Space Data Corporation has now filed a lawsuit against Google by jury trial for patent rights infringement by Google and Alphabet accusing the companies of stealing their balloon based communication technologies. For the unintiated, Project Loon is Google’s pet project which seeks to send thousands of helium balloons around the world and deliver Internet to users in remote areas. The project was started in June 2013 by the top secret Google Division X and currently being tested out in India, Australia, New Zealand, Nepal and Latin America....

The answers of over 11,000 respondents accessing several of its services was compiled by that the company that it had collected via a survey. The data includes information about the programming language developers use, for what they use the language, preferred frameworks, and general salary information. Based on what developers are using on a day-to-day basis, the survey showed that today’s top 10 programming languages ranking is made up of JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, HTML (not a programming language though), C#, SQL, CSS (this too), C++, and R....

It is nearly a 8 months since FBI and Polish police collaborated to arrest Artem Vaulin the owner of KickAssTorrents (KAT). On 20 July 2016, the United States Department of Justice announced that it had seized the KAT.cr domain and had identified its alleged owner. Artem Vaulin, a 30-year-old Ukrainian man known online as “tirm“, was detained in Poland after being charged with a four-count U.S. criminal indictment. The remaining domains were taken offline voluntarily after the KAT....

For those unaware, Kodi (formerly Xbox Media Center) is a free and open-source cross-platform software media player and entertainment hub developed by the XBMC (Xbox Media Center) Foundation for digital media for HTPCs (Home theater PCs) and TV audiences, which is totally free. It lets you play videos, music, podcasts and other digital media files from the internet, local storage or a home network. Kodi v18 will focus on stability and ease of use, with a task that will require rewriting large portions of code that have now become obsolete....

“TGIF has traditionally provided a place to come together, share progress, and ask questions, but it’s not working in its current form,” Pichai wrote in the email explaining the meeting change. He noted that Google is “unfortunately seeing a coordinated effort to share our conversations outside of the company after every TGIF.” Further, Pichai in his note referred to recent leaks given by the employees to the media. “I know this is new information to many of you, and it has affected our ability to use TGIF as a forum for candid conversations on important topics....

The announcement was made by the company on the Chinese microblogging website, Weibo wherein it confirmed the launch date and time of the phone. In a fresh promo teaser shared by Lenovo (via Sparrow News), the company has confirmed that the upcoming gaming phone will feature the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus (aka Snapdragon 865+ SoC) instead of Snapdragon 865 chipset to provide enhanced gaming performance. The upcoming Lenovo gaming phone is expected to feature a Full-HD+ (1,080×2,340 pixels) resolution display along with 144Hz refresh rate and have a 270Hz touch sampling rate for smooth scrolling....

It has also addressed problems discovered in the Btrfs and EXT4 file systems and patched the networking (IPv4) and sound issues. As expected, Linux kernel 3.14.41 LTS comes with numerous updated drivers, especially for ACPI, USB, Bluetooth, GPIO, MTD, Memory Stick, MD, GPU (Radeon and Intel i915), I2C, SCSI, Ethernet (Intel e1000), Wireless (rtl8192cu, wl18xx), InfiniBand, CLK, and SPI. “I’m announcing the release of the 3.14.41 kernel. All users of the 3....

The researchers found that Microsoft Defender’s command line tool “MpCmdRun.exe” was abused to side-load malicious DLLs that decrypt and install Cobalt Strike beacons on victims’ PCs. For those unaware, MpCmdRun is an important part of Microsoft’s Windows Security system that helps protect your PC from online threats and malware. “During a recent investigation, we found that threat actors were abusing the Windows Defender command line tool MpCmdRun.exe to decrypt and load Cobalt Strike payloads,” SentinelOne wrote in detail about the new attack in its blog post....

At a private dinner held at the White House in October 2019, Zuckerberg “made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook,” WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter. In these meetings, Zuckerberg is said to have resounded the same fears he voiced in a meeting with students of Georgetown University in October....

The ExoMars spacecraft consisted of two parts, a Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Schiaparelli Entry, Descent and Landing demonstrator module. The 2020 mission will drill two metres into the Martian surface and study samples for any indicative signs of past or present life on the red planet. The main objective of the ExoMars mission is to search for evidence of methane — a gas produced by living microbes on Earth, and traces of which have been observed by previous Mars missions — and other trace atmospheric gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological processes....

Towards a cashless era At the global level, the financial ecosystem is approaching a cashless era, it is imminent that various innovations emerge, proffering solutions for effective and efficient transactions. The rapid change that is occuring in this sector a number of innovations springing up in different areas. Mobile wallet options like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Wallet are all examples of innovations already in existence in line with this revolution....

The revelation came as Home Secretary Theresa May outlined a new bill regulating online surveillance by authorities. In her Commons statement, she referred to how successive governments to access data from communications companies under the 1984 Telecommunications Act. According to the BBC report, Mi5 didn’t record what was said during phone calls, just the fact contact was made. The programme was “so secret that few even in MI5 knew about it, let alone the public,” according to the BBC’s security correspondent....

Mr. Wheeler, was only 17, when he and his hacker gang was accused of hacking and stealing at least $US100 million ($A108.2 million) worth of software and data from Microsoft, Valve and the US Army. He was under police radar following a joint international investigation into five suspected hackers, most of them US-based. Facing a possible sentence of ten years, Mr. Wheeler fled the country almost after three years later....

Gates said that by allowing Google to develop Android even before Microsoft could develop a competing mobile operating system cost the company nearly $400 billion. “In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win,” Gates told Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz....

For those unaware, WB Games is the video game division of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and is a publisher behind popular game franchises such as Batman: Arkham, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Microsoft’s interest in acquiring WB Games comes after Warner’s parent, AT&T, a telco giant, announced its intentions last month to sell off WarnerMedia’s gaming division in a deal that would pull in around $4 billion in order to help lessen its $154 billion debt, according to a CNBC report....

For those unaware, Windows Terminal, an open-source tab UI-based terminal application was originally announced at Microsoft’s Build Conference 2019 in May last year. It is a modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL. Its main features include multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and custom themes, styles, and configurations, and can run Linux GUI apps directly....

Microsoft snooping update, KB3035583 returns to Windows 7 users forcing them to upgrade to Windows 10The upgrade patch as well as the snooping patch has been marked as “important” on Windows 7 PCs, and they are labeled as recommended by Windows Update, so users who might not know what they are all about could easily install them. Despite of the fact that many Windows 7 users have preferred to stay with it instead of Windows 10 being available to them for free, Microsoft wants them to upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as possible....

What if such movie like situations can actually happen in reality too. Thanks to Microsoft, millions of Chinese have been able to enjoy the theme of a movie in real life too. According to The New York Times, the software giant company has come up with a Chinese-language chatbot called Xiaoice that has managed to grab the attention and strong fondness of millions of people who message it regularly. The bot has more than 20 million registered users as of today....

This surprise announcement from Microsoft comes after the software giant in May had agreed to sell its entry-level feature phone assets to FIH Mobile Ltd, which is a subsidiary of Foxconn technology group and HMD Global, Oy for $350 million. The Nokia 216 is dual SIM mobile phone that comes with a 2.4 inch QVGA display along with a 320 x 240-pixel resolution and offers 16MB of RAM. It also comes with 16MB of in-built storage and supports microSD card for additional storage up to 32GB....