Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

Google is rolling out a series of changes to Android Messages, one of which makes it possible to send text messages from the comfort of your computer. Called "Messages for web" the feature enables users to use a desktop web browser to send SMSes rather than their phone.

While this is almost certainly the biggest and most exciting changes for Messages, Google is also pushing a number of other new features to the app, including Smart Replies, GIF search and link previews.

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Microsoft has acquired Flipgrid, a social video discussion platform used in classrooms around the world. The acquisition strengthens Microsoft's educational offerings and helps it to better compete with rivals Google and Apple.

Flipgrid is used by million of students and teachers to collaborate on lessons, covering everything from Pre-K to PhD level. The acquisition is great news for schools: Microsoft is slashing the current price tag of $1,000, and making the service free just like Office 365 for Education.

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Apple has announced that with iOS 12, iPhone users in the US will be able to automatically share their location with first responders when they make 911 calls.

Building on its currently-used location technology, Apple says that it will start to use RapidSOS's Internet Protocol-based data pipeline to quickly and securely share HELO (Hybridized Emergency Location) data with 911 centers.

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Cryptocurrency mining malware has become a serious problem recently, and it seems the latest people to fall victim to the threat are users of the Android emulator Andy OS -- also referred to as AndY and Andyroid.

The emulator makes it possible to run Android software within Windows or macOS, but it appears that the installation harbors a dark secret -- a GPU miner trojan that secretly mines for Bitcoin. Over on Reddit there are large numbers of upset users trying to find out what's going on.

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Google is deepening it drive into China, and now the search giant has announced a $550 million "strategic partnership" with Chinese ecommerce goliath JD.com.

This is far from being Google's first venture in China, but the major investment shows the company's eagerness to take advantage of the market. It will enable Google to better take on the likes of Amazon in Asia, and it will also help JD.com to expand its operations to other parts of the world.

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Computer scientists from the University of California, the College of William and Mary, and Binghamton University have published a paper detailing a new "design principle" that avoids speculative execution vulnerabilities.

Researchers says that the SafeSpec model supports "speculation in a way that is immune to the sidechannel leakage necessary for attacks such as Meltdown and Spectre". Importantly, the design also avoids the problems associated with other Meltdown/Spectre fixes.

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Kaspersky Lab has published a report in which it reveals that a Chinese hacking group has attacked the national data center of an unnamed Central Asian country.

The cyberattacks are said to have been carried out by a group known as LuckyMouse -- but also goes by the names Iron Tiger, Threat Group-3390, EmissaryPanda and APT27. The attacks started in 2017, and Kaspersky says that malicious scrips were injected into official website to conduct country-level waterholing campaign.

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Google has published the latest edition of its diversity report in which the company highlights the makeup of its workforce in the name of transparency.

Despite Google's seemingly endless claims that it wants to do more to improve diversity, the report shows that little has changed over the last year. Women still account for less than a third of the workforce, and the company has a high attrition rate for black employees.

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The World Cup is now officially under way in Russia to the delight of sports fans around the globe. If you just can't get enough football, Facebook Messenger can help to satiate you between matches with a series of mini games you can play with your friends.

Games in Facebook Messenger have been with us for some time, and the social network has used the World Cup as a reason to update the selection. In addition, there are also new camera filters in the app -- here's how you access them and the games.

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Google has given its Ad Settings page an overhaul in the name of transparency. The page gives people the chance to not only see how Google uses the data it has gathered about them to personalize the ads they see, but also exercise a degree of control over these personalized ads.

The page makes it possible to disable ad targeting, so you will see rather more generic ads if tailored advertising concerns you. The company has also updated its "Why this ad?" feature, so you will be able to determine why you are seeing certain Google-supplied ads on the sites you visit.

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Apple says that it is planning to release an iOS update that will block a loophole used by police to access iPhones.

Law enforcement agencies and hackers have been able to exploit a handset's Lightning port to get around passcode limits and brute force their way into a phone. But with the upcoming update, Apple will shut down data access via the Lightning port after an hour if the correct passcode is not entered.

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There has been something of a spate of chip vulnerability discoveries recently, and now another one has emerged. Known as Floating Point Lazy State Save/Restore, the security flaw (CVE-2018-3665) is found in Intel Core and Xeon processors and it is another speculative execution vulnerability in a similar vein to Spectre.

The security flaw takes advantage of one of the ways the Linux kernel saves and restores the state of the Floating Point Unit (FPU) when switching tasks -- specifically the Lazy FPU Restore scheme. Malware or malicious users can take advantage of the vulnerability to grab encryption keys. Linux kernel from version 4.9 and upwards, as well as modern versions of Windows and Windows Server are not affected.

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The fall out from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues for Facebook, and the social media giant is busy trying to repair its somewhat tattered reputation. The latest measures see the company introducing new privacy safeguards to inform users if advertisers are using information supplied by so-called "data brokers".

These brokers are firms that gather data about people and then sell this information on to other companies, often for the purposes of targeted advertising. Facebook is not banning the practice, merely requiring advertisers to keep users informed.

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Apple has tweaked its App Store policies, closing a loophole that made it possible for developers to gather data from phone contacts and then sell or share that data without consent.

Until very recently app developers have been able to ask for permission to access users' address books and then use this permission to gather data about contacts. But with the latest policy change -- introduced with no announcement -- Apple has clamped down on this practice in the name of privacy.

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Google is improving the offline translation skills of Google Translate with an injection of AI in the form of neural machine translation (NMT).

The use of on-device AI helps to dramatically improve the quality of offline translations, and works in much the same as online translations do. The use of neural machine translation helps to improve accuracy by looking at complete sentences, rather than translating word by word.

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