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The Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was so profound that its effects and origin are still being investigated. In the problem is often talk of networks of bots controlled that shared false news and attacking Hillary in one way or another, with the eye on Facebook and something on Twitter, but with Instagram going unnoticed and seen by the public as " the good network of Facebook ". The reality, according to The Guardian and Bloomberg, following two reports prepared for the US Senate by New Knowledge and researchers from the Oxford and Columbia universities and Candield Research LLC, is that the impact of Instagram on the Russian plot has been underestimated, until the point that in their appearances before the elected representatives, neither Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg mentioned it as the focus of the problem. But Instagram was important for the entity that according to the investigation was behind the manipulation, the Russian Internet R...

Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise will soon receive a new feature quite useful for companies and power users. This is Windows Sandbox, a new lightweight desktop environment created especially to run applications in isolation. The main purpose of this, as explained by Microsoft, is to offer greater security in certain situations, such as when we download an .exe file and we are afraid to execute it, or when we need a clean installation of Windows but we do not want to create and configure a machine virtual. Windows Sandbox offers the solution for both cases, it works as an isolated environment in which you can run software that you do not trust without having any impact on your Windows installation. Everything you download or install in the sandbox stays in the sandbox and does not affect anything else. Windows Sandbox is an isolated environment within Windows 10 that self-destroys everything you download or install in it once closed It is basically a lightweight Windows disposable with...

It is December 19 and the year can still be very long to Facebook. Beyond how their actions have evolved in the stock market during the year, it is impossible to remember a worse course for the company, not so much for what they have done in it (as well) but for collecting the harvest of the bad practices carried out during so many years . After scandals like Cambridge Analytica, multiple security breaches or public knowledge and means of bad practices as a result of the publication of internal documents, comes the final culmination. Hand in hand with The New York Times (NYT), which recently published an extensive report on the company where the worst stop was Sheryl Sandberg, comes the publication of an investigation based on hundreds of pages of internal documents and interviews with more than 50 employees showing how Facebook would have reached agreements to allow access to data to 150 companies among which are large technology companies such as Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Apple...

Each city has a unique character, and many times we are able to identify them simply by seeing an image. In an increasingly globalized world, what makes a city like Paris recognizable at first sight? That is precisely what many scientists have asked of Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris). It seems that they have found the answer, but they have had to resort to an algorithm to decipher this enigma. Large avenues, double-paneled windows, names of the streets in blue and green signs, street lamps and subway entrances with a characteristic design ... all these elements help Paris to have its own identity. Thanks to this study carried out by both universities, we now know that in the French capital there are a series of elements that appear much more frequently than in other cities. These objects that appear behind every corner, in every block, help Paris to be Paris. Analyzing the streets of the city through Street View, they began to collec...

Until not too long ago, Twitter offered a timeline in which the tweets appeared in chronological order. Or what is the same: the last messages were the first we saw. From then on, we were moving from the most recent tweets to the oldest ones. The logical for a large number of users. However, one day that changed and through an algorithm Twitter modified our chronology in order to highlight certain outstanding tweets. Although there were tricks and options provided by the social network itself to avoid this altered experience, as of today Twitter allows you to return to the chronological order in a simpler way and from the timeline itself. It is an option that we were able to meet a few weeks ago when it was advanced by Jack Dorsey. This new way to control the timeline of Twitter is based on a button that will appear in the iOS application today and in the Android, soon. Also in the Twitter Lite and web mobile.twitter.com soon. Without it being necessary to go to the configuration o...

Finally, the Windows 10 October 2018 Update seems to have come out of almost all its problems and now, more than two months after its initial release, it is available to any Windows 10 user who seeks to update from Windows Update. The famous version that was deleting files of some users was withdrawn just a few days after being released and relaunched officially five weeks later, but not without being stopped from following the problems, so Microsoft had blocked the update on some computers with software or hardware not compatible. This version will probably be remembered as one of the worst updates of Windows 10 in its relatively short life, but not because of the lack of news or features, but because of the accident of its launch and all the failures that were presented, before, during and after of its launch. The infamous Windows 10 October 2018 Update is officially available to all users near the end of December While the critical bug of file loss was solved, others such as inc...

