Samsung clarifies that there is no ‘Microsoft Edition’ Galaxy S8

Shortly after the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, there was some interesting news regarding a possible “Microsoft Edition” of the phones. It turned out that the announcement was little more than a promotional campaign to get people to buy the phones from Microsoft stores. Basically, those who bought the phone from Microsoft stores got access to some of Microsoft’s productivity software once the phones are connected to a Wi-Fi network.

“A Microsoft customization is applied to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ Microsoft Edition when the devices are unboxed and connected to Wi-Fi,” a spokesperson said at the time of the phone’s launch. “This customization ensures customers a best-in-class productivity experience with Microsoft applications such as Office, OneDrive, Cortana, Outlook and more.”

Given that plenty of people enjoy Microsoft’s various productivity software, there was nothing really wrong with this move. The phones bought from Microsoft were identical to those bought anywhere else and Microsoft’s software could be uninstalled if it wasn’t wanted.

The amusing bit of news comes half a year later courtesy of Windows Central’s Al Sacco. He reports that he was recently contacted by Samsung regarding his original story on the Microsoft-branded S8. Samsung, apparently late to the game, has decided that it wishes to clarify that there are no “Microsoft Edition” S8s.

“Samsung Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, and Galaxy Note8 devices are available in the Microsoft online and retail stores with a unique Microsoft experience which ensures their customers, particularly small-to-midsize business owners and entrepreneurs, a best-in-class productivity experience,” a Samsung representative told Windows Central. “There is not a ‘Microsoft Edition’ brand of any Samsung Galaxy products.”

We’re not really sure what Samsung was hoping to accomplish with this late announcement. If the company was concerned about potential brand confusion, then it would have made more sense to make this announcement near the device’s launch. At this point, it’s too late really do anything and serves to confuse the issue more than anything else. Most people have likely forgotten that the “Microsoft Edition” S8s were once a topic of discussion until Samsung made this announcement.

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This $23 Anker Classic Bluetooth speaker packs a powerful punch

Portable sound for anywhere you go!

The Anker Classic portable Bluetooth speaker is down to $22.99 on Amazon when you clip the $5 off on-page coupon. That’s the lowest direct price drop on this speaker ever. It has been selling around $28 for the last few months, but even that is a drop from a previous $35 selling price.

Android Central reviewed this speaker, so you should check that out for an in-depth breakdown of everything this little guy is capable of.

Features include:

• Experience your tunes in high definition and surprising fullness realized through a 4W / 2in driver and bass port – outclassing other similar-sized portable speakers.
• Unrivaled 15 to 20-hour playtime powered by a built-in rechargeable 2100mAh Li-ion battery.
• Automatically connect to the last-connected device when turned on enables one-step music streaming. Compatible with all Bluetooth-enabled devices (2.1 and over). 3.5mm audio port for non-Bluetooth devices.
• Outstanding connection range of up to 33 feet. Built-in microphone with a 2-feet pickup range allows the speaker to double as a speaker phone.

The Classic has 4.4 stars based on more than 6,200 user reviews. All Anker products come with an 18-month warranty.

This is a great price on a powerful little speaker, but Anker does have a huge selection of speakers to choose from. You could upgrade to the Anker SoundCore 2 for just $10 more.

See on Amazon

Mattress maker Casper faces lawsuit for tracking web visitors

Unless you’re using strict privacy controls in your browser, you generally expect that online stores will track at least a bit of your activity, if just to send you targeted ads when you browse the web. However, a proposed class action lawsuit is claiming that Casper was far nosier. The suit alleges that the mattress-in-a-box startup violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by using code from NaviStone to grab personal data from web visitors without permission. Reportedly, it would collect keystrokes, clicks, IP addresses and other identifying info whether or not you actually submitted it. In theory, Casper could see what you’d typed into a form even if you backed out.

Not surprisingly, both Casper and NaviStone reject notions that this amounted to spying on visitors. Casper described the lawsuit to CBS as a “blatant attempt to cash in on and extort” a rapidly growing startup. NaviStone was caught off-guard by the lawsuit, but has said that it takes privacy laws seriously and wanted to “clear up any misunderstandings” about what its web tracking tools do. It doesn’t link email addresses to personal information, for instance.

