XAMI

Facebook in 2015 added peer-to-peer mobile payments to its Messenger app. The addition made it easy for friends to swap cash but if you need to pay multiple people (to split up a restaurant tab or chip in on a gift purchase, for example), things can get a bit time-consuming. Fortunately, Facebook has addressed the shortcoming with its latest app update. The expanded payments feature now allows users to pay multiple people simultaneously (or request money from a group at once). Just like before, you’ll first need to link a payment card to your Facebook account and set up a PIN. Once that is in place, the process is very similar to paying an individual – simply tap the plus sign in the bottom left of the screen then select the “Payments” icon. From there, just select the people in the group that you want to send or ask money from, enter the amount and bam, it’s a done deal. As Engadget highlights, if you’re requesting money, you can enter in the amount you want from each person or simply input the total and let the app split the requested amount up evenly among the group. Messenger will show who has and hasn’t paid. Group payments should be available starting today for Android and iOS users in the US.

Welcome Florin

There's no debating the importance of using security measures to protect your data and computer. GlassWire's excellent firewall is one such tool for protecting your digital self. Rated 4.5 out of 5 by PCWorld, GlassWire is an all-encompassing safety solution that allows you to monitor, track, and reinforce your computer with unrivaled control. With GlassWire, you can keep tabs on current and past network activity, sorting by traffic type, apps, and geographic location. GlassWire also includes a robust firewall that updates you on your computer's background activity and notifies you when a new app or service accesses the web for the first time. There is a basic version of GlassWire which you download for free. You can also upgrade GlassWire for extra protection with two levels of service. GlassWire Pro lets you monitor, track, and protect up to three computers, while GlassWire Elite ups the count to ten. There's a deal on GlassWire Pro for $29 or Elite for $49, saving 70 percent off their usual retail prices. GlassWire's award-winning features offer unparalleled control over your online security.

Security researchers have discovered a new zero-day attack in the wild that can silently install malware on a fully-patched computer through a vulnerability in Microsoft Word. McAfee and FireEye posted blogs revealing the attack, which, as these things so often do, starts with a malicious email attachment. In this case, it’s a Word document that contains an embedded exploit. Once opened, an HTTP request is sent to a remote, attacker-controlled server to download a malicious HTML application file (HTA), which appears as a fake Rich Text Format document. The .hta file is executed automatically, allowing the attackers to gain full code execution on the machine, downloading additional payloads from "different well-known malware families." The nature of the attack means it can bypass most memory-based mitigations designed by Microsoft. It works on all versions of Windows, even Windows 10, and, unlike most other Word exploits, it doesn’t require Macros to be enabled. It even shows a fake Word document to hide the attack from the victim. McAffee and FirstEye say the vulnerability is related to the Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) function, which allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. FireEye said it has been working with Microsoft on the vulnerability for several weeks and had agreed not to publicly disclose it until a patch was released, but decided to reveal the details after McAfee published its post. Microsoft said it would issue a fix for the issue tomorrow as part of its monthly security updates. But always remember to take care when it comes to suspicious files attached to emails, even if you know the sender.

Most people know how ransomware works; after it infects a machine, the malware encrypts files, or the entire system, and the decryption key will only be released once a person pays the ransom. But rather than handing over some Bitcoins, a new kind of ransomware asks victims to reach a high score on an incredibly difficult game before unlocking the files. Anyone who finds that “Rensenware” has made its way onto their computer will discover a typical warning that "your precious data like documents, musics, pictures, and some kinda project files" have been "encrypted with highly strong encryption algorithm." The only way to release them is by scoring over 200 million points in the anime-style, bullet hell shooter Touhou Seirensen (Undefined Fantastic Object)'s "lunatic" level. Rensenware, which itself is a pun on the 2009 game’s name, was created as a joke by a Korea-based undergraduate student who goes by the name Tvple Eraser on Twitter. Kotaku spoke to the creator, who admitted he couldn’t reach the required score and that he’d accidentally infected himself while programming the malware. After uploading Rensenware’s source code to Github, Tvple Eraser fell asleep. Upon waking, he found it was spreading fast. “I realized that it [had] become a huge accident and [was] confused,” he said, before admitting that the exact number of infected machines was unclear. Once the malware was traced back to Tvple Eraser, he removed the original code from Github and posted an apology, along with a “forcer” tool that circumvents the encryption without the need to play the game. "I'd like to apologize [to] everyone for making [them] shocked or annoyed," the apology read. "Ransomeware is definitely kind of highly-fatal malware, but I made it. I made it for [a] joke and just laughing with people who like Touhou Project series," he wrote. A new, “cut” version of Rensenware that doesn’t include any forced encryption is now available on Github to show off the software. Check out the video below to get an idea of just how hard it is to unlock the original Rensenware.

