How to remove personal information from photos in Windows 10 – CNET

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

There’s more to your digital photos than meets the eye. Embedded in each file is EXIF data, or metadata, that contains information on your camera’s make and model, the time and date the photo was taken, and even GPS coordinates if you happened to take the photo from a camera (or, more likely, a phone) that has geotagging enabled.

Luckily, Microsoft lets you remove this sensitive information in Windows 10 in just a few easy steps. Of course, if you’d rather not bother running all your photos through your desktop before posting them online, you can also turn off geotagging at the source.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

1. Open the folder that contains the photo you want to remove metadata from. Right-click on the photo and click Properties. (You can also select several photos, right-click them, then click Properties.)

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

2. In the Properties window, click the Details tab to see the photo’s metadata. At the bottom of the window, click Remove Properties and Personal Information.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

3. If you would like to remove metadata directly from this file, select Remove the following properties from this file and select all of the property values you want to remove. Click OK to remove the data.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

4. If you want to retain a copy of the file with metadata, select Create a copy with all possible properties removed — this will create a copy of the file with metadata removed, but you will still have original metadata-filled file.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

5. Windows 10’s metadata-removal tool isn’t perfect, unfortunately, and it may not be able to remove all the personal information from your photos. If you run into issues removing metadata with Windows, you’ll need to try a third-party tool such as BatchPurifier Lite.

Stop the whining! Make Apple EarPods play nice with Xbox One – CNET

Other headphones play nice with the Xbox One, but if you have tried to use Apple EarPods with Remote and Mic with an Xbox One controller, it probably wasn’t for long. Because if you plugged in a pair of Apple EarPods to a newer Xbox One controller that has a headphone jack, you were greeted by a high-pitched whining buzzing sound.

The easy solution is to simply use another set of headphones. But if you must use Apple’s EarPods, then I would direct your attention to clever YouTuber Nick Robinson, who figured out a fix. And it is this:

1. Plug your Apple EarPods into your Xbox One controller.

2. Double-tap the big Xbox button on your controller to open Xbox One’s left panel on your screen and scroll down to the gear icon to open the Settings menu.

3. Move the slider for Mic monitoring all the way to the left to mute it.

4. Enjoy the silence.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Robinson suggests that in addition to adjusting the slider for Mic monitoring, you also toggle the switch to Off for Headset mic. I found, however, that just moving the slider for Mic monitoring did the trick.

Robinson also posits an interesting theory about why Apple’s EarPods create this annoying buzzing sound in the first place. He explains that Apple reversed the ground and mic rings on the plug.

(Via OS X Daily.)

Instagram blocks users from linking to Telegram and Snapchat

You know that website section in your Instagram bio? It’s the only place on the social network where you can deeplink to other parts of the internet, and IG celebs often use it to let fans know where else they can be found. It still works as intended, but it has suddenly stopped supporting Telegram and Snapchat links, as TechCrunch reported. An IG spokesperson confirmed to TC that it has “removed the ability to include ‘add me’ links” to profiles.” He said that it was “not the way [their] platform was intended to be used,” but that “other types of links are still allowed.”

The spokesperson didn’t name specific websites, but upon checking, we can confirm that Instagram continues to support Twitter, LinkedIn and, of course, Facebook links. If you try to add a Telegram or a Snapchat profile, though, you get this message:

Telegram founder Pavel Durov took to Twitter to air his grievances against Facebook, IG’s parent company. This isn’t the first time a Facebook-owned service put up walls keeping out Telegram links, after all: in late 2015, Whatsapp also removed the ability to deeplink to its rival messaging app. Durov believes Facebook has been targeting his service either because it’s been growing steadily (he says it now has 100 million monthly active users) or because of the launch of its public chatrooms called Channels, which could make Telegram a legit social network. We’ve reached out to the Snapchat team for their insights on why IG also blocked their ephemeral messaging app, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Another @Facebook tentacle closes on users’ ability to share a link to their Telegram profile. #hypocrisy pic.twitter.com/xC6ydp3M0p