Trend Micro security researchers have identified a new threat that they have called "malicious memes." Basically, it's a new type of malware that receives its code instructions hidden in memes posted on Twitter. Cybercriminals exploiting this use an old technique (stenography) to hide malicious code in images and evade security, the novelty here is that they are using the technique in images that are shared in the social network. Now, the malware itself is not downloaded from Twitter and the mechanism used to infect users, or where it comes from, or the intentions behind it has not yet been identified. It is a remote access Trojan that when infecting the computer can take screenshots and steal other system data that it then sends to its control server. It seems to be an experiment The authors of the malware identified by Trend Micro published two tweets with malicious memes last October through a Twitter account created in 2017. The memes contained an embedded command...

The Indian multinational HCL Technologies announced an agreement whereby they will acquire part of the IBM software business for 1,800 million dollars. The operation, which would be completed by mid-2019, would be the largest that an Indian technology company has made. For IBM this agreement is an opportunity to cut back on its oldest businesses and focus fully on cloud computing, especially after acquiring Red Hat in a historic $ 34 billion operation just to boost its Hybrid Cloud division. HCL will buy seven IBM software platforms looking for a larger clientele and allowing it to increase its presence in the areas of commerce, security and marketing. The acquisition would represent a market opportunity of more than 50,000 million dollars that, according to the Indian firm, would help boost their profits. The tools acquired include Appscan (web security monitoring and testing tools), BigFix (systems management), Unica (business marketing management), Commerce (e-commerce), Portal ...

It is usually the digital stores of Steam, GOG and even Humble Bundle that occasionally surprise us with great news by enabling the free download of a video game that we can stay forever. This time has not been any of the three, but Uplay, which has surprised us with this great news by allowing us to download free Anno 1602. The way to add it to your account is very easy and it will not take you a minute. You just have to click on the following link, which will include the notice to exchange it for PC. Next you will need to connect with your Ubisoft store account and voila, it will automatically be yours to play when you want. Anno 1602 02 The promotion is because the Anno saga is celebrating its 20th anniversary, being precisely this delivery the first one that was published 20 years ago in Windows 95, although it is better that you do it when before because it will only be available in this way until the December 23th. In Anno 1602 it will be possible to build a realistic and ali...

That fandom on the Internet becomes obsessive and even dangerous is nothing new, but the PewDiePie seems to be going beyond what had been seen so far in favor of a youtuber. If first there were thousands of printers hacked (although initially with the intention of showing their vulnerability) with documents that asked to follow the Swedish star, now it has been The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) who has suffered on their servers an attack by part of his fans. PewDiewPie fans are on fire because the youtuber with the most subscribers in the world can lose their position against T-Series, a channel without personal videos dedicated to songs and trailers. However, most seem to be with the WSJ, which at the time published an investigation on the alleged anti-Semitic language of Swedish. That caused YouTube as a platform to terminate the collaboration of the YouTube series Red Scare PewDiePie. In addition, Disney also ended its contract with Disney Maker Studios. Since then, and although that...

2018 has been a better year for Google than for Facebook, mediately speaking. However, the giant Mountain View has faced two major controversies. On the one hand there was Project Maven, which was a collaboration with the Pentagon with military drones, and which is supposedly canceled. On the other hand was Dragonfly, the project with which, after leaving China in 2010, Google wanted to return with a search engine that worked with the censorship imposed by the iron regime of Xi Jinping. As we have told, this has generated a division among employees and criticism of organizations that were responsible for human rights, such as Amnesty International. According to The Intercept, the media that uncovered everything, critics of the project may be in luck, because Google has effectively ended Dragonfly, after there were strong internal clashes. To build its search engine, and despite its experience in the field, Google has used data obtained through the website 265.com, which it acquired...

Year after year, year after year, the most used passwords are published and they are always the ones you imagine with very few surprises. They are the worst possible, and this year's list published by SplashData with the worst 100 passwords of 2018 once again shows that '123456' does not go out of style. At least 10% of people use one of the 25 worst passwords on the list, where they appear great of all time as "password", "12345" or "qwerty". And almost 3% of people use the worst of all: "123456". After evaluating more than 5 million passwords filtered on the Internet, the company found that users remain equally predictable year after year, verifying that despite all the time we have been pursuing security in passwords, even the most basic measures they still do not reach out to the general public. The report mainly includes filtered data from users in North America and Western Europe, and although most of the most used password...

There are companies that will end the year celebrating that in 2018 they have grown or improved their service. After so much scandal this year, Facebook is not among them, and is that a few days ago came to light the nth security hole, which exposed the photos of 6.8 million users. The good news is that they were not shared publicly, but only with the developers of applications to which the user had given permission. The bad, that the developers of Facebook do not have to be trusted (or the network itself, at this point), and may have acted on behalf of their own interests, and consequently, to the detriment of the privacy of users. Facebook has launched a statement where, in addition to reporting that the photos published in the biography and Facebook Stories were accessible between September 13 and 25, 2018 due to an API error, it also provides a tool to know what applications have had access to your other photos. If you open the web without being authenticated in the service, yo...