Welcome Aymann

Canonical, makers of the po[CENSORED]r Ubuntu Linux distribution, recently announced it is pulling out of the mobile device market and will no longer invest in its Unity8 phone and convergence initiative. The decision will also see the company switch back to GNOME for the default Ubuntu desktop when Ubuntu 18.04 LTS arrives. Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a recent blog post that he took the view that, if convergence was the future and they could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry as there is substantial frustration with the existing, closed, alternatives available to manufacturers. Shuttleworth said he was wrong on both counts, noting that the community viewed their efforts as fragmentation instead of innovation. The industry has not rallied behind the possibility, either, having instead taken what the South African entrepreneur calls a “better the devil you know” approach to such form factors. Canonical embarked on an ambitious crowdsourced campaign to fund a high-end, Linux-based smartphone called the Ubuntu Edge in mid-2013. The project had a solid showing but fell short of its lofty $32 million goal with only $12.8 million raised. The group went on to launch a handful of rebadged smartphones and tablets but middling hardware and questionable marketing campaigns ensured Canonical would never make any serious traction. Shuttleworth said the decision has been very difficult due to the force of his conviction in the convergence future but the choice, he concluded, is ultimately shaped by commercial constraints.

The Ryzen 5 series of processors from AMD does not even hit store shelves until next Tuesday, but that has not stopped Antonline, from selling the CPUs from a sample lot. Forbes reported that early reviews of the Ryzen 5 1600 have already surfaced stating that it outperforms the Intel Core i7-7700K. Even though the quad-core 7700K is clocked at a base of 4.2 GHz, the Ryzen 5 was able to beat it with its 6-core/12-thread architecture clocking at 3.2 GHz. In fact, the Intel processor could not even keep up when it was overclocked to 4.9 GHz. Speaking of overclocking, the boys over at HardOCP were curious how far the new Ryzen 5 CPUs could be pushed. So they too decided to take advantage of the available samples and run them through their water-cooled unit. The Ryzen 5 series comes in four flavors the quad-core/8-thread 1400 and 1500X, and the 6-core/12-thread 1600 and 1600X. HardOCP purchased two 1400 and two 1600 to put through stress testing. All of the processors have a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz. First, they tested the 1600 CPUs. After hours of testing, the CPU was running stable at 4.0 GHz using 3200 MHz RAM. The core voltage was set to 1.45 volts and level 5 load-line calibration. Both Ryzen 1600s worked identically. They then tested the 1400 processors. The first was stable at 3.9 GHz running at 1.4 volts and an LLC at level 2. The second one they really tried to push to 4.0 GHz, but it would only operate at that speed for less than an hour. They got it stable at 3.975 GHz with a 1.45 v core and at LLC 5. All of these overclocked tests were pushing the CPUs to their absolute limits. All threads were running a full load and the heat produced was high even with water cooling. The 1400 units were operating in a temperature range of 57-67 Celsius, and the 1600s were around 70-73 C. HardOCP stated that “Once you get past 3.8 GHz on these processors, the voltage usage and heat emitted just gets exponential with them. So they get very hot, very quickly,” so you would be better of giving up that extra 100 MHz. Overall, the testers were more pleased with the Ryzen 5 1600. They said that the 1600s were more consistent and easier to set up and get stable. However, they recommend that overclockers be sure to have their BIOS updated because they have experienced buggy issues involving RAM. Ryzen 5 series will hit store shelves April 11, but if you cannot wait that long Antonline is still selling them on Ebay for $180 for the 1400 and $232 for the 1600. Check out TechSpot's full review of the Ryzen 5 1600X and 1500X coming up next Tuesday after the official embargo lifts.

