Comcast to offer unlimited data for an extra $35 a month
As the world’s attention shifts from typical cable services towards streaming alternatives, Comcast is trying its very hardest to keep people interested in its products. The company recently announced that it was bringing a ton of new content to the X1 and now, in what seems to be a complement this, it has rolled out an unlimited Internet plan for an extra $35 a month. The add-on gets rid of the pesky 300-gigabyte monthly data cap that has been put in place in Atlanta, Miami and Nashville. If enough people in these cities opt to get rid of the bandwidth cap then the offer could potentially see a bandwidth cap placed on all data plans across the country, encouraging heavy users to opt for an unlimited plan. It’s a clever way to recoup lost revenue because if, for example, 100,000 people pay for the service it can generate an additional half-million dollars for Comcast every month. The company conducted a survey and found that users would be more than willing to pay a flat fee to get rid of their data cap and make sure they weren’t stung with overuse fees. I mean, I know I would.
Source: Washington Post
Here’s a sneak peek at the new ‘Warcraft’ movie trailer
Legendary Pictures today released a 16-second clip of the trailer for Duncan Jones’ upcoming World of Warcraft movie. The trailer itself will debut this Friday at Blizzard’s BlizzCon event while fans will have to wait until June 10th to see the movie in all of its CGI-dominated glory.
Via: Verge
Source: Legendary Pictures (YouTube)
I’m not paying CBS to watch ‘Star Trek’ online
Yesterday I got the best birthday present a lifelong Trekkie could hope for: Star Trek is coming back to television — kinda, sorta.
It’s been over a decade since Star Trek ended TV production and, while fans have had two successful films to enjoy (or despise), corporate infighting between CBS and Viacom has kept the franchise from its rightful home on the small screen. However, it looks like the two companies have hugged it out with the news that a new Star Trek series will return to “television” in early 2017. And while this would normally be cause for celebration among Trekkies, the announcement doesn’t come without a few caveats in terms of who’s making it and how it’s being distributed: The show will be produced by the team in charge of the recent films, and it will only be available via CBS’ subscription streaming service, CBS All Access. It’s a bit of a no-win situation (a Kobayashi Maru scenario, if you will) for die-hard fans who wanted to see Star Trek back on television. Star Trek may be back, but it comes at a cost: both figurative and literal.
Snapdeal.com will now start selling Honor devices
To celebrate selling 1 million smartphones in India over the last 12 months, Honor will now be teaming up with Snapdeal.com to sell devices. With this new partnership, Honor plans on furthering their online presence.
Mr. P. Sanjeev, Vice-President Sales, Huawei India Consumer Business Group, said:
“Our e-brand, Honor, has received an overwhelming response from Indian customers, and we are thankful to all our fans for their support. Our aim has been to provide best-in-class smart phones and at exciting price points and so far we have been successful in doing so. We are confident that this partnership with Snapdeal.com will help us reach out to larger group of Honor smartphone fans.”
Honor’s new flagship smartphone, Honor 7, and their last flagship, Honor 6 Plus, will still be sold exclusively from Flipkart.com. However, to say thanks for selling 1 million phones in India and celebrating the new Snapdeal.com partnership, Honor will be having some discounts on other smartphones.
- Honor 4X available at Rs. 8999 (Rs.1000 off)
- Honor 4X (gold) available at Rs. 9499 (Rs.1000 off)
- Honor 4C available at Rs. 7999 (Rs.1000 off)
- Honor Bee available at Rs. 3999 (Rs. 500 off)
- HDFC (debit and credit cards) – Flat 10% off, up to a maximum of Rs. 2000
The phones listed above will be sold for these prices at Snapdeal.com, but hurry, they only last from Nov 2 – 4, 2015. After that the sale will be over and prices will return to normal.
Press Release:
NEW DELHI, November 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ —
– Honor Devices to be Available Also on Snapdeal.com, Starting 2nd November, 2015
– Exciting Diwali Offers for Honor Customers
Honor, an independent Internet smartphone brand under Huawei, today announced its new partnership with Snapdeal.com, to further expand its presence in the online retail market. This announcement follows the sale of 1 million Honor smartphones inIndia over the last 12 months.
Commenting on the new partnership, Mr. P. Sanjeev, Vice-President Sales, Huawei India Consumer Business Group, said,”Our e-brand, Honor, has received an overwhelming response from Indian customers, and we are thankful to all our fans for their support. Our aim has been to provide best-in-class smart phones and at exciting price points and so far we have been successful in doing so. We are confident that this partnership with Snapdeal.com will help us reach out to larger group of Honor smartphone fans.”
Honor recently launched its flagship Smartphone Honor 7, which received an overwhelming response from customers like its predecessor, Honor 6 Plus. Both these premium smartphones are still available exclusively with Flipkart.com.
Commenting on this alliance, Mr. Tony Navin, Senior Vice President- Strategic Partnership and Initiatives at Snapdeal, added, “We are excited about this alliance with Honor and about offering the Honor products to our consumer base. We are hopeful and positive of a mutually rewarding and a longstanding relationship with Honor.”
