Well that’s that then, it’s official, Twitter is Vinally ending its popular video looping app, Vine.
It was the Vinest of time, it was the worst of times…
Vine, which Twitter, the social media company bought for a guesstimated $30 million in 2012 that plays 6 second loops in an endless loop, and that only officially launched in January 2013, is soon to be no more.
According to some sources, the ending of Vine has been on the cards for some time, but last Thursday, Twitter said as well as ending Vine as a going concern, it was also going to cut around 9% of its global workforce (around about 350 people) in an effort to reduce costs.
While not unexpected, the internet still seemed collectively saddened by the news. Twitter has for a while now been focusing more on Periscope and its live video streaming, and Vine has at times begun to becomes a somewhat anachronistic throwback despite only being a little under 4 years old. It is telling as well that none of the original co-founders are left at Twitter either, having all left since the original acquisition.
That said, Vine still has a sizeable active base. At the last count, the 6 second video loop still had around 200 million active users, despite signs that the numbers were starting to contract.
The hash-tag #RIPVine began trending on-line in the hours after the announcement, and still seemed to be going strong earlier today when I last checked.
But it’s not like Vine has disappeared just yet.
Users still have time to download Vines and save for them for the sake of nostalgia or to post them somewhere else, and the Vine website is apparently not going anywhere any time soon, so people will still be able to view old Vines whenever they feel like it. It’s just Vine itself won’t be accepting any new ones.
As for alternatives, there’s always other apps, such as the aforementioned Periscope, and others such as Instagram, or Snapchat.
But in the meantime, find a quiet spot and for 6 seconds, reflect on the fact that Vine is now out of time.
Despite all the hype and attention that surrounds the “Big Three” of internet browsers, there are far more options than the standard internet user may realize. Each of the lesser-known options has its best features and its selling points, but there may be no bigger factor in this current digital climate than privacy and security.
Secure Browser was built with complete privacy in mind, intent on making sure no one tracks the user’s history or can access it later. That’s why closing out the browser automatically deletes the browsing and search histories, the cookies, and more. It might be annoying to those who want to “autocomplete” their search terms based on what they have viewed in the past, but for those who recognize the potential for harm–especially those looking for a secure browser to protect proprietary information related to their work–this is a huge plus.
But that only prevents outsiders who’ve gained access to your computer or device from seeing what you’ve been up to. What about real-time protection? Secure Browser gives you the option to activate its tracking protection feature. Even the sites you visit won’t know you’ve been there.
One of the major security pitfalls is in the way users communicate online, which is why Secure Browser has addressed encryption. According to the company, Secure Browser lets you “encrypt your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more secure. Automatically switch thousands of sites from insecure ‘http’ to secure ‘https,’ protecting yourself at all times online. We have enabled HTTPS Everywhere produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in an easy to manage service.”
This browser also offers a “safe” mode for browsing, powered by Google, that alerts you to malicious code or harmful sites in real time. Google has made headlines lately for its web alerts that will inform users about the threat as they browse, and Secure Browser’s alert system is powered in the same way.
But all of this security and privacy is useless if the speed isn’t there. It’s all well and good to lock yourself in a tower, after all, but pointless in the end if you can’t climb down. Secure Browser has addressed the page load speed issue by targeting lag times at the source: advertising. The company estimates that as much of 60% of the time it takes for a page to load is related to ads, and its ad-blocking feature means you not only get pestered by annoying ads, you don’t get bogged down in them either. Of course, browser speed starts at the source, and Secure Browser was built on the Chromium rendering engine to ensure that your websites load efficiently and quickly.
According to data released by StatCounter for October, mobile devices were used more often for web browsing than traditional desktop machines.
The figures show that combined mobile and tablet devices accounted for 51.3 percent of worldwide web use compared to 48.7 percent via desktop.
OK, so there’s only a 2.6% difference overall, but the moment is a very significant one for the world-wide web overall, and it’s a trend that’s unlikely to find itself reversing any time soon.
