Future Android update will show how apps are draining your battery

Android Oreo, announced with great fanfare during the eclipse in August, has gotten some pretty neat features, like more recognizable emojis and notification dots for app icons. Now Android 8.1 will show you which apps are draining your battery in a new, more impactful way.

According to a report at Android Police, users of the 8.1 developer preview now see a banner at the top of the regular Battery screen that calls out any egregious examples of battery draining apps. In two examples cited by the site, 8.1 users saw a little red symbol next to Tile, which requests location data frequently, and Fenix, a Twitter client that can keep your phone awake.

The new feature is a nice step forward for managing your battery, and we’re hoping it makes it into the final 8.1 release. It could be a good way to focus in on the apps that make the most demands on the already short-term battery life of most modern smartphones.

Via: 9to5Google

Source: Android Police

Chinese firm nabs social video app Musical.ly for as much as $1 billion

The popular teen lip-syncing app Musical.ly has been purchased by Chinese firm Bytedance — the company behind China’s major news aggregating service Jinri Toutiao. The details of the deal haven’t been disclosed but sources told the Wall Street Journal that the app sold for somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion.

Since its launch, Musical.ly has expanded its content offerings beyond just social lip-syncing video creation. Last year, it spun off a separate live-streaming app called Livel.ly and earlier this year it began offering original mini-shows. In June, a short version of MTV’s Nick Cannon’s Wild ‘N Out, a how-to show called Fashion to DIY For, a series called Greatest Party Story Ever and Hearst’s Seventeen and the City all debuted on the app. NBCUniversal has also been creating shows specifically for Musical.ly.

Bytedance, which was recently valued at $20 billion, says that Musical.ly will remain a separate, independent business.

Via: TechCrunch

Amazon expands influencer program to Twitter and Instagram ‘stars’

A couple of months ago, Amazon opened up its influencer program to more YouTube stars with large followings. It lets people with large followings on the video service set up their own page full of Amazon products, of which the influencer gets a cut when someone buys from that page. Now the online retailer is expanding to include Twitter and Instagram influencers in the program.

The Amazon Influencer Program is basically the retailer’s regular Associate program but makes it easier to create a custom storefront. It also gives influencers a simpler vanity URL for fans to visit, since many YouTube stars mention the link verbally. At a session during the current Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, YouTube influencer Dan Markham noted that he was able to quit his job as a biotech engineer with the proceeds of his Amazon storefront, making nearly $161,000 dollars on a fidget cube product placed on his custom storefront.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Amazon / Web Summit

MacRumors Giveaway: Win Custom-Painted Black AirPods From BlackPods

Our BlackPods giveaways have been extremely popular with MacRumors readers, so this week, we’ve once again teamed up with BlackPods to offer you a chance to win a pair of AirPods that have been custom-painted black to better match darker devices.

Black AirPods pair especially well with the new iPhone X, which features an OLED display with a thin black bezel even on the iPhone X models that come in silver.

BlackPods takes a standard pair of Apple AirPods and then paints them black using a proprietary coating system. The company uses a three-phase finishing process for a high-quality coating of paint that’s not going to chip, fade, scuff, or wear off.

Each pair of BlackPods is completed by hand and is given a rigorous inspection to ensure a flawless finish. There are two options when it comes to BlackPods — the BlackPods classic, with a high-gloss look, and the BlackPods Stealth, which has a matte satin finish.

BlackPods charges $279 for the BlackPods Classic and $299 for the BlackPods Stealth, a $120 to $140 premium over Apple’s standard AirPods, but it’s the only way to get a unique black finish on your AirPods.

Along with selling finished sets of painted AirPods, BlackPods also lets customers send previously purchased AirPods in for customization. This process costs $99 for the glossy black and $119 for the matte black, and it takes approximately 10 days to complete. Painting of both the AirPods and the case is included in the price.

Because BlackPods are re-painted AirPods, the full AirPods functionality remains intact, with a W1 chip for simple pairing, a long battery life, an accelerometer for ear detection, and gesture support.

