Thinking of buying a car in the UK? Good news! You can get a personal contract purchase (PCP) and it will cost you less to buy a new Merc than it would to buy a used Ford Focus.
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In a blog post today, Google announced that it will start including an “ad filter” in Chrome early next year as it looks to build “a better web for everyone.” Google’s plans for such a feature were first reported earlier this year and the official announcement today is a way for the company to give publishers time to improve ad quailty…
Skype has suffered from feature bloat and poor performance for years. Instead of creating a leaner video and messaging experience, like Google has done with Duo and Allo, Microsoft today announced a brand new Skype experience with a mishmash of features from other apps.
All of this may sound familiar if you have been using Skype Preview for the past few months. Most of the changes are related to the chat screen, which has been split into three tabs - Find, Chat, and Capture.
Didn't it seem strange that Mylan, the pharmaceutical company that makes the EpiPen, enjoyed a stock price rally when the news came out in October that it was going to have to give the US government $465 million for overcharging Medicare? Well, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General says that Mylan overcharged taxpayers by $1.27 billion, making the half-billion dollar payout a simple cost-of-doing business expense.
Mylan, the scummy firm that jacked up the price of a single EpiPen injector from $57 to $500, deliberately misclassified the EpiPen as a generic drug, which allowed them to charge more for the life-saving medication.
From Gizmodo:
The late afternoon news dropped the stock price of Mylan by 1 percent and tomorrow’s trading will show just how big a deal for the company this problem will be in the short term. Shareholders are pissed and a group of four institional investors are calling for six directors of the company to be blocked from reelection. The investors say that the directors have caused Mylan “significant reputational and financial harm.”
Mylan didn't invent the EpiPen, it acquired it in 2007, getting a drug that had been approved since 1987 and had 90 percent market dominance. Nor does it manufacture the EpiPen itself. Mylan buys it from a wholly owned Pfizer subsidiary for $34.50 per pen.
Mylan Chairman Robert Coury made $160 million 2016.
CNBC’s Brian Sullivan interjected, asking her to explain how the price of the drug could go from $100 five years ago to $600 today.
“How does that happen?” he asked.
“First, I know this is a complicated conversation around healthcare and insurance, (but) the $600 is a list price — $608 is a list price,” Ms Bresch said.
“What Mylan takes from that — our net sales — is $274. Against that, there’s (the cost of) manufacturing the product, distributing the product, enhancing the product, and investing.”
Sullivan asked if she understood the outrage.
“Surely Heather, you must understand the outrage,” he said. “People are outraged because it seems outrageous. The American Medical Association says this is basically the same product it was in 2009 and the price has gone up 400-fold.”
Then Ms Bresch uttered the phrase that ended up in headlines around the world.
“No one’s more frustrated than me,” she said.
“But you’re the one raising the price? How can you be frustrated,” Williams asked.
“Everybody should be frustrated,” Ms Bresch said. “I am hoping that this in an inflection point for this country, our healthcare is in crisis, it’s no different than the mortgage or financial crisis back in 2007. This bubble is going to burst.”
Adobe today is launching a new mobile app that makes it easier to convert paper documents and other things into digital, editable PDF files. While there’s no shortage of scan-to-PDF apps on the App Store, many are not free, have a dated design, or simply convert an image to PDF format, but don’t allow for edits. Adobe Scan, meanwhile, uses optical character recognition (OCR) to… Read More
Google’s plans for a new London campus have taken a while to come to fruition, but the company has now submitted a formal planning application for the redesigned building. It will be situated directly opposite Kings Cross station, close to the Eurostar terminus.
Initial plans were filed back in 2013, but the company later decided the design lacked ambition. In 2014, Google asked for an all-new design, and later commissioned the team behind its Mountain View campus to carry out the work …
There’s been a whole lot of talk about initial coin offerings (ICO), company fundraising events based around the sale of cryptocurrencies, but not much in the way of action until yesterday. That’s when web browser maker Brave, founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, raised $35 million from its ICO — and it did it in less than 30 seconds, too.
