Category Archives: Blog

Spotify starts testing its own payments on Android — and Bumble will soon do the same

Nick Barclay / The Verge Earlier this year, Google announced a pilot that would allow Spotify (and eventually other apps) to bypass the standard Google Play billing on Android in favor of their own payment systems. Crucially, Google still gets a cut of those payments under this new User Choice Billing initiative, but in Spotify’s…

Still the best tablet-laptop: Microsoft’s Surface Pro 9 review

Enlarge / Microsoft’s Surface Pro 9. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Let’s talk about the Surface Pro 9. Which Surface Pro 9? Not the version with 5G, which comes with a Qualcomm-made Microsoft SQ3 Arm processor and the typical shortcomings of an Arm Windows device (relatively low performance, continued app compatibility issues)—but the vanilla, plain-old Surface Pro…

Single Hubble image captured supernova at three different times

Enlarge / On the left, the full Hubble image. On the right, different images of the gravitationally lensed object. (credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen, Patrick Kelly) Over the last few decades, we’ve gotten much better at observing supernovae as they’re happening. Orbiting telescopes can now pick up the high-energy photons emitted and figure out…

Google says surveillance vendor targeted Samsung phones with zero-days

Google says it has evidence that a commercial surveillance vendor was exploiting three zero-day security vulnerabilities found in newer Samsung smartphones. The vulnerabilities, discovered in Samsung’s custom-built software, were used together as part of an exploit chain to target Samsung phones running Android. The chained vulnerabilities allow an attacker to gain kernel read and write…