It should also serve as a wake-up call to any business that hasn’t yet decided to focus on mobile first approaches to doing business in the cloud in the 21st Century. Not only is mobile use going to become increasingly more important as the amount of traffic it generates continues to grow, but Google itself now favours mobile-friendly websites for its mobile search results.
That said, StatCounter’s data also found some interesting demographical (wow, I honestly didn’t think ‘demographical’ would be an actual word!) differences between different global regions. The ‘maturity’ of western based internet markets such as in the UK, the US, and Ireland still see a majority of web traffic being accessed from full blooded desktop machines. In the UK for example, desktop browsing accounted for 55.6% and 58% in the US. (Although the gap is decreasing)
It will come as no surprise that the emergent markets in the world such as India sees mobile web traffic account for 75% of all use as more users seek to use the internet in a cost effective manner.
Google originally identified, helped pioneer, and promote the original trend towards mobile browsing several years ago, and its ranking algorithms have shifted in recent times to favour mobile devices. since accelerated the shift with changes to its search favouring mobile.
While everyone bemoans the slower-than-molasses lag time of an older computer and internet service providers boast about their industry-beating high-speed internet packages, too many tech users overlook one of the most common and easiest culprits in slow hardware: a clogged computer.
Advanced Systemcare is a one-click utility that rids your hard drive of the garbage you don’t need, freeing up disk space and generally keeping things running more smoothly. Now that version 10 is out of its previous public beta round and is ready for download, here are some of the updated features and old mainstays that you can rely on:
Advance system optimization
Privacy protection
FaceID
‘Speed Up’ features
Surfing Protection & Ads Removal
Backup and restore
Privacy Sweep
Some of the more interesting–and admittedly, cautious–features that have been incorporated in this version are involved in user security. In order to offer top-notch protection, the user does have to turn over access to a few key things, like the camera. FaceID is great for blocking unauthorized users from accessing your content, for example, but only if you’ve pre-loaded your own authorized image of your face and if you’ve given access to your camera to the application. At the same time, though, the enhanced browsing and ad blocking in the new version is aimed at keeping prying eyes out of your web-based business.
One of the things that initially made Advanced Systemcare’s previous versions popular with tech users is still in place, and that’s its ability to monitor RAM, CPU, and disk space in real time. Once this feature is enabled, users can see what tasks are chewing up space and processing speeds and either end them or work with them. A simple click provides a key look at where the holdup might be. Coupled with the ability to fully clean out any unnecessary programs, such as those that come packaged or bundled with drivers or updates, Advanced Systemcare works to ensure your hardware is up to speed.
Facebook has seen its desktop ad revenue grow by 18% compared to this time last year, and has said that bypassing ad blockers is the root reason for the increase in profits.
“On ad blocking, in terms of the impact I would just point out that this quarter we had 18 percent year-over-year desktop revenue growth. If you look at recent quarters, it was about half of that growth rate on a year-over-year basis. So, that increment, that acceleration in desktop revenue growth is largely due to our efforts on reducing the impact of ad blocking. So, that’s what led to the acceleration of desktop revenue growth.”said Facebook CFO, David Wehner.
Facebook currently makes around 85% of its revenue via mobile devices, but its use on desktop still managed to pull in an impressive billion dollars plus in the last quarter.
As we here at FileHippo reported back in August, Facebook went to some lengths to stop users with ad-blocking software from not displaying ads, making it tougher for ad-blocking software such as AdBlock, to distinguish between ordinary posts, status updates and ads. The move showed just how seriously Facebook was and is taking the rise of ad-blocking software, and also just how fiercely it will fight s to protect its income streams.
Facebook of course doesn’t exactly struggle when it comes to making money from advertising. Between itself and Google, the two companies control an astonishing 64% of online digital advertising.
AdBlock Plus succeeded in initially circumventing the ban by Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg’s social media titan quickly put paid to that bypassing, and has since managed to keep the ads flowing freely through people’s pages.
The position of Facebook is that advertising is how the company makes money, and that the ads themselves are unobtrusive and it is how they can offer the service for free. Critics, on the other hand argue that Facebook ads are still a distraction, and that ad blockers help people from being tracked on-line and alleviate privacy concerns.