ICOs operate by selling… Read More
If you're dying for the next cool personalization feature from Allo, today is going to be a good day for you. Version 12 of Google's most talked about chat app is set to roll out today and it is upping the selfie game with a new feature called selfie clips. The name kinda says it all – they're basically short gifs of yourself. According to Amit Fulay of the Allo team, this version will also bring an updated design for the compose bar.
NVIDIA mostly focuses on the SHIELD Android TV these days, but it hasn't forgotten about the SHIELD Tablet. After getting the device updated to Nougat in February, NVIDIA has sent out two small updates. That includes today's v5.2 update. The changelog shows nothing major, but it's nice of NVIDIA to keep this tablet up-to-date.
Here's the changelog for the v5.2 OTA.
Fixes to GPS crash
Improved compatibility with non-standard chargers
Overall stability & security optimizations
Update to Android Security Patch Level April 1, 2017
A good VPN isn't as complicated as it used to be, but it's still a pretty big step for a "regular" user to take. But it's time to get my family used to it. Their data may depend on it.
Over the past year I've been slowly moving my family to more secure options for their phones and computers. Password managers — to promote the usage of longer and stronger passwords — was the first step. Then we all moved to more secure messaging.
Now it's time for the big one. The one I'd been dreading. VPNs.
I've been using Virtual Private Networks for years. Almost exclusively for work, but I was plenty familiar with the principle. But while I'm certainly no expert in networking, I wasn't looking forward to trying to explain all this to my wife and kids. And, actually, it's still a work in progress.
Not overly difficult questions, right? But when you're taking something that just works — our phones and our computers — and adding yet another layer of complexity atop what already has become more annoying with incomprehensible passwords and seventeen different messaging apps ... Well, I get it. Is a VPN something we really need to use?
Yeah, it is.
I'll keep this relatively short.
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A VPN is far from foolproof, but you'd be a fool to not use one.
What is a VPN?
A VPN is like a private tunnel created within the Internet stream to which you've connected. Whether you're at home, at work, in public — wherever.
When you're using a VPN, all of your data will flow — encrypted — through the VPN to the end destination, and look like it's coming from something other than your computer. So instead of looking like it's coming from computer aaa.bbb.c.c, it'll look like it's coming from xxx.yyy.z.z.
And if you choose a VPN provider with exit points outside of your home country, you can disguise your location — handy for when you're, say, traveling and are unable to get to your home content.
Why would you need a VPN?
Any time you want to have a strong layer of security around your internet traffic is when you'll want to use a VPN. That may be all the time. That may be only part of the time. That part's up to you.
Also sometimes content isn't available where you are, so you want to look like you're somewhere else. When I was on a work trip in China a couple years ago, things like Facebook and Twitter and loads of other services were unavailable behind the government firewall. For other folks, it's about being able to see content (sports, for example) outside of the home area.
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Or maybe you just want to disguise your location on principle.
More recent and for many folks more concerning, has been the recent Net Neutrality rollback making its way through Washington. Internet Service Providers. Ignoring the politics of the matter, it really comes down to whether you trust your ISP (or mobile provider) to not do something with your data that you'd disapprove of.
It's your data. It should stay that way.
It's not just about trusting your ISP — it's about having to worry as much whether you can trust your ISP.
When should you use a VPN?
We've all done it a million times. Walked into a coffee shop, leeched off the free Wifi longer than we were supposed to, logging into all sorts of things while we were there. Free, unsecured Wifi.
At the gym. ... At the mall. ... On a plane. ... In the grocery store. ... Think of the number of places you've ever connected to an unsecured network without giving it a second thought. Is it likely someone was sniffing packets while you doing your thing? Who knows. But if someone wanted to, they could see any unencrypted traffic you were passing along. And I don't know about you, but that's not really the sort of thing I keep track of at that sort of level.
At a bare minimum that's when you're going to want to use a VPN. It's pretty much the only time I worry about it, other than when I have specific things I need to do for work that require a VPN.
As for the rest of the time? It's a matter of trust. Do you trust your ISP to not hand over your data — where you've gone online, and what you've potentially done while you were there — or, perhaps even more annoyingly, to not inject its own ads (or worse) whenever and however it wants? VPNs will help guard against this.
