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You Can Now Search Google From iMessage With App Download

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There’s a fun, new update for Apple’s iMessage app that will probably make lots of power users happy.  As long as you also have Google’s iOS app installed, you’ll be able to perform Google searches from within iMessage itself.

In order to make it work, you’ll have to go into the app drawer (App Store icon) and enable the iMessage extension.  Once enabled, all you have to do to use Google search is to tap on the Google shortcut icon to get the search box.  Even better, the update includes shortcuts for watching trending YouTube videos, scoping out nearby restaurants, checking out local weather conditions, and even a handy GIF search.  There’s also a quick news search option.

If you search for restaurant recommendations, the new app makes the results easy to share in the conversation you’re having. Although curiously, this feature doesn’t carry over to YouTube videos or news.  Even so, it can be situationally useful.

In a similar vein, Google’s keyboard app, “GBoard” also now has search built into it.  In fact, you don’t even have to have GBoard installed.   As long as you’ve got the core Google App, the search extension will appear in iMessage’s app drawer.

These are small changes, but if you spend a lot of time texting, you’ll find them invaluable.  Think back to prior text conversations you’ve had.  There have probably been a number of occasions when you found yourself wishing you could do a quick search on whatever topic you were talking about.

It’s great to see these kinds of changes as the cellphone market continues to grow.  When the iPhone first burst onto the scene, apps were few and far between.  Now, not only are there untold thousands of apps on the market, but they are becoming increasingly integrated.  That’s very good to see.

New Freemium Offer Mines Cryptocurrency

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Freemium software is certainly nothing new.  They are free apps that offer premium features if you don’t mind ads displaying while you’re using it or paying a small fee to have the ads removed.  At least one company is trying a new business model on for size, albeit with limited success.

The company is Qbix, and their freemium app is called “Calendar 2.”  It’s a solid calendar app with more features than Apple’s default app, and the Qbix offers its users premium features if they’re willing to allow the company to make use of CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency.

Hackers around the world have been enslaving the computers of unsuspecting users and using their processing power to mine cryptocurrency, all while making millions in the process. However, this is the first instance we’ve seen of a company attempting to bring the business model mainstream.

Unfortunately, there were two issues with the release of the latest version.  First, there was a bug in the way the mining app was implemented that kept it running, even if users opted out of the default setting (which is, of course, to accept the arrangement).

Second, and even more disturbing, the mining software consumed twice as much processing power as the calendar app claimed that it would.  Both flaws were discovered by Calendar 2 users, who did not have nice things to say about the app and expressed their concern that Apple had allowed the app on the App Store in the first place.

For Apple’s part, the company seems to have no problem with the revenue scheme, provided that the offering company gets the consent of the user. Although given Calendar 2’s less-than-spectacular-success with the idea, the company may well change their Terms of Service to forbid it going forward.

New Chips Support Increased Network Speeds To 400Gbps

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Marvell Semiconductor has a new product out, and it’s a game changer.  Their new “Alaska” chip (the Alaska C 88×7120) is the first on the market to support the new 802.3 standard.  The 802.3cd is on tap to eventually replace current Ethernet ports running at 25Gbps to 100Gbps with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200 Gbps, and 400 Gbps.

The future is now.

Granted, the Alaska chips aren’t for sale just yet, but they are sampling to customers (“Sampling” in the chip world is akin to beta testing in software).  The chip supports sixteen 50 Gbps ports, four 200 Gbps ports, and two 400 Gbps ports, which will quadruple network output.  Even better, the new chips support both copper and fiber-optic wiring, as well as SerDes (long-reach serialization/deserialization) on system and line side interfaces, allowing OEMs to use the chips for wide-area interfaces.

Also of interest, the new chips use PAM4 (pulse-amplitude modulation), which is a four-level signaling scheme that’s designed to replace NRZ (non-return to zero) binary modulation, and even better, the new PAM4 protocol will be backwards compatible with NRZ hardware.

The port density on the new chip has been optimized to enable both Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable – Double Density and Octal Small Form Factor Pluggable port types for 500 GbE, 200 GbE, and 400 GbE deployments.

If all of those technical details make your head spin, not to worry.  The short of it is that once these chips go mainstream, network output is going to increase dramatically, which means that network speeds are about to get even faster.

Unless you run or manage a huge data center, you’ll probably never have direct contact with these chips. However, as big data centers begin deploying them, you’ll absolutely see the benefits.

Attacks on Health Organizations Increasing At Alarming Rate

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It used to be the case that credit card companies and retail outlets were the primary targets of hackers around the world.  Make no mistake, they still get attacked with regularity, but the hackers have found a new and even more lucrative target:  Health Organizations.

According to a new report jointly produced by the Ponemon Institute and Merlin International, the medical/healthcare industry suffered nearly a quarter (23 percent) of all the data breaches that occurred in 2017.  It gets worse.  Those breaches exposed PHI and PII of more than five million individuals.

The reason for the shift away from credit card data to medical records comes down to profits.  PHI and PII can often be sold on the Dark Web for ten times the amount that credit card information will bring.  The hackers are simply obeying the laws of economics and going where the money is.

