For Samsung’s 10th-anniversary, a major leak have been exposed regarding the latest in the Galaxy range. Samsung allegedly plan to release four Galaxy S10 models, each with up to six cameras, 5G carrier support, and the biggest phone displays Samsung has ever made. However, with these features there will also be some controversial compromises.

The leak claims that every model of the Galaxy S10 will cut a hole into their displays: “The Galaxy S10 Lite, S10, and S10+ are all Hole in Super AMOLED screens, but the S10+ has dual front cameras, so the whole design is slightly different.”

The ‘hole’ refers to a circular hole cut out of the front touchscreen and positioned in the top left corner, for the front camera. This design allows Samsung to reduce the size of the top bezel to compete with rivals and changes the aesthetics.

However, the single hole, or dual holes in the case of the Galaxy S10+, leave no space for facial recognition sensors so Samsung’s breakthrough Face ID rival has been removed to accommodate it.

Nonetheless, the new releases pave the way for Samsung’s ‘New Infinity’ display which will integrate cameras and sensors under the display. It has been claimed this will remove the need for any form of cutout, but the models won’t be ready until at least 2020. In addition to this, the Galaxy S10 will also be the first mass-market smartphone to support 5G, although not all S10 models will feature it. There will also be a truly affordable entry-level version, as well as a crazy 6.7-inch flagship codenamed the ‘Beyond X’ – an apparent rival for Apple’s 10th-anniversary iPhone X.

The international hotel chain, Marriott, has announced a massive data hack that impacts as many as 500 million customers who made a reservation at a Starwood hotel. Marriott acquired the Starwood hospitality group in September 2016, which operates numerous hotel brands including Sheraton, Westin, Aloft, and W Hotels. It is reported the enormous data breach started in 2014, before Marriott’s acquisition.

Currently it is thought that 327 million people had sensitive data stolen, such as, passport numbers, phone number, email address, date of birth, gender, trip and reservation information, and Starwood Preferred Guest account information. In addition is seems that around 170 million Marriott customers had their basic information stolen, including, names, address or email address. It has also been exposed that some credit card numbers were also stolen as part of the breach.

Breach response experts have stated the fact the attackers attackers had access for four years is likely to have made the breach worse. Time gives attackers the ability to chip away at defenses, or simply learn more about a system to understand where the valuable data is. It is also possible to hackers could have encrypted the stolen data as part of their exfiltration strategy. Hackers often use encryption as a tool to mask data and sneak it past a network’s “data loss prevention” defenses, which monitor for sensitive data in transit.

“If you made a reservation on or before September 10, 2018 at a Starwood property, information you provided may have been involved,” the company’s breach response page reads. The Marriott seem to be erring on the side of caution that all customers were affected before September this year. They have established a call center and breach notification website and are off offering enrollment in the identity monitoring service WebWatcher for one year to anyone who thinks they were impacted by the four-year network intrusion.

Marriott have responded to this incident with resources and information for victims, however a breach that lasted over four years is substantial. “They are still investigating this heavily and don’t know to what extent attackers had access—this could turn out to be much, much larger,” says David Kennedy, CEO of the penetration testing and incident response consultancy TrustedSec. “Four years is an eternity when it comes to breaches. If attackers had access for that long I would assume they had access to virtually everything.”

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and developing a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium.

Due to the lack of success of the Edge, since its release in 2015, Microsoft are building a new web browser to replace Edge on Windows 10. Edge uses a rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, which was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure. But when launched it came with an array of issues that resulted in early users rejecting it. As such, Edge struggled to gain popularity – the decline in usage of Edge (and IE) compared to the rise of Chrome is significant – see W3’s trend graph here.

The new browser, codenamed “Anaheim”, uses Blink – a similar rendering engine to the Google’s Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. In fact, the Edge app for iOS and Android already uses a rendering engines native to Chromium platforms, so this is a change for the desktop platform only.
It has been announced that Anahein will replace Edge on Windows 10, but it is currently unknown if Anaheim will retain the Edge brand or forge a new identity.

Some users will be pleased to hear that Edge will be replaced. Having a Microsoft browser based on Chromium should mean that websites behave similar to how they would on Google Chrome. This is also good news for developers and companies, who need to maintain compatibility across different systems and browsers.