Using a VPN has gotten much easier — remembering to do so may be the hardest part.
How do you use a VPN
The good news: This has gotten easier over the years. Yes, there are plenty of lightweight clients that let you load configuration files manually. And if you're OK with that, great.
But most services out there also have standalone apps that take care of the details for you. You load up their app on your phone or computer, enter your username and password (which, by the way, probably shouldn't be something someone could recognize you by since the idea here is to be a little more secretive than usual), and off you go.
Yes, it's an extra step and a few clicks. But not too much more than that.
Which VPN should you use?
Here's the thing: I don't know.
There are dozens and dozens of VPN providers out there. They all do things differently. Some are free. Some aren't. The basic rule of thumb, though, is that if you're not paying for a product, then you are the product. And when you're trying to protect your data it's not the time to skimp.
You're going to want to do a little homework here. Read reviews. Read the blog posts from VPN companies. Check out the VPN subreddit. (I thought this piece from ProtonMail was really good.) Ask lots of questions. And don't be afraid to change providers if one does something you're not comfortable with. Commercial products are there to make money, first and foremost. That doesn't mean there aren't good commercial VPNs out there, but stay vigilant.
I'd recommend reading That One Privacy Site, which has an excellent comparison chart of VPN services. And for the more technically inclined, Ars Technica has a good tutorial on rolling your own VPN. (But even I haven't gone that far — yet.)
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The bottom line
If it seems like VPN providers are thirsty, that's because they are. Security and privacy are more important than ever, and they'll continue to be for a long, long time. That means there's a lot of money to be had.
Be wary of deals that sound too good to be true. Be skeptical. But also don't be afraid to pay for a service. Just remember that you're paying it to protect your data.
And above all, remember to use your VPN once you've got it.
Keeping company data secure is priority one, and that starts with protecting the tools that your employees use every day. We’re constantly adding security features to help businesses stay ahead of potential threats, and are excited to announce new security features for Gmail customers, including early phishing detection using machine learning, click-time warnings for malicious links, unintended external reply warnings and built-in defenses against new threats.
New machine learning models in Gmail to block phishing
Machine learning helps Gmail block sneaky spam and phishing messages from showing up in your inbox with over 99.9 percent accuracy. This is huge, given that 50-70 percent of messages that Gmail receives are spam. We’re continuing to improve spam detection accuracy with early phishing detection, a dedicated machine learning model that selectively delays messages (less than 0.05 percent of messages on average) to perform rigorous phishing analysis and further protect user data from compromise.
Our detection models integrate with Google Safe Browsing machine learning technologies for finding and flagging phishy and suspicious URLs. These new models combine a variety of techniques such as reputation and similarity analysis on URLs, allowing us to generate new URL click-time warnings for phishing and malware links. As we find new patterns, our models adapt more quickly than manual systems ever could, and get better with time.
New warnings for employees to prevent data loss
When employees are empowered to make the right decisions to protect data, it can improve an enterprise’s security posture. To help with this, Gmail now displays unintended external reply warnings to users to help prevent data loss. Now, if you try to respond to someone outside of your company domain, you’ll receive a quick warning to make sure you intended to send that email. And because Gmail has contextual intelligence, it knows if the recipient is an existing contact or someone you interact with regularly, to avoid displaying warnings unnecessarily.
Protecting your business with the latest security advancements
Security threats are constantly evolving and we’re always looking for ways to help people protect their data. With new built-in defenses against ransomware and polymorphic malware, Gmail now blocks millions of additional emails that can harm users. We classify new threats by combining thousands of spam, malware and ransomware signals with attachment heuristics (emails that could be threats based on signals) and sender signatures (already marked malware).
Outside of today’s updates, here are a few other security advancements we’ve made within Gmail to make sure you stay protected:
If you’re about to replace your roof, Tesla has you covered, but roofs have a long life span, and besides, not all of us have the luxury/misery of having a roof to replace in the first place. Most of us have walls with glass in them, however, and that’s the window of opportunity SolarGaps is reaching for, with a Kickstarter campaign for its solar panel window blinds. Read More
In terms of bang for your buck, the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T were easily two of the strongest releases of the past year. However, the company has recently discontinued those devices to make room for the upcoming OnePlus 5. Now, we’re getting confirmation that the company won’t be leaving them behind, confirming Android O for both phones.
