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The European Commission has added new antitrust charges against Google in the areas of search and advertising as it continues to investigate into the Internet search giant. On Thursday, the EC charged Google in a “statement of objections” that it has placed restrictions on the ability of certain third party websites to display search advertisements from the search giant’s competitors. Google places search ads directly on the its search website but also as an intermediary on third party websites through its “AdSense for Search” platform, according to the Commission. As a result, the company has prevented existing and potential competitors, including other search …

Earlier this week, we learned that the insanely popular mobile gaming app Pokémon Go requested full access to users' Google accounts when activated on iOS. Niantic said that it was a mistake, and the issue was corrected in an update for the app. Yesterday, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter (PDF) to game creator Niantic asking the company to explain that issue as well as some of the other privacy choices in the game. The letter notes that Pokémon Go collects profile and account information, location data, and data "obtained through Cookies and Web Beacons." The game also asks permission to do things like control vibration and prevent the phone from sleeping…

On Wednesday, Microsoft claimed that its Edge browser was the only one of the big four browsers—which also includes Chrome, Firefox, and Opera—to offer 1080p resolution while playing Netflix content. A quick test of all four browsers by PCWorld proved this claim to be true, with the other three browsers capped at 720p. Currently, Opera runs Netflix at a maximum resolution of 720p. Why this matters: Microsoft’s been busy trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Edge, which suffered after the browser initially offered slower performance than its competitors, while also lacking the plugins and extensions that other browsers, particularly Firefox, have offered for y…

Despite a recent appellate court ruling that said sharing passwords could be grounds for prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, streamers who might be sharing Netflix or Hulu passwords don’t really have anything to be worried about. Here’s a summary of the case: David Nosal worked as a director for a headhunting firm called Korn Ferry International. He left the firm to start his own competing business and had been using the login information of his former assistant who still worked at Korn Ferry to download valuable proprietary information from the company’s database. Nosal was charged with conspiracy, theft of trade secrets and three computer fraud coun…

T-Mobile has announced today that for its next T-Mobile Tuesday promotion, Pokemon Go players — in the wake of what has been no less than an explosive launch — will receive free, unlimited data for the mobile game. Set to take effect July 19th, the Un-carrier will give its customers a full year’s worth of data that won’t count against their high-speed plan… Here’s the full list of perks that customers will receive, including free Lyft rides and 50% off select accessories. Oh, and what would a Pokemon Go adventure be without a free Wendy’s Frosty, too? View the full article

Nearly all of the top product and business leaders at Vine, Twitter’s three-year-old short-form video service, have left the company in the past four months — many of them in the past few weeks. And while Vine remains culturally interesting and an “important” part of Twitter’s strategy, it seems to be struggling. Vine’s recent executive departures include its head of engineering, head of business development and operations, head of user experience, head of editorial and all three of its product managers. Almost all of the departures coincide with Vine’s appointment of a new general manager, Hannah Donovan, which was announced at the end of March. Donovan started…

It's not hard to get a capacious solid-state drive if you're running a server farm, but everyday users still have to be picky more often than not: either you get a roomy-but-slow spinning hard... Read more about Samsung’s 4TB SSD is built to replace your hard drive on Lunarsoft. View the full article

Pokémon Go isn’t reading your Gmail. The makers of the hot, new mobile game are fixing a bug that allowed the app to gain full access to users’ accounts, when they signed in using their Google account information. The company claims it didn’t mean to ask for such elevated permissions, and it will now correct this. The app had the power to access your Gmail, your Google Docs, your Google Photos, as well as track your location history, your search history, and more. And this was in addition to the app’s already necessary high-level access to things like your current location, camera, and phone sensors, which are needed for gameplay. The issue was isolated to iOS and on…

Google Fiber launched business class service in November of 2014, after taking a little heat from startups running into the residential Google Fiber terms of service regarding server operation. Originally, the company offered symmetrical gigabit service with an SLA for $100 per month. But in a new announcement by the company, Google Fiber notes that it's introducing three new business class pricing tiers, and in the process raising its rates for business-class customers. Under the new pricing, the company is now offering symmetrical gigabit broadband for $250 per month, a $150 per month mark up suggesting its former $100 price point likely wasn't fully paying the bil…