Advanced SystemCare PRO 10 – provides an always-on, automated, the all-in-one PC optimization utility, specializes in ONE-Click solutions to detect, clean, repair, speed up and eventually protect PC. To better protect users’ online privacy with Advanced SystemCare 10, “Protect” tab is newly added, which is designed to provide quick access to protect browsing frombeing tracked by automatically cleaning privacy traces once browser closed and detect and resist the attack of malicious plugin/toolbar by Browser Anti-Tracking and Plugin/Toolbar Cleaner in this tab. Advanced SystemCare 10 is a PC maintenance program that’s incredibly easy to use, the World’s Top System Utility for Superior PC Health! With the novel system technology, Advanced SystemCare empowers you to run your computer faster, more stably and more efficiently than with any other system utilities.
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• More than 20 dedicated smart tools for everyday PC maintenance. Advanced SystemCare integrates IObit’s latest Toolbox, with more than 20 dedicated smart tools for everyday PC maintenance as well as advanced needs. The Toolbox feature has tools for system cleaning, optimizing and repairing, tools for security enhancement, and tools for full control over the PC system.
• Cloud technology to keep database up-to-date. The new “Cloud” technology ensures the database is kept updated at all times so that you can benefit from the latest definitions and configurations.
• Boost your PC for working and gaming. You now have two Turbo Boost options, Work Mode and Game Mode. In addition, you can now adjust the configuration of each mode from the main screen.
• Next-generation registry deep clean and optimizer. Safely cleans registry junk, compacts registry bloats and defragments the whole registry for maximum performance. Finds and fixes the registry errors that other utilities miss with “Deep Scan” technology.
• Automatically works in the background. This powerful utility works continuously, automatically and quietly in the background on your PC. You can set the program on a regular schedule or just let it work automatically when your PC is idle.
• New UI technology for quicker start and less resource usage! With the new UI technology, Advanced SystemCare will start up faster using fewer system resources.
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• Improved Care module with more powerful clean and optimization functions. The new developments in the “Care” module include features such as “Start-up Optimization”, which will scan and clean your PC much more effectively.
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• FREE, Award-winning Customer Support for All Users. 100% free 24×7 Technical Support and community support.
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Last Friday, a DDOS attack set off a shockwave of disbelief when internet users couldn’t access some of their typical websites. Some major websites were affected, along with a few others who rely on the same infrastructure provider, Dyn. Dyn reported repeated DDoS attacks that came in one after another, effectively blocking websites with an overload of junky, fake users. Interestingly, there’s a tie-in through the Mirai botnet malware, which infects IoT devices and uses them to assist as some of the junk clogging up the website victims’ servers. (NOTE: That’s a way oversimplification of the process, but this has to keep moving. There’s a great article here and here about how it actually works.)
Now for the fun part: the tinfoil hat speculation. Within hours of the attack, groups were already claiming that Anonymous had launched it in retaliation for Wikileaks head fugitive Julian Asange having his internet access cut off. Then came much speculation that state-sanctioned Russian operatives were behind it in an attempt to interfere with the US Presidential campaign. There is even some connection to a network operators’ conference in Dallas that morning in which the Director of Internet Analysis for Dyn presented a talk on (you guessed it) DDoS attacks; one of the company’s chief data analysts had also beenworking on a blog about the very subjectand its impact on DNS providers like Dyn.
So is this the new future of both the internet and everyday life? A DDoS attack cripples popular websites when the political tides shift, or when your favorite outlaw-in-hiding makes headlines? It very well might be, and it speaks to the need to make serious changes in both online security and consumer reliance on the internet
Banking experts are claiming that several high-profile banks have decided it’s cheaper to pay hackers in bitcoin than deal with damaging and embarrassing cyber attacks.
According to cybersecurity company Malwarebytes, the City of London is a literal ground zerofor ransomware attacks compared to the rest of Europe. The cyber-security firm spent the best part of 2 years studying the online threats different cities in Europe faced, and analysing the degree of risk by recording which destinations received the maximum number attacks or threats. The financial areas of London were found to be targeted again and again.
