Court makes orders in Telstra “Belong” trademark case against solar power company
Melbourne-based solar power provider Belong Energy was ordered to cancel its registered business name of “belongenergy” and any other business names containing “belong”.
The company was also ordered to transfer the domain names belong.energy and belongenergy.com.au to Telstra, as well as any other domain name containing the word ‘belong’.
https://belong.energy/
Microsoft bows to Chrome, Firefox, with security tweak
The new feature builds on Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) for Microsoft Edge, software that isolates web sites opening them in a virtual container isolated from Windows. Doing so means that any malware on the page will find it harder to get a toehold in Windows, and therefore also harder to penetrate a corporate network.
Edge has just 4.23 percent market share globally, well behind Firefox’s 9.72 percent and Chrome’s 65 percent.
Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18358, released on 15 March, included WDAG browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. The new extensions mean that when a site on an enterprise’s naughty loads into either browser, “the user is redirected to an isolated Microsoft Edge session.”
That’s a win for admins, who can be sure their Do Not Browse policies apply across popular browsers. It’s also a win for Microsoft as it may expose more users to Edge, which Microsoft feels is under-appreciated even if it has decided to dump its own code base in favour of Chromium.
Dropbox limits free accounts to just three devices
Dropbox has removed unlimited device linking for free accounts.
Only paid plans will now come with unlimited device linking, with prices starting at $12.74 per month for individuals or $17.50 per user per month for businesses.
Google fined another US$1.7 billion for ad blocks by EU
Google was fined €1.49 billion ($US1.7 billion) on Wednesday for blocking rival online search advertisers, the third large European Union antitrust penalty for the Alphabet business in only two years.oogle fined another US$1.7 billion for ad blocks by EU
The case concerned websites, such as of newspaper or travel sites, with a search function that produces search results and search adverts. Google’s AdSense for Search provided such search adverts.
The misconduct included stopping publishers from placing any search adverts from competitors on their search results pages, forcing them to reserve the most profitable space on their search results pages for Google’s adverts and a requirement to seek written approval from Google before making changes to the way in which any rival adverts were displayed.
Google to prompt Android users to choose preferred browsers
Google will prompt Android users to choose their preferred browsers and search apps
by pre-installing its Chrome browser and Google search app on Android devices, Google had an unfair advantage over its rivals, EU enforcers said.
“In the coming months, via the Play Store, we’ll start asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use,” he wrote without providing details.
ten years after animated character was put out to virtual pasture, having irritated countless users and been mercilessly parodied.
Clippy appeared first in Microsoft Office for Windows version 97
Clippy survived until Office 2007 for Windows, and Office 2008 for Mac although it was turned off by default in Office XP a few years earlier.
Even then, Microsoft wasn’t fully ready to part ways with Clippy and a year ago inserted a hidden message about the animation into its personal digital assistant for Windows 10, Cortana, as a so-called Easter Egg.
Telstra turns on 10,000th mobile network site
Telstra has turned on its 10,000th mobile network site, throwing the switch on a 5G site in the regional Australian city of Toowoomba.
Austraia’s largest telco says the new site in Toowoomba will not only provide better coverage to its customers in the area
Telstra (then Telecom) launched 1G in Sydney back in 1987 with just 14 base stations, and the telco says that today, the its mobile network covers more than 2.5 million square kilometres – “vastly more than any other mobile network in Australia” – and offers coverage to 99.5% of the Australian population.
“Not only is our network getting bigger, it is getting faster and smarter. The new base station in Toowoomba includes the very latest technology as part of our 5G program,” a Telstra spokesman said.
Google Home Hub is the Most Popular Smart Display in Australia
- Google Home Hub was launched in late October 2018 and Australia was among the first countries to get it.
- The timing must have been good because, after just 10 weeks, Google Home Hub reached 41.5% of the smart display market installed in Australia, even though it was the last device to arrive in the Australian market.
- Amazon Echo Show and Spot both accounted for just 13.2% of the market share, slightly behind its 14.2% share of all the rest of the smart speakers. This is despite the fact that the Spot was available in Australia five months earlier and the Show beat Home Hub to market by about a month.
- It’s interesting to know that in Australia, 22.2% of all smart speaker owners have a smart display compared to just 13.2% of U.S. device owners. That means over one million Australians have access to a smart display today.
- Proceed to talk about my Google Hub speaker
Windows 10 to automatically uninstall faulty monthly updates
- This is expected to be included in the upcoming feature upgrade for Windows 10, the new functionality will back out of failed installations and then wait 30 days before trying the install again.
- Windows 10 will self-diagnose start-up failures and if necessary uninstall recent updates to get the PC up and running, it will try to diagnose and resolve failures due to disk issues, system file corruption, invalid registry keys, or other such causes.
- “If all these steps are unsuccessful and your machine is still unable to start up properly, Windows will determine if the startup issue was introduced after recent driver or quality updates were installed. If so, these updates may be uninstalled automatically to get the device back to a workable state. “This is only done as a last resort, said Microsoft.
- Microsoft outlined for Windows 10 1903 update it would, if it worked as advertised, prevent the repetitive reboots we normally get when an update goes wrong.
- So instead of attempting to reinstall the update every day and rebooting every day like its does now, [Windows] will go ‘Damm, I need help,’ and pause the update to give Microsoft 30 days to figure out what’s wrong with it , then try again.
Dyson Pure Cool Me – Designed to make your personal space comfortable
- Here is a cool gadget.
- Dyson is well known for vacuum cleaners…but as some know they also have a range of fans and air purifiers to suit a number of different situations. This week the company has announced that it is moving into the personal air purifier market with a small table top device.
- The new device is designed to make your personal space more comfortable rather than the whole room. Thanks to new technology it calls Core Flow it promises to clean up to 40 litres per second of your personal air space.
- The purifier will come with a remote control, a rotating head that sits on the top to displace the air around, and a sleep timer of up to 8-hours….It won’t however come with any sorta app connectivity, Dyson is trying to keep the costs down and the acknowledgement that this is about your personal use rather than room wide purification.
- Some examples on show by Dyson at the launch of the event included suggesting placing the device on your bedside table to offer you comfort while you sleep, or on your desk while you work.
- The Pure Cool Me will cost £299 in the UK when it goes on sale there this week…. There is no word as when it will be released into Australia yet…
Avoid Google Play Store apps that promise to update your Android phone
- There is Apps in the Google Play Store that purport to upgrade your phone to Android 9.0 Pie, but be aware that an app cannot perform that task.
- Some apps in the play store, named like “Update to Android P – 9.0” or “Updates for Samsung,” or update for what phone you may have are designed to trick users into updates to their phones, but you should know that the Play Store does not handle OS updates.
- Installing these apps in the hopes of receiving a platform or OS update is likely a good way to wind up bombarded with advertisements, spyware, or malware….
- So how can I get Android OS updates for unsupported phones?… glad you asked 🙂 …. There are aftermarket or third-party Android ROMs, like LineageOS, that provide the latest version of Android for a select number of phones.. Simply go to -> https://www.lineageos.org/ and see if your model phone is supported.
- The process of installing LineageOS is slightly involved, taking about an hour or so of effort to accomplish. For an example, check out TechRepublic’s guide to installing LineageOS 16 on the OnePlus 5T….
- Here –https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-install-lineageos-16-on-oneplus-5t/