There is good reason to be skeptical of a potential class action suit, since it’s all too common to see lawyers encourage them in a bid to get their name in the spotlight over a hot-button issue. However, this isn’t the first time questions have surfaced over NaviStone’s tools. Gizmodo recently learned that dozens of websites (such as Quicken Loans) used NaviStone, and its reporting led to NaviStone backing away from a practice of emailing customers who’d typed in their addresses but never sent them. Users clearly aren’t consenting to or aware of the data sharing, and while Casper may only have intended to pitch would-be mattress buyers, there are serious privacy implications if it was identifying those customers before they’d even clicked a “submit” button.

Via: CBS Moneywatch

Source: ClassAction.org

Google’s Allo messaging may link to your email account

Google has been going out of its way to keep Allo relevant, but there’s been one glaring issue: you need a phone number to sign up. How’s it going to compete with iMessage or Facebook Messenger if there needs to be a phone involved at some point? You might not need one soon… or at least, you’ll be less dependent on it. The 9to5Google crew has sifted through the code of Allo’s latest Android release and discovered hidden references to chatting with Gmail contacts once you connect your account. You could find people through their email addresses once you’ve linked things up, too.

There’s no guarantee that this reduced phone dependence will be widely available soon, but code like this typically hints that it’s on the horizon. If it does arrive, though, it could make Allo a more elegant experience, particularly if you regularly use it across multiple devices.

Source: 9to5Google

Cut down on waste and share your leftovers with others via the OLIO app

We are long finished with Thanksgiving, but there still may be some leftovers hiding in the fridge. But even beyond holiday feasts, we’re all used to the concept of leftovers and having extra food. Sometimes, we may not know what to do with all of that food if we don’t feel like eating it ourselves. Luckily, a Britain-founded mobile phone app called OLIO hopes to fix this problem while making the world a better place, one meal at a time.

Food waste is a major issue, and plenty of people are coming up with ideas to fix this. If you have some food you no longer want to eat, or you happen to cook too much for dinner, you can use OLIO to help. The app, created by two entrepreneurs, connects people with neighbors and with shops in their local areas so surplus foods can be shared, as opposed to being thrown away. OLIO can even be used for non-food household items as well, like furniture and clothes.

OLIO is quite simple to use. All you have to do is open up the app, add a photo of the food along with a description, and add when and where the item will be available for pick-up. If you’re looking for food on the app, you just need to browse the listings in your area, and make a request for whatever catches your interest. Then you can arrange for a pick-up via a private message. In addition to this, the app is totally free to use.

Tessa Cook, the company’s co-founder, grew up on a dairy farm in Yorkshire in northern England and witnessed first-hand how difficult it is to produce food. So when food was being wasted, she wanted to find someone to give it to, but was unable to. That’s when the idea sparked.

“I thought, ‘This is perfectly delicious food. I know there is someone within 100 meters who would love it. The problem is they don’t know about it,’” Cook said. She decided to partner up with Saasha Celestial-One, a former investment banker in America, to launch the OLIO app, and raised $2.2 million from  investor funding.

More than 400,000 food items have been shared on the app so far, and there are hundreds of thousands of registered users.

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Jellies makes YouTube safe for kids, allows parents to curate content

App Attack is a weekly series where we search the App Store and Google Play Store for the best apps of the week. Check out App Attack every Sunday for the latest.

The internet can be a scary place, even for adults. But more importantly, children have infinite access to all types of content. All it takes is a few clicks to land on a website, photo, or video that isn’t safe. This week, we have an app that will make it much easier for both parents and children of all ages to watch kid-friendly videos without having to worry.

Jellies — Safe Kids Videos is an app available for iOS that provides a safer way to watch YouTube videos on a mobile device. With YouTube receiving backlash lately for its disturbing content aimed specifically at children, parents are having to tighten the reins on how their kids are using the internet.

For parents, Jellies allows you to curate your child’s library based on the videos available through the app. There’s over 1,000 handpicked videos spanning across over 100 different topics —  from arts and crafts to animals, and more. New playlists are also added each week for fresh content.

When downloading the app, there’s a free 30-day trial you can sign up for, and after that you’ll be charged $5 per month to use it. While using the trial, I had full access to all of the different videos and was able to curate my own library with all the different videos offered.

The interface is easy to navigate, with three different tabs separated into featured videos — also known as playlists, a section for browsing, and your library. The videos are also separated neatly by age, from two and up, to four and up, all the way up to age eight and up. By scrolling through the gallery of different topics within the age brackets, you can either add all of the videos or choose specific ones.