It found that the City of London suffered 10,500 ransomware attacks, which is 670% more than the second-biggest target, Manchester.
As part of their Disaster recovery plans, Several of London’s largest banks now have a constant supply of bitcoin to hand in the event of a successful attack by cyber criminals.
Ransomware is essentially malicious software that is installed in computer hardware that then encrypts files so that the data it contains can’t be accessed without a specific password or code that only the hacker knows.
In order to access the locked files, the target of the attack, usually has to pay a ransom in bitcoin or face losing their data forever. Once the ransom has been paid, the attacker will normally then send decryption key to unlock the data. But however, there is no guarantee the hacker will send on the unlock code.
Marcin Kleczynski, CEO at Malwarebytes said “I talked to a couple of banks and they say they have 50-100 bitcoin ready at all times in a wallet to deploy if a ransomware attack hits.”
Bitcoin is the currency of choice for hackers because it is virtually untraceable, hence the reason it is being acquired by blue chip companies to pay ransoms.
The American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) has announced new screen time guidelines for children under three years old
While previously the AAP had advised no screen time for at all for children under the age of 2, the advice has now changed.
The AAP which first issued that recommendation back in the last year of the 20th Century, has now revised and updated its guidelines for both children and their parents in a move that reflects new research and habits.
The new advice is that children aged over 18 months can and should use video chat with family, and watch supervised “high quality” programmes such as Sesame Street until the age of five.
The new guidelines move fully place the emphasis on what children are watching to who they are watching it with. The report reads:
“Families should proactively think about their children’s media use and talk with children about it, because too much media use can mean that children don’t have enough time during the day to play, study, talk, or sleep…What’s most important is that parents be their child’s ‘media mentors’. That means teaching them how to use it as a tool to create, connect and learn.”
The report also focused on the on the importance of physical activity and non-screen face to face interaction, and recommends completely media-free locations in family homes, such as bedrooms and play rooms.
Two- to five-year-olds should be limited to one hour of screen time a day, and “media free times” should be created by carers, the guidelines add.
The report also encourages parents to put their smartphones down when interacting with their children, and make sure they got enough sleep. The importance of media free times were also highly recommended, such as at dinner and also before going to sleep, and stated that media devices should not be present at these social occasions.
Previous studies have shown compelling evidence that too much screen time can negatively affect sleep, promote obesity and depression, and have an overreaching negative impact on childhood development.
Qantas, JetStar, and Virgin Australia take step to snuff out risk of on-board fires
The 3 airlines all cite the smartphone’s potential fire risk as the reason for the ban, which came into effect on Sunday night.
It’s more bad news for Samsung which is currently in the process of recalling its Note handsets. According to sources, around 40 Note 7s have been reported to have caught fire while charging, due to a problem with the lithium ion battery that the Note users.
The problem with Samsung’s flagship device, which was only released earlier this year is expected to cost the company and the manufacturer of the battery in and around a billion US dollars to make right.
The airlines which have made the decision to ban the Note 7 have not been directed to institute the ban on the electronic device by aviation authorities from within the country, but is instead their own choice.
In the US, Alaska Airlines last week opted to start carrying fire proof bags for portable devices that catch fire, but the latest news from the US is that the Federal Aviation Authority might be banning them from US flights as well in the next week.
Qantas states that the total ban on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will come into force on all Qantas and Jetstar flights from 12:01 am (AEDT) on Sunday 16 October:
“The ban applies to devices being carried onto the aircraft, in carry-on baggage as well as check-in luggage…Other Samsung devices are not affected.”
While previously, the airlines allowed with the phone to fly as long as it was turned off, now anyone found with the phone in their possession, or in their hand or checked luggage will be denied the right to board.
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Watch out, Apple. HP on Wednesday introduced a new generation of premium computer products that could generate the kind of excitement in the market that's usually the domain of the folks at One Infinite Loop.
Among the new HP offerings are a new tablet-laptop convertible, a svelte laptop, an innovative all-in-one model, and a 4k display designed for dual screen setups.
