paid the hackers $100,000 to destroy the pilfered data, and that its new CEO knew about the breach for more than two months before revealing it to customers and drivers. The hack and its fallout are just the latest problems to strike a firm that is already a target for harsh criticism about its management -- from claims it fostered a reckless, misogynist company culture that led to sexual harassment and bullying, to revelations about use of secret technology for evading authorities' oversight, to a trade-secrets lawsuit by Google self-driving spinoff Waymo, and an $8.9 million fine levied Nov. 20 by Colorado over drivers with serious criminal and driving-infraction records. The beleaguered San Francisco company's latest personal-dat...

Tesla Inc. chief executive Elon Musk is on track to deliver on a promise by building the world's biggest lithium-ion battery in the Australian Outback within 100 days, an official said on Tuesday. Musk [pictured here] promised to build the 100-megawatt battery within 100 days of the contracts being signed at the end of September or hand it over to the South Australia state government for free. Audrey Zibelman, chief executive of Australian Energy Market Operator Ltd., which manages the Australian electricity grid, said on Tuesday she expected the battery would be ready by Friday, the first day of the Australian summer when power use on air conditioning soars. "We're in the process of testing that battery right now and we expect it to be ready on Dec. 1," Zibelman told Australian Broadcasting Corp. "That's the end of this week and so we've done an incredible amount of work and I have to say I'm very pleased and delighted with Elon's staff. They...

Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that criminals use to attack computer systems. Hackers often demand the victim to pay ransom money to access their files or remove harmful programmes. The aggressive attacks dupe users into clicking on a fake link – whether it's in an email or on a fake website, causing an infection to corrupt the computer. In some instances, adverts for pornographic websites will repeatedly appear on your screen, while in others, a pop-up will state that a piece of your data will be destroyed if you don't pay. In the case of the Wanna Decryptor or 'WannaCry' Virus that hit the NHS last month, this targets Microsoft's widely used Windows operating system. The virus encrypts certain files on the computer and then blackmails the user for money in exchange for the access to the files. It leaves the user with only two files: Instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself. When opened the software tells users that ...

Millions of computers are at risk of infection by a virulent spam attack that threatens to destroy your files, unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom. The Scarab malware is being distributed by Necurs , the internet's largest email spam botnet , which has been used in a number of previous online onslaughts. Within the first six hours of the attack 12.5 million emails had been distributed, with more than two million messages being sent out per hour at its height. Millions of computers may have been infected by a virulent spam attack that threatens to destroy your files, unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom. The malware is being distributed by Necurs , the Internet's largest email spam botnet . This image shows an infected email How to spot one . The biggest giveaway of a malware email is that they are sent without being asked for, so it is always best practice to never open an unsolicited attachment.  The subject line of emails in the Scarab attack suggests the image scans they con...

Starting today (27th November 2017) we're rolling out an update to the Android 8.1 developer preview, the last before the official launch to consumers in December. Android 8.1 adds targeted enhancements to the Oreo platform, including optimizations for  Android Go  (for devices with 1GB or less of memory) and a  Neural Networks API  to accelerate on-device machine intelligence. We've also included a few smaller enhancements to Oreo in response to user and developer feedback. If you have a device enrolled in the  Android Beta Program , you'll receive the update over the next few days. If you haven't enrolled yet, just visit the  Android Beta site  to enroll and get the update. At the official release in December we'll bring Android 8.1 to all supported Pixel and Nexus devices worldwide -- including  Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL , Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel C, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6P. Watch for announcements soon. What's in this update? This preview update...

A new study suggests that dark streaks on Mars represent flowing sand -- not water. Monday's news throws cold water on 2015 research that indicated that lines on some Martian slopes were signs of water currently on the planet. Instead, Arizona scientists report in Nature Geoscience that these lines appear more like dry, steep flows of sand, rather than water trickling downhill, at or near the surface. If water is present, they said, it's likely a small amount -- and not conducive to life. NASA, though, said the jury is still out. The lead scientist for NASA's Mars exploration program, Michael Meyer, points out that the latest study does not rule out the presence of water. But he acknowledges, "It just may not be as exciting as the idea of rivers going down the sides of cliffs." NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided the images of these so-called recurring slope lineae, or RSL. Thousands have been spotted on Mars, from the equator midway to each pole. ...