If you don’t want to search by age, you can also find videos by category instead. After tapping on the thumbnail, there’s a brief description of what each playlist is about and how many videos are available within that playlist. You can then choose to add it to your library by tapping “add to Library” on the bottom.

Browsing through the different playlists on the app is super simple, but I do wish there was an option to preview at least some of the videos before adding them to the library. Instead, you’re presented with a screenshot from one of the videos featured within that playlist, and you can’t watch any of them until you’re in “Kids Mode.”

Once all of the videos are chosen and ready for your kids to watch, you can then enter “Kids Mode” by tapping on the big green button at the bottom, which is always readily available regardless of what section of the app you’re in. In Kids Mode, you can tap on a specific playlist and will be brought to all of the different featured videos. You can also switch from video to video even while you’re in watch mode.

When going through all of the different type of content provided, I noticed that it all resembles a children’s TV channel like Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. It seems that nowadays, kids have become more interested in YouTube celebrities and unboxing videos than cartoons or more educational videos.

As part of Jellies’ mission statement, it specifically mentions that videos with influencers can have a negative impact on children. The same also goes for inappropriate ads, which you thankfully don’t have to worry about while using Jellies. Each video plays straight through to the next one, without any interruption.

If you’re worried about your kids being able to go in and change the curated content, Jellies uses a secure system. Kids won’t be able to access anything outside of “Kids Mode” unless they’re able to solve a multiplication problem. If they try and unlock that specific mode, a pop-up window appears asking to solve the equation in order to move forward.

Jellies is for parents who don’t want to risk the inappropriate content slipping through the cracks. Instead, they have full control and the comfort of knowing the only videos that live on the app are always appropriate. While you do need to pay a subscription fee after a month, it’s a small price to pay knowing your children won’t be exposed to dangerous ads.

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Tinder injects some A.I. into your love life with Super Likeable

Finding love in the 21st century may be harder than it was in the 12th century, especially now that we have tools like dating apps showing us just how many fish (and in some cases, piranhas) in the sea there really are. But if you’re tired of constantly looking for love on your phone, one dating app may be able to take some of the work out of swiping. Tinder has introduced a new artificially intelligent feature called Super Likeable, which is said to “delight and surprise” users by introducing them to “people [Tinder] think will be of special interest to you.”

Look out, matchmakers — A.I. is coming for your job.

The feature seems to build off of a two-year-old Tinder gimmick called Super Like, which is a way for users to show one another that they’re particularly interested, as opposed to just reasonably interested (which is apparently what a flippant right swipe suggests). Unfortunately, however, Super Likes haven’t proven quite so popular: for example, the Verge noted that the feature made some folks feel uncomfortable, and Mashable reported that the Super Like button felt a bit desperate to use.

Alas, the Super Likeable function does depend a bit on Super Likes, too. You see, Tinder determines whom its AI tool believes you’ll be especially compatible with, and on occasion, will show you four folks on a single card that may be Super Likeable to you. From there, you’ll be given a free Super Like (that’s right, you have to pay for multiple Super Likes) that you can send to any one of these four lucky lads or ladies. You can’t search for users who might be Super Likeable — Tinder will decide when to show them to you as you swipe.

As it stands, Super Likeable is being tested in New York City and Los Angeles. There’s not been quite enough time to determine if Tinderers feel the same way about this new AI feature as they do about Super Likes as a whole, but we’ll soon be able to tell if Tinder really knows their users better than their users know themselves.

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Listen to Neil Young’s entire back catalog free in high-definition audio

In conjunction with the release of his 39th album The Visitor, singer-songwriter Neil Young has just opened the doors to his vault with the Neil Young Archives, a site that contains nearly his entire back catalog available in a high-quality streaming format.

Young has often voiced his concerns about the poor quality of the audio we’ve all been listening to for the past several years. At the D: Dive into Media conference in 2012, he said that the average MP3 file only contains about 5 percent of the audio from an original recording, according to The Verge.

Unlike many artists, Young seemed was dismissive about piracy concerns and streaming music. “It doesn’t affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone,” he said. “If you really want to hear it, let’s make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

He even Kickstarted his own music service, only to become frustrated with the whole process and eventually announcing that he was pulling his catalog from all streaming services due to the low quality. “When the quality is back, I’ll give it another look. Never say never,” he wrote.

That time is apparently now. The Neil Young Archive gives fans the opportunity to listen to nearly everything he’s ever done free, at least through the end of June. After that, you can subscribe for a “modest cost.”