"HP has absolutely raised their bar in design, quality and performance," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.
The new HP machines target the premium end of the PC market, he told.
"The target market for these are consumers who care a lot about design and performance and are willing to pay for it," said Moorhead. "HP has been gaining premium PC market share in U.S. retail, so they must have obviously cracked the code there."
Convertible and Laptop
HP's convertible offering is the Spectre x360 (pictured above), which is 2 millimeters thinner than its predecessor and now weighs less than 3 pounds. It has a 13.3-inch FHD IPS display, four speakers and is offered with either an i5 or an i7 seventh-generation Intel Core processor.
It supports log-in via facial recognition and has up to 15 hours of battery life. What's more, the battery can be charged 90 percent in 90 minutes via a quick-charge function.
The Spectre x360, available immediately, sells for US$1,049.99.
HP Envy Laptop
The Envy will be available Oct. 26 priced at $849.99.
All-In-One and Monitor
The Envy AIO 27 is HP's all-in-one desktop unit. It has a 27-inch QHD 3.6 million-pixel display that is just 15mm thick, because all the computing and storage power resides in the monitor's base.
The display supports a "low blue light" mode for improved eye comfort. The base has a sound bar with four speakers tuned by Bang & Olufsen.
Other features include a webcam that pops into the display when not in use, support for sixth-generation Intel quad core i5 or i7 desktop processors, storage on a solid state drive of up to 256 gigabytes, a hard drive of up to 2 terabytes, and HDMI in and out ports.
The AIO 27 sells for $1,299 and will be available this month.
HP's new monitor is the 27-inch Envy 27. It supports 4K video and has a micro-edge bezel. Its RGB color accuracy exceeds 99 percent and includes a Display Port, HDMI and USB C, which can be used to charge devices.
The Envy 27 will be available Dec. 4 for $499.99.
Apple Dropped the Ball
The new HP offerings meet an unfulfilled need in the market, said Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at Technalysis Research.
"These are premium-looking and well-configured products," he told "and given how Apple has dropped the ball advancing the Mac, there's an opportunity on the premium side of PCs."
Sinking PC shipments have spurred computer makers to intensify their efforts to impress.
"It's become more incumbent upon the companies staying in the market to drive more profit from the premium end," said Ross Rubin, principal analyst with Reticle Research.
"Of course, Apple has been strong in that segment of the market," he told
However, Apple is expected to pick up the ball again at the end of the month with a refresh of its Macintosh line of computers.
"It's too early to tell if HP has upstaged Apple until we see what Apple comes out with next," Moorhead said. "It does set a higher bar for Apple to cross, though."
Reviving PC Market
PC shipments have been declining for years, although there was a small bump up in this year's second quarter.
PC shipments in the United States jumped 1.4 percent compared with the same period a year ago, reported Gartner, which includes tablets in its tallies.
PC shipments climbed 4.9 percent, according to IDC, which excludes tablets.
Worldwide shipments fell, however -- by 5.2 percent according to Gartner, and by 4.9 percent according to IDC's analysis.
HP and others hope to create some momentum in the market by introducing new premium products capable of generating the kind of excitement that could infect the whole market.
"In aggregate with what Dell and Lenovo have done, HP's new line could breathe some new life into the PC market," Moorhead said.
PCs Not Dead
HP also is hoping the new line can prod consumers to buy a new computer.
"All PC manufacturers are trying to kickstart the replacement market," said Jack E. Gold of J.Gold Associates.
"Everyone says PC's are dead," he told.
"PCs aren't dead. It's just that people are holding onto them for much longer than they have in the past," Gold pointed out.
"Lenovo, HP, Dell -- they're all trying to find ways to bring some excitement back into the market," he said. "They're looking at new form factors and all sorts of things to get consumers to get excited and buy upgrades. It's not a bad strategy."
Will the new HP offerings excite consumers enough to trade in their old PCs?
"It's always a challenge to get people to spend money for tech," Gold acknowledged, "but for those users who have not been upgrading in the past, there's a lot of stuff here to really like."