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) March 2, 2016

Source: Techcrunch

The Hubble has seen farther back in time than ever before

NASA announced on Thursday that an international team of astronomers have used the Hubble space telescope to spot the most distant galaxy discovered to date — not to mention one of the oldest in the visible Universe. The galaxy, dubbed GN-z11, has a measured redshift of 11.1, meaning it formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

GN-z11 is 25 percent smaller than the Milky Way and contains barely one percent of its star mass. That makes sense, given that we’re looking at an infant galaxy. However, the number of new stars being formed there outpaces the Milky Way’s by 20 times. It’s these bright new stars that illuminate the galaxy enough to be seen by the Hubble.

“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz said in a statement. If these measurements are correct, and NASA is confident they are, that would mean GN-z11 formed near the start of the epoch of reionization, the period of time in which the first galaxies coalesced.

The team’s finding will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the Universe was only three percent of its current age,” the paper’s lead author, Yale’s Pascal Oesch, said.

Source: Hubble Space Telescope

DARPA unveils its next VTOL aircraft concept

DARPA announced on Thursday that it had awarded the Phase 2 design contract for its unmanned VTOL X-Plane concept to Aurora Flight Sciences (AFS). VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) planes, like the current generation of V-22 Osprey or F-35B Lightning II, have to trade off between a number of mission requirements including flight speed versus range or fuel efficiency versus power. With the X-Plane, DARPA hopes to have it all and make this VTOL platform more functional on the battlefield.

For the upcoming demonstrator aircraft, DARPA hopes to achieve a top sustained flight speed between 300 and 400 knots, a hover efficiency of at least 75 percent, boost its cruise lift-to-drag ratio to 10 (up from the V-22’s ratio of 5 to 6), and have the ability to carry at least 40 percent of the plane’s expected 10,000-pound gross weight.

AFS’s concept would employ the same 4,000 HP engine used by the V-22 to generate 3 MW of electrical power that will drive the 24 ductless fans spread across its rear wings and front canards. These fans will rotate, as you can see in the image above, enabling the X-Plane to seamlessly transition from a hover to forward flight.

“This VTOL X-plane won’t be in volume production in the next few years but is important for the future capabilities it could enable,” DARPA program manager, Ashish Bagai, said. “Imagine electric aircraft that are more quiet, fuel-efficient and adaptable and are capable of runway-independent operations. We want to open up whole new design and mission spaces freed from prior constraints, and enable new VTOL aircraft systems and subsystems.” AFS expects to have its demonstrator in the air sometime in 2018.

Source: DARPA

Samsung’s free Gear VR offer with Galaxy S7 and S7 edge purchase goes live

As promised a few weeks ago, Samsung has started offering people in the U.S. who purchase a Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge a free Gear VR headset. (Or, in some instances, the Gear S2 smartwatch.)

The offer is for people who pre-ordered or ordered those phones from between Feb. 23 through March 18. Those folks have under March 31 to submit their Offer Claim Form and valid purchase receipt. along with the phone’s IMEI and Wi-Fi MAC address, at the Gear VR offer site. The offer also includes six free games that are worth about $50 in total, in addition to the $99 Gear VR. The headset will be mailed out in between four to six weeks.

Check out Samsung’s free Gear VR offer

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• Galaxy S7 and S7 edge hands-on
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• Here are all four Galaxy S7 colors
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• The SD card is back on the GS7
• Join our Galaxy S7 forums

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Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and others file joint amicus brief supporting Apple

Google has officially joined other major tech companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and more in filing an amicus brief, or “friend of the court” statement. It’s supporting Apple in its current legal fight against the FBI over unlocking an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooting suspects.

Apple has refused the FBI’s order, stating that such a move could cause others to gain access to the phone via a “backdoor”. The other companies that are joining the brief are Box, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote, Mozilla, Nest Labs, Pinterest, Slack, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Yahoo. In a statement, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith says:

“We’ve reached a critical moment in which a new generation of mobile and cloud-based technologies have far outrun the laws that protect our safety and preserve our timeless and fundamental rights. By standing with Apple, we’re standing up for customers who depend on us to keep their most private information safe and secure.”