Concord wants to be your all-in-one solution for everything related to contracts. The startup just raised a $3.7 million Series A round from Alven Capital, with existing investors Streamlined Ventures, Bruno Deschamps and Thibault Poutrel also participating. Many departments rely on contracts to work with clients, suppliers, legal partners and more. But it’s still a tedious process as… Read More
Sony tends to play it pretty safe with its smartphones, but the company is going way outside of its comfort zone with one of its latest products. The Sony Xperia Touch is a crazy Android-powered projector, and today Sony has finally revealed how much it will cost and when you can buy it.
Last summer, Microsoft launched Planner as part of its Office 365 suite of productivity apps for businesses and schools. It could readily be described as a Trello style kanban board with the collaborative functionality of a tool like Basecamp rolled in as well. After the launch of the iOS app last week, Microsoft is now bringing Planner to Android.
The app is exactly what you'd expect from a task management tool, allowing you to keep track of projects, assign responsibilities, share files, and chat with the rest of the team or class about what needs to be done.
"Role-players, boardgamers, writers, coders, artists, graphic designers, teachers, house-cleaners, lucid dreamers, gym-rats, distance runners, commuters" can enjoy over 100 ambient atmospheric loops with names like "Orbital Promenade," "Lunar Outpost," "Testing Chamber" and so on.
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Alongside its first phone, Essential is also unveiling the Essential Home — a clear direct competitor to the likes of Google Home and Amazon Echo. Though it's tough to get a sense of scale from a simple product page with a few images, the Essential Home looks relatively compact and sleek. Rounded and smooth, the top surface is cut at an angle and shows off a 5.6-inch circular LCD that you can interact with.
The core of the Essential Home experience is what it calls Ambient OS — the software that ties it all together. Essential shows off the Home doing the typical home assistant features: playing music, setting a timer, answering questions and controlling smart home devices. Other features sound a whole lot like Google Home, such as alerting you when you have to leave for an appointment or you have an upcoming anniversary on your calendar.
The idea behind Essential Home is that technology is there, supportive, and proactive enough to be helpful, without forcing you to ask or type a question. It's in your environment; you can tap or glance at it, but it never intrudes or takes you away from the things that are important to you.
Essential is positioning this new technology as being "ambient" in that it will bring information to you rather than expecting you to ask for things all the time. The base of the Essential Home can glow to let you know about information, but you can of course tap the screen to activate it or just ask it verbally.
When it comes to controlling your smart home devices, Essential Home is supposed to be able to automatically "introduce" itself to your existing devices in order to help you set them up quickly. Essential is also offering an open SDK to build applications or hardware that can interface with Ambient OS on the Essential Home.
Unlike the Essential Phone, we don't have details on pricing or availability of the Essential Home. We get a link to sign up to receive more information in the future, but right now we have this single product page and a couple of simple blog posts to go off of. We'll need to see far more information and actually interact with the Essential Home before we can see where it fits in among the established players from Google and Amazon.
Terry Selwood, 73, was fishing near Evans Head, New South Wales, Australia when a nine-foot great white shark jumped onto the deck of his boat.
"I caught a blur of something coming over the boat … and the pectoral fin of the shark hit me on the forearm and knocked me down on the ground to my hands and knees," Selwood told ABC. "He came right over the top of the motor and then dropped onto the floor... There I was on all fours and he's looking at me and I'm looking at him and then he started to do the dance around and shake and I couldn't get out quick enough onto the gunnel."
According to the Evans Head Marine Rescue Unit, they arrived to find the shark on the on the boat and Selwood "covered in blood with numerous lacerations on his right forearm."
Selwood received stitches and is now fine. The dead shark was delivered to the Department of Primary Industries for study.
The brains behind your Amazon Echo can also manage your to-do list.
