Charlotte Henry

Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, announced it is moving to “eradicate” the weak TLS 1.0 and 1.1 HTTPS standard, The Register reported. Apple made a similar announcement in October 2018.

From next month, users hitting a site running TLS 1.0 or 1.1 will not connect immediately, but see a warning screen stating: “Secure connection failed.” There is an option to override this, in which case it will be overridden for all sites. Thyla van der Merwe, cryptography engineering manager at Mozilla, said: “We plan to keep the override button for now; the telemetry we’re collecting will tell us more about how often this button is used. These results will then inform our decision regarding when to remove the button entirely. It’s unlikely that the button will stick around for long. We’re committed to completely eradicating weak versions of TLS.”

The proposed T-Mobile-Sprint merger got the go-ahead on Tuesday, Yahoo Finance/Reuters reported. A judge approved the deal, rejecting antitrust concerns raised by some states.

During a two-week trial in December, T-Mobile and Sprint argued the merger will better equip the new company to compete with top players Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc, creating a more efficient company with low prices and faster internet speeds. The states, led by California and New York, had said the deal would reduce competition, leading to higher prices. The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero clears the path for the deal, which already has federal approval and was originally valued at $26 billion.

Google will commence its efforts to have over $9 billion of fines from the EU overturned this week. Bloomberg News looked at the impending legal battle.

The EU’s General Court in Luxembourg will host a three-day hearing starting on Feb. 12 as the Alphabet Inc. unit seeks to topple a 2.4 billion-euro ($2.6 billion) penalty in 2017 for thwarting smaller shopping search services. Lawyers say the court clash will help set the scene for a broader crackdown on U.S. tech giants by Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner. Apple Inc. is separately battling her massive back-tax order and Amazon.com Inc. is currently being investigated for potentially favoring its own products over those of third-party sellers on its platform.

Whenever a topic dominates the headlines it blows up on Wikipedia with users and editors battling to have proper information on the site. The coronavirus outbreak has been no different, Wired reported.

Over a few weeks, the English-language version of Wikipedia witnessed the creation of at least six articles about the outbreak. Since the beginning of January, over 18 million people have read those entries. Countless others have found their way to articles indirectly related to the coronavirus, including those for Sars, Wuhan, “bat as food” – and even Corona beer, which has seen an uptick in editing. This frenetic surge in interest is a challenge for Wikipedia’s community of volunteer editors, who have to deal with a firehose of information about the health crisis constantly flooding the website, and inevitably fight off rumours and misinformation.

Multitasking on the iPad has improved, but is still something of a sore point for power users, and barely used by most others. Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac made some recommendations that would mean multitasking on an iPad closer resembled how works on a Mac.

Gestures are faster, and while entirely unintuitive, they are easy to remember once you’re used to them, so I wouldn’t take them away. They can effectively be the power user option: the iPad equivalent of keyboard shortcuts. Second, while recognizing that an iPad is not a Mac, I can’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how you close or expand a window. Why not have the same Close, Minimize, and Full-Screen buttons we have on Mac apps? Sure, they would be tiny touch targets for a finger, but they could initially be a single touch target that expands into a larger version when tapped, and we then tap the specific button we want.

I’m sure you would all agree, that what we need is another streaming service. Thankfully, ViacomCBS are set to answer our call. A new service bringing together content from the newly merged firm is in the works, CNBC reported, creating yet another challenger for Apple TV+.

While ViacomCBS executives haven’t made any firm decisions, they are considering creating a service with advertisements that will combine CBS All Access with Viacom assets including Pluto TV, Nickelodeon, BET, MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, said the people, who asked not to be named because the product discussions are private. An ad-free version will also be available, and a premium version of the streaming service will include Showtime, the people said. ViacomCBS executives haven’t decided on a name for the service, nor a price, though the base service will probably be less than $10 a month, two of the people said.

The impact of the coronavirus outbreak is continuing to be felt by Apple. Key iPhone assembler Foxconn has now told its works to stay away from its Shenzhen factory, Bloomberg News reported.

The moratorium represents an extreme effort by Apple Inc.’s most important partner to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus that’s paralyzed much of China’s manufacturing. Foxconn’s main iPhone-making base is farther north in Zhengzhou but coastal Shenzhen serves as its Chinese headquarters and the majority of the tens of thousands employed there are out-of-towners. The company also assembles a small portion of iPhones there. “To safeguard everyone’s health and safety and comply with government virus prevention measures, we urge you not to return to Shenzhen,” Foxconn wrote in a text message sent to employees. “We’ll update you on the situation in the city. The company will protect everyone’s work-related rights and interests in the duration. As for the happy reunion date in Shenzhen, please wait for further notice.”

Flixed surveyed Apple TV+ users. It found that 72 percent of those who signed up for a seven-day trial people didn’t purchase it once that trial expired, iMore reported.

According to their report, they surveyed 1090 Apple TV+ trial users. 73% of those people signed up with a seven-day trial, only 21% got the free year that comes with an Apple device purchase. Half of those surveyed said their trial had expired. Of those whose trial was over, 72% said they did not purchase Apple TV+ after it had expired, with only 28% going on to become paying subscribers. Of the rest whose trials had not yet expired, nearly 60% said they would pay the $4.99 fee once the time came. In comparison to Netflix, only 19% said that the service was either a little or much better. The rest all said that Apple TV+ was either the same, a little worse or much worse than Netflix.