Amazon’s Prime Day seemed to make the Internet go insane this week, as people both raged against Amazon trying to unload piles of useless junk while at the same time scooping up those 100-packs of old CD-Rs. This seeming contradiction was best captured by Thomas Nguyen on Twitter, who observed that before Prime Day, “I didn’t realize that there are so many things I don’t need but I want.”
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I love my Jawbone UP3. Quality control issues continue to plague Jawbone, but the device and accompanying app are fantastic. I recently lost 50 pounds in just three months, and there is absolutely no question that UP bands and software were instrumental in my success.
As I continue to lose weight — now down about 75 lbs — and improve my health, Jawbone’s products still play an integral role for me. But there is one area where the UP falls short, and a former Apple engineer has stepped up to fill that huge gap.
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With the release of Ant-Man just a few hours away, signaling the end of Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it might be a good time to take a look back at everything that Marvel has brought the theaters over the past few decades. The studio has certainly been on a hot streak over the past few years, but looking back, not every Marvel property has been a critical success.
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We’re not sure we can top yesterday’s list of paid iPhone and iPad apps on sale for free, but we’ve found seven iOS apps that are definitely worth checking out. And if seven isn’t enough, you can always head back to yesterday’s post, where you’ll find a few solid sales that haven’t ended yet.
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The following is a very crazy iPhone bug that you should be aware of, as it might come in handy in some situations – though hopefully you’re never going to have to use it. Apparently, asking Siri to charge your phone to 100% will trigger an emergency call to the police. That means you could use the command to ask for help without letting your assailant know that you’re about to call the cops on him or her.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has long been known as a protector of the free Internet, but the organization can’t do it alone. One of the EFF’s greatest strengths is its ability to rally people behind its causes, which of course isn’t terribly difficult since the group’s causes always benefit Internet users.
With the EFF’s latest project, the organization has created a new open source tool that makes it easier than ever for Americans to contact their Congressmen and women and make their voices heard. And just as important, the tool will also allow the EFF to hold members of Congress accountable.
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What if there existed a smart camera that could constantly analyze the scene in your home or office and alert you when someone enters carrying a gun? That dream may or may not become a reality, and it all depends on whether or not nanoWatt Design can manage to raise the $200,000 it needs to jump-start production in the next 34 days.
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The writing has been on the wall for quite a while. Flash is dying a slow death, yet it continues to gasp for air. After some new vulnerabilities were discovered, many have been calling for the plug to be pulled.
Facebook’s Chief Security Officer called for its demise the other day.
“It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day,” he said. “Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.”
Then, Mozilla blocked all versions of Flash in Firefox after security researchers discovered vulnerabilities that affect various operating systems, that hadn’t been patched.
Yes, this was temporary. Adobe issued an update on Tuesday about a resolution for the vulnerabilities. Here’s thecompany’s statement in full:
A few days ago we were notified of two vulnerabilities within the Flash Player that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of an affected system. Upon investigation, we confirmed and fixed the issues, and took steps to ensure that this class of attack cannot be used as a future attack vector.
We released an update to Flash Player this morning, and are proactively pushing the update out to users. We are also working with browser vendors to distribute the updated player.
We would like to thank Dhanesh Kizhakkinan of FireEye and Peter Pi of TrendMicro and slipstream/RoL for reporting the issues and working with us to help us quickly address them.
Flash Player is one of the most ubiquitous and widely distributed pieces of software in the world, and as such, is a target of malicious hackers. We are actively working to improve Flash Player security, and as we did in this case, will work to quickly address issues when they are discovered.
We continue to partner with browser vendors to both improve Flash Player security as well as invest in, contribute to and support more modern technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
Nothing in there about killing Flash. Still, the calls for its death continue.
Wired, one of the most well known magazines in tech, published an article on Wednesday called, “Flash. Must. Die.” In that, the technology is called “That insecure, ubiquitous resource hog everyone hates to need.”
The headlines related to Flash are rarely positive. Earlier this year, YouTube deprecated Flash embeds and its Flash API. Then Google started automatically converting Flash ads to HTML5. Flash can potentially hurt websites in search rankings. Google even announced that it would try to save people’s laptop batteries by pausing Flash in Chrome.
Despite the wide disdain for Flash, it’s still being very heavily used in advertising. We recently looked at a study from Sizmek, which called this a “major issue”.
What’s happening is that Flash ads that would otherwise be dynamic are appearing as static images on mobile device, and this can ultimately cost the advertiser clicks and conversions.
“This raises questions as to whether or not marketers are aware of how many of their ads are not being seen properly and how much ad spend they are wasting,” a spokesperson for the firm tells WebProNews.
“As mobile inventory grows, the channel is also changing, particularly in the realm of rich media. The days of Flash-supported inventory on mobile devices are numbered,” the report says. “iOS devices have never had native Flash support, and it’s been six full operating system versions since Android devices supported Flash. This means that only 11% of Android devices are capable of supporting Flash, and those devices are running significantly out-of-date software. Because mobile support for Flash inventory is nearly extinct, rich media ad formats that rely on Flash are likely to default – or revert to a single, static image – nearly 100% of the time. This means 5.35 billion rich media impressions served to mobile devices were squandered in Q1 of 2015 alone.”
According to Sizmek’s findings, only 8.3% of HTML5 impressions defaulted, while these formats represent less than half of rich media ads served to mobile devices.
“The Flash mobile default problem isn’t exclusive to just a few advertisers,” the report notes. “Among campaigns that served at least 1 million impressions in Q1, the average default rate was 35.2%. Many advertisers had it much worse than that – 36% of the advertisers in this sample defaulted much more than average, including the 12% of advertisers that never successfully served a rich media ad to a mobile device. The rate of rich media failure was much lower on desktop inventory, where 60% of advertisers defaulted at a rate of less than 3%.”
You can take a look at the full report here.
The post Should You Be Using Flash? appeared first on SecurityProNews.
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Netflix is awesome but you’ll have to pay more for it in the future. Per The Guardian, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings this week told users to brace for price increases in the future, although he said that they would be gradual and wouldn’t happen overnight.
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In a couple of months, Apple will launch two new iPhones that will probably sell extremely well from the moment they become available for preorder. For Samsung, that’s both good and bad news, as the company will make plenty of money on the new iPhones, and it will also see sales of its own devices take another hit.
Either way, Samsung is already preparing for a massive iPhone 6s launch on both fronts, according to reports. The company is reportedly pushing up its Galaxy Note 5 launch, while mass-production of a boatload of components for the new iPhones kicks off at the same time.
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