Eurocom has unveiled a new notebook computer that’s perhaps unlike any you’ve seen before. That’s because it’s technically a mobile server. The Eurocom PX7 Pro SE is powered by Intel’s quad-core (eight threads) Xeon E3-1505M v5 processor clocked at 2.8GHz on a CM236 server chipset alongside up to 64GB of ECC DDR4-2133 RAM and up to an Nvidia Quadro M5500 graphics card (8GB of GDDR5 VRAM). It packs a 17.3-inch FHD (1,920 x 1,080 resolution) IPS matte display, support for four M.2 solid state drives (two of which are PCIe) and a standard 2.5-inch drive (RAID 0/1/5 is supported). The optical drive can also be removed and replaced with another 2.5-inch drive, we’re told. Other noteworthy features include a Killer E2400 Gigabit Ethernet controller, a built-in 9-cell / 7500mAh / 83.25Wh UPS that provides 1.5 hours of backup power, six USB 3.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 1.4 and more. You can load up Microsoft’s Server 2012R2, Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 as well as Linux / Ubuntu. The PX7 Pro SE measures 17.1 inches x 11.8 inches x 1.9 inches and tips the scales at 8.4 pounds. Eurocom hasn’t yet said how much the PX7 Pro SE will sell for or when it’ll be available.

What happens when you take one of the world’s top mobile developers and hand them the keys to one of the leading first-person shooter franchises? I’m not yet sure but we’ll find out soon enough as Candy Crush Saga developer King Digital Entertainment is currently working on a new Call of Duty mobile game. King said in a job listing that their challenge as a team is to create a Call of Duty experience on mobile that will strive to transform the best console experience fans know and love while also breaking new ground for mobile and redefining the genre. Their approach and ambition, King said, is to be fresh, social and highly accessible while providing a very authentic game experience. As for the development side, the team will turn out multiple prototypes and have the freedom to think outside the box. Those working on the game will be encouraged to stretch their expertise in ways to create “surprising” results, we’re told. They’re looking for an art director, level designer, senior systems designer and a senior UX/UI designer to join the team in Stockholm, Sweden, the listing notes. King isn’t going at it alone, however, as they’ll be collaborating with Activision Blizzard on the project. Activision Blizzard, if you recall, purchased King Digital Entertainment for an eye-popping $5.9 billion in late 2015. This Call of Duty game will be the first Activision property that King will work on. Engadget speculates that, if successful, the project could open the door for future mobile adaptations of po[CENSORED]r franchises like Destiny or Overwatch.

Are you enjoying the new Stories feature Facebook introduced last week? Probably not. The ability to post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours isn’t proving hugely po[CENSORED]r among the social network’s users, so the company is making some changes. The Verge reports that Facebook is altering the Stories UI. When none or very few of your friends are using the feature, which is the case for most people, you will no longer see an empty white space at the top of the app; instead, Facebook is filling it with ghostly images of people you know. The greyed-out icons represent those frequently contacted friends who haven’t posted any Stories recently– or ever. Tapping on one of the images informs you of this fact with the message: “[name] hasn’t added to their story recently.” The idea behind the change is that it will encourage people who’ve never used the feature to give it a try - while making it less obvious that very few people are even aware of it. It appears that the update is only being tested on a small percentage of users right now. Like many of Facebook’s experiments, there’s no guarantee it will be rolled out to everyone at some point in the future. It was Snapchat that first came up with the ephemeral Stories format back in 2013. Facebook-owned Instagram ‘borrowed’ the idea, which it also called Stories, in August 2016. Facebook added its version of the feature last Tuesday, part of an update that also included a new in-app camera and a private messaging feature called Direct.

Microsoft has updated its Windows Store policies to ban developers from submitting game system emulators to any of its platforms. While the policies were initially published at the end of last month, the company began taking action this week, delisting the po[CENSORED]r Universal Emulator from the store. The latter was one of the more po[CENSORED]r emulators on the Windows Store, with support for NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and GameBoy Color/Advanced games using an Xbox One controller. The app had been previously banned from Xbox One consoles just a few days after receiving approval. Back then Microsoft said that third party apps that are targeted to Xbox One and are primarily gaming experiences must be approved through the ID@Xbox program. However, with the policy update, submitting console emulators through the ID@Xbox program is now out of the question. While console emulators can no longer be downloaded from the Windows Store, you can still run them on Windows if they’re available to download elsewhere. Universal Emulator in particular is also available in a browser based version that’s independent from app stores and even works on the Xbox One. With this Microsoft joint Apple in clocking console emulators from their respective app stores, leaving Google as the only mobile app store still supporting game emulator apps.