Is a PewDiePie video a commercial or an independent review? That's what the Federal Trade Commission wants to make sure Warner Bros. Home Entertainment makes clear after settling with the agency over charges of not disclosing who they paid to advertise a 2014 video game. Warner Bros. was slammed by the FTC for not clearly representing that Felix Kjellberg (popularly known on YouTube as PewDiePie) and other online "influencers" were paid as part of a marketing campaign for Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Those involved in the campaign were paid between hundreds to thousands of dollars for their participation, created sponsored videos that garnered more than 5.5 millio…

It's not hard to get a capacious solid-state drive if you're running a server farm, but everyday users still have to be picky more often than not: either you get a roomy-but-slow spinning hard drive or give up that capacity in the name of a speedy SSD. Samsung may have finally delivered a no-compromise option, however. It's introducing a 4TB version of the 850 Evo that, in many cases, could easily replace a reasonably large hard drive. While it's not the absolute fastest option (the SATA drive is capped at 540MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s writes), it beats having to resort to a secondary hard drive just to make space for your Steam game library. …

If you signed up for Pokémon Go with your Google account, you might not know it but the game now has "full account access." That can be a major security risk. Adam Reeve, who first documented the issue on his Tumblr blog, said it appears to be a problem isolated to iPhones and iPads. It's not thought to affect Android devices. In our testing on two iPhones, the Pokémon Go app didn't explicitly ask permission for full account access when logging in with a Google username and password. By this point, it should have told us what data the app needs. Instead, it simply skipped straight to the app's terms of service, which makes no reference to the full account access…

One of the most fun ways to communicate is using animated GIFs or graphics interchange format. Twitter had added GIFs to its list of features back in 2014 with the integration for GIPHY and Riffsy added in this February, but the GIF size was limited to 5MB. But now you can add animated GIFs which are up to 15MB in size, provided you add these GIFs from the desktop. GIF size limit for mobile uploads and photo size limit for mobile and desktop uploads stays the same at 5MB. This feature will be limited to the web only. This feature will only be available on Twitter and has not been added to TweetDeck yet. GIFs are generally well compressed and exceeding 5MB o…

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost seven years since Mozilla Research first began sponsoring the development of Rust, at the time little more than an ambitious research experiment with a small but devoted community. Remarkably, despite a long history of inventions and discoveries, Rust’s key principles have remained constant. The Rust core team’s original vision—a safe alternative to C++ to make systems programmers more productive, mission-critical software less prone to memory exploits, and parallel algorithms more tractable—has been central to Mozilla’s interest in backing the Rust project and, ultimately, using Rust in production. An equally promising developme…

YouTubers including PewDiePie were paid tens of thousands of dollars to give video games positive reviews, it's been claimed. Warner Bros, makers of Shadow of Mordor, has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after they were accused of hiding the payments from people. The FTC, a consumers rights organisation, stated Warner Bros had deceived customers by paying YouTubers to promote the game without admitting it. The company is now banned from hiding similar deals in the future and from pretending sponsored videos are the work of independent producers. "Consumers have the right to know if reviewers are providing their own opinions…

Tor has been the go-to for anonymous communication online for years now — and that has made it one of the juiciest targets possible to the likes of the NSA and FBI. A new anonymizing protocol from MIT may prove more resilient against such determined and deep-pocketed attackers. The potential problem with Tor is that if an adversary gets enough nodes on the network, they can work together to track the progress of packets. They might not be able to tell exactly what is being sent, but they can put together a breadcrumb trail tying a user to traffic coming out of an exit node — at least, that’s the theory. A team of researchers led by MIT grad student Albert Kwon (…

Like many forms of encryption in use today, HTTPS protections are on the brink of a collapse that could bring down the world as we know it. Hanging in the balance are most encrypted communications sent over the last several decades. On Thursday, Google unveiled an experiment designed to head off, or at least lessen, the catastrophe. In the coming months, Google servers will add a new, experimental cryptographic algorithm to the more established elliptic curve algorithm it has been using for the past few years to help encrypt HTTPS communications. The algorithm—which goes by the wonky name "Ring Learning With Errors"—is a method of exchanging cryptographic keys that's…

