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Google confirms that websites soon won’t be able to detect Chrome’s incognito mode
In brief: While Chrome’s incognito mode prevents other users from seeing what you’ve been up to on a device, websites are still able to detect when the mode is activated. But Google will be closing this “loophole” with the release of Chrome 76 at the end of the month.
The tech giant explained that some websites can tell if a person is browsing in Chrome incognito mode by checking for the presence of Chrome’s FileSystem API (Application Programming Interface), which is disabled to avoid leaving traces of any activity on a device. Should the sites receive an error message, this indicates a private session is taking place.
Google said the FileSystem API would be modified in Chrome 76 so that the sites trying to detect it will no longer receive the error message. The latest version of Chrome’s browser is set for release on July 30.
We first heard reports that Google was looking to implement this solution back in February.
“Chrome will likewise work to remedy any other current or future means of Incognito Mode detection,” the company wrote.
One effect of the change is that sites using metered paywalls—as in, those that let people read a certain number of articles before requiring they subscribe—will no longer be able to detect if incognito mode is being used to dodge this policy. Google suggests publishers avoid “reactive measures” in response to the change. It instead advises requiring free registration for all content, offering more “generous” free allowances, or hardening their paywalls.
Yesterday brought news that researchers had found 93 percent of the 22,484 porn sites they analyzed leaked data to third parties. The authors added that using incognito mode did not stop online trackers from recording a user’s porn-viewing habits.
By: Techspot
Microsoft posts $125.8 billion revenue in its record fiscal year for 2019
Bottom line: In its earning release for FY19 Q4, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud led the way in terms of generating revenue with an $11.4 billion figure, an increase of 19 percent year-over-year. Second was the “Productivity and Business Processes” which posted $11 billion in revenue, an increase of 14 percent year-over-year, and third came the “More Personal Computing” business which includes Windows and other consumer hardware like the Surface and Xbox that reported a revenue of $11.3 billion (a 4 percent year-over-year increase).
Microsoft published earning results for Q4 ending on June 30, 2019 with a $33.7 billion revenue reported for this quarter, an increase of 12 percent from Q4 2018. “It was a record fiscal year for Microsoft, a result of our deep partnerships with leading companies in every industry,” said CEO Satya Nadella.
Operating income increased to $12.4 billion, a 20 percent increase with all three reporting segments of the company posting a growth in revenue as compared to Q4 2018. “Q4 commercial cloud revenue increased 39 percent year-over-year to $11.0 billion, driving our strongest commercial quarter ever,” said CFO and EVP Amy Hood.
The company’s efforts in the cloud business have been paying dividends and with its recent multi-billion dollar cloud deal with AT&T, it looks committed more than ever to challenge the dominance of AWS. Its highest jump was reported by the Intelligent Cloud segment at 19%, which includes server products, GitHub, enterprise services and Azure, the key driving business which itself posted a revenue growth of 64 percent.
In its Productivity and Business Processes, Microsoft was able to generate $891 million driven by strong growth of its Office 365 Commercial and Consumer versions. The company’s acquisitions have been a rough patch but it saw LinkedIn posting a 25 percent increase in revenue at $371 million. Its Dynamics suite of business applications also reported an increase of 12 percent revenue driven by a 45 percent growth of Dynamics 365 line-up of products.
Under its “More Personal Computing” unit, Windows reported a 7 percent increase in revenue at $368 million thanks to Windows OEM and Windows Commercial businesses. “Windows OEM Pro revenue increased 18 percent, ahead of the commercial PC market, driven by healthy Windows 10 demand, strong momentum in advance of Windows 7 end of support, and increased inventory levels,” notes Microsoft, while its OEM non-Pro suffered a decline of 8 percent, which the company says is due to “continued pressure in the entry level category.”