We have one set of BlackPods to give away to a MacRumors reader, with the winner able to choose a Stealth or Classic finish. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winners and send the prizes. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.

Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years or older and Canadian residents (excluding Quebec) who have reached the age of majority in their province or territory are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.

a Rafflecopter giveawayThe contest will run from today (November 10) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on November 17. The winner will be chosen randomly on November 17 and will be contacted by email. The winner will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before a new winner is chosen.

Tags: giveaway, AirPods
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20-qubit IBM Q quantum computer could double its predecessor’s processing power

IBM has long been one of the organizations at the forefront of research into quantum computing, especially when it comes to offering commercial access to its hardware. Now the company has announced significant new developments pertaining to its IBM Q program.

When IBM first gave the public access to its quantum computer via the internet in May 2016, its quantum processor comprised only 5 qubits. The company has announced that by the end of 2017, clients will be able to access a 20-qubit processor via its online portal.

Thanks to across-the-board improvements to elements like its connectivity and packaging, this means that the computer will be able to perform quantum computations as much as twice as fast as the 5- and 16-qubit systems that are currently available via the IBM Q platform.

IBM says that these improvements come as the result of three generations of development that have taken place since the IBM Q project got underway. Further enhancements are set to come in 2018, which should allow users to further explore the practical applications for this technology.

The company has already built and measured a prototype 50-qubit processor that is apparently already operational. It’s reportedly capable of similar performance to the systems that have already been rolled out, and will be made available as part of the next generation of IBM Q hardware.

These hardware improvements are accompanied by an expansion of QISKit, IBM’s open source software developer kit that’s intended to facilitate the use of quantum computers. Users can now use the package to create their own programs that can then be run on the company’s quantum hardware, or simulators.

Over the past 18 months, IBM Q has allowed 60,000 uses to run a total of 1.7 million quantum experiments for educational and experimental purposes. While various different entities are pushing the field of quantum computing forward, IBM stands alone in terms of its efforts to make the technology widely accessible to anyone who is interested in using it. Going forward, the possibilities are only going to grow in scope thanks to the improvements being made to the company’s hardware.

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MalwareBytes throws down the gauntlet to AV firms that are “failing” their users

In the wake of the Equifax hack and growing mistrust of major anti-virus companies, it’s becoming harder and harder to know where to turn for your digital security. MalwareBytes believes it should your solution in these troubled times, and has thrown down the gauntlet for other anti-virus firms with a new tool and report that highlights how they are failing their customers.

MalwareBytes is an anti-malware application that offers manual scanning in its free version, and real-time protection with its premium option. Traditionally, it’s been used as remediation tool by consumers, as a redundancy after their main anti-viral solution fails to prevent infection. But as 2017 ends, MalwareBytes is looking to step out of the toolsets of IT professionals, and into the hearts and minds of consumers the world over — by taking a swipe at its competitors.

To highlight their failings, it’s released a heat map of MalwareBytes users the world over, who have discovered malware infections using its scanning tool. The kicker is that all of those found to be infected are already running some form of security software, be it anti-virus tools like Avast, AVG or Symantec, or built-in defense systems like Windows Defender.

Regardless of the security system in place, every dot on that map is someone actively fixing their system with MalwareBytes. That’s why the company wants you to make MalwareBytes your first line of defense, not the last.

Stepping out of the shadows

First released in 2007 after co-founder and CEO Marcin Kleczynski had his own brush with troublesome malware, MalwareByres has been used as a popular “remediation,” tool ever since. That’s because many users have found it to be a more effective tool for discovering infections and attacks than existing antivirus protection. We asked  Kleczynski what makes MalwareBytes a more effective way to discover, and ultimately stop, malware attacks in their tracks.

“A lot of traditional antivirus firms do a lot of work with signatures,” he said. “You’ve seen it before, they ship a large database of signatures [of malware]. They’re hundreds of megabytes. They update it every day or every hour. The issue with that approach is they must react. They actually have to see the malware.”