If a recent report is to be believed, Apple fans may have a reason to be thankful for the Galaxy S8+. It seems the upcoming iPhone 8 could be cheaper than expected - an attempt to put it in a similar price bracket as Samsung’s handset. It’s been widely reported that Apple’s next flagship iPhone will cost upwards of $1000, but in a report from global financial services firm UBS (obtained by MacRumors), analyst Steven Milunovich believes the 64GB base model could start at $850 to $900. Milunovich says the fact the iPhone 8 will have a smaller display than Samsung’s new device has forced Apple to rethink its pricing strategy, pushing the cheapest version of the iPhone 8 closer to the S8+’s $840-$850 price. There may still be a $1000+ iPhone 8, but this will be the top-tier, 256GB model. Additionally, Milunovich says Apple’s other two upcoming handsets, likely named the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus, will start at around $649 and $749, respectively. In other iPhone 8 news, it’s rumored that the smartphone may not be ready in time for the expected September launch date. A report from the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (via Digitimes) says problems with the switch from LCD to OLED screens is causing the delay, which could see the phones pushed back to October or even November. “Technical issues related to the lamination process of curved OLED panels, and the adoption of a 3D sensing system may cause the delay of the new iPhone devices,” states the paper.

Ultrawide 21:9 monitors are growing in po[CENSORED]rity. The displays, which are usually around the 34-inch or 35-inch mark, can offer unparalleled levels of immersion and an amazing gaming experience – providing you have a capable graphics card. But it seems Samsung wants to go bigger. According to TFTCentral (via PC Gamer), the Korean company has plans to manufacture what is being officially called a ‘double full HD’ (DFHD) panel. It features a 32:9 aspect ratio, will be 49-inches across and boasts a resolution of 3840 x 1080 – essentially, it’s like two 27-inch full HD displays next to each other, just without the bezels in the middle. Not only is the DFHD panel huge, it will feature an 1800R [CENSORED]ture, making it curvier than many (but not all) Ultrawides. The great news for gamers is that it’ll come with a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz and support either G-Sync or FreeSync, depending on specific vendor implementation. It also uses VA technology, boast a 5000:1 static contrast ratio, and has a “3-side frameless design.” The display isn’t the only one in Samsung’s 'Grand Circle' format. It’s also working on a 44-inch, 3840 x 1200 panel, with what it says is a 29:9 aspect ratio (though PC Gamer notes it’s technically 32:10 or 16:5). Again, the panel uses VA tech, comes with an 1800R [CENSORED]ture, and should support G-Sync/FreeSync, but there will reportedly be both 60Hz and 120Hz versions available. Production of both panels is set to begin in September, which means the retail units should arrive next year, giving you enough time to save up for what will undoubtedly be some pricey products.

Solid state drives are generally considered more durable than their spinning predecessors but that designation is typically only associated with physical “toughness.” Excessive reading and writing of NAND flash is one sure-fire way to trash an SSD with the quickness. Unfortunately, if your profession involves doing just that – say, you’re a filmmaker that records 4K digital video – then there’s really no way to avoid it. Your best bet in such a scenario may simply be to arm yourself with hardware that’s better equipped to stand up to the abuse. Sony believes it has just what the doctor ordered with its new G Series Professional SSDs. The G Series Professional line consists of two drives – the SV-GS96 which offers 960GB of storage and the smaller (and cheaper) SV-GS48 that has 480GB of space. The larger of the two drives is rated for up to 2,400 terabytes written (TBW) over the life of the drive while the smaller drive is good for 1,200 TBW thanks to Sony’s Error Correction Code technology. There’s also tech built in that Sony says will prevent sudden speed decreases when writing to the drive. Both feature read speeds of up to 550MB/sec. The drives also feature beefed up SATA connectors that can withstand being connected and unplugged up to 3,000 times. That, according to Sony, is upwards of six times more durable than a standard SATA connector. The G Series Professional SSDs are scheduled to arrive in May. Expect to pay $539 for the 960GB model and $287 for the smaller 480GB variant.