The Surface division continued its upward trend with a revenue of $165 million, a figure that includes contribution made by its pricey Surface Hub 2 interactive whiteboard that recently began shipping. Search advertising and Gaming revenue stood at $184 million and $233 million, respectively. The latter saw a noticeable decline of 48 percent with its Xbox hardware, mostly because it’s been almost 2 years since its last console release and with consumers anticipating the next-gen Project Scarlett. Its Xbox software and services revenue also reported a 3 percent decline, which Microsoft notes was “offset in part by subscriptions growth.”
By: Techspot
An exploit shows your Bluetooth-connected mobile devices are vulnerable to tracking
Why it matters: Bluetooth is the invisible glue that binds billions of mobile devices together, so any vulnerability or bug will affect a large number of consumers who are seemingly unaware that they are sitting ducks for hackers looking to track them or potentially steal their data. Today’s news is an important reminder about the risks we take when we’re using Bluetooth devices, by leaving what essentially are open doors into our digital lives.
Boston University engineers have just come out with an extensive analysis on how the Bluetooth implementation on a number of popular modern devices could allow anyone to identify and track you. Everything from Apple and Microsoft seems to be affected, as well as wearables from companies like Fitbit that appear to be the easiest to exploit.
The vulnerability was discovered by David Starobinski’s research team, who had been looking at different IoT protocols to assess if they presented any privacy risks. The one they found is related to the way Bluetooth devices pair with one another. To do that, they have to establish a hierarchy in which one plays the central role and the other is the peripheral, so that they can begin exchanging information.
The peripheral — say, a pair of headphones — has to broadcast its identity (a unique address) so that the central device — your phone — can know about its presence and its availability for a connection, which is stored along with some other information in something called a payload.
Most Bluetooth low-energy devices are configured to send randomized addresses that change periodically as an attempt to improve privacy, but BU researchers found that the payload remained the same, meaning a simple “sniffer” algorithm could treat that information as a unique identifier instead.
Interestingly enough, Android devices aren’t affected by the exploit, because they don’t broadcast any identifying tokens, instead relying on peripheral devices to advertise themselves. In any case, the researchers notified Microsoft and Apple about their findings in November last year, and while we don’t know if they’ve patched the problem yet, a simple way to deal with this is as simple as turning Bluetooth off and back on your device.
There is no reason to be worried for now, even as Bluetooth adoption is “projected to grow from 4.2 to 5.2 billion devices between 2019 and 2022”. The researchers noted that while manufacturers would do well to take privacy more seriously, there are many other ways to track people even without Bluetooth. That is, you can keep using your smartwatches and other wearables, but it’s good to be aware about the fact that they may as well be “broadcasting something all the time.”
By: Techspot
Breakthrough Initiatives teams up with VERITAS to search for coded messages from extraterrestrials
In brief: Are we alone in the universe? It’s tough to say for sure, but that question is one that’s been on humanity’s mind since the early days of astronomy; when we first gained a greater understanding of the galaxy and space as a whole. In the hopes of discovering an answer to that century-old question, some scientists are starting to look for messages that could be hidden in light flashes.
The scientists in question (from the VERITAS Collaboration) have teamed up with Breakthrough Listen — the “initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe” — to accomplish this task. The two sides will scan the stars for gamma rays by looking for “extremely brief” (they last for about a nanosecond) flashes of blue “Cherenkov” light, which apparently get emitted when the rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere.
The VERITAS Collaboration’s role in this partnership lies in hardware and tool expertise: they are providing the four 12-meter telescopes that will be needed to look for these rays. VERITAS and Breakthrough are hoping the light flashes mentioned above will contain coded messages from alien life forms — as Engadget aptly puts it, you can think of this project as a hunt for extraterrestrial Morse code.
Breakthrough says the use of four telescopes instead of one should allow for “very effective discrimination” against false positives.
Obviously, this entire project is quite a long shot. If there is alien life out there, there’s absolutely no guarantee it will look like us, think like us, or communicate like us; much less understand enough about human intelligence to send coded messages our way. However, VERITAS and Breakthrough feel this method is at least worth a try, and given how few results the global hunt for alien life has turned up over the years, it’s hard to disagree.
“When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates,” said Breakthrough founder Yuri Milner. “So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”
We’ll let you know if this partnership leads to any results, but don’t expect anything interesting any time soon.