That’s no good, he says, because it’s impossible to discover every piece of malicious software out there. “You’re never going to see all of the malware, you’re not even going to see five percent of the malware. You have to look at trends and patterns,” he said.

Malwarebytes does exactly that, relying on analysis of how software is running instead of looking for specific signatures associated with known malware. “When we started in 2004, the majority of antivirus ideas were already 20 years old, so we were really able to come up with AV 2.0, and take our own approach to it. […] Even back in 2004, we were already looking at characteristics.”

Today, MalwareBytes employs numerous approaches to cover as many bases as possible. That includes using the signatures of existing and detected malware to track down known infections, and leveraging machine learning to plan. It also looks at behaviors and expected use patterns, so if certain software starts doing something it shouldn’t, it can put a block on it before it starts.

“You’re never going to see all of the malware, you’re not even going to see five percent.”

“Our anti-ransomware system which ships with MalwareBytes, it’s exclusively behavior based,” Kleczynski said. “We look for encryption events and we score them and if we see too much, we actually roll back the process and arrest it. That’s an example of a custom-built technology that we had to put together, because ransomware was such a big issue.”

Ultimately, Kleczynski said, MalwareBytes doesn’t use a “Silver Bullet” technique, claiming that no one solution works for all malware attacks. Instead, it uses a combination of systems and expertise to come at the modern world of breaches and infections with a multi-faceted approach.

Carrots and sticks

While Kleczynski talks a big game, its the company’s recent report on its competitors that is the starkest part of its recent promotional efforts. It’s not just claiming that MalwareBytes is the best. It’s showing how its competitors are failing customers.

“[We]’ve seen a lot of the AV labs putting out reports where many of them score 100 percent,” Kleczynski said. “It’s become increasingly popular with AV vendors to slap stickers on their website. Malware in a lab performs very different from malware in the wild. The only real way, I think, to compare AV vendors is to analyze the real-world data.”

That’s exactly what it did with its “Mapping AV Detection Failures,” report. In it, it looked at around 10 million infected systems that cleaned themselves up using the MalwareByte scanning tool between January, and June, of 2017. Of that number, some 44 percent had two or more antivirus solutions installed — yet were infected anyway.

“Taking out all data that looks at MalwareBytes actively blocking threats, we only looked at data of the major AV companies,” Kleczynski said. “They had to be registered in the Windows security center, so had to be actually activated with Windows. If we cleaned up the mess after AV, we sent that information back to our servers. [We recorded] if we have cleaned up malware on a computer and [what antivirus] it has installed. That’s the only data we collected, no personally identifiable information. We tossed away all the IP addresses.”

Other notable stats in the report include that 52 percent of ransomware infections caused by the notorious ransomware known as Hidden Tear were discovered on systems running multiple antivirus solutions. If you eliminate Microsoft’s bundled Windows Defender from the results, some 40 percent of all malware tracked were discovered on a system with an add-on antivirus solution.

Live tracking success and failure

MalwareBytes is aware of the potential for perceived bias in such a report. After all, its own report claiming it’s better than the competition is hardly surprising. That’s where the live heatmap comes in. Available now for anyone to view, it tracks live MalwareBytes scans across the world, highlighting that often these systems have third party antivirus installed — which failed.

While MalwareBytes goes out of its way to avoid naming and shaming anyone in its aggregated report, the live data does not. Microsoft tops the list, suggesting the Windows Defender tool that comes installed by default with Windows 10 is the most popular antiviral solution around. Still, big names like Avast, AVG, McAffee, Symantec, Kaspersky, and many others make the list. They all fail to pick up malware that MalwareBytes ultimately cleans up.

“They might have Windows Defender installed, and then add in Avast, but they’re still getting infected.”

If nothing else, the heatmap shows that a lot of people are using MalwareBytes, and they’ve having success with it. Within just a few minutes of viewing the map, hundreds of success “blips” appear across it. Scrolling through the list, just about every mainstream consumer and business antivirus has been thwarted by an infection that MalwareBytes ultimately cleans up.