Uber is working on a system to prevent travel sickness in cars, which it sees as a barrier to the adoption of self-driving vehicles, stopping people from doing other things as they are ferried to their destination. According to a patent, which describes a "sensory stimulation system for autonomous vehicles," Uber plans to use vibrating and moving seats, the flow of air targeting the face or other part of the body, and light bars and screens to prevent passengers from feeling travel sick. "With the advent of autonomous vehicle technology, rider attention may be focused on alternative activities, such as work, socializing, reading, writing, task-based activities and the like," Uber says in the patent. "As the autonomous vehicle travels along an inputted route, kinetosis (motion sickness) can result from the perception of motion by a rider not corresponding to the rider's vestibular [balance and spatial orientation] senses." Uber's plan is to have ...

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press:   The Council on National Policies of the Global Prolife Alliance (GPA) issued a statement at the end of council expert consultations requesting that the governments of West Africa declare a nuclear free zone across the region in a Resolution No.244. The GPA Council also adopted a Resolution No.245 on Nuclear Terrorism Prevention Strategy, to request that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) place a moratorium on new construction of nuclear power plants in all member states with existing high-level or potential threats of terrorism to nuclear facility sites.  The proposal in some countries like Nigeria to build nuclear power plants could complicate the current complex security situation across the West African region. A situation could be envisaged where terrorist organizations like Boko Haram and ISIL could capture the nuclear plants and use it as a weapon of mass destruction by blowing up its core reactors. One could imagine if S...

An increase in suicide rates among U.S. teens occurred at the same time social media use surged and a new analysis suggests there may be a link. Suicide rates for teens rose between 2010 and 2015 after they had declined for nearly two decades, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why the rates went up isn't known. The study doesn't answer the question, but it suggests that one factor could be rising social media use. Recent teen suicides have been blamed on cyberbullying, and social media posts depicting "perfect" lives may be taking a toll on teens' mental health, researchers say. "After hours of scrolling through Instagram feeds, I just feel worse about myself because I feel left out," said Caitlin Hearty, a 17-year-old Littleton, Colorado, high school senior who helped organize an offline campaign last month after several local teen suicides. "No one posts the bad things they're going through,...

The First AI-Driven Solution for SAP Cybersecurity -- In development for two years, the ERPScan solution covers all areas of SAP cybersecurity, and is also intuitive thanks to machine learning and adaptive interfaces. LAS VEGAS -- Nov. 21, 2017 --  ERPScan , the most innovative ERP cybersecurity provider, announces the release of the first and only AI-driven SAP cybersecurity platform at "Cybersecurity for SAP Customers"  conference in Las Vegas. The new platform leverages Machine Learning and Deep Learning to provide predictive, preventive, detective and responsive capabilities thus covering  all aspects of SAP Security  in one platform. Gartner predicted, "Through 2022, AI will be a major battleground for technology leadership," and we already started to drive it [1]. While cyberattacks are looming large over enterprises, it is inappropriate to rely on the detection and patching of vulnerabilities alone but crucial to detect any potential attack. Business appl...

For well over a decade, Qualcomm has been the research and development engine driving advances in cellular wireless. By making big bets on technologies years ahead of time, it created inventions that now enable streaming video, street-by-street directions, photo sharing, longer battery life and a host of other features found on nearly every smartphone on the planet. If Broadcom succeeds with its bold $103 billion takeover bid to acquire Qualcomm, would it continue the practice of pursuing long-term research on the next big innovation that pushes the mobile technologies forward? An increasing number of analysts don't think so. It is not the way Broadcom Chief Executive Hock Tan has run his companies over the years. "He optimizes everything around efficiencies," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst with Tirias Research. "He is an investor. The philosophy he is taking is: We don't invest in research and development. We buy it." Broadcom's effort to acqu...

Auto buyers have yet to show much love for electric cars. Sales of the Tesla Model S and Model X have stalled at around 25,000 per quarter. The company has yet to prove it can make and sell the lower-priced Model 3 in large numbers, saying Monday that it had produced only 260 of the cars through Sept. 30. Chevrolet sells only a few thousand Bolt EVs a month, despite rave reviews. Electric cars total only about 1% of total passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. Yet on Monday, auto giant General Motors announced it will begin selling two new all-electric vehicles in the next 18 months, and will have at least 20 new zero-emission electric vehicles in its lineup by 2023. The announcement follows similar plans revealed by major automakers around the world. Volkswagen Group, which last year was the world's top automaker, has said it will offer 80 new electric vehicles by 2025, and will electrify its entire fleet by 2030. Mercedes-Benz similarly promised to make all its cars available wi...