Have you sold your used Android phones in the past when upgrading to a new smartphone? Were you safe, making sure to reset the phones and wipe them of all your personal data first? Bad news, Android users: A new study has revealed that using Google’s reset function in Android doesn’t actually delete your personal data.
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These days we tend to think of physicists as people who are seeking answers to the biggest questions about how the universe works, but it turns out they can solve some of the most vexing first-world problems too. ABC News reports that U.K. physicist Robert Matthews of Aston University in Birmingham has come up with an insanely simple way to make sure that your earbuds don’t get tangled: Just clip them together at key spots.
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Last month, Apple made two key hires as it continues to bolster its team of wearables experts ahead of its highly anticipated iWatch launch, which will undoubtedly be the first of many wearable devices Apple will release in the coming years. After Nike recently discontinued its FuelBand product line, stating that it will instead focus on software, several members of the 80-person FuelBand team were let go. Now, as 9to5Mac reports, two of them have joined Apple.
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Google issued a tiny, but significant, update for its Google Now voice-based smart assistant that will let users correct the search engine when it doesn’t correctly understand what they ask for. The new correction hot phrase starts with “No, I said,” which has to be followed by the word or words Google Now has misunderstood. For example, if you’re using Google Now to check the progress on that popular potato salad project on Kickstarter, or on any of the knock-offs projects that followed it, and Google Now for some reason doesn’t understand what you meant to search for, you can quickly correct it by saying “No, I said potato salad.”
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Adobe on Tuesday issued a critical security update to patch a vulnerability that could help hackers “take control” of computers after users visit various sites, CNET reports. Security blogger Michele Spagnuolo, who detailed the security exploit, says the Flash issue can be used by hackers to steal cookies that authenticate users on “thousands of websites.”
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We haven’t really seen any indication yet on how the Federal Communications Commission feels about the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, but some key appointments made this week show us it could be in for a rough ride. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reports that the FCC has appointed two people to its Comcast–TWC merger review team who have in the past been highly critical of major proposed mergers.
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Sony’s Xperia C3 is a new Android smartphone whose main purpose is to improve your whole selfie experience, and Sony has released a massive infographic alongside Xperia C3 news in an effort to convince you that selfies are a lot more important than you think and should be taken very seriously – and that probably also means buying a smartphone that can do justice to self-taken photographs of oneself with/without friends.
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Do you enjoy watching old concerts? If so then you’re going to love what Music Vault did this week when it uploaded roughly 13,000 new videos of concert live footage onto its YouTube page.
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The VR market has been heating up recently as Sony’s Project Morpheus and the Oculus Rift, now owned by Facebook, duke it out for the high-end market, but Samsung’s unannounced headset might be taking a different approach. SamMobile reports that it can now confirm the existence of the Gear VR, a virtual reality device that Samsung will debut alongside the Galaxy Note 4 at IFA 2014 in September.
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Foxconn has recently confirmed that it plans to deploy a fleet of robots in some of its factories to work on products for Apple, but the “Foxbots” will not be able to replace its human workforce just yet. Quoting a report from Chinese site UDN, G for Games says that robots will only play a supporting role in building devices such as the iPhone 6, as they won’t be able to perform certain tasks that require more subtle assembly or manufacturing procedures.
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