One of the most common tips when it comes to Internet security when we talk about authentication on websites and services is the use of two-step verification, which usually uses the smartphone with verifying element, with SMS as the main means to receive a second unique key that gives access to the service. However, as has already been demonstrated on some other occasion, "classic" security measures are becoming less infallible, and in this case the same thing happens. A group of researchers from Certfa Lab has published a study that explains how Iranian hackers, allegedly in charge of the eastern country's executive, have attacked US officials, journalists and activists. In the attack has had much prominence, as almost always, email. But the enabling part of hacking, according to researchers, is double-factor authentication, which in some cases can be very safe, but in others it does not offer the level of yesteryear. The Iranian hacker group did nothing too new. Fir...

Nowadays, a laptop or a tablet can be the epicenter of our office or business, enabling us to work from anywhere. The real challenge is finding sites that are comfortable, quiet and, above all, have a good Internet connection. This is where Workmode comes in, a platform in which to discover places where we can set up our office for a few hours. In the words of the service itself, "the goal of Workmode is to help the user find the best place to work". The operation is very simple: once we enter we will ask to access the location and we will see a map with nearby pins. On the left you will break down the best places to work, with scores and schedules. We can sort this list by: connection speed, distance, ratings, coffee quality and how quiet this site is. This is an important point, since sometimes we might need a fast Internet connection, while at other times the main thing could be silence to work as concentrated as possible. Window And Banners And Alerts And Workmode Fin...

JQBX (sounds like "Jukebox") has just become one of my favorite applications this week, if I had discovered it before maybe it would have gone to one of our best lists of the year. If you are a music lover and you have at least a small group of friends with whom you enjoy sharing your discoveries, you will almost certainly love it. Those who once used the deceased Turntable.fm probably find something familiar, basically brings that concept to the Spotify era, and Spotify plays an important role with JQBX, since you need a premium account of that service to enjoy the app. Since we have established that only Spotify Premium users can enjoy this little gem, if you are one of them, keep reading and failing, we feel in your soul that it is not integrated with any other streaming music service. Join or create your own music room, DJ or let some friend or stranger be it Jqbx Genbeta App interface in macOS when you're inside a room JQBX is completely free and integrates 100% ...

After many years of hegemony, it seems that Steam will start receiving serious competition. Not for the part of the user, where he has always had it, but for the part of the developers. If a few days ago it was Epic Games that launched the Epic Games Store, with few games but with the condition that the developers would remain 88% of the revenue, Discord that up the ante. As of 2019 they will expand access to the Discord store just announced and to their "extremely efficient game patching" by launching a self-publishing platform. In it you can sell from a developer who has written his first game at home to large studios that launch triple-A games. Compared to the 12% of the creators of Fortnite, or the 30% that remains Steam of the price of each game sold, Discord will be left with only 10%, so the developers will take 90%. Until now, there has not been much opposition, and in the largest software store in the world, Apple's App Store on iOS, is also practiced 30%. In...

Facebook has just revealed that a bug in the API photos of its platform gave application developers too much access to images of up to 6.8 million users. "We have solved the problem but, due to this error, some third-party applications may have had access to a larger set of photos than usual," they say in a statement. This new security breach of the social network headed by Mark Zuckerberg would have been open for twelve days, between September 13 and 25 of 2018. It has affected Facebook users who have used the network login and have granted permission to third-party applications to access their photos.     "When someone gives permission for an application to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only allow the application to access the photos that people share on their timeline, in this case, the error potentially gave developers access to other photos, like those shared on the Marketplace or Facebook Stories, the error also affected the photos that people...

Within Apple's modern and up-to-date ecosystem, it has been a long time since a very old application has grinded and, for many, it has been little updated to new times like iTunes. In that sense, for many users of the company, the worst thing is that both in Windows and in macOS, if you are an Apple Music subscriber there is no other way to play songs other than going through the hoop of an application that has remained on the ground of nobody (since the iPhone and iPad do not need to connect to it). Since its launch in 2015, Apple Music was expected to count on a desktop with a dedicated client. It is something that according to personalities of the leaks as Mark Gurman was in the plans of the Cupertino, but has not yet arrived. However, all users who want to avoid iTunes or simply access Apple Music from unsupported operating systems or from the web are in luck, as a developer has PlayAppleMusic, a very complete client that works perfectly. The first thing you think about bei...