Early indications suggest that Samsung’s Galaxy S8+ is one amazing device. Its 6.2-inch OLED screen has come in for particular praise - DisplayMate called it the most innovative and high-performance smartphone display ever tested. But does its brilliance come at the cost of short battery life? Apparently not. PhoneArena has been testing the Galaxy S8+ against other po[CENSORED]r smartphones. It found that Samsung’s handset came second on the overall list of flagship devices, beating many of the other larger handsets but still a fair bit behind the iPhone 7 Plus. All phones were tested with their screen brightness set to 200 nits. The Exynos 8895 version of S8+ is used, with the resolution set to 1080 x 2220. The S8+ manages exactly 8 hours of battery life, putting it ahead of its S line predecessor – the S7 Edge – by 42 minutes. The new handset pushes the iPhone 7, which has a 1960 mAh battery, out of second position, beating it by 14 minutes. Apple still boasts the device with the longest life. Lasting 9 hours and 5 minutes, the iPhone 7 Plus beats the S8+ by quite a margin, though the iPhone does have a much smaller display. Nevertheless, Samsung’s phone, which boasts a 3,500 mAh battery, is ahead of competitors such as Google’s Pixel and the Huawei P10. One area where the S8+ has many of its rivals beat is charging time. With Samsung’s Fast Adaptive Charging support, the handset can fully recharge from 0 to 100 percent in 99 minutes, much quicker than the 197 minutes it takes for the iPhone 7 Plus to fully juice up.

Huawei has launched a new flagship smartphone under its Honor sub-brand. Dubbed the Huawei Honor 8 Pro, the new handset features a sizable 5.7-inch quad HD display (2,560 x 1,440 resolution, 515 PPI) that’s powered by an octa-core Kirin 960 processor, Mali-G71 graphics and 6GB of RAM. There’s also 64GB of local storage on tap that’s expandable up to 128GB, dual 12-megapixel rear-facing cameras with f/2.2 aperture lenses, an 8-megapixel selfie camera up front, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, a 3.5mm headphone jack, NFC, GPS, USB Type-C charging and more. A large 4,000mAh battery with Fast Charging technology keeps the show going. Speaking of, that show will be powered by Google’s Android 7.0 Nougat with Huawei’s custom EMUI 5.1 overlay on top (sorry, no pure Android here). The handset measures 157mm x 77.5mm x 6.79mm and weighs just 184 grams. The Huawei Honor 8 Pro will be offered in your choice of blue, black and gold color schemes starting at £475, or just south of $600. Given the general cost of today’s flagships (Samsung's Galaxy S8, for example, starts at $750), that’s on the lower end of the scale for a handset that looks incredibly solid – at least, on paper. No word yet on whether it’ll be sold through your local US carrier but you should be able to grab one from Amazon come April 20.

Overlooking its obvious flaw, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 was one heck of a smartphone with a terrific display. At the time, renowned smartphone display expert and DisplayMate President Dr. Raymond M. Soneira found the flagship to have the most innovative and high performance display of any handset. That’s some stiff competition to tackle but according to Soneira, Samsung has done just that with the Note 7’s successor. In a report on the matter, Soneira notes that the Galaxy S8 steals the crown as the most innovative and high performance smartphone display they’ve ever tested in the lab. Soneira found that the Galaxy S8 matches or sets new smartphone display records for highest peak brightness (1,020 nits), largest native color gamut (113 percent DCI-P3 and 142 percent sRGB / Rec.709), highest contrast rating in ambient light (227), highest (infinite) contrast ratio and lowest screen reflectance (4.5 percent), just to name a few. The screen expert recalls that the first notable OLED smartphone they looked at, the Google Nexus One, came in last place in their 2010 smartphone display shootout. In the span of just seven years, mobile OLED technology now has a commanding first place lead on the industry and continues forging ahead. The culmination of that is the Galaxy S8, the first in a new generation of OLED smartphones. Samsung is setting the stage for 2017 flagships as they’ll all likely use full screen display designs with flexible OLED technology. Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones go on sale April 21.