The beauty of using something like Alexa to manage your to-do list at all is the voice interaction. You suddenly think of something that you need to take care of later, but where's your phone, or even a pad and pen?
Alexa can take down that note for you, and here's how you use the to-do list feature.
There are two ways. The first involves opening up the Alexa app on your phone, tablet or in your web browser.
Launch the Alexa app from your home screen or the app drawer.
Open the sidebar menu.
Tap or click on lists.
Select to-do and not shopping.
Add your to-do.
The other way is by asking Alexa to add something to your to-do list. It's pretty simple, just say:
"Alexa, add (your to-do) to my to-do list."
How to get your to-do list from Alexa
Naturally, if you can add your to-dos through Alexa, you can also hear them back or see them in the app. Follow steps 1 to 3 from above if you want to see a snapshot of your to-do list on your phone.
Alternatively, within earshot of your Echo simply say:
"Alexa, what's on my to-do list?"
Alexa will now tell you how many items you have on your to-do list and read each of them out to you in turn.
How to clear your to-do list
Currently, this is the only part you can't complete using your voice. If you ask Alexa to mark a to-do as complete or to clear your list, you'll be told to go to the Alexa app.
So, grab your phone, tablet, or head into your browser and follow the steps listed above to navigate to your to-do list. Tap the checkbox next to each complete item, and you'll then see it struck through. A delete button will present itself so you can clear out old tasks and keep it fresh for new ones.
Alexa will also display in the app what it heard if you used voice to add to-dos. This is handy to check if you're getting errors, as it'll highlight what was heard wrong.
Alexa to-do list in other apps
Your Alexa to-do list inside Any.do
Because Alexa is a platform that other services can hook into, your to-do list can also be integrated with other apps. One of these is Any.do, which has an option in settings to link your Amazon Alexa account.
Once you've done this, a dedicated Alexa to-do list will be created within the app, and anything you add or remove in Alexa will sync with Any.do. And vice-versa, anything you scratch off in Any.do will disappear from Alexa.
If you have a favorite app that integrates Alexa's to-do list, be sure to drop it into the comments below.
It’s just over two months since we got our first peek at the Essential Phone – a new smartphone from father-of-Android Andy Rubin – and we how have our first full look at the device and its specs.
Despite the name sounding like something basic, it’s a flagship device, priced at $699, having a near-bezel-free design, constructed from titanium and ceramic materials, and with an impressive spec …
Caverns of Sonora – Sonora, Texas: A Texas cave network is home to some of the world's most spectacular-looking and bizarrely named mineral formations.
Adobe today is launching a new mobile app that makes it easier to convert paper documents and other things into digital, editable PDF files. While there’s no shortage of scan-to-PDF apps on the App Store, many are not free, have a dated design, or simply convert an image to PDF format, but don’t allow for edits. Adobe Scan, meanwhile, uses optical character recognition (OCR) to… Read More
There’s been a whole lot of talk about initial coin offerings (ICO), company fundraising events based around the sale of cryptocurrencies, but not much in the way of action until yesterday. That’s when web browser maker Brave, founded by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, raised $35 million from its ICO — and it did it in less than 30 seconds, too.
ICOs operate by selling… Read More
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.
NVIDIA mostly focuses on the SHIELD Android TV these days, but it hasn't forgotten about the SHIELD Tablet. After getting the device updated to Nougat in February, NVIDIA has sent out two small updates. That includes today's v5.2 update. The changelog shows nothing major, but it's nice of NVIDIA to keep this tablet up-to-date.
If you’re about to replace your roof, Tesla has you covered, but roofs have a long life span, and besides, not all of us have the luxury/misery of having a roof to replace in the first place. Most of us have walls with glass in them, however, and that’s the window of opportunity SolarGaps is reaching for, with a Kickstarter campaign for its solar panel window blinds. Read More
Concord wants to be your all-in-one solution for everything related to contracts. The startup just raised a $3.7 million Series A round from Alven Capital, with existing investors Streamlined Ventures, Bruno Deschamps and Thibault Poutrel also participating. Many departments rely on contracts to work with clients, suppliers, legal partners and more. But it’s still a tedious process as… Read More
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.