By: Techspot
Microsoft scores multibillion-dollar cloud deal with AT&T
The big picture: Microsoft has a renewed focus on what it does best, and that is keeping its enterprise clients happy by giving them the cloud tools necessary to keep them competitive in today’s machine learning and connectivity race. This deal is a boon for both companies, with Microsoft getting access to AT&T’s upcoming 5G network and the telecom giant getting access to the Azure cloud and Office 365.
Microsoft is expanding its strategic alliance with AT&T in a multiyear deal that will see the latter using Azure infrastructure as its preferred cloud provider, and later on moving most of its workforce to the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity tools. The combined value of the two contracts is estimated at $2 billion, which no doubt has rivals Amazon Web Services and Google wishing they could score a similar arrangement.
For AT&T, the move is part of becoming a “public cloud first” company, which is marketing speak for a broader initiative on moving non-network workloads to the cloud by 2024. The news comes just a day after IBM announced a hybrid cloud partnership of its own in which AT&T’s business applications will migrate to the IBM Cloud, while internal applications will rest on local infrastructure that uses Red Hat, also owned by IBM.
Microsoft is the second-largest cloud provider after Amazon Web Services, and while the AT&T deal sounds like a big win, it likely won’t increase Azure’s otherwise respectable double-digit market share. It will, however, strengthen that position, as 250,000 AT&T employees are set to begin using the cloud-based Office 365 suite of productivity tools as part of their daily workflow.
It’s also worth noting that with AT&T’s 5G network slated for nationwide coverage by the first half of 2020, Microsoft will get a great testbed to develop low latency systems, with drone tracking and detection systems and factories packed with sensors as notable examples. Satya Nadella said he’s hoping to expand that into self-driving cars and the Internet of Things, two key areas of interest that could see its $100 billion in annual revenue rise significantly in the coming years.
As more big companies scramble to modernize their businesses, Microsoft is looking to attract as many as it can to its cloud offering. Earlier this year, the company entered another significant partnership with Walgreens, which has other cloud players worried enough that they’re forging new alliances like the one between HPE and Google in the hope of keeping up with the Redmond giant’s growth.
By: Techspot
Microsoft is starting to force-update Windows 10 machines from version 1803 to 1903
Microsoft has been known to force its Windows 10 users to update their machines; much to the chagrin of many customers. Though Microsoft’s Windows 10 updates are usually fine and relatively stable, they do sometimes bring sweeping changes that can frustrate users or even cause performance issues and outright data loss.
With this volatility and unpredictability in mind, it’s perhaps understandable that many users would try to avoid updating their machines for as long as possible. For several individuals, that means sticking to Windows 10’s 1803 update, which came out around mid-2018.
Unfortunately for those folks, Microsoft has had enough of their reluctance to update and has opted to take matters into its own hands. Starting now, the tech giant will be force-updating computers running Windows 10 version 1803 to the latest version of the OS, which is the Windows 10 May 2019 update (version 1903). Microsoft says its reasoning primarily stems from a desire to keep user systems secure.
“Keeping these devices both supported and receiving monthly updates is critical to device security and ecosystem health,” the tech giant wrote in a support article announcement. “Based on the large number of devices running the April 2018 Update, that will reach the end of 18 months of service on November 12, 2019, we are starting the update process now for Home and Pro editions to help ensure adequate time for a smooth update process.”
Though some users will undoubtedly feel they know their machines and their potential security risks better than Microsoft does, there is no clear way to opt-out of this update — short of using software like ShutUp10 to disable the functionality entirely (which can carry its own risks).
The good news is, Windows 10 version 1903 seems to be relatively stable so far and perhaps a bit ironically, it even includes some helpful new update control features. For example, the ability to “defer” updates was once a Pro-exclusive option, but all May 2019 update users will be able to utilize a similar functionality now. Specifically, Windows 10 version 1903 lets you push updates back up to 5 times, for 5 days each (up to 35 days in total).
By: Techspot