There are an incredible number of games available on Steam, many of which vary in quality from average to utter garbage. The platform has implemented several methods over the last few years to separate the wheat from the chaff, and is now about to overhaul the system to increase the visibility of high-quality titles and bury those it refers to as “fake games.” The company invited YouTube critics Jim Sterling and John "TotalBiscuit" Bain to its Seattle headquarters to discuss the changes, which the pair laid out in lengthy videos. If you don’t want to watch the cumulative one hour and 24 minutes, Kotaku has summarized everything. The most noticeable change will be the introduction of “Steam Explorers.” The opt-in system involves users buying games from pre-selected lists of low-selling titles, then flagging any undiscovered gems so that the algorithms are more likely to increase their visibility. Anyone can be an Explorer, and while you do have to purchase the games, Steam is considering rewards such as unique badges, access to exclusive forums (for sharing titles and setting up multiplayer matches), and, most importantly, no-argument refunds (one per week). The curator system is also getting an overhaul to make it a more “rewarding and useful experience.” Curators will soon be able to create top ten lists, embed videos, and use different types of sorting. A big change for Curators is the addition of an integrated “key mailer system,” which lets developers contact them directly through the platform and hand over game keys - so no more using email or other methods outside of Steam, which has led to attempted fraud in the past. Curators will also be given more information about how their actions affect game sales. Valve is even considering paying the most influential Curators as an incentive to keep up their good work. As noted by Kotaku, the system sounds like it could be exploited by unethical Curators, and even the honest ones could unconsciously skew their recommendations based on the po[CENSORED]rity of a game. For regular Steam users, Valve will soon include more data about the games they see, including why it’s being shown, how many impressions the page gets, where the impressions come from, and so on. Additionally, when Steam Direct – the replacement for Steam Greenlight – finally launches, there will be fewer games arriving on the service, and they will supposedly be of a higher quality. It’s worth noting that none of the changes are definitely going to happen - some details could change. We’ll just have to wait and see how they affect the average user.

With the majority of Apple's focus on mobile devices and laptops, they have been largely ignoring their desktop users. In an extremely rare move for the company, Apple has owned up to this mistake and now has plans for a total Mac Pro redesign. Speaking to a small group of reporters including TechCrunch, Phil Schiller, Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing, apologized for what happened with the Mac Pro and stated Apple was "going to come out with something great to replace it." Apple doesn't often share much about their future plans, so this announcement carries extra weight. Apple has come to believe that the aggressive industrial design of the 2013 Mac Pro was a mistake and that they designed themselves "into a bit of a thermal corner." The small form factor was a nice idea, but was flawed from the beginning. The Mac Pro was aimed at serious professionals that needed a high performance workstation for content creation and other applications. Many of them didn't care about the size and would gladly have accepted a slightly larger Mac in exchange for better performance. Since everything was crammed into the small form factor, Apple wasn't able to upgrade it very much either. With a Windows PC, creators could upgrade their hardware nearly every month it seemed, but the Mac Pro went 3 years without a single substantial upgrade. While the new modular redesign won't be coming out anytime this year, Apple is refreshing the Mac Pro in the meantime. A 6-core Xeon with 16GB of RAM and two AMD FirePro D500s will cost $3000 and for an additional $1000, you can upgrade to an 8-core processor with dual FirePro D700s. While the Mac desktop line only accounts for about 20% of Apple's computer sales, it's still an important segment of the market for them. These professional users help give the Mac its brand recognition and high end appeal.