This is another step towards revitalising Windows’ reliability and usability, and represents a significant step for Microsoft, as they have maintained their own web browser and rendering engine since Internet Explorer was first released back in 1995.

There is more to know about Anaheim but the initial announcements seem interesting.

The UK government has pledged £78m of funding to the start-up Raspberry Pi, which sells the most popular British computer in the world. The project will train 40,000 teachers across the UK in computing education – who will then in turn go on to teach computer science to children in every school in England.

Over the next four years, the Raspberry Pi team along with its partners, STEM Learning and the British Computer Society, will deliver a programme for primary and secondary school teachers. They will provide 40 schools with face-to-face workshops and after deliver training to neighbouring schools. This will include free educational resources, nationwide training, and certification.

In other countries, teacher training in computer science tends to be bundled with other science subjects or funded through philanthropy. In the US, Code.org, a non-profit organisation, says 900,000 teachers use its resources, but only just over a third of high schools teach computer science. Code.org is funded through a combination of corporate donations and state or federal money. The UK funding is part of a £100m tranche of money announced by the chancellor in the last Budget, a per capita investment by government that is unprecedented.

Raspberry Pi is a non-profit company founded in 2008 by Eben Upton, with the aim to get young people interested in technology. They designed a $5 credit-card-sized computer that could be programmed by anyone from a laboratory engineer to a child, these are used with partners included Google, ARM and Cisco and have since sold 23m units.

Children will now have the opportunity to work on projects including Google Home voice systems, space experiments and chatbots. Technology is becoming integral to our society, and so the importance of teaching computer science is has become an increased necessity. “We have not seen anything of this scale and comprehensiveness in the world from a government, which is really exciting,” said Philip Colligan, chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Linkedin have changed their privacy settings, making email addresses private to connections. This has arguably increased the privacy and security of users, but may have negative consequences on businesses or recruiters using Linkedin to gain email addresses through connections.

This new setting has been quietly introduced and blocks users from exporting email addresses.Linkedin state: “This is a new setting that gives our members even more control of their email address on LinkedIn. If you take a look at the setting titled ‘Who can download your email’, you’ll see we’ve added a more detailed setting that defaults to the strongest privacy option. Members can choose to change that setting based on their preference. This gives our members control over who can download their email address via a data export.”

The option to show or hide your email address can be changed under Settings & Privacy – Privacy – Who Can See My Email Address? – Allow your connections to download your email [address of user] in their data export?. Significantly the toggle now defaults to No.Most users don’t know this exists because LinkedIn has not widely announced it. That means nearly no one’s email addresses will appear in LinkedIn Archive exports anymore. Your connections will still be able to see your email address if they navigate to your profile, but they can’t grab this from their whole graph.

Facebook came to the same conclusion about restricting email exports when it was in a data portability fight with Google in 2010. Facebook had been encouraging users to import their Gmail contacts, but prohibited users exporting their Friends’ email addresses. Facebook argued that users have ownership of friends email addresses privately, but not those of their Friends solely through Facebook. On a social network like Facebook, preventing email address being exported makes more sense but LinkedIn’s professional network is used differently. Users purposefully connect with those they don’t know to gain professional contacts, and where exporting has always been allowed, making this change subtly could result in some unhappy users.

Microsoft and Apple are working together to resolve iCloud for Windows compatibility issues. This is due to the latest update of Windows 10 in October 2018, where Windows reports that iCloud is “incompatible”. After this update, users of iCloud faced compatibility issues when updating and/or installing.

If users attempted to install the latest version of iCloud, after the new update, Windows presents an error message stating “iCloud for Windows requires Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10 (April 2018 Update) and earlier.” And for those users who already had the app installed prior to the latest Windows 10 update, there are numerous issues with photos syncing and other features.

In a post on its support webpage, Microsoft says it is now temporarily blocking users with the iCloud application already installed from updating to the Windows 10 October 2018 build, to prevent this problem occurring. Additionally, Microsoft says it is working with Apple to “provide a compatible version” of iCloud for users.