Google has yet to offer its own statement on joining the amicus brief as of this writing.

Source: Microsoft

Hello Games gives No Man’s Sky an official release date for PS4 and PC

British indie game maker Hello Games has just announced a release date for its upcoming epic, No Man’s Sky.

The title is much-anticipated because of its sheer scale; you are free to explore the game’s virtual open universe of about 18 quintillion planets. Amazingly, a small team of only about 10 or so developers is behind No Man’s Sky. Hence all the excitement. Well, we knew it was due to release in June, but now we’ve been given an official date: 21 June (Engadget says 24 June for the UK).

On those days, it’ll arrive for PlayStation 4 and PC. There’s even a physical Blu-ray edition for PS4. Pre-orders are live now through PlayStation, Amazon, BestBuy, GameStop and Steam. Although it costs $59.99 (£50 on PS4 and £40 on PC), that figure pales in comparison to the whopping $150 Explorer’s Edition (a limited version of the game sold exclusively by iam8bit).

Depicted as another PlayStation first title, No Man’s Sky, the “universe size sandbox”, is one of those mind-bogglingly impressive games that leaves us wanting more each time we see it. And at E3 2015, we saw gameplay involving space combat, research, and discovery.

It’s a game so big that not even the developers know how every planet in every solar system in this giant space exploring epic will look, nor what exactly will be on their surfaces. It’s like the big band theory to video games.

Watch a recent trailer below for a closer look.

Nintendo makes SNES games exclusive to ‘New’ Nintendo 3DS

Want to play classic, Super Nintendo games on the go? Hope you updated to Nintendo’s vaguely named “New” Nintendo 3DS last year, then — the company just announced that the latest additions to its virtual console library are exclusive to the revised handheld. Starting later today, NN3DS owners will be able to download Super Mario World, F-Zero and Pilotwings from the Nintendo E-Shop.
The announcement is a little bittersweet. SNES support has been one of the most requested additions to the virtual console library since the launch of the 3DS, but the general consensus was that the handheld console simply wasn’t powerful enough to emulate the 16-bit hardware. It’s the same reason Nintendo hasn’t released GameBoy Advance games for the 3DS, apart from the few titles it gave to 3DS Ambassadors back in 2011 — and even those didn’t work that well, forcing the handheld to reboot into a mode that disables most of its features. The New Nintendo 3DS upgraded processor, however, apparently gives the device enough oomph to do the job. Having the games on the New Nintendo 3DS is better than nothing, but it’s still a bummer for folks who haven’t upgraded to the new hardware.

If you have bought in to Nintendo’s upgraded handheld, however, the new VC games seem pretty nice. Virtual Console SNES games will include a “perfect pixel” mode to retain the original hardware’s aspect ratio, and Nintendo is promising a solid line-up of classics for the next few weeks — including Donkey Kong Country (and Donkey Kong Country 2), Super Mario Kart, Earthbound, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid. Not bad! Unfortunately Nintendo hasn’t said how much each title will cost or if it will offer discounts to users who already purchased the games on their Wii U. Here’s hoping.

Update: That price? $7.99 a pop, sadly without any discount for folks who already purchased the title on the Nintendo Wii U. Bummer.

‘Monster Hunter Generations’ hits 3DS in the summer

Monster Hunter Generations, known as Monster Hunter X in Japan, hits 3DS in the summer across the western world, Nintendo announced today. Monster Hunter is a popular action role-playing series that has players find, battle and capture fantastical creatures, and Generations will be no different.

Dedicated series fans can transfer their save data from Monster Hunter 4 to Generations to unlock bonus content. To sweeten that deal, Monster Hunter 4 is on sale for $20 in the Nintendo eShop for 48 hours starting at 3PM PT today. Start hunting those monsters, people.

Monster Hunter X is coming to the #3DS in the west as #MonsterHunter Generations! #NintendoDirectNA pic.twitter.com/4O03unN9xk

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) March 3, 2016