Security experts have documented a disturbing spike in a particularly virulent family of Android malware, with more than 10 million handsets infected and more than 286,000 of them in the US. Researchers from security firm Check Point Software said the malware installs more than 50,000 fraudulent apps each day, displays 20 million malicious advertisements, and generates more than $300,000 per month in revenue. The success is largely the result of the malware's ability to silently root a large percentage of the phones it infects by exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unfixed in older versions of Android. The Check Point researchers have dubbed the malware family "Hu…

Facebook appears to have a major tax headache on its hands after the Internal Revenue Service sued the social network on Wednesday to force it to comply with summonses related to a 2010 asset transfer. According to documents the IRS filed in San Francisco federal court, the agency suspects Facebook and its accounting firm, Ernst & Young, understated the value of intangible assets transferred to Ireland by billions of dollars. The IRS says it is seeking an order to enforce six summonses that asked Facebook to appear at the agency’s offices in San Jose, Calif., and to produce papers and others records. According to IRS agent Nina Stone, Facebook failed to show…

Security software giant Avast Software has acquired rival AVG Technologies. Avast will pay $25 cash for each of AVG’s outstanding ordinary shares in a deal amounting to around $1.3 billion. Founded out of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s — initially called Grisoft — AVG has grown to become one of the biggest brands in desktop and mobile security apps. It also offers a range of related services, including AVG Cleaner for Android and Mac. The company is now headquartered in Amsterdam. Avast’s origins can also be traced back to the old Czechoslovakia, as the company was founded out of Prague in 1988. It has since emerged as one of the leading online security firms…

Cable giant Comcast will allow popular web video streaming service Netflix onto its X1 platform, the companies confirmed after being asked by Recode about talks to do so. Said the pair in a statement: “Comcast and Netflix have reached an agreement to incorporate Netflix into X1, providing seamless access to the great content offered by both companies. We have much work to do before the service will be available to consumers later this year. We'll provide more details at that time.” Sources said the deal to be on the cable giant’s set-top box would be akin to the arrangement that Netflix has cut with smaller cable operators in the United States and bigger ones ac…

Since it first debuted in 2007, Netflix’s streaming video service has remained largely unchanged. A lot of content has come and (mostly) gone, but the basic idea – that of a streaming, web-based service – has stayed the same. That may not be the case for long. Netflix is reportedly considering adding offline functionality, which would enable users to download content and watch it offline. Subscribers would still be able to stream online, but they would also be able to enjoy Netflix in places without Wi-Fi or 4G. That second part, of course, would be a major change. So what do stakeholders think of the new idea? We polled Netflix’s user base to find out. Our resu…

Amendments have been passed by the Bulgarian Parliament requiring all software written for the government to be open source and developed in a public repository, making custom software procured by the government accessible to everyone. Article 58 of the Electronic Governance Act states that administrative authorities must include the following requirements: "When the subject of the contract includes the development of computer programs, computer programs must meet the criteria for open-source software; all copyright and related rights on the relevant computer programs, their source code, the design of interfaces, and databases which are subject to the order should ar…

Freedom of Expression on the Internet is taken for granted by many of us. Around the world, headlines are heralding the fact that the UN has passed a resolution which reaffirms Internet Access as a human right and condemns any country which blocks certain parts of the Internet for any reason. The non-binding resolution reaffirms each country’s commitment to “Address security concerns on the Internet in accordance with their obligations to protect freedom of expression, privacy and other human rights online.” While over 70 countries supported this resolution on the “promotion, protection, and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet,” it is important to note the 17 countr…

AMD and Intel released the first 64-bit CPUs for consumers back in 2003 and 2004. Now, more than a decade later, Linux distributions are looking at winding down support for 32-bit hardware. Google already took this leap back in 2015, dumping 32-bit versions of Chrome for Linux. Ubuntu’s Dimitri John Ledkov put forth a proposal to wind down 32-bit support on the Ubuntu mailing list recently. Hardware that can’t run 64-bit software is becoming much less common, while creating 32-bit images, testing them, and supporting them takes time and effort. (On Linux, the “i386” architecture is the standard 32-bit for Intel-compatible CPUs, while “amd64” is the 64-bit archit…