For some years it has become customary to publish the most prominent photos of our Instagram in a small collage. Each year a different web or service appears that offers to take out the accounts and do the work for us in the absence of an official option. This year you can use topnine.co to discover which were your nine most popular images on the social network during the year and publish your Instagram Top Nine 2018 quickly and easily. If you do it from the computer you just have to enter the web, write your Instagram username and then your email address. In a couple of seconds you will receive an email with the download of the collage, which will also tell you how many "I like" you received during 2018. Instagram Top Nine 2018 topnine.co While the process is a bit tedious, as it is a free service the mail you receive has a couple of offers to buy some products with your Instagram photos printed on them, but all this is optional and non-invasive. You can ignore all that ...

Microsoft has been testing some changes in its search interface for a while, a year ago the Insiders could see a panel similar to the Spotlight in macOS that worked separate from the start menu, but with the October 2018 Update the results with preview of documents and webs were implemented, the interface was not changed. Now, some Insiders who are testing the 18298 build of Windows 10 have witnessed another experiment in which the Search has completely separated from Cortana, in fact, with a different icon for each one in the taskbar. Cortana and the search in Windows 10 have been practically synonymous since Microsoft began to integrate its personal assistant into the system, if you want to look for something there it is always listening even if you never want to talk to it. In this new interface Cortana has its own separate view that they have called "Conversation Canvas" and will be used only to manage Cortana's notes, reminders and connected devices that support ...

On the Internet, discerning what is true from what is not is a more complicated task as time goes by. Gone is that era of the fakes and hoaxes of dubious quality that were defended by the poor quality of, for example, the cameras of the moment. However, we are close to making a huge leap in making alternative realities with deep fakes. In video we have already seen worrying realities, but in the photo the new features of the NVIDIA developers are even more disturbing. The company specializing in graphics cards and increasingly in artificial intelligence began to show face generation results with what they call Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). However, he still had problems in the faces to be credible to people. What they just showed on video is impressive, the faces look like those of anyone you can meet in real life, without features that are strange in any way. The GANs offered, according to the NVIDIA research, very little control over the generated images. The new system ...

Linus Torvalds, creator and leader of Linux kernel maintenance, has for years been clear the main reason why Linux has triumphed in everything except the desktop. For him it's simple, most people do not want to install an operating system and the advantage is Windows because it comes pre-installed, just as it happens with Android on mobile phones. And as he tells in an interview recently, another reason why Linux on the desktop has not taken off in 25 years is fragmentation. In fact, Torvalds goes so far as to say that he would like a standard desk for all the distros. Fragmentation in Linux is a fact and for years it has been a divisive issue among the community, some believe it is a plague, and like Linus, they blame it largely for being one of the reasons why Linux on the desktop simply You will never have your year, there are too many dilute efforts between different projects that could come together to create something more competitive. For others, Torvalds idea of ​​a sin...

One of the most problematic cases of the year in software has been the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, with the star of the show being the erasure of files produced in some computers that installed it in the first hours. Before the avalanche of critics, Microsoft stopped the propagation of the update, and did not resume it until the fifth week, just a month ago. At the time of relaunching the 1809 update, the company stated that they had taken steps to improve the updates from that moment and that they were more than ever committed to the quality of the software. To achieve this, they said they would slow down the update installations. Devices that could present future compatibility problems would not update, even when compulsively pressing "Check for updates" in Windows Update. The exact words were that even for avid search engines for updates, the Windows Update button's roll-out feature would be limited and slower. However, according to a statement from Microsoft d...

With the year about to end most of the big platforms are starting to get the accounts and to reveal what things were most successful on the Internet during 2018. From the hated YouTube Rewind with what was supposed to be the best of the video platform, to the the most marathon series on Netflix or the torrijas that most people searched for on Google. Now we can add the best of Instagram during 2018, a review of the year quite detailed that they have done in the social network and in which they tell us from the emoji most used in the comments to the sticker most used in the Stories. The hearts seem to remain the dominant force in Instagram, and both the most used GIF as a sticker in the Stories and the emoji most used in the comments (14,000 million times) was a ❤️. And if we are guided by this on Instagram, Tokyo Disney would be the happiest place on the planet, since the photos placed there were the ones that most used the smile emoji 🙂. ASMR, #Fortnite, BTS Army, #inmyfeelingsch...