Young’s own high-quality music service is called Xstream, and it’s an adaptable service that changes with available bandwidth. The Master setting delivers 24-bit high-resolution audio, or you can toggle back to 320kbps if necessary.

The site contains everything Young has released as a soloist or bandleader, plus his work as a member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. However, as Pitchfork notes, unreleased albums and recordings Chrome Dreams, Homegrown, and Toast are not yet available to stream.

The site navigation itself is rather clunky and old-fashioned, and that’s probably by design. In his introductory video, Young encourages exploration and discovery. A good place to start is probably the Timeline section, where you can scroll through various milestones during Young’s five decades of performing, and click through to the various albums from different points in his career.

Films and books are also included, so you can spend many hours just browsing through the career of this incredible musician. As he admonishes in the welcome video, “Don’t forget to have a good time. And try not to get lost.”

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This Bitcoin collection is worth $75 million — it’s also buried in a landfill

Bitcoin has grown by leaps and bounds in the years since it was introduced, and those who got in the ground floor stand to make a very good profit — assuming they still have access to those Bitcoins. Unfortunately for James Howells of Newport, South Wales, the hard drive he stored those Bitcoins on is currently buried under a landfill.

In 2013, Howells threw away the old hard drive he had used to mine Bitcoins. Howells quickly realized his mistake, but was unable to recover the hard drive. Now, four years later, Howells’ Bitcoin collection is worth $75 million.

Howells told Wired that he has been in touch with the Newport City Council in an attempt to get permission to dig for his old hard drive, but so far, he’s had no luck.

“I haven’t actually tried to search for the hard drive yet as I haven’t been given permission to look despite having financial backing in place and engaging the local council a number of times,” Howells wrote. “Digging up a landfill is not as easy as just digging a hole in the ground.”

Assuming Howells does get permission to conduct a search, it would be the first dig of its kind authorized in the U.K.  that was not done in conjunction with a criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the City Council said that authorities had been contacted about the dig, but were concerned because such an exercise would cost millions of dollars and could cause a “huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.” Of course, the other major issue here is that there’s no guarantee that the hard drive could be found, or that it will be operational.

Howells says that he believes that, as the value of Bitcoins increase, the City Council will concede to let him dig. If he does find the working hard drive, he has promised a “nice percentage as a gift or donation.”

In the meantime, Howells is keeping an eye on the value of Bitcoin and is monitoring the public address of his account so he knows the Bitcoins have not been transferred. He compared it to seeing your bank account full of millions of dollars that you can’t spend.

For now, Howell’s $75 million worth of Bitcoins remains buried beneath hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage.

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This Bitcoin collection is worth $75 million — it’s also buried in a landfill

Bitcoin has grown by leaps and bounds in the years since it was introduced, and those who got in the ground floor stand to make a very good profit — assuming they still have access to those Bitcoins. Unfortunately for James Howells of Newport, South Wales, the hard drive he stored those Bitcoins on is currently buried under a landfill.

In 2013, Howells threw away the old hard drive he had used to mine Bitcoins. Howells quickly realized his mistake, but was unable to recover the hard drive. Now, four years later, Howells’ Bitcoin collection is worth $75 million.

Howells told Wired that he has been in touch with the Newport City Council in an attempt to get permission to dig for his old hard drive, but so far, he’s had no luck.

“I haven’t actually tried to search for the hard drive yet as I haven’t been given permission to look despite having financial backing in place and engaging the local council a number of times,” Howells wrote. “Digging up a landfill is not as easy as just digging a hole in the ground.”

Assuming Howells does get permission to conduct a search, it would be the first dig of its kind authorized in the U.K.  that was not done in conjunction with a criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the City Council said that authorities had been contacted about the dig, but were concerned because such an exercise would cost millions of dollars and could cause a “huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.” Of course, the other major issue here is that there’s no guarantee that the hard drive could be found, or that it will be operational.

Howells says that he believes that, as the value of Bitcoins increase, the City Council will concede to let him dig. If he does find the working hard drive, he has promised a “nice percentage as a gift or donation.”

In the meantime, Howells is keeping an eye on the value of Bitcoin and is monitoring the public address of his account so he knows the Bitcoins have not been transferred. He compared it to seeing your bank account full of millions of dollars that you can’t spend.

For now, Howell’s $75 million worth of Bitcoins remains buried beneath hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage.

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