Sorry, Zuck Is Not Sharing His Facebook Billions With You

 
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are generous people. But don't expect your share of their billions any time soon.

As Tech Insider notes, a message circulating on Facebook excitedly suggests that "people like you and me" can earn a piece of Zuckerberg's wealth by simply copying and pasting a message to their feed. If the poor spelling and grammar didn't tip you off, though, the message is a hoax, as are most Facebook messages that promise something in exchange for using a copied and pasted message as your status.

The memo comes less than a month after Zuckerberg and Chan announced plans to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares to their new philanthropic enterprise, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

"Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities," the duo wrote in a letter to their newborn daughter, Max.

As you may have noticed, their note does not mention helping you pay off your student loans or buying you a new car.

Facebook did not immediately respond to TCMall's request for comment.
It remains unclear how many people have shared the fake proclamation. But this is not the first time folks have been duped by phony Facebook scams.

In September, cyber scammers rolled out a faux "dislike" button—a ruse that dates back to at least 2011.

Days later, another long-running hoax re-emerged—that Facebook would begin charging for access.

The proliferation of these scams prompted the company earlier this year to crack down on bogus News Feed stories. A January update to the site aimed to "reduce the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes." Facebook also added an annotation to flagged messages, reducing distribution of fake links, photos, videos, and status updates.

The social network, however, will not remove reported stories or review any content to determine its accuracy.

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Security Team Reportedly Collects $1M iOS 9 Bug Bounty

 
A team of unnamed security researchers are now $1 million richer.
The researchers apparently discovered a way to break into Apple's new mobile operating system, iOS 9, netting them the huge payout from controversial Washington D.C.-based start-up Zerodium, which buys and sells security zero-day exploits. In a Twitter post Monday, Zerodium congratulated the winners of its Million Dollar iOS 9 Bug Bounty challenge, but kept the identity of the researchers — and details of the winning exploit — under wraps.

Our iOS #0day bounty has expired & we have one winning team who made a remote browser-based iOS 9.1/9.2b #jailbreak (untethered). Congrats!

— Zerodium (@Zerodium) November 2, 2015

Zerodium did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the winning flaw or team.
Zerodium launched the contest late last month, offering three $1 million rewards for remote iOS 9 exploits. The company promised $1 million to each individual or team that submitted an "exclusive, browser-based, and untethered jailbreak" for the OS powering Apple's new iPhones.

"Apple iOS, like all operating system[s], is often affected by critical security vulnerabilities," Zerodium said in its announcement. "However due to the increasing number of security improvements and the effectiveness of exploit mitigations in place, Apple's iOS is currently the most secure mobile OS.

"But don't be fooled, secure does not mean unbreakable, it just means that iOS has currently the highest cost and complexity of vulnerability exploitation," the company continued. "And here's where the Million Dollar iOS 9 Bug Bounty comes into play."

It's no surprise Zerodium is keeping mum about the flaw. The company's founder, Chaouki Bekrar, has a history of selling exploits to the highest bidder, rather than disclosing issues to the manufacturer.

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No 'Force Awakens' DLC for Star Wars Battlefront

EA has confirmed that content from Star Wars: The Force Awakens won't be added to Star Wars Battlefront.

When asked on Twitter if DLC from Episode VII would ever be included in the latest Star Wars game, EA had this to say:

This was a pretty straightforward answer that leaves no room for interpretation. EA wants to focus its efforts solely on content from the original trilogy for Battlefront.

While this may be the case, it should be noted that the recently released DLC, The Battle of Jakku, is actually related to The Force Awakens. That DLC focuses on the final battle between The Rebellion and The Empire, which takes place on the planet of Jakku, the same location featured in the beginning of The Force Awakens.

Since the game will focus on battles and characters from the original trilogy, it would be reasonable to assume that content from the prequel trilogy will also be excluded.

For a game that has been criticized for lacking more robust content, excluding anything outside the original trilogy seems to be a strange move on EA's part, especially given the popularity of The Force Awakens.
Star Wars Battlefront is currently available on the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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Judge Throws Out 'iMessage Purgatory' Case

 
A California judge has put the Apple "iMessage purgatory" case to bed.

As noted by Business Insider, Judge Lucy Koh dismissed the case in a brief ruling issued this week.

At issue were text messages that people "lost" when switching from iPhone to another mobile OS. When an iPhone owner traded their phone in for an Android or Windows device, but kept the same phone number, a flaw in Cupertino's system recognized the number as an iPhone, and sent texts to that device rather than the new handset.

It could be fixed by switching off iMessage on the old iPhone, but if you got rid of or traded in that iPhone, you were out of luck and your texts were trapped in "iMessage purgatory."
Cupertino last year released an online tool that lets people deregister iMessage on an old phone, allowing all texts to move freely between any devices.

