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Apple Pay is off to a good start: by December, two out of three dollars used for contactless payments were from Apple Pay. . . Cook explained why Apple Pay works: It respects people's needs for privacy and security, which makes it trustworthy. It's first and foremost a value. We believe that customers have a right to privacy. And that the vast majority of customers don't want everyone knowing everything about them. ... You are not our product. That is our product. ... there's no reason why anyone, or us, that we need to know where you're buying something, what...

I have several large PDF files to email and whenever I try to attach them to a yahoo email I get sent to Dropbox -- I HATE Dropbox. How do I send these files without Dropbox?

Samsung's smart TVs have already come under fire this week for a poorly worded privacy policy that apparently let the devices listen in on owners' conversations. Now, there are reports that the sets are inserting ads "every 20-30 minutes" into users' own, locally stored content. There's been a string of complaints online by customers using third-party video apps such as Plex and Australian service Foxtel, with most referring to rogue Pepsi ads interrupting their viewing. "After about 15 minutes of watching live TV, the screen goes blank, and then a 16:9 sized Pepsi ad (taking up about half the screen)...

If real-time translation apps can get it right, they could upend a lucrative sector. According to a recent report by the Economist newspaper - which cited consulting firm Common Sense Advisory - the language interpretation industry generates about $37bn (£24bn) worth of sales every year. But the problems I experienced in Bilbao suggest that processor-powered translations still have far to go. Those issues are indicative of speech recognition tech's limitations in general, according to Joseba Abaitua, an academic at the modern foreign languages department at Bilbao's University of Deusto. Mr Abaitua, who specialises in online communication, suggests that interacting via...

Microsoft released their latest Patch Tuesday. This Patch includes a fix for vulnerability CVE-2015-0057, an IMPORTANT-rated exploitable vulnerability which we responsibly disclosed to Microsoft a few months ago. As part of our research, we revealed this privilege escalation vulnerability which, if exploited, enables a threat actor to complete control of a Windows machine. In other words, a threat actor that gains access to a Windows machine (say, through a phishing campaign) can exploit this vulnerability to bypass all Windows security measures, defeating mitigation measures such as sandboxing, kernel segregation and memory randomization. Interestingly, the exploit requires modifying only a single...

Imgur Does Away with Pro Membership, Now Offers Free and Unlimited Photo Storage for All After being started back in 2009 as a gift for Reddit users, Imgur has quickly become one of the Web’s most dominant forces in image hosting. Yesterday marked the service’s sixth year in existence, and to celebrate, Imgur has decided to phase out Pro subscriptions. The benefits of paid membership are now completely free for every user.

The latest rumor from Mark Gurman’s Deep Throat over at 9to5Mac claims Apple will focus on performance and stability rather than features in iOS 9 – and that its new mobile OS will be 64-bit only. Learning from history It makes sense for Apple to decelerate the pace of regular feature introductions and take the time to optimize and improve the many it already has. It is interesting (and informative) to reflect that the last time it chose to decelerate feature improvements was when it launched OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, which introduced a range of under-the-hood improvements, the...

Left, a Sport Cruiser aircraft of the same type; right, the MacBook Air after the fall A South African pilot appears to have taken the name of his MacBook Air a little too literally, managing to drop it from the light aircraft he was flying when the canopy flew open. The MacBook, along with his flying license and logbook, fell 1000 feet into the fields below–but amazingly survived the experience. Admittedly it didn’t emerge entirely unscathed. Pilot and Reddit user Av80r reports that the unibody casing was bent, the glass trackpad shattered and the cooling fans were damaged, but...

WASHINGTON – Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing labor costs down 16 percent, a report Tuesday said. The Boston Consulting Group predicts that investment in industrial robots will grow 10 percent a year in the world's 25-biggest export nations through 2025, up from 2 percent to 3 percent a year now. The investment will pay off in lower costs and increased efficiency.

Republican FCC Commissioner Slams ‘Obama’s 332-Page Plan To Regulate The Internet’ Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai on Friday raised the first of many criticisms to come about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s aggressive net neutrality plan distributed to commissioners Thursday, which Pai described as “President Obama’s 332-page plan to regulate the Internet.” In a statement released Friday, Pai lamented the fact that the 332-page plan, which he tweeted a picture of himself holding next to a picture of Obama, won’t be released to the public until after the commission votes on its implementation later this month.

Apple issues a compulsory Flash update Apple has issued a compulsory update forcing Mac OS X users to upgrade to the latest version of Flash, following the discovery of three zero-day vulnerabilities in the software. The update appears as a pop-up in all Apple systems using an outdated version of Flash. "If you're using an out-of-date version of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, you may see the message ‘Blocked plug-in', ‘Flash Security Alert' or ‘Flash out-of-date' when attempting to view Flash content in Safari," read the advisory. "To continue viewing Flash content, update to a later version of Adobe Flash...

Apple’s most recent quarterly numbers broke all sorts of records and, as we shall see, a number of laws. Apple just released its numbers for the quarter ending last December, the first quarter of its 2015 Fiscal Year. The figures are astonishing: iPhones: Apple sold 74.5M, + 57% over last year’s same quarter. iPhone revenue was $51.2B, + 57%. That’s enough iPhones for 1% of the world population, 9.4 iPhones for every second of the past quarter. I hope to see some day a documentary movie on the supply chain heroics leading (parts manufacturing, assembly, transportation logistics) required to achieve...

Affinity Photo is a new program that was launched today by the England-based software company Serif. It’s designed to be a powerful alternative to Adobe Photoshop for professional photographers and retouchers who work on a Mac.

Only two of the responding automakers said they could respond to an effort to hack on-board data systems "in real time," the Markey report found. The report also raised concerns about privacy, noting that automakers are collecting and using large amounts of driving data, in many cases storing the data with third parties. Customers "are often not explicitly made aware of data collection, and when they are, they often cannot opt out without disabling valuable features such as navigation," said the report, which was disclosed, by the CBS program "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday.

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve probably seen the following ad plastered around your screen, showing a farmer in a red hat with the bold text “Grocery stores fear him!”. But what, really, could grocery stores hate so much about this guy? I decided to investigate for myself to see what was going on, and how a company could afford to spend so much money on this crazy advertisement, because I see it everywhere I look, whether I want to or not.

RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) — A pilot and his wife used their iPads to fly about 80 miles in the dark and land safely without landing gear at the Rapid City Regional Airport after the electrical systems failed, compromising their single-engine plane. The couple, whose names have not been released, were flying to Wisconsin from Wyoming Friday night when their single-engine propeller plane had a full electrical-system failure about 80 miles from Rapid City, said Oliver White, a spokesman with the Rapid City Fire Department. Neither passenger was hurt, but the plane was damaged on landing.

(Language Warning) NEGLIGENT DISCHARGES HAPPEN! I am very unlucky, but very lucky! However I am on my way to recovery!

An Ubuntu-powered smartphone is coming to the market a year and a half after a previous attempt to launch a model via crowdfunding failed.The Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu edition relies on a card-like user interface that is not focused on apps. Unlike the original proposal, the handset does not become a desktop PC when plugged into a monitor. It is initially being targeted at "early adopters", who developers hope will become advocates for the platform. The British company Canonical, which developed the Linux-based operating system, said it hoped to emulate the success of Chinese companies including Xiaomi with its launch...

Looks like Bank of America is down. I was just told to call back on Monday to pay my credit card bill. WOW.

Ok, could someone list the command to embed a video in a post or reply? Some sites do this automatically. I need HTML help here. The basics cover posting links and pictures, which I'm familiar with. How does one post a video from say, YouTube on here?