“This map shows when remediation cleans up the malware on the devices as its happening,” Kleczynski said. “[We’re] not claiming we’re the best, but […] we’re looking at a lot of consumers who use multiple solutions. They might have Windows Defender installed, and then add in Avast, but they’re still getting infected.”

Building trust in a world full of breaches

Along with its more varied approach to malware detection and prevention, MalwareBytes also employs several practices to keep its own code secure. Competitors like of Ccleaner and Symantec have faced security concerns at the very core of their service, so MalwareBytes thinks this could help build trust among consumers who find it increasingly hard to know where to turn for protection. It’s especially important now that security researchers have highlighted how some antivirus software can introduce more security vulnerabilities than they protect against.

“We have internal security teams – I just hired a new information security officer myself a year ago – and we do a lot of code audits, third party audits,” Kleczynski said. “We have a bug bounty where we pay up to $5,000 for a bug discovered and are thinking about raising that to raise interest. We’re partnered with HackerOne, too.”

This is something all companies should be doing though, he thinks. Highlighting how some of the recent debacles with security at major firms have impacted the public’s opinion of them and data collection services in general, Kleczynski highlighted that ultimately, it’s the way that companies respond to issues that defines them most.

“People will try to find vulnerabilities in your software and it’s how you respond. No programmer is perfect, and I don’t think AV [introduces] more vulnerabilities if done right.”

And his idea of what antivirus (or anti-malware) “done right,” — is MalwareBytes of course.

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Take better photos with the RevolCam lens accessory!

We’re reaching a point with smartphones where it’s expected that all new releases come with a great camera. With nearly identical specs and comparable results, its easier than ever to take good photos with your phone — but if you want to take truly great photos you’ll need some accessories

There are a lot of photography accessories out there to choose from and it can be a bit overwhelming. Some of them are kind of clunky to use or they’re crazy expensive.

If you want to step up your photography game without breaking the bank, you need the RevolCam multi-lens smartphone photography accessory. It’s an all-in-one accessory that includes three lenses on a rotating rig along with an adjustable and detachable LED light for shooting in low-light conditions.

The RevolCam can easily clip onto practically any smartphone and lets you choose between wide-angle, macro, and fisheye lenses with a simple flick. There’s also a built-in mirror behind the LED light, which allows you to take selfies using the better-quality back camera on your phone.

Buying all of these accessories individually would likely set you back a few hundred dollars, but you can get the RevolCam from Android Central Digital Offers for just $34.99!

Better still, use coupon code GIFTSHOP15 at checkout to save an additional 15% — that brings down the final price to just $29.75! So what are you waiting for? Take your photography to new heights with the RevolCam.

See at Android Central Digital Offers

BlackBerry Motion now available at Bell, TELUS, Koodo, and SaskTel

It’s not available in the U.S., but Canadians can now purchase a BB Motion.

Although SaskTel was the first to go live with orders for the BlackBerry Motion in Canada, Bell, TELUS, and Koodo have now also got the all-new BlackBerry Motion added to their lineups. Pricing is pretty standard across all retailers offering the Motion but here’s the breakdown.

Bell

• $0.00 – 2-year term – Requires a minimum of 1 GB ($25/mo.) of data per account plus a minimum of $70/mo. per user.
• $99.99 – 2-year term – Requires a minimum of 1 GB ($25/mo.) of data per account plus a minimum of $60/mo. per user.
• $599.99 – No term

TELUS

• $0 – Starting at $95 per month a 2-year plan
• $100 – Starting at $85 per month a 2-year plan
• $605 – No term pricing

Koodo

• $100 + $21 Tab charge for 24 months
• $245 + $15 Tab charge for 24 months
• $365 + $10 Tab charge for 24 months
• $605 No term pricing

The BlackBerry Motion is live on all the sites right now for consumer accounts, while Bell and TELUS also have business customer options available. If you’re looking to pick your BlackBerry Motion up in store, remember select Bell, TELUS, and SaskTel stores will have it available while Koodo is only offering the Motion online. With the sites now live, let us know if you placed your order yet in the comments!