For the last 20+ years, the traditional thinking in the tech industry has been that in order to have any real power and influence, you had to have an operating system. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google have turned their OS offerings into platforms, which could then be leveraged to provide additional revenue-generating services, as well as drive the direction and application agenda for other companies who wanted to access the users of a particular OS. In an effort to follow that strategy, we’ve witnessed a number of companies try, unsuccessfully, to reach a position of power and control in the tech industry by building or buying operating systems of their own. From Blackberry, to HP and LG (with WebOS), to Samsung (with Tizen), there have been numerous efforts to try to replicate that OS-to-platform strategy. Over the last year or so, however, we’ve begun to see the rise of platforms that are built to be independent from an OS. Prominent among these are Amazon, with Alexa, Facebook with, well, Facebook, and most recently, Samsung with a whole set of services that, while initially focused on their hardware, actually reflect a more holistic view of a multi-connection, multi-device world. Interestingly, even many of the traditional OS vendors are starting to spend more time focusing on these “metaplatform” strategies, as they recognize that the value of an OS-only platform is quickly diminishing. Each of the major OS vendors, for example, is placing increased emphasis on their voice-based assistants—most of which are available across multiple traditional OS boundaries—and treating them more like the OS-based platforms of old. Moving forward, I suspect we will see more machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-based services that may connect to the voice-based assistants or the traditional OS’s, but will actually be independent of them. From intelligent chatbots, that enable automated tech support, to sales and other common services, through smart news and media-delivery applications, these AI-based services are going to open up a sea of new opportunities for these “new” platform players. Another key new service will likely be built around authentication and digital identity capabilities. This will serve not only as a first log-in of the day, but function as an identity gateway through e-commerce, online banking, secure communications, and many other key services that require verification and authentication of one’s identity. While some OS-independent platform strategies have been known for some time, the recent Samsung S8 launch event unveiled the first real glimpse of what Samsung may have in mind going forward. While some of these OS-independent platform strategies have been known for some time, the recent Samsung S8 launch event unveiled the first real glimpse of what Samsung may have in mind going forward. Because of the company’s extensive range of not only consumer tech products, such as smartphones, tablets, wearables and PCs, but also TVs and other consumer electronics, along with white goods like connected appliances, Samsung is uniquely positioned to deliver the most comprehensive connected hardware (and connected home) story of almost any company in the world. In fact, with the recent purchase of Harman—a major automotive component supplier—they can even start to extend their reach into connected cars. To date, the company hasn’t really leveraged this potential position of power, but it looks like they’re finally starting to do so. Samsung Pass, for example, moves beyond the simple (though critical) capability of digital payments offered in Samsung Pay, to a complete multi-factor biometric-capable identity and vertification solution. Best of all, it appears to be compatible with the FIDO Alliance standard for the passing of identity credentials between devices and across web services, which is going to be a critical capability moving forward. On a more concrete level, the Bixby Assistant on the S8, of course, provides the kind of voice-based assistant mentioned previously, but it also potentially ties in with other Samsung hardware. So, for example, you will eventually be able to tell Bixby on your Samsung phone to control other Samsung-branded devices or, through their new Samsung Connect Home or other SmartThings hub device, other non-Samsung devices. While other companies do offer similar types of smart home hubs, none have the brand reach nor the installed base of branded devices that Samsung does. As with any single-branded effort to dominate in the tech world, Samsung can’t possibly make a significant impact without reaching out proactively to other potential partners (and even competitors) on the device side in order to make its connected device platform viable. Still, because of its enormous footprint across so many aspects of households around the world, Samsung now possesses a bigger potential to become a disruptor in the platform war than its earlier OS-based efforts with Tizen might have suggested.

Barring a handful of news items, there hasn’t been much new information released this year about Microsoft’s upcoming Project Scorpio console. It’ll undoubtedly be a big part of the company’s E3 presentation in June, but reports suggest we’re going to find out more about the machine sometime this week. Windows Central claims a “major gaming outlet” recently visited Microsoft to check out Scorpio’s internals “ahead of a planned exclusive blowout of coverage.” Forza Motorsport 7 is said to have been used to show off the console’s power and 4K visuals. It's also thought that Microsoft will demo Star Wars: Battlefront II and Red Dead Redemption 2 on Scorpio at some point. The Inner Circle believes the specs will arrive this Thursday via Digital Foundry. The report lines up with Xbox head Phil Spencer’s March statement that Scorpio details could be released before June as “doing everything at E3 would be difficult.” “Clearly we’re gonna talk about Scorpio at E3” he said on IGN’s unlocked. “I also don’t want to take up the majority of the time doing things about hardware.” “I like our E3 show being about games,” he added. Additionally, Spencer was asked by a Twitter user about Scorpio's specs being released this week, he neither confirmed nor denied the rumors. We already know that Scorpio will boast 6 teraflops of computing power, 12GB of GDDR5, 8 CPU cores, and 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It’s said to come in a compact design, despite sporting an internal power supply. Last month, it was reported that owners of non-4K TVs would be able to take advantage of Scorpio’s technology, thanks to supersampling that renders games at a higher-than-1080p resolution before downscaling to 1080p, resulting in smoother edges and shadows. While there are some who claim Scorpio could challenge the PC as the best gaming machine available, it seems the console won’t have one of its rival platform’s best features: upgradeable components. “The idea that users will open up a console and change compute components inside seems like a stretch to me,” said Spencer.