Brian Wells, the Director of Healthcare Strategy at Merlin International had this to say about the report:

“In an increasingly connected, digitally centric world, hackers have more opportunities and incentive than ever to target healthcare data, and the problem will only increase in scope over time.

Healthcare organizations must get even more serious about cyber security to protect themselves and their patients from losing access or control of the proprietary and personal information and systems the industry depends on to provide essential care.”

Worst of all, a shocking percentage of medical/healthcare companies don’t seem to be serious about cyber security at all.  Although the average cost of a medical data breach is approximately four million dollars, a staggering 49 percent of companies in the industry don’t have an incident response plan of any kind.  There’s no process in place to properly respond to an attack, or to mitigate the fallout if a breach occurs.  These companies are sitting ducks.

Used with permission from Article Aggregator

Windows Media Player May Be Replaced By Microsoft App

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A Reddit user named “Noam_ha” recently posted a screenshot displaying a popup message when users open the venerable Windows Media Player (WMP), asking users if they would instead like to open the video file with the company’s more modern Movies and TV app.

The popup message touts the Movie and TV app’s advantages, which includes better battery life if running on a phone or laptop, better compatibility with more modern video formats, a mini-view, and support for 360-degree video on Augmented Reality devices.

There are several interesting things to note here:

First, while the new popup message clearly signals Microsoft’s preferences, the reality is that in many ways, the Movie and TV app is a poor substitute for WMP.  It only has modest functionality and has a downright awful interface. Even worse, many features found in WMP (like streaming video from online repositories, queuing, and variable play speeds), are simply not present in the new app.

Second, this appears to be a recent shift inside the company, because WMP comes pre-installed on Windows 10.

On the other hand, WMP hasn’t received a significant update since the Movie and TV app was first released with the launch of Windows 7.  In that respect, at least, the writing has been on the wall for some time now.

This marks the second beloved app that Microsoft has decided to kill in recent months.  Recall that just last year, the company announced the end of Microsoft Paint, a kludgy, barely functional graphics program that was nonetheless, strangely beloved by users.  It was retired and replaced with “Paint 3D,” and now, all indications are that Windows Media Player is headed for a similar fate.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but given the condition of  the new Movies and TV app, the decision probably isn’t going to win Microsoft any friends.

Netflix To Release More Parental Controls To Help Parents

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If you have a Netflix account and children living at home, there’s a reason to cheer about the company’s most recent announcement.  They’re rolling out some robust new parental control features that will allow you to exert much more control over what your children are watching.

You can now set content-specific PINs to lock movies or TV shows. So for example, if you don’t want your children watching “Zombeavers” (yes, that’s a real movie, by the way), you could lock that content with a PIN.  This is in addition to the existing controls Netflix offers that allow parents to set broad PIN-based protections that block content at specified maturity levels.

Additionally, the company has stated that it will start displaying these maturity level designations at the start of each program to give parents greater awareness of what their children are watching.  The changes are slated to be rolled out over the next few months.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the rollout of these changes is slated to coincide with Disney’s planned launch of their own kid-friendly streaming service.

It’s worth noting that Netflix and Disney reached a streaming agreement back in 2012, which didn’t go into effect until 2016.  Disney has stated their intention to end the deal beginning with films released in 2019.  For their part, Netflix will retain the right to show older Disney films until the end of 2019.

Netflix has been the King of the video streaming hill for a long time, but the company is coming under increasing pressure from a growing number of competitors.  The company is fully aware that Disney already has the hearts and minds of millions of children around the world. They realize that unless they do something to bolster their parental controls feature set, they stand to lose ground to this latest entrant in the field of streaming video.

Microsoft To Help Intel With Security Issues

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By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of the “Spectre” and “Meltdown” security flaws that affect every Intel chip produced in the last decade.  Users have been waiting for a fix for both of these since January, when the issues were first discovered.

From the beginning, Microsoft agreed to include the fix for Spectre in its regular software updates but insisted that Intel and PC manufacturers would have to push the Meltdown fix on their own.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of users are still waiting, and in the meantime, untold millions of machines are at risk.  Intel’s first attempt at a fix was so spectacularly bad that the company urged users not to install it until a better fix could be rolled out.

Intel has since released an updated fix, but few users have taken advantage of it so far.  The reason is because most users simply don’t know how.  They’re not aware that they have to go to Intel’s website to manually download and install it, or wait for an OEM push, which could still be months away.

Given this reality and the extreme danger that Spectre poses, Microsoft has reversed course and agreed to make special Windows update releases that include the Spectre fix.  The first such update, KB4090007, is now out and available to users.

There are two important caveats to be aware of, however:

These special updates will not be delivered automatically. Users will have to go to the Windows Update Catalog and select the appropriate package, then run it on their computers

The updates are available only for Windows 10, version 1709, and Windows Server, version 1709

The currently available package (KB4090007) is meant for Intel Skylake CPU owners only. Additional packages will be released over the course of the next few months.

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