Vivaldi 2.2 is now available, a new browser update oriented to power users and based on Chromium. It is just the first release since Microsoft announced that Edge would also be based on the open source project created by Google and on which Opera and Chrome are also based. In Vivaldi they believe that it is now more important than ever for browsers to distinguish between them, and that we can not afford to reach a point where the web means the same as Chrome. Vivaldi seems to have a clear focus, betting on more and more customization options, and this latest version brings us a few novelties in that regard. Save groups of tabs as session and add customizable keyboard shortcuts for each web Screenshot 2018 12 13 At 11 30 35 Save tabs as session in Vivaldi Vivaldi 2.2 adds better management of tabs and one of its novelties has to do with the possibility of grouping groups of these and save them as sessions that can be restored later and that we can also rename. You only have to press...

Beat a record on your own platform sounds positive. The problem is when that record is for having the most dislikes video in history, something YouTube just got. Everything pointed to this happening very quickly, since this week has been accumulating dislikes by leaps and bounds. Finally all the predictions have been fulfilled and he has snatched this title from Justin Bieber's 'Baby'. Currently it already adds more than 10 million "I do not like" (data from LikesCounter), while that of Justin Bieber slightly exceeds 9.9 million dislikes. We can ask ourselves why this video is generating so much rejection by users. Marques Brownlee (better known as MKBHD), one of the most important YouTubers on the planet (with a very important role in this year's Rewind), uploaded a video a few hours ago to explain his version of events: Brownlee says that YouTube is too stubborn to show all "how nice and clean YouTube is" to advertisers, omitting people, trends...

More than five years ago, Twitter began testing automatic translation of tweets with Microsoft Translator, the Bing translator. After several comings and goings, the service settled translating tweets of many languages ​​to the user's native. The function, without being of the stars of the social network, is quite used, because in many cases, thanks to retweets or breaking news, unintelligible text may arrive in, for example, Chinese. The translation of Bing has never been as good as Google's, and it seems that on Twitter they are aware of this, because they are doing tests with the Google Translate in the iOS version according to the social network Alex Barredo. Even so, they look like A / B tests, because it does not appear to all users and from any language. In the iPad version that I have tried, for example, it continues to translate Bing.     It looks like Twitter is using Google translation services instead of Microsoft's? pic.twitter.com/Bxo1tUWJ2i  ...

It can be quite frustrating that your main competitor has a domain that interests you. That's what happened to DuckDuckGo, who spent several years trying to get 'duck.com' from Google. It all started in 2010, when the Mountain View company acquired On2 Technologies (a company formerly known as The Duck Corporation). Google bought On2 and the domain one year after DuckDuckGo was born. Google has hundreds of domains that point to your search engine (for example googel.com) and some DuckDuckGo users were surprised to enter 'duck.com' and end up in Google. A few days ago, rumors began to emerge that Google might have changed its mind, and now NamePros has been in charge of confirming the transfer. Of course, at the moment it is unknown how much they have had to pay Google to release this domain. DuckDuckGo thanks Google for changing its mind Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, thanked his rival for this gesture of goodwill, since from now on it will be much easier...

With the launch of Mojave macOS, there are many applications that are being updated to support their new dark theme. In that sense, Microsoft did not want to be left behind with Office 365, and already in October began to appear a new dark theme in the Insider versions of the main applications of the subscription service of the suite. Finally, Microsoft has just updated the common versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel with the dark theme, which has, in addition to the visual, some details to comment. For example, the new dark mode is completely linked to macOS Mojave, I come out to discover an unofficial way of activating it in other versions. Already in Mojave, the dark mode only applies if we select the dark mode, and the interesting thing is that the applications change dynamically with the system. That is, it is not necessary to restart applications to establish their dark mode. With just go to "System Preferences -> General -> Aspect...

The bad news does not seem to end in 2018 for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and reality insists on remembering that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was so big and relevant that forgetting about it will not be something they can do so easily. The United Kingdom became the first country to fine the people of Menlo Park for the case, and although it applied the maximum penalty, everything was about 560,000 euros because it took place before the entry into force of the GDPR. However, as La Vanguardia picks up from the EFE Agency, the Competition and Market Guarantee Authority (AGCM) of Italy, an institution whose role is similar to the Spanish National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC), has imposed to the company a double fine amounting to 10 million euros. It considers that Facebook Ireland and Facebook Inc., which began investigating "for alleged violations of the Consumer Code", "misleads users who register on the platform, without informing them adequately...