In a way of saying thanks to the 1 million customers in India for their response to Honor, the brand would be rolling out an inaugural offer on Snapdeal.com as below:
- Honor 4X available at Rs. 8999 (Rs.1000 off)
- Honor 4X (gold) available at Rs. 9499 (Rs.1000 off)
- Honor 4C available at Rs. 7999 (Rs.1000 off)
- Honor Bee available at Rs. 3999 (Rs. 500 off)
- HDFC (debit and credit cards) – Flat 10% off, up to a maximum of Rs. 2000
Celebrating the festive season in conjunction with this special offer, Honor customers will be able to avail these discounts for a period of three days, from Nov 2 – 4, 2015 on Snapdeal.com.
About Honor:
Honor is Huawei’s smartphone e-brand. Honor is the world’s leading smartphone e-brand. Honor has been expanding aggressively in global markets, and has successfully launched its products in 57 global markets within 6 months in 2014, entering the bestselling charts in most of the European countries where it was launched. Accordingly, Honor obtains a huge user base which has yielded powerful mouth-spreading asset. Honor products also enjoy global aesthetics, super processing technology and massive patent support. The three basic characteristics of Honor product are – best camera, long battery life and remarkable craftsmanship. Honor is born for ultimate tech innovation. Huawei is the world’s 3rd largest smartphone brand in the world with a global market share of 7.5% clocked in Q3 of 2015. It is also china’s largest smartphone brand. For more information, visit http://hihonor.in
Come comment on this article: Snapdeal.com will now start selling Honor devices
Tweetbot 4 for iOS Updated With Support for Apple Watch
Tapbots today released a significant update for its latest Tweetbot 4 Twitter client, adding support for the Apple Watch. On the Apple Watch, the default view is the Activity Feed, which includes Mentions, Favorites (soon to be likes), and Follows – the content you’d most likely want to view on a small screen.
From the Activity Feed, it’s possible to tap to view individual tweets to Reply, Retweet, or Favorite, and tapping on a name also leads to a profile where a Direct Message can be sent to a user or someone can be followed. A force press on the Apple Watch within Tweetbot will bring up the option to send a tweet, and composing a message is done via voice dictation.
Today’s update is the second major update to Tweetbot 4, which Tapbots released a month ago. Tweetbot 4, a newly universal app for the iPhone and the iPad, introduced a redesigned look, new Statistics and Activity Views, and support for features like split-screen multitasking on the iPad. A later update also brought support for 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
Tweetbot 4 can be downloaded from the App Store for $4.99. [Direct Link]
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How to unroot your Android phone or tablet
Rooting your phone and unlocking its true potential is one of the best parts of the Android ecosystem, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. For one, the process is a bit complicated. Not to mention the fact that you could potentially harm your device, and tinkering with a handset can void the warranty, resulting in an unfortunate situation.
Don’t want to be part of the root club anymore? Being in Google’s protective arms is definitely nice, and it is an inconvenience that root gets in the way of updating your software over the air. Additionally, when it comes to selling a phone, many buyers want the “out of box” experience, as if the phone were brand new, which root technically detracts from.
The thing is, there’s plenty of tutorials out there for rooting a smartphone, but not as many show you how to unroot. Let’s fix that!
Unroot by using SuperSU
Many users take advantage of SuperSU, a popular tool for managing rooted devices. Among its many features is the ability to unroot your device.
The process is as simple as they get. Just open the SuperSU app and head over to the Settings tab. Scroll down and select “Full Unroot”. Follow instructions and let the phone do its thing. After it takes care of business, just restart the phone and you will be back to normal.
Unroot by using an app
Not using SuperSU? There’s a slight chance you might still be able to unroot your phone by taking advantage of a simple app. The only caveat is that these applications don’t seem to work well with every smartphone out there. It’s kind of a hit or miss.
The most popular option is Universal Unroot, which can easily get rid of root privileges in Android devices. Sadly, there’s plenty of downsides. For starters, a bunch of Samsung devices won’t work, due to a complication with KNOX. LG devices will be unrooted, but they will still show as rooted afterwards, thanks to LG’s eFuse.
I will say this is a bit of a gamble, as it costs $0.99, but that might be worth it if you don’t want to play around with your phone too much.
Unroot by using a file manager
Root access might seem like a complicated set-up, but it’s really nothing but a bunch of files on your phone. Get rid of them and root will also go away.
To do this, you will need a file manager with root access. My favorite one happens to be ES File Explorer (just turn on root access in the settings).
- Access your device’s main drive and look for “system”. Select it, and then tap on “bin”. From there, delete “busybox” and “su”. By the way, these might not be there. If that is the case, move on to the next step.
- Go back to the system folder and select “xbin”. If the files are there, go ahead and delete both “busybox” and “su”.
- Go back to the system folder and select “app”.
- Delete “superuser,apk”.
- Restart the device and it will all be done.
Unroot by installing an OTA update!
Remember we told you root gets in the way of updating? Well, that is only if you want to update the traditional way, you can still push updates manually. We won’t get into those details right now, but the trick here is that software updates tend to break root access. Most users have to root again, but if you don’t want root it’s easy to simply install your next update.