See at Bell
See at SaskTel
See at TELUS
See at Koodo

BlackBerry Motion Specs and Features

More BlackBerry Motion First Look Videos

Sphero Mini is the best $50 you can spend on your kids this year

I’m loving this little ball of fun, and at $50, it’s one of the best toys you can add to your (or your kid’s) collection.

This past week, my life has been consumed by a particular game that has nothing to do with an erstwhile plumber with a magical hat.

No, the game is a ball, a literal ball, that moves with the help of some innovative tech and a very cool Android app. It’s Sphero Mini, a pint-sized version of the popular Sphero robot that has been delighting people for years. At $50, it’s less than half the price of the regular version, and while it doesn’t have the same overall capabilities and battery life, I’ve found it to be just as enjoyable.

See at Amazon

What is it?

Sphero Mini is a small motorized sphere and uses magnets, sensors and a bunch of programmatic magic to respond to movement from a smartphone app. The Mini is considerably smaller than the mainline version, and as a result can zip through corners and under couches (and more easily annoy pets) than its larger counterpart ever could.

Who’s it for?

Sphero Mini is aimed at kids, and that’s reinforced by its cutesy packaging, neon color options (blue, orange, green, pink, and one) and straightforward charging options. That guidance also extends to the app, which in addition to controlling the little sphere with a virtual joystick also encourages kids (and kids at heart) to use facial expressions to move the ball up, down, left, and right.

What can you do with it?

Drive it! When I was young, I loved remote-control cars, and Sphero Mini is the next step in that gaming evolution. Instead of winding up a Matchbox Car and letting ‘er rip, this little thing lets you ride around for around an hour on a full charge, doing tricks and smashing into things (or knocking down the small bowling pins that come in the box), which on their own is a lot of fun.

But there’s also three games included in the app, allowing you to use the Sphero as a controller to accomplish tasks. It’s fun and rewarding, and teaches kids that there can be a physical element to virtual play. The company promises more games in the near future, too, which is exciting.

I heard you can program with it, too

Yep! Sphero is interesting because it uses its robots to teach kids how to code using a simple-to-understand language and a familiar app-based interface.

Available through the Sphero Edu app, the idea is to help kids understand the basics of coding using macros and templates that make the Sphero perform tricks or recall an obstacle course.

It’s the best $50 you can spend on your kids this year

I’m not going to lie — I’ve used the Sphero Mini a lot in recent weeks, but one of my favorite moments was giving it to my five-year-old niece and watching her go wild with it. From the ridiculous Face Drive feature (which isn’t accurate but it’s terribly fun) to the built-in games (with more to come) the Sphero Mini is great value.

See at Amazon

2017 Holiday Gift Guide

Deal: Jaybird Freedom wireless headphones are just $49

The headphones usually cost $149

Black Friday will be here before you know it, and while some sales will be reserved specifically for that day, there are a lot of deals that have already begun so you can start doing some early Christmas shopping right now.

Best Buy is one retailer that’s running early Black Friday sales, and one of the best ones we’ve seen so far is a $100 discount on the Jaybird Freedom wireless headphones.

The Freedoms usually cost $149, and while they aren’t the newest wireless headphones around, it’s hard to find anything to complain about with them for as little as $49. Jaybird promises 8-hours of battery life between the headphones themselves and the included battery pack, a sweat-resistant design is perfect for jamming out to your tunes while at the gym, and you have full control of your listening experience through Jaybird’s MySound app.

Add all of this together with a sleek design, numerous wing and ear-tips to help you get the perfect fit, and a free carrying pouch, and the Jaybird Freedoms are a steal at this price.

It’s unclear just how long this deal will last, so we recommend jumping on it as soon as you can to make sure you don’t miss out.

See at Best Buy