But that came after Apple was sued over the issue. It tried to have the case throw out last year, but Judge Koh allowed it to proceed. Earlier this year, however, she rejected efforts to turn it into a class-action case, and has now thrown it out entirely.

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What Is 4K (Ultra HD)?

High definition has meant 1080p (1,920 by 1,080) resolution for years now, and it's ready for an upgrade. That's where ultra high-definition, or UHD, television comes in. You might have heard it called 4K. It's technically UHD according to the Consumer Electronics Association, but the two terms have become interchangeable. And now those terms finally matter a lot to your HDTV buying decisions, since 4K is finally a mature, accessible technology.
 
What Is 4K?A UHD or 4K display is one with at least 8 million active pixels. For televisions, that resolution has standardized to 3,840 by 2,160. Digital cinema 4K (the resolution in 4K movie theaters) is slightly higher at 4,096 by 2,160. However you define it, it's four times the number of pixels on a 1080p display, and over 23 times the resolution of standard definition television.

How Is 4K Different Than 1080p?For starters, 4K is obviously much sharper than 1080p. In the space that a 1080p HDTV holds a pixel, a 4K HDTV of the same size can hold four. That makes for a significant jump in clarity, assuming you have native 4K source material to watch in that resolution.

Because the resolution is much higher, it requires more bandwidth to transmit. The HDMI 2.0 standard was developed to support 4K, and allows 2160p video to be displayed at 60 frames per second. Older HDMI standards could work with a 4K source to some extent, but not reliably or at that framerate. You can also stream 4K video over the Internet, which similarly requires a very fast connection; Netflix recommends a steady 25Mbps downstream speed to watch 4K content over its service.

If you don't have a 4K source video, a 4K HDTV can still make your movies and shows look better. All 4K televisions use some kind of upconverter to display 1080p and lower resolution video. These upconverters do more than just break each pixel into four identical pixels; they employ edge smoothing and noise reduction algorithms to produce, ideally, a sharper picture. When it works well, you get video that looks natural on a 4K screen (though it doesn't add any actual new details, just sharper lines and more even color and light). When it doesn't, the picture can look a bit blotchy, like a painting.

While some regular viewers struggle to see the difference between 1080p and 720p in smaller television sizes, it's much more obvious on 50-inch and larger TVs. 4K is another significant jump in terms of clarity and detail, especially as people are becoming more and more used to the incredibly tiny pixels displayed by today's Retina-style HD screens on mobile gadgets. This is a major factor for large HDTVs as well, since 55 inches has become a low boundary for just how big a big screen can get.

What 4K HDTVs Are Out There Now?4K HDTVs have been hitting the market for a few years now, and have finally become both affordable and functional. 4K no longer has the pricing premium of early adoption, and you can get a good-performing 4K HDTV for about the same price as a mid-to-high-end 1080p HDTV last year.

Vizio's M65-C1 $1,754.99 at Amazon stands out as an Editors' Choice with surprisingly good picture quality and a big 65-inch screen for a reasonable price. If you want to go smaller, Sharp's 50-inch LC-50UB30U$697.99 at Dell can be found for even less. You can still go all-out if you want a flagship HDTV and are willing to spend big bucks; LG's 65EF9500 $4,999.99 at Dell 4K OLED television and Samsung's UN65JU7500FXZA $2,134.35 at WalMart deliver fantastic image quality, but both cost a pretty penny.
The availability of such a broad range of 4K HDTVs indicates that the market has matured past the point of early adopters and technophiles, to suit a wide range of buyers looking for the best new tech.

Is There Even Any 4K Content You Can Watch on an HDTV?
Thanks to Amazon and Netflix, there's a surprising amount of 4K content you can watch if you have a fast-enough Internet connection. 4K has gone past the eye candy landscapes and tech demo phase that early HD content went through, and now you can find plenty of television and movies in the format, like Breaking Bad, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones. Both services are steadily adding more 4K content, and if that isn't enough, YouTube supports 4K video for anyone from studios to GoPro users.

Blu-ray will bring you 4K in the future, as well. The Ultra HD Blu-ray standard lets studios release movies in 4K on Blu-ray discs, though they're more advanced Blu-ray discs than the 1080p-capable ones you're used to. You'll need a UHD Blu-ray-compatible player, and you'll have to buy new Blu-rays in that format when they start coming out next year, but they'll offer another way to get commercial 4K video easily.

Bottom Line: Do You Need 4K?You probably don't need 4K quite yet, but now is a good time to consider upgrading to a 4K HDTV anyway. The technology has become standardized enough that you can be reasonably sure a 4K television you purchase now will be ready for the future (just make sure it has HDMI 2.0 ports), and it's affordable enough to be compared directly with 1080p televisions in price.

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