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Showing posts from February, 2018

Bluetooth 5.0: What’s Different, and Why it Matters

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Modern smartphones and other devices, from the iPhone 8 and iPhone X to the Samsung Galaxy S8, advertise support for “Bluetooth 5.0” on their specifications list. Here’s what’s new in the latest and greatest version of Bluetooth. What is Bluetooth? Bluetooth 5.0 is the latest version of the Bluetooth wireless communication standard. It’s commonly used for wireless headphones and other audio hardware, as well as wireless keyboards, mice, and game controllers. Bluetooth is also used for communication between various smart home and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A new version of the Bluetooth standard means various improvements, but only when used with compatible peripherals. In other words, you won’t see any immediate benefit from upgrading to a phone with Bluetooth 5.0 if all your Bluetooth accessories were designed for an older version of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is backwards compatible, however, so you can continue using your existing Bluetooth 4.2 and older devices with a Bl

How to Check if Your Password Has Been Stolen

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Many  websites have leaked passwords . Attackers can download databases of usernames and passwords and use them to  “hack” your accounts . This is why you shouldn’t reuse passwords for important websites, because a leak by one site can give attackers everything they need to sign into other accounts. Have I Been Pwned? Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned website maintains a database of username and password combinations from public leaks. These are taken from publicly available breaches that can be found via various sites on the web, or  dark web . This database just makes it easier to check them yourself without visiting the sketchier parts of the web. To use this tool, head to the main  Have I Been Pwnd?  page and search for a username or email address. The results tell you whether your username or email address has ever appeared in a leaked database. Repeat this process to check multiple email addresses or usernames. You’ll see which leaked password dumps your email address or u

OnePlus 5T Lava Red officially sold out in North America

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Just a few weeks after being launched, the Lava Red variant of the OnePlus 5T smartphone is officially sold out in the United States and Canada. This announcement was made by the Chinese company itself through its Google+ account. In Europe, the model seems to be still available - at-least it's listed as in stock on the company's German online store. It's worth mentioning that the handset's European launch happened the same time as the US release.

Essential Phone's Android 8.1 beta is now available over-the-air

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Andy Rubin's Essential Phone has definitely had a bumpy ride so far, with less than 100,000 units sold last year. But the startup is still supporting its first smartphone, even though it decided against releasing a 'stable' Android 8.0 Oreo update for it. The company is now working on Android 8.1, of which a first beta became available for eager testers exactly one week ago. And starting today there's a much easier way than before to get it. Up until now, if you wanted a taste of the Essential Oreo update, you had to manually sideload it to your phone. That's not something everyone enjoys doing, so now there's another option. When you enroll in the beta by heading to the dedicated page on Essential's website, you simply choose "over-the-air" as the answer to the question "How would you like to install the beta?". Then you enter your name, email, and device ID. Once that's done you will receive the notification to download

What Are All Those NVIDIA Processes Running in the Background?

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If you’ve installed NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software, you’ll see quite a few NVIDIA processes running in the background on your PC. We counted ten separate processes in our Windows Task Manager. But what do they all do? We reached out to NVIDIA for an explanation of these processes, but they wouldn’t provide any additional information. We suppose that’s not surprising—not even Microsoft explains all the processes in Windows itself. But we learned a lot just by poking around. ( Warning : We talk about disabling services and ending tasks to puzzle out what does what here, but we don’t actually recommend you start manually disabling services or ending tasks. We don’t know exactly what each process does.) NVIDIA Container You’ll see a lot of “NVIDIA Container” processes running on your PC. This program, named nvcontainer.exe, appears to be responsible for running and containing other NVIDIA processes. In other words, NVIDIA Container isn’t doing much itself. It’s just runni

Samsung Galaxy S9+ hits Geekbench with record-breaking scores for Android

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With less than a week to go until their official announcement on Sunday, a few hours ago almost every single detail regarding Samsung's Galaxy S9 and S9+ was leaked. And yet, while we've already seen the Exynos-powered S9 going through Geekbench, it's only now that its sibling's run has been added to the benchmark's database. The S9 already had very respectable results, with a single-core score of 3,648 and a multi-core score of 8,894. The S9+, however, beat even that, as you can see, scoring 3,773 and 9,024, respectively. To put that result into perspective, consider that in Geekbench's most recent Android chart, the S8 duo both scored on average around 1,950 single-core and 6,400 multi-core. The best result of the S8+ was 2,159 single-core and 7,235 multi-core. Thus, the performance improvements brought by the new Exynos 9810 SoC in this particular benchmark, compared to the Exynos 8895 in last year's Samsung flagships, are simply staggering.

How to Spot (and Avoid) Fake Android Apps in the Play Store

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Fake Android apps in the Play Store are a problem. People create listings designed to look exactly like popular apps, often using the same icon and name, to trick you into downloading it—then bombarding you with ads (or worse, malware). This issue has been especially prominent lately. A fake version of WhatsApp was downloaded by more than one million people last year, and just this week Reddit’s /r/android community found a fake version of the popular SwiftKey keyboard and an ad-riddled version of VLC on the Play Store. The first two were removed after making headlines, and while Google was initially reluctant to remove the faux-VLC app, it was finally taken down last night after being at the top of the Android subreddit all day. Good work, you guys! These types of apps are not something to take lightly. Behind the scenes, they’re often doing some very gnarly stuff—like stealing all of your personal info, tracking every move you make, or even worse. ABC News actually did a goo