For those unfamiliar, Apple’s iCloud for Windows application allows users to access core iCloud functionality from their PC, including photos, email, iCloud Drive files, and more.

Flickr is an image and video hosting service, created in 2004. Since then ownership has been changed several times. Recently, in April 2018, Flickr was taken over by SmugMug.

It has been announced that changes to Flickr free accounts will come into effect next year. Flickr has always offered two types of accounts: Free and Pro. On January 8, 2019 free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos or videos stored, with videos limited to 3 minutes, instead of the previous free allowance of 1 TB of storage with no restrictions. Pro users will now be offered unlimited storage.

From January 8, 2019 members will no longer have access to 1TB of free storage and instead will be offered free storage for 1000 items. Users will then have until February 5, 2019 to remove photos and videos above this amount. On this date, Flickr will automatically delete data over 1000 if users do not subscribe to Pro, with the exception of content that was uploaded with a Creative Commons license before November 1, 2018.

The reason for this change is said to be due to Yahoo providing users 1TB of free storage in 2013 — and this has likely become unsustainable to provide since. Flickr has reported three major points as to why this has had a negative effect, see their press release here.

Flickr have stated a fair logic for choosing 1000 photos or videos to offer free users. Although most products today sell storage in megabytes or gigabytes, calculating how much storage photos or videos consume can be difficult. It is a much easier measurement to count in number of items, similar to their method in 2013 where they offered free users 200 photos. It is definitely a positive to be able to upload high quality pictures without considering space requirements. Lastly, Flickr found that more than 97% of Free members had less than 1000 photos and videos, whilst the majority of Pro users had over 1000 items, and therefore believe they have found a fair benchmark to offer.

Assessing the reasoning, it seems Flickr are keen to show they are a service worth a price to ensure a high quality platform for people interested in photography, although it can be argued there are free users serious about photography who will be disadvantaged by this move.

If you would like to sign up for a Pro account please take advantage of our discount code, which takes 30% off the Pro price, valid until the end of November.
Enter code: FLICKRPRO30

Pro-Brexit campaign group Leave.EU and an insurance company owned by its founder Arron Banks face total fines of £135,000 over breaches of data laws.

This fine was given by the Information Commissioner Office for the misuse of personal data by political campaigns. It has been reported that over a million emails were sent out containing marketing for the Eldon Insurance firm’s GoSkippy services.

Mr Banks attempted to defend himself by stating that “we may have accidentally sent a newsletter to customers” but there was “no evidence of a grand data conspiracy”. He also reportedly added “Gosh, we communicated with our supporters and offered them a 10% Brexit discount after the vote! So what?”.

Since the EU in a referendum in June 2016 there have been several investigations assessing how the different campaigns were run, including into how they were funded and how they used personal data. The ICO said this had been the “most complex data protection investigation” it had ever carried out, through which they had uncovered a “disturbing disregard for voters’ personal privacy”.

Elsewhere in the report, it highlights what it says is the close relationship between Leave.EU and Eldon Insurance. Both organisations face fines of £60,000 for emails which breached data laws. It also imposed a £15,000 fine for a separate “serious” breach after a Leave.EU newsletter was sent to more than 319,000 email addresses on Eldon’s customer database.

The use of personal data to target political messages has to be transparent and lawful. It has been shown that personal privacy rights have been compromised. Misuse of personal information threatens the integrity of an election process and results in uncertainty as to whether individuals were unknowingly influenced to vote a certain way in the UK EU referendum.

On September 15, 2008, Stack Overflow’s public beta went live. It is now ten years old. Stack Overflow is a community in which developers can learn and share their programming knowledge. Today, it’s the largest and most trusted website where programmers share information and code, and thereby develop their understanding, and by extension careers.

Throughout the ten years, 9.3 million users have provided 25 million answers to 16 million questions. The answers provided have been searched and found 12.3 billion times by other developers in need. This site has created a space where developers are not embarrassed to ask questions and can get help, enabling them to learn more and faster. Solutions can even be found in different languages to be accessible for all.

Stack Overflow is currently working on ways to include new users and further develop their platform. They have an active blog and are developing new business services, such as team StackOverflow for teams and recruitment offerings.

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