The obvious downside is that you do have to wait for an update to arrive. Oh, and don’t forget to uninstall SuperSu and any other root-related apps. Alos keep in mind that this will only work when using the stock recovery on your device.
Unroot by installing stock firmware
Taking the phone back to its original firmware is usually the best way to unroot a phone. There’s no ifs or buts here, it will work regardless of your device, ROM, kernel or recovery. This is because the firmware has all the necessary software packaged together.
The only sad part is that we can’t quite give you a tutorial. Phones have different ways o accomplishing a firmware install, so you will have to do a bit of research on how to do this to your specific smartphone. Users will need to download their specific firmware files, use USB Debugging and possibly download some PC software.
Wrapping it up
So there you have it, guys. Now you have the necessary tools for getting your phone away from the potentially dangerous world of rooting. Remember smartphone hackery is not exactly for everyone!
Have any of you guys tried these methods? Hit the comments to let us know your experiences. I have personally only used the last option. I feel like clean starts are always better, but I do have to say it makes me work and research much harder.
Vertu’s mysterious Chinese buyer has its own secure smartphone OS
In recent years, we’ve watched Vertu evolve to a luxury phone maker that actually cares about specs, and you can thank CEO Massimiliano “Max” Pogliani for that. But according to Financial Times, Swedish private equity group EQT has recently sold Vertu to Hong Kong’s Godin Holdings, and Pogliani has since decided “to pass on the baton” to someone else. While these changes may bring a tear to some eyes out there, things are about to get real interesting for Vertu. You see, after some digging around in the Hong Kong Companies Registry, we found out that this Godin Holdings is actually just a four-month-old shell company of Godin Cyberspace Security Technology (translated name), which claims to be working on its very own secure smartphone OS dubbed “GOS.” If you put the pieces together, we could be looking at a luxury equivalent of the Blackphone or the BlackBerry Priv in the making.
Via: Ben Wood (Twitter), Financial Times
Source: Godin (Weibo)
Factory Reset Protection on Samsung devices can be bypassed in just a few minutes
In Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google introduced a security feature called Factory Reset Protection to help folks keep their data safe. It works like this: if FRP is turned on and your Android device is reset from the recovery menu, the Android device will require you to re-enter the primary Google account information that was last on the device. This means that if someone steals your phone and resets it from recovery, there’s no way for them to get in.
Well, with one big exception.
If you happen to own a Samsung device, you can bypass Factory Reset Protection by using an OTG drive and a single APK. In the video shown below, RootJunky was able to bypass FRP on his Samsung device in just under 10 minutes.
You see, there’s a feature on Samsung devices that will automatically launch a file manager when an OTG drive is plugged in, even when the phone is locked. So when the device asks you to enter in your Google account information, simply insert your OTG drive and install the APK (attached in the video’s description) on your device. The APK will pull up the Settings menu automatically, so you can scroll down and perform a factory data reset from the Settings menu. When your device boots up again, you won’t run into the same Factory Reset Protection wall you experienced the first time around.
See also: Lollipop’s Factory Reset Protection to make thieves’ life harder
This can be used for both good and evil, but most likely it will be used for the latter. If you performed a factory reset from your recovery menu and can’t seem to remember your account information, just a quick install from the APK and you should be good to go. Alternatively, and much more likely, this is a tool that can be used if someone steals your Samsung device and doesn’t have your password.
Factory Reset Protection is in Android for a reason, and it’s a little unsettling to think that Samsung devices are vulnerable at the moment. We’ll be sure to let you know if Samsung issues a fix. But for now, let’s hope if you do happen to lose your phone, it doesn’t end up in the wrong tech-savvy person’s hands.
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Firefox brings its tracking-resistant private browsing to everyone
Psst: the private browsing mode in your current web browser probably isn’t that private. It’ll (usually) get rid of your history and cookies, but it won’t prevent cross-site trackers from getting a feel for what you’re doing. However, you now have an easy way to deal with that — Mozilla has released a finished version of Firefox with its promised stricter Private Browsing mode. Switch it on and you’ll get tracking protection that blocks code from those ads and social services that follow you from site to site. There’s also a central control panel on the desktop for managing privacy and security, including the option to turn tracking protection off if it’s breaking an important page.
Source: The Mozilla Blog, Firefox, Google Play
Adware found in MacUpdate’s Skype Installer package
Long-trusted software site MacUpdate has apparently gone the way of its competitors: It has been tainted by adware. A Twitter user tried to download a Skype Installer package from the site and discovered that all was not as it appeared. The file looks normal at first and when opened you’re prompted with a user agreement that people generally just click past, but it’s here that gives the installer the right to change browser settings and add a “search-assist” browser extension. This type of software-trickery is identical to those used by InstallCore adware and as soon as the Skype agreement is confirmed, an InstallCore browser is added to Safari. It’s usually wise to download software from the developer’s site but the appeal of MacUpdate was that it acted like a one-stop-shop of sorts, carrying with it a strong reputation for reliable downloads. Now, with this news coming to light, maybe it will have to be added to the boycott list right under Download.com and Softonic.
Source: Ciro Urdaneta (Twitter)
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